Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-15/2006 in review

2006 in review

Special: 2006 in Review, Part II

Part I of the series can be viewed here.

Just two weeks ago marked the end of 2006, and the end of the biggest year Wikipedia has seen, in terms of growth, press coverage, and quality. During last year, the English Wikipedia grew from less than 900,000^[1] to over 1,500,000^[2] articles. It began with elections for the Arbitration Committee and stewardship, and ended with elections for the Arbitration Committee and stewardship. This week, the Wikipedia Signpost continues our look back at the year that was 2006 in Wikipedia.

Arbitration Committee Elections

Due to a scheduling quirk, 2006 saw two annual Arbitration Committee elections. The January elections saw 11 arbitrators elected in all (originally, 8 seats were up for reelection, but to avoid high turnover on the Committee, and with a high rate of community support, Jimbo Wales chose to add three extra seats). In all, 68 candidates applied for the elections; of these, 14 withdrew during the vote.

3-year terms (Tranche Beta): Charles Matthews, Filiocht, Jdforrester, Mindspillage, and Morven.
2-year terms (Tranche Alpha): Dmcdevit, Fred Bauder, and SimonP.
1-year terms (Tranche Gamma): Jayjg, Mackensen, and Sam Korn.

All but one incumbent arbitrator regained a seat on the Committee (Kelly Martin withdrew from consideration early in the vote and resigned from the committee shortly thereafter, citing personal reasons.)^[3]

In December, a second election was held. In this election, the five three-year seats in Tranche Gamma were available; with the resignation of Mindspillage, who took a seat on the Foundation Board of Trustees, and the absence of Filiocht, who had not participated in arbitration due to illness, two additional two-year seats were made available. Jimbo indicated that Mindspillage and Filiocht were free to claim extra seats should they come back before their terms were due to expire in December 2008.^[4] 37 candidates ran for the seats, of which 6 withdrew during the elections. The results were as follows:

3-year terms (Tranche Gamma): Flcelloguy, Jpgordon, Kirill Lokshin, Paul August, and UninvitedCompany.
2-year terms (Tranche Beta): Blnguyen and FloNight.

Of the previous Tranche Gamma, one seat was vacant due to the resignation of Mackensen in February.^[5] None of the four remaining incumbent arbitrators chose to run again. This was the first time in the Arbitration Committee's history that no incumbents attempted to defend their seats.

Steward elections

Oddly enough, two annual elections were also held for the global position of steward. Stewards' main jobs are to help out with the jobs of bureaucrats and CheckUsers on smaller wikis, where bureaucrats are unlikely to be active or existent, and CheckUser policies have not yet been agreed upon (only 27 individual projects, along with Wikimedia Commons and the Meta-Wiki, currently have CheckUsers).^[6] While the Board of Trustees makes a final ruling on the suitability of a candidate, and can pick any candidates with at least 80% support and at least 30 support votes to become stewards, their decision in both 2006 elections was to promote all candidates who had received 80% or more.

In January 2006's elections, nine candidates were chosen: Ascánder, Ausir, Jean-Christophe Chazalette, Jon Harald Søby, Paginazero, Rdsmith4, Romihaitza, Suisui, and Walter.^[7] Of the nine, two (Jean-Christophe Chazalette and Ascánder) have since resigned.

In December 2006's elections, eleven candidates were chosen: Bastique, Cspurrier, Darkoneko, Dbl2010, Drini, Effeietsanders, Guillom, M7, MaxSem, Pathoschild, Redux, and Shanel.^[8]

CheckUser and Oversight

In 2006, two new user classifications became widely used: CheckUser and Oversight. CheckUser, which was actually introduced as a formal classification in 2005, is the ability to view and compare the IP addresses of contributors when it is presumed that these users might be involved in sockpuppeting or disruption. The requests for CheckUser page, created in January 2006, has become a key site to visit by users who suspect that sockpuppeting might be occurring.^[9] Oversight, meanwhile, is the ability to hide page revisions containing libel, personal informations and in extreme cases, copyright violations; it was introduced in June after the insertion of inappropriate content, particularly on busy pages like the administrators' noticeboard, where deletions caused undue stress on the servers, due to the number of revisions involved.^[10] There were 17 users with oversight privileges when it was introduced; there are currently 28 users with these privileges.

Userboxes

A source of controversy in early 2006 was a series of disputes over userboxes. Introduced to the English Wikipedia in late March, 2005, as a way of communicating to other users the languages that a user speaks, userboxes soon became a way to express one's likes and dislikes, talents, and even edit counts. Controversy erupted in late December 2005 when Kelly Martin began deleting userboxes that she deemed controversial or offensive, and those that contained fair use images; two requests for comment were filed in the case.^[11]

More controversy occurred when a pro-pedophilia userbox ignited a wheel war. Jimbo Wales temporarily de-sysopped five of the administrators who had been most involved in escalating the situation.^[12] An arbitration case was hastily brought in the matter, and just five days after the case was opened, it was closed with the following remedies:

El C was resysopped immediately and reprimanded.
BorgHunter was resysopped after two days, and reprimanded.
Ashibaka was resysopped after two weeks.
Karmafist and Carnildo did not have their sysop powers restored. Rather interestingly, Carnildo regained adminship in September, in a controversial decision by bureaucrats,^[13] while Karmafist was eventually banned from the site.
Dschor, who created another, inflammatory version of the pedophilia template, was banned for two months (in May, he was indefinitely blocked for "massive sockpuppetry" by Mackensen).
SPUI, who created a joke version of the template, was banned for ten days, and placed on probation.
Paroxysm, who created the original template "in good faith", according to the Committee, was banned for three days and prohibited from editing userboxes again. Paroxysm has not edited under that username since March, but has edited under other usernames.

The case was the fastest arbitration case to close with remedies enacted. Although an April arbitration case involving userboxes was filed, and resulted in the desysopping of Guanaco, most of the controversy over userboxes has since faded, as most have been moved from the template namespace into user subpages. Divisive or inflammatory userboxes are rarely seen anymore, and can be speedy deleted under criterion T1.

Other involuntary desysoppings

Through 2005, only five users had been permanently desysopped. 11 users were permanently desysopped in 2006; other than Karmafist and Carnildo, the others are:

Everyking, de-adminned in September 2006 after offering to post a page revision containing personal information to a Wikipedia criticism site. Dmcdevit said for the Arbitration Committee:

"Recently it was brought to the attention of the Arbitration Committee that administrator Everyking has posted to an external site in the process of trying to determine the contents of inappropriate material, sensitive personal information, deleted from an article. Everyking looked up the deleted material using his administrator privileges, and offered to post the deleted content publicly...We view this as a serious misjudgment and a betrayal of the trust the community has given him in adminship. As such, Everyking has been immediately desysopped."

Everyking replied:

"This is shocking and I call for it to be overturned. I didn't actually post anything (being worried that SlimVirgin might get pissed) and even if I did I don't see how it could be a betrayal of anything."

When Dmcdevit mentioned his willingness to post personal information as a "liability", Everyking replied:

"Personal information? I didn't even know what the content was. I still don't know. I sure as hell would never post anybody's personal information."

Freestylefrappe, de-adminned in February 2006 due to an arbitration ruling.^[14] Under another identity, KI, he applied for adminship, but was rejected. He has since been banned.
Guanaco, de-adminned for a second time in April 2006 after an arbitration ruling in a userbox-related case. He cannot re-apply for adminship.^[15]
NSLE/Chacor, de-adminned in June 2006 after the Committee found evidence of sockpuppeting, a claim that NSLE denied.^[16]
Dbiv/Fys, de-adminned in August 2006 after an arbitration ruling.^[17]
Marudubshinki, de-adminned in October 2006 after an arbitration ruling.^[18]
MONGO and Seabhcan, de-adminned in December 2006 after an arbitration ruling.^[19]

In closing...

2006 was the biggest year Wikipedia has seen in terms of overall progress and growth. It's likely that 2007 will be even bigger, busier and more bustling. Thanks for editing Wikipedia, and thanks for reading the Signpost.