Wikisource:News/2007-07-01

Illy loses administrator access
Illy (confirmation) lost administrator access due to his inactivity; Danny (confirmation) was confirmed. According to the Administrator policy, every administrator must be confirmed at least once per year. Shanel is being confirmed this July.

Reform month
With no featured text for July, Pathoschild proposed and implemented Reform month. The event, scheduled to end on 01 August, is a call to all readers and editors to "give us constructive suggestions and comments concerning any part of Wikisource". The page was advertised on the Main Page and in the sitenotice.

Extensions enabled

 * The ProofreadPage and Labeled Section Transclusion extensions have been enabled on all Wikisource wikis.

2007 Board of Trustee elections
The 2007 elections for the Board of Trustees are open, with three positions being filled for a two-year term. The 2007 elections introduced endorsements as a new requirement, which disqualified three candidates. Each eligible candidate was required to obtain 12 positive votes by an established editor on any project before the actual vote.

The final vote began on June 28, and was preceded by candidate submissions and endorsements. The vote will be hosted and administered by a neutral third party, Software in the Public Interest, which will also audit the tally. Any user having at least 400 edits as of 01 June 2007 on one project is eligible to vote in favour of any number of candidates. The three candidates with the greatest number of favourable votes will be appointed.

Candidates
15 candidates met all the requirements before the deadline. A summary of each candidate's platform follows.

These summaries are unofficial, and may contain errors or omissions. While five candidates have corrected or approved their summaries, others haven't.


 * Ausir: statement, questions
 * Danny: statement, questions
 * DragonFire1024: statement, questions
 * Eloquence: statement, questions, 2006 election platform, political autobiography
 * Frieda: statement, questions
 * Kate: statement, questions
 * Kim Bruning: statement, questions
 * Kingboyk: official statement, expanded statement, questions
 * Michael Snow: statement, questions
 * Mindspillage: statement, questions
 * Oscar: statement, questions
 * UninvitedCompany: statement, questions
 * WarX: statement, questions
 * Yann: statement, questions
 * ^demon: statement, questions

Board resolutions

 * The policy governing access to nonpublic data has been updated. The change is summarized as: "Clarified access policies for OTRS, stated intent of the resolution, made age requirement optional".

Unofficial brand survey
This is an ongoing event since the last news report.

Erik Moeller (board member) unofficially suggested that every Wikimedia project be renamed to use the Wikipedia trademark, renaming Wikisource to Wikipedia Sources. However, this proposal met with strong opposition from users who offered such reasons as the dilution of the Wikipedia trademark, damage to the smaller projects' potential and individuality, and the possibility that this would make them 'subprojects' of Wikipedia.

Later this month, after discussion had died down with little or no support for the idea, Erik has launched an official brand survey to gather wider opinion. The survey asks several questions related to branding, including &lsquo;Would you support or oppose rebranding the projects as "Wikipedia Sources", "Wikipedia Quotes", "Wikipedia Textbooks", and so on?&rsquo; The survey can be found at Wikimedia brand survey.

Debate over Creative Commons 3.0 licenses
Creative Commons has announced versions 3.0 of its licenses, earlier versions of which are heavily used on several Wikimedia projects (though nearly inexistent on Wikisource). However, a new clause about moral rights (quoted below) has become very controversial, and it is uncertain whether the version 3.0 licenses should be permitted on Wikimedia projects. These are currently prohibited on the Wikimedia Commons.

The debate concerns the enforcement of moral rights through the copyright license. Moral rights are normally separate from copyright, and do not exist in some countries such as the United States. The change allows authors to enforce their moral rights in any country that recognizes copyright licenses, and critics argue that it allows the copyright holder to unilaterally control the use of their work. For example, this would allow an author to release a work on Wikisource, then sue a redistributor for modifying the work in a way the author does not like.

Mike Linksvayer, the Vice President of Creative Commons, stated that the new clause is not intended to introduce moral rights where none previously existed, but acknowledged that the wording is vague.

The clause states :  [...]  Except as otherwise agreed in writing by the Licensor or as may be otherwise permitted by applicable law, if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation. Licensor agrees that in those jurisdictions (e.g. Japan), in which any exercise of the right granted in Section 3(b) of this License (the right to make Adaptations) would be deemed to be a distortion, mutilation, modification or other derogatory action prejudicial to the Original Author's honor and reputation, the Licensor will waive or not assert, as appropriate, this Section, to the fullest extent permitted by the applicable national law, to enable You to reasonably exercise Your right under Section 3(b) of this License (right to make Adaptations) but not otherwise.  

Fixed bugs

 * When blocking a user, the summary box is now limited to the number of characters accepted. Such summaries were previously truncated.
 * When a user attempts to log in with an incorrect name or password, the password filled in on the previous page is no longer automatically re-entered into the form.

New features

 * Administrators
 * When changing the protection level of a page, administrators can now check a box to watchlist it.
 * When blocking a user, administrators can now prevent them from sending email through Special:Emailuser.


 * Special pages
 * Special:Newpages can now display new pages for all namespaces.
 * Special:Contributions/newbies now shows the name of the user who made the edit.


 * Watching and unwatching a page uses AJAX to avoid loading a new page in compatible browsers.
 * Deletion logs are now shown when editing an inexistent or deleted page. Previously, this was only accessible by searching the deletion log (Wikisource's message linked to it).
 * Image syntax was expanded with new parameters for thumbnailing. They can now be thumbnailed by the height measure using the 'upright' parameter, and thumbnailed without a frame with the 'frameless' parameter.
 * A new parameter ($7) has been added to MediaWiki:Blockedtext which contains the user, IP, or range actually blocked.
 * Each entry on Special:Whatlinkshere now links to the whatlinkshere for that entry.
 * Local image pages for images on the Wikimedia Commons now show the Commons' image history.

Server problems
A fire alarm in a Wikimedia server facility turned off air conditioning in one area on Monday, which let several servers overheat. These were disabled by automated safeguards, and the developers made all Wikimedia wikis read-only (no edits, uploads, new accounts, et cetera) for a few hours. The increased load on the remaining servers also significantly slowed Wikipedia until the servers were brought back online.

The fire alarm was apparently false.

Page view statistics
Brion Vibber (Wikimedia developer) has released statistics derived from the new 'sampled logs', which gather data about one in 1000 page views (excluding images, style sheets, et cetera). The extrapolated date estimates 233.6 million visits per day.