Communications committee/Notifications/Archives/2007

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I wrote a piece tonight for the Signpost:

On Wednesday, September 20, 2006, the 100,000th article assessment was carried out on the English Wikipedia! Such assessments provide a basic analysis of the overall article quality as on a six-point scale, and may also assign a level of importance to the topic as Low, Mid, High or Top. Some may include a short set of comments. Assessments are carried out by around 100 WikiProjects on articles within their purview, with a project template on article talk pages indicating the assessment and generating a suitable category. Work is often done by a designated "task force," and the military history project alone has managed to assess over 13,000 articles in this way. A bot crawls through the project assessment categories every 24 hours and compiles a worklist table, a log and statistics for each WikiProject. The data can be used by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team for locating higher quality articles in specific subject areas for inclusion on a CD or DVD release. The project worklists automatically indicate if a particular article has been included in an offline release. It seems that article assessment has finally arrived!

Should we be announcing this initiative to the outside world? I'm thinking of something along the lines of:

• "ARTICLE ASSESSMENT COMES TO WIKIPEDIA The quality of articles on Wikipedia is now being evaluated using a simple six-point scale. Brief assessments are carried out by "WikiProjects" which coordinate work within specific subject areas, and results are posted on article talk pages. Projects may optionally include an importance rating and comments on possible improvements. The results are automatically compiled into project tables, which can be used to locate high-quality articles as well as important articles needing work. This week the English Wikipedia celebrated 100,000 assessments completed, with over 50,000 carried out in the last month alone.

When I have shown this work to librarians the response has always been very enthusiastic, along the lines of "This is what we've been waiting for!" It may not be New York Times material, but it may interest some more specialised media such as library journals and journals that focus on internet issues. I also think this assessment system is something we can begin to mention in more general press releases. Walkerma 04:30, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

At 17:46, 9 November 2006, en:User:DragonflySixtyseven blocked "143.231.249.141" (which is registered to the US House of Representatives per [1]) with an expiry time of 1 hour, citing the reason "vandalizing Donald Rumsfeld". ([2]). Please look into this. Thank you. w:User:Shreshth91 17:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

This is just to note that earlier today I blocked en:User:143.231.249.141 which is a US House of Representatives IP address; it had been blanking the "controversy" section of en:Steve Buyer. The block was for 24 hours, anon only. Instructions on the talk page of that IP instructed me to notify the communications committee. Mangojuice 02:40, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

• Blocked again, for edits such as this after multiple warning. 48 hours. Anon only. Wikibofh 22:21, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I am forwarding this to your committee because your charter includes "Supporting and overseeing communication with the general public" and "Coordinating communications with the press, including press releases, interviews, and inquiries"

I am widely published, both in peer-reviewed journals, and, over the last 20 years, by having regularly contributed to several commercial publications, most recently as a Contributing Editor for Byte.com

About a week ago I was alerted that defamation was being published about me in Wikipedia, under the username Garsecg, on the 'Talk' page of the Wikipedia entry on 'Vitamin D' at URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Vitamin_D

I attempted to contact the individuals involved in those postings, and to contact those who had removed material about the research of myself and my colleagues from that Wikipedia entry. I encountered a blizzard of words, with no respect whatsoever being paid to my professional status as a published expert on that topic. Later I noted that another expert had also been 'run-off' by the Wikipedians posting material on that same Vitamin D entry.

I have no stomach for the time wasting waiting for mediation at Wikipedia.org to get its house in order. I need to spend my time with the FDA, with the NIH, and with my scientific colleagues around the world.

I am therefore alerting this executive committee to the problem which has arisen, in the hope that there is some mechanism in place which will act to protect the public from the apparent lack of controls upon the scientific integrity of the medically oriented content published here.

Sincerely, Professor Trevor G Marshall, PhD, Director, Autoimunity Research Foundation.

Professor Trevor Marshall 16:12, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

What does the Wikimedia Foundation do to fight corruption in Wikimedia projects? Is there a place to report corruption? What point of view has the Wikimedia Foundation with respect to the goals stated by Transparency International? Tobias Conradi 15:09, 20 February 2007 (UTC)