Metapedian, 2008-01-22

Following the closure of the recent arbitration regarding articles related to Palestine-Israel disputes, a new working group on ethnic and cultural edit wars has started.

The English Wikipedia has a new checkuser: Thatcher. Apparently responding to the appointment, Majorly created a proposal for granting checkusership (see original version) which would be driven by community, rather than by the Arbitration Committee. The original proposal has been withdrawn, but discussion continues on its talk page regarding some possible reforms. A list of current checkusers can be found here.

Seems it was a busy day for Meta's requests for permissions page. Aside from Thatcher's appointment, Newyorkbrad has also been approved for oversight access by the Arbitration Commitee, and Majorly requested removal of his bureaucratship on Meta.

New adminship candidates: Stormtracker94 (3rd), Smalljim, Jamesontai, Rodhullandemu, Wisdom89 (2nd), EncMstr, Lquilter.

Arbitration update... newly opened: Episodes and characters 2. Dismissed: Kingofmann.

Metapedian, 2008-01-20

In a post to wikien-l, Phoenix wiki cites several recent controversies over userbox and userpage content, and proposes wider discussion as to the acceptable limits therein. First post links several recent or ongoing discussions, currently has 23 replies. See also, on-wiki request for comment.

Possible landmark AfD: Adult-child sex (2nd nomination).

Ongoing discussion regarding a possible essay and/or policy supplement: Silence and consensus.

New adminship candidates: WeBuriedOurSecretsInTheGarden, Gwen Gale, DDima, Jauerback, Gonzo fan2007, MONGO (2nd), Malinaccier, Zeibura, John 254 (2nd), Urban Rose.

Arbitration update... moved into the voting phase: Bluemarine. Suspended by motion: Matthew Hoffman. Motion to close: Kingofmann. Closed: Palestine-Israel.

Metapedian, 2008-01-18

Bit late to cover the rollback dispute. This week's Signpost includes a story about that, and another on the end of Wikimania 2009 bidding.

Continued disputes over redirection of articles of TV shows has led to ongoing discussions at admin noticeboards, as well as a large centralized discussion and request for comment.

Following extensive discussion focused on blocking policy as it relates to Tor nodes, a new proposal aims to allow approved users to circumvent blocks on open proxies.

Tim Starling has announced that work on the new MediaWiki parser is nearing completion. Esoteric templates may need to be updated. New ParserFunctions will include #tag (allowing users to dynamically create pseudotags like <ref>, <gallery>, or <imagemap> on the fly) and #iferror (useful for detecting errors in some other functions).

Current adminship candidates: RC-0722, MBK004, Alexf, NASCAR Fan24, Triwbe, Esanchez7587, Wikidudeman (2nd), Victuallers, Islander (2nd), BritandBeyonce.

Arbitration cases in the evidence phase: Kingofmann, Waterboarding, Bluemarine, Highways 2. Voting phase: IRC, Matthew Hoffman. Motion to close: Palestine-Israel. Recently closed: R. fiend, Dbachmann, Zeraeph.

NSA editing 9/11 article?

After a brief edit war over en.wikipedia's 9/11 Truth Movement article, an anonymous editor posted on the article's talk page that the article will be retitled to "9/11 denialism," citing NPOV concerns. I'd just been observing things, but the plot thickened a bit when another user claimed this IP address was associated with the National Security Agency.

Difficult to quickly assess the validity of that claim, of course, but the anon's reaction wasn't what I expected: they immediately removed the claim, first citing Wikipedia's harassment guidelines and then national security concerns.

I'm really not sure what to make of that, but it seems to be worth an arched eyebrow.