Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Episode8

Episode 8: Esperanza Released: 4 December, 2006

WikipediaWeekly episode 8.

Downloads

• OGG

Transcript

A partial transcript will be available here. Please help by copyediting or adding to it!

The Panel

Currently, it's planned that we make a conference on Skype, which works up to five folks.

Those signing up should be experienced with previous episodes, and be regular listeners of other podcasts.

Main hosts

• Fuzheado | Talk
• Tawker from Vancouver, Canada

Guest hosts

• Daveydweeb
• - Zero1328 _Talk? - Likely a last minute decision, since I'll be back Friday night.

Planned guests

• Mathias Schindler of German Wikipedia (Germany) - CONFIRMED
• Anthere, Florence Devouard, Chairperson of Wikimedia Foundation, Board of Trustees (France)

For discussion of Wikipedia:Esperanza deletion

• Celestianpower - CONFIRMED
• Cyde - CONFIRMED

Agenda

This is the basic layout of how the episode is planned to move along.

Time of Recording

Proposed: 1500 UTC, Saturday, December 2, 2006 To accommodate two European participants

Introduce the panel

That'd be the speakers listed above. Each person says what they'd like to about themselves, and we move on.

See the script

News

• ArsTechnica reports that experts find Wikipedia to be more accurate than non-experts do. This will probably be in the next Signpost. (???)

• -- "Article-free Sunday" -- on the German Wikipedia, aimed at improving existing content rather than producing new articles. Links in rather nicely with our 1.5M discussion last episode... (PRESROI)

• Chinese-language Wikipedia presents different view of history -- widely reported story condemning inconsistencies between zh: and en: Wikipedias. (FUZHEADO)

• Esperanza's MfD. Esperanza was nominated for deletion by User:Robth, citing -- among other things -- the concern that it gives new users the "idea that Wikipedia place for socializing rather than working on an encyclopedia". It was closed early by User:Kim Bruning after the MfD was edited more than 600 times in just two days. (DAVEYDWEEB)

1. What is Esperanza? When was it set up, and what are its activities? How large is its membership?
2. What kind of culture exists within Esperanza?
3. What were the major issues that caused Esperanza to be nominated for deletion, and how did they come about?
4. By the time the MfD ended, various users had expressed agreement that EA needed a major overhaul, and the organisation is now discussing such an overhaul. What has come out of that?
5. What is the status of Esperanza's subprojects, like admin coaching and the Barnstar Brigade?
6. What changes are being considered to Esperanza's governance?
7. Robth, what changes do you think need to be made to Esperanza? Is the organisation recoverable, in your opinion?

From the Signpost

• Steward elections begin on meta. Should include an explanation of the role of stewards, their history, etc. (MESSEDROCKER)
  • How many candidates? 15..
  • Any issues so far?

• Software updates: "Whitelisting" now available to produce autoblock-exempt IPs; auto-edit summaries; new feature to revert edits other than the last one; (FUZHEADO)
  • First type of Whitelist in Wikipedia?
  • Spam whitelist?

• Tunisia blocks Wikipedia, ironically, since they hosted the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society which involved members of the WMF. (???)
  • ?

Feedback

If anybody provides some particularly interesting feedback, or one of us has anything cool to say, we'd say it here. Who knows? It might be interesting, if we ever have anything to say.

• Steel359 - Comment on Fuzheado [1]

The World According to Wikipedia

This would be a quick, light-hearted discussion of any particularly funny page-rankings we see on The Top 100 pages at Wikipedia. There's at least two or three minutes' worth of humour in that.

If lacking material, we could look at another Top 100 page, such as The Top 100 Vandalised pages on Wikipedia.