Reports/Older reports

French Wikipedia

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11 novembre 2003: Como esta senor French wikipedians ban w:fr:Utilisateur:Papotages.
Papotages, also refered to PP, claims to be a member of the raelien mouvement and has been mostly working on w:fr:secte, w:fr:aumisme, w:fr:mouvement raëlien, w:fr:pédophilie, w:fr:prévention de la pédophilie since july 2003. He has revealed himself a difficult contributor from the very beginning, posting pov or copyrighted text, being generally agressive, using profanities. It did not help the issue, that a couple of french contributors were openly anti-cult and quick to heat topics. However, most contributors were quite neutral initially, and a couple of users succeeded to work with him, though at great energy expense. The community suffered a lot from not being able to agree as a whole on the procedure to follow.
Finally, after a collection of wrong edits, Papotages was blocked, and then created vandal accounts, and vandalised many pages under these accounts or IP. The issue around unblocking papotages raised a lot of dissension among the french community, but PP was finally unblocked.
By the time the discussion went to banning him, the decision to do so was quite unanimously consensual. More disagreement occured again over what techniques to use to inforce the banning, especially since some users claim to know (and revealed) the real name of Papotages and several wanted to contact its isp. Currently, the method used is both some specific blocking at the server level, and deletion/reversion in mass, practiced by most of the french sysops.
Since beginning of november, french people have to cope with someone "vandalising" the wikipedia, every day, for about 6 to 8 hours a day, which basically prevent doing any other administrative task. On the 15th of november, the blocking was improved (or Papotages quit trying to edit), and peace is slowly coming back, with editors trying to exchange many wikilove thoughts.
It is yet to see which consequences this episode will have in the long term, but for now, it probably drove several newbies away to see screaming insults in summary boxes, made at least one contributor quit w:fr:Utilisateur:Eslios, and raised discord in the whole community. This will certainly stay as a teaching experience, as regards how efficient a divided community can be over an issue, and as regards technical and non technical options to inforce banning.
Likely, it will also promote new jargon and habits :-)

fr: banissement de w:fr:Utilisateur:Papotages

Discussion fin 2003

German Wikipedia

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  • Tabellenkonvertierung (mid December 2003): TomK32 has written an extensions for PyWikipediaBot which allows converting HTML-Tables to the new wiki-syntax very easily. About 3700 articles on de: contain tables.
  • Three new admins: Dec. 9, 2003 Mikue, Sansculotte and Tsor have been given administrator rights.
  • wikipedia.de is back (Nov. 13, 2003): Arne Klempert convinces the domain grabber to release wikipedia.de. The domain is now owned by Wikimedia, Kurt Jansson is admin-c (administrative contact), and Arne is tech-c (technical contact).
  • New website impressum (Nov. 12, 2003 ): Wikipedians are trying to agree on a place and time to meet and found the association. German law requires a meeting of at least seven people to found an association.
  • Kurt Jansson proposes to rename the title Administrator/ Sysop to clarify that administrators are not liable for the German Wikipedia's contents. de:Wikipedia:Impressum is created to show who's responsible for the contents.
  • discussions about an association (Nov. 3, 2003): As we expect a legal battle for the domain, ideas are raised to found a registered non-profit association (eingetragener Verein in German law) which would have better chances in a German court than a single person or the Wikimedia Foundation. The association should get a name like "Supporters of the German Wikipedia e.V." instead of "Wikipedia e.V." to clarify that it isn't legally responsible for Wikipedia contents. The Diskussion stoped on the point on where to meet.
  • Domain wikipedia.de gets lost (Nov. 2, 2003): The domain wikipedia.de gets grabbed and now points to an advertisement/ linkfarm page.
  • Wikipedia meeting in Munich (Oct. 28, 2003): Five Wikipedians partipate in the first meeting of German Wikipedians in Munich.

Spanish Wikipedia

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Encyclopedia name 15 nov 2003: Results of the vote (Second round) on the name of the Spanish Wikipedia. Polls closed on 15 November 2003

  • a) Wikipedia (16 votes)
  • b) Librepedia (6 votes)

Total valid votes 21. There was one null vote (user that did not put link to his page). Therefore the name of the Spanish Wikipedia is ’Wikipedia

Original message (Spanish) in http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cambio_de_nombre_de_la_Wikipedia_en_espa%F1ol, is the following (minus HTML format):

YA TENEMOS GANADOR

El nombre ganador de la segunda vuelta y futuro nombre de la Wikipedia en español es.... <redoble>.........

WIKIPEDIA
Los resultados (contabilizados hasta el 15 de noviembre) son:

  • Wikipedia: 16 votos
  • Librepedia: 6 votos (no contabilizado "Coco" por no

poner enlace a su página de usuario)

Proposal to unify Malay and Indonesian Wikipedia

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15 November 2003

There was a brief discussion on the Malay wikipedia on the possibility of merging with the Indonesian wikipedias. Kowey (me) proposed that they should on the grounds that the languages are similar enough to be mutually understood. Yosri and Vyasa, from Malay and Indonesian wikipedias disputed the mutual intelligibility of the languages felt that vocabulary differences such as varying use of English loan words would be disorientating for students. They counter-proposed a greater degree of coordination and interlinking.

As Yosri points out (see Talk), the now stricken text was not faithful to his arguments. Hopefully this is a better summary.
Kowey 18:34, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)
If this did come to pass, I advise that you note which language this article was originally written in. Then, we can split up the encyclopedias later on, when there is enough activity. -- User:zanimum

A barnraising to upgrade Finnish wikipedia to Phase III?

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There is some movement on the Finnish wikipedia, now that we mysteriously acquired a mailing list. (asking for one may have had something to do with it :)

We may well organize a time when the most active and committed users are free at the approximate same time, and ask Brion to run his script. The idea being that we do a barnraising style group effort to fix all the concommitant stuff that needs to be fixed by hand. This may well be somewhat ardous, but it will be over then (like pulling a tooth), and maybe we will build some team spirit in the process. This probably would not have worked only a few months earlier, but now there seems to be a lot of pent up energy; so it is conceivable we may pull it off. If we don't, please bury me in a shallow grave ;-) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 13:35, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)