Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-06-28/News and notes
Progress at Wikipedia Library and Wikijournal of Medicine
The Wikipedia Library deploys "authentication-based access"
On 9 June 2020 The Wikipedia Library (TWL) announced the roll-out of "authentication-based access", a change that introduced two improvements to the platform:
Authentication-based access: Instead of having an individual username and password, access code, or other unique way of accessing each publisher, we will move to authentication-based access for most available resources. Users will simply log in to the Library Card platform where they will be able to access any authentication-configured content they are authorized for with a single click.
Library Bundle: We will also be making a set of resources available in a Library Bundle. These collections will not need any application from users: instead there will be an automated eligibility check in the software. Approximately 25,000 editors will be eligible for the Library Bundle, which will contain more than 60% of the library's content.
Under the new authentication-based access, EZproxy will be used for 30 of TWL's 60 partners, meaning individual log-ins have been disabled. 14 publishers are accessible through EZProxy to all users who meet the criteria (500+ edits, account created more than 6 months ago, 10+ edits over the last 30 days, and no active blocks on any Wikimedia project). Sources accessible to all qualifying users include the Edinburgh University Press, JSTOR, ProQuest, and various Oxford Reference-based resources.
WikiJournal of Medicine to be indexed in SCOPUS
The WikiJournal of Medicine was accepted into SCOPUS, an abstract and citation database, on 18 June 2020. The WikiJournal describes itself as "an ISSN-registered, peer reviewed, open access journal in medicine and biomedicine published free of charge." The concept of WikiJournals dates back to a 2004 proposal, but no formal journal existed until the WikiJournal of Medicine in 2014. Several other journals have since been founded. The journal first applied to SCOPUS in March 2017, but the application was rejected as premature. A second application in early 2020 was recently accepted by the Content Selection & Advisory Board which called the journal an "embryonic journal with global potential".
German Wikisource wraps up 15-year proofreading project
The German Wikisource community recently completed its online edition of Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, one of the most important biographical reference works in the German language, comprising around 26,345 articles. The work on this project consisted of correcting and proofreading OCR text of scans published elsewhere, under a four-eyes principle as mandated by the community's quality standards. Work on the ADB actually predates the existence of German Wikisource as a separate language project, having been started before it split out of the multilingual version at wikisource.org (initially sources.wikipedia.org) in 2005. Still, it was completed much faster than the publication of the original print version, which took 37 years from 1875 to 1912. In the meantime, a government-funded project also published a digital text edition. However, the archivist and Wikisource community member Klaus Graf argues that the quality of the Wikisource version is higher.
The ADB's successor project, the Neue Deutsche Biographie ("New German Biography") published its first volume ("Aachen – Beheim") in 1953 and is currently expected to be completed in 2023. Back in 2010, the German Wikisource already also created a project page for the NDB; however, under current copyright laws it would likely have to wait until well into the 22nd century for the entire content to become available under public domain.
Brief notes
- The Wiki Education Foundation: Based on social media posts and tips from employees to The Signpost, the Wiki Education Foundation is expected to announce that about half their staff have been laid off due to insufficient fund raising. The Foundation is not part of the WMF, but runs programs in the US and Canada helping university Wikipedia editing classes. We expect to post the official announcement next month.
- Milestones: Wikimedia Sverige reports that the Swedish Wikipedia has reached 50,000 biographies of women, with the milestone article Sigrid de Verdier written by FBQ. About 21.15% of the 236,148 biographies on SVwiki are on women. This compares to 318,844 bios (18.50%) on women out of 1,723,693 total bios on ENwiki. The Spanish Wikipedia, with 84,777 (21.27%) women's bios and Japanese Wikipedia with 70,554 (21.19%) are among the leaders in the larger language versions according to the June 23, 2020 Gender by language report.
- The Wikimedia Foundation's 17th birthday was on June 20.[citation needed]
- Bot scrambles world geography: Google searches are returning English language geography articles bot translated to ceb.wiki. See the proposal on meta to nofollow the bot articles.
Current logo of MediaWiki, regarded as outdated by some - The Wikimedia Foundation's Community Development team launched an experimental series of online meetups called "Wikimedia Clinics" "where any active Wikimedian is welcome to attend and ask questions or ask for advice about whatever Wikimedia-related goal or problem they're working on." Digests of past calls and future dates are available at meta:Wikimedia Clinics.
- A discussion has been started to find a new logo for MediaWiki.
- Big oops Posted to wikitech-l: a server mis-configuration on June 26 (evening of June 25 in North America) sent session cookies to other users and
Some users reported that they saw the site as if they were logged in as someone else
. WMF reset all login sessions to prevent use of the cookies, and statedThere are several layers of protection against something like this happening, and we don't yet know how all of them failed
... and in a followup,Users reportedly had full access to the accounts of other users.
Discuss this story
"A rebrand will happen" ... maybe?
Feel free to revert my edit that removed that note, but it seems inaccurate (given the Board statement of a few days ago). I haven't read other Signpost pages yet; I'm guessing the latest news is covered on other pages. - Dank (push to talk) 19:08, 28 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]