Partisan arrangements, dodgy dollars, a mysterious union of strings, and a hole that became a monument

Featured articles

Four featured articles were promoted this week.

• German–Yugoslav Partisan negotiations (nominated by Peacemaker67) During the redeployment of Josip Broz Tito's headquarters and his partisans across the Nazi puppet state of Croatia in August 1942, a group of Germans from the Organisation Todt were captured. The leader of the group had been tasked by the German Abwehr with making contact with the partisans, and a series of prisoner swaps were initiated. By March 1943, the partisans' military situation had deteriorated, and to forestall continuing German attacks, they again entered into tentative negotiations regarding prisoner swaps and a possible truce. The Germans saw a possibility that the partisans might oppose a British landing, which would have given support to the Royalist Chetniks. There was an exchange of "between 600 to 800 partisans in total" by 1945. Tito stated in 1978 that the objective of the negotiations was "solely to obtain German recognition of belligerent status for the Partisans".
• 1804 dollar (nominated by RHM22) The 1804 dollar is an odd bird. Despite the date, none with this date were minted until the 1830s; although some silver dollars had actually been minted in 1804, they were dated 1803. Large silver coins, such as the Maria Theresa thaler, were used worldwide as standard trade coins. The introduction of the US silver dollar in 1794 added another coin to the trade, and large numbers of dollars were exported by traders. From 1806, the production of silver dollars was officially halted (none had been struck since March 1804) in favour of the minting of smaller denominations; this meant that there was small change available to the US economy but that the exporting of coins stopped. The "1804" dollars were struck when Edmund Roberts, who headed a trade mission to the Far East, requested sets of coinage to be presented to kings and sultans as gifts. The date may have been chosen because the Chief Coiner thought that there had been coins minted with that date; he was anxious to avoid angering coin collectors!
• Deinocheirus (nominated by FunkMonk and IJReid) Deinocheirus is a genus of ostrich dinosaur, so called for their superficial resemblance to the bird. Living about 70 million years ago, they were big – one specimen was about 11 m (36 ft) long and weighed 6.36 t (224,000 oz).
• M-theory (nominated by Polytope24) M-theory is a unification of "all consistent versions of superstring theory". It's not yet been completely formulated, but it's reckoned that the theory "should describe two- and five-dimensional objects called branes and should be approximated by eleven-dimensional supergravity at low energies" (that's exactly what we were about to say...). M-theory was introduced by Edward Witten, whose "proposal was based on the observation that the five string theories can be mapped to one another by certain rules called dualities and are identified by these dualities".

Featured lists

Seven featured lists were promoted this week.

• List of Navy Midshipmen head football coaches (nominated by A Texas Historian) The United States Naval Academy is represented in college football by the Navy Midshipmen football team. Since 1882, the team has had 36 head coaches. The present coach is Ken Niumatalolo.
• List of Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order appointed by King Edward VII (nominated by Noswall59) Admission to the Royal Victorian Order is the personal gift of the "reigning monarch of the United Kingdom and several Commonwealth realms"; it recognises "distinguished personal service to the order's Sovereign" (the monarch), their family, and their viceroys. This list is of those men given the Knight Grand Cross of that order by King Edward VII.
• List of York City F.C. players (25–99 appearances) (nominated by Mattythewhite) York City Football Club was formed in May 1922. Since then, "more than 300 players [have] completed their York career after playing in at least 25 and fewer than 100 senior competitive matches". The list includes Charlie Lemons, Len Butt, Fred Laycock, Andy Leaning, and Michael Gash.
• World Fantasy Award for Best Artist (nominated by PresN) The World Fantasy Award for Best Artist is an annual award given to the "artists of works related to fantasy released in the preceding calendar year". It is awarded at the World Fantasy Convention; the winners are decided by a selection process which starts with an attendee ballot to select two finalists, followed by a nomination of three more by a panel of fantasy authors, who then vote on the overall winner. The winner receives a caricature bust of H. P. Lovecraft.
• List of scheduled monuments in Sedgemoor (nominated by Rodw) They do say that if you walk through the ankle-high mist on the levels, you'll be dead within the fortnight. While you are awaiting your inevitable demise, you can spend the fortnight visiting these marvellous monuments. You'll have probably seen Brent Knoll, a flat-topped hill close to the M5 motorway. The hole that became a monument? There's several on the list, but our favourite's not on it. That's Fox's Hole at Crook Peak, which is great if you like confined spaces and spiders.
• 63rd Academy Awards (nominated by Birdienest81) The 63rd Academy Awards were held in March 1991. Dances with Wolves won Best Picture and six other awards. Unfortunately, the wolves could not make the show, as they had a previous engagement with ghosts, mobsters, and dopa.
• List of cricketers who have carried the bat in international cricket (nominated by Vensatry) In the game of cricket, when an opening batsman remains not out at the end of the fortnight game, they are said to have "carried the bat". The expression refers back to a time when batsmen shared bats, and the outgoing batsman would leave his bat on the field to be used by the incoming player. An equivalent expression, "carrying the box", fell out of use after an outbreak of crabs.

Featured pictures

23 featured pictures were promoted this week.

• 1804 dollar (created by the U.S. Mint, photographed by Heritage Auctions, nominated by Godot13) A Class III 1804 dollar, created specifically for collectors years after the "originals" were struck as diplomatic gifts. Although not actually minted in 1804, they're still valuable; this one sold for $2.3 million in 2009. (This image was promoted on 13 March, but the feature was held back to coincide with the above article on the same subject.)
• Audi e-tron (created by Thomas Wolf (Der Wolf im Wald), retouched by: LiveChocolate, nominated by Crisco 1492) The Audi e-tron is a series of cars by Audi, using either one or more electric motors or a combination of an internal combustion engine and electric motors in the same car (hybrids). This photograph shows an e-tron concept car, shown at the 2009 International Motor Show in Frankfurt. It is powered by four electric motors, providing four-wheel drive.
• Eight Bells (created by Winslow Homer, nominated by Crisco 1492) Eight Bells is an oil painting by Winslow Homer of two fishermen holding sextants. The "eight bells" refers to the nautical time, which is noon; the fishermen are using their sextants to determine the highest position of the sun, and hence local apparent noon. They can then calculate their longitude.
• Garden at Sainte-Adresse (created by Claude Monet, nominated by Crisco 1492) A woman and man are in conversation on a terrace overlooking La Manche at Sainte-Adresse. This peaceful but banal scene is miles away from the dramatic landscapes and scenes predominant in Western art; it is part of the revolution in painting forged by the Impressionists.
• Clanculus corallinus (created by Llez, nominated by Armbrust) You knew right away that these whorls were convex, spirally granose-lirate, but you had forgotten what a globose-conic shape with an acute spire looks like. Now you remember.
• Embryonic stem cells (created by Ryddragyn, nominated by The Herald) The blob in the centre of this photograph is a colony of human embryonic stem cells. They have been taken from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst stage of a human embryo, five days after fertilisation. Their importance lies in the fact that they are pluripotent, that is, they can differentiate into any kind of cell found in the human body. The first clinical trial using stem cells was on patients with spinal-cord injuries. Started in 2009, it was halted in 2011 for financial reasons.
• [[:|Alison Bechdel]] (created by Riccardo De Luca for the MacArthur Foundation, nominated by Crisco 1492) Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist, is here seen drawing a self-portrait, using the image on the screen of a digital camera as an aide-memoire. The eponymous Bechdel test is applied to works of fiction; they pass if they have two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.
• Descent of the Soyuz TMA-14M (created by NASA, nominated by The Herald) On March 12, 2015, shortly after local sunrise over central Asia, this Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft floated over a sea of golden clouds during its descent by parachute through Earth's dense atmosphere. TMA-14M was the 123rd flight of a Soyuz spacecraft, the first flight launching in 1967. The Soyuz remained docked to the space station for the Expedition 42 increment to serve as an emergency escape vehicle until undocking and landing as scheduled in March 2015.
• Dishes with Oysters, Fruit, and Wine (created by Osias Beert the Elder, nominated by Hafspajen) Osias Beert was a Flemish painter who specialised in breakfasts. His paintings were built up using glazes of semi-transparent oil colour to give depth and a wide range of colours. Beert's paintings of food are called in Dutch ontbijtjes, or "little breakfasts" – here there are oysters, honey, chestnuts, raisins, sugared almonds, bread, and meringues, with a glass of Madeira wine.
• Étienne Maurice Gérard (created by Jacques-Louis David, nominated by Crisco 1492) Étienne Maurice Gérard had a military and political career stretching from 1791 to his death in 1852. He must have been remarkably adaptable, as the only hiatus in his career was between 1815 and 1817, when he was hiding out in Brussels after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. Gérard also managed to survive the retreat from Moscow.
• Frida Kahlo (created by Toni Frissell, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) This photograph of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was part of a 1937 photo shoot by Toni Frissell for fashion and lifestyle magazine Vogue. Kahlo was being photographed for an article entitled "Señoras of Mexico", published in the US edition of 1 October 1937. The photograph used in the magazine was of Kahlo standing upright against the agave, holding her rebozo above her head; the photo was colourised. She was referred to as "Mrs Diego Rivera", as she often was at the time – besides a 1939 purchase by the Louvre, she was largely ignored by the mainstream art world during her lifetime, and wouldn't gain widespread recognition until decades after her death.
• Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, and Annette Duvivier, Comtesse de Vergennes (created by Antoine de Favray, nominated (1 2) by P. S. Burton and Hafspajen respectively) Such a cute couple. Excellent portraits of the diplomat Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes and wife, by Antoine de Favray. A good example of French orientalist art and turquerie. Gravier played an important role in Franco-Ottoman relations, both as ambassador and later as French Minister for Foreign Affairs. He commissioned the work from Favray while in Constantinople. Favray was a French painter known for his portraits of personalities of the Ottoman Empire, as well as paintings of Grand Masters in Malta.
• Religion saved by Spain (created by Titian, nominated by Alborzagros) Religion saved by Spain is a painting by Titian completed in 1575. It's a mix of allegory and political propaganda, depicting the defeat of a Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto.
• Mariana (created by John Everett Millais, nominated by Hafspajen) With the painting technique of an angel and the imagination of a Hackney barmaid, John Everett Millais combined "precision, attention to detail, and stellar ability as a colorist" with ponderous didacticism to produce works of art that told a moral story. In the stained glass windows, the portrayal of the Annunciation promises a virgin birth, but the broken snowdrop in the coat of arms symbolises a loss of virginity; it is already too late. The motto In coelo quies (In Heaven there is rest) was the motto of Cardinal Wiseman. Millais had a certain non-committal fascination with the pomp and ceremony of the Roman Catholic church, to which attitude John Ruskin referred when he drew attention to Mariana's boredom with her "idolatrous toilet table". Mariana is based on a poem by Alfred comma Lord Tennyson: "With blackest moss the flower-plots / Were thickly crusted, one and all / The rusted nails fell from the knots / That held the pear to the gable-wall. dah dah dah The sparrow's chirrup on the roof / The slow clock ticking, and the sound / Which to the wooing wind aloof / The poplar made, did all confound". What's it all about, Alfie?
• François-Henri d'Harcourt (created by Jean Honoré Fragonard, nominated by Alborzagros) This oil on canvas portrait of François-Henri d'Harcourt by Jean Honoré Fragonard is one of four of the "Fantastical Portraits", a series of portraits by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, mostly dating to 1769. It is said they were executed in a single hour, from which they gained the Italian name fa' presto (made quickly). François-Henri d'Harcourt was Count Lillebonne, a French general, duke and peer of France, He emigrated during the French Revolution, and he became a representative of Louis XVIII of France to the British government (1792–1800).
• The Stolen Kiss (created by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, nominated by Alborzagros) Jean-Honoré Fragonard's works display the kind of eroticism and voluptuousness and the liking for romantic folly that was popular before the French Revolution among French aristocrats. The Stolen Kiss was no different. Fragonard includes scenes of voyeurism in his paintings. This scene depicts a stolen kiss in lavish surroundings, containing luxurious details of textures, silks, and lace, like the rug with flower pattern, silk draperies, her shawl on the chair, and the elegantly clad ladies visible through the open door. For half a century or more, Fragonard was so completely ignored that Wilhelm Lübke's 1873 art history volume omits the very mention of his name. (Of course, Lübke was an anti-Semite and also omitted Jews, so there is that.) On December 5, 2013, Bonhams sold the Fragonard portrait of François-Henri duc d'Harcourt for $28,058,081 – setting a world record price for the artist at auction.
• Stitching the Standard (created by Edmund Leighton, nominated by Brandmeister) Painted in 1911, this canvas by Edmund Blair Leighton depicts a woman stitching an Austro-Hungarian military flag, with its crowned two-headed black eagle on a gold field. The painting was sold at Christie's in 1928 under the title Preparing the flag to the art dealer W. W. Sampson, who was the leader of an illegal knockout ring of dealers. The inebriated Sampson drowned in a bathtub in Brighton in 1929, leaving an estate worth £10. The painting seems to have gone out of sight until art dealer Richard Green bought it at a Phillips auction in 1977 under the title Awaiting his Return. Green sold it to a private collector, and it re-appeared as Stitching the Standard at a Sotheby's auction a year later. In 2011, the painting went back to Sotheby's, where it was sold for an eye-watering £373,250. Leighton reworked the subject in his Hostage of 1912 using the same model, this time with blonde hair, sitting on the ramparts doing embroidery. Paula Rego, in her 1987 painting The Policeman's Daughter, subverts the whole genre; the daughter sits by a window through which moonlight streams, polishing her father's jackboots.
• Blue petrel (created by JJ Harrison, nominated by JJ Harrison) The word "petrel" is derived from Saint Peter and the story of his walking on water. This is in reference to the petrel's habit of appearing to run on the water to take off. This wonderful photo of a blue petrel from our longtime contributor of fine work in the nature field, JJ Harrison, is a fine example of one of nature's more fortunate creatures using its most precious skill. And the bird looks good as well. Leaves us to ask, if you could fly, would you? Silly question, contact ground control on 121.8, have a good flight ....
• Papilio machaon (created by Zeynel Cebeci, nominated by Crisco 1492) A wonderful macro photo of a butterfly, this is the wing underside view of a swallowtail Papilio machaon in Erdemli, Turkey. In some countries, P. machaon and its subspecies are protected by law. Papilio machaon machaon is protected by law in six provinces of Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. The species is protected in the United Kingdom, and subsp. verityi is protected in India.
• Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (created by Rembrandt, nominated by SchroCat) Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 is a self-portrait by the Dutch artist Rembrandt, now in the National Gallery, London. Dating to 1669, it was the last in his long series of self-portraits, but it is not currently on display. Rembrandt created nearly one hundred self-portraits during his lifetime, including approximately fifty paintings, thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. The self-portraits create a visual diary of the artist over a span of forty years. "Hmm, I think I will paint me, again. Hand me the canvas please!"
• The Kiss (created by Gustav Klimt, nominated by Crisco 1492) A golden Kiss? Gustav Klimt's "Golden Phase" was marked by positive critical reaction and financial success. Many of his paintings from this period include gold leaf. Klimt had previously used gold in his Pallas Athene (1898) and Judith I (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and this wonderful work of art, The Kiss (1907–08).
• A Virgin with a Unicorn (created by Domenichino and Annibale Carracci, nominated by Hafspajen) A Virgin with a Unicorn is a painting by Domenico Zampieri on display at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Domenico Zampieri (or Domenichino) (1581–1641) was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese School, a rather talented one. This school flourished in Bologna between the 16th and 17th centuries, and rivaled Florence and Rome as the center of painting in the Italian Baroque era. The painting depicts Giulia Farnese, mistress to Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). The Pope fell in love with Giulia and decided to make her his mistress.... Well, so much for that unicorn.
• The Mystical Nativity (created by Sandro Botticelli, nominated by SchroCat) The Mystical Nativity by Sandro Botticelli is on display at the National Gallery in London and depicts a scene of joy and celebration, of earthly and heavenly delight, with angels dancing at the top of the painting. The Greek inscription at the top translates as: "This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three-and-a-half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture". Alrighty then.
• Dorf in den Berner Alpen (created by Adolf Mosengel, nominated by Hafspajen) Are the people next door getting under your skin? We have the perfect place for you: the Alps. Et voilà, Dorf in den Berner Alpen by German painter Adolf Mosengel (1837–1885) – only 68 by 50 centimetres (27 in × 20 in), but never mind the width, feel the quality. Mosengel was a landscape painter from Hamburg, Germany. He had built a reputation painting Alpine scenes, like this one, and he later turned to scenes from Westphalia.

Good articles

This is a new feature, including a list of all the good articles promoted during the week covered in this report (22–28 March 2015). Please tell us what you think! This week, thirty-five good articles were promoted.

Song of the Carolina wren

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2015-04-08

WikiProject Christianity

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By Go Phightins!

With the Christian Holy Week having recently drawn to a close, it is an apt time to examine WikiProject Christianity, which was created in 2006, and boasts over 200 active members. However, in a time when Christianity is in decline in the Global North (where a majority of contributors to the English Wikipedia reside),^[1][2] how is the project faring? We spoke to three of its contributors to find out.

1. What interests you about WikiProject Christianity? Do you have a real world connection to the religion?

   A: John Carter: Yeah, I'm an active Catholic, who also has studied a fair amount of religion in general in school.

2. Article development seems to be a primary focus of the project, which boasts an impressive 138 featured articles, but at the same time, there are 16 top importance articles currently rated as stubs. Quite simply, is improvement of these articles a priority, and how does the project go about doing so?

   A: Carter: Improvement is, but sometimes finding out how to do so can be difficult. There is at least one current estimate of there existing 20,000 distinct Christian denominations, broadly defined, out there today. That's not counting the untold number of older groups that have faded away over the years. Finding ways to fairly and neutrally develop the core topics can be problematic. There are a few editors, including me, working on developing material from old reference works over at Wikisource, which, theoretically, barring any changes in academic views in the interim as found in more recent sources, could be used to develop a lot of the related content here. While the sheer breadth of extant and yet-to-be-created articles can be problematic we are at least in the early stages of maybe getting the structure of the content here more fully fleshed out.

3. Recently, the challenges of working in this topic area have been revealed to the entire community with arbitration cases such as Historicity of Jesus and Christianity and Sexuality. Do the issues in these cases typify general challenges, or are these extreme cases? More broadly, as religion is such a personal topic, how difficult is it to maintain a neutral point of view, and what strategies does the project use in seeking to achieve one?

   A: Mugsalot: I feel that it is much easier to maintain a NPOV when one has access to both sides of the argument, as not only does this allow me to clarify historical debates but it also prevents me from hearing only one side of the argument so that I can accurately record historical events without bias.

   A: Carter: There have been particularly in the west since the 1960s really serious changes in the popular and academic views regarding religion in general. Particular attention has seemingly been given to topics which might, in the eyes of some, be able to "disprove" core beliefs of Christianity and other religions, particularly in the secularism and new atheism communities. Some of these recent changes have gotten widespread academic support, others have received less support. The significant cultural changes brought about by contraceptives and other developments have brought about quite a few changes in all sorts of groups, including some specifically Christian groups and some others. Finding ways to keep the content NPOV, particularly when some editors on both sides might reasonably be seen as having serious POV difficulties, can be and like in those cases sometimes is really problematic. Luckily, there aren't that many such topics that are subject to particular controversy at any given time.

   A: Astynax: A related problem is that a popular literature has developed (sometimes authored by academics making their mark in this or that well-studied niche and sometimes advanced by people with no credentials in the field) that exploits a textual or archaeological interpretation to advance sensationalistic, book-selling hype or revisionist premises. I can think of several instances where editors have latched on to such fringe statements, mistaking them as being widely accepted; ignoring the mainstream view of scholarship in the field and often also missing any subtle qualifiers that the author may have inserted. When an idea is intriguing, however unsupported by other evidence or scholarship, some editors have insisted on inserting fringey material into articles (or making them the subject of entire articles). On rare occasions, a novel thesis will eventually receive enough backing that it makes a dent in the mainstream scholarly view, at which point it deserves inclusion in articles. It can be difficult to convince editors, however, that policy requires that we await the academic process to work itself out before the encyclopedia can report such material as even a notable minority view within an article. As in other little-watched areas of Wikipedia, this type of questionable material is extremely difficult to keep out of articles per policy. It often takes only one or two advocates of inserting a purely speculative and otherwise unsupported marginal or fringe material to dominate discussion and "consensus" in little-watched areas. Dispute resolution processes largely ignores content, so this sort of situation can be extremely frustrating to the few editors who may be attempting to keep an article reflecting the weight of the significant reporting in reliable sources. For those articles where a large enough segment of the community is not watching to provide balance, the encyclopedia often ends up reporting unencyclopedic information, and because there is no ready recourse when someone challenges fringey information, such disputes sometimes result in the loss of valuable editors, and the repetitive walls of text and frustrated attempts at correction are off-putting to new editors, even scholars, who come to such pages. Lack of content oversight and avenues for resolving content disputes is a Wikipedia-wide problem for largely unwatched topics, but as the religion projects have many such articles, it is particularly noticeable here.

4. Personally, what has been your most rewarding experience with WikiProject Christianity?

   A: Carter: I'm a bit of a history buff myself, and finding out about some of the now smaller groups, like the Assyrian Church of the East, Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Syriac Orthodox Church, and Armenian Apostolic Church, and how they have influenced, sometimes in very big ways, our current culture has been fascinating. Particularly when for some of these topics the available English language sources can be rather weak or hard to access. One of the biggest examples that comes to mind is the Ethiopian Meqabyan, which so far as I can tell have become available in English only since 2008 in a vanity press translation.

5. I noticed you have a project newsletter. What does it cover, and is it effective in recruiting and engaging members?

   A: Carter: I regret to say that the newsletter has been inactive for some time now. I would love to see it reactivated, if anyone wanted to, but I myself haven't had the time to do so lately.

6. The project has a lengthy to do list, which looks rather overwhelming, quite frankly. What are the most important tasks for the project right now, and how can new contributors help?

   A: Carter: Like I said, there are about 20,000 extant Christian denominations of all sorts out there, and an untold number of now defunct groups. Probably the biggest priority is getting the more core articles up to a decent level of development so we can know what is to be included in those articles, and what material would best be included in some spinout article. From the standpoint of building construction, as it were, we've got a few good walls up but still have some serious questions with the foundations and basement. Getting the more central articles up to good status, along with those articles which, for whatever reason, get the more short-term attention, is probably our core need right now, pretty much like it is with most other projects.

Editor's note: Our regular WikiProject report writer Rcsprinter123 is currently on a break due to real-life demands. Would you be interested in helping write the section, even if just one time? We have detailed instructions and resources to make it as easy as possible. If so, please contact us.

References

1. ^ Grant, Tobin (January 27, 2014). "The Great Decline: 60 years of religion in one graph". Religion News Service. Religion News. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
2. ^ Kumar, Anugrah (July 20, 2013). "Study: World Is Turning More Religious; Atheism Declining". The Christian Post. Retrieved April 4, 2015.

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2015-04-08

New functionary appointments

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By Gamaliel and Go Phightins!

The Committee has voted on the 2015 appointments to the functionary team. Two users, Callanecc and Mike V, were granted both checkuser and oversight powers. Callanecc is also serving as an arbitration clerk. Bbb23 was appointed as a checkuser and six other users were appointed oversighters: GB fan, HJ Mitchell, Keilana, Kelapstick, Lankiveil, and Ronhjones. HJ Mitchell is the regular author of the Signpost's Arbitration report.

Of the candidates appointed, none received any oppose votes from the Committee. The arbitrators, however, were evenly split on two other candidates: HJ Mitchell was denied checkuser rights, though he received significant support in the community discussion and on the Committee, one of them writing: "I don't find the opposes convincing." Bbb23 wrote in their nomination statement "I don’t think I’ll use the oversight tool much" and those on the Committee opposing the nomination unanimously cited this as the cause for denying them oversight rights.

One question dominating the community discussion was exactly how many votes from the Committee were needed to appoint a Functionary, whether it was a mere majority or an 80% threshold. This ended up being a moot point since all the candidates either received exactly 50% or 100% of the vote.

The Committee also offered their thanks to J.delanoy "for his years of service" as a checkuser. J.delanoy resigned from his Wikipedia and Wikimedia posts in January, citing demands from his professional life. He became an administrator in 2008, a checkuser in 2009, and a steward in 2010.

In brief

• Dreadstar desysopped: By motion, the Arbitration Committee removed the administrative privileges of Dreadstar for "conduct unbecoming of an administrator." Subsequently, he blocked himself, and retired.
• Liz appointed as trainee clerk: On March 27, the committee approved Liz as a new trainee clerk. She is the third recently appointed trainee clerk, joining L235 and Robert McClenon; ArbCom requested additional help in January, and with three new trainee clerks, it appears they have found that for which they were looking.
  
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2015-04-08

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Wikimedia tech ambassadors

The following content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Editors can join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [1]
• Read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. Current work is on the roadmap. [2] [3]
• The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [4]
• Editors can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [5]

Problems

• The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. Please delete and import pages again if necessary. [6]
• Labs was broken several times this week. [7] [8] [9] [10]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
• It is now possible to add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [11]
• Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [12] [13]
• Editors can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [14]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [15]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

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