A intégrer petit à petit

The French-language WikiPedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/) is part of the WikiPedia project, using the GNU FreeDocumentationLicense, a neutral point of view policy, and aiming to build a free encyclopedia.

It is one of the medium-sized non-English WikiPedia sites, reaching 20 000 articles in november 2003.

In july 2003, possibly favored by discussions with AntHere on the reason for the logo difference, ErikMoeller proposed a new logo contest to try to fix the matter of the english language in the initial logo. After a long contest, with many french proposition, a common logo was finally approved on meta. It was widely welcome by french wikipedians in replacement of the dove logo.

The french-language Wikipedia was using UseModWiki software until October 31 2002, when it was upgraded to what is referred to as Phase III software. While under usemod software, some strong disagreements with a user called Mulot led the french to use HardSecurity against that user (7 days ban).

It is one of the medium-sized non-English WikiPedia sites, reaching 20 000 articles in november 2003. Its growth was fastest when its size doubled in two months from 943 articles on July 1 to 2045 articles on August 31, 2002.

On November 18, 2002, with 2718 articles, it was the world's 13th BiggestWiki. Its participants were francophones from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, England, and USA mostly. Half of these users were participants on at least one other wikipedia (Esperanto, Spanish, English), helping to establish strong relationships between the different wikipedias.

In January 2003, the contributors set themselves a series of targets to increase the number of articles. The article count increased to 5,000 pages in february 2003.

Heading to 10.000 articles (april 2003), the french wikipedia is currently a rather quiet place to live. A recent user Oliezekat is currently proposing a new concept for Wikipedia : a personal homepage (under the model of my yahoo) any user could adapt to his needs and desires (per external css file for example). See [1]. The proposition lead to disagreements as the new proposed Main Page model in particular require browsers to respect XHTML and unicode, which is not the case of all browsers used by current editors, and could lead to restriction on participation abilities.

Multiple Main pages possibility, as already raised on metawikipedia, is however thought an interesting suggestion.

In may 2003, an advertisment made on Linux site brought a very high number of new contributors. In july 2003, the french wikipedia made 2% of the whole wikipedia sphere traffic rank. In september 4%.

The french wikipedia welcomes her fair share of difficult contributors. One, Utilisateur:Papotages, was especially very active from july 2003 till november 2003, focusing essentially on cultist and pedophilia issues. Pap'otages claimed to be a member of the raelien mouvement, and actually, a very active and controversial person is identified on prevensect and usenet discussions under that name. Papotages was a terrible drain on the spirit of the whole community, some trying to cope with him by assuming good faith and favoring discussion, while others thought the first ones were only feeding the troll. That difficult contributor mostly act through inserting very pov additions to the wikipedia, stirring up dissent between contributors by praising some, while attacking others , filling up the talk pages with endless discussions which exhausted all participants; He ended up essentially constantly reverting or creating new pages filled up with non sense, propaganda, and call for help against censorship. Some consider that he indeed has been victim of censorship from the very beginning, by the activity of three french contributors, active members of anti-sect mouvements.

For about a week before Papotages was banned, the situation was very unclear as the CommunityDoesNotAgree publicly. Finally, the arguments over wether to apply DissuadeReputation, and how to apply it, have been done by irc, icq and private mail, so the community could finally present a rather united front. However, some editors not included in the private communication or not available on irc, deeply resented the lack of FairProcess and openess to all editors. It seems this was one of the major reason why a TrustedEditor finally decided to quit Wikipedia.

On the november 11th, Pap'otages was finally banned by the french community. It may be interesting to note that Jimbo Wales, the leader of the wikipedia project did not participate in that decision, confirming the fact the french wikipedia is basically free of any moral leader. However, some french contributors confirmed to him the banning was unfortunately the only option left, after much had been tried. 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. Pap'otages using multiple ips, and suspected bot to edit pages, the action that can be taken against him are questionned, favoring again very deep dissent among the community. Some favor just blocking and reverting, some want to contact his isp, other want to publish and publicly attack his RealName. The latter option is controversial since there is no proof as yet that the person on prevensect and the one on wikipedia are the same. Other also argued for private life respect. Among french contributors, this deeply raise the issue of how HardSecurity might be achieved in case of a very insistant vandal. On the 13th of november, several technical options were decided to try to block him; being controversial, these decisions raised disagreement between the non-french developper as well.

It is yet to see which consequences this episode will have in the middle term, but for now, it probably drove several newbies away to see screaming insults in summary boxes, made at least one contributor quit, and raised discord in the whole community.

Likely, it will also promote new jargon and habits.

Those who argued for "do not feed the troll" were favouring DissuadeReputation and DissuadeInteraction. This is just another demonstration that these methods do not work if the CommunityDoesNotAgree - here, others are trying to AssumeGoodFaith and ModelDesiredBehavior, and the split in the community response is more dangerous than the person causing the split.

Anyone using a bot can break SoftSecurity - that's when you need to MeetForceWithForce. Complaints to ISPs may be appropriate, where this is focused to LimitDamage. However, publically naming and shaming is a dangerous application of PunishReputation - it does not directly help the wiki, but hopes to indirectly help it by hurting the person who is hurting you. This approach can have no effect, or worse, be counter-productive - you need a good judgement of character to apply it. However, the negative consequences of applying it are less important than the negative consequences of a community split over whether to apply it.

That edit summaries are untouchable is a misfeature in MediaWiki. At a minimum they should be hidable and unhidable (by anyone, not just sysops) - this would promote ForgiveAndForget and ameliorate the fossilised arguments that can discourage newcomers and demoralise oldtimers.

November 25, 2003

The situation settled down quite a bit for the last two weeks, thanks to a series of TechnologySolution""s by TimStarling. First, range and useragent blocks were applied -- these were relatively ineffective. Then, a script was written allowing recent changes to be dumped to IRC. Coupled with client-side alerts triggered by characteristic text in the edit summary, this allowed Papotages to be quickly blocked each time he made edits, often within 10 seconds. Despite this, Papotages was still accused of polluting recent changes with large numbers of edits. To address this, the edits in question were hidden from recent changes after the fact. At first this was done manually by TimStarling using database write access, and later by other sysops with a secret option in the URL. This technique appears to have greatly reduced the inconvenience caused by Papotages' attacks.

The first consequence of the ban of Papotages is that a big discussion started on administrator nomination (I fail to see how it really was a consequence Yann Really, AntHere?, absolutely Yann, support of my claim being the speed at which the whole discussion died, and the fact no decisions have been taken whatsoever in the end). But this also shows that the FrenchWikipedia is maturing with more formal procedures, or on the opposite getting nearer the risk of fossilisation (just getting over 20000 articles with 1000 more articles in a month doesn't seem to be fossilisation. 1000 more does not mean there is as much care given to aspects such as respect of copyrights, or respect of NPOV. Actually quite the contrary. There is no recognition of conflict resolution process, no central management about images, little care given about consolidating procedure, which is why several users are currently on a leave if you have not noticed Yann). Also there is a project to have a local non profit set up in France or in Europe, and we received an offer to host a mirror of the site in Paris, by the cooperative Ouvaton. That project was received with mixed feelings by some members of the community. (by AntHere says Yann who add don't generalize your opposition, AntHere ;o). Look very carefully at the comments given Yann. My sentiment on the matter are NOT the only ones, I am just particularly noisy. Several other people mentionned their doubts as well, on the mailing list and on wikipedia itself, you just choose not to "see" them. One of those also being worried about this proposition is namely TarQuin. I suggest you talk to him before claiming I am the only one bothered :-)).

= Appel Wiki Autrans 2004

Y'aurait t'il un représentant de WikiPedia France que nous pourrions inviter pour parler Echange De Savoir lors des rencontres Autrans 2004 (cf AutransWiki )? -- ChristopheDucamp

plus sérieusement, il est préférable d'éviter de parler de Wikipedia France. Et la notion de "représentant" est un peu "floue", car personne ne peut se targuer de représenter la communauté dans son ensemble. Préférer le terme "participant" :-)

Merci de ces précisions. Nous veillerons désormais à parler plutôt de WikiPedia en LangueFrançaise ou francophone. Quelques participants à Autrans seront donc ravis de rencontrer YannForget ou tout(e) autre Wikipédien(ne) à Autrans :-) -- ChristopheDucamp

j'espère qu'il pourra être la. Bonne chance pour les rencontres, cela doit être beaucoup de travail.