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29 May 2022

From the team — A changing of the guard
From the archives
The Onion and Wikipedia
 

2022-05-29

A changing of the guard

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By EpicPupper and JPxG
Soldiers from the National Guards Unit of Bulgaria being relieved by their replacements during a guard mounting ceremony
Soldiers from the National Guards Unit of Bulgaria being relieved by their replacements during a guard mounting ceremony

Last April, Smallbones said he was preparing to step down as The Signpost's editor-in-chief. This month, he did... we appreciate his hard work and dedication over the last three years, and hope to keep seeing his ~~~~ around The Signpost.

This April, two guys nominated themselves as replacements, and in May the discussion was closed after unanimous support. It's official: these two guys are now the Editors-in-Chief. But what? Huh? Zuh??

We are the illustrious EpicPupper and JPxG. We're Wikimedians who have both written and edited a lot of Signpost articles, and are stoked to try and hold this thing together. In our new capacity as co-EiCs, we will be assisted by Bri, Ixtal, and Smallbones, the fantastic editors of The Signpost — as well as our contributors and readers.

Our plan is to keep doing what we've been doing: serving the Wikimedia movement by spotlighting the stories of our diverse readership. As a major publication on the English Wikipedia, The Signpost offers an opportunity for people to be heard who otherwise wouldn't be. We aim to advocate for free knowledge and access, and help build a positive community culture. We also aim to publish an absolute banger of a newspaper, which seems likely this month (with a whopping 25 articles).

Along with reviewing previous suggestions, we've identified potential action points in moving toward these goals. These include:

  • increasing our social media reach through other channels such as Reddit, TikTok, and WT.social
  • creating a "Signpost Guide" to help readers navigate each issue by filtering by tags or categories
  • creating a scavenger hunt game for every issue as a fun, engaging way to explore The Signpost
  • applying for user group status
  • creating a non-editing role account as an easy way to email both EiCs
  • making The Signpost's templates and technical implementation more accessible, faster to load on slow connections, responsive, easier to use, and more compliant with MediaWiki best practices

We have already made some improvements, such as creating a short URL for easier navigation (signpost.news).

We invite the community to provide feedback on these proposals and the project at large in our 2022 Reader Survey, open now. We hope that we will be able to conduct one annually. We immensely appreciate your feedback and thank you for your time.

Finally, we would also like to take this opportunity to invite more community members to join The Signpost team. Although many of our segments have active contributors, our writers need rest from The Signpost from time to time, and redundancy is much appreciated. We are looking for volunteers to help us with the following segments:

  • From the archives republishes articles from older editions of The Signpost, usually based on current events, anniversaries or holidays. The segment is intended to highlight interesting or important parts of the Wikimedia movement's history.
  • Tips and tricks is a section that republishes from the Tips of the Day project, providing useful tidbits of information.
  • On the bright side articles showcase good news throughout difficult times.
  • The Discussion report aims to provide a summary of the most significant ongoing discussions and polls of community-wide relevance.
  • Essay republishes essays from Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement that spotlight important issues. Humorous essays are generally republished in Humor.
  • Our Special report column always needs submissions! Do you have an article idea that doesn't fit into any of the other categories? Let us know, and we can publish it in this column. Alternative headings for special reports include Community view, Forum, or In focus.
  • Op-eds published are always the subject of much discussion. The Signpost wishes to cover a wide range of perspectives and as such is always looking for more contributors to express their views on current community issues.
  • The Traffic report reports on the most popular articles on Wikipedia during the last publication period, measured in page views. The Signpost is specifically looking for volunteers to assist in also reporting on most-edited pages in this segment.
  • The WikiProject report reports on the progress and background of selected WikiProjects.
  • Galleries are photographic sections containing high-quality images in a curated, topical form. These often are selected based on current events, anniversaries, or holidays.
  • Interviews are interviews with Wikimedia contributors.
  • Featured content covers recently-featured content on the English Wikipedia, including Featured Articles, Featured Lists, and Featured Pictures.
  • Humor column providing light-hearted entertainment to the community. Often, this takes place in the form of republishing humorous essays, or puzzles such as crosswords.
  • The Technology report contains news and developments in the technical platforms used by the Wikimedia projects.
  • News and notes contains major internal news, presenting broad coverage of goings-on within the Wikimedia movement.
  • In the media publishes instances of media coverage of Wikipedia.
  • Recent research reports on academic studies done on Wikimedia or with Wikimedia in mind, similar to In the media.
  • The Arbitration report summarizes ongoing or recently concluded arbitration cases on the English Wikipedia.
  • Serendipity often covers matters that do not fit into any other column in a light-hearted matter. It is similar to Op-eds and the Special report column.

In sum, The Signpost always needs a hand with publication. If you can, please volunteer by sending us a message here. Thank you so much for volunteering!

The Signpost will continue to inform, entertain, and publish for years to come.



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2022-05-29

2022 Wikimedia Board elections

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By EpicPupper, Sdkb and Andreas Kolbe

Wikimedia Foundation 2022 Board elections

A timeline of the elections process.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board election process for 2022 started in April. Twelve Wikimedians have submitted their candidacy, and six members of the Analysis Committee have been confirmed at the time of publication. The Analysis Committee is responsible for evaluat[ing] the candidates against the skills and diversity, equity and inclusion criteria shared by the Board of Trustees. An affiliate shortlisting period will be held from July 1 to 15, and a community voting phase is scheduled for August 15 to 29. To help inform affiliates on the wishes of the community, The Signpost is holding a poll to select a potential shortlist. For more information, please see Community view. – E

Wikimedia Foundation publishes Form 990 for 2020 calendar year

Form 990 is a United States Internal Revenue Service document that provides the public with financial information about a nonprofit organization. It is often the only source of such information. The WMF has just published its Form 990 for the 2020 calendar year, along with an associated FAQ on Meta. Here is a very brief summary of some key points:

The form shows that in 2020, eight Wikimedia executives earned more than US$300,000 in compensation and benefits, headed by then-Executive Director Katherine Maher ($423,318). Five of these eight executives (Maher, Ingersoll, Uzzell, Negrin, and Arville) are no longer with the Wikimedia Foundation today; three of them only served for a couple of years before leaving again. Comparing the data in the 2020 and 2019 forms, Chief Product Officer Anthony Negrin's compensation and benefits rose by the highest amount – from $258,896 in 2019 to $324,916 in 2020, an increase of more than 25%. He left in November 2021, after many years with the WMF.

The number of US-based employees went up, from 291 to 320. Overall salary costs (for US-based and non-US-based employees, but excluding contractors) rose from $55,634,913 to $67,857,675, an increase of more than twelve million dollars.

The highest-paid independent contractors were:

  • Jones Day at $901,872 (San Francisco, US, legal services)
  • Snohetta Design AS at $613,221 (Oslo, Norway, brand strategy)
  • Gluzdov.com, Inc. at $538,746 (Philadelphia, US, engineering services)
  • Swift + Possible LLC at $461,455 (Portland, US, public relations)
  • Minassian Media at $319,214 (New York, US, public relations)

The full set of Wikimedia Foundation financial reports – both the filed Form 990s and the annual financial statements, along with their respective FAQs – is available on the Wikimedia Foundation website. Forms 990 are also available on external sites such as propublica.org. – AK

Fundraising campaigns in India and Latin America to kick off shortly

"32% of your gift will be used to support the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day" – this is the caption accompanying the above image in the email which the WMF says is being sent to Indian donors. The same wording and image were according to Meta also used a few months ago in the Swedish emails.

The WMF has announced on Meta that it will run fundraising campaigns in India (which skipped last year's fundraiser because of COVID-19) and Latin America from May 31 to June 28, 2022, with parallel email campaigns from May 23 to June 20.

According to mock-ups linked on Meta, emails will ask existing donors to renew their support "to keep Wikipedia online for yourself and millions of people around the world", "to ensure that Wikipedia remains independent, ad-free, and growing for years to come", and to "keep Wikipedia online, ad-free, and growing for years to come".

The first email (of a total of three) explains, at the top of page 2, that "32% of your gift will be used to support the volunteers". This text is illustrated with a picture of schoolchildren in Rwanda. Based on revenue of $163 million in the 2020–21 financial year (likely to be exceeded this year, judging by the WMF's second-quarter revenue reports for this year and last year), this would correspond to more than $50 million of donations revenue being used to support volunteers. (The same email text and picture was, according to the Meta Fundraising page, also used in Swedish emails sent out in March 2022.) Total expenditure in 2020/2021 was $112 million (this includes $5 million paid to the Wikimedia Endowment and $68 million for WMF salaries and wages).

A fundraising banner campaign is also currently underway in South Africa (May 23 to June 20). – AK

Most widely attended RfA ever turns on comment about desysoping Trump supporters

Tamzin, a seasoned and well-respected editor known for their work at SPI and in various other areas, was nominated for adminship on May 1. Initial smooth sailing brought a slew of supports, but the RfA took a sharp turn after Ad Orientem asked about an earlier comment Tamzin made, in which they stated "I'd be fine with a rule that we automatically desysop any Trump supporter. I will never vote for an admin candidate who's right-of-center by American standards (although I wouldn't vote against someone solely on that basis)." In answering, Tamzin moderated their stance only slightly, writing that "avowed, continuing support for Donald Trump constitutes support for an oppressive regime, and thus should be disqualifying" for adminship. "I don't think it's unreasonable to judge someone's fitness for a position of trust based on one's impression of the reasonableness (or lack thereof) of their political views," they wrote, but "it should not be the only consideration, definitely not a litmus test."

This response led to a run of opposes; many of them cited an ardent, later-rescinded !vote by Hammersoft, who wrote: "This lock-step belief that a person can't be trusted if they have political views opposing the candidate's isn't just troubling, it's disgusting in the extreme. That we would embolden a member of this community with such despicable views is horrifying. An administrator must be able to be dispassionate in their assessments. This candidate clearly can not be so."

Meanwhile, Tamzin also continued accruing support, and many editors who had previously supported affirmed their !votes. Most disagreed with Tamzin's specific stance, but testified to their quality contributions as a whole, and noted the lack of evidence that their views had influenced their editing.

The RfA closed with 340 supports, 112 opposes, and 16 neutrals, making it the most widely attended nomination in Wikipedia history. At just over 75% support, the raw !vote total fell a hair above the traditional discretionary zone in which nominations are closed through a discussion among bureaucrats ("bureaucrat chat"). Maxim initiated a bureaucrat chat anyway, citing in part "the acrimoniousness of the discussion". The discussants questioned how much weight to give reaffirmations, and ultimately decided 9-to-2 that there existed consensus to promote. – Sd[1]

Input sought for revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct and its Enforcement Guidelines

As announced on the Wikimedia-l mailing list on May 25, 2022, pages have been opened on Meta to discuss improvements to the Universal Code of Conduct and to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines:

The WMF also published a report (announcement on Wikimedia-l) on the feedback received during the vote on the Enforcement Guidelines, along with what is said to be a full list of anonymised comments users had left along with their votes. – AK

Brief notes

The WMF has decided to stop accepting cryptocurrency donations, following a community RfC on Meta.
  • Administrator and bureaucrat activity requirements: Activity requirements for administrators and bureaucrats were raised following an RfC. For more coverage, please see the Discussion report.
  • Wikimedia Foundation stops accepting cryptocurrency donations: After an RfC on Meta was closed, with consensus from the community to recommend the WMF stop accepting cryptocurrency donations, the WMF decided to discontinue direct acceptance of cryptocurrency as a means of donating (link). The RfC on Meta was started by GorillaWarfare; there is related coverage of GorillaWarfare in this month's In the Media section.
  • Leadership Development Working Group formed: Fifteen members of the Leadership Development Working Group were announced on May 16.
  • CR&S office hours: Community Resilience & Sustainability is hosting conversations on IRC on June 2 at 17:00 UTC.
  • Wikimedia Enterprise conversations: The Wikimedia Enterprise project team welcomes conversations via Zoom on June 9 at 17:00 UTC.
  • Hubs Global Conversations event: A Global Conversations event on Regional and Thematic Hubs with a focus on peer-to-peer sharing is occurring on June 24-26.
  • Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: Igbo Wikipedia (10,000 pages), Saraiki Wiktionary (70,000 entries), Ukrainian Wikivoyage (1,000 articles), Interlingue Wikipedia (10,000 articles), Karakalpak Wikipedia (10,000 registered users).
  • Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Turkey (bird). Please be bold in helping improve it!

Disclosures

  1. ^ Disclosure: The author of this segment !voted or otherwise participated in the discussion.



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2022-05-29

Have your say in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections

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By EpicPupper

The Wikimedia Foundation Board election process for 2022 started in April. Twelve Wikimedians have submitted their candidacy, and six members of the Analysis Committee have been confirmed at the time of publication. The Analysis Committee is responsible for evaluat[ing] the candidates against the skills and diversity, equity and inclusion criteria shared by the Board of Trustees. An affiliate shortlisting period will be held from July 1 to 15, and a community voting phase is scheduled for August 15 to 29.

To help inform affiliates on the wishes of the community, The Signpost is holding a poll to select a potential shortlist. To participate, please use this link; contributors can select "yes", "abstain" or "no" for each candidate. The top 6 candidates will be published and recommended for affiliates to select for shortlisting. Please use your username in the "name" field; only the Signpost Editors in Chief (EpicPupper and JPxG) will have access to the vote logs. Once done, please email one of the EiCs to confirm your vote. Duplicate votes will not be counted.

Edit count statistics are tallied below for each candidate, for voter convenience.

  • Farah Jack Mustaklem (Fjmustak): ar.wikipedia.org 3,643 enbaike.710302.xyz 3,182 commons.wikimedia.org 1,926 meta.wikimedia.org 985 www.wikidata.org 546 wikimania2016.wikimedia.org 66 ar.wikisource.org 46 he.wikipedia.org 34 www.mediawiki.org 29 fr.wikipedia.org 29 Other projects 194
    • All projects 10,680 [3]
  • Mike Peel (Mike Peel): www.wikidata.org 192,526 commons.wikimedia.org 130,267 enbaike.710302.xyz 73,789 en.wikisource.org 5,054 meta.wikimedia.org 4,043 simple.wikipedia.org 929 wikimania2018.wikimedia.org 477 pt.wikipedia.org 299 wikimania.wikimedia.org 174 foundation.wikimedia.org 114 Other projects 510
    • All projects 408,182 [4]
  • Gilbert Ndihokubwayo (Gilbert Ndihokubwayo): meta.wikimedia.org 211 commons.wikimedia.org 121 rn.wikipedia.org 36 fr.wikipedia.org 19 eo.wikipedia.org 16 enbaike.710302.xyz 11 www.wikidata.org 9 wikimania.wikimedia.org 2 en.wikivoyage.org 2 eo.wikiquote.org 1 Other projects 0
    • All projects 428 [5]
  • Tobechukwu Precious Friday (Tochiprecious): meta.wikimedia.org 1,086 www.wikidata.org 487 incubator.wikimedia.org 310 commons.wikimedia.org 306 ig.wikipedia.org 232 www.mediawiki.org 165 enbaike.710302.xyz 44 wikimania.wikimedia.org 9 sn.wikipedia.org 4 en.wikiquote.org 4 Other projects 8
    • All projects 2,655 [6]
  • Lionel Scheepmans (Lionel Scheepmans): fr.wikiversity.org 23,399 fr.wikipedia.org 4,877 meta.wikimedia.org 2,939 en.wikiversity.org 1,090 fr.wikibooks.org 856 commons.wikimedia.org 738 be.wikimedia.org 442 enbaike.710302.xyz 259 www.wikidata.org 186 wikimania.wikimedia.org 84 Other projects 566
    • All projects 35,436 [7]
  • Abderamane Abakar Brahim (Abakar B): fr.wikipedia.org 577 commons.wikimedia.org 515 meta.wikimedia.org 117 wikimania.wikimedia.org 74 fr.wiktionary.org 18 www.wikidata.org 3 enbaike.710302.xyz 3 www.mediawiki.org 2 pl.wikipedia.org 1 en.wikivoyage.org 0 Other projects 0
    • All projects 1,310 [8]
  • Joris Darlington Quarshie (Joris Darlington Quarshie): commons.wikimedia.org 13,307 enbaike.710302.xyz 3,588 www.wikidata.org 1,254 outreach.wikimedia.org 1,178 meta.wikimedia.org 1,168 www.mediawiki.org 1,097 en.wikiquote.org 46 af.wikipedia.org 14 incubator.wikimedia.org 4 ak.wikipedia.org 3 Other projects 1
    • All projects 21,660 [9]
  • Egbe Eugene Agbor (Eugene233): www.wikidata.org 11,192 commons.wikimedia.org 771 meta.wikimedia.org 547 test.wikipedia.org 467 www.mediawiki.org 90 enbaike.710302.xyz 24 fr.wiktionary.org 10 fr.wikipedia.org 4 nl.wikipedia.org 2 wikimania.wikimedia.org 2 Other projects 2
    • All projects 13,111 [10]
  • Kunal Mehta (Legoktm): enbaike.710302.xyz 29,898 www.wikidata.org 22,133 commons.wikimedia.org 4,908 www.mediawiki.org 4,059 meta.wikimedia.org 1,269 es.wikipedia.org 573 en.wikinews.org 326 de.wikipedia.org 243 fr.wikipedia.org 241 it.wikipedia.org 233 Other projects 3,721
    • All projects 67,604 [11]
  • Shani Evenstein Sigalov (Esh77): he.wikipedia.org 9,968 www.wikidata.org 2,439 meta.wikimedia.org 921 commons.wikimedia.org 865 enbaike.710302.xyz 361 outreach.wikimedia.org 301 wikimania.wikimedia.org 156 wikimania2014.wikimedia.org 47 wikimania2012.wikimedia.org 36 wikimania2016.wikimedia.org 17 Other projects 48
    • All projects 15,159 [12]
  • Gina Bennett (Redwidgeon): enbaike.710302.xyz 479 en.wikiversity.org 130 commons.wikimedia.org 78 meta.wikimedia.org 59 wikimania.wikimedia.org 45 outreach.wikimedia.org 7 www.wikidata.org 7 en.wikibooks.org 6 en.wikivoyage.org 5 ca.wikimedia.org 2 Other projects 0
    • All projects 818 [13]
  • Michał Buczyński (Aegis Maelstrom): pl.wikipedia.org 15,159 www.wikidata.org 2,489 meta.wikimedia.org 969 pl.wikimedia.org 713 enbaike.710302.xyz 571 commons.wikimedia.org 382 pl.wikinews.org 17 pl.wikiquote.org 13 de.wikipedia.org 11 wikimania2013.wikimedia.org 10 Other projects 83
    • All projects 20,417 [14]

Thank you for sharing your views!



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2022-05-29

The Wikimedia Endowment – a lack of transparency

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By Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost and has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2006. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Signpost. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. – E
A Wikimedia email encouraging a donor to make a will, with the Wikimedia Endowment as a beneficiary.

In 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation established the Wikimedia Endowment, designed to "serve as a perpetual source of support for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation". The Endowment's target was to raise $100 million by 2026, and it has been hosted as a "Collective Action Fund" at the Tides Foundation.

Financially, the Endowment appears to have been a runaway success, far exceeding communicated expectations.

Hosting by the Tides Foundation was intended to be a temporary arrangement, and the WMF has promised for more than five years now to transfer the Endowment to a standalone 501(c)(3) organization, which would then be legally required to make its own Form 990 disclosures of financial data each year – revenue, expenditure, salary costs, highest-paid contractors, grants, etc. – in line with the minimum standards of transparency for US non-profits.

On 29 March 2017, for example, Lisa Seitz answered community questions about the Endowment on Meta as follows:

"The WMF board has already given us the direction to move it into a separate 501c3 once the endowment reaches $33 million. ... WMF's Executive Director is supportive of moving it to a new 501c3 once it reaches $33 million."

But as the Foundation proudly announced last September, the Endowment passed $100 million in June 2021, five years early. The $33 million mark came and went years ago. The move to a standalone non-profit never happened.

Fast forward a few years, and WMF staff were still making the same sorts of public statements about moving to a 501(c)(3) soon. As Endowment Director Amy Parker and Director of Development Caitlin Virtue told me on Meta in April 2021:

"No grants will be made from the Endowment until its total revenue surpasses $100 million. Updates on funds raised are posted to this page. We are in the process of transitioning the Endowment to a new US 501c3 charity, after which it will begin making grants and will publish its own Form 990. ... As we approach the $100 million funding milestone, we are in the process of establishing the Endowment as a separate 501c3. ..."

"We are in the process of establishing a new home for the endowment in a stand-alone 501(c)(3) public charity. We will move the endowment in its entirety to this new entity once the new charity receives its IRS 501(c)(3) determination letter."

This was more than a year ago.

Promises, promises ...

Note that the promise to post updates on funds raised is no longer kept. The last update on Meta as of this writing was to say that the Endowment had surpassed $100 million in June 2021. There has been no update on funds raised since then. We, and donors around the world who are asked to contribute, or to include the Wikimedia Endowment in their wills, don't know if the Endowment now stands at $120 million, $150 million, $200 million, or higher ...

The Wikimedia Foundation also refuses to disclose how much money it has paid the Tides Foundation (incidentally, an organization the WMF's General Counsel Amanda Keton used to head before she moved to the WMF in 2019) for its administration and management of the Endowment since 2016, or indeed whether – and how much – any other consultants, law firms, advisors, staff, or other help have been paid from Endowment funds.

Asking about these matters yields the terse response:

"As a matter of practice, we do not disclose specific terms of contracts with our vendors."

We also don't know whether grants have already been made – as Amy Parker said could happen upon reaching the $100 million mark – nor do we know who may have received those grants. There isn't a lack of precedent: we have already seen millions of dollars of Wikimedia money being given to outside organizations via Tides without disclosure until months later.

Matters would be considerably more transparent if the Wikimedia Foundation had done what it said it would do years ago: transfer the Wikimedia Endowment to a standalone non-profit publishing its own annual Form 990, with a binding commitment to follow the guidelines of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA).

What is the delay? Is the Wikimedia Foundation having trouble getting the IRS to recognise the Endowment's qualifications for non-profit status? When will we see a Form 990? Will the Foundation make a retrospective declaration of all costs and expenses since 2016, if the Endowment is ever transferred to a 501(c)(3) non-profit?

How about voluntarily publishing properly audited financial statements for the Endowment, covering the period from 2016 to today?

As long as there is no such transparent accounting, anybody donating funds to the Wikimedia Endowment is effectively throwing money into a black hole.



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2022-05-29

Putin, Jimbo, Musk and more

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By Bri, FormalDude, Ganesha811, Andreas Kolbe, Mhawk10, Lane Rasberry, and Smallbones

Guerrilla warfare against crypto-grifters

Wikipedia administrator Molly White, known here as GorillaWarfare, runs a blog (Web3 Is Going Great) cataloging misfortunes and scams in cryptocurrency. Today's Washington Post covers her in First she documented the alt-right. Now she’s coming for crypto (archive). Since 2021 White has been documenting ripoffs which she estimates cost cryptocurrency investors $10 billion. You can also find her on Twitter – S

Putin – "You can't just rely on Wikipedia"

Putin enlightens Znanie CEO Maxim Dreval (5 May 2022)

Short video with subtitles here. Full meeting transcript (in Russian).

The Moscow Times reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Russians to have alternatives to Wikipedia. "You can't just rely on Wikipedia," he says. So far he agrees with Jimmy Wales and most other Wikipedians. While Wikipedia is a wonderful place to start your research on a topic, it's not a good place to end it. A representative of Znanie [ru], a state sponsored non-profit which publishes lecture videos, was called on to agree with Putin on TV. They're ready to help.
See previous coverage in The Signpost about Putin's plans to replace Wikipedia with the Great Russian Encyclopedia here, here, and here. – S

Russia fines WMF $41,594

A "special military operation" is the name given by Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials to exchange of missiles, bombs, and bullets between Moscow's armed forces and Ukraine's which the Kremlin initiated on February 24. Western news sources and much of the rest of the world call it a "war" or an "invasion of Ukraine", as does the Russian-language version of Wikipedia. A new Russian law says that Russian publishers must only use the facts and terminology provided by officials of the Russian Federation when reporting military affairs. On April 26 a Moscow court levied a 3 million ruble fine ($41,594) on the Wikimedia Foundation for violating this law according to Reuters. The WMF has previously addressed this issue: "we will not back down in the face of efforts to censor and intimidate members of our movement. We stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world." Don't expect them to pay the fine. – S

We're a battleground in a culture war. Is it genocide?

In The War Over Ukraine—On Wikipedia, Catarina Buchatskiy writes for Lawfare that the Kremlin is carrying out an "information war" on Wikipedia. She states "seemingly petty Wikipedia edit wars are actually an important battleground, and unfortunately, they are a battleground on which Russian narratives are much more successful compared to how Russian soldiers have fared on the ground in physical battle against the army of a nation Russians pretend does not exist." She states:

A debate is taking place about whether Russia is engaged in genocide within the meaning of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as any of several types of atrocity when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” ... consider for a moment that this activity is taking place concurrent with mass killings, deportations of children and the deliberate destruction of cities.

– FD, B, S

The Signpost and the "shadow war"

The Fake Accounts Whitewashing Oligarchs' Wikipedia Pages (subscription required): Omer Benjakob at Haaretz analyzes an article published here in March. He compares the recent Signpost investigation by Smallbones into "inauthentic behavior" around Russian oligarchs' biographies and related pages to past incidents and concludes that "Wikipedia is on Russia's radar" and that "a shadow war is playing out on Wikipedia between editors seeking to weed out for-profit editing and PR firms working for their clients". – B

A profile of Wikipedians and breaking news

Jason Moore at WikiConference North America 2016

CNN published an in-depth look at the Wikipedians who start and maintain breaking news entries. The article, Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started focuses on the contributions of long-time Wikipedian Jason Moore and several others. Going deeper than many similar pieces, the article does a very adept job of explaining Wikipedia's policies and how these articles are shaped over time. Kudos to the reporter, Samantha Murphy Kelly![1] – G

A bit musky in here

The world's richest man is obsessed with how he is described on the free internet encyclopedia: in Slate, Stephen Harrison reviews the editing history of the Elon Musk article and notes that Musk has complained several times about aspects of his Wikipedia biography on Twitter. However, Harrison thinks Wikipedians had it right – and feels it is important that there is a place online "where billionaires cannot purchase their preferred version of events, nor own the means of conversation." – AK

Wales on Musk

Jimmy Wales comments on Elon Musk's buying Twitter. Speaking exclusively to LADbible, he said: "This is the point where I think it’s a huge risk for Twitter and Elon Musk, because if you go to [sic] far – or very far at all down that path from where Twitter is now - I think you start to lose market share. We have to remember, Twitter is not a monopoly, there’s loads of other platforms and places, we should be really focused on thinking about that competitive landscape. If you don’t like the moderation policies on one service, you can go somewhere else." Read the full interview here. – FD

Jimmy Wales interview: free speech and friendly society

Jimmy Wales in a different interview in 2018

In Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward interviews Jimmy Wales [15] (30:48). Reason leads with "Wikipedia continues to quietly grow in utility, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness" and it "has maintained its reputation and functionality since its founding, even as the rest of the social internet seems hellbent on tearing itself apart".

Reason and its editor, Mangu-Ward, advocate for some controversial positions, so this interview has some interesting sparring, but never breaks out in open debate. Discussion points include:

  • Is the Wikipedia model generalizable?
  • friendly societies versus insurance companies,
  • public spaces for heterodoxy,
  • the libertarian response to online harassment,
  • ejecting trolls in a bible study group should never be illegal,
  • Wales' WT.social social media site, which like Wikipedia eschews ads, is "not a great business model, it's not lucrative at all, we're not making money",
  • and creating meaningful content versus merely controversial content.

– B, S

Other video interviews

In brief

  • Councillor edits own Wikipedia page to "repair misinformation": The Otago Daily Times reports that a member of the City Council in Dunedin, New Zealand edited his own Wikipedia biography. The edit was made under an account bearing his name; readers can come to their own conclusions as to the merits or demerits of the changes made. Both the Otago Daily Times article and the Wikipedia article claim that the changes were reverted; a perusal of the edit history shows, however, that a number of them were subsequently incorporated.
  • The many fake lives of a pro cyclist: Cycling Tips reports that the owner of a Virginia bicycle shop built a completely fake history of himself as a professional cyclist. "Until 2020, the first page of results for 'Nick Clark cyclist' brought up a Wikipedia page corroborating details of his path into the sport and his racing career, the events he said he rode at and teams he said he rode for." For a while, he was "credited on Wikipedia as the winner of the U23 Australian Time Trial Championship in 1999 and 2000 – when he would have been 23 and 24 years old, again in years that the category didn’t exist." See the 2020 AFD.
  • The saints of Wikipedia: High praise for those who "have done a good job of collecting" Space Force insignia (Gizmodo).
One of many Space Force unit badges found on Wikimedia Commons
  • How academic institutions can help bridge Wikipedia's gender-gap: This column in Nature provides possible solutions to addressing the encyclopedia's bias that favors male achievements.
Is Kathy Barnette notable yet?
  • U.S. Senate candidate deletion: [16] Christian Post runs down deletion criteria pretty soundly but still disagreed with the May 9 deletion of the biography article for candidate Kathy Barnette, then 2% behind the front runner in the Pennsylvania Republican primary for U.S. Senate. She finished third with 24% of the vote according to Ballotpedia; vote counting is under way for a two-way tie between the front runners (heavily covered in U.S. media as of writing deadline). The article Kathy Barnette was re-created and re-nominated for deletion on May 19 for the third time in 45 days. The latest discussion was closed with consensus to keep.
Tajh Taylor, Wikimedia Foundation VP of data science and engineering
  • How I Got Here: A pivot from music to computer science paved Tajh Taylor's path to Wikimedia VP: in Technical.ly documents how Tajh Taylor, the VP of data science and engineering at the WMF, switched from applying for university programs in music to computer science degrees from Morehouse College and UC Berkeley. Thank his mother! He is now the highest-ranking Black staff member at the WMF.
  • #KnowWithWiki is a social media campaign in India that the WMF is using to introduce Indians to Wikipedia via social media influencers. Exchange4media interviews Khanyi Mpumlwana, the WMF's Creative Director, and she tells readers about the WMF, how Wikipedia works, and about the campaign. The one message that she wants Indians to understand is "Whatever you want to know, you can know it with Wiki!"
  • Bollywood vs Wikipedia: Karma Cola with more fizz than substance?: There's controversy over the Wiki article characterizing the film The Kashmir Files as fiction.
  • Wikipedia Italia e l'invasione dell'Ucraina: la storia di una bozza lunga 19 giorni: (subscription required) in Italian about Mark Bernstein in la Repubblica.
  • British historian Paul Kennedy writes book with 80+ citations to Wikipedia: "Many university professors would mark down a student paper that included uncorroborated Wikipedia citations", according to the New York Times book review of Victory at Sea published by Yale University Press. But Kennedy breaks from the pack in this book about World War II, with an unprecedented 80+ citations to Wikipedia.
Trichromia phaeocrota, accessed by 3 people in 2021



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2022-05-29

Three stories of Ukrainian Wikimedians during the war

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By Anton Protsiuk and Viacheslav Fedchenkov

Russia's military invasion of Ukraine upended the lives of most Ukrainians, and most members of the country's Wikimedia community. Some people have had to flee their homes, some joined the army – and many are working on expanding free knowledge on Wikipedia and beyond.

For this article, I spoke with three members of Ukraine's Wikimedia community: one who lost his home in the siege of Mariupol, one who made an emotional decision to join the army, and one who was writing a Wikipedia article every day even when traveling across the country to evacuate her relatives.

The tragedy of Mariupol, as seen by a first-hand witness

Mariupol after Russian shelling, photo taken by Oleksandr
Mariupol after Russian shelling, photo taken by Oleksandr
Mariupol's drama theater before the war
Mariupol's drama theater destroyed by Russian bombing

The Russian siege of Mariupol, a major city in southeastern Ukraine, has become one of the most profound tragedies of the 21st century.

Authorities estimate that over 20,000 civilians have died since early March, as a result of shelling, and the effects of the siege like lack of food and water. The vast majority of Mariupol's buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged by indiscriminate shelling.

Oleksandr, known on Wikipedia as Wanderer777, was born in Mariupol and spent much of his life in the city. He eventually managed to escape from the city and is safe now, but before that he had witnessed the siege and its effects first-hand.

Oleksandr graduated from the Pryazovskyi State Technical University in Mariupol, specializing in the automatization of metallurgical processes and computer-integrated technologies.

On Wikipedia, he's been most active in the Russian-language edition; over the past 15 years, he had the opportunity to be an administrator, a bureaucrat, a member of the Arbitration Committee, and a mediator on the topic of Ukraine. Oleksandr has also contributed to Ukrainian Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other wiki projects.

When Russia openly invaded Ukraine on February 24th, Oleksandr and his family contemplated leaving Mariupol but decided to stay, hoping that the war would not reach them quickly. The predictions proved too optimistic – Russian forces advanced rapidly in the east of Ukraine, and soon Mariupol was encircled. On the third day of the invasion, leaving was already impossible, Oleksandr recalls.

Oleksandr's family moved to a safer western part of the city. Within a few days, the occupiers destroyed practically all civilian infrastructure. Supermarkets, electrical transformer substations, water supply pumping stations were shattered, and so were fire stations and funeral homes.

Oleksandr and other people in his building moved to the basement and lived there for a few weeks. He remembers constant shelling – a picture of a Russian tank approaching the neighborhood and indiscriminately shooting at residential buildings was not uncommon. Oleksandr's house was hit and damaged but not destroyed – unlike most of the buildings around it, which collapsed completely.

As soon as possible in mid-March, Oleksandr and his family managed to sneak from the city to a nearby village. This wasn't the end of their ordeal, though – they spent another month looking for ways to escape from occupied territory. Finally, they managed to leave by car in the second half of April, reaching the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia.

Oleksandr says it's a miracle he managed to leave Mariupol. People leaving later, especially military-age men, were either not allowed to leave or placed in filtration camps, effectively being jailed for an indefinite period without trial.

He helped his family move abroad and remains in Dnipro, a city in eastern Ukraine that's controlled by the Ukrainian government and is relatively safe as compared to beleaguered Donbas.

Oleksandr says we'll never know the full extent of the devastation in Mariupol. As he describes on his user page in Russian Wikipedia, "many people died, truly many … People were dying from missiles and shells. In houses and on the streets, in yards and shelters. When they were trying to get at least some food from destroyed shops, when they were cooking food in bonfires, when they were looking for a place that still had mobile connection. People were dying when buildings collapsed from air bombs and in basements from smoke caused by fires. People were dying from the lack of insulin, antibiotics and medications for heart diseases. People were dying from hunger and thirst."

Now, what once was a major industrial center with over 400,000 residents is in ruins – and fully occupied by Russia. Active fighting has stopped, but the humanitarian disaster is not over – the city's infrastructure was destroyed, and the occupying authorities aren't likely to rebuild it soon.

For another account of the Mariupol tragedy, check the diary of doctor Oleh Zyma – also a Wikipedia editor – published by "Bird in Flight".

Armed service and Twitter poems – the story of Wikipedian joining the army

This article is a first-hand account written by Wikipedia editor Viacheslav Fedchenkov, user fed4ev; translation by Anton Protsiuk

Viacheslav Fedchenkov participating in Wikimedia Ukraine's annual Wikimarathon in 2018
Ukrainian delegation at Wikimania 2019. Viacheslav Fedchenkov is the tall guy on the left

I've been contributing to Wikipedia as user fed4ev for twelve years now; I've also contributed to Wikinews and Wiktionary (mostly the Ukrainian editions). I've volunteered for Wikimedia Ukraine in event organizing and led wiki trainings. I visited two international Wikimania conferences and participated in Ukrainian Wikiconferences.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't take me by surprise; I believed in the assessments made by Western intelligence services before the war. However, to be honest, I did nothing to prepare for the war. My loved ones refused to leave Kyiv even in the first days of the war. During that time, my wife and I, like many other Kyivans, slept in metro stations [which have served as shelters from air attacks]. For a few days, we weren't able to go to the left bank of Dnipro, where my mother lives. We donated to the army and humanitarian causes.

I'm a military reservist – I served in the army as a conscript in 2006–2007. As a loyal citizen of Ukraine, I decided in advance to go to the army. I also voluntarily came to the military enlistment office in 2014, in the first days of the occupation of Crimea and with the beginning of the Russian aggression in Donbas.

It is worth mentioning that I am Russian by origin: Russian is my native language, and more than two thirds of my ancestors were ethnic Russians (from Moscow, Moscow region and Orlov region). I know my family history well, and I've never felt discomfort because of that. At the same time, my origins didn't cloud my judgment, didn't cloud my conscience. I've always seen Ukraine's relations with Moscow as a struggle of the former colony for liberation from the grip of the imperial metropolis. And like any modern person, I've rooted for the freedom-loving colony.

The actions of the Russian government, the lies with which it justified its war, and the crimes of the Russian army only strengthened my readiness to join the Armed Forces.

However, I now understand that my decision to join the Armed Forces was rather emotional – I was not ready for war, and I would be more useful in civilian life with my specialty as a social worker, an expert in the protection of children's rights. In organizing support centers for internally displaced persons, in documenting war crimes against children, in working with a new wave of migration from Ukraine to the west, in the placement of children who have lost their parents, and more. But human stupidity has no limits, and for the second time under the same circumstances, I would probably do the same and go about the same path.

My service is not easy. But I try to support myself with usual civic activities; for example, I write poetry on Twitter; I have already created a selection of haiku (search #хайкуЗСУ on Twitter).

In two months of service, I have not contributed to wiki projects; I hope to return to active editing after Ukraine's victory. But I've used Wikipedia to look up different information. I'm grateful to editors who are developing military articles and I think I will join them, because I found gaps in some military topics (such as tactical and technical characteristics of certain types of weapons and ammunition).

Maybe even now, in calmer conditions, I will add a couple of articles or publish something from the drafts, because Wikipedia is love, and it's love that is the strongest support in times of war and enmity.

New article on Wikipedia every day – completing the #100wikidays challenge during the war

Antanana at a wiki event

In 2015, Bulgarian Wikipedian Spiritia initiated the #100wikidays challenge. The rules are simple – creating at least one article on Wikipedia every single day for 100 days.

Over the next seven years, the challenge grew in popularity. Over 400 Wikipedia users joined the challenge, and over 100 people successfully finished it. The participants jokingly call themselves "victims" – creating a new article every single day is fun but difficult; you have to sacrifice other tasks or even sleep.

Seven years ago Antanana, an experienced Wikipedian and Ukrainian Wikipedia administrator, became one of #100wikidays' first participants. In 2022, she decided to complete the challenge again.

Antanana started her 100-days marathon on January 2nd – and almost half of her #100wikidays had to be completed during Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. Still, Antanana managed to complete the challenge successfully. In an interview with me, she shared how she managed to do it, when creating an article was most difficult, and who was inspired by her run to complete the challenge themselves.

Why #100wikidays – and what the articles covered

Zohar Argov, Israeli singer who was the subject of Antanana's first article in her #100wikidays challenge

The decision to start #100wikidays was a sort of New Year's resolution for Antanana. She says she often "lacked a sense of accomplishment during the day" – the tasks she'd been working on were progressing slowly, and she wanted to see some tangible work completed every day.

She set additional restrictions for herself that are not required by the general rules of the challenge – she covered only Israel-related topics, and each article had to be linked from a different article created in this #100wikidays round.

Antanana chose Israel because she is learning Hebrew – and also because she wanted to visit the country again but hadn't been able to for a long time because of the COVID-19 travel restrictions. Her first #100wikidays article was about Israeli singer Zohar Argov, while the last one, created on April 11th, covered composer and singer Avihu Medina, who created music for Argov.

During her #100wikidays Antanana wrote, for example, about the Montefiore Windmill, the Sasson Report, and the 1931 census of Palestine. (She also joined other challenges on Ukrainian Wikipedia during her run, and she didn't count the articles created then as #100wikidays articles).

Antanana mostly translated articles from English and Hebrew editions of Wikipedia. She says writing articles "from scratch", i.e. not translating from another language, is too difficult when it has to be done every day.

Overall, during her 2022 #100wikidays round Antanana added 685,744 bytes to Ukrainian Wikipedia (one Ukrainian character counts for two bytes).

Contributing every day during the war

Late on February 23rd, Antanana wrote her 53rd article for the challenge. A few hours later, Russian missiles hit her city – and many other cities across Ukraine.

In the early hours of the invasion, Antanana thought about giving up on #100wikidays – but soon decided that she would finish it anyway, and Russian aggression would not force her to abandon her plans.

However, the first days of the Russian invasion were still the most difficult. On February 24, Antanana was in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in Western Ukraine, but her mother and brother were in a village near Kyiv with Antanana’s grandfather, some 600 kilometers eastward. They had to be evacuated to Western Ukraine. Getting to that village is difficult even in peacetime, and much more so during the war.

A decision was made to immediately get in the car and drive to get Antanana's family members. The journey was ultimately successful and relatively safe, but long and difficult. They drove for three days – with short breaks for sleep, with large military vehicles on the neighboring lanes, and with long lines at gas stations.

Still, Antanana kept writing a Wikipedia article a day, even in the car (as a passenger) on the way toward Kyiv. She says it was really useful that Wikipedia's translation tool automatically saves progress – it was helpful when connection was spotty during the drive. These several days were the most difficult in terms of keeping up with #100wikidays, but Antanana managed to do it.

A few days after returning to Ivano-Frankivsk, Antanana went to Israel – and, ironically, finished the challenge of writing articles about Israel in that very country, where she couldn't get for a few years before.

How to find the time for an article a day

Sketch satirizing sleep deprivation that comes as a result of embarking on #100wikidays

For Antanana, one new article took approximately two hours. That's enough to translate an average article – not a long and highly detailed one, but something more than a short stub.

Of course, much depends on the topic of a specific article. For Antanana, it also depends on the language which she is translating the article from; she needs more time to translate from Hebrew than from English.

How to find two hours every day? "If you want to, you'll find a way," Antanana says. Writing an article on Wikipedia becomes an urgent item on the to-do list. When the task has a specific deadline, you can sacrifice other tasks which can wait for a few more days. And, of course, you can sacrifice the time you'd otherwise spend on reading news, scrolling social media feeds, and even sleeping.

One useful lifehack – plan article topics beforehand. When you're more busy on a certain day, you can plan to create a shorter article. For Antanana, for example, the quickest to create were articles about Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. (In theory, one can also prepare full texts of the articles beforehand. The rules of the challenge prohibit it, but they also encourage ignoring all rules.)

Consequences of #100wikidays

Antanana's example inspired a couple of Wikipedian friends to get on a new round of #100wikidays as well.

The first one who couldn't resist was Spiritia, a Wikipedian from Bulgaria and the challenge's founder. Many of her 100 Bulgarian-language articles were devoted to Ukraine; for example, she wrote about the theater destroyed by Russian invaders in Mariupol and about prominent Ukrainian painter Maria Prymachenko.

Then, Israeli Wikipedian Ijon joined. He was also among the first #100wikidays participants in 2015. Now, his personal challenge is "consequences of 100wikidays". The idea is going back to the 100 articles created during the challenge and writing all the articles necessary to turn all the red links blue, i.e. creating all the missing articles linked from the 100 original articles.

Antanana says she doesn't yet have plans to embark on #100wikidays again – but in the future she might start fixing the "consequences" of her previous two rounds.



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2022-05-29

Measuring gender diversity in Wikipedia articles

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By PAC2

When thinking about gender diversity in Wikipedia, we often think of the number of biographical articles about men and women. The Humaniki project shows that about 19% of biographical articles on the English Wikipedia are about women. However, this is only one aspect of gender diversity. In this article, I develop a method which measures gender diversity at the article level and show why it's useful.

Motivation

While working on the article about economics on the French Wikipedia, I was surprised by the low number of women among the people cited in the article. So I've started exploring methods to measure gender diversity. I draw a distinction between gender diversity and gender parity[2]. First, gender parity supposes binary gender, which excludes non-binary people. Second, gender parity implies that the ideal would be a fifty-fifty divide between men and women. After some iterations, I've found a way to measure gender diversity at the article level. This tool can be used to explore gender diversity for articles about academic fields, activities, or occupations. My approach is very basic and simply computes the share of people cited in an article by gender.

This simple quantitative approach to measure gender diversity is similar to many research projects on this theme in computational social sciences. David Doukhan is tracking women's speaking time on the radio[3]. Antoine Mazières and his co-authors are computing the share of screen time with women in popular movies[4] and Gilles Bastin and his co-authors are computing gender frequency of people cited in French newspapers[5].

Methodology

For each article, I get the list of internal links (also known as blue links). I retrieve them using the Wikipedia links API. Then I combine this query with a Wikidata SPARQL query[6]. I select all links corresponding to human beings in Wikidata (property P31 is Q5) and I retrieve their gender (property P21 in Wikidata). Note that gender in Wikidata can be male, female, non-binary, intersex, transgender female, transgender male, or agender. I'd find it more intuitive to group together transgender males with males and transgender females with females but I prefer to keep the classification of Wikidata.

Last, I count the number of entities by gender and compute the share.

Everyone can compute gender diversity for a single Wikipedia article using the gender diversity explorer tool.

This is a very basic approach. It doesn't distinguish any difference between entities cited in the references and entities cited in the core of the article. It doesn't take into account people cited in the article without a link to a Wikipedia article. But even if it's imperfect, I believe this is a useful approach.

Numbers should be interpreted with caution. The number of gendered entities cited in a single article is often very low. I personally don't interpret proportions if the total number of gendered entities is lower than 50.

Insights

Focus on economics

Chart measuring gender diversity in the Wikipedia article Economics in May 2022.

Let's have a look at the article about economics. In May 2022, we find 137 males, 6 cisgender females, and 1 transgender female[7]. So fewer than 5% of people quoted in the article are female. Of course, everyone knows that many prominent economists from Adam Smith to Jean Tirole are male. So no one is really surprised to find a vast majority of males in the results. Nobody would be able to say what a fair share of females in the article would be. However, I personally think that 5% is not much and that the contribution of women to economics is more important. Harriet Martineau, Mary Paley Marshall, Joan Robinson, Elinor Ostrom, Anna Schwartz, Janet Yellen, Esther Duflo, or Susan Athey have all made major contributions to economics.

Focus on academic fields

Share of people cited in articles by gender for academic fields

In this section, I compare gender diversity in Wikipedia articles about some important academic fields. As with economics, we know that most academic fields have long been dominated by male figures. So we're not surprised to find a relative low share of women in Wikipedia articles. By comparing Physics, Architecture, Economics, Social science, Computer science, Philosophy, Mathematics, Psychology, Medicine, Music, Political science, Sociology, Biology, Science, Art, History, and Literature, I find that all of them have a proportion of men higher than 80%[8]. Values for computer science and political science should be taken with caution since the number of people cited in those articles is lower than 50. If we exclude computer science and political science, we find that 10 out of 15 articles have less than 10% of women among all gendered entities! If we look at raw numbers, the count of women in each article is really low: 4 women in mathematics, 4 women in medicine, 1 woman in physics.

Conclusion and discussion

I believe that measuring helps to raise awareness of the problem of gender diversity in Wikipedia articles. Anyone can play with the gender diversity inspector and discover some insights.

In the next months, I would like to explore gender diversity in articles about occupations (journalist, politician, etc.) and activities (journalism, politics, sports, etc.). I would also like to have large scale studies looking at all articles about academic fields or all articles about an occupation.

My experiments with measuring gender diversity in Wikipedia articles lead me to believe that women are often forgotten or undermined in Wikipedia articles about general topics. It would be worthwhile to give specific attention to this topic. WikiProjects such as Women in Red could focus on this issue to ensure that the role of women hasn't been diminished in articles.

References

  1. ^ Conflict of interest disclosure: The subject of the article contributed a minor correction to this section. He authorized linking to his user page here, along with his real name.
  2. ^ "The idea of closing the “gender gap” itself has always struck me as somewhat problematic as it implies a gulf between two equivalent sides and reinforces the idea of binary gender. An aspiration to equitable “gender diversity” might be more fitting" writes Katherine Maher in "Capstone: Making History, Building the Future Together", in Wikipedia @ 20, MIT Press, 2020, https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/4d61w771/release/2?readingCollection=08ec69da
  3. ^ https://larevuedesmedias.ina.fr/la-radio-et-la-tele-les-femmes-parlent-deux-fois-moins-que-les-hommes
  4. ^ "Computational appraisal of gender representativeness in popular movies", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00815-9
  5. ^ Gendered News project, https://gendered-news.imag.fr/genderednews/
  6. ^ See the SPARQL queries in the project methodology
  7. ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/explore-gender-diversity-in-a-single-wikipedia-article?wikipedia=enbaike.710302.xyz&article=Economics
  8. ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/gender-diversity-in-wikipedia-articles-evidence-from-some?collection=@pac02/gender-diversity-in-wikipedia-articles



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2022-05-29

Portals, April Fools, admin activity requirements and more

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By FormalDude and EpicPupper

This Discussion Report covers conversations that were closed or archived from April 1, 2022 to May 29, 2022.

Using non-free biographical images of persons immediately after death?

George Ho asked on March 9th if using a non-free biographical image of a person immediately after (or upon) the said person's death (date) is acceptable, unacceptable, or neither. The result was a consensus that it is technically acceptable per policy, with some important caveats. There should be a respect for commercial opportunities, which in some cases may mean the immediate use of a non-free image post-death is not appropriate. There remains a consensus that free images are preferred over non-free ones, and that regardless of the time period elapsed after death a serious effort should be made to find free images before deciding to use non-free ones.

Outing policy in mainspace

Mhawk10 started a discussion on March 15th that asks: when both the username and real name of a Wikipedia editor are widely reported by reliable sources, to what extent should Wikipedia prohibit articles in the mainspace from stating that such a person edits under that account name? Editors brought up policies such as WP:BLPPRIVACY and WP:DUEWEIGHT, but the discussion has now been archived without a formal closure.

Changing portal links on the Main Page

On 15 March Sdkb and JBchrch proposed removing the portal links from the Main Page, adding a mention of portals in the "Other areas of Wikipedia" section, and adding the language switcher to where the portal links formerly were. Barkeep49 closed the discussion on 14 April, finding consensus to remove the portal links and add a mention to the other areas section, and finding a weak consensus to add the language switcher. Barkeep also noted procedural objections with the neutrality of the RfC, but they found insufficient reason to not honor the proposal.[1]

Increasing administrator activity requirements

Worm That Turned proposed on 17 March to increase the administrator activity requirements. An administrator that has made neither edits nor administrative actions for at least a 12 months period OR has made fewer than 100 edits over a 60-month period (coming into force 1 January 2023) may be desysopped for inactivity. Consensus to implement this proposal was found by Slywriter on April 13. In a follow-up RfC, Worm That Turned suggested that the same change be made to the bureaucrat activity requirements. The discussion was closed on April 22 by Wugapodes with consensus to change.[1]

Time to stop April Fools' Day joke edits on Wikipedia?

On April 2nd Bduke made a request for comment about ending Wikipedia's tradition of April Fools' Day jokes. After a gaggle of input in just two days, the discussion was closed with no consensus.[1]

Using samples in song articles

A discussion about using a non-free sample for purposes of identification in an article about a song was started on April 11th by George Ho. It received a decent amount of support, but was not formally closed and is now archived.

Necessity of RfCs to make policy changes

On April 20th, Barkeep49 eloquently posed the question of what our policy is regarding changing policies; specifically, is a formal request for comment required? This discussion was not closed, but led to some valuable observations and conclusions before being archived. Most editors agreed that consensus and discussion are required for policy changes, but that doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of a request for comment.[1]

Disclosures

  1. ^ a b c d Disclosure: An author of this segment may have !voted or participated in some way in the discussion.




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2022-05-29

WikiProject COVID-19 revisited

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By Ixtal
An illustration of SARS-Cov-2.

In March 2020, we interviewed members of WikiProject COVID-19 right as the pandemic was starting to spread. Two years later, we've invited them back to discuss how their work has progressed and adapted to the changes the pandemic underwent.

  1. How has the work of the project evolved for the last two years?
    Kencf0618: I do not know. There are forests and trees. Parsing is an art.
    Gtoffoletto: We have entered a crucial phase of maintenance after the initial flurry of activity.
    FormalDude: At the beginning of the pandemic, it was a rush to get the best and most important information onto the encyclopedia. Now that two years have passed and so much more research is available, the result is a comprehensive network of articles that in my view are some of Wikipedia's most useful informative content.
  2. How will the future look for the WikiProject?
    Kencf0618: I do not have a crystal ball.
    Gtoffoletto: A lot of consolidation will be needed now to reduce some of the excesses of the first years.
    Tenryuu: I don't watch a lot of COVID-19 related pages, but it feels like new activity has died down. Maintenance seems to be on the rise.
    FormalDude: There's some unanswered questions in the overarching narrative of the pandemic, that, if answered, will drastically effect articles and content from the project. I think neutrality in light of revelations will be something we have to continue to work towards.
  3. How has your work on the WikiProject reflected your own experiences with COVID-19?
    Kencf0618: Timing: I began the timeline article the day they shut Wuhan down. I had been following an epidemiologist on Twitter and he said he was getting masks; I followed suit. Two or three days later, they were not to be found (I gave my stash to clergy, a rabbi and my parents' minister ‐I figured that they would be on the front lines whereas I could just go to ground).
    Gtoffoletto: I was able to vastly increase my efforts during the lockdown phase. I felt ensuring our articles were accurate was my contribution to fighting the pandemic. Now I can contribute much less as thankfully the acute phase of the pandemic has passed and most are now vaccinated.
    Bondegezou: I found my own work on COVID-19 research, including advising government, left me unable to have the same input to Wikipedia because I had a conflict of interest and found it difficult to separate Wikipedia's epistemological positioning from that of my own work. It also made editing Wikipedia feel too much like work and I want to enjoy editing Wikipedia! I became much more of a user and less of an editor of Wikipedia's COVID-19 content. I often found myself going to Wikipedia for clear timeline information or details of what restrictions applied where/when.
    Tenryuu: I took over contributing to COVID-19 pandemic in British Columbia for a while, but I haven't updated it much now that my life has gotten busier.
  4. The disease has become increasingly politicized as the pandemic progressed. How has your WikiProject dealt with this?
    Kencf0618: Documentation, documentation, documentation.
    Gtoffoletto: Stick to reliable sources.
    Bondegezou: We have long accepted that health information on Wikipedia is especially sensitive and we have special rules at WP:MEDRS for medical information. However, there are grey areas over what MEDRS covers. The community faced tensions around how to cover questions of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, particularly the so-called lab leak hypothesis. My experience was of many discussions and proposals over how to apply MEDRS that were really a back door for the same recurring argument over what credence and coverage to give to the lab leak hypothesis. These seemed a particular cause of Wikipedia stress. In those contexts, it remains hard for editors to reach a settlement that everyone can accept.
    Tenryuu: I find this tough to answer as many parties insist they have evidence supporting their hypotheses. Like Bondegezou mentioned above, WP:MEDRS is good for viral mechanics and trends, but not over any human-involved action.
    FormalDude: All COVID-19 related articles are under a stricter set of guidelines called discretionary sanctions, and that makes it easier for experienced editors to prevail even when POV-groups push fringe ideas. It ultimately is a group effort and it plays out much like it does on the rest of Wikipedia, where due weight is typically a primary concern.
  5. I imagine working in this topic area must have been stressful. Do you have tips for other editors working in contentious topic areas on how to deal with wikistress?
    Kencf0618: Heh. I am officially 100% disabled; I am an autistic; severe mental illness is my jam. "Wikistress" is, shall we say, bupkis. That said, I hove into subjects with great focus and intensity –and I rely on the corporate nature of Wikipedia thereafter.
    Gtoffoletto: I try to remember to take it slow and accept that no article will ever be perfect. Some trust is needed that the process will work in the long run.
    Bondegezou: I think it's important to be able to walk away and trust that everyone else will look after Wikipedia's work. That can be difficult with some less edited Wikipedia articles, but the COVID-19 articles generally all had so many editors contributing that I think it felt easier to rely on the community.
    Tenryuu: Find another niche here. I primarily focused on copy editing with the GOCE before the pandemic, and I continue to do so now along with frequenting the Teahouse to help newcomers.
    FormalDude: It is stressful, and I recommend taking breaks. Stepping away from the wiki, or at least a certain area of the wiki for several days or even a week can be rejuvenating.
  6. As a more positive note, what are the contributions to Wikipedia's coverage of COVID-19 that you are most proud of?
    Kencf0618: Undoubtedly the timeline. Swine Flu made a deep impression on me. An entire branch of my family does not exist because of the Spanish Flu.
    Gtoffoletto: I'm really proud of the way we were able to share the consensus reached in some articles across the entire project to ensure that we wouldn't be repeating the same discussion multiple times. I think this is something that can be replicated in other areas too.
    Bondegezou: I started Hedgehog coronavirus 1 in early January 2020 and then Beluga whale coronavirus SW1 the next month as a spin-off of reading about coronaviruses as the threat of the pandemic first reared. I'm still proud of those!
    Tenryuu: Timelines are quite detailed (at least, the big ones I've seen). Aside from PEIS issues, the large amount of citations helps support Wikipedia's pillar of verifiability.
    FormalDude: I created Chinese government response to COVID-19 that merged sections from two articles with another article. I really like working on scope related issues and finding the best way to present our content to readers, and this was the culmination of months long discussion, so it was really rewarding.
  7. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
    Kencf0618: Wikipedia has a steep learning curve.
    Gtoffoletto: Science rocks! We got incredible vaccines in record time. Really grateful.
    Tenryuu: Hopefully this will be an area that only historians will work on one day.
    FormalDude: It has been an honor to take part in Wikipedia's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thank you to all participants for their insight on a complex and vast area of editing. We hope to be able to publish more WikiProject interviews in the future!

WikiProject news in brief



Reader comments

2022-05-29

A new video player for Wikimedia wikis

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By EpicPupper

Video.js deployment done

The software to play video and audio files on pages has now changed on all Wikimedia wikis. The old player has been removed and replaced with Video.js. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years, and uses best practices. For more information, see Tech News.

Community configuration for Growth features

A screenshot of the 2022 Growth Features configuration.

Over the past four years, the Growth team at the Wikimedia Foundation has developed Growth features, a set of tools that make contributing easier for newcomers. As contributors start editing Wikipedia, they need to learn how the wikis and the community work. These features nudge them to spend time on tasks important to their community. They also make connections through mentorship systems that allow for direct, 1-on-1 contact with an experienced community member. On 26 April 2022, the team also announced a new configuration system, allowing communities to alter the settings of their Growth Features installation.

Gadget and user script policy being drafted

A policy for MediaWiki gadgets and user scripts is being drafted. Previously, these tools were ill-defined, leading to misunderstandings between engineers and wiki-based code developers when wiki-based code breaks. This also leads to code rot, where developers do not feel empowered to make changes as it's unclear how their changes will impact wiki-based code developers. On top of this, when wiki-based code breaks it's not clear who can and will fix it. Together, a policy is being drafted that has the goal of working for Wikimedia staff, volunteer contributors (on Gerrit and Github), and wiki-based code developers, to lead to a better experience for all parties and try to restore trust and good faith between them. Community input is welcome on the talk page.

2022 Wikimedia Hackathon completed

The logo of the Hackathon.

The 2022 Wikimedia Hackathon was held as a hybrid event from May 20-22. An online, game-style space was utilized, and 11 local meetups were conducted with the help of community grants. 117 participants signed up, participating in sessions on a variety of topics including infrastructure, localization, Python, Wikibase, and community-building. The next Wikimedia technical event is the Wikimania Hackathon, scheduled for August 11-14, 2022.

Real Time Preview for Wikitext project deployed on some wikis

A version of the Real Time Preview project has been launched on the Polish Wikipedia by the Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation. The team is working on soliciting community feedback in order to improve the issue. They have decided to roll it out as a Beta Feature before they release the feature to everyone, due to the high-impact environment. This will allow them to collect feedback and make improvements before they release it to everyone. Feedback is welcome on the project's talk page.

Some old browsers no longer supported

Due to the use of nonoptimal workarounds, some very old browsers and operating systems are no longer supported (see Tech News). Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in very old browsers, like Internet Explorer 9 or 10, Android 4, or Firefox 38 or older. This change follows the MediaWiki compatibility guidelines.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

For further news and updates associated with user scripts, see the Scripts++ Newsletter

Bot tasks

Recently approved tasks

Bots that have been approved for operations after a successful BRFA will be listed here for informational purposes. No other approval action is required for these bots. Recently approved requests can be found here (edit), while old requests can be found in the archives.


Current requests for approval
Bot Name Status Created Last editor Date/Time Last BAG editor Date/Time
ScannerBot (T|C|B|F) Open: BAG assistance requested! 2022-05-05, 01:48:28 0xDeadbeef 2022-05-28, 07:43:47 Headbomb 2022-05-17, 10:24:23
ButlerBlogBot (T|C|B|F) On hold 2022-03-07, 14:03:04 Primefac 2022-03-10, 10:29:19 Primefac 2022-03-10, 10:29:19
ZabesBot (T|C|B|F) On hold 2022-01-15, 22:43:07 Zabe 2022-05-14, 11:56:56 Primefac 2022-02-16, 12:39:30
DoggoBot 7 (T|C|B|F) In trial 2022-04-03, 22:49:12 EpicPupper 2022-05-18, 15:24:21 Primefac 2022-05-07, 14:53:51
GalliumBot (T|C|B|F) In trial 2022-04-29, 04:02:58 Theleekycauldron 2022-05-18, 19:16:10 Primefac 2022-05-07, 14:51:13
BareRefBot (T|C|B|F) Extended trial 2022-01-20, 21:37:46 Rlink2 2022-05-04, 12:29:37 Primefac 2022-03-28, 18:32:02
AssumptionBot (T|C|B|F) In trial 2022-02-16, 11:35:09 AssumeGoodWraith 2022-04-10, 03:23:38 Primefac 2022-03-27, 12:37:16
Qwerfjkl (bot) 12 (T|C|B|F) Trial complete 2022-05-14, 09:13:42 Qwerfjkl 2022-05-26, 14:53:36 Primefac 2022-05-26, 14:31:27
BattyBot 67 (T|C|B|F) Trial complete 2022-05-24, 04:14:48 GoingBatty 2022-05-24, 19:33:32 Primefac 2022-05-24, 08:22:29

Latest tech news

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2022 #21, #20, & #19. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Meetings

Installation code

Further information: Wikipedia:User scripts § How do you install user scripts?
  1. ^ Copy the following code, edit your user JavaScript, then paste:
    {{subst:lusc|1=User:Terasail/ArticleInfo.js}}
  2. ^ Copy the following code, edit your user JavaScript, then paste:
    {{subst:lusc|1=User:NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh/AjaxLoader.js}}
  3. ^ Copy the following code, edit your user JavaScript, then paste:
    {{subst:lusc|1=User:Anerisys/contribution_shortcuts.js}}
  4. ^ Copy the following code, edit your user JavaScript, then paste:
    {{subst:lusc|1=User:Diegodlh/Web2Cit/script.js}}



Reader comments

2022-05-29

Featured content of April

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By Adam Cuerden and FormalDude
The General (the Buster Keaton film by United Artists) is a new featured picture, nominated by GamerPro64
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from April 1st through April 30th. Quotes are generally from the articles, but may be abridged or simplified for length.

We showcase the very best articles, pictures, videos, and other contributions from last month and highlight the Wikipedians that helped create them.

31 featured articles were promoted this period.

Mount Price behind Garibaldi Lake.
Close-up of a red panda.
Mount Price (British Columbia), nominated by Volcanoguy
Mount Price is a small stratovolcano in the Garibaldi Ranges of the Pacific Ranges in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. It has an elevation of 2,049 metres (6,722 feet) and rises above the surrounding landscape on the western side of Garibaldi Lake in New Westminster Land District. The mountain contains a number of subfeatures, including Clinker Peak on its western flank, which was the source of two thick lava flows between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago that ponded against glacial ice. These lava flows are structurally unstable, having produced large landslides as recently as the 1850s. A large provincial park surrounds Mount Price and other volcanoes in its vicinity. It lies within an ecological region that surrounds much of the Pacific Ranges.
Red panda, nominated by LittleJerry & BhagyaMani
The red panda (Ailurus fulgens), also known as the lesser panda, is a small mammal native to the eastern Himalayas and southwestern China. It has dense reddish-brown fur with a black belly and legs, white-lined ears, a mostly white muzzle and a ringed tail. It is well adapted to climbing due to its flexible joints and curved semi-retractile claws. It is threatened by poaching as well as destruction and fragmentation of habitat due to deforestation. The species has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2015. It is protected in all range countries.
Arnold Bennett, nominated by Tim riley
Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English author, best known as a novelist. He wrote prolifically: between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information in the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. The sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Interstate 90, nominated by SounderBruce
Interstate 90 (I-90) is an east–west transcontinental freeway and the longest Interstate Highway in the United States at 3,021 miles (4,862 km). It begins in Seattle, Washington, and travels through the Pacific Northwest, Mountain West, Great Plains, Midwest, and the Northeast, ending in Boston, Massachusetts. The highway serves 13 states and has 16 auxiliary routes, primarily in major cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Rochester.
Combe Hill, nominated by Mike Christie
Combe Hill is a causewayed enclosure, near Eastbourne in East Sussex, on the northern edge of the South Downs. It consists of an inner circuit of ditch and bank, incomplete where it meets a steep slope on its north side, and the remains of an outer circuit. Causewayed enclosures were built in England from shortly before 3700 BC until at least 3500 BC; they are characterized by the full or partial enclosure of an area with ditches that are interrupted by gaps, or causeways. Their purpose is not known; they may have been settlements, meeting places, or ritual sites. The historian Hadrian Allcroft included the site in his 1908 book Earthwork of England, and in 1930 E. Cecil Curwen listed it as a possible Neolithic site in a paper which attempted to provide the first list of all the causewayed enclosures in England.
Mary Jane Richardson Jones, nominated by Ganesha811
Mary Jane Richardson Jones (1819 – December 26, 1909) was an American abolitionist, philanthropist, and suffragist. Born in Tennessee to free black parents, Jones and her family moved to Illinois during her teenage years. Along with her husband, John Jones, she was a leading African-American figure in the early history of Chicago. The Jones' household was a center of abolitionist activity in the pre-Civil War era, helping hundreds of fugitives fleeing slavery.
Cerro Tuzgle, nominated by Jo-Jo Eumerus
Cerro Tuzgle is a dormant stratovolcano in the Susques Department of Jujuy Province in northwestern Argentina. Tuzgle is a prominent volcano of the back-arc of the Andes and lies about 280 kilometres (170 mi) east of the main volcanic arc. Part of the Central Volcanic Zone of the Andes, it is 5,486 metres (17,999 ft) high above sea level and grew during different stages over a caldera and lava domes. Some major lava flows emanate from the summit crater, and one confirmed and one possible flank collapse unit as well as an ignimbrite sheet are associated with this volcano.
Frank Russell, 2nd Earl Russell, nominated by Wehwalt
John Francis Stanley Russell, 2nd Earl Russell, known as Frank Russell (12 August 1865 – 3 March 1931), was a British nobleman, barrister and politician, the older brother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the grandson of John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, who was twice prime minister of Britain. The elder son of Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, Russell became well-known for his marital woes, and was convicted of bigamy before the House of Lords in 1901, the last peer to be convicted of an offence in a trial by the Lords before that privilege of peerage was abolished in 1948.
Battle of Little Blue River, nominated by Hog Farm
The Battle of Little Blue River was fought on October 21, 1864, as part of Price's Raid during the American Civil War. Major General Sterling Price of the Confederate States Army led an army into Missouri in September 1864 with hopes of challenging Union control of the state. During the early stages of the campaign, Price abandoned his plan to capture St. Louis and later his secondary target of Jefferson City. The Confederates then began moving westwards, brushing aside Major General James G. Blunt's Union force in the Second Battle of Lexington on October 19. Two days later, Blunt left part of his command under the authority of Colonel Thomas Moonlight to hold the crossing of the Little Blue River, while the rest of his force fell back to Independence. On the morning of October 21, Confederate troops attacked Moonlight's line, and parts of Brigadier General John B. Clark Jr.'s brigade forced their way across the river. A series of attacks and counterattacks ensued, neither side gaining a significant advantage.
55 Wall Street, nominated by Epicgenius
55 Wall Street, also formerly known as the National City Bank Building, is an eight-story building on Wall Street between William and Hanover streets in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. The lowest three stories were completed in either 1841 or 1842 as the four-story Merchants' Exchange and designed by Isaiah Rogers in the Greek Revival style. Between 1907 and 1910, McKim, Mead & White removed the original fourth story and added five floors to create the present building. The facade and part of the interior are New York City designated landmarks, and the building is a National Historic Landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). The building is also a contributing property to the Wall Street Historic District, listed on the NRHP.
1985–86 Gillingham F.C. season, nominated by ChrisTheDude
During the 1985–86 English football season, Gillingham F.C. competed in the Football League Third Division, the third tier of the English football league system. It was the 54th season in which Gillingham competed in the Football League, and the 36th since the club was voted back into the league in 1950. After an unbeaten run of seven games, Gillingham were fourth in the league table in late September, just outside the top three places which would result in promotion to the Second Division. After slipping to ninth in October, the team climbed to third, but at the close of 1985 had fallen again to eighth. As the end of the season approached, the team were still in with a chance of finishing in a promotion position, however three defeats in the last six games meant that they ultimately fell short, finishing in fifth place.
2021 World Snooker Championship, nominated by Lee Vilenski
The 2021 World Snooker Championship (officially the 2021 Betfred World Snooker Championship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 17 April to 3 May 2021 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. It was the 45th consecutive year the World Snooker Championship was held at the Crucible Theatre and the 15th and final ranking event of the 2020–21 snooker season. It was organised by the World Snooker Tour. The event was sponsored by sports betting company Betfred and broadcast by the BBC, Eurosport and Matchroom Sport. It featured a total prize fund of £2,395,000 of which the winner received £500,000.
The Holocaust in Greece, nominated by Buidhe
The Holocaust in Greece was the mass murder of Greek Jews, mostly as a result of their deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp, during World War II. By 1945, between 83 and 87 percent of Greek Jews had been murdered, one of the highest proportions in Europe. In March 1943, just over 4,000 Jews were deported from the Bulgarian occupation zone to Treblinka extermination camp. From 15 March through August, almost all of Salonica's Jews, along with those of neighboring communities in the German occupation zone, were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. In mid-1944, Jews living in the Greek islands were targeted. Around 10,000 Jews survived the Holocaust either by going into hiding, fighting with the Greek resistance, or surviving their deportation.
John Minsterworth, nominated by Serial Number 54129
Sir John Minsterworth (died 1377) was a fourteenth-century English knight from Gloucestershire, who fought in the Hundred Years' War and was executed by King Edward III for treason. Nothing is known of his upbringing, but he first comes to prominence during the 1370 invasion of France. The war, under the command of the King's son, Edward the Black Prince, was going poorly and had only recently restarted after a nine-year truce. Minsterworth was part of a force sent to relieve the English command in France under the nominal leadership of Sir Robert Knolles, whom contemporaries praised for his military acumen. Landing in the north, Knolles and Minsterworth carved their way to the west of France. There, divisions among the leaders—which may have been present before the campaign began—erupted into mutiny.
Daisy Pearce, nominated by 4TheWynne
Daisy Pearce (born 27 May 1988) is an Australian rules footballer playing for the Melbourne Football Club in the AFL Women's (AFLW) competition. Often regarded as the face of women's Australian rules football, Pearce has served as Melbourne captain since the competition's inaugural season, having previously captained the club in the women's exhibition games staged prior to the creation of the league. She captained Victoria in the inaugural AFL Women's State of Origin match in 2017, where she was adjudged best afield. Outside her playing career, Pearce became an established media personality in both television and radio. She is an expert commentator for the Seven Network and 1116 SEN's AFL coverage; she appeared on the Seven Network program AFL Game Day as a rotating panel member from 2016 until the show's cancellation in 2020.
Time in Finland, nominated by LunaEatsTuna
Finland uses Eastern European Time (EET) during the winter as standard time and Eastern European Summer Time (EEST) during the summer as daylight saving time. EET is two hours ahead of coordinated universal time (UTC+02:00) and EEST is three hours ahead of coordinated universal time (UTC+03:00). Finland adopted EET on 30 April 1921, and has observed daylight saving time in its current alignment since 1981 by advancing the clock forward one hour at 03:00 EET on the last Sunday in March and back at 04:00 EET on the last Sunday in October, doing so an hour earlier for the first two years.
Battle of Glasgow, Missouri, nominated by Hog Farm
The Battle of Glasgow was fought on October 15, 1864, in and near Glasgow, Missouri, as part of Price's Missouri Expedition during the American Civil War. The battle resulted in the capture of needed weapons and improved Confederate morale, which had been dented after a defeat in the Battle of Pilot Knob.
Neutral Milk Hotel, nominated by Famous Hobo
Neutral Milk Hotel was an American band formed in Ruston, Louisiana, by musician Jeff Mangum. They were active from 1989 to 1998, and again from 2013 to 2015. The band's music featured a deliberately low-quality sound, influenced by indie rock and psychedelic folk. Mangum was the lyricist, and wrote surreal and opaque songs that covered a wide range of topics, including love, spirituality, nostalgia, sex, and loneliness. He and the other band members played a variety of instruments, including non-traditional rock instruments like the singing saw, uilleann pipes, and Digital Horn.
Olive Morris, nominated by Mujinga
Olive Elaine Morris (26 June 1952 – 12 July 1979) was a Jamaican-born British-based community leader and activist in the feminist, Black nationalist, and squatters' rights campaigns of the 1970s. At the age of 17, she was assaulted by Metropolitan Police officers following an incident involving a Nigerian diplomat in Brixton, South London. She joined the British Black Panthers, becoming a Marxist–Leninist communist and a radical feminist. Morris became a key organizer in the Black Women's Movement in the United Kingdom, co-founding the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent in London. When she studied at the Victoria University of Manchester, her activism continued. She was involved in the Manchester Black Women's Co-operative and travelled to China with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding.
Mindful (song), nominated by Aoba47
"Mindful" is a hip-hop and R&B song by American singer K. Michelle from her third studio album More Issues Than Vogue (2016). T-Pain wrote and produced the song, which Atlantic Records released as the album's third single on February 19, 2016. Throughout the track, Michelle raps the lyrics and warns critics to be "mindful" of her. Some reviewers noted that its uptempo production differed from Michelle's previous singles, and she stated that it was one of the first times she recorded a more light-hearted song.
Kharijites, nominated by AhmadLX
The Kharijites (Arabic: الخوارج, romanized: al-Khawārij, singular Arabic: خارجي, romanized: khāriji), also called al-Shurat (Arabic: الشراة, romanized: al-Shurāt), were an Islamic sect which emerged during the First Muslim Civil War (656–661). The first Kharijites were supporters of Ali who rebelled against his acceptance of arbitration talks to settle the conflict with his challenger, Mu'awiya, at the Battle of Siffin in 657. They asserted that "judgment belongs to God alone", which became their motto, and that rebels such as Mu'awiya had to be fought and overcome according to Qur'anic injunctions. Ali defeated the Kharijites at the Battle of Nahrawan in 658, but their insurrection continued. Ali was assassinated in 661 by a Kharijite seeking revenge for Nahrawan.
Levantine Arabic, nominated by A455bcd9
Levantine Arabic, also called Shami, is a group of mutually intelligible vernacular Arabic varieties spoken in the Levant, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Turkey (historically in Adana, Mersin and Hatay only). With over 44 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic comprehensible all over the Arab world. Levantine is not officially recognized in any state or territory. Although it is the majority language in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, it is predominantly used as a spoken vernacular in daily communication, whereas most written and official documents and media in these countries use the official Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a form of literary Arabic only acquired through formal education that does not function as a native language.
Hamlet chicken processing plant fire, nominated by Indy beetle
On September 3, 1991 an industrial fire caused by a failure in a hydraulic line destroyed the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Despite three previous fires in 11 years of operation, the plant had never received a safety inspection. The conflagration killed 25 people and injured 54, many of whom were unable to escape due to locked exits. It was the second deadliest industrial disaster in North Carolina's history.
Illustration by John Gerrard Keulemans of the white-headed fruit dove.
White-headed fruit dove, nominated by AryKun
The white-headed fruit dove (Ptilinopus eugeniae) is a species of bird in the pigeon family Columbidae. It was described by the English ornithologist John Gould in 1856, and the specific name eugeniae honours the French empress Eugénie de Montijo. Adults of the species have white heads, a purplish-red breast patch, a grey shoulder patch, olive-green upperparts, greenish underparts with a blue tinge, and a yellowish vent. Juveniles have green heads with the white restricted to the forehead and upper throat, a much smaller grey shoulder patch, and the red breast patch restricted to the centre of the breast.
Paper Mario: Color Splash, nominated by Panini!
Paper Mario: Color Splash is a 2016 video game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Wii U console. It is the fifth installment in the Paper Mario series, a part of the larger Mario franchise. The story follows the protagonist Mario and his new ally Huey, on a quest to save Prisma Island and rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.
Battle of Poitiers, nominated by Gog the Mild
The Battle of Poitiers was fought on 19 September 1356 between a French army commanded by King John II and an Anglo-Gascon force under Edward, the Black Prince, during the Hundred Years' War. It took place in western France, 5 miles (8 km) south of Poitiers, where John unfurled his sacred standard to indicate that no prisoners would be taken and was then himself captured.
Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories, nominated by Mike Christie
Marvel Tales and Unusual Stories were two related American semi-professional science fiction magazines published in 1934 and 1935 by William L. Crawford. Crawford was a science fiction fan who believed that the pulp magazines of the time were too limited in what they would publish. In 1933, he distributed a flyer announcing Unusual Stories, and declaring that no taboos would prevent him from publishing worthwhile fiction. The flyer included a page from P. Schuyler Miller's "The Titan", which Miller had been unable to sell to the professional magazines because of its sexual content. A partial issue of Unusual Stories was distributed in early 1934, but Crawford then launched a new title, Marvel Tales, in May 1934.
1993–94 Gillingham F.C. season, nominated by ChrisTheDude
During the 1993–94 English football season, Gillingham F.C. competed in the Football League Third Division, the fourth tier of the English football league system. Prior to the season, Glenn Roeder resigned as the club's manager and was replaced by Mike Flanagan. The team did not win a Third Division match until the eighth league game of the season. A week later, Gillingham won away from home in the Football League for the first time in 18 months. Gillingham's form remained inconsistent and, although they climbed to 10th in the 22-team league table in October, the team spent most of the season in the bottom half and finished 16th.
1838 Jesuit slave sale, nominated by Ergo Sum
On June 19, 1838, the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus agreed to sell 272 slaves to two Louisiana planters, Henry Johnson and Jesse Batey, for $115,000, equivalent to $2.93 million in 2021. This sale was the culmination of a contentious and long-running debate among the Maryland Jesuits over whether to keep, sell, or manumit their slaves and whether to focus on their rural estates or on their growing urban missions, including their schools.
Tom Holland, nominated by FrB.TG
Thomas Stanley Holland (born 1 June 1996) is an English actor. His accolades include a British Academy Film Award, three Saturn Awards, and an appearance on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list. Some publications have called him one of the most popular actors of his generation. Holland achieved international recognition playing Spider-Man in six Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero films, beginning with Captain America: Civil War (2016). The following year, Holland received the BAFTA Rising Star Award and later became the youngest actor to play a title role in an MCU film in Spider-Man: Homecoming. The sequels Far From Home (2019) and No Way Home (2021) each grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, and the latter became the highest-grossing film of the year. During this period, Holland gained recognition for playing darker roles in the crime dramas The Devil All the Time (2020) and Cherry (2021).
Nizar ibn al-Mustansir, nominated by Cplakidas
Abu Mansur Nizar ibn al-Mustansir (1045–1095) was a Fatimid prince, and the oldest son of the eighth Fatimid caliph and eighteenth Isma'ili imam, al-Mustansir. When his father died in December 1094, the powerful vizier, al-Afdal Shahanshah, raised Nizar's younger brother al-Musta'li to the throne in Cairo, bypassing the claims of Nizar and other older sons of al-Mustansir. Nizar escaped Cairo, rebelled and seized Alexandria, where he reigned as caliph with the regnal name al-Mustafa li-Din Allah. In late 1095 he was defeated and taken prisoner to Cairo, where he was executed by immurement.

17 featured pictures were promoted this period (including one each used as the header and footer for this article).

One featured topic was promoted this period, nominated by Shahid.

view | edit | discuss
Preity Zinta
Featured topic
3 articles
Filmography
Awards and nominations

16 featured lists were promoted this period.

The large-eared pika is one type of lagomorph. As it's in the Ochotonidae family within the lagomorphs, it also appears on List of ochotonids, which was also featured this month. Neither list directly denies that this cute little guy has lightning powers, so we're presuming he does and have prepared a very special hamster ball for him ...
List of lagomorphs, nominated by PresN
Lagomorpha is an order of placental mammals, comprising the hares, rabbits, and pikas. Members of this order are called lagomorphs. It currently comprises 107 extant species, which are grouped into 12 genera. Lagomorphs live on every major landmass and in a variety of habitats, especially forests, grasslands, shrublands, and rocky areas. They are generally small in size and come in two main groupings of body plans, the larger rabbit group and smaller pika group, ranging overall from the 11 cm (4 in) long Gansu pika to the 76 cm (30 in) long desert hare. The domestic rabbit subspecies of the European rabbit has been domesticated, resulting in a worldwide distribution.
Michael Jackson albums discography, nominated by TheWikiholic
American singer Michael Jackson released 10 studio albums, 3 soundtrack albums, 1 live album, 39 compilation albums, 10 video albums and 8 remix albums. Since his death, 2 albums of unreleased tracks have been posthumously released. Jackson made his debut in 1964 at the age of five with The Jackson 5 (later known as The Jacksons), who were prominent performers during the 1970s. Jackson is globally recognized as one of the biggest selling music artists in history with over 400 million records sold. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Jackson has sold 89 million certified albums in the United States, making him the sixth top-selling album artist in the country.
List of Roman emperors, nominated by Avilich & Tintero21 & Ichthyovenator
The Roman emperors were the rulers of the Roman Empire from the granting of the name and title Augustus to Octavian by the Roman Senate in 27 BC onwards. Augustus maintained a facade of Republican rule, rejecting monarchical titles but calling himself princeps senatus (first man of the Senate) and princeps civitatis (first citizen of the state). The title of Augustus was conferred on his successors to the imperial position, and emperors gradually grew more monarchical and authoritarian.
List of prime ministers of Italy, nominated by Nick.mon
The prime minister of Italy is the head of the Council of Ministers, which holds effective executive power in the Italian government. The first officeholder was Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, who was sworn in on 23 March 1861 after the unification of Italy. Cavour previously served as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, an office from which the Italian prime minister took most of its powers and duties. During the monarchy period, prime ministers were appointed by the king of Italy, as laid down in the Albertine Statute. From 1925 until the fall of his regime in 1943, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini formally modified the office title to "Head of Government, Prime Minister and Secretary of State". From 1861 to 1946, 30 men served as prime ministers, leading 65 governments in total.
List of Most Played Juke Box Race Records number ones of 1947, nominated by ChrisTheDude
In 1947, Billboard magazine published a chart ranking the top-performing songs in the United States in African-American-oriented musical genres under the title of Most Played Juke Box Race Records; placings were based on a weekly survey among jukebox operators. The chart is considered to be part of the lineage of the magazine's multimetric R&B chart, which since 2005 has been published under the title Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs. The term "race records" was then in common usage for recordings by black artists.
International Film Music Critics Association Award for Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media, nominated by Matthewrb
The International Film Music Critics Association Award for Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media is an annual award given by the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA). Established in 2007, the award is given to the composer of a video game score based on two criteria: "the effectiveness, appropriateness and emotional impact of the score in the context of the film for which it was written; and the technical and intellectual merit of the composition when heard as a standalone listening experience." The awarding period runs January 1 through December 31 every year, and IFMCA members vote for the winner the following February.
Pershing House, nominated by Maile66
Pershing House has been the residence of the commanding officers of Fort Sam Houston since 1881. Located in Bexar County, San Antonio, Texas, the military post is currently part of Joint Base San Antonio. After the Texas annexation to the Union in 1845, the United States Army became a steady presence in what was then designated the Department of Texas, providing a line of defense during both the 1846–1848 Mexican–American War, and the Texas–Indian wars that ended with the 1875 surrender of Comanche chief Quanah Parker at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The combining of Fort Sam Houston, Randolph Air Force Base, Lackland Air Force Base and Martindale Army Airfield, to create Joint Base San Antonio, took place in 2009.
The Ancient City of Nesebar is one of the World Heritage Sites in Bulgaria
List of World Heritage Sites in Bulgaria, nominated by Tone
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designates World Heritage Sites of outstanding universal value to cultural or natural heritage which have been nominated by countries which are signatories to the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, established in 1972. Cultural heritage consists of monuments (such as architectural works, monumental sculptures, or inscriptions), groups of buildings, and sites (including archaeological sites). Natural features (consisting of physical and biological formations), geological and physiographical formations (including habitats of threatened species of animals and plants), and natural sites which are important from the point of view of science, conservation or natural beauty are defined as natural heritage. Bulgaria accepted the convention on 7 March 1974.
List of ochotonids, nominated by PresN
Ochotonidae is a family of small mammals in the order Lagomorpha. A member of this family is called an ochotonid or, colloquially, a pika. They are widespread throughout Asia and western North America, and are generally found in grassland, shrubland, and rocky biomes. Pikas are all roughly the same shape and size, with no tails, ranging from the 11 cm (4 in) long Gansu pika to the 29 cm (11 in) long northern pika. No species have population estimates and many have not yet had their conservation status evaluated, though the Helan Shan pika, Hoffmann's pika, Ili pika, and Koslov's pika are considered endangered.
List of Hulk video games, nominated by Cat's Tuxedo
The Hulk is a fictional superhero in the Marvel Comics universe who first appeared in the comic book series The Incredible Hulk in 1962. The Hulk's first appearance in a video game was the 1984 graphic adventure computer game Questprobe featuring The Hulk, and the character began making appearances on home and handheld consoles a decade later. The Hulk's standalone titles are often action games that pit the Hulk against supervillains in a beat 'em up format, with his human alter ego Bruce Banner occasionally appearing for stealth or puzzle elements. Apart from his standalone titles, the Hulk also appears in several other Marvel titles within an ensemble cast.
List of awards and nominations received by Anne Hathaway, nominated by FrB.TG
American actress Anne Hathaway has won 40 awards from 101 nominations. Her career began with a leading role in the television series Get Real (1999–2000), which garnered her a Teen Choice Award nomination for Choice TV Actress. Her film debut came with the leading role of Mia Thermopolis in the Disney comedy The Princess Diaries (2001), for which she was nominated for an MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. She made a transition to adult roles with the 2005 dramas Havoc and Brokeback Mountain, the latter of which was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The following year, Hathaway gained nominations for a Teen Choice Award and a British Independent Film Award for the comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada and the biopic Becoming Jane, respectively.
GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Drama Series, nominated by PanagiotisZois
The GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Drama Series is an annual award that honors drama series for excellence in the depiction of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) characters and themes. It is one of several categories of the annual GLAAD Media Awards, which are presented by GLAAD—an American non-governmental media monitoring organization founded in 1985, formerly called the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation—at ceremonies in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco between March and June.
Mnet Asian Music Award for Best Music Video, nominated by Nkon21
The Mnet Asian Music Award for Best Music Video is an award presented annually by CJ E&M (Mnet) at the Mnet Asian Music Awards. The event was launched in 1999 as the Mnet Video Music Awards and was primarily a music video-centered awards ceremony, modeled after the MTV Video Music Awards. From its inaugural ceremony up until the 2005 awards, the category was officially titled Music Video of the Year and consisted of one of the two daesang (or most prestigious) prizes, alongside the Most Popular Music Video category. In 2006, the event underwent an overhaul; the daesang status of the category was removed, and it was retitled as "Best Music Video". Meanwhile, the Most Popular Music Video category was discontinued.
List of Washington ballot measures, nominated by ThadeusOfNazereth
The U.S. state of Washington has had a system of direct voting since gaining statehood in 1889. Citizens and the state legislature both have the ability to place new legislation, or legislation recently passed by the state legislature, on the ballot for a popular vote. Washington has three types of ballot measures that can be voted on in a general election: initiatives, referendums, and legislatively referred constitutional amendments. In order to be placed on the ballot, supporters of a measure must gather signatures from registered voters. From 1898 to 1912, the only ballot measures allowed were legislatively referred constitutional amendments. In 1912, an amendment successfully passed to create a citizen-led process for initiatives and referendums, and the first successful initiative was passed in 1914.
List of Music Bank Chart winners (2020), nominated by EN-Jungwon
The Music Bank Chart is a record chart established in 1998 on the South Korean KBS television music program Music Bank. Every week during its live broadcast, the show gives an award for the best-performing single on the South Korean chart. The score for domestic online music services is calculated using data from Melon, Bugs, Genie Music and Naver Vibe. Soribada was also used until November 2020, when it was replaced by Flo. The show was hosted by actress Shin Ye-eun and Golden Child member Choi Bo-min till July 17, 2020. Arin, a member of girl group Oh My Girl and Tomorrow X Together member Choi Soo-bin were announced as new hosts the following week.
List of Houston Texans first-round draft picks, nominated by Atlantis77177
The Houston Texans are a professional American football team from Houston, playing in the National Football League (NFL). Following the controversial relocation of the Houston Oilers to Nashville and the NFL's need for a 32nd team in the league, Houston was awarded the upcoming franchise, at a cost of $700 million paid by then-owner Bob McNair. The Houston Texans made their first selection as an NFL team in the 2002 NFL draft, selecting Fresno State quarterback David Carr number 1 overall. The team's most recent first-round selection was Tytus Howard, an offensive tackle from Alabama State, selected in 2019.


Goodbye and good night (Yawning infant, a featured picture created by Martin Falbisoner, nominated by Q28)



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2022-05-29

Wikipedia's Pride

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By EpicPupper

For this Pride Month, The Signpost interviewed queer Wikimedians to better understand their views on inclusivity in the Wikimedia movement. Vermont is a steward and administrator on the Simple English Wikipedia. Padgriffin is a vandalism patroller and new page reviewer, primarily active on the English Wikipedia. Tamzin is an administrator on the English Wikipedia and a SPI clerk.

How did you first get started with editing Wikipedia?

  • Vermont: I started out on the English Wikipedia working mostly on article topics that interested me, like Charles Mattocks and other important Vermonters. Did a lot of NPP and AfC work, and eventually shifted away from the English Wikipedia to more global stuff.
  • Padgriffin: I started out by doing anti-vandal work and patrolling new pages, mostly reverting cases of vandalism and CSDing blatant cases of advertising.
  • Tamzin: (Setting aside some sporadic IP edits and bored afterschool vandalism...) My favorite geography trivia fact has always been that France's longest border is with Brazil, so when I noticed that the article France treated that country's overseas departments like territories, I put in an edit request. A day later, I noticed an article that I incorrectly thought was OR, and created an account so I could AfD it. Whoops. But hey, the edit request was granted, and the footnote I added to the article's lede after becoming confirmed is still there.

What's kept you sticking around?

  • Vermont: The people. Editing a website without friends seems quite boring to me. It also allows me to keep a good balance – some weeks I’ll spend most of my Wikimedia-related time editing, other weeks I’ll spend most of it chatting with people. Or I’ll change up how I contribute, maybe I’ll answer VRT queues or close RfCs or do some spam cleanup. The wide variety of ever-changing work, and the diversity and awesomeness of the people we have, has kept my attention for years.
  • Padgriffin: I would say that would be the sense of working towards a greater goal and the people- the knowledge that my work actively contributes towards maintaining the overall quality of the Wiki is quite satisfying. It has also allowed me to meet and chat with other (mostly) like-minded people, and I've met plenty of interesting personalities over my 8 years of editing.
  • Tamzin: Editing Wikipedia is a rewarding experience, whether that's writing an article, completely restructuring a complex template, or sifting through a convoluted sockpuppet investigation.

What are your thoughts on inclusivity in the Wikimedia movement?

  • Vermont: The movement has a decent way to go, and so does the world. A queer person’s experience on Wikimedia projects depends, to a large extent, on the project that they’re editing and the areas that they focus on. Some projects are rife with intolerance, others are warm and welcoming. I think there’s certainly a lot that can be done here, especially in terms of developing properly-nuanced global standards for conduct, as well as outreach and small-project capacity building through affiliates and communities. My experience with this is certainly skewed, as someone who hears so much more about the bad things than good when it comes to inclusivity; regardless, as a movement that has members from all parts of the world, levels of tolerance vary dramatically across and within Wikimedia projects.
  • Padgriffin: While my personal perspective is quite limited, as I mostly stick to my personal circles, I believe that the movement is overall quite inclusive, and I've met numerous other members of the LGBTQ community on those platforms.
  • Tamzin: I'm for it!

In your experience, how has Wikipedia changed? Has it become more or less inclusive?

  • Vermont: In aggregate, I think the movement is becoming more inclusive. Again, I am certainly skewed on this; as I’ve started to become more public with my queerness the circles of people I talk and contribute with have shifted, and I feel a high level of inclusivity. I also am not looking at this from the position of a new contributor, who can be more vulnerable to intolerance and exclusive behavior. Venturing away from my usual groups, however, is often uncomfortable and can lead to exclusive/intolerant situations. There are various projects with anti-LGBT userboxes, for example, and though it does provide a helpful list of people to avoid, it’s less than optimal knowing that people you collaborate with may very well believe you shouldn’t have rights.
  • Padgriffin: I personally believe that it has become a lot more inclusive over the years, at least on the English Wikipedia, as I've never personally encountered editors who have been intolerant towards my sexuality- I would personally attribute this to the environment created by policies WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL, as members of the community are expected (and required) to act in a civil manner.
  • Tamzin: When I started editing, you could get away with most forms of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on-wiki as long as you weren't painfully blatant about it, and with certain forms even if you were. That's changed, and I guess makes us both more and less inclusive. It's still easier to get away with LBGTQ-phobia than, say, racism, but often that may come down to admins not being aware of relevant dogwhistles. Overall, I'm very proud of the progress the community has made in the past decade. We've continuously had at least one openly queer arbitrator since 2013, if I recall correctly, which is a very uplifting statistic.

What are some of the biggest challenges that the Wikimedia movement faces in fostering an inclusive environment and how can these challenges be met?

  • Vermont: One of the larger difficulties in the Wikimedia movement as a whole is differences in inclusivity between projects and cultures. A good (though not particularly recent) example is from the Amharic Wikipedia, where an admin enforced a ban on queer contributors in line with Ethiopian anti-gay laws. The movement decided nearly unanimously to globally ban this user (who has since become an LTA), but no one really noticed this problem until a globally-aware, active contributor was affected by it. We don’t know how many potential local contributors were lost due to this exclusivity and intolerance. I think this is somewhere that the UCOC can help, to some extent. One of what I believe to be the more important parts of the Enforcement Guidelines is the section that prevents local projects from maintaining policies contrary to the UCOC. Though this does not necessarily make it easier to find these local issues, it will speed up enforcement and removal of problematic policies when found. This also does not prevent local contributors from being intolerant, as we know from the various projects which are open to queer contributors on paper but which may have hostile contributors in positions of power. The Wikimedia movement, as with the rest of the world, is going through a time where large populations of internet-users hold very differing culturally-informed stances on LGBT+ issues. We cannot press a button to make it go away on Wikimedia projects, but we can do everything possible to make explicitly clear that the Wikimedia movement seeks to be a tolerant one.
  • Padgriffin: I believe that the single biggest challenge faced by the movement is that it is close to impossible to truly stamp out hate, especially in a large, global and community-driven project such as Wikimedia, where members will be inevitably divided over social, cultural and political lines. The sheer size of the movement creates the risk that intolerant and hostile environments can form in pockets of the community without being noticed, and that damage will have been done by the time they are identified and stopped.
  • Tamzin: We always need to be on the lookout for any attempts to assert a "right to exclude" (on the basis of religion, politics, culture, etc.). Another thing we need to remain vigilant against is internecine conflict within the LGBTQ community. There was a trans user who made a number of deeply transphobic remarks that admins didn't initially recognize as such because they were unfamiliar with that brand of rhetoric. But we'll never fix the problem of bigotry in Wikimedia, or in any space with a dynamic population. The best we can do is always stay aware of common strategies being used to undermine inclusivity.

What advice would you give to someone who's making their first edit to Wikipedia today?

  • Vermont: Make friends. Talk to people. Some people love editing in the corner, updating articles on some specific genus of plant, but many like to mix in the social aspect, whether it be to ask for help and learn, or just to be social. Finding people with experience, mentors, who you can also develop friendships with is truly one of the most fun and productive parts of engaging in a community like Wikipedia.
  • Padgriffin: My personal advice would be to read up on basic policies and interact with other users, as Wikipedia is, after all, a community project- if you have questions, don't be afraid to ask up on resources such as the Teahouse or on the talk pages of other users, and don't be discouraged if your edits get reverted. At the end of the day, we're not flawless, and we're a work in progress- this applies to both users and the project as a whole. If you see something that you disagree with or are unsure of, be sure to speak up or ask.
  • Tamzin: Find something that's wrong on a page that doesn't seem very busy. Fix it. If you make a mistake, ask for help. If you wind up in conflict, move on to something else.




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2022-05-29

Those thieving image farms

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By Vysotsky

Photos in Wikipedia influence the way people look at the text, because readers can't escape from an image. That's good, as long as photographs in articles give a clear impression of the subject. (I didn't say "neutral", did I?). Wikimedia Commons has an enormous database of photographs, videos, vector images and sounds. This database now consists of 83 million "freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute". That's nice. It's also a database that anyone can steal images from. Roughly 40 million images in Commons are under a Creative Commons CC-BY license – these images require attribution. The other 40 million images have a public domain license, and are up for grabs. In this piece I will show how things work out, and I will give advice on how to prevent stealing of your images.

Rawpixel

Ramses II, from L'histoire de l'art égyptien, "digitally enhanced by Rawpixel". Incl. Rawpixel logo, image used 150 times in Wikipedia

Rawpixel Ltd. is a stock image company "operating from its HQ in the UK and its creative hub in Bangkok, Thailand", according to their website. Rawpixel takes images that are in the public domain, removes watermarks, and enhances colours and resolution. Collections used by Rawpixel include paintings & prints by Vincent van Gogh, John James Audubon, Jean Bernard, Benjamin Fawcett, Edwin Landseer, Frederick Sander, May Rivers, Henry Sandham et al.; photographs by NASA and many others. The image near this text is a nice depiction of Ramses II, taken from the book L'histoire de l'art égyptien (1878) by Émile Prisse d'Avennes. Rawpixel generously gives the source: New York Public Library. This version (with the Rawpixel logo) is used 150 times in several Wikipedia versions, though there is a version without the logo (also uploaded to Commons by Rawpixel!). Rawpixel now has >9,000 images in Commons, used 1,500 times in Wikipedia. Nothing wrong with that, because the Rawpixel logo can be removed from the images. The only odd thing is that the authors' field in the metadata is often wrongly identified as "Rawpixel". The original author is, of course, the original painter or photographer; Rawpixel has merely simplified and enhanced these pictures. But Rawpixel is fairly open about their business: they mention the source of their images, and offer three types of accounts for usage: Free, Casual and Business, the last one at $9 a month.

Alamy

Alamy, on the other hand, is completely different. Alamy harvests public domain images and publishes them on their own website (watermarked: Alamy) without mentioning the original source. They scraped 292 million photos to their website, from various sources, including Wikimedia Commons. Alamy even sends infringement letters and invoices to users of the public domain pictures – sometimes even to the original photographers! Photographer Carol M. Highsmith was sternly told "According to Alamy's records your company doesn't have a valid license for use of the image(s)". Mind you, this warning was about her own photographs, as Alexis Jazz showed in his brilliant piece on Commons: How Alamy is stealing your images.

Cohen & Alamy

David Cohen, uploaded to Commons in 2013, enhanced in 2016
David Cohen, in Alamy since 2017 or so, for sale at $11 to $ 189

In 2013 I uploaded a photo of Dutch historian David Cohen to Commons. The original at the Dutch National Archives was a bit frayed, low-res, and had a watermark (number 023 0069, down right). In 2016 I cropped the image a bit, removed the watermark and uploaded a version in higher resolution. Alamy took my version of the photo, upgraded the resolution and now sells it for $11 to $189, depending on intended usage. They bluntly state: "This image is a public domain image, which means either that copyright has expired in the image or the copyright holder has waived their copyright. Alamy charges you a fee for access to the high resolution copy of the image." And of course, Alamy doesn't tell us they took the image from Commons, where anyone can download it freely.

Preventing usage of photographs by stock image companies

All of this is tantamount to taking your property without your permission: that is, stealing. And yes, you're right: it's legal, with PD images. A public domain image is what it is: public domain. These images are creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply, so they can be used by anyone, without attribution. Remember – Alamy doesn't sell the original image, they say they charge a fee for access to the high resolution image. Stock image companies can't be prevented from offering public domain images and charging people for usage. But anyone can easily prevent Alamy and the like from selling the images of which they own copyright. Even if you want to stimulate usage of your photographs: just give your photographs a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA). Stock image companies don't like to attribute, so they probably won't touch your images. Archives, libraries and museums: if you own copyright on certain collections, please publish them under a CC-BY-SA license, and not in the public domain.




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2022-05-29

35 million Twitter links analysed

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By Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

"TWikiL - the Twitter Wikipedia Link Dataset"

This paper,[1] to be presented at next month's ICWSM conference, provides a dataset containing "all Wikipedia links posted on Twitter in the period 2006 to January 2021" - 35,252,782 URLs altogether, from 34,543,612 unique tweets. While framed as a dataset paper designed to enable future research, it also reports various exploratory data analysis results, for example on the distribution of links across Wikipedia languages:

more than half of all links posted on Twitter (54%) are taken from the English language version. Links from the Japanese version account with 24% for the second highest share followed by Spanish, German and French.

The author notes that the Dutch Wikipedia received a high number of Twitter links relative to its share of pageviews.

Analysing the linked articles by topic category (relying on the language-agnostic automated ORES article topic classification rather than Wikipedia categories), the author finds that

"The ranking of article meta categories from most frequent to least frequent is Culture, Geography, STEM and History & Society and this ranking does not change radically through the years. The popularity of Culture might be traced back to biography links which account for 21.3% of all linked items ..."

Concerning the popularity of concepts across languages (i.e. Wikidata items)

"more than half of all concepts were only posted once and that the distribution is again highly skewed. Among the top five most popular concepts we do not find historical figures or events as one could expect, but two boy bands, the South Korean boy band Bangtan Boys (BTS) and the Filipino boy band SoundBreak 19 (SB19). While being among the most linked concepts they still account only for a very small percentage ..."

It is worth bearing in mind that Twitter links provide only a small percentage of the traffic that Wikipedia received from external referrers (where search engines dominate), and in a weekly list of articles that received most social media traffic on English Wikipedia that the Wikimedia Foundation has been publishing until the end of last year, Twitter seems to have appeared less often as referrer than Reddit or Facebook.


Briefly


Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.


Fact-checking dialogue responses using Wikipedia

From the abstract:[2]

"We introduce the task of fact-checking in dialogue, which is a relatively unexplored area. We construct DIALFACT, a testing benchmark dataset of 22,245 annotated conversational claims, paired with pieces of evidence from Wikipedia. There are three sub-tasks in DIALFACT: 1) Verifiable claim detection task distinguishes whether a response carries verifiable factual information; 2) Evidence retrieval task retrieves the most relevant Wikipedia snippets as evidence; 3) Claim verification task predicts a dialogue response to be supported, refuted, or not enough information."

As an example dialogue where the (itself automatically generated) response was successfully refuted by the automatically retrieved evidence snippet from Wikipedia, the authors offer the following:

  • Context: "Biathlon means two sports right? What is the other sport?"
  • Response: "Biathlon combine the two sports into one event called the cross country ski race. It’s a lot of fun!"
  • Evidence from the article Biathlon: "The biathlon is a winter sport that combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting."


"Wikidata Completeness Profiling Using ProWD"

From the abstract:[3]

"... we present ProWD, a framework and tool for profiling the completeness of Wikidata [...]. ProWD measures the degree of completeness based on the Class-Facet-Attribute (CFA) profiles. A class denotes a collection of entities, which can be of multiple facets, allowing attribute completeness to be analyzed and compared, e.g., how does the completeness of the attribute "educated at" and "date of birth" compare between male, German computer scientists, and female, Indonesian computer scientists? ProWD generates summaries and visualizations for such analysis, giving insights into the KG [ knowledge graph] completeness."


"Representation and the problem of bibliographic imagination on Wikipedia"

From the abstract:[4]

"The author used an extended example, the Wikipedia article on the Philippine–American War, to illustrate the unfortunate effects that accompany a lack of attention to the kind of sources used to produce narratives for the online encyclopaedia. [...]

Findings

Inattention to sources (a lack of bibliographical imagination) produces representational anomalies. Certain sources are privileged when they should not be and others are ignored or considered as sub-standard. Overall, the epistemological boundaries of the article in terms of what the editorial community considers reliable and what the community of scholars producing knowledge about the war think as reliable do not overlap to the extent that they should."

See also our coverage of earlier papers by the same author

"WikiContradiction: Detecting Self-Contradiction Articles on Wikipedia"

From the abstract:[5]

"... we propose a task of detecting self-contradiction articles in Wikipedia. Based on the "self-contradictory" template, we create a novel dataset for the self-contradiction detection task. Conventional contradiction detection focuses on comparing pairs of sentences or claims, but self-contradiction detection needs to further reason the semantics of an article and simultaneously learn the contradiction-aware comparison from all pairs of sentences. Therefore, we present the first model, Pairwise Contradiction Neural Network (PCNN), to not only effectively identify self-contradiction articles, but also highlight the most contradiction pairs of contradiction sentences. [...] Experiments conducted on the proposed WikiContradiction dataset exhibit that PCNN can generate promising performance and comprehensively highlight the sentence pairs the contradiction locates."

As an example of a pair of contradictory sentences that were detected successfully (i.e. in accordance with the ground truth), the paper offers the following from the article The Silent Scream (1979 film):

  • "The film was released theatrically by American Cinema Releasing in limited theaters in November 23, 1979 in Victor, Texas, and in January 30, 1980 in Bismarck, North Dakota."
  • "The film is released 1980/1/18" [sic]

References

  1. ^ Meier, Florian (2022-05-05). "TWikiL -- The Twitter Wikipedia Link Dataset". arXiv:2201.05848 [cs.SI]. / published version, to appear in Proceedings of ICWSM 2022 (dataset, code)
  2. ^ Gupta, Prakhar; Wu, Chien-Sheng; Liu, Wenhao; Xiong, Caiming (2022-03-24). "DialFact: A Benchmark for Fact-Checking in Dialogue". arXiv:2110.08222 [cs.CL].
  3. ^ Wisesa, Avicenna; Darari, Fariz; Krisnadhi, Adila; Nutt, Werner; Razniewski, Simon (2019-09-23). "Wikidata Completeness Profiling Using ProWD". Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Knowledge Capture. K-CAP '19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 123–130. doi:10.1145/3360901.3364425. ISBN 9781450370080. Closed access icon Author's copy (thesis, code: [1] [2])
  4. ^ Luyt, Brendan (2021-01-01). "Representation and the problem of bibliographic imagination on Wikipedia". Journal of Documentation. 78 (5): 1075–1091. doi:10.1108/JD-08-2021-0153. ISSN 0022-0418. S2CID 245394165. Closed access icon
  5. ^ Hsu, Cheng; Li, Cheng-Te; Saez-Trumper, Diego; Hsu, Yi-Zhan (December 2021). "WikiContradiction: Detecting Self-Contradiction Articles on Wikipedia". 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). pp. 427–436. arXiv:2111.08543. doi:10.1109/BigData52589.2021.9671319. Closed access icon. (code and data)




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2022-05-29

The reference desks of Wikipedia

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By EpicPupper


Tip of the Day (TOTD) is an effort organized by contributors to "provide useful daily advice on how to use or develop Wikipedia more effectively." These tips are selected from the week before publication.


An External links section, if any, should always be placed at the end of the article. It should always be spelled with that capitalization, never "External Links" or "external links". The term should be used even if there is only one external link.

Placing templates

Template messages vary in their placement. For example, a {{merge}} notice goes at the top of the article, but the {{stub}} message goes at the bottom. Read the documentation at the bottom of a template for instructions on how to make use of it.

Where on the page to put images

When adding images to an article, be careful where you place them. See the picture tutorial for ideas on image placement.

Check your work before you save, using Preview

When you edit a page, you can use the Preview button (located right next to the Save page button) to see in advance what your edits will look like. This lets you check your work periodically without filling up the page history by making lots of smaller edits. The preview function can also help you avoid mistakes, such as when using an unfamiliar type of wiki markup. The preview will appear together with the edit box you have been working in (either above or below it, however you prefer).

An even faster way to preview a page is with the keyboard shortcut ⇧ Shift+alt+P.

Please return the favor

When you make use of Wikipedia's desks (Help desk, Village pump, and the Reference desk), please consider putting some time in as a volunteer by reading and answering some questions at whichever desk you think you will be the most helpful. Remember: the Help desk always needs help, and questions asked at the Reference desk span the breadth of all human knowledge. You're likely to know the answer to some of the questions.

Go to the right desk

  • The Teahouse is primarily for newer editors' questions about topics such as creating pages, citing sources, and approval of articles.
  • The Help desk is for more experienced editors' questions about how to use Wikipedia.
  • Village pump (technical) is for more technical questions about Wikipedia.
  • The Reference desk is for questions about life, the universe, and everything (other than about Wikipedia). It's a virtual version of the reference desk at a library. Wikipedians are very knowledgeable, and if they don't know the answer, they can probably find it pretty quickly.

Transclusion caveat

When you transclude a page (that is, automate the display of a page's content on another page), all its tags (like {{TOCRight}}) go with it, which will be implemented on the host page. Just add the following code if you want to add a right-aligned TOC to a page, but do not want it to be displayed on "derivative" pages:

<noinclude> {{TOCright}} </noinclude>

For a more detailed explanation, see Help:Wiki markup#Templates and transcluding pages.

Table of contents

Any article with more than three headings automatically gets a table of contents (TOC). The TOC is placed above the first section heading. All text above the first section heading is commonly referred to as the lead section. Depending on the overall length of the article, this introduction should not exceed one to four paragraphs in length and should summarize the article's key points.

If you do not like the TOC placement in an article, you can move it by inserting __TOC__ where you would like it placed. If you do not want a TOC on a particular page, add the text __NOTOC__ anywhere on the page; if you, personally, do not like the TOC feature, you can disable it in your user preferences.



Tips and Tricks is a general editing advice column written by experienced editors. If you have suggestions for a topic, or want to submit your own advice, follow these links and let us know (or comment below)!



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2022-05-29

Strange highs and strange lows

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By Igordebraga, YttriumShrew, Benmite, SSSB, and EpicPupper
This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, YttriumShrew, Benmite, SSSB, and a helpful IP.

Most viewed articles

Aaja jariwale nile aasman ke tale, Jai ho! (April 17 to 23)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (April 17 to 23, 2022)
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes/about
1 K.G.F: Chapter 2 3,443,321 India's latest box-office hit remains at the top spot. It follows the leader of an Indian crime syndicate operating out of the Kolar Gold Fields fighting rivals for supremacy as well as the Indian government. It has received mixed reviews but did very well at the box office and became the highest-grossing Kannada film of all time. It is also quickly ascending #5, currently positioned at lucky number 7. Unsurprisingly, a sequel is in development.
2 Amber Heard 2,964,855 Depp is currently suing Heard over an op-ed she wrote in the Washington Post in which she detailed her experience with the culture around victims of abuse. In the op-ed, Heard alleged Depp had been abusive throughout their relationship; Depp then sued Heard, alleging he was actually the victim of abuse. Given Heard's accusations were ruled to be "substantially true" in a previous libel case, I don't particularly fancy his chances. Whatever happens, it's in the news (and the Report), and will probably continue to be until the verdict comes out.
3 Johnny Depp 2,824,692
4 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine 1,336,881 Russia has launched a slow offensive through eastern Ukraine. The situation in Mariupol continues to worsen. The war continues to be awful.
5 List of highest-grossing Indian films 1,296,418 With both #1 and RRR taking runs at the record books, it's hardly surprising this list is here.
6 The Batman (film) 1,167,044 HBO Max released the biggest hit of 2022 so far, with a box office of $758 million worldwide. It has the Riddler and lasts three hours, but thankfully not by taking a page from Batman: Arkham and having Batman collect question mark-shaped trophies around Gotham.
7 Cristiano Ronaldo 1,058,195 An adequate number, there. One of football's biggest names became a father again, and for the second time of twins – but in a sad note one died in childbirth. Still he was back on the pitch on Saturday and scored his 100th Premier League goal, leading even the opposing team's supporters to applaud CR7.
8 Elon Musk 979,969 His bid for Twitter is still in the news. Also in the news over leaked text messages where he argues with Bill Gates who reportedly holds a large short position against Tesla stock.
9 John Wayne Gacy 896,843 This prolific serial murderer was the original killer clown, murdering at least 33 people in Chicago in the 1970s. Why is such a horrific individual who was executed 28 years ago on the list, you say? Why, because of Netflix of course! Or, more specifically, Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes.

Incidentally, this photo is a crop of him with Rosalynn Carter.

10 Deaths in 2022 852,550 There is one thing that I would die for
It's when you say: "My life is in your hands"

You hit me once, I hit you back, you gave a kick, I gave a slap (April 24 to 30)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (April 24 to 30, 2022)
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes/about
1 Amber Heard 3,502,940 The world continues to pay attention to the big lawsuit. I think it's a shame this has turned into a courtroom drama instead of what it should be; a judicial process to determine if serious allegations of domestic abuse were true.
2 Elon Musk 3,372,198 After two weeks of incessant speculation, the world's richest man bought Twitter this week for $54.20 a share (yes, he managed to sneak a meme into even this), approximately $40 billion. A lot of people are worried that he will axe Twitter's moderation policies while doing little to counter government censorship. The announcement spawned an exodus of users, caused Tesla stock to drop, and has been all over the news. One thing is for certain; I will now refer to him as ******. (Or maybe I'll stop being petty and drop it.) And his placement splitting the feuding couple is adequate, given he dated #1 for a while.
3 Johnny Depp 2,934,834 To be fair, this lawsuit was arguably more about Depp trying to discredit Heard and gain public support than any interest in judicial settlement.
4 K.G.F: Chapter 2 2,101,961 This Kannada production is now fourth on (both this list and) #5, quickly coming for RRR's spot at number three, and is positioning itself to be the highest-grossing Indian film of the year. To put into perspective why this is such a big deal, consider this: before the K.G.F series, the biggest Kannada movie had made just $9.8 million in 2017, a measly number by Indian standards. Then came K.G.F: Chapter 1 in 2018 with a cumulative total of $33 million that was enough to set records for Kannada cinema (but not to break into #5). Its sequel has now quadrupled that achievement, entering the so-called 1000 Crore Club for Indian movies this week, minting big bucks at the box office with $130 million in and counting. For a relatively niche film industry, that is a monstrous success by any measure.
5 List of highest-grossing Indian films 1,311,975
6 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine 1,142,375 The war continues to be awful. Some explosions in Transnistria led to worries about it being drawn in.
7 2022 NFL draft 1,139,811 Gridiron held its latest recruitment of college players. The top pick was Travon Walker, taken by the Jacksonville Jaguars.
8 John Wayne Gacy 924,271 This serial killer is featured in the Netflix documentary Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, following Ted Bundy three years ago.
9 Twitter 874,183 Tweet-sized write-up: #2 purchased the social network where he ranks 7th in the most followed accounts. And a guy who could be right below on that list if he didn't get himself banned said Musk's involvement made him give up on any attempts at returning, so not everything is bad!
10 Deaths in 2022 852,296 Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again...

Faces come out of the rain, when you're Strange (May 1 to 7)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (May 1 to 7, 2022)
Rank Article Class Views Image About
1 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 3,442,958 The first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie of the year brings back Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, trying to protect multiversal traveler America Chavez. Director Sam Raimi still has the sensibilities that resulted in the first three Spider-Man movies, and shows his horror movie credentials, as the film has many jump scares, cruel deaths, and makes a terrifying villain out of someone who used be on the side of the heroes. Reviews were positive and Multiverse of Madness beat the Distinguished Competition for the biggest opening of the year with $450 million worldwide.
2 Amber Heard 2,513,708 Ah, Depp v. Heard. My favourite thing to write about. Amber Heard took the stand this week in the defamation trial that has occupied a significant part of the news and the internet since it began on April 11.
3 Roe v. Wade 2,373,194 Ruh-Roe! In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected a pregnant woman's right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction, effectively legalising abortion. However, now there are hopes/fears (depending on position on abortions) that the world's most famous court ruling might be overturned following a leak of the first draft of a majority opinion. Many states either have laws that uphold the legality of abortion, or have trigger laws that would outlaw abortion in the event of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision being overturned.
4 Johnny Depp 1,981,410 It's unusual to see two legal cases in the top 5, but 2022's weird. Depp's lawsuit focusses on the idea that Amber Heard's 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post about the culture around victims of sexual abuse caused irreparable damage to his career, and in particular his firing from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. This seems a bit dubious because Heard's article wasn't really even about the allegations (although the claim was undeniably part of the story), Depp's firing might not have been about the allegations at all, and even if it was, they were ruled to be substantially true in a previous case in 2020. To me it seems pretty hard to argue that Johnny Depp is in the right here, but then again, I'm not the internet.
5 Naomi Judd 1,704,981 A legendary country singer, mother of both actress Ashley Judd and Naomi's partner in the duo The Judds, Wynonna. The Judds split in 1991 after Naomi was diagnosed with hepatitis C, with reunions on occasion, including a Super Bowl halftime show, a 2011 tour and most recently a performance at the 2022 CMT Music Awards. Naomi, who also had a presence as host and judge in television, had long struggled with mental illness and decided to end her life on April 30, at the age of 76, the day before The Judds would be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, which also forced the cancellation of a farewell tour The Judds would perform in the second semester.
6 K.G.F: Chapter 2 1,396,418 The most expensive and most lucrative Kannada film ever is now the third-highest-grossing Indian film of all time. We already detailed its success last week, so there doesn't seem like much point rehashing it, but FWIW it looks like the K.G.F franchise will continue with a third chapter.
7 Elon Musk 1,184,411 Most of this week's Elon Musk news was about how he plans to finance his acquisition of Twitter. You see, Musk doesn't actually have $44 billion because almost all of his wealth comes from his Tesla stock, which he can't sell because then he'd have to pay taxes on it. He's therefore only paying some of the money out of his own pocket. The rest will come from a loan he's taken out from some banks using Twitter and his own Tesla stock as collateral, and he's also got some money from other billionaires. There have been reports he may be able to lower the price he pays for the company in later negotiations, but the plan as it is now will leave Twitter with a substantial amount of debt going forward, which will likely pose significant challenges to the platform.
8 Cinco de Mayo 1,077,194 The year's most self-explanatory entry returns again. One can only hope this is from people finding out where it comes from as opposed to the date on which it occurs.
9 List of highest-grossing Indian films 1,062,340 Both third and fourth are green on this list, which isn't something you see often.
10 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine 1,034,627 Ten weeks in, and Russia's invasion is still awful. The news this week was dominated by the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steel plant and U.S. intelligence claims about them helping Ukraine to sink the Moskva and kill Russian generals.

Can I Play with Madness? (May 8 to 14)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (May 8 to 14, 2022)
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes/about
1 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 2523503 The latest Marvel Cinematic Universe film, from the original Spider-Man trilogy's director Sam Raimi, continues to top the box office despite a steep 67% drop in profits, which I'd attribute to it polarizing audiences due to containing much less MCU shenanigans and much more of Raimi's signature comically absurd body horror. (Though personally, I thought the film was excellent and a breath of fresh air for the increasingly samey and fan service-obsessed franchise.)
2 Eurovision Song Contest 2022 1207777 Ukraine won the annual song contest this year, represented by Kalush Orchestra with the song "Stefania", which received over 200 points from the 25 country votes, and over 400 points from the audience vote. The UK improved dramatically from last year, going from receiving 0 points to coming second place (thanks to a space man), receiving over 300 points. Although the show's hosts and the viewers likely expected Ukraine would win as a result of #4, it was nice to see Ukrainians finally enjoy something and be happy after months of war. Our #7 also appeared on the show.
3 K.G.F: Chapter 2 1058176 India continues to bring in the crore to this Sandalwood epic set in the Kolar Gold Fields .
4 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine 1023189 Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues to be awful, and could now cause a worldwide food shortage due to its blockade of the port at Odessa. On the bright side, Ukraine won #2 by a landslide, whereas Russia were excluded from attending the annual song contest completely because of the invasion.
5 Johnny Depp 1013880 Depp v. Heard is still polluting making headlines as the he-said-she-said legal drama continues.
6 Amber Heard 983264
7 Mika (singer) 912682 The singer who wanted to be like Grace Kelly then tried a little Freddie was one of the hosts of #2, and also performed a medley of his hits.
8 Deaths in 2022 888058 And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make...
9 List of highest-grossing Indian films 875766 #3 has now surpassed RRR for third place, meaning the Sandalwood epic is only behind the Tollywood\Kollywood collaboration Baahubali 2: The Conclusion and Bollywood's Dangal.
10 2022 Philippine presidential election 840705 Voters in the Philippines went to the polls this week to (among other things) elect their president for the next six years, and elected Bongbong Marcos, whose central promise was to return the country to the days of his father's dictatorship. It's an... odd choice, especially given his opponent seems to be actually competent, but I guess that's what happens when disinformation replaces reason.

There'll be times when my crimes will seem almost unforgivable (May 15 to 21)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (May 15 to 21, 2022)
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes/about
1 Amber Heard 1,540,466 After dropping out last week, Johnny Depp's depressingly successful attempt to publicly discredit Amber Heard has returned to the top spot.
2 Johnny Depp 1,236,120
3 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 1,166,564 Sam Raimi's return to superheroes was a magnet for fan theories, and even after release the story of sorcerer Stephen Strange trying to stop a mom who lost her kids from killing a kid who lost her moms is still bringing attention (not to mention over $800 million worldwide!).
4 2022 Buffalo shooting 1,004,206 Another mass shooting in America. This time, a white supremacist domestic terrorist attack which killed 10 people, on May 14. As usual, the shooting has raised the debate surrounding gun laws, and as usual, nothing will change.
5 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine 987,902 The defenders of the Azovstal iron and steel works surrendered to Russia this week after over two months trapped inside it; conditions inside the steelworks were horrific. It's not known what will happen to them. In other news, Russia's blockade will likely cause global food shortages, as Ukraine produces about 9% of the world's wheat, which it can't export anymore. Great. Another crisis.
6 2021 Southeast Asian Games 876,822 Southeast Asia's regional version of the Olympics took place over the last week and a half, after being postponed a few months for... some reason. Hosts Vietnam won the most medals in front of the crowds in Hanoi.
7 Deaths in 2022 853,104 Your talk'll be somethin' that shouldn't be said out loud
Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now
8 Andrew Symonds 819,768 Australia mourned this retired cricketer who died at just 46 in a car crash.
9 Eurovision Song Contest 2022 753,443 To compensate for #5, Ukraine won here. Wonder if Kalush Orchestra will also follow last year's winner Måneskin in following the competition with a global hit.
10 Elon Musk 752,385 Elon Musk's sort-of-aborted Twitter acquisition seems to be the only reason he's on here (unless he's done some other "newsworthy" things I don't know about).


Exclusions

  • These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

Most edited articles

This month, the Traffic Report is trying out a new section for the most-edited articles. Commentary provided for these pages will include potential reasons for why certain pages are "hotter" for editors. The Signpost hopes that this will unveil interesting editing patterns inside Wikipedia. – E

Articles in this column are sourced from this database report; the period covered is April 8 – May 8 2022.

Rank Article Class Edits Notes/about
1 Deaths in 2022 1869 The list that never leaves the Top 25 Report also apparently gets enough edits that it's topped this list. I wonder if we'll have to start doing songs about death here too...
2 2022 World Snooker Championship 1280 Ronnie O'Sullivan became champion for a record equalling seventh time, beating Judd Trump in the final. The event took place from April 16 to May 2, and has a dispropotional large number of edits (when compared to its views). If I had to guess, I'd say the live updating of scores was to blame?
3 K.G.F: Chapter 2 1178 In April 2022, this Kannada film was released, and became the fourth-highest grossing Indian film (now third), as you will know if you've read the writeups about it above.
4 2022 NBA playoffs 986 The postseason for basketball's finest started with a bang. And now it seems it might boil down to "six finals in eight years" vs. "17 titles", talk about an anti-climax.
5 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine 984 While edit numbers for this article aren't quite what they were two months ago, editors are still documenting the largest war in Europe since 1945.
6 List of equipment of the Ukrainian Ground Forces 979 As the war continues, the equipment Ukraine has access to changes rapidly, both from Western countries supplying them with arms, and from Russia destroying/capturing them.
7 List of Chinese football transfers winter 2022 918 User:Qby is making sure to keep updated the changes to the Chinese Super League and China League One rosters.
8 2022 NFL Draft 858 262 gridiron players were chosen here, no wonder it had so many edits.
9 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness 780 The latest instalment of the MCU was released near the end of this counting period, and became the highest-grossing film of 2022 so far. The amount of available information about the film massively increased during that time, and (judging by the article length) about half of it was added to the page.
10 Libs of TikTok 751 The reveal of the responsible for this anti-liberal TikTok led to quite the edit war.
11 Russian cruiser Moskva 738 Russia's highest profile loss, this cruiser was destroyed 14 April, over half of the pages entire edit history falling in the last 5 weeks, and 6⁄7 coming in this year (at time of writting).
12 Neoplatonism 699 Unlike most of the other entries on this list, this isn't an article with a lot of recent information. It's just an article a particular editor is working on.
13 Bigg Boss (Malayalam season 4) 682 The Malayalam version of Big Brother has been running since 27 March 2022, including a 24/7 live stream on Disney+ Hotstar.
14 2022 French presidential election 682 The world (well, most of it) breathed a sigh of relief after centrist incumbent Emmanuel Macron defeated far-right challenger Marine Le Pen. Macron's victory managed to be both emphatic and hollow; he won by a bigger margin than most predicted, but still received 2 million fewer votes than he did last time. Depending on who you ask, this is either a win, a near miss, or somewhere in between.
15 Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore 677 The return of the Wizarding World aka Warner Bros. doing Harry Potter movies after finishing the main series. Less eventful than The Crimes of Grindelwald, but with less "What is J.K. Rowling doing?", so an improvement. Underwhelming box office might finish what were supposed to be 5 movies in this third, but at least it's a movie with a clear ending rather than an open one that requires a sequel.
16 2022 Badminton Asia Championships 643 Along with being one of the favorite sports of our Indian friends (Olympic medalist P. V. Sindhu even went well here too), this continental tournament was held in the Philippines, who also have a significant contingent who manifest every once in a while.
17 2022 Pacific typhoon season 620 A season of worry, specially to our many Philippine readers. And the hurricane article will probably get even more edits, we have some very dedicated editors on that.
18 List of songs recorded by Sabina Yasmin 614 One user is documenting the ouvre of this Bengali singer. The article lead says her output is in the thousands, so it's a lot of work!
19 Candidates of the 2022 Australian federal election 601 1,624 candidates nominated for Australia's election, which was held four days ago as I write this. Editors generally added candidates' names as they nominated, which caused this article to get edited a lot.
20 2022 Mutua Madrid Open – Women's singles 600 And you thought Wikipedia only cared about Grand Slams. The Tunisian Ons Jabeur took this one.
21 2022 in film 593 The year's movies keep on coming, with many good ones. Most of the edits might be to update the table of the highest-grossing.
22 Lebanese Shia Muslims 581 This page has seen mass editing by Savipolo, dating back to the end of last year.
23 1987 in the United States 578 1987? What the Fuck Is Going On? Well, one user decided to update on the births of that year.
24 List of highest-grossing Kannada films 571 After all, #3's box office numbers were being frequently updated. And adequately, its predecessor as the biggest overall was K.G.F: Chapter 1.
25 Beast (2022 Indian film) 542 Round out the list is another recent Indian action film release, although this one didn't do nearly as well as #3.



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2022-05-29

Winners of the Human rights and Environment special nomination by Wiki Loves Earth announced

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By Iryna Yehiazarova
This article was originally published on April 26, 2022 in Diff; it is republished here with minor modifications for style. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. – E

Since 2014, dozens of countries around the world have organized annual photo contests devoted to their natural heritage within the international Wiki Loves Earth contest. In 2013, we held WLE in Ukraine for the first time, and in 2014 it went international. Overall, WLE collected 767k free photos of protected areas, with around 180k being used in the WikiProjects.

In 2021, we introduced the Human rights and Environment special nomination supporting the initiative Wiki4HumanRights, which partners with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Its goal is to raise awareness of nature protection and human impact on nature.

The 2021 contest united 34 countries and territories, with 9 of them joining Wiki4HumanRights and receiving submissions for the new nomination. Last week our jurors had a final round evaluating the pictures, and we are delighted to present the top-5 of the Human rights and Environment special nomination!

1st place: Mario Barroso

These pictures taken in the Emas National Park make a powerful triptych referring to the immense challenges Brazil is facing regarding the conservation of its natural ecosystems. The country has experienced unprecedented wildfires in the last decade. The Emas National Park is a part of the Pantanal Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. It covers 1,320 square kilometers of cerrado savannah. Wildfire is a natural factor shaping tropical savannahs and has been present in the cerrado for thousands of years.

2nd place: Robson de Oliveira

Another picture from Brazil depicts a wildfire in Serra do Gandarela National Park. It is situated within the Espinhaço Range and holds the largest intact remnant of Atlantic Forest in Minas Gerais. This transition region between the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado biomes contributes to species diversity.

3rd place: User:Olegandros


— tells the author of picture about the “Don’t burn our houses!” action to protect the forests of Polissia, in particular Polissia Nature Reserve.

4th place: User:Paneos77

The author caught a mysterious view of Thousand Trees location, Doiran Lake, Greece. One of the jurors, Monica Iyer, comments: “The image alone conveys a powerful representation of human interaction with nature and the threats posed by rising waters. The lake was in danger of drying out and now is flood-prone because of human manipulation of the water supply”.

5th place: User:Miguel G. C. Domingos

The photo shows us a stunning view at sunset from the top of Serra de Montejunto, a protected landscape in Portugal's Montejunto-Estrela mountain range. We can see some wind farms on small neighboring hills and Serra da Arrábida in the distance. This mountain range, Serra da Arrábida, is a part of Arrábida Natural Park, which comes into contact with the ocean.

The 10th edition of the Wiki Loves Earth contest runs through the end of July, and we are happy to say that we will keep the Human rights and Environment special nomination this year!

We are grateful to our amazing jurors:

  • Benjamin Schachter. Human Rights Officer and the focal point for climate change and the environment at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Prior to joining OHCHR, he worked as an attorney in the United States and as a research assistant to the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples at the University of Arizona.
  • Lukas Mezger. Attorney and climate activist from Germany. As a longtime Wikipedian, he currently serves as the chair of the Wikimedia Deutschland supervisory board.
  • Monica Iyer. Human rights attorney, advocate, and researcher with a particular interest and expertise in human rights and the environment.
  • Oleksiy Vasyliuk. Chairman of the Board of Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has been working to help the occupied national parks and rescue the environmentalists from the war zone. In peacetime, he is involved in various initiatives to help protected areas and designs new national parks.



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2022-05-29

The EU Digital Services Act: What’s the Deal with the Deal?

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By Jan Gerlach and Franziska Putz


Policymakers in the European Union (EU) have finally completed their negotiations over the Digital Services Act (DSA), a regulation that aims to address the spread of illegal content online. Now they have largely agreed on the rules that will govern online content moderation. Some technicalities still have to be ironed out, but the cornerstones of the regulation are known.

The Wikimedia Foundation has been tracking the developments of the DSA since the consultation phase and before the European Commission introduced the draft proposal. We have always supported the core aim of the DSA: to make content moderation more accountable and transparent. At the same time, we have cautioned that designing regulatory structures that only fit the operating models of big, for-profit websites could have devastating consequences for not-for-profit websites like Wikipedia. The legislation will fundamentally shape how online platforms operate in Europe, and also have an impact on the rest of the world online. It is also an opportunity to protect the community-governed, public interest internet, as we asked policymakers to do through four essential measures:

  1. Rules that address the algorithmic systems and business models that drive the harms caused by illegal content.
  2. Requirements for transparent and equitable terms of service without overly-prescriptive rules on how they are created and enforced.
  3. Rules on the processes for identifying and removing “illegal content” must allow user communities to participate.
  4. Rules that do not force platforms to substitute the work of people with algorithms when it comes to moderating content.

While the DSA, to a certain degree, distinguishes between centralized platforms and those that are community-governed, some concerns remain. Here is how the final outcomes stack up to our requests.

1. Does the DSA address the business models and algorithmic systems that drive the harms caused by illegal content?

The DSA framework was largely designed to address the rapid and rampant spread of illegal content online by defining some of the processes through which online content is removed. It is our position that regulations need to target the causes, not the symptoms, of the spread of illegal content: i.e., the targeted advertising business model and algorithms driving profit for ad placement. Focusing on these aspects both gets at the root problem of the issue and avoids regulating non-for-profit websites like Wikipedia as if they were operated according to the same model.

The outcomes of trilogue negotiations fall short of what we desired, but are still worth celebrating. The text bans targeted advertising that is based on sensitive information such as political, sexual or religious preferences. The EU is also banning “dark patterns”: i.e., deceptive design tactics that trick users into accepting, rather than refusing, tracking options. The DSA mandates that options to reject and accept tracking must be equally easy to select.

2. Does the DSA leave room for community-developed policies for content?

The information on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is produced, maintained, and debated according to volunteer-developed rules, which are fully transparent. This volunteer-led model of content moderation has its imperfections, but it has also helped make Wikipedia a global source of neutral and verifiable information. To protect this community-governed internet, laws should not require platforms to enforce rules that are set by their users or oblige service providers to engage in top-down content moderation.

We are pleased to see that the DSA will focus only on the rules set by the service providers and their moderation obligations, leaving room for Wikimedia communities to develop and refine their own policies for content and conduct as well as to enforce them. The DSA will not prevent volunteer editors from taking care of our public interest information ecosystem.

3. To what extent does the DSA recognize user communities as part of the process for identifying and removing “illegal content”?

It is not enough for regulations like the DSA to just permit community-based content moderation: the law should explicitly promote that people, as members of our information society, play a more significant role in creating digital public spaces. While we applaud EU policymakers for recognizing that the rules of the DSA must not be articulated with only one type of platform in mind, we would have hoped for rules around the process for removal of illegal content that explicitly support community-governed content moderation systems. Even so, the regulation’s new notice-and-action regime has been vastly improved when compared to the original proposal, which could have led to Wikimedia getting constantly “trolled” by bad-faith actors. First, the service provider can determine whether or not to take action after a notice has been submitted. This is particularly important because so many of the notices that the Wikimedia Foundation receives are not about content that is actually illegal. Second, service providers retain the right to ignore notices from individuals or organizations if they consistently provide false or misleading information.

We are, however, concerned about the “crisis mechanism”, because it allows the European Commission to mandate that Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) tackle certain content that contributes to a threat to public health or safety. Through this mechanism — in the case that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia are determined to be VLOPs — the DSA essentially gives the Commission the executive power to override content moderation decisions by the Wikimedia communities. The safeguards, added after civil society organizations have voiced grave concerns, limit the potential for abuse to a certain degree — for instance, through a sunset clause and a high standard for transparency about the Commission’s demands to platforms.

4. Does the DSA enable human oversight of content moderation?

Wikimedia’s open, volunteer editing model is grounded in the belief that people should decide what information is included in the projects, and how it is presented . . . not machines or automated systems. Although the latest version of the DSA does not explicitly rule out automated tools, we find it encouraging that their use is neither explicitly mandated nor done so de facto through very short removal deadlines. The explicit prohibition of general monitoring obligations further alleviates a persistent concern we have had: i.e., that short removal timeframes and the threat of being held liable for user-uploaded information would compel service providers to deploy algorithmic tools in order to swiftly identify and remove any and all allegedly illegal content. What comes next for the DSA?

We are looking forward to seeing the complete text, where any outstanding details have been clarified. The Parliament will vote on the consolidated version in July 2022, and once the regulation is published in the Official Journal of the European Union — the official EU gazette of record — it will come into force 20 days later. Online platforms and websites will have 15 months after that date to prepare for when the rules start to apply.

Once it becomes law, the DSA will shape communication and life online for everyone in Europe, and most likely for everyone around the world as well. The Wikimedia communities have always emphasized transparency about how their projects are built and developed. Now the DSA will make content moderation processes on many other platforms more transparent and predictable as well, which will also benefit Wikimedia editors and readers. Free knowledge as a whole and the Wikimedia projects in particular are an important part of people’s online experience. For that reason, we will continue to advocate public policy that protects and promotes them, and that empowers everyone to participate in the kind of decentralized decision making and content moderation that makes Wikipedia so successful and popular in Europe and the rest of the world.




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2022-05-29

How the entire country of Qatar was blocked from editing

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By EpicPupper
This month we have a light-hearted video-based submission from a community member that explores the 2006 accidental block of Qatar from editing, and its impacts on today. The opinions expressed are those of MJL and do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost. – E



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2022-05-29

Diving under the sea for World Oceans Day

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By EpicPupper

In honour of World Oceans Day on June 8, here we explore Featured Pictures of the world's oceans on Wikimedia Commons.

  • View of the Seal Rocks at the north end of Ocean Beach, San Francisco, California, USA.
    View of the Seal Rocks at the north end of Ocean Beach, San Francisco, California, USA.
  • Trindade is a volcanic island over 1000km off the coast of the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo. It constitutes an archipelago with Martim Vaz and is part of the municipality of Vitória.
    Trindade is a volcanic island over 1000km off the coast of the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo. It constitutes an archipelago with Martim Vaz and is part of the municipality of Vitória.
  • Ponta de São Lourenço, the easternmost point of the island of Madeira in Portugal. It is inside the town of Caniçal and forms a part of the municipality of Machico. Heading north north east.
    Ponta de São Lourenço, the easternmost point of the island of Madeira in Portugal. It is inside the town of Caniçal and forms a part of the municipality of Machico. Heading north north east.
  • Every day, around noon, when the tide is low, women head to the dry lagoon at Jambiani to take care of the seaweed farm.
    Every day, around noon, when the tide is low, women head to the dry lagoon at Jambiani to take care of the seaweed farm.
  • Cape Purakkari, the northernmost point in mainland Estonia, at the end of October. Weather was very windy (up to 20 m/s), water level was high and sun had just set down moments ago. There are glacial boulders in the picture. Long exposure makes the waves look like mist.
    Cape Purakkari, the northernmost point in mainland Estonia, at the end of October. Weather was very windy (up to 20 m/s), water level was high and sun had just set down moments ago. There are glacial boulders in the picture. Long exposure makes the waves look like mist.
  • North beach from Willinga Point in the township of Bawley Point, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This high-resolution panorama was stitched from multiple exposures.
    North beach from Willinga Point in the township of Bawley Point, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This high-resolution panorama was stitched from multiple exposures.
  • Pärispea Peninsula, Lahemaa National Park. The are glacial boulders in the picture are commonly found in the northern coast of Estonia.
    Pärispea Peninsula, Lahemaa National Park. The are glacial boulders in the picture are commonly found in the northern coast of Estonia.
  • The Bell in Chersonesos, Crimea, Ukraine. This bell is an 18th century historical monument in Ukraine and was originally used to warn ships away from the foggy shore.
    The Bell in Chersonesos, Crimea, Ukraine. This bell is an 18th century historical monument in Ukraine and was originally used to warn ships away from the foggy shore.
  • Promenade pier of Sopot, Poland.
    Promenade pier of Sopot, Poland.
  • Sanderlings (Calidris alba) at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California, USA.
    Sanderlings (Calidris alba) at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California, USA.
  • A marbled godwit (Limosa fedoa) walking on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California, USA at low tide against the sun.
    A marbled godwit (Limosa fedoa) walking on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California, USA at low tide against the sun.
  • Sea caves at Cape Greco National Park, Cyprus.
    Sea caves at Cape Greco National Park, Cyprus.
  • A beachcomber is touching a dead whale washed ashore at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The marks of great white sharks bites are seen at the rear of the whale.
    A beachcomber is touching a dead whale washed ashore at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The marks of great white sharks bites are seen at the rear of the whale.
  • Twelve Apostles at Port Campbell National Park, Princetown, Victoria, Australia.
    Twelve Apostles at Port Campbell National Park, Princetown, Victoria, Australia.
  • Impression of the Caribbean Sea. Shutter speed of >20s in daylight achieved by using a 3.0 ND filter.
    Impression of the Caribbean Sea. Shutter speed of >20s in daylight achieved by using a 3.0 ND filter.
  • Long Spit, Sea of Azov, Yeisk district, Krasnodar region, Russia.
    Long Spit, Sea of Azov, Yeisk district, Krasnodar region, Russia.
  • Island Archway on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia. Taken as a 6 segment panorama showing the surrounding coastline.
    Island Archway on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia. Taken as a 6 segment panorama showing the surrounding coastline.



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2022-05-29

The Onion and Wikipedia

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By EpicPupper
In honor of Smile Day on May 31, this month we look back at when The Onion published a humorous article regarding Wikipedia's issues with vandalism, and reflect on how calls for change then have impacts today. The following Signpost article, by Michael Snow, originally appeared in the 31 July 2006 edition as "Onion riff prompts some to cry for change". A minor modification to fix a dead link was made.

Parody newspaper The Onion poked fun at Wikipedia last week with a "news" story about celebrating the 750th anniversary of American independence. Reactions from Wikipedia editors ranged from enthusiastic appreciation of the joke to advocating major changes in an effort to have Wikipedia taken more seriously. The article [archived link] was part of The Onion's July 26 issue, and described how Wikipedia celebrated the supposed anniversary on July 25 with a featured section on the Main Page. It included excerpts from the "American Inderpendance" article riddled with vandalism, and indicated that it had apparently been protected as a result. A number of farcical facts and subjects were discussed, rounded out by sincere-sounding quotes from Jimmy Wales about the age of the United States relative to other historical events. The Onion even mentioned links to videos of the first Thanksgiving hosted on YouTube.

This is one of several recent uses of Wikipedia in a humor context. A piece in the August issue of Wired by comedian Stephen Colbert refers to Wikipedia as a way to get your own encyclopedia entry. As a bonus, he adds, "You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter." Late Show host David Letterman read the article Cougar (slang) aloud on air earlier this month. Also, the comic strip Working Daze recently featured a series of strips featuring Wikipedia, culminating in a manager ordering one of her employees to write an article about her.

A number of Wikipedia editors thought The Onion parody was one of the better attempts at Wikipedia-related comedy they had seen. Dpbsmith said he found it "hysterically funny". Not all agreed that The Onion's effort was especially witty, however, as a few contributors from outside the United States thought the story was somewhat lacking in the humour department.

The serious side of the story

Going even further, some editors took this as an opportunity to reiterate calls for significant change. Adam Carr said the piece should be taken as "a very serious warning" that the Wikipedia philosophy of open access to all editors was turning it into "an object of ridicule." Carr, who believes Wikipedia would be better off with both fewer articles and fewer editors, has long advocated eliminating the ability to edit without registering, along with a process for bringing articles to a state of completion.

Meanwhile, Ben Houston wrote an essay criticizing the overuse of anonymity and pseudonymity on Wikipedia. He suggested adopting a system similar to Amazon.com's "Real Name" attributions. Implementing a method to authenticate an editor's identity and encouraging its use, he said, "substantively improve Wikipedia's quality and reputation." Houston thought the authentication process could be outsourced to a commercial partner, possibly fee-supported, with a second option provided for those who don't have credit cards, which is what the Amazon.com system is based on.

Reactions to these proposals were mixed. Some editors agreed with the notion of disabling edits by unregistered users; others defended the importance of anonymity to the principle of free speech. Whether any action will be taken as a result is uncertain — similar proposals have been floated in the past, but so far the primary change is the restriction of article creation by unregistered users (see archived story), a practice that is still officially considered experimental.



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2022-05-29

How not to write a Wikipedia article

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By theleekycauldron
This Wikipedia essay was first posted in April 2022. You may edit the essay, but please do so at Wikipedia:Source your plot summaries, not here. Essays express the opinions of individual contributors, rather than those of the Signpost team, and do not constitute official Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

Wikipedia articles concerning fiction frequently feature overly long or excessively detailed plot summaries. While any plot section can be trimmed, it can be hard to know what to cut if one hasn't consumed the relevant media, while those who have might be tempted to explain any intricacy that arises to give the reader the full experience of the show. This essay offers a solution: sourced plot summaries.

Reasons to source plot summaries

While editors are encouraged by MOS:PLOTSOURCE to rely on secondary sources, the guideline does not require that they do so; the reasoning goes that it is generally assumed that the work itself is the primary source for the plot summary. However, relying on this can lead to original research and overly long summaries. Sourcing plot summaries provides clear benefits in terms of overall encyclopedic value to the reader.

Verifiability

Articles on fictional works often cover something a future article editor would never read; novels in genres they have no interest in, TV shows on streaming platforms or channels they don't have, movies in languages they can't speak or translate. Given this, while any editor can in theory verify a plot summary by gaining a detailed understanding of a work in order to find out what's important to the plot, this isn't a widely-utilized solution in practice. Basing plot summaries on reliable sourcing allows the next reader to reassess and re-evaluate the length and content of the plot summary with the same agreed-upon and widely accessible yardstick, thus minimizing the risk of original research slipping in.

Minimalism and due weight

It seems not unreasonable to speculate that articles about fictional works have a tendency to be written by fans of the work, and that the in-depth knowledge of a work's plot possessed by a fan tends to lead to plot summaries stretching too long and giving too much detail. Pieces of trivia and other cruft can frequently work their way in, and without having read or watched the original, it can be difficult to know whether the relevant piece of cruft is actually important. By referencing sources for a plot summary, editors can check whether a given fact discussed in enough detail to be relevant, or if it's even mentioned at all. Relying on organizations that have more rigorous editorial processes helps keep the information presented by Wikipedia minimal, relevant, and encyclopedic. This essayist, however, regrets not being able to talk about Bob Murray's kidney stones in their first featured article.

Other media

Fictional characters

Articles on fictional characters arguably suffer from long and irrelevant plot summaries more than their parent works. Characters can build up long, complicated backstories over years in their movie franchise or book series or television serial; and in an absence of abundant coverage, editors may be tempted to revert to writing long "character biography" sections as a substitute for real-world encyclopedic content. There is a better way; character articles are prime targets for mixing real-world, reliably sourced interpretation with canon. Instead of giving a complete history of the character's appearances and little details found in flashbacks, consider using reliable sourcing to talk about the character's personality, their strengths and weaknesses, how and if they evolve, and if there are weak points in the character's writing or portrayal.[a] Utilizing reliable sourcing in a character's article can provide a clearer, broader set of topics that appeal to all readers, and not just fans.

For non-fiction, too!

This problem isn't limited to works of fiction, either; political books, documentaries, scholarly articles, and history books all have lots of content that might need to be summarized if the work qualifies for a Wikipedia article. However, for political books especially, the main idea should not be to summarize every point and argument made, or even the ones that stand out. By referencing reliable sources, critical review especially,[b] editors can get an idea of what parts of the argument are most important, and allows for a minimalist argument summary that is still a valid and comprehensive reference for the reception section.

Notes

  1. ^ This, of course, could no longer go in a section labelled "character biography", but perhaps "character role" would substitute well.
  2. ^ Critical review is ideal because some works are the subject of long-yet-trivial coverage. You can find, for example, lots of articles from respectable news outlets about episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver—but many turn out to be sensationalist recapping that just focuses on the eye-catching parts. Articles that contain real, critical review are more likely to be focused on the most important aspects of a work, instead of the parts that make the most clickbaity headlines.




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2022-05-29

A new crossword

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By Ganesha811

The crossword is back! The previous Signpost crossword can be found here. The answers to previous crosswords can be found at the following link – thank you all for playing!

We have a new crossword for this month – once more, all of the answers have something to do with Wikipedia, though the clues may seem unrelated.

This month's answers are taken from Wikipedia's Featured Articles – every correct answer will be the verbatim title of one of the articles listed on that page. (Parenthetical descriptors excluded.)

You can play the crossword online at this link (recommended) or manually by printing out the image and clues below. Enjoy! Hints may be given in the comments, so scroll cautiously.

Crossword image for printing and visual



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