Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2022-02-27

Readers of The Signpost may have heard in this space nearly a year ago that Smallbones, our Editor-in-Chief since 2019, planned to step down from the position and resume being a regular member of the writing and editorial staff. As Smallbones put it then, the Editor-in-Chief carries out the following critical functions:

• Solicits articles for the next issue,
• Anticipates topics that are likely to come up,
• Evaluates and edits submissions,
• Has backup plans if an article falls through,
• Organizes and helps with the copy editing,
• Makes sure that everything that needs to be done before publication is actually done, and
• Certifies that no Wikipedia rules are broken in any article.

The Signpost staff anticipate this to be a smooth process and will continue to provide you, our readers, with the content about which you have provided us much positive comments and constructive feedback. However, the process is overdue, and Smallbones has reiterated a desire to be replaced in the next few months at the latest. We have begun to discuss how to make this transition, beginning by building a list of contributors for the past two years with whom we would like to reach consensus concerning who may be best suited to lead us as Smallbones' successor. If you think you are that person and you want to talk to Smallbones, he has invited you to discuss it with him here.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in an uptick of AN/I reports for related disruption, as well as arbitration enforcement activity in the Eastern Europe sanctions area. A variety of reports and suggestions were filed, regarding POV-pushers, incivility from some new users, and other misguided activity. Since the invasion began only a few days ago, developments are ongoing. The article covering the invasion was selected for In the news on 23 February 2022; it had over 2 million pageviews on 24 February, and again on 25 February. The parent article, Russo-Ukrainian War, also had over a million pageviews on 24 February, dropping slightly the following day. – B, E

The 2022 Steward elections ended on 26 February. The global Wikimedia community elected 5 candidates representing the diversity of our Movement. The Signpost congratulates AntiCompositeNumber, BRPever, Hasley, TheresNoTime and Vermont, the newly elected Stewards, and thanks the Elections Committee for their hard work. – E

The Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation proposes to support the creation of a global, community-driven Leadership Development Task Force. The purpose of the task force is to advise leadership development work by the Community Development team as well as in broader community initiatives in the near term, pending any future changes of direction coming from the Movement Charter and Global Council currently being formed. The applications for the Task force will open on 1 March 2022. Interested editors are invited to participate on Meta. – E

The fourth rendition of Wiki Loves Folklore began on 1 February 2022 and will end on 15 March 2022 (UTC). The contest is dedicated to celebrating the unique and rich traditions and culture that make up the world's unique and diverse heritage. The winners of the contest will be announced on Commons on July 25, 2022. Wiki Loves Folklore was extended 15 days after the original end date of 28 February 2022. – E

• Oversight group renamed: The Oversight group was renamed globally to "suppress" after 6 years of discussion and implementation.
• WMF conversation meeting: The Community Resilience and Sustainability (CR&S) team is hosting a new conversation meeting (‘previously called ‘Office Hour’) led by its Vice President Maggie Dennis. Topics within scope for this call include Movement Strategy coordination, Board Governance, Trust and Safety (and the Universal Code of Conduct), Community Development, and Human Rights. More details are available on Meta.
• WMF global conversations event: The Movement Strategy and Governance team of the Wikimedia Foundation will host a global conversations event on the concept of Hubs on March 12, 2022. It is the second event focusing specifically on Hubs. Interested editors can find more information on Meta.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Modussiccandi.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Google. Please be bold and help to improve this article.
• CEE March meetup: The March 2022 talks from the Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe partnership will be hosted on 5 March. More details are available on Meta.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: Moksha Wikipedia (10,000 pages), Macedonian Wikipedia (100,000 registered users), Icelandic Wikibooks (500 book modules), Navajo Wikipedia (20,000 articles), Paiwan Wikipedia (200 articles)

As reported in a special report in The Signpost last month ("WikiEd course leads to Twitter harassment"), things went very wrong in December 2021 in a class supported by Wiki Education's Wikipedia Student Program. I came away from the ensuing discussion understanding that there's a gap between what we do and the community's understanding of what we do. Our program is the single largest outreach effort in the Wikimedia community. In 2021 we brought over 12,000 student editors to Wikipedia, who added over 9.6 million words to 12,000 existing articles and created 1,000 new articles.

It's human nature to make judgements based on extreme cases, both good and bad. And once we’ve found these patterns, confirmation bias does the rest. If you only come across outstanding student work — the student who revamps a mess into a high quality summary, or the student who creates a new article — you come away thinking students' work is exceptional. And when you read about the kind of incident stemming from our program that was highlighted in January's Signpost, you can get the impression that the results of student editing are (as one editor said in the discussion) "decisively mixed". My experience, as a Wikipedian since 2004 who supports the 12,000+ student editors writing on Wikipedia each year through Wiki Education’s programs, is different. I see almost everything students do.

I'm writing this as User:Guettarda, a longtime contributor to English Wikipedia. But I'm also writing this as User:Ian (Wiki Ed), the Senior Wikipedia Expert at Wiki Education. Wiki Education is a US-based nonprofit bridging the gap between Wikipedia and academia. Our biggest program, the Wikipedia Student Program, supports 12,000+ student editors a year, all of whom attend a higher education institution in the United States or Canada.

Our organization has its origins in an effort to increase the pool of Wikipedia contributors, and to improve article quality. This project has grown from an initial 18-month pilot in 2010, involving 24 universities and over 800 students, into our current program: in Fall 2021 we supported 5,972 student editors, who contributed 4.7 million words to over 6,400 articles. Since 2010, more than 102,000 students have added 85 million words to 116,000 articles. Our program is the single largest outreach effort in the Wikimedia community by count of new editors recruited, articles edited, and content added. Moreover, almost all of this content passes Wikimedia editorial review and remains in Wikipedia.

Both in terms of bringing in new editors, and in terms of bringing in high quality content, Wiki Education has been very successful.

In the course of normal editing, you encounter the work of our student editors quite regularly. They create new articles about minerals. They expand existing articles about environmental science. They write about music of the world, and African archaeology, and poetry. They write about deafness in various countries. Wiki Education's courses cover nearly every discipline taught in higher education. Our program for university partnerships is one of the Wikimedia movement's biggest success stories for a way to systematically improve content areas.

Students add a lot of scholarly citations to Wikipedia. A 2020 paper by researchers Jiro Kikkawa, Masao Takaku, and Fuyuki Yoshikane reported that in 2016 15.5% of the editors who added scholarly citations to English Wikipedia articles were participants in Wiki Education-supported programs. Citations matter because they're the way Wikipedia articles achieve credibility despite being written by pseudonymous editors. And thanks to university libraries, students have easy access to a wealth of scholarly work that might be difficult for most readers (and many Wikipedia editors) to get access to.

In 2016, students in George Waldbusser's Biogeochemical Earth class transformed a redirect into an article about the Boring Billion, an approximately billion-year period in the Earth's history where very little happened. In 2020, another Wikipedian took the raw material that the students had created and converted it into the Good Article that exists today. It's impossible to say whether they would have created this article from scratch if they didn't have the student work to improve.

But the idea that student work creates an impetus for article improvement is consistent with what Kai Zhu, Dylan Walker and Lev Muchnik found in their 2020 study of the impacts of student editing. Using data from Wiki Education's Dashboard, they were able to trace the fate of 3,300 articles that were edited by students in Fall 2016, and compare them with a control group that students hadn't touched. It turned out that after the students had finished editing, the articles they worked on had 12% more page views than the control set. This also translated into more page views downstream, in the articles linked from these ones, and more edits from other Wikipedians. As I wrote in a 2020 blog post:

At the start of 2016 the article about Kalief Browder — an African American boy who was imprisoned in Riker's Island for three years without trial for the crime of allegedly stealing a backpack — was about 380 words long. In spring term that year, a student editor in Fabian Neuner's Black Lives and Deaths class worked on Browder's biography and expanded it to more than 5,500 words. The difference in this case is that the article has continued to attract edits since the class ended. In the remainder of 2016, after the class ended, the article received 135 edits, almost precisely the same number of edits (133) as it had received in the previous two years. Not only that, the article has continued to develop as other editors have tweaked and modified the article. At the end of the class, 82% of the article was the work of one student editor; today it's only 53%. The article about the short life and tragic death of Kalief Browder hasn't gotten much longer, but its overall quality has continued to improve.

Because students tend not to stick around beyond the duration of their class, it's easy to think of their impacts as one-off. But instructors do tend to stick around, and over the course of many classes, an instructor can make a real impact on a topic area.

Since 2013, Erik Herzog has included the Wikipedia assignment in his chronobiology class, which runs every other Spring. When chronobiologists Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the world rushed to Wikipedia to discover who these people were. And Wikipedia's biographies of these three scientists existed, for the most part, because of the work that was done by students in these classes.

Similarly, since 2012 Joan Strassmann's behavioral ecology classes have added well over 1.8 million words to Wikipedia in articles about bees, wasps, spiders, and flies. Her sister Diana Strassmann's classes have added over 1.3 million words to Wikipedia, primarily in the areas of poverty, justice and human capability. Last term they created two new articles: Medical racism in the United States and Anti-Apartheid movement in the United States. Other students successfully contributed to articles like Discrimination based on skin color and Racial disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Past classes have made edits like this one to the Discrimination against drug addicts article and this one to the Mental health and immigration detention article. Both classes have had students stick around after the end of the class to take their work through the Good Article process.

As of 2020, Wiki Education brings in 19% of new active editors on the English Wikipedia. Student editors in programs supported by Wiki Education make up about 3% of all active editors on the English Wikipedia. In other words, the interactions you had with a student editor, or the work you read (good or bad), isn't necessarily representative of the whole, just as an interaction with any editor isn’t representative of the community as a whole. The scale at which our program operates is massive.

The community has long been aware of the issue of systemic bias in Wikipedia, and the fact that this is a problem that is exacerbated by the composition of the community. According to WMF's survey data, only 0.5% of Wikipedia editors in the US are Black or African American, while 8% of our student editors identify as Black or African American. Only 5.2% of editors in the US are Hispanic, while 12% of our students are. And while only 22% of Wikipedia contributors are women, 67% of our student editors identify as women (and another 3% identify as non-binary or other).

The relatively narrow demographic base of our contributors is part of the reason why large areas of content are under-represented. The issue of the coverage of women on Wikipedia is quite well known, but this is also true for members of minoritized groups and for areas in the Global South. Even within the United States, the contributions of students from an Appalachian State University class on The History of Coal were eye-opening to me: it was apparent from their writing (and from the emails I exchanged with some of them) that they had a familiarity with this topic that most editors lack. In particular, their creation of the Broad form deed article filled an important lacuna in Wikipedia's coverage, but one that may not jump out at you if you don’t live in an area where strip-mining regularly occurred on land occupied by people who only owned the surface rights.

Adding contributors who are outside of the normal demographics of Wikipedia contributors may not be able to fix the problem of systemic bias that stems from what McDowell and Vetter have called Wikipedia’s "logocentric reliance on written knowledge", but it is a valuable part of the community’s overall toolkit to improve this problem.

How do you support 6,000 students at once without creating a massive free-for-all where students are struggling, failing, and generally taxing the resources of the community? And, it’s worth asking, are we doing that?

Our model involves supporting instructors in higher education in the United States and Canada who take their students through the "Wikipedia assignment". After going through an online orientation, our Assignment Design Wizard takes instructors through a process that uses their input to create a timeline for the class. The instructor then submits their course page for approval. My colleague Helaine Blumenthal goes through each submission, and makes sure that they are suitable. Since instructors can customize the timelines, Helaine ensures that the key components are all there, and that the class is following our best practices developed since 2010.

Students create a Wikipedia account and sign up on the Wiki Education Dashboard After this, students are prompted to take several training modules and go through a series of exercises. After this, students begin the process of drafting an article. This involves selecting a few candidate articles (students are encouraged to select stub- or start-class articles, and stay away from GAs and FAs). Once they've narrowed their choices down to one topic, the Dashboard takes them through a step-by-step process in which they build a bibliography, draft their contribution, peer-review one-another’s work, and finally move their work to mainspace.

People being people, problems occur. The Dashboard monitors a lot of what students do, and sends a whole range of alerts. If students are behind on the trainings, the Dashboard will email the instructor and ask them to remind their students to get up to date. If students assign themselves FAs or GAs, the Dashboard emails them and their instructors and strongly encourages them to pick a more suitable article. If they assign themselves an article subject to discretionary sanctions, I am notified. If they edit GAs or FAs, I am notified. If they move their sandbox to mainspace, I am notified. And most importantly, if their work is flagged as a potential copyvio, I get notified (as do their instructors). These are just some of the things we do; we’re constantly looking for new and better ways to monitor student work, and to catch problems before they become problems. Also, the help of community members who flag me when things go wrong is immensely helpful.

Beyond this, students are encouraged to get in touch if they have questions or run into problems. We provide multiple ways for them to get in touch, either on-wiki or through the Dashboard. We also encourage instructors to get in touch with us, to ask questions and to relay student questions. In addition, the Dashboard lets me monitor classes and check in on what students in any class are up to. We have things set up to pay additional attention to classes working in areas where they may run into problems. This system enables us to head off potential problems, intervene early where we can, and be notified when something goes wrong. Of course, things do go wrong sometimes — and these are usually the ones you hear about — but for the vast majority of the 12,000+ students editing every year, things go well, and Wikipedia gets high-quality information added.

As an individual, I can't imagine anything I do would have a bigger impact on the world than my contributions to Wikipedia. Health permitting, I might be able to contribute to Wikipedia for another 30 years. But every term working with student editors I make an impact that’s orders of magnitude greater than what I can do on my own. Working with student editors allows me to help add content that would otherwise take decades to be added. This is why what we're doing matters to me.

On December 28, 2021, Samuel Lafont, the head of digital operations for far-right French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, revealed to Le Parisien that a group of Zemmour supporters were editing the French Wikipedia. Freelance journalist Vincent Bresson had already infiltrated Zemmour's campaign, and had been monitoring the "WikiZedia" group led by Lafont since early November. French Wikipedian Jules*, also the lead author of this article, had taken the first steps toward helping Bresson follow the edits more closely and documenting the effects of the WikiZedia cell.

Zemmour is a candidate in the presidential election to be held on April 10 (with a second round, if needed, held on April 24). Opinion polls currently put him in third or fourth place behind President Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. He is roughly tied with the rightwing Valérie Pécresse.^[1] Zemmour is also a conservative television commentator by trade. He's been convicted of hate speech three times, and his platform centers on "immigration zero". He is proud to have received the encouragement of former United States President Donald Trump over other right-wing candidates.^[2]

On December 21, a journalist and one of the publishers at Éditions Goutte d'Or contacted Jules* through an experienced Wikipedian. The publisher wanted to meet about "a political team that coordinates to direct several Wikipedia pages about its candidate and circumvent the rules of the encyclopedia", which he was investigating with Bresson (the author of the book). He first questioned Jules* about the operation of Wikipedia, then described a team of about ten people, headed by a lieutenant of the candidate, whose aim was to surreptitiously promote its candidate on Wikipedia. He did not name the candidate – or, until later, the investigating journalist.

"By the end of the meeting, it was clear that I could help the author and his editors better analyze the contributions of the members of the WikiZedia team." Beyond the public interest, Jules* had a Wikipedian interest: he had an opportunity to access otherwise inaccessible information, to protect Wikipedia from political manipulation. The conditions for this collaboration were as follows: Jules* promised to keep the information secret in order to protect the author of the investigation, who was infiltrating the group, and to refrain from intervening on Wikipedia against the members of the group until the book was published. "My essential condition for helping the journalist was to be able to transparently detail everything to the community after the investigation – they accepted it."^[3]

The WikiZedia cell did not meet in person, but only through overlapping discussion groups on Telegram and Discord. The Telegram group had about 10 members, and the Discord group about 8, for a total of around a dozen members.

According to the book At the Heart of Z by Bresson. The Discord channel gave the following goals for the group:

This was followed by the names of articles to be edited.

The book editors regularly gave Jules* copies of the discussions of the cell. A cell leader who did not edit Wikipedia, identified only by the name "Grand Chef" in the meetings, was apparently Samuel Lafont, one of the leaders of Zemmour's campaign. Another important member of the cell had extensive experience editing Wikipedia. He identified himself to other WikiZedians as User:Cheep. Jules* later wrote:

A series of Cheep's edits to the article on Zemmour beginning on December 3 resulted in an edit war, edits hidden by administrators, and very nearly got Cheep a short-term block. He added photos to the article of the two main Vichy leaders with the caption "Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, whose responsibility in the Holocaust in France is subject to debate". While the caption corresponds to Zemmour's view, it contradicts the broad consensus of historians who consider Pétain and Laval to have been Nazi collaborators in the Holocaust, and traitors to France.

The many other edits by Cheep which pushed Zemmour’s point of view include:

• Questioning the relevance of accusations against Zemmour of sexual improprieties being placed in the Zemmour article
• Inserting the template:Eric Zemmour into over 20 articles
• Moving positive information up in the article, while moving references to "extreme right" from the first sentence to the sixth paragraph

These edits and many others from the WikiZedia cell are documented here, in French. Other WikiZedians edited the targeted articles, but not as successfully as Cheep did.

On February 17 author Vincent Bresson published his book Au Coeur de Z (At the Heart of Z) and Jules* made an on-Wiki announcement of his findings. These were discussed on the French Wikipedia, at the Bulletin des administrateurs (here, with notes here), and Le Bistro here. They were also discussed on the English Wikipedia, at the village pump (here), and AN/I (here).

Several news articles were also published, including:

• Le Monde, "Here I am integrated into a ghost team": excerpts from an undercover story in Zemmour's team (subscription required)
• Le Parisien, Social networks, Wikipedia, petitions… The secrets of Éric Zemmour's digital campaign (subscription required)
• Numerama, How Wikipedia was deceived by a cell of pro-Zemmour militants (not paywalled)
• and TheGuardian.com, French reporter infiltrates campaign of far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour (not paywalled)

Seven editors, including Cheep, were banned on the French Wikipedia.^[3] 60 of the 68 French admins !voted to ban the seven editors. Only eight admins preferred the less serious penalty of indefinitely blocking the offenders. Cheep was indefinitely blocked on the English Wikipedia.

There have always been biased edits to Wikipedia articles made by politicians, and by almost all political parties. But the WikiZedia cell shows how far biased political editing has come. This is the first known instance of a party organizing a secret cell to influence Wikipedia articles, and the first time that the operations of such a cell have been so thoroughly documented and connected to top party officials.

The cell made many edits which were contrary to a neutral point of view taking a non-encyclopedic approach, and concealing their intentions. Their results were ultimately fairly poor, their organization too clumsy and inefficient. Wikipedia's method of vetting edits, given enough time, more or less worked – thanks to the vigilance of volunteer Wikipedians. We can only imagine what could happen if we faced a better organized cell.

The duplicity of Cheep is especially hurtful. Mutual trust is needed in a collaborative encyclopedia: it can't function without editors being able to assume good faith. The cell edited in violation of the spirit and the letter of core principles such as the neutral point of view, civility, and Wikipedia being an encyclopedia. Beyond the members of this organized cell, there have been other POV-pushers and single purpose accounts supporting Zemmour. Some have already been blocked, some have not. Organized attempts at political influence may continue, despite the revelations made so far.

It was not an isolated individual who tried to manipulate Wikipedia, but a political party supporting a person who is running for one of the most important positions in all of the democratic countries of the world. Wikipedians must remain vigilant.

It's been a news-filled month for the UK House of Commons and Wikipedia. On 4 February, the Independent reported (subscription required) that Michael Gove's "leveling-up" plan plagiarised Wikipedia and contained many errors – including spelling mistakes and entire paragraphs that were repeated. Four days later, Debbie Hayton writing in UnHerd said that an editor battle over the biography of British MP Tonia Antoniazzi is "instructive of how a small group of activist editors can manipulate information to service their agenda". On 23 February, the New Statesman wrote that the Wikipedia pages for two MPs were whitewashed: a section about Bob Blackman's connections to Azerbaijan was removed from his article, and a section in the Gillian Keegan article related to the Post Office scandal was removed. Both removals were made from IP addresses tracing back to the Palace of Westminster. Neither Blackman nor Keegan could be reached by New Statesman for comment. – E, S

The Wikimedia Foundation's new project titled Wiki Unseen was reported on by Hyperallergic and jamaicans.com. The WMF launched the project on February 9 during Black History Month to amplify the voices of "the people who have shaped the world, but were systematically erased from knowledge spaces". The project pays artists for portraits of historical figures where no freely licensed illustrations are available. – E

• 
  Astrophysicist Mercedes Richards by artist Esther Griffith
• 
  Activist Asquith Xavier by artist Esther Griffith
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  Poet May Miller by artist Bukhtawar Malik
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  Filmmaker William Greaves by artist Bukhtawar Malik
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  Biochemist Marian Ewurama Addy by artist Enam Bosokah
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  Artificial intelligence scientist Rose Dieng-Kuntz by artist Enam Bosokah

ESPN reported on vandalism in Wikipedia sports articles. Matt Hamilton is given as an in-depth example. His article briefly contained colorful vandalism, among them that "curling is not a sport", that Hamilton had donated to charities supporting irritable bowel syndrome because he suffered from it himself, and that he was a long-lost relative of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., a viper, and a cougar hunter. The story applauded vandalism fighters, including Earl Andrew. Hamilton's article is currently pending changes protected. The ESPN article is well-written and its analysis is interesting. But sooner or later, we should all recognize that the best journalism about vandalism is no journalism about vandalism. Criticism just encourages the vandals. – E, S

BolaVIP reports that Danish center-back Mads Fenger lost a chance for playing for Belgian soccer team Zulte Waregem because Wikipedia misstated his height as 186 cm (6 feet 1 inch), rather than the actual 183 cm (6 feet 0 inches). "The transfer failed due to Wikipedia." With such a small difference, it's important to get the details right. Until it was changed on January 24, Wikipedia reported that Fenger stood at 185 cm, not 186 cm. If anybody is to blame for Fenger not getting the job, it's Zulte Waregem, for making the decision based on such a trivial detail. Or perhaps the fault lies with Fenger, who may not have stood up straight during the measurement. More likely, the fault lies with BolaVIP, which preferred to take a cheap shot at Wikipedia without checking the facts. – S

The Fall 2021 Introduction to Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) class at the University of Minnesota Morris is another class that joined the over 500 universities that have been creating content for Wikipedia through the Wiki Education program since 2013. The class of 24 students contributed in unique ways, adding 12,000 words and 57 references to articles that had received 37,000 views as of the end of the semester in December. New articles included Lissa Yellow Bird-Chase, the founder of Sahnish Scouts, a citizen-led organization dedicated to finding justice for missing people and their families. – E

The Verge featured an independent interview with Molly White (GorillaWarfare onwiki), known for her Request for Comment on Meta to stop cryptocurrency donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. The interview covered White's Web 3 Is Going Just Great, launched on December 14th, and her views on cryptocurrency, NFTs, DAOs and Wikipedia. – E

After countless articles already existing about Wikipedia rabbit holes, Mashable is at it again with another story. This one suggests exploring List of common misconceptions, Military marine mammal, COINTELPRO and more. Have fun descending deeper and deeper into the depths of the wiki. – E

On Valentine's Day Input reprinted these 2008 photos from the High five article which go viral every so often. Input tells you everything you'd ever want to know about the photos, including the uploader's real name and profession. Not to worry, though – the uploader has posted his profession, first name and family name on-Wiki. – B, E

• The Met's Editathon: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting an editathon related to the BHM exhibit Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. Coverage included an All Arts article as well as the Met's own site.
• Indian ministry's Wikipedia-like portal: The Indian Express reports that India's Union Culture Ministry is planning to create a "portal like Wikipedia on 'unsung heroes'".
• Fiction, like TV – not reality, like Wikipedia: Deadline praises a drama set during the Watergate scandal for not being a "Wikipedia rundown".
• It's nepotism, baby: "[P]eople born into dynasties of wealth, fame, prestige and connections have a greater opportunity to pursue stardom for themselves", evidenced by the fact that famous people like Maude Apatow often have parents with bluelinks on Wikipedia – The Internet continues to erode the myth of meritocracy (MEL Magazine)
• How to make polite conversation in South Africa: An economist writing for The Daily Maverick uses MediaWiki API data to track potential edit wars and thus decide which South Africa-related topics would be best to avoid during the dinner party you might host in Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha—the name of the city depends on which side you support.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth" is a well-known quote. It is sometimes attributed to Hiram Johnson but probably older than this quote by Johnson from 1929: “The first casualty when war comes is truth and whenever an individual nation seeks to coerce by force of arms another, it always acts, and insists that it acts in self-defense" (Locomotive Engineers Journal, February 1929, p. 109). Does that remind anyone of a recent war?

Here we present a tour of war photography. We start in Crimea in 1855 and end it in Kyiv, about 550 miles to the north, about 165 years later. This tour makes stops in the United States in the 1860s, Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and Vietnam in the 1970s.

The Crimean War (1853-1856) was a war in which Russia lost to an alliance of France, England, the Ottoman Empire and Piedmont-Sardinia. The image of that war is largely captured by drawings and paintings (Charge of the Light Brigade), but there were also photographers wandering around, notably Roger Fenton. (Perhaps I should use the words "driving around", because as shown below, camera equipment in those days required a vehicle to transport.) Fenton didn’t capture the cruelties of war, but gave a lively picture of the environment of the Crimean War.

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  Roger Fenton’s photographic van
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  3rd Light Dragoons, British Army (photo by Roger Fenton)
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  Valley of Death (version with cannonballs, by Roger Fenton)

Probably the first real war photographs were made by Mathew Brady in the American Civil War, around 1862. His bloody photographs paint a horrific image of the reality of war.

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  Mathew Brady
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  Confederate dead, Second Battle of Fredericksburg (1863)
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  American Civil War (1863)

Wars produce iconic photographs. Robert Capa will be mainly remembered for his photos of the Spanish Civil War (The Falling Soldier, 1936), but he also made photographs during World War II in Germany. War photographs can also be used as a weapon: the weapon of propaganda. It is well known that governments always try to prevent photographs of war scenes and body bags from being widely circulated. These photos influence public opinion. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, used photographs to effectively work the minds of the German people.

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  The ruins of Guernica
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  Veterans of the 3rd Ukrainian Front march in Red Square in Moscow's 1945 victory parade
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  Leni Riefenstahl photographing Adolf Hitler, 1934

The opinion of the American people on the Vietnam War was heavily influenced by photos – think of the Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, a photo by Eddie Adams of the Saigon execution in 1969, or the picture by Nick Ut of children hit by napalm attacks in 1972.

• 
  Photographer Eddie Adams
• 
  World Press Photo 1973

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began less than a week ago. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and consequently, anyone in Ukraine with pictures to share can upload them to Wikipedia. Look carefully, and keep in mind that photographs are used to gain influence. So far, only a few photos have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The Wikipedia editing event for Ukraine's Cultural Diplomacy Month 2022 was still being supported by the organizers as of February 24. While the event's call is for text editing, anyone who wants to join current editorial discussions about Ukraine – whether for current events or any other part of society – can talk to editors on the talk page there. Be aware that the discussion may be difficult.

• 
  Wreckage in Eastern Ukraine, Feb. 2022
• VOA video filmed between Kharkiv and Kyiv Feb. 24
• 
  Residential building hit by a Russian rocket
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  Wreckage in Kyiv, 24 Feb. 2022

The Wikimedia Foundation established the Community Tech team in 2015 as a product team devoted to building features and making changes that active Wikimedia contributors need the most. Rather than those on the team coming up with their own ideas and proposing them to the community, the team decided to let the community tell us what to work on. To do this, they invited the community to participate in a cross-project survey to set our agenda for the year. This consisted of two weeks for contributors to propose ideas, followed by two weeks of support voting.

325 proposals were submitted to the 2022 survey, with 1578 editors contributing 9554 support votes, producing a ranked list of 270 ideas. Community Tech committed to investigating and addressing the as many as it gets in light of the results of the prioritization process and external factors [they] can't change — designing and building new tools themselves, or collaborating with other teams and volunteers who were working in those areas.

Out of the top 10 winning proposals, Community Tech has completed two of them (copy-pasting from diffs, and disambiguation link warnings), and is currently working on one, leaving 7 that are incomplete. Some community members expressed concerns that the 2022 Survey would yield the same result, with wishes having long delays in implementation. Community Tech responded, pointing to their prioritization method and policy of research[ing] projects before committing to them. With the 2021 Survey, the Team picked 4 wishes to implement and publicly declined one. More details are available on Meta.

The Editing team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been hard at work developing tools for the talk pages project. As of 18 February, the Reply Tool is available to everyone (logged in and out) on desktop at all Wikimedia wikis except for fi.wiki (T297533), and ru.wiki (T297410). The Reply Tool is planned to be turned on at the English Wikipedia for all editors using the desktop interface on 7 March 2022 (Phabricator task). Registered editors are welcome to opt-in to the final testing period and provide any feedback, ask questions, or report issues to the Talk Pages project team in the discussion at the project talk page. Additionally, the team is working on introducing functionality that will alert you, in real-time, when someone posts a new comment in the discussion you are using the Reply Tool within. Instructions for how to try the prototype and share feedback about it can be found here. You can see the full list of what talk pages project features are available at what wikis by visiting the MediaWiki wiki.

After many feature requests for a dark mode gadget, one has been created in December 2021. It is based on the work of Wikimedia Design team members Volker E. and Alex Hollender, supported by volunteer MusikAnimal and others. To enable the gadget, go to your gadget preferences, and enable the gadget "Dark mode toggle: Enable a toggle for using a light text on dark background color scheme". The tool has been criticized for its completely black background color with a white foreground causing eye strain for some. More details can be found here. Happy darkness!

The Teahouse is a forum where editors can inquire on their editing struggles, and is a crucial component to our welcoming and editor retention initiatives. From helping newcomers to advertising WikiProjects, this project has many impacts. How are these goals achieved, and what do the hosts think about the Teahouse itself? To answer that, we interview a diverse group of hosts at the Teahouse, from Cullen328 who has been at the project almost since day one and stalwarted earliest development, to Celestina007, a new pages patroller, to Panini!, a three-time FA writer, to Qwerfjkl, a bot operator and AWB wizard, to ThadeusOfNazereth, a vandalism fighter.

• Sdkb: The Teahouse is a centralized forum where we direct new editors who are encountering difficulty with some part of Wikipedia or just have a question. As hosts, we try to help newcomers navigate our processes and edit productively. We hope that they'll be encouraged to contribute further, not feel bitten, and that a few will ultimately become experienced editors.
• Blaze Wolf: The Teahouse is a friendlier, more welcoming version of the Help Desk; however, this doesn't mean the Help Desk is only for experienced users, or that Teahouse is only for new users. Rather, the Teahouse is just more geared towards newer users.
• Cullen328: The Teahouse is a friendly, welcoming place where more experienced editors can answer questions from newer editors about how to edit Wikipedia productively. Friendly helpful answers are the expectation.
• ThadeusOfNazereth: The Teahouse is the closest Wikipedia comes to a genuine "community center" – a place where anybody can come to ask their questions about editing Wikipedia without fear of judgement.
• Nick Moyes: The Teahouse is a friendly question and answer forum, catering mainly for new editors, which aims to solve their editing difficulties. Everyone who asks a question there is individually welcomed and answered in as simple a manner as possible. There are a number of more experienced editors there (known as Hosts) who serve up answers, but absolutely anyone can help out, just so long as they're confident in it being a helpful reply.
• Panini!: The Teahouse is a service where users can ask questions about the ropes Wikipedia and receive guidance from experienced editors. It's a newcomer-frinedly environment, where anyone can ask anything and get speedy and helpful service.
• Celestina007: In summary, the Teahouse is a very friendly venue which teaches new editors how to edit and even older editors how to edit better. The beauty of the Teahouse is that it is so much more than that, the Teahouse serves as a guide to nurture new editors from beginner level to become experienced editors, another salient point I noted above which is imperative and would like to speak on, is that the Teahouse is not only for new editors as even very experienced editors visit the Teahouse for help. What I can’t over emphasize is being a host at the Teahouse also invariably teaches hosts themselves new things they previously were unaware of. The Teahouse serves as a life long learning process for everyone both new and old editors, and as aforementioned, even hosts themselves. Another beauty of the Teahouse is the warm reception of new editors by hosts (A group of very advanced individuals well grounded in policy). The Teahouse is the most friendly environment a new editor can feel comfortable in when asking questions compared to other venues similar to the Teahouse.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: The Teahouse is, as everyone above said, a place where new users can ask questions regarding editing, whether they are just getting started or are having a problem with editing. But it is not just for new users, experienced editors can also ask questions here. We the hosts treat everyone here as editors, regardless of experience, and give everyone the same amount of helpfulness. Oh and sometimes hosts ask questions too!

• Sdkb: I can't speak much to the Teahouse's history, as I wasn't around when it was launched as a more beginner-focused alternative to the help desk. But it's currently poised to undergo some transformations in the near future, so I'll speak to those instead. They're coming about because of the WMF Growth Team, which is developing features to encourage newcomers. Marshall Miller and the other members of the team have so far been fantastic about communicating and collaborating with us, and their help is needed because of much of the work in this area involves interface changes that require developer support. They've found that newcomers prefer to have a specific mentor, so they're introducing a new mentorship system that sends questions to your talk page and may someday largely supplant the Teahouse's current role. I'm curious to see where it goes, but there are also some potential obstacles. Particularly, I'm concerned about the impact on volunteers of having questions addressed specifically to them, which can feel more burdensome compared to getting to choose which questions to answer as at the Teahouse.
• Cullen328:I have made about 8,163 edits to the Teahouse, and my goal has always been to help improve the encyclopedia by welcoming and helping good faith newbies, while constantly realizing that spammers and self-promoters need to be informed of the facts of Wikipedia life in a polite but firm way. I cannot think about what has changed too much since I first started contributing to the Teahouse, except that I am much more experienced now, and still strive to give accurate and helpful answers.
• Nick Moyes: There are few hosts who have been there right from the beginning, but I am not one of them. I don't think anything has changed in terms of its original aim to be a safe, friendly, informal place for new users to ask questions and be served with helpful answers. Looking through its many elements that are now marked as 'historic' one can see that we no longer invite visitors (guests) to create a profile for themselves, nor is there a rota of on-duty hosts known as a Maître d'. A scheme to award one another with 'Teahouse badges' is no longer used, either. These were overly complicated, and were soon phased out once the Teahouse took off, and simply aren't necessary nowadays.
• Qwerfjkl: I haven't be a host for long, but more recently I've noticed a few things changing, such as templates like {{WikiDonation}} and {{THYFA}} being created. The Reply Tool is also soon to be enabled for all editors by default, which will help a lot with answering questions (by identifying the editor who asked it).
• Celestina007: My vast proficiency with policy aside, I’ve been here only six years, thus I can’t comment with veracity as to the modus operandi of the Teahouse 10 years ago. Having said, what I can however say, is that the Teahouse is a super very friendly space for new editors to request guidance. It is my candid opinion that the Teahouse is literally the safest and friendliest venue for newer editors, The Teahouse hosts are extremely patient and polite individuals, answering the same questions over and over again every single day without an iota of frustration, so whilst I can’t expressly state the manner in which the Teahouse operated ten years ago and what has changed now, what I can however do is speak of how things currently are at the Teahouse as I have explained. Having said, It is my firm believe that 10 years ago, it worked with the same philosophy which we currently are using, which simply put is assisting editors to edit better.

• Sdkb: Just the fact that it exists and works is an achievement. We're nearly always able to give helpful information to any newcomer competent enough to ask an understandable question, and I think most editors who are trying to do something constructive come away feeling like they've had a positive interaction. Many people these days are used to the awful customer service bureaucracies elsewhere on the internet, so it's often a pleasant surprise to discover that there's a group of humans who are not just willing but eager to understand their problem and help them out.
• Blaze Wolf: Like Sdkb said, that it exists and works. There are a million ways the Teahouse could've failed, and yet it continues to succeed. Users are able to ask genuine questions and receive genuine answers, which isn't usually true elsewhere on the internet. It's amazing that this works so well.
• Kaleeb18: For me it's the community that has been created at the Teahouse. I think it is awesome how a bunch of editors can come together and help out other editors and their questions.
• Nick Moyes: It has to be editor retention. OK, I know that's a very anodyne term, but the reality is that the right Teahouse response can turn a frustrated newcomer into someone who is encouraged to stick around and contribute, knowing they aren't all on their own here, and can get help whenever they need it. Right from the start, the Teahouse has built a reputation for itself of being different and more informal, tolerant and friendlier than anywhere else in this project.
• Qwerfjkl: I think it's the reputation the Teahouse has – as a place for new editors to ask questions and receive helpful answers, often after only a few minutes, due to the hardworking editors that monitor the Teahouse (not all of them hosts). These editors ensure there are very few questions that go unanswered.
• Cullen328: Our greatest achievements are the informative encyclopedia articles that we have assisted new editors to create, and if some of those people go on to be long term contributors, then that is an achievement as well.
• Panini!: The Teahouse, I believe, has achieved everything it striven for. The community and presence that the portal has gained really makes it the number one place for any user to come to. I've seen people, including myself, go from asking the questions to answering them!
• Gerald Waldo Luis: I agree with everyone above. It's fun to assist new editors in helping to build the Wikipedia effort, especially seeing those who came to make DYK and GA articles. Like Panini!, I too was a questioner before being an answerer, and I have to partially credit that improvement to the amazing hosts.
• Celestina007: In summary, our greatest achievements is nurturing new editors to achieve their fullest potential. The Teahouse has also become a major factor in editor retention.

• Sdkb: The way the Teahouse functions is pretty straightforward: people ask questions and we as hosts answer them. Most of the time, the questions are things that any experienced editor will easily know, like how to move a page. There are a lot of editors trying to create an article through AfC and wondering why it got declined or when it'll be reviewed. Most of the time we tell them to just be patient as we don't want to incentivize jumping the queue, but if they're polite and working on an important or underrepresented topic I'll sometimes review it for them.
• Nick Moyes: I probably type the Teahouse shortcut (WP:TEA) a dozen times a day to check for new questions. If they've all been answered: great. If not, or if I think a new editor has been given a curt or over-jargony response, I might drop by and add in a "Welcome" message and a follow-up explanation. I think this makes questioners see a more personable side to interactions on Wikipedia, plus it sets an example to other editors and hosts that the friendly, informal approach is the one we take there. I also keep a 'Watchlist eye' on the Teahouse's Talk page for any discussions that might impact on how the Teahouse is run. The key thing is to make sure it remains friendly, informal and distinct from all the other, more formal, venues here. I also try to monitor any new editors who've added themselves to the Teahouse host list. After a quick check that they're an obvious fit and with enough apparent experience, I try to drop by and leave a welcome message on their talk page. I believe that being a Teahouse host can be the first step for some editors to take up a greater role in the 'behind the scenes' work of Wikipedia. If we can encourage that kind of participation, then we're helping to retain users and to keep Wikipedia going long into the future.
• ThadeusOfNazereth: I don't know that there is an "average" day at the Teahouse. It seems like every day I see some of the same questions, but more often I see questions that I haven't seen before, sometimes questions that I don't even know the answer to myself! The most common questions usually relate to WP:RS, article creation, or people who were warned and don't know why.
• Panini!: I grab a cup of coffee—yes, coffee—and I see if there's any new questions I can adequately respond to. Most users are quick to the punch, so much that multiple people respond at the same time! It isn't uncommon for me to get an edit conflict from another host who answered the question the exact way I did. The questions we see on a daily basis are relatively similar to each other, but one thing I love about the Teahouse is how everyone treats a question like it's the first time it's been said before. You don't see any templates at the Teahouse!
• Gerald Waldo Luis: Whenever I don't edit but am still online, I would always keep the watchlist open, with the "Live updates" button on, so whenever a Teahouse question pops I would be notified of it immediately. I wouldn't consider myself the most active host, but I am considerably active. Most of the time, I don't answer a question because either it is not of my expertise, or others have made a good answer to the question. I would generally say "Hi!" before giving an answer as compact as I can. Usually more experienced hosts would correct some mistakes, and I'm always fine with it since they're mostly right, and just because you are a host doesn't mean you are always right. It's an interesting domino effect where I would be the answerer, but then another person corrects me, and I would become the questioner, and another person would be the answerer. It's interesting how you not only teach someone something new, but you would also learn something new.
• Celestina007: In my experience, a typical day at the Teahouse comprises answering multiple questions from new editors pertaining article creation and policy, My roles include proffering advice, how do I go about this? Typically, I try to advice them then link them to the relevant policy. I try as much as I can do to ensure the former comes before the latter as mere pointing them to policy without spelling it out for them may not suffice. Furthermore, a good number of editors come from AFC where their article(s) might have been declined or rejected, thankfully I have the AFC pseudo-perm so every now and again if an article by an editor might have been declined, I proffer tips and if I can see notability being met as detailed in our general notability guideline I may accept the draft article at AFC.

• Blaze Wolf: Definitely. For one it could be made to look more friendly in how it is styled. Currently it looks like every other Wikipedia page. But I think with some clever formatting it can be improved. Some of its weaknesses are no FAQ, so we often get new users asking the same questions that have been asked before. Also, I think some things aren't very clear to new users. Unfortunately, some things can't be solved easily because some people just don't read. I think other than those things, the Teahouse has been generally successful. Sometimes new users ask a question there and never come back; however, when they do, that's almost always a success.
• Sdkb: The Teahouse's interface is certainly a weakness. Newcomers can't be expected to know things like the need to sign your comments, and teaching them those technical points uses up valuable instructional space, making banner blindness a problem and increasing the likelihood they'll miss other important instructions like "please link to the page you're working on". I'm very much looking forward to the new discussion tool being activated by default, as that will improve that element. Another issue that often comes up is over-responding, where a host will add on more details after a question has already been answered, leading to long threads that many newcomers find overwhelming (alas, it seems Signpost interviews are vulnerable to the same phenomenon).
• Cullen328: Two problems are answers that are inappropriately forceful and brusque, and less experienced editors guessing at answers and giving out incorrect information. I do not hesitate to go to an editor's talk page and ask them to be friendlier, and to not answer a question unless they are highly confident that the answer is correct.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: The layout looks a bit cluttered and I'm sure it can be modified to be simpler and more navigable for newbies; it was intense confusion to me when I wrote my first question. We also have a recurring problem of the same topics coming up over and over again; for example, questions about why a person's obviously non-notable draft is declined; I think a FAQ bar would help with this. There must also be penalties for hosts who give out incorrect answers, as Cullen noted.
• Celestina007: Yes, we have a weakness and the greatest weakness is leadership noting that in my capacity I'm somewhat of a leader figure there thus I share in this blame. You see, leadership at the Teahouse is pretty much decentralized, this in itself isn't necessarily wrong – in fact this helps eliminate bureaucracy – but the problem, which is a clear and present existential danger, is just anybody can become a host. Even though decentralized leadership isn't a negative thing, I would want a leader figure who determines just who can become a host; we have seen too many inexperienced editors just sign up and become hosts and give blatant wrong answers to new editors. For example, prior to officially becoming a host, I answered questions there for several months (at least 6 months) without anyone correcting me, thus I knew I was prepared to officially become a host. A fix I can think of is, perhaps a certain threshold could be implemented as a prerequisite for becoming a host.
• Kaleeb18: Although I disagree with there being one set leader, I do think the Teahouse hosts could and probably should come together every now and then to see what we could do to make the Teahouse better. There are definitely some holes in the Teahouse that need to be fixed, but that might be because we hosts do not get together and talk about how we can improve the Teahouse. You can tell from the above there are things that need fixing, but probably never will because we do not often discuss things. So I would say one weakness the Teahouse might have is that the hosts do not communicate that often about the Teahouse.

• Blaze Wolf: One aspect that is automated is archiving of posts, which is now done by a bot. We also now have an automated response regarding the donation banners ({{WikiDonation}}). Replying has become much easier with the introduction of DiscussionTools, which provides an easy way to reply to posts and allows for subscribing to sections.
• Nick Moyes: The only bot I ever see at the Teahouse is SineBot, which is incredibly helpful when new users don't realise Wikipedians get somewhat tetchy if people don't sign to say who they are. It really sorts that one out for us very quickly; SineBot automatically signs the message, and posts a helpful message teaching newbies to sign their posts. The fact that we don't give templated answers to questioners, but respond to them individually, really helps maintain that all-important personal feel.
• Kaleeb18: There is also the Muninnbot, which sends messages to users' talk pages telling them the thread they created at the Teahouse has been archived in order to prevent confusion.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: To add on to Blaze Wolf, the Reply Tool is a really helpful new addition. It doesn't sound like much, but to open the source editor, wait a minute for it to load, scroll to the very bottom, then put indents and press ⇧ Shift+~ four times, it's a hassle. DiscussionTools simplifies all this in just two clicks, and it's now enabled by default for all users.
• EpicPupper: HostBot was created and approved in 2012 with the goal of inviting new editors to the Teahouse. Direct invitation is the primary way that new users find out about the Teahouse. But only a small number of invited newcomers show up, so manual invitations are not enough on their own. HostBot sends out roughly 100 invitations per day, each one signed with an active host to provide a personal touch.

Interviewer note: This question is optional (like all of the other questions), and some participants might not have chosen to answer this question for various reasons (e.g. privacy and outing).

• Kaleeb18: Two major things that might separate me from the typical Wikipedian is that I am a homeschooled high schooler and a Republican editor. I’ve been told by user Kingsif that they think it is "neat" that I am a Republican editor because Wikipedia might be more liberal like people say, which could mean that right-wing topics aren't covered as much because editors just aren't interested. Although I am a Republican editor, that does not stop me from being nice to others who are not. While being in high school might show that I am a little sloppy when it comes to things like grammar, I think it also helps me have a different viewpoint on Wikipedia than the typical Wikipedian. Though after saying that, one thing that I do, that I hope every Wikipedian does, is strive to be nice in everything they do on Wikipedia.
• Blaze Wolf: I'd say I contrast with the stereotypical image of a Wikipedia editor because I always like to hear both sides of an argument before coming to a decision, and I also try and give off a more friendly vibe with things I do on Wikipedia to make it seem like a more welcoming and friendly place, which is the opposite of what Wikipedia looks like at first glance.
• Nick Moyes: I rarely think of other editors as being anything other than exactly like myself (i.e. boringly white, male, European, getting on in years, and with a science education and a sense of humour). So I treat everyone equally (or at least, I try to). So it's then a delight to discover many are not like me, usually younger, perhaps living on the other side of the world or having English as their second or third language. The joy of Wikipedia is that all those differences (whether cultural, social, sexual, physical, emotional or whatever) simply don't matter here – or at least, they shouldn't do when it comes to actual editing and collaboration. That said, it is important that our content and our editor base reflects diverse backgrounds, and that isn't always the case. So anything we can do to redress that balance is to be welcomed.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: I can't say that I'm outside of the stereotype, as I find myself sometimes resorting to uncivility. But over time, I have taught myself to be civil regardless of the present heat. The common thought is that Wikipedians are autistic high school teenagers who are editing Wikipedia when they are free from school, and I am an autistic high school teenager who edits Wikipedia when he's free. If anything separates me, is that I am from Indonesia, thus not using English as a first language (apologies for all my grammatical mistakes galore). I also try to engage with editors using fun language, and whenever others respond to it nicely, it makes me feel safe editing, because it tells me that I am listened to. It's also the same feeling I try to evoke through my Teahouse answers.
• Celestina007: An interesting question. I see myself as others and others as myself, and I believe every editor here is equal regardless of anything and should be treated with respect. However just remembered that I once read a user page three years ago describing Wikipedians as "lonely", "bitter", and "vengeful". However I'm a recluse, and I do not believe that sort of generalization is correct either. Additionally about two years ago when my new page reviewer request was still pending, an editor whom I had crossed paths with in a not so pleasant manner reverted one of my edits as "blatant vandalism" when it was not. The thing about NPR is that "blatant vandalism" is one of the core transgressions that could see you lose the permission. It was a very crafty and vengeful play in my opinion, but the granting admin saw the whole ordeal for what it was and made me NPR anyway. But no, despite that experience I refuse to believe we are vengeful people; in time, myself and that editor grew to respect each other. I refuse to believe that there is such a thing as a "stereotypical Wikipedian" as there simply isn"t.
• Kaleeb18: I would also like to add that I do not think there is such a thing as a stereotypical Wikipedian. I’ve come across many editors now with Celestina007 being the most recent one, and I can truly say I do not think I have ever met an editor that is just like someone else. There are so many different types of editors on Wikipedia. It is amazing how everyone has a unique way of doing something, and how everyone is different. All the different editors on Wikipedia though is what makes Wikipedia what it is.

• Sdkb: I initially came to the Teahouse because I was working on revamping the newcomer tutorial series, and I wanted to understand the newcomer experience better. I've continued as a host since it's gratifying to help out others. Encouraging newcomers is one of the most important things we can do on Wikipedia, since a new editor that sticks around long-term will make thousands of edits, and those who helped mentor them can take partial credit for their future contributions.
• Kaleeb18: As a newer host, what motivated me was purely because of the friendliness and warm environment at the Teahouse. Back in October 2021, when I was a new editor, I was constantly asking questions at the Teahouse and would usually receive a great response. After I became a better editor over time and with my previous experiences at the Teahouse, I really wanted to help newcomers out in the most nicest way that I possibly could. So I gave it a shot by answering a few questions and have stayed around the Teahouse ever since.
• Blaze Wolf: I'm not technically a host (yet); however, what motivated me to answer questions at Teahouse is that I was a newcomer at one point and, while I had an advantage in that I was previously a Fandom Wiki editor so I knew how the editor worked, I was confused as to how everything worked. I want to help new users understand Wikipedia so that they too can help improve this ever growing encyclopedia.
• ThadeusOfNazereth: I remember what it was like starting out as an editor and not knowing what I was doing, and now that I've established myself a bit more than the average editor, it just seems right that I try and pass on some of the knowledge I've gained over the last few years. The Teahouse is also a great reprieve from the drama and vitriol that often masquerades as "discussion" on the noticeboards.
• Nick Moyes: I've always gained satisfaction from helping other people, but I can't remember how I first learned about the Teahouse. Back in 2017 I had a problem with table sorting, so went there and got some great advice. I started lurking there, and eventually began answering a few questions. One of its stalwarts (Cullen328) later dropped by my talk page and encouraged me to "pitch in" with answers whenever I was able. There was no mention of 'hosts' – just simple encouragement, and that was all it took. I've been at the Teahouse ever since!
• Panini!: One thing I always strive for is that every user gets the best possible answers and advice in the friendliest way. We don't bite, after all, so why should we act like we do? I've seen users get discouraged, and I certainly have too, so I've looked for ways to be the better person. I did some digging, and I asked a question at the Teahouse about a day after I made my account. I requested an article idea and asked if I could help make it, and was astonished when a user told me it's possible to make it from scratch myself. After seeing other questions being answered poorly elsewhere, I probably came to the Teahouse to give better answers.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: My desire to help people and provide them with advice (whenever I can). It's always been my passion in real life, and over time I learned that the Teahouse is a great way for me to help people on Wikipedia.
• Celestina007: I have been a personal home tutor in the past, who taught the English language to African students. To be honest I’d say I have a natural propensity or affinity for teaching. The innate joy is inexplicable and this is what made me become a Teahouse host.

• Sdkb: There are unfortunately a lot of questions asked at the Teahouse by editors who, to put it bluntly, lack competence. Wading through those, and through requests from editors trying to do things contrary to our purposes like writing an autobiography, absolutely does get tiring. Fortunately, it's always possible to just go do something else and return later, by which time there will be a new set of questions. The other frustrating thing is that sometimes, people will ask a question and then disappear, so you don't know if they ever even saw your answer.
• Blaze Wolf: Yes and no to both questions. Sometimes I'm fine with the attitude of newcomers because they're new to Wikipedia. However sometimes how they ask questions can seem a bit demanding. Teahouse does sometimes tire me out; however, I always remember that these people have no clue what they are doing and are asking genuine questions.
• Kaleeb18: I feel that for the most part the attitude of the newcomers is generally nice, but every once in a while, like Blaze said, they can seem a bit demanding and a little rude, which can sometimes make their answers harder to reply to. For the question if the Teahouse tires me out or not, that is a definite yes. After I grind a couple of questions for about a week or two, I will usually take a little break from answering questions at the Teahouse to rejuvenate and focus on other projects that I am doing as well on Wikipedia.
• ThadeusOfNazereth: The vast majority of people who utilize the Teahouse are kind people who truly care about the project! A while back, there was an older person (in their 70s) who asked a series of questions about how to start editing who was incredibly gracious to everybody who helped him – That's the sort of thing that makes it all worthwhile.
• Nick Moyes: Like many reading this, I find Wikipedia addictive but the Teahouse is especially so. I thought I might find giving the same sort of answers to lots of people very tiring. But behind the keyboard there's a real person with a real problem they can't solve, and it's stimulating to be able to help them or to point them towards guidance they need to read. Because I am sometimes rather verbose in my replies, it can be frustrating to have an edit conflict with another helper where someone has given precisely the same answers but in much shorter time. That's a waste of my own time, but whose fault is that? I'm perfectly happy with the attitude of the newcomers who come to ask questions. A few might expect us to help them jump the review queue or do their homework for them, but I honestly can't remember when I last encountered any unpleasant attitudes from questioners nor, indeed, from Teahouse hosts and helpers.
• Qwerfjkl: I only look at the Teahouse every few days (previously I was more active); however, a few questions are off-topic, unhelpful, spammy, or vandalism. Luckily, the vast majority of questions are posed by editors geniunly willing to learn from other editors, and to improve their work. I have sometimes stayed away from the Teahouse because I can't face the sheer volume of questions (the whole thing can take 20-30 minutes to read); however, after a few days I do check the Teahouse again.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: I'm not an avid 24/7 Teahouse checker, so I'm not "tired" of the questions. But I'm certainly surprised that everyday we get the same, as Sdkb says, lacking-competence questions. Which is why I suggested in a question above to include a FAQ bar. One thing couldn't be prevented by a FAQ though: I was once emailed by a Teahouse questioner threatening despite knowing that they are in the wrong; of course, it didn't happen, but it's a real issue. However this is not to neglect the many well-meaning newcomers – also editors in general – who just want to be better. In those cases my joyful side kicks in instantly. As I said, my passion has always been helping.
• Celestina007: Absolutely not, perhaps my natural affinity for teaching makes me not tire, I am of the belief that what you love doing can not make you weary, in-fact, I believe the inverse is what happens to me, the more questions I get to answer, the more energized I am.

• Sdkb: There are moments of amusement like this one. But my favorite questions are those that get me to think about something in a new way. Newcomers often have a particular form of insight, since they see everything with fresh eyes. For instance, the other week a user came by interested in translating an article from Guarani. They correctly recognized that the Guarani article was not neutral and wouldn't be appropriate for here, but they thought it still had value as a cultural document. It prompted me to think more about how biased content, while certainly something non-encyclopedic that we want to remove, might still have some intrinsic value elsewhere, perhaps for future historians of knowledge.
• Nick Moyes: I don't have a particular favourite. But I do like those questions that are sufficiently technical that nobody else has answered it yet and where I think I have a chance of learning something new along the way. It's also quite nice when a questioner comes back and acknowledges that you've helped them.
• Kaleeb18: I am with Nick Moyes on this one. I like finding questions I do not really know the answer to like this one. It made me work hard to figure out the answer to their question and I learned how to do something I had no clue how to do before.
• Qwerfjkl: It was an interesting discussion about an editor who drew an artwork of the subject of an article, as there were no images available, and used that instead.
• Panini!: I love questions where I walk away learning something, too. I remember a user asked a question about how to make hyperlinks that don't lead to disambiguation pages, so I taught them about piping links. Then, another user jumped in and taught me to give more advice, which taught me about piping shortcuts; how you don't need to specify the disambiguation (such as [[Door (song)|]]). It's great to have a bunch of hosts actively present, so minds can be put together to give all sorts of new information, especially moments when multiple users guide a newcomer through a process.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: Have to agree with Nick. Some questions not only help the questioner learn, but also help you learn, as you research the problem raised. Another instance of the domino effect I talked about earlier.
• Celestina007: I believe I’ve answered so many questions there, it has become a blur in my memory, I can't single out one now; however, questions pertaining to notability, sourcing, and article creation are the sort of questions I enjoy answering.

• Sdkb: Anyone who wants to help out can just jump in. If you want to be listed as an official host, you can sign up here. More help is always welcome, but I'd emphasize to Signpost readers that one of the best things you can do for the Teahouse is to prevent editors from needing to come to it. Linking the acronym justifying your revert in your summary only takes a few seconds, but it can really help out a newcomer struggling to navigate Wikipedia's complex systems. Improving template documentation and making help and project pages clear, consolidated, and concise are crucial.
• Blaze Wolf: Gain lots of knowledge on varying policies and in how Wikipedia works. Also study other hosts' answers at the Teahouse as you can learn a lot just by watching other people. Finally, don't try and join in too early and answer questions just to give an answer if you don't know the answer.
• Nick Moyes: We welcome anyone answering questions at any time. They just need to be the right answers! So I'd advise lurking for a while and simply try answering a few questions where you can contribute something useful. Do it in a friendly manner and, if you like it and are able to meet our 'Host Expectations', simply hit the big blue button on the Teahouse header and 'Become a host'.
• Kaleeb18: DO NOT RUSH IT! I remember wanting to be a Teahouse host after the first week of me starting Wikipedia! What a crazy thing for me to think. The reason I decided not to become one is because I did not meet the host expectations. I eventually became a much more experienced editor and familiarized myself with Wikipedia’s policies and became a host a few months later. I am very glad I decided not to become a host right away or the answers to all the newcomers’ questions would have been horrific. So for newer editors I would definitely suggest being patient and growing as an editor first before rushing it and becoming a host.
• Qwerfjkl: Patience is key. I find a few editors who are newcomers to the Teahouse themselves, and then go on to answer other questions with not quite the correct advice, although done with good intentions. There was a WT:TEA thread at Wikipedia talk:Teahouse § Inexperienced editors answering questions about this.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: Fun fact – when I answered a question for the first time, I didn't make myself an officially-listed host since I didn't know you should list yourself in the first place. Luckily no one reverted my answers and I found it out myself, and listed myself as host. Always be kind, welcoming, and patient. Keep answers as short and simple as possible. Don't act like a stiff customer serviceperson, be engaging!
• Celestina007: This brings us back to one of our weaknesses I discussed earlier: literally anyone can sign up. The threshold is pretty much non-existent, or if it exists the bar is set very low. However, I've observed Nick Moyes, arguably one of our finest, if not our finest alongside 331dot & Cullen 328, remove certain editors who signed up as hosts due to experience related concerns.

• Sdkb: In a sense, every question asked at the Teahouse represents a failure, since it means that our help pages and processes are too complicated for someone to navigate without personalized guidance. We're happy to offer that guidance, but it takes a lot of editor time and energy compared to instructions that only need to be written once, so we should be aspire to make our processes self-explanatory enough that fewer editors end up needing the Teahouse's assistance.
• Kaleeb18: I would like to give some credit to some other Teahouse host that didn’t get to do this interview. One Teahouse host who I always strive to be like is GoingBatty. He is super nice, friendly, and to me is a great example of what a Teahouse host should be. I guess you could also say he was part of my motivation to becoming a host. There is also David notMD, who is the Teahouse’s most active editor and helped me create my first article Space 220 Restaurant, which reminds me, I need to work on that article soon. ColinFine is another great editor who I will run into sometimes. Other great host I’ve run into at the Teahouse that definitely deserve to be mentioned are Tigraan, Tenryuu, FormalDude, Severestorm28, David Biddulph, Cassiopeia, Melecie, ClaudineChionh, Shushugah, Jéské Couriano, Pyrrho the Skipper, Timtempleton, Maproom, Deor, and ARoseWolf. Also Hoary and Michael D. Turnbull, who are not host, are a great help at the Teahouse. I am sorry for the others I have missed, but without those people, the Teahouse would not be what it is today. I would also also like to add if your an experienced editor trying to figure out something, do not be afraid to stop by the Teahouse. We are always glad to answer your questions too along with the newcomers.
• Nick Moyes: Since its formation in 2012, the Teahouse, together with the Help Desk, have effectively replaced Adopt-a-user as a way to help new editors (though the latter still plays its part in supporting long-term, committed new editors). I think every potential administrator who expects to work with other editors should spend at least some time helping out in one of these places. It makes you appreciate the needs and knowledge gaps of the inexperienced newcomer, and how to interact with them considerately; it's they who eventually become the major contributors of tomorrow. But soon there will be a new support opportunity – assigned mentorship – and I expect the Teahouse will be a valuable stepping stone for those willing to offer one-to-one support via the new user Homepage tab.
• Blaze Wolf: While the Teahouse is most certainly a very friendly and welcoming place, it is certainly not the only place. Even in different WikiProjects there are friendly and kind people who are willing to help you out. Never be afraid to ask questions. If you are then you don't learn nearly as much as if you do. Most of the time you won't get in trouble just for asking a question because it's nearly impossible to learn without asking questions.
• Qwerfjkl: To echo Kaleeb18 above, I have always respected Tenryuu, for their hard work and helpful replies at the Teahouse, and they contributed to my decision to become a host.
• Panini!: I don't drink tea.
• Gerald Waldo Luis: In Indonesia, there's a saying, "Malu bertanya sesat dijalan", which means "Ask, or you will never know the way out." As clumsy as a question may sound, if it is well-intentioned, ask, because it's your only way out. It did give me the way out.
• Celestina007: Nothing much, the Teahouse is a huge success due to arduous tasks carried out by veteran hosts who I’m saddened aren’t in this discussion. I believe a threshold could be set for editors who want to become hosts, perhaps, observing their proficiency overall and a specified time frame as prerequisite for becoming a host.

Thank you so much to the wonderfully diverse group of hosts who participated, and to you, the reader. This interview broke a record in terms of the number of respondents; 10 editors contributed and shared their insight, a wonderful coincidence with the 10th Teahouse anniversary. If you would like to participate in a future interview, or have any comments, please feel free to post them below. Happy March!

Featured Content is back, and here to stay! The editors of The Signpost regret that the past year were not covered. Please review the archives of Goings-on or various other logs to see that content.

Last month, you got a very serious and well-written deletion report. This month, well — I've been busy with some stuff, so you're getting a deletion report.

Remember that massive village pump discussion about the sports notability guidelines, which was covered in length in last month's deletion report? Well, it's still going. It was 400,000 bytes then, and it's 800,000 now, so who knows what we'll be looking at by March. Maybe it'll have increased again to 1,200,000, doubled again to 1,600,000, or ${\displaystyle {\frac {(n*10^{-5})^{2}}{2}}*10^{5}}$ed again to 3,200,000. Or maybe it's a factorial, and the entire world's industrial output will become subordinated to manufacturing storage media to host discussion of the sports notability guidelines. It's anyone's game right now. Bottom of the ninth. Triple overtime. Thirteenth subproposal. Let's go for the gold!

• Jamie Fitzgerald (American football) (31 !votes, 69,634 bytes)

All of that pent-up frustration over the sports notability guidelines had to come out somewhere. Was this football player notable? Nobody could tell. More importantly, was the discussion "bush-league song and dance" or "nonsense wikilawyering"? No consensus could be found on that, either. Or on whether the article should be kept.

• Pepe Escobar (7 !votes, 61,626 bytes)

Is he a prophetic geopolitical analyst or a non-notable literally-who? The no-consensus close, by Sandstein, said that nobody could tell because the AfD had been "bludgeoned to death by walls of text by the nominator, who has since been blocked for this kind of conduct". They advised a renomination, without their participation, could result in a clearer consensus. Said second nomination is already rolling – we'll have to see what shakes out.

• List of feature films with LGBT characters (22 !votes, 61,319 bytes)

Keep !voters say that deletion is not cleanup. Delete !voters say that the list criteria are impossibly broad. Some point to the category system as a remotely maintainable alternative to this article. Some point to the bathwater, and advise against babies being thrown out with it. Whose arguments are more persuasive? Well, we don't know. It hasn't been closed yet.

• Meadow Oaks, Florida (11 !votes, 58,481 bytes)

Geostubs really bring out the sword in the Wikipedian's soul, don't they? A long time was spent delving into census records, newspaper clippings, and that old favorite, the conduct of other AfD participants. In the end, it was kept.

• Sarah Azhari (13 !votes, 57,634 bytes)

While it would be possible to write a succinct description of what went on in this protracted no-consensus nomination, perhaps the best way to summarize this AfD is by a verbatim transcription of Vanamonde's close note:

What a mess. Those arguing to keep this article have spent far too long badgering the opposition, and far too little providing reliable sources and explaining what makes them so. Conversely, the few sources that have been provided (albeit late in the discussion) haven't been commented on by most !voters. The walls of text are long enough to scare most fresh eyes away; so I'm closing this as no consensus, explicitly with no prejudice against speedy renomination. I would like to remind the "keep" !voters in particular to confine their attentions to evidence for notability, substantiated by sources, in any future AfD, and to lay off of personal commentary.

• Ghost of Kyiv (48 !votes, 30,655 bytes)

There's a war going on, which is a serious and dismal event in which many people have died and many more have suffered greatly. This is not a subject of humor; it is a human tragedy. However, this article – what's even going on here? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it even a real person, or simply a meme run amok? Is it notable when a meme runs amok? The non-admin close, by Styyx, was a SNOW keep "before it turns into a clusterfuck of a thing". Indeed!

• Jamie Fitzgerald (American football) (31 !votes, 69,634 bytes)

No, get out of here, I already wrote about you. You can't be in both lists.

• Poul Nielsen (footballer, born 1915) (27 !votes, 56,864 bytes)

This is one of those weird batch nominations you see sometimes. Initially, it was a batch of five Nielsens: Poul, Leo, Kaj, Jørgen and John. All five, according to nominator RandomCanadian, were created in a "rapid spree based on database entries only". This was a perfectly respectable batch, but after a few comments had been made, a much larger list was contributed by another participant. It turned out that those five Nielsens had been part of a family of speedily created articles – Wilhelm, Poul, Leo, Kaj, Kai, Jørgen, John, Hugo, Henry, Frank, Flemming, Erik, Erik, Benny, Arthur, Arno, Allan, Aksel, and Ernst. Once noticed, this new, nineteen-strong nation of Nielsens was notched (none too neatly) into the nomination, making it nearly nonsensical and nudging it towards being a non-starter. The current imbroglio over NSPORTS was cited in the note from Star Mississippi, who closed it as "no consensus/trainwreck" and said "I would suggest rather than 19 separate AfDs, which no one wants, that the creator, nominator and interested parties see if draftification might be an amenable solution until such point as suitable sourcing can be identified".

• Neo-Nazism in India (25 !votes, 42,186 bytes)

CFORK created to split out content from a bloated main article, or POVFORK to avenge the deletion of a category? It's hard to say. The article was nominated fairly shortly after creation, but consisted of a few short paragraphs (mostly duplicated from other articles). Some SYNTH concerns were raised. Mostly, what I learned from this is that there's an ice cream shop named after Hitler. And a pool parlor named after Hitler. What's next, "I Kissed A Hitler And I Liked It"? Maybe if that hit the charts in Mumbai, this article would still be standing. But it isn't – the discussion was closed as "delete".

• Timeline of the war in Donbas (2020) (23 !votes, 26,295 bytes)

This one is still ongoing. Arguments in favor of deletion are primarily based on WP:NOTNEWS, and allege undue detail in the article. Arguments in favor of keeping it revolve around the information being properly attributed to reliable sources; a tale as old as time. The nomination is batched with similar timeline article for 2021 and 2022.

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

In a study titled "Emotions in Wikipedia: the role of intended negative events in the expression of sadness and anger in online peer production",^[1] four Germany-based researchers (three among them from the field of psychology) argue that while "Wikipedia explicitly strives to provide objective and neutral information in unbiased language [, ...] Wikipedia articles might still contain subtle expressions of emotions from the experiences of their authors."

Specifically, the authors

"... analysed N = 330 [English] Wikipedia articles with automatic linguistic text analyses and found that Wikipedia articles on man-made attacks (e.g. terrorist attacks, shooting rampages) contained more anger-related content than Wikipedia articles on man-made disasters (e.g. ship accidents, train accidents) and natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes, flooding) [...]. Wikipedia articles on man-made attacks also contained fewer sadness-related words than articles on natural and man-made disasters [...]. Depending on the kind of negative event, individuals seem to express certain negative emotions in the respective Wikipedia article to a greater extent than others. It seems that these collective emotional expressions are driven by the psychological mechanism of intentional harm that may explain the current findings"

The automated linguistic analysis method is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a tool developed in the 1990s by Pennebaker and others. LIWC has been widely used and vetted, but nowadays exists alongside more sophisticated sentiment analysis methods – a fact that the paper's limitations section coyly alludes to. The researchers used LIWC to detect the percentage of an article's words that match "three specific negative emotion categories [...]: sadness (e.g. 'loss', 'sorrow', or 'grief'), anger (e.g. 'offensive', 'brutal', or 'violent'), and anxiety (e.g. 'panic', 'afraid', or 'scared')." They illustrate them with the following examples:

• Sadness-related words: "The Haitian art world suffered great losses" (from 2010 Haiti earthquake)
• Anger-related words: "He had a history of violence, including an arrest in July 2009 for assaulting his girlfriend" (from Boston Marathon bombing)
• Anxiety-related words: "... which sparked fears in the scientific community of massive numbers of fish dying" (from Hurricane Katrina)

To avoid confounds, the text of references and external links was excluded from this analysis. Also, the authors "did not include the word 'attack' within the anger category or the word 'terror' within the anxiety category in all analyses to avoid the possibility that the topic of the articles could be a confounding factor in our analyses". However, they appear to have made no attempt otherwise to distinguish emotions that are expressed directly in the text (in what editors call "Wikipedia voice") from emotions that are merely reported and attributed to others (such as the scientific community's "fears" in the Hurricane Katrina example, or quoted reactions from politicians etc.).

The authors suggest that online peer production systems such as Wikipedia

"...could design user interfaces in such a way that Internet users are hinted by alerts, for instance, to the fact that they are about to write about a negative event that could potentially produce negative emotions. Although Wikipedia's control system for counteracting potential violations of objectivity and a neutral point of view is already very elaborate and sophisticated, it could potentially benefit from taking emotional aspects into account. It would be possible, for example, to highlight certain emotional passages by the computer system while people are writing a text, so that Wikipedia users are aware of emotional expressions. Other Wikipedia authors, administrators, and bots could flag content that needs correction also with respect to emotional wording."

The paper extends and replicates results from a 2017 publication by the same authors (which had also examined article talk pages, finding that "Surprisingly, Wikipedia articles on those two [types of] events contained more emotional content than related Wikipedia talk pages").

Having "demonstrated that Wikipedia articles on terrorist attacks contained more anger-related content than Wikipedia articles on earthquakes", two of the authors replicate and extend this result by directly measuring the emotional reactions of Wikipedia readers in a more recent study.^[2] Specifically,

"... raters rated their emotional reactions during and after reading the content of Wikipedia articles. We conducted two studies, each with a different focus. In Study 1, four raters rated 60 existing Wikipedia articles on earthquakes and terrorist attacks regarding their emotional reactions while reading the articles. As a conceptual extension, in Study 2, 35 participants [all native speakers of German, and 29 of them female] serving as independent raters indicated their emotional reactions after reading four existing Wikipedia articles on earthquakes and terrorist attacks. Moreover, Study 2 used an Asian and a European earthquake as well as an Asian and a European terrorist attack in order to take the geographical proximity of the negative event into account."

The researchers conclude

"... that Wikipedia articles on terrorist attacks elicited more threat, anger, sadness, and anxiety than Wikipedia articles on earthquakes. These effects occurred for negative events in Europe but were absent for events in Asia, with one exception. The anger effect was the same across Europe and Asia. [...] The findings of Study 2 showed that the Wikipedia article on the nearby (i.e., European) terrorist attack elicited more threat appraisal than the Wikipedia article on the nearby earthquake, which was not the case when the negative events happened far away (i.e., in Asia). For the elicitation of anger, however, the geographical proximity of the negative event did not matter."

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
• The deadline for paper submissions to the "Wiki-M3L" workshop has been extended to March 9. The event is intended to be "a space for the Wikipedia community and the multimodal & multilingual research community to share and support each other."

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.

This paper describe the development of a machine learning model used in the "Add a link" task suggestion feature for new Wikipedia editors (deployed by the Wikimedia Foundation's "Growth" team on several language Wikipedias last year). From the abstract:^[3]

"...despite Wikipedia editors' efforts to add and maintain its content, the distribution of links remains sparse in many language editions. This paper introduces a machine-in-the-loop entity linking system that can comply with community guidelines for adding a link and aims at increasing link coverage in new pages and wiki-projects with low-resources. To tackle these challenges, we build a context and language agnostic entity linking model that combines data collected from millions of anchors found across wiki-projects, as well as billions of users' reading sessions. We develop an interactive recommendation interface that proposes candidate links to editors who can confirm, reject, or adapt the recommendation with the overall aim of providing a more accessible editing experience for newcomers through structured tasks. Our system's design choices were made in collaboration with members of several language communities. [...] Our experimental results show that our link recommender can achieve a precision above 80% while ensuring a recall of at least 50% across 6 languages covering different sizes, continents, and families."

(See also: research project page on Meta-wiki)

From the paper and abstract:^[4]

"We introduce the multilingual Wikipedia hyperlink prediction objective to contextualise words in a text with entities and concepts from an external knowledge source by using Wikipedia articles in up to 100 languages. Hyperlink prediction is a knowledge-rich task designed to (1) inject semantic knowledge from Wikipedia entities and concepts into the MMLM [Multilingual Masked Language Model ] token representations, and (2) [...] to inject explicit language-independent knowledge into a model trained via self-supervised learning [...]. We devise a training procedure where we mask out hyperlinks in Wikipedia articles and train the MMLM to predict the hyperlink identifier similarly to standard MLM but using a 'hyperlink vocabulary of 250k concepts shared across languages [...]"
"In our experiments, we use Wikipedia articles in up to 100 languages and already observe consistent gains compared to strong baselines when predicting entities using only the English Wikipedia."

From the abstract:^[5]

This paper presents a new way to increase interconnectivity in small Wikipedias (fewer than a 100,000 articles), by automatically linking articles based on interlanguage links. Many small Wikipedias have many articles with very few links, this is mainly due to the short article length. [...] Due to the fact that Wikipedias are translated in to many languages, it allows us to generate new links for small Wikipedias using the links from a large Wikipedia (more than a 100,000 articles).

From the abstract and paper:^[6]

"Here we develop an approach for automatically finding useful hyperlinks to add to a website. We show that passively collected server logs, beyond telling us which existing links are useful, also contain implicit signals indicating which nonexistent links would be useful if they were to be introduced. We leverage these signals to model the future usefulness of yet nonexistent links. Based on our model, we define the problem of link placement under budget constraints and propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on Wikipedia [...]"

"in the English Wikipedia, of all the 800,000 links added to the site in February 2015, the majority (66%) were not clicked even a single time in March 2015, and among the rest, most links were clicked only very rarely [...] In a nutshell, simply adding more links does not increase the overall number of clicks taken from a page. Instead, links compete with each other for user attention."

(See also: Research project page on Meta-wiki)

So here's what happened this month.

• A very large announcement was made regarding a number of very old discretionary sanctions, which the Committee began a process to review last month. The beginning of this process was covered in last month's arbitration report; its conclusion will be covered in this one. Essentially, a number of sanctions were lifted in areas where they hadn't been relevant for years, or in some cases, over a decade. The full list of sanctions lifted are:
• Senkaku Islands (instituted in 2011)
• Waldorf education (instituted in 2013)
• Ancient Egyptian race controversy (instituted in 2014)
• Landmark Worldwide (instituted in 2015)
• Transcendental Meditation movement (instituted in 2011)

Additionally, some article probation remedies were abolished:

• Remedy 5 ("Mentorship") of the Neuro-linguistic programming case (instituted in 2006)
• Remedy 2.1 ("Article probation") of the Occupation of Latvia case (instituted in 2007)
• Remedy 2 ("Article-related Probation") of the Shiloh case (instituted in 2006)
• Remedy 14.3 ("Articles semi-protected") of the Obama articles case (instituted in 2009)
  • Finding of Fact 3 ("Articles placed on probation") of the Obama articles case (instituted in 2008), which was the subject of a 2009 review in Remedy 1.1 ("Article probation review") and addressed by a March 2015 ANI thread

• Timwi, an administrator who gained the bit in 2003, was the subject of a case this month regarding the use of administrator tools in content disputes; a lengthy arbitration request with statements from many parties concluded with a February 11 motion warning him that "the use of the administrator toolset must conform to the policies set by the community". The Committee further said that it would consider "any further misuse of the toolset within a two-year period to be immediate cause for opening de-sysop proceedings".
• Another case was opened, this one regarding Jonathunder. It bore strong similarities to the Timwi case – a user who had been an administrator for nearly two decades (in this case since 2006) was accused of inappropriate tool use during a content dispute. While the Committee accepted the case request, Jonathunder's lack of response to the proceedings caused it to be suspended on the 26th. During this time, Jonathunder was temporarily desysopped, pending the outcome of the case. The case will automatically close in six months with a permanent desysop if Jonathunder does not return to Wikipedia and request the case to be resumed.
• The Skepticism and coordinated editing case, accepted by the Committee and covered by The Signpost last month, has proceeded. Since I made a preliminary statement in the case urging it to be accepted, I will again err on the side of caution and not go into too much detail. Various pieces of additional evidence were supplied, the evidence phase was closed, the workshop phase took place, and the proposed decisions are currently being voted on by arbitrators.
• HazelBasil and SquareInARoundHole were placed under a mutual interaction ban by a February 11 motion, with SquareInARoundHole additionally being forbidden to edit a specific article under dispute.

• Miki Filigranski was unblocked on January 30, following a successful appeal of a May 2021 indefinite block.
• Following a period of inactivity, the checkuser and oversight rights of Callanecc were removed on February 2. On behalf of the Committee, Maxim thanked Callanecc for his service as a functionary.
• The Committee made a general comment, in which it was clarified that the granting of an appeal regarding sanctions "does not necessarily mean that the initial decision that resulted in the sanction was incorrect at the time, unless the appeal announcement specifically says so". Moreover, the Committee said that they would "continue to consult with the community, or to have appeals posted for review by the community, in appropriate cases".

• Arbitration enforcement action appeal by FDW777, on February 1, was closed with the sanction being lifted.
• Just another Wikipedian editor, on February 2, was closed after Just another Wikipedian editor was blocked as a sock.
• Clean Copy, on February 3, was closed with Clean Copy topic-banned from Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, broadly construed.
• 71.114.58.144, on February 3, resulted in the IP address in question being blocked for six months as a standard administrative action.
• 207.47.175.199 was closed with no action on February 11.
• Ypatch was also closed with no action, on February 12.
• Arbitration enforcement action appeal by Iskandar323 closed with the duration of Iskandar323's topic ban being "reduced to time served" on February 13.
• Grandmaster, on February 18, closed with Grandmaster being indefinitely topic-banned from the Armenia–Azerbaijan topic area.
• Iskandar323, on February 18, was closed without action, and with the filer cautioned against filing arbitration enforcement requests without having attempted prior venues of dispute resolution.
• Venkat TL, closed on February 18 with no action taken and a reminder issued to involved parties to "moderate their tone, and to refrain from edit warring".
• Mzajac, February 19, was closed as an issue beyond the remit of arbitration enforcement (namely, an accusation of administrator misconduct).
• Hemantha was closed without action on February 22, with an exhortation to exhaust other means of dispute resolution before requesting arbitration enforcement.
• Kautilya3, February 22, was withdrawn by the filer.
• ObtuseAngles, February 26, was closed after the user in question was blocked as a sock.

Three enforcement requests are currently open:

• Nobita456
• Baxter329
• Arbitration enforcement action appeal by Ypatch

Two clarification requests were opened this month: Non-ARBPIA Western Asia disruption (closed) and Palestine-Israel articles (still open).

There have been a total of 87 enforcement actions logged this month.

• Abortion: 1 semi-protection
• American politics 2: 7 semi-protections and 1 indefinite PC.
• Armenia-Azerbaijan 2: 1 warning, 1 topic ban and 1 semi-protection
• Biographies of Living Persons: 1 topic-ban vacated and 10 semi-protections
• BLP issues on British politics articles: 1 indefinite PC.
• COVID-19: 3 EC-protections and 5 semi-protections
• Eastern Europe: 6 EC-protections and 31 semi-protections
• Gender and sexuality: 1 semi-protection, 1 PC and 1 indefinitite article ban
• India-Pakistan-Afghanistan: 1 EC-protection and three semi-protections
• Iranian politics: 1 PC
• Kurds and Kurdistan: 1 semi-protection
• Macedonia: 1 semi-protection
• Palestine-Israel articles: 6 EC-protections
• Pseudoscience: 1 topic ban and one semi-protection

Wikidata contains a huge amount of data. How can it be used to answer the questions that Wikipedia editors are interested in? This article shows one example. Of course, academics and other professional researchers may research similar questions to those you are interested in. But it can be hard to find their results. It can take months or even years before a peer reviewed paper is published. And it may be costly to read the articles, once published. Sometimes a do it yourself approach is faster and answers your specific question better than any available peer-reviewed paper. PAC2 originally published this article here with the full dataset and graphics available. CC-BY SA 3.0

How does your birthplace affect your probability of being covered on Wikipedia? Having a Wikipedia page can be a sign of how successful you are in certain aspects of life. We know that the probability of being successful depends on your birthplace. So in this article I look at the probability of having a Wikipedia page depending on your birthplace.

While browsing Wikipedia in French, I was surprised by the number of people born in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine) or in Paris. So I wanted to know if there was an over-representation of people born in these places. I've been looking at place-of-birth data in France. The national statistical institute (Insee) publishes data about the number of people born in each département from 1975 to the present (France is divided into 100 "départements" i.e. districts). Unfortunately, there is no older data available on births by department. This is a hard limit; our dataset is limited to those born after 1975. They are 47 years old or younger in 2022. Some people, of course, may become notable after this age. However this is the best available French data to examine my question of interest.

I collected data about the number of people with a page in Wikipedia in French born in each department using a SPARQL query from Wikidata. I also used data from the Code officiel géographique (the official list of French departments). All my data were collected using a Jupyter notebook written in the R language. The data set is stored in a CSV file.

Comments and feedback are welcome on my Wikidata talk page!

For each department, we have the number of people born in the department with a Wikipedia page over the total number of people born in the department between 1975 and 1990. We compute the probability "per mille" [per thousand] (ie ‰).

• People born in Paris between 1975 and 1990 have a 2.7‰ chance of having a French Wikipedia page.
• People born in Pas-de-Calais between 1975 and 1990 have a 0.3‰ chance of having a French Wikipedia page.
• People born in Creuse between 1975 and 1990 have a 0.2‰ chance of having a French Wikipedia page.

Of course interpretation is tricky. This may reflect a real inequality of opportunity to gain success in the real world, or it could be an encyclopedic bias. However, unlike gender bias, it is difficult to imagine reasons why the encyclopedia would be biased towards certain departments. So it probably reflects inequality of opportunities between French departments which drives the results.

I was not surprised to find Paris in the first place. The five departments coming after Paris are much more surprising: Hautes-Alpes, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrénées, Pyrénées-Orientales and Alpes-Maritimes are mountain departments. Further analysis shows that there is a high concentration of rugby players in the South West departments such as Hautes-Pyrénées, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Pyrénées-Orientales and Haute-Garonne which might explain their ranking. People born in those departments would have a higher probability of having a Wikipedia page because they can become rugby players. In the Hautes-Alpes, we find a high concentration of ice-hockey players. We definitely need further investigation to understand these geographical disparities.

A poster is crucial to the promotion of a film or drama. It is where an artist can truly express the essence of their work. The more visually appealing a poster is, the more audiences it will attract. Many historical posters have become classic works of art due to their accurate representation and memorability. This month's gallery spotlights an array of featured pictures of historical film and drama posters, coming from the United States, Indonesia, and Italy. They are all in the public domain, which shows how great open access is artistically.

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  Three Friends, by Cleveland : A.B.C. Co
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  Island of Lost Men poster, by artist(s) of The Other Company
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  Plan 9 from Outer Space poster, by Tom Jung
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  The Mummy poster, by employee(s) of Universal Pictures, attributed to Karoly Grosz
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  Queen Christina poster, by employee(s) of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
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  Poster promoting an Indian rope trick performance, by Otis Lithograph Co.
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  Vertigo poster, by Saul Bass
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  New Moon poster, by Tooker Litho Co.
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  The Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles at Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., by the Strobridge Lithographing Company
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  Barnum and Bailey poster, by the Strobridge Lithographing Company
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  Flyer for Pahit-Pahit Manis, by the Banteng Film Company
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  Magazine advertisement for Panggilan Darah, by Oriental Film
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  Promotional flyer for Lagu Kenangan, by the Persari Film Corporation
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  Promotional flyer for Supir Istimewa, by the Persari Film Corporation
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  Magazine advertisement for Ratna Moetoe Manikam, by Java Industrial Film
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  Magazine advertisement for Poesaka Terpendam, by Tan's Film
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  1896 poster advertising the Vitascope, by the Metropolitan Print Company
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  Quo Vadis poster, by The National Ptg. & Eng. Co.
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  Quo Vadis poster, by The National Ptg. & Eng. Co.
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  State Fair poster, by the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Wikimedia Commons has media related to 20th-century posters.

• Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Culture, entertainment, and lifestyle/Entertainment

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Anna Sorokin		3,759,292		Even if most of this list was shaped by Super Bowl LVI, the article topping it has no connection to the NFL final. Instead we have Anna Sorokin, a German fraudster convicted of grand larceny and theft of services. Sorokin spent 4 years in New York pretending to be a wealthy heiress, and trying to establish herself as a socialite despite not having the money to maintain the lavish lifestyle she was trying to lead. She was eventually arrested after people started to notice she wasn't paying any of the bills she had accumulated, and ended up in prison. She's on the list because of #3, a dramatization of the period.
2	Dr. Dre		1,305,834		The first of many Super Bowl-related topics on the list, Dr. Dre was one of several performers at this event's halftime show. The show, described as a nostalgia-inducing performance of old-school West Coast hip-hop, received critical acclaim and a higher viewership than the game.
3	Inventing Anna		1,193,019		#1 owes her views to this, a Netflix series (producer Shonda Rimes pictured) about her activity that became the service's top-watched program, despite generally mixed reviews.
4	Eminem		1,083,853		Another performer at the Super Bowl halftime show, a track this artist performed reached the Top 10 in the Spotify streaming chart.
5	Matthew Stafford		1,082,400		The winning quarterback... at the Super Bowl. After 12 seasons with the perennial bottom feeder Detroit Lions, Stafford switched to the Los Angeles Rams this year, which proved a good move as they won the championship after being seeded fourth in the NFC.
6	Justin Trudeau		1,015,060		Well, my commentary from last week aged well. On February 14, the Canadian prime minister controversially invoked the Emergencies Act in response to the Canada convoy protest, the first time this had been done since the act was passed in 1988.
7	Mary J. Blige		1,004,235		Two more performers at the Super Bowl halftime show.
8	Snoop Dogg		991,505
9	Joe Burrow		978,747		The losing quarterback... at the Super Bowl. Burrow made the championship game in his second season as an NFL player, leading the Cincinnati Bengals into the Super Bowl for the first time since 1988.
10	2022 Winter Olympics		973,268		In other news, the Olympics are still going on.

• 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.

This article was originally published on the Diff Wikimedia blog as "Announcing the Wikimania 2022 Core Organizing Team" on February 24 2022. Licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0.

We are excited to announce the Core Organizing Team (COT) for Wikimania 2022! This talented group of volunteers from around the world was selected from more than 70 excellent applications. They will work with you over the next six months to organize our annual flagship event, designing a Wikimania that brings our community together and celebrates our movement. They are:

Anton Protsiuk, Antoni Mtavangu, Evelin Heidel, Houcemeddine Turki, Kayode Yussuf, NANöR, Omar David Sandoval Sida, Richard Knipel, Sandra Aceng, and Venus Lui.

Wikimania 2022 will be a virtual main event, with the option for communities across the movement to host in person events where possible. There will be grant funding for these in person events – more information to come.

In the coming weeks, the COT will be inviting your ideas and suggestions on what Wikimania 2022 should look like – what would you like to see more of? What should we keep from last year? What should be different? And of course we’ll need your contribution to the event as volunteers. More to be shared soon and do not hesitate to share your thoughts with us on the Wikimania 2022 discussion page.

Thanks and here's to a great Wikimania 2022!

Anton Protsiuk has been a Ukrainian Wikipedia editor and administrator for almost a decade now, typically devoting his time to administrative and patrolling maintenance tasks, as well as to writing occasional articles. He is also Programs Coordinator at Wikimedia Ukraine, where he is responsible for overseeing the organization’s programmatic activities, including content campaigns, diversity and editor recruitment initiatives, community events, and communications outreach.

Antoni Mtavangu is a Tanzanian Wikimedian, a co-founder of Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania, campaigns & events organizer, trainer, projects manager, mentor, and one of the Swahili Wikipedia's administrators.

Evelin Heidel is a longtime member of the open knowledge ecosystem, now serving as the Senior Project Manager for Wikimedistas de Uruguay. She's passionate about raising awareness on how open strategies can help us communicate around climate change and environmental issues.

Houcemeddine Turki is a former member of WikiIndaba Steering Committee, a former board member of Wikimedia and Libraries User Group, the Vice-Chair of Wikimedia Tunisia User Group and the Secretary of the Affiliation Committee. He has been involved in the Programme Committee of several Wikimedia conferences such as WikiIndaba Conference (Chair in 2018, Member in 2019 and 2021) and WikiConvention Francophone (Chair in 2021).

Kayode Yussuf is the co-founder of Wikimedia Nigeria Usergroup, African Representative on the Wikimedia 2030 Design team, immediate past chair of the Creative Commons Membership Committee of the Global Network Council and he currently serves as the Country Representative on the Creative Commons Global Network Council. Kayode led the logistics for Wiki Indaba 2019, and served on the logistics team for Wiki Indaba 2021.

NANöR is an active user of Arabic Wiki Projects and Arabic communities, and a member of the Middle East and Africa grant committee. She says: “I believe in teamwork and I'm working to empower females' role in my community.”

Omar David Sandoval Sida is a computer science engineer who likes challenges; he has organized free software events, is a board member of Wikimedia Mexico, and has been co-organizer of Wikimania in 2015 and WikiConference North America 2021.

Richard Knipel comes from Wikimedia New York City, and has been part of the WikiConference North America team since 2014. He also embraces the unconference and the picnic anyone can edit.

Sandra Aceng is a Wikimedian based in Uganda. She is an organizer and contributor to major diversity and writing projects such as Wiki For Human Rights, Wiki For Refugees, and others. In 2021, Sandra was the scholarship lead for Wiki Indaba 2021 Virtual Conference. She is a mentor under WikiVibrance African Youth Month.

Venus Lui has been participating in the Wikimedia Movement for a while (more than ten years) and is interested in Open Education, GLAM, and Opendata.

Hello! Last month, The Signpost hosted a crossword, which 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 title of one of the articles listed on that page.

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.

Note: the chronologically next crossword appeared in the 29 May 2022 issue, in the humour column.

This humorous spoof of a Wikipedia notability guideline, originally titled Notability (mailboxes), was started in 2021. You may edit the guideline, but please do so at WP:MAILBOX and not on The Signpost.

On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. This notability how-to guide for mailboxes summarizes consensus reached through discussions and reinforced by established practice, and informs decisions on whether an article about a mailbox or mailbox-related topic should be written, merged, deleted, or further developed. For advice about how to write mailbox articles, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Mailboxes and Wikipedia:Mailbox article guideline.

For the purposes of this guide, a mailbox (also known as a letter box) is defined as a receptacle for receiving incoming mail at a private residence or business. A mailbox-related article (MRA) is defined as an article related to mailboxes. A non-mailbox-related article (NMRA) is defined variously as either an article not related to mailboxes or an article related to something that is not mailboxes.

This guide is independent from the other subject-specific notability guidelines, such as WP:NMAIL, WP:NPOBOX, WP:NPOSTOFFICE, etc., and is explicitly listed as an alternative to the general notability guideline. It is possible for a mailbox not to be notable under the provisions of this guide but to be notable in some other way under the general notability guideline or one of the other subject-specific notability guidelines. Conversely, failure to meet either the general notability guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant if a mailbox is notable under this guide.

1. A non-cool mailbox is presumed notable when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the mailbox or its owner.
2. A cool mailbox is presumed notable when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the mailbox or its owner.
3. A very cool mailbox is presumed notable when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the mailbox or its owner.
4. A mailbox flag is presumed notable when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the mailbox flag, the mailbox to which it is attached, or its mailbox's owner. Mailbox flags which are determined to be non-notable are generally redirected to the page for the mailbox to which they are attached.
5. All carrier pigeons are presumed to be notable.

Some new editors attempt to create a page for their mailbox as their first article, and these are often nominated for deletion. It takes a lot of work to create an article, so if your mailbox article has been nominated for deletion, this may feel very discouraging. But don't panic just yet—deletion isn't automatic; it's a process. While mailbox articles do sometimes get deleted, and authors of non-notable mailbox articles do sometimes get permanently banned from ever editing or reading Wikipedia again and then defenestrated for good measure, this doesn't always happen.

Maybe your initial reaction was feeling hurt, or even angry. Know that plenty of established users have had their mailbox articles nominated for deletion. People will (or at least will try to) argue objectively about whether or not the mailbox is worthy of being in Wikipedia, so try not to take the deletion discussion personally. Listen to the reasons given in the nomination. Address or refute those reasons as best you can (preferably backed with reliable sources, such as the International Journal of Mailbox Studies), and try to improve the article accordingly. Please note that sources that you received via a mailbox cannot be used to support the notability of that mailbox due to the conflict of interest.

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Mailboxes in Red
• Wikipedia:Avoid instruction creep