Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2022-08-31

The Wikimedia Foundation will start sending out its English fundraising emails to donors in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US from 6 September. According to samples of the emails provided by the WMF on Meta, each email features a photo of Jimmy Wales and gives "[email protected] [email protected]" as the sender's name and email address.

This is what they look like:

• Email 1
• Email 2
• Email 3

The text portions are as follows, respectively:

Email texts

Email 1 From: [email protected] [email protected] Subject: You are one of those rare exceptions Date: August 3, 2022 at 7:58 PM To: [email protected] My name is Jimmy Wales, and I'm the founder of Wikipedia. In the past, you donated to keep Wikipedia online for yourself and millions of people around the world. Each year, fewer than 2% of Wikipedia readers choose to support our work. You have been one of those rare donors, and for this I want to thank you warmly. I'm grateful you agree that we can use the power of the internet for good. We will achieve this not as individuals, but as a collaborative movement of knowledge seekers. Together, we can rebuild trust in the internet, and by extension, in each other. Will you renew your solidarity with a donation? This is awkward to admit, but I have to be honest: 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way when we ask for an annual donation. We choose not to charge a subscription fee, but that doesn't mean we don't need support from our readers. We don't send a fundraising email every month. We respectfully ask for just one donation this year so that Wikipedia may continue to move forward and offer knowledge to the world. If all our past donors gave a small amount today, our fundraiser would be over. Unfortunately, most people will ignore this message. We have no choice but to turn to you: please renew your gift to ensure that Wikipedia remains independent, ad-free, and thriving for years to come. We're a non-profit. That means we aren't selling the articles that millions of people read on Wikipedia each day. We don't profit from the knowledge you seek. In fact, we firmly believe that knowledge should exist outside of the realm of supply and demand. That's hardly a given nowadays; so much of the world's digital knowledge is driven by profit. Wikipedia is different in that it doesn't belong to the highest bidder, the advertisers, or corporations. It belongs to you, the readers, editors, and donors. You're our community, our family. You're the reason we exist. The fate of Wikipedia rests in your hands and we wouldn't have it any other way. It's readers like you who safeguard our non-profit mission. You help us maintain our integrity, quality, and accessibility. Today, please consider giving again, or even increasing your gift, to keep Wikipedia free and independent. Now is the time we ask: can we count on you to renew your solidarity with a small donation? It will keep Wikipedia online, ad-free, and growing for years to come. https://donate.wikimedia.org Thanks, Jimmy Wales Founder of Wikipedia Renew your donation Where will your donation go? 42% of your gift will be used to sustain and improve Wikipedia and our other online free knowledge projects. 31% of your gift will be used to support the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day. 27% of your gift will give the Wikimedia Foundation the resources it needs to fulfill its mission and advance the cause of free knowledge in the world. Email 2 From: [email protected] [email protected] Subject: It's non-negotiable Date: August 3, 2022 at 8:01 PM To: [email protected] You have been a Wikipedia donor in the past and have donated once. You've unlocked: Bronze Badge / Silver Badge / Gold Badge / Platinum Badge When you gave in the past, you were one of those rare donors who kept Wikipedia thriving for yourself and millions of other readers. Ready to earn your next badge? Please match your last gift today. I took the liberty of emailing you a second time on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation (the organization responsible for the protection of Wikipedia), because I wasn’t sure you got a chance to read the first email we sent to [email protected], the address we have on file for you since your last gift. I hope this badge will act as a reminder of how crucial your commitment to supporting free knowledge has been and still is to us. At every turn, we have been pressured to compromise our values, but I'll be honest: This isn’t negotiable for us. People always ask us, why not just run ads to make revenue? Or capture and sell reader data? Or make everyone pay to read? While these things seem like the norm online nowadays, we'd like to remind you that there is another way—a way that doesn’t jeopardize the neutrality of our content and threaten your personal data. We just ... ask! Not often, but it works. After 21 years of saying no, I can still say we are proud to have left that money on the table. We’re a non-profit. Only 2% of our readers give, but we manage to serve hundreds of millions of people per month. Imagine if everyone gave? We could transform the way knowledge is shared online. I've been happily stunned by the response from our donors, but we haven't reached our fundraising goal and we don't have a lot of time left. We’re not salespeople. We’re librarians, archivists, and information junkies. We rely on our readers to become our donors, and it’s worked for over 20 years. This year, please consider making another donation to protect and sustain Wikipedia. We know people’s circumstances have changed a lot in the last year. Some find themselves with less to spare, but a lucky few happen to have a bit more. If you’re one of the lucky ones, will you give a little extra to keep Wikipedia growing? Renew your donation Give 5 Give 20 Give 35 Give another amount Any gift will unlock your next badge. Thank you, Jimmy Wales Wikipedia Founder DONATE NOW Email 3 From: [email protected] [email protected] Subject: Our final email Date: August 3, 2022 at 8:01 PM To: [email protected] I know you've heard from me twice already, so I'll get straight to the point. In the past, you were among the extremely rare readers who made a donation to invest in the future of free knowledge. If you've made it far enough to open this email, could you take a minute to help us out? Many of our readers see our emails and think they'll get round to it later, but life happens and of course they forget. Our annual email fundraiser is coming to an end, so if you've been holding off until “later”, this is your moment. I'm asking you respectfully: Please, renew your donation; it matters. Around the time our fundraising campaign starts, I hear from friends, family, and long-lost classmates who see our fundraising messages while they're looking something up on Wikipedia. It's a reminder of how many folks, from all walks of life, rely on Wikipedia. This incredible public support is crucial for our organization and our movement to thrive. It allows us to serve the world, and to do so with independence and integrity. We don't belong to anyone, because we belong to everyone. You donated in the past and we sincerely thank you. If you still see value in Wikipedia, please sustain your support in 2022 and keep Wikipedia thriving. This is our biggest fundraising moment of the year. It's when we launch the online campaign that brings in donors who will propel us throughout 2022 and beyond. I'm one of them. I'm a regular donor. We are the non-profit that supports one of the world's most visited websites. We don't generate revenue by selling off our users' data to the highest bidder. We don't run ads that could jeopardize the integrity and neutrality of our content. Though our size requires us to maintain the server space and programming power of a top site, we are sustained by the support of our donors who give an average of about $16. This year, will you take one minute to keep our work going? 5 / 20 35 / Other Renew your donation Give less this year Thank you, Jimmy Wales Wikipedia Founder DONATE NOW

(In addition to the texts shown above, each email also has small print explaining how to unsubscribe.)

The English email campaign will run until 20 November. It will be followed by the annual banner campaign for these countries, which this year is scheduled to run from 29 November to 31 December.

• The content of the above emails is currently being discussed at the Village Pump: WP:Village pump (proposals)#Review of English Wikimedia fundraising emails. The discussion was started by the author of this article. – AK

An experiment was conducted on Farsi Wikipedia between October 20, 2021 and April 20, 2022 in blocking IP edits to mainspace.

The study concluded that "the restriction on Farsi effectively reduced vandalism on the wiki. We can say this based on the fact that reverts were down 68% compared to the previous six months and down 70% compared to same time period last year. Blocks were also down by over 50% in both comparisons."

But the restrictions were not without negative consequences: "[T]he restriction also prevented good-faith edits. The total number of content edits was down 24% compared to the previous six months."

See related Signpost coverage, "Portuguese Wikipedia bans IP editing" (November 2020). – B

In a Special report almost exactly three years ago, we reported on how a then-new active admin low count of 500 was of concern. Since then, the English Wikipedia community has hit significantly lower counts of active administrators in a calendar year, shown here:

• In 2019, 493 active administrators on 10 December
• In 2020, 493 active administrators again on 25 October
• In 2021, 460 active on 5 December^[a]
• In 2022 so far, 449 active on 4 April, an all-time low

When the active count recently fell again to 452 on 13 August, it looked like we were close to hitting another all-time low. However, since then, the active count has rebounded somewhat, and there has been a nearly simultaneous recent run of successful Requests for adminship. 2022 is already up by two from last year's all-time low of just seven successful RfAs in a calendar year. So, is it good that we're not at all-time lows for the admin corps? Or is it bad that we are close? Are we on an improving trajectory yet? Or are we seeing admins "walk away in silence" as it was put by an Administrators' noticeboard commenter on an action by Arbcom this March? Only time will tell. – B

An open letter from the English Wikipedia's New Page Review (aka NPP) has attracted well over 400 signatures in support from Wikipedians over the past month. The open letter asks the Wikimedia Foundation to allocate resources to the maintenance of the PageTriage software, something the Foundation has been unwilling to do.

PageTriage, the suite of NPP tools comprising the New Pages Feed and Page Curation used by New Page Reviewers, is an important firewall against inappropriate new pages and also used to encourage users to improve their article submissions. NPP volunteers say the software is essentially unmaintained by the WMF, who created it in 2012. Dozens of Phab reports for bugs and upgrades are stalled at "unassigned" or "needs triage". Active reviewers (only around 100 out of about 750) are at present unable to keep the backlog at a sustainable level, and software improvements are urgently required.

Editors interested in helping with NPP can check the criteria, read the tutorials, and apply at PERM for access to the tools. New Page Patrol even provides a school for reviewers. There is a particular need for reviewers who can accurately judge the quality of foreign-language sources.

• The open letter and its signatories to date can be viewed at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Coordination/2022 WMF letter. – AK

• New Movement Strategy Forum: The Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team at the Wikimedia Foundation launched a proposal for a new Movement Strategy Forum (MS Forum) on 24 May 2022. The proposal was open for a 2-month community review period, ending on 24 July 2022. During that time, the MS Forum was operational for community members to try it out. A report on the community review is now available on Meta-Wiki. The feedback received on the MS Forum ranged from very supportive to cautiously accepting. The forum's automatic translation capabilities were particularly well received. Outside of the MS Forum, several long-term Wikimedia contributors criticized the creation of a new space, preferring to focus on the use of Meta-Wiki. The MSG team has committed to the long-term maintenance of the MS Forum and its integration into the Movement Strategy processes and will announce a call for new moderators and administrators.
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this month's newest Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Tyap Wikimedians User Group and the Women in Religion User Group
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators: DanCherek (9 August), DatGuy (15 August), Femke (18 August), and Z1720 (29 August).
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this month or last:
  • 500,000 articles: Turkish Wikipedia
  • 50,000 article: Ladin Wikipedia
  • 5,000 articles: Tumbuka Wikipedia
  • 2,000 articles: Dagbani Wikipedia
• Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in India: This year's edition of the contest runs from 1–30 September.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is cartoonist (29 August – 4 September), to be followed by gender studies next week. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
• Wikipedia for Improvement: The Scots Wikipedia is having a September Writin Drive. Its aim is "to fix all of the bad Scots Wikipedia articles, help out the site's admins by teaching them proper Scots, and generally improve the quality of the Wiki." (See prior Signpost coverage "Scots Wikipedia language quality problems ripple around the Internet...")

Rising costs, the COVID-19 pandemic, and now a software disaster: Wikimania, the annual main conference of the international Wikimedia movement, is in deep trouble. How could that happen, and what conference do we actually need?

If you own a dog, you will surely have walked it with a smartphone in your hand at some time. But as part of an online meeting, together with other dog owners? In 2022, the most important conference of Wikipedians made it possible.

Wikimania 2022 was supposed to be a very special festival: fewer presentations than last year, more group contributions and workshops, and only three tracks so that attendees would not be spread out over too many programmed events, resulting in larger audiences per events.

Additionally: watch outdoor games, talk about a selected dish from a specific country, dance and sing! Visitors would feel that they are spending fun time together.

When I saw the software for the first time, Pheedloop, I was excited. A neat and tidy user interface with many features including quite some customization: for the visually impaired, for people suffering from attention dysfunctions, for everybody. With a high chance that your language of choice would be available. Options for managing your personal schedule. Notifications, chat opportunities, mobile versions for Android and iOS...what could possibly go wrong?

It turned out that the software was not that perfect. For example, on the smartphone app, used with a tablet, scrolling did not always work; so I could only select a language from the upper half of the list (mais oui!). But the most important software failure was the video streaming. Especially on the first and second days, many programme items would not start, or started late, or the speaker could not hear anything, or they were cancelled altogether.

I still don't know whether Pheedloop was supposed to be the streaming platform itself, or whether it was only a platform to embed streaming/videos from YouTube, Zoom or Jitsi. You had to deal with two frames, the Pheedloop frame and the YouTube/Zoom/Jitsu frame. Links and embedding often didn't function properly. Sometimes clicking here and there worked, sometimes not. And usually, you had to operate several windows. The chat function on YouTube was deactivated; commenting was possible only via Pheedloop. Notes? Open a browser, use Etherpad!

A well-known Wikimania veteran from the US put it this way: he'd never before attended a Wikimania that was such a disaster.

According to the Pheedloop counter, there were only about 300–450 attendees online at any time. A typical programme item saw 15–40 attendees. Maybe many visitors were frustrated by the technology, but there were other issues as well. For example, although the chat function for group chats worked really well, only very few people came to the group chats.

Reducing the number of programme items obviously did not make more participants visit the conference. And ...

• if you had no dog, were not interested in watching other people eat, did not want to listen to music etc.,
• considering that many items were cancelled (for technical or other reasons),
• if some items were too difficult or specific for you,
• and also given that there were no famous keynote speakers,

...then there was not much left to attract you to Wikimania 2022.

Few speakers means that few people drag their friends and fans to the conference. Not much hoopla on social media. According to the discussions at the Kurier magazine on the German Wikipedia, many Wikipedians glanced over the programme, picked a handful of items and only logged in at the given time of an event. Or they decided to watch the video later on YouTube.

And indeed, some of the programme items turned out to be a less than perfect experience. Some contributors had announced a workshop but actually delivered simply a one-directional presentation. Quite a few speakers read out a text. It was also remarkable how many contributions were labelled ideal for newcomers, although they were very unsuitable for beginners – for example, complicated discussions about UCoC enforcement. One 'workshop' (in reality just a presentation) was even labelled as ideal for newcomers and as a master class as well.

It is a huge challenge to organize a good online meeting. Ever since the first Star Trek movie in 1979 we have known that it is not very entertaining to watch grumpy people in confined spaces who are looking at screens.

Before organizing such an online event again, we as a movement should answer some questions.

What platform or combination of platforms serves our needs best? I understand why Pheedloop was selected, but even if it had worked better, I think we could improve the experience, especially for visitors using a smartphone. Streaming and chat should be possible on the same platform, for example.

What kind of programme items can attract many attendees and make them stay a little bit longer thereafter? Think of a shopping mall, where huge, so-called magnet stores lure the potential customers into the building and then also make them visit other, smaller shops. An online conference can benefit from a flashy kick-off event, maybe with a comedian who explains the software and the programme in an enjoyable way. Keynote speakers and similar attractive programme items should be scheduled in a way that visitors may want to stay longer (i.e. at the beginning of the day rather than at the end).

What kind of programme serves which types of target groups? An international online meeting should concentrate on topics that are relevant to a larger group of people from different parts of the world. So, a programme item should not be too closely related to one country or culture, or be too specific thematically. For example, I am looking forward to a presentation (plus question time) that informs non-Wikidatans of how Wikidata has progressed the previous 365 days. Other Wikidata-related contributions are generally better reserved for a dedicated Wikidata meeting.

Is Wikimania primarily a meeting for the movement, or a meeting for newcomers and partners of the movement? In my humble and personal opinion, it can work for either purpose, but maybe not for both simultaneously. Make up your mind and then create a meeting that is perfect for the target group selected. All other people are welcome, of course, but have to understand the chosen nature of the conference.

And yes, I take it personally when a contributor calls a presentation ideal for newcomers that is clearly not.

Annie Rauwerda, who is best known for her Instagram account depths of Wikipedia, was named "Media Contributor of the Year" as part of the Wikipedians of the year awards at this year's Wikimania and by Diff. She has also been named five times in this column for her work and for the extensive news coverage of her work by National Public Radio, The New Yorker, The New York Times and many others – including this ABC News Nightline report today. We heartily concur with the award and send our congratulations. – S

The Buffalo News reports that the Wikipedia biography of Darin Pastor was allegedly used by Pastor and a partner, Halford W. Johnson, as part of a scheme to defraud nearly 100 investors.

Their audacious lies, according to prosecutors, stretched around the world, from a purported deal to buy livestock from companies in Kenya and Somalia to sell to companies in Oman, to fraudulent gold deals with companies in Hong Kong and Australia. A gas-to-liquid-fuel plant peddled to investors with annual $1 billion revenue projections was lifted entirely from a PowerPoint presentation an Arkansas business group pitched to them. Prosecutors said Pastor and Johnson's intentions were as false as the Wikipedia page Johnson created to entice investors ...

A report by the United States Department of Justice states,

Pastor and Johnson maintained an online Wikipedia page for Pastor that misrepresented his net worth, and[,] in soliciting investments in Capstone, encouraged potential investors to research Pastor online. Pastor actually had a negligible net worth and was millions of dollars in debt. While investors believed their money would be used to fund Capstone’s business deals, millions of dollars were used to pay for Pastor’s personal expenses and to fund a lavish lifestyle for himself and his wife ...

Darin Pastor's article, created in 2013 by a single-purpose account, User:KCDPR (later renamed to User:D Pastor2014) was discussed at the WP:BLPN noticeboard after the publication of the above articles. – AK

On Tuesday August 30, a section in the article Kwasi Kwarteng was removed. The Labour-aligned tabloid the Daily Mirror and the Conservative The Spectator soon reported that the edit had been made from the UK Houses of Parliament, suggesting that Kwarteng was responsible for the edit, while not directly accusing him.

Kwarteng is the leading candidate for Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in UK government, if Liz Truss becomes prime minister. The Daily Mirror is not considered a reliable source by many Wikipedians. The Spectator has been a weekly fixture in British publishing since 1828.

The section deletion was reverted after one minute. A Twitter account announced the deletion five minutes later and an additional sentence was added to the article after another 5 minutes:

On 30 August 2022, this section was removed from Kwarteng's Wikipedia entry, with it being revealed that an IP address from the House of Commons had removed it.

This edit was itself soon reverted and over the rest of the day over 40 edits were made concerning these two edits. As with almost any edit on Wikipedia, it can be almost impossible to identify the person who made it. While it might have been made by a Kwarteng staffer, it also might have been made by one of his political opponents, Labour or Conservative, or indeed by anyone with access to the parliamentary internet system. – S

A longstanding Wikipedia hoax was reported by the abovementioned Annie Rauwerda in Input, a digital magazine covering culture. Rauwerda said that a hoaxer had claimed that a Scot named Alan MacMasters invented the electric toaster in the 1890s, apparently learning of the hoax from a blog post on Wikipediocracy, an online forum critical of Wikipedia.

The hoax was first introduced to Wikipedia in 2012 in an edit to the Toaster article and later expanded into an Alan MacMasters biography. In a classic case of citogenesis, many credible media sources subsequently copied the hoax, including the Daily Mirror in 2012, the BBC in 2013, and The Scotsman's "Scottish Fact of the Week" in 2014, which in turn all eventually ended up used as sources to bolster the fake biography. The hoax made its way into children's books about history published by Penguin Random House and Dorling Kindersley as early as 2016. Google to this day answers the question "Who invented the electric toaster" with "Alan MacMasters", citing the website of the Hagley Museum and Library.

The Alan MacMasters article was nominated for deletion by Mangoe after its dubiousness was pointed out in a post on notorious forum Wikipediocracy by user "tarantino", and the article was removed from the English Wikipedia last month, but at the time of writing Alan MacMasters still lingers in one form or another in about a dozen other Wikipedia language versions. – AK, B

A topic the Signpost has banged on about at great length, this is the question asked by Distractify in a piece that

• vastly underestimates Wikimedia Foundation salaries (the Foundation's 2020/2021 salary costs were $68M for employees alone (excluding contractors), so an average salary of $65,000 per head would require about 1,000 employees, two or three times the number the Foundation actually had),
• correctly notes that WMF assets went up by over $50 million in the 2020/2021 financial year and that the Wikimedia Endowment reached its $100M target five years early, and then
• proceeds to present a Sue Gardner quote from 2013 ("I believe that currently, too large a proportion of the movement's money is being spent by the chapters. The value in the Wikimedia projects is primarily created by individual editors: individuals create the value for readers, which results in those readers donating money to the movement ... I am not sure that the additional value created by movement entities such as chapters justifies the financial cost, and I wonder whether it might make more sense for the movement to focus a larger amount of spending on direct financial support for individuals working in the projects.") as something she said last year.

As this article by a media outlet that is cited several hundred times as a reliable source in Wikipedia illustrates, the quality of media reporting on Wikipedia remains very patchy. – AK

Conor McGregor was declared dead on Spanish Wikipedia, then by Google, leading to complaints on non-Wiki social media, and finally at least three sportswriters reported that the well-known UFC fighter was alive and that the report was all Wikipedia's fault. Normally, in a case like this we'd expect that a vandal added the fake death, was reverted ten minutes later and that the press didn't have any real story to report so tried to shock their readers with a super-scoop "Surprise! There's vandalism on Wikipedia!"

The press did miss the major part of the story here, but we were likely the most surprised of all. The level of vandalism on the Spanish Wikipedia is many times worse than anything ever seen on English Wikipedia. A death date was inserted by an anonymous (IP) editor, but rather than being reverted within ten minutes, the death date was modified, reverted, reinserted and re-reverted in a game of IP hot potato that lasted several weeks. Between June 15 and August 22 there were 51 edits to the article by 21 editors, 38 (74.5%) of the edits made by IPs. Good faith edits were in short supply: only one of the IP edits seemed to add actual meaningful content. Six edits were made by the three registered users, and seven were reversions made by a bot. The changes made over the 51 edits were limited to a couple of minor content changes, an added reference or two, and minor wording changes.

So who is responsible for the vandalism? Certainly the IP editors, but perhaps a systemic fault lies with the Spanish Wikipedia which might have too few recent changes patrollers, inferior software tools for patrolling, or just too many IP editors. – S

The Search Engine Journal seems to be better informed about Wikipedia policies against using our encyclopedia for advertising and other conflict of interest editing than they have been in the past. In "Wikipedia And SEO: Everything You Need To Know", they accurately describe our policies and guidelines on notability, neutral point of view, no original research, verifiability, reliable sources, and spam. They do take some liberties with "no firm rules", not mentioning that the purpose of occasionally ignoring rules is to improve the encyclopedia, not to improve their bottom line.

They do understand that linking to Wikipedia articles is not going to improve their clients' ranking in Google searches. They also seem to understand that stealing links in Wikipedia articles isn't going to improve the rankings either. They even wax poetic about how well Google and Wikipedia complement each other – just like chocolate and peanut butter, they say. So what can SEO firms add to the mix? Horse manure; a rather untasty addition.

They suggest replacing dead links in Wikipedia with links to their clients' websites, not so much to improve search ranking, but only because a bit of extra traffic to the sites never hurts anything. They suggest that you work with an experienced Wikipedian to write an article about a client's firm, but that you should, "Just be careful to avoid being labeled as spam".

So what have they forgotten to mention? Just two small things: our policy that paid editors must declare their clients and employers and that you must be here to improve the encyclopedia. – S

Indian outlet WION featured an exclusive interview with Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia founder sees enormous potential in India; brushes aside Elon Musk's criticism. Wales discussed the increasing number of Indian volunteers:

The country is home to almost 65,000 contributors – representing almost a fifth of the total number of Wikimedia volunteers. Wikipedia is currently available in 25 of the languages spoken across India, including Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Odia and Telugu and even endangered and tribal languages like Tulu and Santali. In addition to these Indic languages, India recently became the country with the second largest population of contributors to English Wikipedia after the US.

Asked about the success of the recent Indian fundraising campaign (see previous Signpost coverage), Wales said:

Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites, yet many people don’t know that it is hosted and operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Unlike other top websites, we rely on donations to support Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, with the average donation being about US $15. I’ve always hoped that if we build something people care about and value, then they will want to support it.

Wales rejected criticism from Elon Musk that Wikipedia was losing its objectivity. Asked about cyber warfare in the context of global conflicts, Wales said that while Wikipedia has good mechanisms in place to counter bias, disinformation campaigns –

are also becoming increasingly more sophisticated and difficult to spot. Because of this, the Wikimedia Foundation is also investing in its capacity to respond to disinformation threats and support volunteers. An example of this was the task force the Foundation prepared ahead of the 2020 US presidential election. Foundation staff worked for hand in hand with volunteers to establish clearer lines of communication between volunteers and staff to surface and address disinformation attempts, conducted research to better understand how disinformation could spread on Wikimedia projects and built new tools for volunteers to evaluate potentially malicious edits and behaviour on the site.

• Interview with Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander: Africa.com has a Q&A with Maryana Iskander answering questions about the Wikimedia Foundation, its role in Africa and the recent Wikimania conference.
• A defining moment: USA Today fact checks a claim that Wikipedia changed the definition of "definition" recently, backed up by an apparently photoshopped page history screenshot. In its most extreme form, the hoax said that U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the change. USA Today stated that our "definition" definition had not changed in the last six months: They checked the edit history, and further compared it to two dictionaries, showing our definition is (and has been) similar to other reliable sources.
• Where's the reliable source? Tom Springfield, a musician, songwriter, and producer in the 1960s, and a very private person since 1970, died on July 27 but his death was not reported until August 21 in the Australian ABC and other sources. In the meantime word unofficially leaked out until an anonymous editor using the IP address of Springfield's solicitor made a quickly reverted death announcement in the Wikipedia article. See Talk:Tom_Springfield for commentary on the situation. See here and here if you are a seeker of the truth.
• In age of misinformation, group of North Carolina residents keeps Wikipedia (mostly) correct – the North Carolina Wikipedians (story originally by The News & Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina, widely syndicated [MSN, etc.])
• Ukraine–Russia on-wiki battle over identity of assassin: Ukrainska Pravda via Yahoo! News. The Signpost found that the article about the supposed assassin of Darya Dugina was removed from Russian Wikipedia following a brief deletion discussion.
• Russian Wikipedia alternative appears and disappears: Former editors of the Russian Wikipedia have launched a Russian analogue named "Runiversalis", reports Bulgarian news outlet Novinite. The Runiversalis project stated that its main task would be to edit "in accordance with the requirements of Russian legislation and with respect for traditional values", but its site was inaccessible again a day after its launch, according to the Novinite report. The Wikimedia Foundation reportedly "distanced itself from both the project and the Russian editors".
  • The Runiversalis article in the English Wikipedia is currently subject to a deletion discussion.
• Are you gobsmacked or discombobulated by supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? The Wednesday Journal will get you recombobulated with the help of Wikipedia.
• "Recession" media coverage continues. We discussed this at length in last month's issue, but it's not stopping. Here's a sample of the new coverage it's gotten: The Hill, Fox Business, Bloomberg, MarketWatch, Entrepreneur, Yahoo! Finance, The Telegraph, Slate etc.
• Wiki court articles repeated by courts: The Washington Post and Slate also cover one of July's hot stories in August (see related coverage in previous issue of The Signpost).

This report was written with the assistance of GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. More information on Signpost GPT-3 articles can be found here. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed the text and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.

This month's discussion report is shorter than usual, but not for lack of trying.

The Community Voting period for the 2022 Board of Trustees election is now open. Here are some helpful links to get you the information you need to vote:

• Try the Election Compass, showing how candidates stand on 15 different topics (see below)
• Read the candidate statements and answers to Affiliate questions
• Learn more about the skills the Board seeks and how the Analysis Committee found candidates align with those skills
• Watch the videos of the candidates answering questions proposed by the community

If you are ready to vote, you may go to SecurePoll voting page to vote now. Voting has already started and ends on September 6 at 23:59 UTC. To see about your voter eligibility, please visit the voter eligibility page. Thanks for your participation in selecting a representative Board of Trustees!

An "Election Compass" has been made available to support the community members in the selection process. The Election Compass is based on the open source project called "Open Election Compass", whose source code is publicly available. The tool has been widely used also in other contexts, e.g. by media pages for the German parliamentary elections in 2022. Every member of the community was requested to submit statements within the larger scope of the Board of Trustees. Following the period of proposing statements, community members upvoted the declarations they considered as the most distinct and therefore useful in learning about the candidates' positions. The last 15 statements were chosen by the Election Committee.

• Review of English Wikimedia fundraising emails (see News and notes)
• Reliability of Fox News for politics and science
• Process for changing Wikipedia's default appearance (see Technology report)
• Open letter to the WMF about new page patrol (see News and notes)
• Reliability of Royal Central and one of its authors
• Appearance of the external links icon

This article was first published on wikiedu.org on August 26, 2022 (licensed CC BY-SA 3.0).

I’ve been a Wikipedian for 18 years. Were it a person, on Friday August 26, my account will be old enough to vote. Over the years, my role has changed from new user to administrator, from pure volunteer to that strange dual role of volunteer editor and Wiki Education staffer. In the last year I experienced an odd identity crisis when the edit count of my work account surpassed that my volunteer account. While my activity waxed and waned over the years, the drive to contribute – to make the internet better by making free knowledge widely available – has remained a constant.

Over those years, Wikipedia has changed dramatically, as has the knowledge environment in which it is embedded.

So many Wikipedians' origin stories include an encyclopædia — maybe bought by parents making a significant financial sacrifice, or an older edition purchased at a garage sale. For me, it was different. I grew up, not just in a world where knowledge was scarce, but also where it was fleeting. I learned about the world through the stories in daily newspapers. Not only did you need to catch it the day it was published – unless, for some reason, you clipped the story – there was no way to go back. Hard facts were only what you captured in your memory, and when people debated what had happened a week or a year or half a decade ago, the only verification was what you remembered.

My perceptions of what was available changed once I went to university, and later to grad school. But even though I knew so much more was available, it still wasn’t accessible. A journal database search was something you needed to request. And whether you read it in a book or a journal, your ability to access a fact depended on the quality of the notes you had taken, and on how well you organized the slips of paper that you worked from.

The Internet changed things, but not always for the better. My first decade online (1994 to 2004) saw the birth of the World Wide Web and the rise of the search engine. Though it was growing explosively, the content that was online represented only a sliver of human knowledge. You could find all kinds of weird and wonderful facts online, but finding the same website twice might be a challenge. And whether to trust this arcanum was an open question.

The early 2000s brought further changes. The rise of Web 2.0 and the blogosphere meant that these websites developed more of an identity. The blogger’s creed — I link, therefore I am — meant each blogger was a window onto a world of other sites, often less popular, less widely read, but more likely to be written by an expert. But these were also the days of the Bush administration and their "post-truth politics". Bloggers were some of the few to challenge the alleged rationale for the invasion of Iraq, but other blogs and websites emerged as cheerleaders for the administration, or as proponents of dodgy ideas like intelligent design or what was then called global warming skepticism.

This was the state of the world when I began to contribute to Wikipedia. The old ethos of "write what you know" was crashing into not just a strengthening verifiability policy, but also a (still nascent) idea that you should include citations and a debate over what constituted a reliable source. Calls to include citations also faced another challenge — for many Wikipedians, sources meant sources that were available online. Even if you did consult a scholarly source, before things like Google Scholar and Google Books the only way to search these sources was something like Web of Science, which were slow and clumsy to navigate (assuming you were fortunate enough to have access to a university library).

In a world like this, with Wikipedia on the rise, knowledge was still fragile. The neutral point of view policy gave amateurs the ability to document what experts said without having to decide which experts were correct. The techno-utopian view that we might be above these debates between scholars makes sense until you realize that you need some way to distinguish between the serious scholars and the cranks. To make matters worse, members of the community might support the cranks, or worse yet — you might be the one who believes the cranks.

The community eventually figured out a lot of this. Addenda like the "due and undue weight" section of the neutral point of view policy were eventually written. As the breakdown of cultural transmission of the norms of the project broke down under the weight of the "eternal September" of 2006 (where the size of the community exploded), more and more policies and guidelines were written down. The adage that policy was "descriptive, not prescriptive" became less and less true. And the encyclopædia became less fragile.

Eighteen years after I first registered my account on the English Wikipedia, I’m amazed at what the project has become. When I started contributing to Wikipedia it was at the front lines of "post-truth politics". Today, not only is it one of the most important sources to combat misinformation and disinformation, it’s also the place where the quality and reliability of sources is debated with more commitment and enthusiasm than anywhere else I’m aware of. It’s far from perfect, it may not even be good enough, but in aggregate, it’s probably the best hope for non-specialists looking for accurate information.

And that is a big achievement.

Optional: Hi! I'm Urban Versis 32. This is my first article to The Signpost. I figured I could write about an aspect of Wikipedia that has not been featured here for a while – userboxes. These are basically rectangular boxes designed to be put on your user or user talk page, and are a great way to display one's interests. Here's an example of a simple userbox:

A userbox is a small rectangular box that looks like this.

There are many different kinds of userboxes. Some are red. Some are blue. Some feature images. Some don't. But they all take that rectangular form, and they work very nicely when put together. On the right, I put together a group of userboxes that could appear on someone's userpage.

You can clearly see the variation. That's why they're useful: there's a userbox for everyone.

To find a userbox, simply go to Wikipedia:Userboxes/Galleries and navigate through the list. If you want a list in alphabetical order, go to Wikipedia:Userboxes/Galleries/alphabetical.

With a little digging through Wikipedia's archives and discussions –and thanks to some input from users Xaosflux, ZLEA, and Adam Cuerden – I managed to find a basic, semi-detailed history of the userbox.

Userboxes as we know them first came with the idea to create boxes for Wikipedia:Babel signifying the different languages the user spoke and proficiency level in them, such as the userbox below.

The earliest userbox-related edit I could find was made by NSR on 2 July 2005, with the edit summary of "box test", when they created the Template:Userbox page. The next creation of a userbox page was Wikipedia:Userboxes, created by Cedrus-Libani on 18 November 2005, which documented some of the earliest userboxes.

Then came the proposal by Daykart for a WikiProject for userboxes. This eventually led to the creation of WikiProject Userboxes on 22 December 2005, created and headed by Ian 13. Userboxes were beginning to take off.

As userboxes gained more popularity, controversies started to arise, such as the Great Userbox War (GUW). The GUW (circa early 2006) was caused by various factors, but it primarily involved Jimbo Wales desysopping five administrators due to the deleting and undeleting and edit warring of a userbox and a few duplicates of it, all of which stated "This user identifies as a pedophile" (see Signpost coverage).

After the initial controversy, the Arbitration Committee decided to hold a vote to see who was most responsible and to figure out the consequences for the eight main users involved. I won't go into exact details for each user, but here's the basic run-down, with the information gathered from previous Signpost coverage (see the arbitration case for more info):

Remedies

• El C, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, was resysopped at the end of the case. His only action was to place a retaliation block against Carnildo, who had indefinitely blocked him. El C was also reprimanded for inappropriate use of the sysop powers.
• BorgHunter, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, was resysopped two days after the close of the case. BorgHunter made personal attacks against David Gerard, but later apologized. BorgHunter was also reprimanded for inappropriate use of the sysop powers.
• Carnildo, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, was offered the option to reapply for adminship starting on February 24th. Carnildo blocked three users indefinitely with disputed reasonings. Carnildo was also reprimanded for inappropriate use of the sysop powers.
• Ashibaka, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, was desysopped, but was to regain his sysop powers on February 24th. He was involved in the wheel war, restoring the userbox(en) in question five times.
• Karmafist, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, was desysopped, with the ability to reapply for adminship starting on February 24th. Karmafist undid a block made by Jimbo Wales.
• Dschor was banned for two months, and placed on probation. Dschor had created a new pedophilia template which was seen as purposely inflammatory by the Arbitration Committee. In addition, Dschor was prohibited from creating or editing userboxes, either in template or text form.
• SPUI was banned for ten days, and placed on probation. SPUI created a joke template meant to humorously allude to the userbox, but the Arbitration Committee found it purposely inflammatory.
• Paroxysm was banned for three days. The Arbitration Committee felt that his original creation of the userbox was in good faith, but his recreation under an alternate title was not. In addition, Paroxysm was prohibited from creating or editing userboxes, either in template or text form.

This controversy and others sparked debate for more strict rules and policies to be put in place, like the February 2006 userbox policy poll, the May 2006 userbox policy poll, and the "German rule", which duplicated the way userboxes were being managed on the German Wikipedia.

For a time, a list of all userbox nominations at MfD was maintained, although it is now quite out of date.

There have also been some more recent deletion discussions of userboxes. Three examples help highlight this:

• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:FerrousTigrus/ub/non-bias hitler: this discussion deleted four userboxes relating to pro-Hitler and other Nazi beliefs.
• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:UBX/onemanonewoman 4th nomination: this discussion deleted a userbox expressing homophobic and anti-same-sex marriage views.
• Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Qartagir/Userboxes/Fascist: this discussion deleted five userboxes supporting facism.

These controversies, polls, and flamewars eventually gave way to what we know as userboxes. We have userboxes that are very different from each other – from shortwave radio to animal care, userboxes have it all!

SW This user has a shortwave radio.

This user cares about animals.

Now, how exactly do you add a userbox to your userpage? The simplest way is to copy the link of a userbox from the galleries, and paste it where you want it on your userpage while in "Source" mode. For example, if you copy-pasted {{User wikipedia/Member}}, you would get

This user is a member on the English Wikipedia.

Most userboxes are by default left-aligned, though various tricks exist to put them in different locations.

Say you want it in a group, like in the example list of userboxes above on the right. You'd use the following code, but paste it at the top of your userpage:

{{Userboxtop|toptext=Your title here}}

Insert userboxes in this space

{{Userboxbottom}}

You can also put userboxes in tables to arrange them in groups or achieve specific layouts. For example,

{| style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: none;"
|-
| {{User:UBX/clothing designer}}
| {{User:UBX/dressmaking}}
|-
| {{User:UBX/crochet}}
| {{User:UBX/embroidery}}
|-
|}

will give you the following centered table of userboxes

This user likes to design clothes.	This user is a dressmaker.
This user likes to crochet.	This user likes to do embroidery.

If you cannot find a userbox that suits your needs, you can always create one. If you scroll down to the Creating a new userbox section of the userbox page, it may seem a little confusing at first. However, it's not really that difficult after you get the basic skills down for it. If you don't wish to create a userbox manually, there's a great tool that you can use to create userboxes called The Super Simple Userbox Maker by User:The Userboxer. The tool is very easy to use and pretty self-explanatory.

Basic knowledge in templates can be helpful, but it's easy enough to learn. I will explain the basis here.

To create a userbox, you must use the template {{userbox}}. There are many options to creating userboxes, e.g. image borders, userbox borders, text borders, and backgrounds. The userbox at the very top of the page, reproduced here for convenience,

A userbox is a small rectangular box that looks like this.

is generated with the following code

{{userbox|#c8a2c8|yellow|[[File:Crystal kthememgr.svg|40px]]|A userbox is a small rectangular box that looks like this.}}

Here's a breakdown of the arguments of the template.

• The first argument, #c8a2c8, is the color code for the background of the image section of the userbox. It is in hexadecimal format, which can be a bit cryptic, but you can use tools like the Hex Color picker to easily find a color you like (and its associated hex code). Note that regular HTML colors can be used instead, such as purple can be used instead, as in the second argument:
• The second argument, yellow, is the background color for the text (or info) section.
• The third argument, [[File:Crystal kthememgr.svg|40px]], states the location of the image (or id) to be used in the image section, and the size (most userboxes use image sizes of between 30–70 px). This can be replaced with text.
• The fourth argument, A userbox is a small rectangular box that looks like this., is the text or info section of the userbox.

And there you have it – a guide on creating your first userbox.

Two important facts to remember: the left side of the userbox (which contains the image) is referred to as the id of the userbox. The right side of the userbox (which contains the text) is referred to as the info of the userbox.

I have interviewed some users about their experiences with userboxes.

How did you first get into userboxes?

• Auric: I don't really remember when I got into userboxes, they've been around that long.
• ZLEA: I joined WikiProject Userboxes in February 2017, just over a month after joining Wikipedia, although I do not remember what first got me into userboxes.
• Adam Cuerden: I'm one of the ancients, so a lot of userbox things for me were things I set up years ago. But I'd say I got into userboxes through Commons. Commons is a multilingual site; as such, knowing what languages people speak is fairly vital, and a whole series of userboxes exist to communicate information about this. It's simple, easy to use, and just really helps communication there.

How long have you been using/creating userboxes?

• Auric: It took awhile till I was sure enough to create my own, not just fixing others.
• ZLEA: My first userboxes were service awards, which I added to my userpage to encourage myself to gain more editing experience. Within a few months created my first userboxes in February 2017. I have not created very many userboxes, but my early experience with userboxes is what sparked my passion for template editing.
• Adam Cuerden: I added [my first userboxes] in 2008, about two years after I started editing, which I think I started doing in February 2006, though between Single Login not existing back then and a period of pseudonymous editing around 2008 after some harassment creating an account snarl here, it's a little harder to tell from my contributions on en-wiki as opposed to Commons, where I've always used my real name. More recently, most of my experience with userboxes has been spent fighting against them, but just the ones from those deletion debates mentioned above; y'know, the ones that said things like "Hitler was right" and other things that make Wikipedia feel awfully hostile to editors from minorities. But I don't want to sound anti-userbox. Anything that encourages communication can be hijacked for evil.

Why do you like userboxes?

• Auric: I like userboxes because they sometimes need fixing as one image may need replacing and it can be a challenge to find one. Sometimes I have to use a text effect to replace it.
• ZLEA: I believe userboxes remind us that there is a person behind every userpage. They aren't just some pretty templates, they allow users to express themselves on their userpages. I also believe they help us build trust with our fellow Wikipedians by encouraging transparency, as they are an easy way to identify one's own biases, conflicts of interest, and, more importantly, our strengths.
• Adam Cuerden: I suppose I'm not that interested in sharing personal details as some. If people need to know I act in Gilbert and Sullivan or write music or studied biology or live in Scotland or≥ am gay they probably know, and if they want to know what I primarily do on Wikipedia my user page archiving my 715 featured pictures will tell them. Hence, I'm not as userbox-y as some. They're a fun, simple way to put what information you do want to put out there... out there. I just don't have as much I want to share.

What's your favorite userbox and why?

• Auric: I don't really have a favourite userbox, they all had a little something different.
• ZLEA: My favorite userbox is one of my own creations (yes, I'm biased); User:ZLEA/Turboencabulator. The userbox is a play on the Turbo encabulator, a fictional machine which somehow found its way into a 1962 General Electric supplies catalogue. As an engineering student, I naturally found the turbo encabulator to be particularly amusing; too amusing to not be made into a userbox.
• Adam Cuerden: I mentioned Commons' Babel userboxes before. I think they're important enough to making Commons work that they have to be my favourite, even if other userboxes make me laugh more. They also exist on here, and can be used just like on Commons.

• Want to learn more about userboxes? There's a more detailed explanation here: Wikipedia:Userboxes.
• Want to join Wikiproject userboxes? Here's their page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Userboxes.

Today's column is a follow up to last issue's Tips and Tricks column on how to fix citations with automated tools. This time, automated tools are not enough, and so – inspired by last month's How to research an image – I'm going to take you down the rabbit hole of a "simple" typo fix, and how to research citations in general.

WP:JCW/TYPO is a listing of citations containing likely typos. It is part of a family of "maintenance" listings covering various potential issues related to the |journal= parameters of citation templates. I try my best to clear these issues every time the compilation is updated, but there are very, very many issues and, well... people keep making mistakes. So even if I manage to clear them all, I only have to wait a bit to be presented with a slew of new issues.

On 13 August 2022, following the identification of The Women's Journal as a typo for The Woman's Journal, one entry got added to the listing:

The compilation listed that this typo is found in |journal= once (the first 1 in "1 in 1"), in one article (the second 1 in "1 in 1"). This article is linked for convenience: Grace Hazen, who was an American jewelry designer. Prior to fixing, the problem citation was

Foster, Isabel (October 1925). "She Speaks in Gold". The Women's Journal. X (7): 16, 39.

used to back up the claim that Hazen studied at the Pratt Institute for a while.

Simple fix right? Simply change The Women's Journal for The Woman's Journal and call it a day!

Wrong.

Naively thinking I had fixed the typo, I wanted to add a link to a free version of the article. I tried a few Google searches:

The first three search came empty at the time of writing (save for the Hazen article), but the fourth one found something. A Google Books entry about the supposed 10th volume of The Woman's Journal. Sadly, there is little publicly available text, but it is searchable in the "From inside the book" box. I figured I wouldn't have much luck but wanted to at least confirm that the title of the article, pages, and author were right, so I simply searched for Foster... no luck. But then I noticed something. While Google Books listed this as The Woman's Journal, Volume 10, much like I had expected after the simple typo fix, the image of the cover was rather blurry. And I couldn't make out The Woman's Journal, but rather The Woman's C[blurry mess] or The Woman's G[blurry mess]. Could this typo be reflective of a bigger error? Is a different publication meant? The Women's Gazette, maybe?

Those that already followed the link to The Woman's Journal may already know what the answer is. In 1925, the date of the article "She Speaks in Gold" was supposedly printed, the title of the publication was not The Woman's Journal, but rather The Woman Citizen.

Hope?

Let's search for "The Woman Citizen" volume 10 this time. This is significantly more promising than all our previous searches. The first result is an unrelated publication on Amazon. But the second result? A full issue of The Woman Citizen on the Internet Archive. It's the wrong issue, but of the correct volume. Could other issues be archived? Scrolling down to the metadata section reveals a semi-obscure "pub_womans-journal" link, which can be understood as machine-like shorthand for "publication: woman's journal" or similar. Following the link brings us to a collection of microfilms for the years 1917 to 1931. We are in luck, being interested in the year 1925. Filtering by year easily lets us find the 7th issue.

Jackpot!

I will note here that the Internet Archive is a phenomenal resource for old magazines and newspapers, not just archived webpages. They often have entire back catalogues freely available, which can be searched for specific pieces of text. You can often find the article you are looking for just based on keywords and the year of publication, or by searching the author's name.

Just like the initial citation indicated, our article is indeed on page 16, continued on page 39, but it also continues until page 40. Now, equipped with the proper title, full page range, and a link... we can perform the ultimate fix!

Foster, Isabel (October 1925). "She Speaks in Gold". The Woman Citizen. 10 (7): 16, 39–40.

A hidden beauty is now on display for everyone to enjoy: a very convenient free link, to an almost 97 year old article, from a defunct publication, verifying that Ms. Hazen had indeed studied at the Pratt Institute for 6 months. Readers and librarians everywhere rejoiced, not having to do this digital excavation work themselves.

Phew!

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

All sections of this report, except for "English Wikipedia community discussing the deployment of the Vector (2022) skin", were written with the assistance of GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. More information on Signpost GPT-3 articles can be found here. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed the text and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.

Since July, a discussion about the switch to the Vector 2022 skin on English Wikipedia has been taking place. The discussion is focused on identifying what changes need to be made to the skin prior to launching the conversation around deployment.

The Wikimedia Foundation Web team is finalizing the changes that will be needed, and preparing a Request for Comment process around the deployment. The process is expected to start in early September. If you are an English Wikipedian who has feedback or questions around the new skin, the Web team encourages you to check out the new FAQ and add your thoughts to the current conversation.

Vector (2022) is focused on making the interface more welcoming and comfortable for readers and useful for advanced users, especially those from diverse backgrounds and geographies. The skin builds upon the current default Vector legacy (2010) skin to introduce a series of feature changes. The results of quantitative (A/B and multivariate) testing and qualitative (user research and prototype) testing show that these changes make it easier to read and learn, navigate within the page, search, switch between languages, user page and user tools, and more, without negative effects to pageviews, account creation, or edit rates.

The skin has been in development for the past three years and has gone through rigorous testing. Currently, it is the default on half of the top 20 wikis, including Japanese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, in addition to many other projects. The team’s current focus is on bringing it as the default across all wikis.

Throughout the process, the team has been writing about their experience and motivations for building the skin on the Diff blog. Most recently, they published an in-depth blog post that focused on equitable product development and ways in which the voices of the current communities and readers globally were central to the development of the new skin. The post is available in 7 languages.

—OV (WMF), SG (WMF)

The Wikimedia Foundation is building a "Private Incident Reporting System" (PIRS) to make it easy for users to report harmful incidents safely and privately. The newly-formed Trust and Safety Tools team has been tasked with building the PIRS. The team is studying previous research and community consultations to inform their work. They are also mapping out conflict resolution flows across wikis to understand how communities are currently managing conflicts. The goal of the project is to make it easier to address harassment and harmful incidents, ensure the privacy and safety of those reporting, as well as ensure the report reaches the correct entity that needs to process it. In Phase 1 of the project, the team wants to put out some rough ideas around possible product direction, consult with the community on mockups and ideas, and gather feedback from users. They also want to identify wikis that they can pilot PIRS on, establish a baseline for what they’re going to do in Phase 2, and identify potentially helpful metrics to look at when they start building. In Phase 2 of the project, the team wants to start building software based on Phase 1 findings and feedback. You are invited to provide feedback and answer questions about your experiences with inappropriate behavior on Meta. —E

• 
  U.S.
• 
  Quebec
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  Iceland
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  Indonesia

In last month's edition of this column, Vysotsky wrote about libraries and the joys of using photos of libraries that are available on Wikimedia Commons. I emailed him about the joys of contributing photos of libraries to Commons and about a project I've been thinking about for a long time. He invited me to write about it in Serendipity and helped choose some of the photos. He'll return next month. --S

Before the pandemic my favorite Wiki activity was taking photos of the small towns in Pennsylvania, especially in central Pennsylvania among the ridges and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. In almost every small town, I’d park my car at either a church (except on Sundays) or a library. Both were easy to find: the churches have steeples, and libraries usually have road signs (like the ones above). They also usually have free parking and interesting photo opportunities. The libraries were usually the better places to take a break: cool water, clean restrooms, free wi-fi, helpful librarians. and sometimes books on local history. Libraries have done their part in spreading the sum of knowledge from even before the founding of the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC. There’s no better place for a Wikipedian than a library!

Some of my favorite spots are shown below. I never thought I’d run into the Library of Alexandria in a town of 388 people in Pennsylvania. The Halfmoon Township library in Centre County follows the practice of combining the library with the municipal offices, and in this case also includes a pizzeria. Closer to home, the Darby Free Library is one of several libraries that claims to be the "oldest public library in the US." It was founded in 1743 as a subscription library and didn’t become a true public library until 1898. The only building the library has ever owned was designed by a church architect and built in 1872. It looks very much like a church – so I was bound to stop there sooner or later. A Carnegie library is still operating in its original building in nearby Ridley Park.

Last month’s Serendipity column by Vysotsky reminded me of my long held goal: Wikipedia should have at least one photo of every library in the world. Vysotsky insists we need two photos of each – one exterior, one interior. So be it. It won’t be much more difficult.

In general it would help illustrate articles on municipalities, universities, and other places. It would help our readers and Wikipedians find these cultural treasures near their homes as well as when they travel. In an age dominated by the Internet, it might help us all reconnect to the knowledge accumulated over the centuries in libraries.

Library photos can often be appropriately added to articles on cities, towns, neighborhoods or other geographic areas. Others might be part of historic districts. Some folks might think that some areas have too many good photos already. But if these places really exist, they are overwhelmed worldwide by the number of cities and towns that have articles with no illustrations. Photos can also be added to list articles, such as List of public libraries in Delaware County, Pennsylvania or List of Carnegie libraries in Europe. Some might also be included in articles about universities, airports, or railway stations.

Paraphrasing the great city planner and architect Daniel Burnham: "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir our blood and probably will not themselves be realized." As part of Wikipedia, a project inspired by Jimmy Wales' exhortation to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge," we have no qualms about making big plans.

Of course we can prioritize: if we want to concentrate on public libraries first, that may be for the best. But nobody should turn away from a photo of a university library simply because it’s not open to the general public.

We have more specific plans, several, in fact, that can probably work together.

Plan A: Contact one or more librarians at every library and ask them to take a couple of photos next time they are at work. Contacting them through professional groups would be the most efficient method, either at the state, regional or national level. But if there is a glitch in that plan, individual Wikipedians can just contact their local libraries and ask the librarians directly.

Plan B: Of course Wikipedians can take photos themselves without asking a librarian. See if you can get a few pictures of every library within 20 miles of your home.

Plan C: there are many groups on Wikipedia like Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth who have experience running photo contests. We can ask them for help, and local chapters and affiliates might also help.

Plan D: Put out the word on mass media and social media for help. We’re already exploring a social media campaign using the hashtag #1lib2pics.

No, we don’t have an organizational structure yet. Do you think we need one? Perhaps Plan A will work so well that we'll get photos of 90% of all libraries in just a few years. But if you are interested in helping to start an organization, or even in just taking a few photos, leave your user name in the comments section below, or email us at EmailUser/Smallbones or EmailUser/Vysotsky

Now back to the whole point of this article: photos of libraries. I’ve asked Vysotsky to help pick some outside of North America.

So, here we are again. As I write this, I'm recovering from COVID. It's also 23 July, because I really, really don't like saving work for the last minute. Since the month isn't over, it's not clear exactly where we'll be this month, but the trends are looking great: June only had two featured lists in the entire month – the worst month in the entire history of featured lists – while this month is already doing much, much better. There's also a ton of featured pictures, and those article things some strange people seem to care about are also doing great (I kid, of course).

A festival descends on Edinburgh this month, so this might well be my only article for this issue. That said, I also thought that for July, and then wrote four, collaborated on another, and selected the "From the archive" section, so ...

-Adam Cuerden

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

A paper titled "On the Value of Wikipedia as a Gateway to the Web",^[1] presented at The Web Conference last year, examines how often external links on English Wikipedia are clicked, and "also sheds new light on the poorly understood role [Wikipedia] has as a provider not only of information, but also of economic wealth."

The study was based on internal data from a client-side instrumentation (originally gathered for a previous research publication that specifically focused on interactions with citation links), which captured reader clicks on three kinds of external links:

"During the period considered, Wikipedia had 5.3M articles that contained at least one of 63.1M external links (totaling 49.8M unique target URLs). [...] In total, 35.3M (56.0%) of these links appeared in references, 24.9M (39.5%) in article bodies, and 2.8M (4.5%) in infoboxes. Around 1.3M articles in English Wikipedia had an infobox with links, and the average number of links per infobox in these articles was 2.08."

During the time period studied (one month in 2019), "English Wikipedia generated 43M clicks to external websites, in roughly even parts via links in infoboxes, cited references, and article bodies". This corresponds to a much higher click-through rate (CTR) for infobox links (0.9%) than for article body links (0.14%) and reference links (0.03%).

Focusing on infobox links, the authors train a classifier to distinguish "official" links, defined as "the official website of the entity described in the respective article", which made up 0.8% of the 63.1 million links studied and had an even higher CTR (2.47%).

The researchers proceeded to analyze the CTR of these official infobox links in more detail, finding that it is "correlated strongly and negatively" with an article's length and popularity (number of pageviews), "possibly because longer articles, by offering more information, reduce the user’s need to gather additional information from external links, and because more popular articles are more likely to appear in shallower information-seeking sessions" according to previous research.

Next they examine how the CTR varies by article topic (while controlling for an article's length and popularity), finding

"... that internet culture—a topic held by most articles about websites—is indeed particularly over-represented among the articles with the very highest official-link CTR. Similar effects were observed for society (a loose mix of articles), sports, software, and entertainment, among others. On the contrary, we observed that geographical, biography, and television, among others, were particularly under-represented among the highest-CTR official links."

Furthermore, the study examined the "click time" (from opening an article to clicking an external link):

"The global median click time was 32.9 seconds (31.8 seconds for desktop, 34.4 seconds for mobile), with a much lower value for infobox links (18.7 seconds; 20.1 seconds for official links), and larger values for the article-body links (35.4 seconds) and reference links (51.8 seconds)."

The authors use the term "article body" as a catch-all for every location outside infoboxes and footnotes. This is inconsistent with Wikipedia's guidelines on external links, where that term excludes the separate "External links" section at the end of an article:in fact, the guidelines state that external links "normally should not be placed in the body of an article". As a consequence, the paper (unfortunately or perhaps fortunately) mostly does not provide information on whether external links that are placed higher up within the article text (in violation of the guidelines or exploiting one of their rare exceptions) may generate more traffic, apart from one partial result:

The short click time of infobox links, however, seems to be due to their prominent position within articles: when approximately controlling for position by considering only article-body links in the top 20% of the page, the median click time dropped to 22.2 seconds, only 10% longer than for infobox links.

Again analyzing by article topic, the researchers found that "clicks on official links to entertainment-related websites occurred faster, whereas links to websites on more classic encyclopedic topics, such as biographies, geographical content, history, etc., occurred more slowly."

They also note that

"Wikipedia frequently serves as a stepping stone between search engines and third-party websites. We captured this effect quantitatively as well as in a manual analysis, where we found that URLs that are down-ranked or censored by search engines, and thus not retrievable via search, can often be found in Wikipedia infoboxes, which leads search users to take a detour via Wikipedia. We conclude that Wikipedia regularly and systematically meets information needs that search engines do not meet, which further confirms Wikipedia’s central role in the Web ecosystem."

Lastly, regarding the economic value Wikipedia for website owners, the paper asks

"... how much money external-website owners would have to pay in order to obtain an equivalent number of clicks by other means, such as paid ads. In this spirit, we applied the Google Ads API to the content of official websites linked from Wikipedia in order to generate key words for sponsored search and estimated their cost per click at market price. We conclude that the owners of external websites linked from English Wikipedia’s infoboxes would need to collectively pay a total of around $7–13 million per month (or $84–156 million per year) for sponsored search in order to obtain the same volume of traffic that they receive from Wikipedia for free."

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.

From the abstract:^[2]

"In this thesis, we have computationally analysed the language used in Wikipedia in order to find similarities between the language used in different articles. To do so, we have syntactically parsed articles of Wikipedia in different languages using UDPipe 2.0 and gathered the languages’ recurrent syntactic patterns using Grammatical Framework’s GF-UD. Then, we have compared the analyses with cosine similarity in two ways: based on dependency relations and based on linguistic patterns. We have seen that there is a basis for the Abstract Wikipedia project: there are syntactic similarities not only within one language, but also within multiple languages. In addition, we have found that semantically-related topics have a higher similarity than those which are not. Finally, we have gathered syntactic patterns of every language and compared them, which can constitute the basis of the creation of the Renderers for Abstract Wikipedia [a project to create a language-independent version of Wikipedia using structured data]."

From the abstract:^[3]

"This paper analyses the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia using Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) concept of heterotopia. In Foucault’s writings, heterotopias are both similar to and distinct from the conditions that give rise to them. The paper undertakes a case study of one entry on Wikipedia (the entry for the “Episteme”) focusing primarily on the main entry and the talk page. The methodology is content analysis with a directed approach: data were gathered in November–December 2020. The paper argues Wikipedia can usefully be analysed as a heterotopia because it exposes the contentious conditions of knowledge production, which is not standard practice for an encyclopaedia."

As explained in the paper, "Heterotopias are an alternative but not an idyllic alternative. They are possible rather than imaginary. Utopias are a departure from the present but heterotopias both engage with and question the present by enacting an alternative, destabilising established practices and understandings in the process. "

From the abstract and paper:^[4]

"... we consider [ time series] models constructed with the help of dynamical systems that have relatively simple limiting behavior. Switching between different trajectories of the phase portrait, we obtain a high precision prediction. Moreover, the dynamical system approach provides the global qualitative picture of the model's phase portrait, and allows us to discuss multidimensional patterns and long-term properties of the process. The simple limiting behavior allows us to associate different trends with different process's realization scenarios that can be influenced by externalities.

We demonstrate these ideas using the examples of the Wikipedia's traffic of Readers, Contributors and Edits [using data for 2008-2019]. First, we consider the two-dimensional model, predicting the traffic of Readers and Edits. [...] Different trends (corresponding to different fixed points) can be associated with different platform's incentives. Then, adding the Contributors data, we discuss the three-dimensional model (more precise than the three-dimensional VAR). It provides a more accurate short-term prediction of Edits than the two-dimensional dynamic model. The global picture shows that the number of new Edits tends to decline in the future, while the number of new Contributors and Readers will grow in the long run. [...] This can probably be explained by the fact that many of the subjects, in which Readers are interested, have already been contributed to the Wikipedia platform, and there is no demand for the new Edits. However, the Contributors will continue to correct some articles, and the Readers will be visiting the platform for the references.

This is actually an essay I wrote (under my old pseudonymous account) back in 2008. It's located at Wikipedia:Delete the junk, and this is the version as modified by various editors over the years. It shows its 2008 roots in its rather aggressively-sarcastic tone, and the specific way voters are portrayed – which is more relevant to how people acted here in 2008 than today, I hope – and the references to <ref> tags, which were just coming in at the time, and did, certainly help.

Sometimes, an article comes up for AfD (“Article for Deletion”), which, though its subject may be notable, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Perhaps its only source is a promotional, questionable website. Perhaps its material seems to be completely made up from thin air. In such cases, just delete it. Wikipedia lacks articles on a lot of things, and, if the people who found 87 blog and chatpage sources using the University of Google really cared about the subject, they'd find reliable sources to remake the article.

In the end, Wikipedia can only maintain articles at sufficient quality if there are people interested in improving them according to Wikipedia policy. Where large walled gardens exist, it may be necessary to cut them down to a few, manageable articles, so that they can be brought up to sufficient quality. This means going through the huge swaths of bad articles and picking out the worst and least notable for deletion. Likewise, fixing a very bad article on a small aspect of a larger subject may waste resources better spent fixing the articles on the larger subject.

On Wikipedia, we are all unpaid volunteers. Very often, "keep" votes on these sort of articles will be combined with an insistence that... other people rewrite the article from scratch, whereas the person saying this has no intention of editing the article at all. If you're insisting other people do work creating an article on your behalf, and claiming you have the right to do this, you need to rethink your position: If you are not willing to take responsibility for improving the articles you gaily vote to keep, then you are making the jobs of the people genuinely trying to improve Wikipedia by upmerging content, reducing walled gardens to a manageable number of articles, and trying to use limited resources effectively much, much harder.

It is worse to have an article on a notable subject than not to have it, if it contains information that is misleading, or could be slanted, due to a lack of sources to verify the text is still accurate. Some articles have been hacked or slanted with incorrect text, for weeks or months, because the text was not compared to reliable sources and corrected. That problem is being reduced by use of ref-tag footnotes ("<ref>...</ref>") that pinpoint each statement to a particular source, for rapid verification. (NB: That's a pretty 2008 thing to say, isn't it?) The goal is a balance: to make articles tamper-resistant but also allow for improvements, with updates for later research or news reports, by anyone in the world.

This sort of attempt at misleading the reader can often be identified at Articles for Deletion. Horrifyingly, though, some people don't care, and instead insist the article should be kept, even when the entire article is demonstrably full of such attempts to mislead, and thus cannot be trusted, in the idea that other people should, once again, fix the problems they don't want to do the work to fix. This is wrong. Neutral Point of View is a core policy, and if the article has no redeeming merits, then the mere theoretical idea that a (completely different) article could be written on the subject which would be acceptable under Wikipedia policy is not an argument to keep.

Imagine you wanted to build a house, but the sewer main has just burst, spreading sewage across the area where it's to be built. You'd fix the sewage main and clean away the sewage first, leaving yourself with a clean, pristine area on which to build your new house. And yet, on Wikipedia, we can sometimes insist the sewage remains until the house is finished.

A badly written, poorly structured, and, especially, a POV-ridden article can be a nightmare to edit, and can intimidate editors away from it. It gives the perception of a monumental task, which has to be done all at once. And if there are any problems with claimed ownership of articles, any attempts at improvement can be halted before they even start.

However, a clean slate offers the chance to do things right. A new editor can come in, think about how best to structure the article, and create a much more useful framework for further work. It also gives permission for the article to be fairly short, but with the potential for expansion. It's just much more pleasant to work on a clean slate, than in a cesspool of sewage.

Of course, sometimes an article isn't entirely junk. Perhaps it could be partially salvaged?

• Check previous versions: Check the article's history to see if a good version exists that can be reverted to.
• Stubbify the article: If the subject's notable and not something that can easily be redirected, but the existing content is unusable, then cutting everything that's poorly sourced or problematic might salvage a small part of the work.
• Redirect the article to a relevant one of better quality. This isn't quite deletion, as the history can still be seen, and anything relevant can be picked out. If there's actually usable content, a merge can be used instead. For obscure subjects, especially ones prone to fringe or pseudoscientific beliefs or pushing a point of view, we can much easier maintain them if there aren't a lot of articles largely duplicating the same content. Also good for stubs that have no real way to expand.

The point is that it's better to have nothing rather than something that's actively misleading, unreadable, or, for more fringe subjects, part of an unmaintainable mess of interconnected articles. Lacking an article encourages people to create one. And they'd surely do a better job at it than whatever terrible mess got someone linking you this essay.