Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-07-03

On June 29, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation published an open letter (accompanied by social media campaign) asking the UK government and parliament to exempt "public interest projects" – such as Wikipedia – from the proposed Online Safety Bill. The chapter states in an accompanying Medium post that

"[the OSB's] requirements around content moderation, age-gating, and user verification are incompatible with the way in which information on Wikipedia is created and curated, as well as the website’s commitment to user privacy and freedom of speech. ... As it is currently written, the Online Safety Bill could require the Wikimedia Foundation to collect data about Wikipedia users’ identities, track their actions, intervene in their editing processes, and interfere with their ability to set and enforce rules for what constitutes well-sourced neutral content about a given subject. Such requirements are counter to Wikipedia’s editorial guidelines and policies, as well as its privacy policy."

In a post on the Public Policy mailing list, the WMF's Global Advocacy team put the open letter in context of previous efforts (see our previous reporting) and stressed its timeliness:

"In December 2022, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation began outreach to British regulators to educate them on how our projects work and how the Online Safety Bill would threaten them. Over the last several months, we ramped up our advocacy efforts as the bill was debated in the House of Lords. We successfully convinced key Lords and Baronesses to support our proposed amendments and built public and media attention, but the UK Government has resisted making the necessary changes.

Our best chance of protecting Wikipedia is to persuade the UK Government to exempt public interest projects from the OSB, so we’ve written this open letter and formed a coalition of signatories. The list is a testament to the network of allies that WMUK has established over years of promoting free knowledge in the UK. If the government fails to act, our last chance to push this exemption to protect Wikipedia is with Parliament during the Bill’s “Report Stage” voting, starting on 6 July."

The public statements of both organizations are (perhaps understandably) short on concrete examples of how the new law might require WMF to "intervene in [the community's] editing processes, and interfere with their ability to set and enforce rules for what constitutes well-sourced neutral content about a given subject". But it is not hard to imagine that it might become difficult to maintain the "Wikipedia is not censored" principle in its current form, were Wikipedia and its sister projects to continue to remain accessible in the UK in non-age-gated form. The current situation – where the Foundation largely relies on the volunteer editing community to set and enforce content rules on potentially offensive or sexual content – is informed by extensive controversies over a decade ago. See the Signpost's previous reporting: "Foundation commissions external recommendations about objectionable material " (2010), "2010 in review", "'Personal image filter' to offer the ability to hide sexual or violent media" (2011), "News and notes", July 16, 2012 ("At Wikimania the board formally acknowledged the divisiveness of the filter, rescinding its request for the development of the filter mechanism while reaffirming the general principles it had espoused concerning controversial content").

What's more, Wikimedia UK's FAQ argues that one major problem of the bill is its vagueness, giving broad powers to regulators and the executive to decide on concrete requirements and update them in the future:

As the Bill stands, PIPs [public interest projects, such as Wikipedia] will be required to understand and apply this new 260-page law, which imposes at least 29(3) new and often onerous legal duties. Worse still, as a "skeleton" (or "future proofed framework" law), the Bill's full impact on PIPs will only become clear to them once they have also mastered dozens of additional "implementation" rules, guidelines and Codes of Practice that will be issued by Ofcom and the Secretary of State.

Furthermore,

The Bill's clearest requirements are often the most problematic for PIPs: for example, even "citizen history" and "open science" projects will be required to perform statutory assessments of their impact on (i) illegal immigration; (ii) operation of unlicensed crossbow rental businesses; (iii) selling stolen goods; (iv) controlling prostitutes; (v) and displaying words contrary to the Public Order Act 1986 (among many other "Priority offences") (clause 8(5), read with Schedule 7).

The Bill may even subject the more widely-used PIPs to a new duty to submit annual earnings and userbase statistics to Ofcom, so that Ofcom can, if it sees fit to do so, charge that PIP a new "fee" — in essence, a tax to operate in the UK (Clauses 74-77). Ofcom is also given the power to force PIPs to use content filtering and user blocking technologies, without a judge. Those same "proactive technology requirement" powers have already attracted widespread criticism for threatening the privacy and confidentiality of WhatsApp and Signal conversations.

Noncompliance exposes PIPs to serious fines, UK blocking orders, and even staff imprisonment.

– T

Wikimedia Foundation board member Nataliia Tymkiv has advised the community on the Wikimedia-l mailing list that the Wikimedia Foundation Governance Committee has appointed a new Elections Committee:

To recap the process: there was an open nomination period for 2–4 open seats on the Elections Committee from April 10 to April 24 (Anywhere on Earth). 11 candidates applied, and you can read all applications on Meta. After that, staff checked their documents (proof of identity), and if there are any trust & safety concerns. Some candidates opted to not move forward.

Once the first checks were completed, I interviewed each candidate in an hour-long interview where I asked the same questions of each candidate – including if they would be willing to be an advisory member of the committee if they are not selected as a member (this is a non-voting role). Each candidate was also given time to ask questions of me. After the interviews, I provided a confidential summary of the discussions to the Governance Committee and continuing members of the Elections Committee with a recommended slate of Members and Advisory members. Both committees provided feedback before the Governance Committee officially appointed the Elections committee on June 20. Many factors went into determining the committee composition, for example we tried to balance languages, regions, projects, relevant onwiki and offwiki experience.

In parallel the members of the Elections Committee, whose term ended on March 31, 2023, were asked if they wanted to stay on. Four of them decided to continue as voting members for the next term, and one – as a non-voting advisor. I am grateful to the outgoing Elections Committee members for all the work done in the past to support the process.

The committee consists of 8 members and 5 non-voting advisory members.

– AK

On June 9–10, Wikimedia Europe held its first general assembly in-person in Prague. It was founded in July 2022 by various European Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates, and currently has three employees. In March 2023, Brussels was chosen as its legal seat – perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is the de facto capital of the European Union, and WMEU is building on the work of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU.

Among other things, Wikimedia Europe has taken over the publication of the monthly EU policy monitoring reports. The May 2023 report highlights a successful effort by Wikimedia France to get "not for profit online encyclopaedias and not for profit educational and scientific repositories" exempted from a planned law in France that would require online platforms to age-gate their content. In an ensuing discussion on the Public Policy mailing list, Luis Villa raised concern about a "now-ongoing stream of exceptions for 'online encyclopedias'" (an approach that was previously used in the EU Copyright Directive, which Wikipedia blackouts and mass demonstrations had failed to stop on a wider basis). WMEU's Dimi Dimitrov (long known as "Our Man in Brussels") responded that a more general exception had been "not feasible in France", and also addressed the question whether all sister projects would be covered ("Meta-Wiki is what I worry about. I have no answers on this"). What's more, he pointed out that legislative efforts around age restrictions are not confined to France (see also separate story about the UK's Online Safety Bill, above):

I understand that the discussions around controversial content, especially on Commons, have never been easy and we have never managed to get to a consensus. Don't get me wrong, I would also prefer to not change anything. I am not advocating for content-gating solutions with lawmakers. But I want to have this very difficult discussion, not avoid it. The world is changing and age-gating will be a huge legislative topic in the years to come. I guarantee you that.

– T

• Annual reports: Wikimedia Colombia, Wikimedia Ukraine (in Ukrainian, English-language Diff post with key highlights here; for more on Ukraine see Stories of Ukrainian Wikimedians during the war and Diff post on Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine).
• Global bans: Imperator-Kaiser, since 20 June 2023; Skiyomi, since 21 June 2023; Luca Poma / LoSpecialista, since 28 June 2023. The English Wikipedia has a biography of Luca Poma, who also featured in the Italian Wikipedia documentary screened by Rai 3 earlier this year (see previous Signpost coverage).
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement (beginning 3 July) is Tai chi. It will be followed the week after by Literal translation. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!

Georgia Tech announced a forthcoming paper by Casey Wichman and Nathan Chan. Though only the abstract and the Georgia Tech announcement are currently available, we can say that it appears the people who watch a video of the "Hakuna Matata" song from The Lion King are likely to donate more to the WMF than those who don't.

We promise to dig a little deeper when the paper is available. – S

Robin Washington writes in Forward, where he is editor-at-large, about Wikipedia, where he was once an editor. He is upset about the Arbitration Committee's recent decision on a controversy brought to light by a paper called "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust". He says the Wikipedia model is fundamentally flawed, that it is "possibly the most widespread source of disinformation in human history", and that the only fix is to dox all our editors, from gnomes to arbitrators, an organizational model closer to those of Citizendium and Baidu Baike.

While it's impossible to accurately predict what the reaction of the broader editoriat might be to such a policy, we can only guess at how it would play out, although Citizendium and Baidu Baike provide obvious case studies.

Which is why I'm surprised to see Shira Klein, a respected scholar, devote any energy into proving that entries about the Holocaust are false. More baffling is her attempt to correct them by diving into Wikipedia's rabbit warren of arcane rules for article review — administered by volunteer site police who gleefully hide behind pseudonyms.

"Widespread" is accurate: the English version of Wikipedia has 6,676,896 articles, which were viewed 10 billion times last month, on 756 million unique devices, and edited by 39 thousand unique users during that time. "Disinformation" seems unlikely — articles can be edited at any time, they occasionally contain nonsense, and their contents are often the subject of contentious partisan debate, but they are provided without warranty. The Wikipedia article Reliability of Wikipedia, aptly enough, summarizes the state of the matter in great detail (checking the references for an encyclopedia article is a standard component of scholarship).

The Signpost takes no position on the Holocaust in Poland dispute, other than to predict that, unfortunately, it will continue. – S, J

Fandom (née Wikia (née Wikicities)), the wiki host spun off from Wikipedia in 2004 by Wikimedia honchos Jimbo and Angela, has grown alongside Wikipedia over the years as a host for less formal, more inclusive, and more heavily advertising-driven subject-focused wikis. To the morbid-minded, the popups and video ads offer a glimpse of the fate that Wikipedia has fortunately avoided over the years. However, the actual inline content of Fandom sites has typically remained more strongly under the editorial control of individual wikis' editors and administrators.

Recently, however, Fandom has begun to question that control: on June 14th, the McDonald's Wiki page on "Grimace" (a mascot character used in the company's advertising campaigns) was modified heavily at the behest of McDonalds. Afterwards, editing was fully protected (i.e. to administrators only) with the summary "switching over entirety of grimace article at mc∂onald's[sic] request, just for the length of this campaign in 2023".

The previous version can be seen here: it admittedly probably wouldn't have survived on Wikipedia, but it nonetheless features a long list of obscure trivia: he danced at a baseball game in July 2012, and was subsequently not seen in the company's promotions, except for Happy Meal toys in Malaysia. The version it was replaced with, on the other hand, gives a slimmed-down "greatest hits", presumably omitting ads that McDonalds finds irrelevant to their current campaign, and ends with "At participating McDonald’s for a limited time. While supplies last. Grimace’s Birthday Meal includes choice of 10 pc. McNuggets® or Big Mac® © 2023 McDonald’s. ADVERTISEMENT: This page is sponsored by McDonald’s."

The article's main contributor, Nathan Steinmetz (nom de poste Humanstein) said of the edits:

McDon*ld's took over the Grimace wiki page and removed all the real world information, appearances, and citations that I've added over the years and turned the whole page into one big in-universe ad for the birthday promotion :(

Like I can just add it back but what's the point if they're literally paying a dude to undo it. They're partnering with Fandom for an ad campaign for the page now too..

In an interview with Kotaku, he says that "While The Grimace is a very silly page for this to whole thing to be about, I think it probably sets a really bad precedent that an IP holder can approach Fandom or whoever and have user generated content basically 'suppressed' and replaced with a press release".

While Grimace is a silly mascot character created to sell hamburgers, and his appearance in Malaysian Happy Meal toys is largely irrelevant to the broader arc of history, this does raise some questions for the "information ecosystem" writ large. For example, the Ford Motor Company has a site on Fandom, with a (rather brief) article about Henry Ford — should it mention those antisemitic pamphlets he endorsed? Well, it currently does.

In a Wikia of another age, would a General Electric fansite in 1980 have received polite letters requesting its list of Pyranol-brand polychlorinated biphenyls be silently pared down after they were banned by the EPA?

Meanwhile, Wikipedia itself has not been completely immune: an article about the Grimace milkshake was created on June 26.

"Grimace" indeed. – S, J

C-SPAN has video coverage and a full transcript of an event hosted jointly by New America and the Wikimedia Foundation. The topic: regulating big tech companies and social media platforms, and in particular Section 230.

Introductory remarks by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who authored Section 230 together with Republican Christopher Cox back in the 1990s, were followed by a panel discussion featuring New America Senior Director Lilian Coral, Axios reporter Ashley Gold, Politico reporter Rebecca Kern, Association of Research Libraries Director Katherine Klosek, Wikipedian and journalism professor Andrew Lih, the WMF's Rebecca MacKinnon (herself a former New America fellow), Internet Archive counsel Peter Routhier and New America President and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, with AI ascendant, the panel seemed agreed that Section 230 was more vital than ever to safeguard the continued existence of the ecosystem of content and sources formed by Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and that Congress should appreciate that –

We are an ecosystem that is so crucial to not only global knowledge but American competitiveness. If you just want to ... pander to make America really competitive in this area, keep 230 around so that we are still in that leadership position.
— Andrew Lih, time code 1:40:18

– AK

The U.S. Republican Party is targeting universities, think tanks and also the Wikimedia Foundation "to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics", reports The New York Times. Organizations researching disinformation stand accused of censoring conservative speech online. Specifically, it is mentioned that the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee "has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public," and that "America First Legal", "a conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants."

The New York Times' article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation only once, as one of the targets. It remains unclear whether the Foundation is a defendant in the lawsuit, or just one of the recipients of the committee's letters and subpoenas. It appears to be the latter, based on the fact that Wikimedia and Wikipedia are not mentioned in America First Legal's press release about the lawsuit (filed "on behalf of Jill Hines, the co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, the founder the popular news website The Gateway Pundit", which is listed as a deprecated source at WP:RSP).

• Meetup: Yahoo! Life says the monthly Brooklyn Public Library meetup was highlighted in a TikTok video posted by Annie Rauwerda and attracted some potential new 'pedians.
• It's smashing: Smashing Magazine has a "behind the curtains" interview with the designers of the new Wikipedia interface, Vector 2022. See prior Signpost coverage about the redesign.
• Molly White interview: German business magazine Brand eins features an interview with cryptocurrency critic and Wikipedian Molly White.
• Language divide: Global Voices reports on the way Google and Wikimedia are seeking to bridge the language divide in Africa.
• Legal setback in France: The Wikimedia Foundation has lost an appeal in its French court case, reports Legalis (see previous Signpost coverage).
• Open letter: The open letter by Wikimedia UK on the Online Safety Bill (see News and notes for further information) has attracted coverage by cybernews.com and uktech.news.

For the May 19 – June 19 period, per this this database report.

• 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.

In a concerted effort to address the mounting tensions in the English Wikipedia province of projectspace, the United Nations announced this Wednesday that they would dispatch peacekeeping troops to the war-torn region. This decision comes as a response to reports of escalating violence and political unrest in discussions regarding the manual of style, article deletion, and discussion of whether it's unjustified POV pushing to say "escalating violence" instead of "political unrest", as well as whether it's a WP:CIVIL violation to use the f-word when you revert them.

Projectspace, an area long ravaged by conflict and ideological strife, has been "on the brink of collapse" for some time, according to a statement released by the UN Security Council. One major threat to stability in the region is the ongoing skirmishes between paramilitary groups such as the En–Dash Liberation Army and the Hyphens-are-Fine Coalition. Increasing amounts of territory are currently de facto controlled by breakaway factions; the south of the region is disputed between the "People's Front of Wikipedia", the "Peoples' Front of Wikipedia", the "Peoples Front of Wikipedia" and the "People's front of Wikipedia".

The peacekeeping force, composed of troops from countries across the world, will be under the command of a senior UN official, responsible for coordinating actions on the ground and reporting to the Security Council. Their first task will be the three-hundred-kilobyte RfC about whether articles about diplomatic and military detachments such as itself should say they're "United Nations peacekeeping forces", "international peacekeeping missions" or "missions of UN peacekeepers".

Their mission is the protection of civilians, the maintenance of law and order, and the facilitation of political dialogue among warring factions.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, in a speech, that the peacekeeping force was aimed toward creating a secure environment for fair and nonviolent admin elections to take place.