Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-08-15

In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the first grants of a "Knowledge Equity Fund" created in June of the previous year. This involved about a million dollars of WMF funds being given, in the form of grants, to a number of external charitable and advocacy organizations.

This proved controversial; as we covered last October, a "somewhat-viral Twitter thread" questioned the relevance of these organizations to Wikimedia projects and values, and while some of the controversy was certainly political in nature, many of the grant recipients seemed unrelated to Wikimedia projects, prompting further discussion on mailing lists. One concern was the lack of community input into the process that led to the fund's creation. Another was the use of money which was generally solicited on the grounds of being necessary to fund Wikimedia projects, meaning that many donors likely did not know or intend for their funds to be given to unrelated organizations. Two of the grant recipients from the first round seem to have not shared financial reports detailing how the money was spent.

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a second round of grantees this month, saying in its announcement:

Equity – more specifically, knowledge equity – underpins our movement's vision of a world in which every human can share in the sum of all knowledge. It encourages us to consider the knowledge and communities that have been left out of the historical record, both intentionally and unintentionally. This is an important pillar of the Wikimedia movement’s strategic direction, our forward-looking approach to prepare for the Wikimedia of 2030.

There can be many reasons behind these gaps in knowledge, derived from systemic social, political and technical challenges that prevent all people from being able to access and contribute to free knowledge projects like Wikimedia equally. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation launched the Knowledge Equity Fund specifically to address gaps in the Wikimedia movement's vision of free knowledge caused by racial bias and discrimination, that have prevented populations around the world from participating equally. The fund is a part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan for the 2023-24 fiscal year to support knowledge equity by supporting regional and thematic strategies, and helping close knowledge gaps. Building on learnings from its first round of grants, today the Equity Fund is welcoming its second round of grantees.

This second round includes seven grantees that span four regions, including the Fund's first-ever grantees in Asia. This diverse group of grantees was chosen from an initial pool of 42 nominations, which were received from across the Wikimedia movement through an open survey in 2022 and 2023. Each grantee aligns with one of Fund's five focus areas, identified to address persistent structural barriers that prevent equitable access and participation in open knowledge. They are also recognized nonprofits with a proven track record of impact in their region. The Knowledge Equity Fund was initially conceived in response to global demands for racial equity, and the global reach of these new grantees is testament to and in recognition of the systemic impact of racial inequity in affecting participation in knowledge across the world.

The grants announced are as follows:

Black Cultural Archives is a Black-led archive and heritage center that preserves and gives access to the histories of African and Caribbean people in the UK. Their goals with this grant for the coming year include increasing research into their collections, as well as increasing the breadth of their collections for research.

The Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, or the Alliance of the Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN for short), is a non-profit organization based in Indonesia that works on human rights and advocacy issues for indigenous people.

Criola is a civil society organization, based in Rio de Janeiro, dedicated to advocating for the rights of Black women in Brazilian society. They prioritize knowledge production, research, and skills development as part of their work. They are also part of a national and international network of human rights, justice and advocacy organization focused on promoting racial equity.

Data for Black Lives is a movement of activists, organizers, and scientists committed to the mission of using data to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people. They will use the grant in part to launch a Movement Scientists Fellowship matching racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications to drive change in the areas of climate, genetics, and economic justice.

Create Caribbean Research Institute is the first digital humanities center in the Caribbean. The grant will be used to expand Create Caribbean’s Create and Code technology education program to enable children ages 5-16 to develop information and digital literacy as well as coding skills.

The Filipino American National Historical Society, or FANHS, has a mission to gather, document and share Filipino American history through its 42 community based chapters. The grant will support continuing and growing FANHS’ scholarship and advocacy on accurate historical representations of Filipino Americans and counter distorted and effaced ethnic history.

Project Multatuli is an organization dedicated to non-profit journalism, especially for underreported topics, ranging from indigenous people to marginalized issues. Their goal is to produce data-based, deeply researched news stories to promote inclusive journalism and amplify the voices of marginalized communities.

For further background on the grantees, see the Wikimedia announcement. – AK, JG

On the subject of financial transparency regarding the Wikimedia Endowment: here is what the minutes of the January 2022 board meeting had to say about it. Not exactly a wealth of detail, but we do at least get a financial summary:

8) Fundraising update

• Overview, lead by Caitlin Virtue
• Review of Fundraising Report, lead by Amy Parker
• Summary: As of December 31, 2021, the Endowment held $105.4 million. There is currently $99.33 million in the investment account and $6.07 million in cash. An additional $8 million raised in December will be transferred to the Endowment in January 2022.

This summary was the last time the Endowment Board meeting minutes contained a dollar figure for the Endowment's total value (cash plus investments). Requests for an updated figure in February remained unanswered in July.

A couple of weeks ago, the Wikimedia Foundation's Jayde Antonio posted the approved minutes for the January 19, 2023 Endowment Board meeting to the its page on Meta. Noticeable here is the lack of any substantial new information – apart from noting the approval of the Endowment grants which were announced publicly back in April, they essentially just repeat the boilerplate meeting agenda posted months ago.

For example, the meeting's agenda (posted in February 2023) contained the following item:

6:25 - 6:55 pm UTC: Fundraising Update (Board Chair, Jimmy Wales and Endowment Director, Amy Parker)

• FY22-23 year to date update
• Campaign strategy

The minutes approved by the Endowment's board, led by Jimbo Wales, repeated the same point almost verbatim when they were added in July:

Fundraising Update (Amy Parker)

• FY22-23 year to date update
• Presentation of campaign strategy

Following a query on his user talk page about the Endowment's apparent secrecy, Jimbo appeared to criticize the minutes approved by him and his board:

At the meeting we discussed, to universal agreement, that we should publish more information and more often [...] the discussion about publishing more information and more often came about in no small part because the January minutes were something that I felt were not good enough in terms of being open and informative. (A financial report is forthccoming – I haven't seen it yet – but delayed because the relevant person creating it has taken a bit of family leave.)

This is a strange comment, as it would seem entirely within the power of the board to determine what information the minutes of its own meetings should contain. He later clarified: "The minutes of the previous board meetings are not written in realtime in the board meeting. They are a legal document prepared in advance and reviewed by the legal team and staff."

Following that discussion, however, Wales did provide a more meaningful update on Meta-Wiki:

In official business, the Board moved to hire KPMG as our independent auditor for the new entity, approved a spending policy for the Endowment, approved an operational budget of $2.09 million, and approved a grantmaking budget of $2.91 million for FY 2023-24. We also set the target of $11.5 million in revenue between fundraising and investment income this fiscal year. We ended the last fiscal year with $118 million in the Wikimedia Endowment and are projecting to grow the corpus by approximately $6.5 million depending on market performance and after expenses.

How much of this $118 million is held by the Tides Foundation, and how much by the new 501(c)(3) organization, is unknown. The Wikimedia Foundation has been keen to emphasize that the Endowment is now a transparent 501(c)(3) non-profit, fulfilling a promise first made in 2017, but the Endowment website itself continues to say:

The Endowment has been established, with an initial contribution by Wikimedia Foundation, as a Collective Action Fund at Tides Foundation (Tax ID# 51-0198509).

Jimmy Wales also uploaded a document to Meta-Wiki titled "Wikimedia Endowment 2023-24 Plan". This provides information on fundraising goals, an operational timeline, and the Endowment's budget for 2023–2024. It mentions $1.8 million in annual expenses in the most recent financial year (similar to the figure mentioned in the minutes for the July 2022 board meeting), including $400,000 for unspecified professional services. It envisages the Endowment standing at $130.4 million by the end of the 2023–2024 fiscal year.

Even with the information now provided, the Wikimedia Endowment has never published a statement detailing its revenue and expenses for any year of its existence. Its actual receipts and spending from 2016 to the present day, including the fees paid to Tides, are completely opaque. The Wikimedia Endowment, the Wikimedia movement's richest affiliate, remains some way away from delivering the level of transparency ordinarily expected of Wikimedia affiliates.

See also:

• User talk:Jimbo Wales#Endowment (permalink)
• m:Talk:Wikimedia Endowment#Update on endowment

– AK

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that after three years of development, its Wikifunctions project is slowly beginning to roll out.

Wikifunctions, the newest Wikimedia project, is a new space to collaboratively create and maintain a library of functions. You can think of these functions like recipes for a meal—they take inputs and produce an output (a reliable answer). You might have experienced something similar when using a search engine to find the distance between two locations, the volume of an object, converting two units, and more.

The announcement describes Wikifunctions as "a core component of the larger" Abstract Wikipedia, a project designed to have volunteers writing simple Wikipedia articles in code that can then be translated into human languages. Both projects are spearheaded by Denny Vrandečić, the former project lead of Wikidata and a past Google employee. You can learn more about how Wikifunctions works in this short video on Commons and YouTube.

A technical evaluation published in December 2022 had criticized this "decision to make Abstract Wikipedia depend on Wikifunctions, a new programming language and runtime environment, invented by the Abstract Wikipedia team, with design goals that exceed the scope of Abstract Wikipedia itself, and architectural issues that are incompatible with the standards of correctness, performance, and usability that Abstract Wikipedia requires." However, Vrandečić's team disputed such criticisms and rejected the evaluation's recommendations, which had included decoupling Wikifunctions from Abstract Wikipedia, and having it based on the existing Lua programming language that is already integrated into MediaWiki and widely used by Wikipedia editors (see detailed Signpost coverage). – AK, H

Wikimania 2023 is taking place in Singapore this week, from 16 to 19 August, with some workshop, hackathon and pre-conference activities happening on 15 August. Event partners include UNESCO, Google, Creative Commons and Mozilla as well as a number of Singaporean partners like NETS and the National Library Board.

While this year is the first time since 2019 that the Wikimedia movement's annual conference is happening as an in-person event again, it is also open to remote participation. The full schedule can be found here.

The Signpost wishes all those who travel to Wikimania safe journey and a great conference!

• Annual reports: Tyap Wikimedians User Group; Wikimedia Finlands (Financial report); Wiki Cemeteries User Group.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, User:Pppery. Pppery, a prolific technical editor, faced limited opposition during his RfA due mainly to a perceived lack of content creation, finishing with 73% support, near the upper end of the discretionary range. Bureaucrats agreed unanimously in the 'crat chat that there was consensus to promote. – Sdkb
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement (beginning 14 August) is Miss. It will be followed the week after by Physiology. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!

Glenn Greenwald is one of the three journalists who broke the Edward Snowden story that won The Guardian a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014. Living as an expat in Brazil, he has been a vociferous critic of many things over the years, including both major United States political parties, and was one of the founders of The Intercept – a publication he left in 2020, saying that its editors had demanded he redact an article about media coverage of that goddamn Hunter Biden laptop thing.

In a video on YouTube – an excerpt from a much longer (almost two hours long), paywalled episode Greenwald has published on Rumble (transcript here, also mostly paywalled) – Greenwald talks with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, and says that his Wikipedia biography changed in surprising ways after he angered the libs:

I really started noticing things going completely awry when I really started to have what was perceived to be a breach with the political faction with which I had long been associated, at least in the public mind, which was kind of American liberalism [...] I kind of became an opponent of the liberal establishment and its orthodoxies and tactics and what I began to notice was that things that were on my Wikipedia page for over a decade with no change things about events in my life from 10, 20, 30 years ago that had never been altered, suddenly every sentence became a war to try and insert negative insinuations or all kinds of innuendo, all sorts of incredibly tendentious characteristics and descriptions about my work that were designed to be negative to the point where my entire page became an ideological war because of the fact that my perceived political place in the ecosystem had shifted.

It is certainly true that his biography in late 2015 was by and large celebratory, and today is considerably less so. The early life and career sections preceding the discussion of what many people would consider Greenwald's finest hour and his main claim to fame, the Snowden story, today run to a huge 1,720 words (versus 1,043 words back then).

Here are a couple of the passages that have been expanded:

(2015:) While a senior in high school, at 17, he ran unsuccessfully for the city council.[37]

Boy, what a go-getter! The 2023 version reads very differently:

(2023:) Inspired by his grandfather's time on the then-Lauderdale Lakes City Council, Greenwald, still in high school, decided to run at the age of 17 for an at-large seat on the council in the 1985 elections.[17] He was unsuccessful, coming in fourth place in the race with only 7% of the total vote that election.[18] In 1991, Greenwald ran again for the at-large seat on the council at age 23, coming in third place but losing once again with less than half of the total votes of his other two opponents.[18][19] After two losses during his campaigns for the city council, Greenwald stopped running for political office and instead focused on law school.[13]

Sure, it is a neutrally phrased expansion from reliable sources, but doesn't he sound like kind of an asswipe?

Here is another section that has been expanded:

(2015:) Greenwald practiced law in the Litigation Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz (1994–1995); in 1996 he co-founded his own litigation firm, called Greenwald Christoph & Holland (later renamed Greenwald Christoph PC), where he litigated cases concerning issues of U.S. constitutional law and civil rights.[8][31] One of his higher-profile cases was the representation of white supremacist Matthew F. Hale.[38] About his work in First Amendment speech cases, Greenwald told Rolling Stone, "to me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy...not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate".[39]

(2023:) Greenwald practiced law in the litigation department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz from 1994 to 1995. In 1996, he co-founded his own litigation firm, Greenwald Christoph & Holland (later renamed Greenwald Christoph PC), where he litigated cases concerning issues of U.S. constitutional law and civil rights.[11][12] He worked pro bono much of the time, and his cases included representing white supremacist Matthew Hale in Illinois, who, Greenwald believed, was wrongly imprisoned,[21] and the neo-Nazi National Alliance.[22]
About his work in First Amendment speech cases, Greenwald told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013, "to me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy ... not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate".[23]

Another difference between the 2015 and 2023 versions is that the 2023 version contains a prominent, 400-word paragraph titled "Israel and accusations of antisemitism". Even though this paragraph is based on sources dating as far back as 2012, the word "antisemitism" did not occur in the 2015 article, which merely noted that –

(2015:) Greenwald is critical of Israel's foreign policy and influence on U.S. politics,[102] a stance for which he has in turn been the subject of criticism.[103][104]

Patriotic hero, or despicable scum?

The answer is really a matter of opinion. Greenwald's own writing has shifted tone in the last few years. So has the tone of much journalistic output. While it's clear the article in 2023 takes a few jabs — and maybe unfairly so — who's to say that the article in 2015 wasn't unfairly pulling punches? Maybe this is bias and maybe it isn't. Ultimately, Wikipedia processes derive their just powers from the consensus of the governed, et cetera, which means "who the hell knows?"

Certainly, the distinguished editors of the Signpost (hopefully) have better things to do than get dragged into spittle-flecked noticeboard threads about American Punchfest 2, so not us.

The Australian's Adam Creighton picks up on Greenwald's video and adds a few Wikipedia criticisms of his own that are again likely to inflame the noggin and stir the passions. – AK, AC, JG

Techdirt and the Wikimedia Foundation report on a lawsuit in Portugal brought by Caesar DePaço. As the Wikimedia Foundation's article says:

The case started in August 2021 with a complaint that de Paço was upset about the Portuguese and English language versions of the articles about him. These contain information about his right-wing political affiliations and past criminal accusations, topics that had been reported in reliable sources as publicly relevant. The lawsuit went to court in Portugal, and the Foundation won the preliminary case. Like most courts around the world, the lower court’s decision protected the ability of volunteers to research and write about notable topics, including biographies. However, the case took a strange turn on de Paço’s appeal. We are filing a series of appeals of our own in Portugal to protect the safety of users who contribute accurate and well-sourced information on important topics to Wikipedia. In our 5 July filing, we asked the Portuguese appellate court to refer several important legal questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). However, the Portuguese court ruled against us on 13 July, and demanded that the Foundation turn over personal data about multiple users who worked on the article.

Techdirt's Tim Cushing defends Wikipedia in his piece:

Whatever anyone's concerns are about the ability of Wikipedia to deliver facts, it should never be assumed false information will be given a tacit blessing to remain online. The normal moderation issues are present at Wikipedia, which cannot possibly afford (like any other major internet player) to physically backstop all content creation.

But that doesn’t mean Wikipedia doesn’t care whether or not pages are factual. It does. And that’s why Wikipedia (or its founding entity, Wikimedia) has rarely been sued (and never successfully) over information posted to the site by its users.

However, Cushing's statement that the Wikimedia Foundation has never been successfully sued is incorrect. There have been European court decisions ordering the Wikimedia Foundation to remove content from Wikipedia – examples from the German Wikipedia include the Kessler cases (court documents 1 and 2) and the Waibel case (see also English-language case summary by the plaintiff's lawyers). – AK

• "Egregious" plagiarism: Salon writes that Anthony Sabatini's college thesis on Friedrich Nietzsche was full of "egregious" plagiarism of Wikipedia and other online sources. Perhaps he can get out of it by "writing" an article on academic fraud.
• Creationism isn't taken seriously on Wikipedia, says creationist, invokes co-founder: David Klinghoffer writing in the Discovery Institute blog claims that Larry Sanger supports Intelligent Design, and fought to make Wikipedia handle it more favourably. Larry Sanger has described himself on Wikipedia as "an agnostic who believes intelligent design to be completely wrong", but is indeed a longstanding critic of the way Wikipedia implements its neutral point of view policy, especially when it comes to presenting fringe theories as untrue (he feels they should be presented as equally valid, then let the reader decide, as per previous link and pretty much all his writing on the subject).
• Wikipedia turns man into racehorse, and back again: The biography page of British TV personality Les Dennis was vandalized around 9 August to indicate the celebrity was half horse or some such, and people noticed, including the Bristol Post. [1]
• Sensitive topics: The Guardian reports on topics of particular PR interest to the United Arab Emirates, whose climate change-related Wikipedia editing has been in the news of late (see previous Signpost coverage).

Thirteen years ago today, I wrote a Signpost article, which among other things lamented that a Wikigeneration gap was emerging. At that time, over 90% of our administrators had made their first edit more than three and a half years earlier.

Things have not gotten better over time. Actually, they have gotten worse! In 2010, 90% of admins had made their first edit more than three and a half years prior. In 2023, 99% of our admins made their first edits over four and a half years ago. As for that 90% threshold I used in 2010? Over 90% of current admins made their first edit before I wrote that article. As an editor who started in 2007, I'm still relatively new compared to most of our admins — a majority of whom joined the project in 2005 or earlier.

In thirteen years, the Wikigeneration gap has widened by twelve years.

This is a comparison of the admins of August 2010 versus the admins of August 2023, by the year they created their account on the English Wikipedia. Note that in some cases (many in more recent years) it won't be the same editors — this is when people started editing, not when they became admins. The 2010–11 study is here.

I can understand why we don't yet have any admins who started editing in 2022 or 2023: few candidates now succeed without two years' experience in the community, and candidates with only one year of experience are very rare indeed. But I'm surprised at how few admins we have who joined the community in the entire decade of the 2010s, and especially with the class of 2016. Why do we only have two admins who started editing in that year?

This study looks at admins not by when they became admins, but by when they joined the community. If this inspires someone to go off and analyse things by when people became admins, then I'd be interested to see the result; I think both approaches are potentially interesting (to be honest, I suspect that I used account creation date for the 2010 study because it was easier for me to get that data). As for the 2023 study, there is an advantage in repeating the same analysis (on the same benchmark) thirteen years later. But the results are starker, as many of the three hundred new admins we've had since I published that article thirteen years ago were already editing at that point.

On the flip side, I doubt if anyone imagined thirteen years ago that so many of us would still be adminning on this site thirteen years later. My hope is that we can persuade some Wikipedians who joined the community in the 2010s to become admins; I'm sure there are many of you who would pass easily. But given the fact that we have kept Wikipedia supplied with admins through the last decade, less by recruiting more of them than by retaining the ones we had, I'm confident that if Wikipedia is still here in 2036, many of our current admins will still be around.

I just hope they are outnumbered by new recruits.

For those that follow The Signpost, there was a big shakeup recently, resulting in new blood on the team (see Signpost coverage). While Smallbones is now the new editor-in-chief, I've decided to include myself (Headbomb) as a general editor, mostly focusing on copy-editing, writing special pieces and polishing the technical aspects of The Signpost.

The shakeup left the team with a very short amount of time to cobble together the previous issue of The Signpost, with a generally positive reception. While I can't speak for Smallbones (who said that 'getting the issue out was a great experience'), I felt there was very steep learning curve to getting involved and that a lot of things were needlessly complicated, involved pointless busywork, were poorly documented, or relied on someone else knowing how to do something.

We have been putting up call for volunteers and writers for years without much success. But we failed to ask ourselves who wants to work on a boat where you can't get out of your cabin because the door is rusted shut? Possibly because we were too busy patching holes in the hull while at sea. So for this issue, instead of being a random passerby taking on the task of mending sails during the middle of a hurricane, I figure I'd take The Signpost to the shipyard for a long overdue refit. I don't know that getting involved at The Signpost is now as easy as 1-2-3, but it certainly is easier than ever before.

A lot stuff changed behind the scenes to make The Signpost easier to manage and collaborate on. Big ticket changes include

• A redesigned look for the newsroom and its talkpage. These pages are better organized with less clutter, and feature an improved {{Signpost/Deadline}} tracker. Among other things, the tracker now includes a link to a timezone converter so deadlines can be known in local time.
• A major overhaul in the newsroom's functionality. Three main components were overhauled
  • The newsroom now automatically synchronizes itself with the {{Signpost draft}} templates present on draft articles from the next issue. If you mark a draft from the next issue as ready to be copy edited, the newsroom will reflect that automatically.
  • The newsroom now features Recent changes/See also links that make it easier to monitor changes related to the current and next issues, as well as links to other Signpost-like newsletter in other languages with English translations.
  • The introduction section now offers clearer, less intimidating directions to people who want to help and get involved. The clickable buttons are now consistent with those from the submissions and suggestions pages and will present friendlier preloaded forms.
• We now have a live mockup of the next issue to give a quick overview of how the next issue is shaping up. Note that it will not be very interesting to look at right after publication given that work on the next issue will not have started just yet.
• {{Signpost series}} has been dusted off and modernized. The modernization of Mr. Stradivarius's tag manager script is in progress, but it remains functional. Better documentation is still needed, but article series can be reintroduced when relevant.
• The template / HTML structure behind the 'two-column' and 'full width' styles has been greatly streamlined and made compatible with each other, allowing to easily switch between one style to the other if desired. Which style is used is now explicitely controlled with |fullwidth=no/yes in relevant templates, with |fullwidth=no (two-column style) being used by default.

All of this should allow the editorial team to focus on content, rather than waste time managing things across dozens of pages and obscure template / HTML issues. If you go to the newsroom, everything is there within a click or two: the current status of the next issue, upcoming deadlines, recent changes, reader comments, and more.

While improvements to the management aspects of The Signpost will save the team a lot of headaches, writers and readers that want to get involved were not forgotten. Big ticket changes included

• Better guidance about where to do what is provided in general. It is now much less confusing to get around the various pages of The Signpost. Buttons with preloaded forms were added when missing, or polished to be less confusing.
  • Do you know of an exciting story that should be covered? Click on suggestions!
  • Do you plan on writing an article or want to submit a draft for review? Click on proposals/submissions!
• You can now easily create user drafts with the new 'create a draft button'. This will allow you to work on articles in your user space. This is very useful if you have an idea for a special column, but need time to work on it.
• All drafts created through the newsroom have had their preloaded forms overhauled. They now all feature simpler/clearer/more useful instructions.
• The {{Signpost draft}} template now has a lot more useful information and writer resources, including deadlines and submit buttons for user space drafts.
• Signpost drafts now have editable sections, like regular articles. The [edit] button next to sections is now only disabled in published articles.
• The {{Signpost draft helper}} template is now featured at the bottom of every draft created via the 'create a draft' button in the newsroom. The template explains how to create the syntax of many common elements, like images and quotations, and how to control two-column vs full width styles.

These efforts, which would not have been nearly as successful without the help of DannyS712, Evad37, Pppery, TheDJ, have made it simpler than ever to contribute to the The Signpost! No longer do you need to be a template guru with a deep knowledge of an arcane, Rube Golberg-like, syntax! No more getting lost and confused!

Want to get involved? Then your one stop is the newsroom (WP:NEWSROOM)! If you can make your way there, the rest is an easy click or two away. And if you are content remaining a reader, you can sleep soundly knowing that The Signpost team can now spend more of its time on bringing you the best content instead of doing busywork.

If you have suggestions on how to make contributing to The Signpost more user friendly, leave us a comment below (or at WT:SIGNPOST). Happy editing!

In the dynamic world of Wikimedia Commons, where photographers like me share our works with the public under free Creative Commons licenses, one crucial aspect has sparked heated debates: enforcement. As a photographer passionate about fostering collaboration and creativity, I strongly believe that enforcing these licenses with greater diligence is necessary to protect the integrity of our contributions.

As creators, our primary goal is to contribute to the collective pool of knowledge and inspire others through our art. By embracing free Creative Commons licenses, we empower fellow creators to build upon our works and foster a culture of open collaboration. The essence of Wikimedia Commons lies in the ability of diverse minds to come together, create, and share freely.

Despite our commitment to openness, instances of license violations do occur. When our works are used without proper attribution or without adhering to the license terms we've chosen, it becomes a matter of principle to address such violations. We are not copyright trolls; we are creators who wish to protect the essence of Creative Commons – the idea that sharing and collaboration should go hand in hand with proper recognition and adherence to license requirements.

Enforcing compliance with our chosen licenses is an act of responsibility, not hostility. It is a necessary measure to protect the collaborative environment we cherish. Just as any artist deserves acknowledgment for their masterpieces, we, too, deserve the credit and recognition for our creative efforts.

As creators who wholeheartedly contribute to the wealth of knowledge on Wikimedia Commons, we firmly believe that our works should be used according to the licenses we have carefully selected. The decision to license our creations under Creative Commons is a deliberate one, driven by our commitment to openness and collaboration. We willingly embrace the spirit of sharing, hoping to inspire others and contribute to a collective platform that benefits society as a whole.

However, when these licenses are ignored or undermined, it poses a significant challenge to the very foundation of what we stand for as creators. Seeking monetary compensation when our licenses are disregarded is not about adopting a hostile stance or becoming copyright trolls, but rather about preserving fairness and respect for the artistic contributions we have made.

Our chosen Creative Commons licenses are not arbitrary; they are a conscious reflection of how we wish our works to be used and attributed. As photographers, artists, and creators, we invest our time, energy, and passion into crafting meaningful content. We acknowledge that sharing should not come at the cost of eroding the rights and recognition we deserve as authors.

A balanced approach to enforcement is essential, one that upholds the principles of Creative Commons while promoting a culture of respect for creators. We are not seeking punitive measures, but rather a fair acknowledgment that our works are valuable and deserving of recognition. By doing so, we reinforce the credibility of Creative Commons as a powerful framework that fosters creativity and collaboration.

In seeking compliance with our licenses, we are not stifling the spirit of sharing; rather, we are nurturing an environment where mutual respect between creators and users flourishes. Striking this balance enables us to inspire future generations of artists and contributors, confident in the knowledge that their works will be cherished and used responsibly.

It is crucial to remember that enforcing Creative Commons licenses is not about hindering access to knowledge or preventing creativity; on the contrary, it is about preserving the very essence of our shared contributions. Through the fair enforcement of these licenses, we protect the foundation upon which Wikimedia Commons thrives—a place where ideas converge, creativity is celebrated, and knowledge is democratized for the benefit of all.

A desire to enforce the terms of our chosen licenses should not be misconstrued as an antagonistic act but as a means to ensure that the culture of openness and collaboration we hold dear remains intact. By preserving fairness and respect for creators, we are fostering a vibrant and sustainable community that continues to inspire, educate, and shape the world through our collective artistic endeavors. It is through this shared dedication to the principles of Creative Commons that we can uphold the true spirit of Wikimedia Commons and its transformative power in the realm of knowledge and creativity.

As a dedicated photographer on Wikimedia Commons, I value transparency in enforcing the licenses for my images. To address image theft concerns, I include a notice on my uploads:

"This image is protected against image theft.
Failure to comply with the license may result in legal or monetary liabilities. I use Pixsy to monitor, find, and fight image theft. Please follow the specified license to avoid infringement."

I do this to provide re-users with a clear warning and to maintain an open and transparent approach in enforcing the terms of the license when they are disregarded.

While some creators advocate for stricter enforcement of Creative Commons licenses, there are counter-arguments that highlight potential drawbacks to this approach. One concern is that overly aggressive enforcement might be perceived as punitive or profit-seeking, going against the very essence of Creative Commons' principles. Such perceptions could potentially deter users from engaging with the free culture and collaborative spirit that Creative Commons seeks to promote.

Opponents of heightened enforcement also argue that a more lenient approach aligns better with the ethos of openness and accessibility. They argue that the emphasis should be on encouraging sharing and creativity rather than strict compliance. In this view, the value of Creative Commons lies in its ability to offer a flexible framework that allows for a wide range of uses and adaptations, spurring innovation and exploration.

Creative Commons itself acknowledges the importance of enforcement as a means to ensure the meaningfulness of its licenses in creating a sharing commons. However, they also emphasize the need for a balanced approach, one that is fair to all parties involved. They caution against enforcement that is perceived as punitive or profit-driven, as it could undermine the collaborative and open culture that Creative Commons aims to foster.

"CC believes that enforcement of its licenses is an important part of ensuring that they are meaningful for creating a sharing commons. But if CC license enforcement is perceived as punitive or profit-seeking rather than fair, the whole community suffers. Creative Commons licenses are designed to make sharing and reusing work easy, in contrast to the litigious, restrictive culture of standard all-rights-reserved copyright. A reasonable approach to enforcement that focuses on carrying out the original intent of the licensor and is fair to all parties is most likely to sustain a healthy commons." — Creative Commons: Statement of Enforcement Principles

According to Creative Commons, a reasonable approach to enforcement should focus on carrying out the original intent of the licensor while being respectful and fair to all stakeholders. The organization recognizes that the success of Creative Commons licenses lies in making sharing and reusing work easy, in contrast to the traditional restrictive nature of all-rights-reserved copyright.

In summary, while some creators advocate for stricter enforcement of Creative Commons licenses, there are counter-arguments that highlight potential drawbacks to this approach. Opponents of heightened enforcement argue for a more lenient approach that encourages sharing and creativity. The Creative Commons organization itself emphasizes the need for a balanced and fair enforcement approach that upholds the principles of openness and collaboration.

Creative Commons itself recognizes the significance of enforcement in creating a meaningful sharing commons. However, they rightly emphasize the need for a fair and respectful approach that does not undermine the ethos of openness and collaboration. It is this spirit of balance and equity that we, in my opinion, should also aspire to maintain.

Enforcing compliance with our chosen licenses is in my opinion an act of responsibility, ensuring that our artistic contributions are valued and respected. It is not about stifling creativity or hindering access to knowledge but about preserving the true essence of our shared pool of works.

In conclusion, my unwavering belief is that proper enforcement of Creative Commons licenses is an integral part of nurturing a vibrant and sustainable community. By fostering an environment that values both the rights of creators and the principles of collaboration, we can ensure that Wikimedia Commons remains a powerful platform that fuels creativity, innovation, and the shared pursuit of knowledge. Let us embrace this journey together, upholding the true spirit of Creative Commons for generations to come.

Photography is not only one of my favorite hobbies: it's also a way I feel proud to contribute knowledge to other people, by sharing these photos on Wikimedia spaces. Recently however I've been glad to slow down and nearly stop, and below I'll advocate for people in other urban areas to as well.

The reasoning relates to collaborations and digital archives. For one thing, I've been able to simply take ahold of the copyright reasonings at Com:Hirtle Chart to upload countless works from Google Books, HathiTrust, JSTOR, USModernist, NARA, newspaper archives, and more. And many digital archives hold photos of cities already listed as in the public domain, like the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, the Internet Archive, and [Insert your local library name here], all of which are generally easy to reupload on Commons.

Another immensely beneficial project came about by searching for free images of my city of Columbus, Ohio. I found hundreds on Flickr that people had already licensed for use on wiki spaces. One of these people, Warren LeMay, became one of my closer online friends, and we talk about things relating to our shared loves of history, architecture, and urbanism often. LeMay's works are remarkable enough in their own right: he's photographed in every U.S. state, now with 200,000 images of historic and architecturally-significant buildings across the country, all free to use. And though he's always only used a cell phone to photograph (since the time he created his account in 2011), his resulting images nonetheless are typically the best-quality works in any building's Commons category.^{[N 1]}

From there I had to wonder if other photographers would be up for sharing their photos on Wikipedia. So I sent Flickr messages to several people over time, and almost always heard back with a "yes". So now I have hundreds of good photos of historic Columbus school buildings, thanks to Aaron Turner (Oldohioschools), a huge amount of beautiful Victorian house photos thanks to Christopher Riley (Pythaglio), and of downtown Columbus landmarks thanks to Eric (oxfordblues84). I am glad for all the contributions, and so very glad that some people are even willing to take photographs of places I request, buildings that are poorly photographed or have no photographs online. This was especially the case for Joseph Jessee, who is one of incredibly few photographers using a drone and making his works free to use, and who was simply sharing these photos in a neighborhood Facebook group until I asked to use them. And many or most of his photos are places I asked for shots of, and it's so cool to see these incredible places at heights you'd never usually see.

• 
  Photo of a historic Columbus house, by Warren LeMay
• 
  The Hayden Mausoleum in Columbus, photo by Pythaglio
• 
  Majestic image of the Central Ohio Fire Museum by oxfordblues84

Which brings us to one of the biggest impacts, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). DPLA is a national network of libraries that aggregates digital collections, and provides services to their members—one of which is a pipeline to Commons for institutions' open access digital assets. I got to know User:Dominic, who works for the DPLA and coordinates with the Ohio Digital Network to have Ohio libraries and archives contribute their content to Wikimedia Commons, which by the time he emailed me in September 2022 had a collective total of 301,000 images on Commons. He told me that the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML) could also contribute to the collection, and that I should email and find out if they would like to. I emailed Angela O'Neal, who I had met at a Columbus history event, and who was instrumental in even digitizing and organizing the historical images CML has. She approved the image uploads for non-copyrighted items, and surprisingly over the course of weeks, a total of 335,000 images were uploaded to Commons. This makes it one of the largest image collections by a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) in the world, and it doubled the size of Ohio Digital Network's contribution to Wikimedia. DPLA has already uploaded about over 3.7 million images to Commons from over 300 institutions in the United States, so check if there are any from your local area—or else feel free to get in touch with Dominic about how you can reach out to an institution you'd like to see contributing to Commons like I did.

I can still be glad for all Wikimedians taking photographs in rural areas, and of short events, Wikimedia culture, hard-to-access places, hard-to-find items, and other subjects that are rarely available as free images. And I still commend Commons's pro-level photographers who take stellar photos, but I myself no longer see much of any benefit in taking photos in places like Columbus. Many better photographers have captured the places I've been as well as the places I want to go. I thankfully get better results with much more ease with Flickr messages and emails than I do taking photos out on the street.

Note

Arbitrators are currently evaluating a case request against an administrator, the Right Honorable Frimbley Cantingham, 15th Viscount Bellington-upon-Porkshire, for misuse of the tools.

The case was opened following a long thread on the administrators' noticeboard last week, regarding a large volume of reverts across multiple pages which culminated in a long string of blocks from the viscount, alleged to have been made in breach of admin policy (chiefly WP:INVOLVED).

The blocks, issued by Porkshire on Wednesday morning, took place after a series of revert wars with users on a variety of pages, such as Oliver Cromwell, Church of England, Anglicanism, House of Tudor and Ireland.

2023-06-30T12:11:20 ViscountXV (talk | contribs) blocked 132.61.64.123 (talk) from the page Church of England with an expiration time of indefinite (account creation blocked) (WP:NOPURITANS)

Viscount Bellington-upon-Porkshire was quite active in the early days of Wikipedia, when administrators were appointed directly by the King; he wrote many articles, and some of his essays (like WP:NOPURITANS) are still cited to this day. However, in recent years, his editing history has become sparse; his last logged admin action was in 1661.

Porkshire has said in his defense that he is "Truley shocked to see such Heresie and Contumelious behaviour amongste the Scribes", and questioned the basis upon which the Committee drew its mandate.

Hast thou not reason then to bee ashamed, ye followers of that scoundrell Cromwell, who doth think himself high and mightie, yet is but a usurper of the throne? Verily, his deedes are steep'd in deceit and treachery, casting a shadow upon the land and tarnishing the noble historie of our monarchie.

Thou speakest of his so-called religious principles, but what godly man would dare to lay claim to such wickedness? Cromwell, that hypocrite of the highest order, did cloak himself in pietie, yet his actions betray his true nature. He espoused the ideals of godliness whilst trampling upon the sacred rights of kings, seeking to deny the divine right bestow'd upon them. And thou hast encouraged this Vandalisme of the highest order!

No learned lawyer will affirm that an impeachment can lie against an Administrator... I woulde know by what power I am called hither. I woulde know by what authority!

At press time, the Committee was standing at a 7–2 majority to accept, with two arbitrators recusing themselves on the basis that this bit wasn't funny enough to publish.

• 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.