The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2022-08-31. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.
This is an interesting essay. I'd never thought to apply the concept of walled gardens to Wikipedia, so I appreciate Adam introducing that perspective. Ward's wiki dealt with walled gardens in the early 00's and their discussion on the subject might be of interest to those who want to look deeper. — Wug·a·po·des 00:39, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
You obviously never stumbled across longevity articles, which I did in late 2010. That was the poster child of walled gardens on Wikipedia for years, it took over a decade to cut that down to reasonable size. Deleting massive amounts of junk was essential to cleaning that up. WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Longevity was in 2010/2011, and that was only the very beginning of the second (and, after 8 more years, finally successful) massive effort to get that disaster area contained. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:46, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
Nope, the bulk of the longevity dispute seems to be from before I became active. I'd seen references to the case but never looked too closely at it, so that's something I'll need to dig through. Thanks for the additional lead (and for your work cleaning it up). — Wug·a·po·des 19:16, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
I think you made the argument better throughout the rest of the article, but starting with this just created an inherent contradiction from the get-go:
"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."
If an article is notable, then reliable sources would exist for it to showcase that notability and it also wouldn't be made up. I understand that you meant that the article subject was notable, but the existing article didn't represent or use anything that is a part of that notability, but I feel like that was poorly laid out in this introduction. It just creates confusion on what notability even means if the article lacks notability in its representation.
Also, if a subject is notable (which would only be representable via proper reliable source coverage that has a significant amount of information), then I find it hard to see how any argument other than Stubbify/Re-write a stub paragraph from scratch is viable. That one act alone is what should be done in all cases of a notable article subject that has the issues you are pointing out, but is a notable topic. End of story, that is the action to take. And AfD isn't it if the person nominating knows the subject is notable, they should be the ones stubbifying/rewriting it themselves. SilverserenC 00:57, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Not entirely accurate; if Wikipedia is better without the current article, and no one is willing to write a better one, then the article should be deleted or redirected. Ideally, there would be someone willing to write a better one, but we don't live in an ideal world. BilledMammal (talk) 01:09, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
A single paragraph with a minimum of a single reliable source is not a high bar to reach. Anyone who is willing to put in the effort to create and go through an AfD should be equally willing to stubbify and write 3 sentences for an article. Having a single paragraph article with a proper reference is even more so better than having no article on a topic. SilverserenC 01:12, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I completely agree, and would have added a comment to the effect of this comment if someone else had not already made it. Bahnfrend (talk) 02:35, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
@Silverseren, Bahnfrend, and BilledMammal: There's been a trend of "stubbifying" that's come up after 2008, and, yes, it helps deal with the issue. I decided the main essay shouldn't be overly changed, but I added the last section - alternatives to deletion - for the republication since we have more options now. I do think that upmerging can be better than stubbifying, as context is often more helpful.
It's probably also worth noting that what I was editing in 2008 included a lot of pseudoscience pages, where you would get, for example, 300 articles on, say, Ayurveda, including a bunch of barely-sourced "medicines", which you could readily prove existed, and cover from an ayurvedic viewpoint, but WP:MEDRS required non-alternative medicine sources for, and those didn't exist. Basically, a degree of specialisation that no reliable source was going to cover if they hadn't bought into the concept already. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 17:56, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
starting with this just created an inherent contradiction from the get-go
I'm really not seeing this supposed contradiction, but your response seems to be based on some inferences that contradict the points in the essay.
If an article is notable, then reliable sources would exist for it to showcase that notability and it also wouldn't be made up.
An article can't, itself, "be notable" or not. The subject can be notable, but there's no such thing as a "notable article".
I unberstand that you meant that the article subject was notable, but the existing article didn't represent or use anything that is a part of that notability
Well, not just "meant" that, the essay said exactly that. And it's certainly possible for an article on a notable subject to contain falsehoods or fabrications. It's also possible for that article to lack any reliable sources — even if those sources exist (which, as you say, they must), that doesn't matter if the article doesn't employ any of them. It's precisely the articles filled with unsourced, fabricated, distorted, self-serving nonsense, that the essay is targeting; the ones that get "keep" votes purely on the grounds that "subject is notable", therefore we "must" have an article about it. (Even if it's a disaster?) FeRDNYC (talk) 03:58, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
The options are not just keep in that form or delete it. My point was that an AfD discussion is inherently the problem. Because the point of an AfD is to determine notability of a subject. And if the article subject is already stated to be notable, then the entire AfD was pointless from the get-go. Complaining about Keep votes is entirely missing the point, since Keep is the proper response when asked about the notability of a notable topic. Which is why I pointed out that the automatic response to an issue of an article not properly representing the subject it's about should always be stubbify from scratch, not attempt to delete it. So I guess I am arguing against the central premise of the essay, in that it's fundamentally wrong. Since, yes, the point of Wikipedia is that if a subject is notable, we should have an article on it. Period. The end goal is to have articles on all notable subjects. The way to fix a "disaster" is as I already mentioned. SilverserenC 04:46, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
That's not quite true. Articles that have been on notable subjects, were fully sourced, and for that matter were quite popular with the readers, can and have been deleted at AFD under WP:NOT. Hawkeye7(discuss) 22:07, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Under what part of WP:NOT? Because what that covers would inherently not be notable subjects in the first place (since, for example, dictionary words aren't subjects in the first place). SilverserenC 04:57, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
WP:INDISCRIMINATE: merely being true, or even verifiable, does not automatically make something suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia. That has been interpreted broadly to mean that if enough people don't like a particular subject area, articles on that subject area can be barred from Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Justin Bieber on Twitter for an example. This decision gave real teeth to WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Hawkeye7(discuss) 07:02, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
As Wugapodes said, this is an interesting essay. Is anyone aware of previous efforts to identify these "walled gardens" or "collective orphans" within Wikipedia; I would be very interested in looking through them. BilledMammal (talk) 01:09, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
There would doubtless be a network theory way to do this just by analyzing the network of pages and their interwiki links to identify either full splinter networks (a set of pages that only link to each other) or edge isthmuses of the main network that only sparsely link across (especially if the only links are to extremely central nodes indicating possibly trivial links to pages like USA or similar). T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 00:33, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
Very interesting essay but nothing is going to change as long as there are editors who have an interest in keeping a "bad" article. One example was an AfD discussion regarding a BLP where every citation was primary and/or highly exaggerated - likely the work of a "yourwikipediabio.com" group. Multiple editors rallied in defense and it stayed as "No consensus". Another was an AfD about a defunct small business that would normally fail WP:CORP. Again, there was an editorial rally from those who didn't want the shop's memory to die and another article stays as "No consensus". Second, our setup allows any editor to instantly make a new article go "live". We moderate and review after publication. A really bad article about yet another Titanic rebuild flew under the radar with zero RSs and COI for years before it was finally deleted. BlueRiband► 02:36, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Of course many articles at AfD should be deleted. However there is a percentage that are borderline where good arguments can made either way - that's why they aggregate at AfD and not speedied. These can result in difficult discussions. This does not mean people are unreasonable about deleting. It just means not everything is totally clear in every case. It never can be, never will be. Following the 80/20 Rule (which holds true on Wikipedia very well), about 20% of them are going to be fairly controversial. Of those 20%, another 20% will be ever more. And so on until you get to the really big ones that use up everyone's time and attention. -- GreenC 03:54, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I've overhauled a lot of poorly-referenced or completely unreferenced articles, and while they may have some value for the reader if they are factually accurate (but who's to know?), unsourced articles have zero value for the content writer. The best way is always to rewrite completely, following the same process as writing a new article from scratch. It is much easier that way because you have your sources organised and right in front of you. Chasing up facts one at a time is time largely wasted. WP:PRESERVE: As long as any of the facts or ideas added to an article would belong in the "finished" article, they should be retained if they meet the three article content retention policies: Neutral point of view (which does not mean no point of view), Verifiability, and No original research. [emphasis mine]. Hawkeye7(discuss) 05:12, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Interesting choice of photo. It reminds one of this on any day of the week, especially on Monday mornings. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:22, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I think this attitude does a disservice to entertainment content. Sure, it's possible to have a wrong article about a Mortal Kombat character, but this looks like a perfectly fine fiction/entertainment/pop culture article... and yet, consensus apparently was legitimately to merge. It seems counterproductive and nonsensical to be de facto deleting content like this when there is so much other nonsense out there. Deletion, in other words, is largely driven by the whim of whomever decides to start deleting a sort or class of articles, and has never been, (except for maybe the BLPPROD project), focused on the worst or most potentially harmful of content. Jclemens (talk) 04:54, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
@Jclemens: While that's true, consider the case of, say, pseudoscience. It's valuable for Wikipedia to document pseudoscience, but we can't possibly maintain hundreds of different articles which deal with the pseudoscience at increasingly fine detail. And a POV-pushing article on pseudoscience is much worse than an inaccurate entertainment article.
In 2008 I was dealing with pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and other such things a lot more than entertainment, and the essay likely reflects that. But there is an upper limit to how much of a topic we can do well, and, yes, passionate editors who work well can raise that limit. Still, we should stay in that limit. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 03:42, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
I'm thinking there's an actual balance between universal rules, and situationally appropriate common sense. I don't think Wikipedia is good at the latter, as we tend to attract folks who like a Byzantine labyrinth of policy. Jclemens (talk) 04:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
@Jclemens: Honestly, I expected this article to drive debate more than be universally accepted: An essay is meant to express one view; it's not a guideline, it's just one opinion, and there's plenty of room for contrary opinions. I think you do a good job at raising valid objections. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 05:26, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
I wish your intuition had been correct. I think the pendulum has swung too far, such that "throw it out and start over" (when there's no evidence anyone is ever going to be inclined to do that) is sufficiently popular to be an existential threat to Wikipedia. Jclemens (talk) 05:31, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
You say that like it's a bad thing. If there's "no evidence anyone is ever going to be inclined" to write or update an article, then IMHO that article should not exist, because the community is either unwilling or unable to adequately curate it. I also think that's rather the whole point of this essay in the first place. --NYKevin 05:12, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
I'm generally not a fan of deleting an article where editing can fix it - and by "editing" I include blanking the entire thing and starting again. It requires no special permissions to stubbify an article, and if consensus to do so can be reached on the article's talk page - perhaps with an RfC to gain a wider range of opinions - there's no need for it to go anywhere near AfD. In my opinion, AfD should only be about whether an article should exist on the subject; the actual content of the article is another matter entirely. Actually deleting an article that could instead be stubbified only serves to remove a bunch of contributions from general view, which in my mind goes against the openness of Wikipedia. Sometimes we focus too much on the pedia and not enough on the wiki. WaggersTALK 15:15, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
In my view, if a subject's notability has been established, which requires suitable references to reliable sources, there can never be a justification for deletion. Those references are valuable to our readers even if the article has been reduced to a minimal stub, and they can aid future editors who wish to write a better article.--agr (talk) 15:48, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
@ArnoldReinhold: Realise that I'm a lot less involved in deletion discussions anymore, but a common thing that used to happen was that someone would find three or four sources during the discussion, when there were no good sources in the article. How good these sources were varied; sometimes they really didn't support the notability, sometimes they very weakly did, sometimes they were good - but they weren't in the article under discussion, and occasionally - with the more POV-pushing kind of article - directly contradicted everything actually in the article.
This led to awkward conversations of the sort where the article was something like:
“
Efficacy of homeopathy
It works! It's amazing! I've worked as a homeopath for years and think everyone should try it! (etc.)
”
And someone votes "Keep. These sources show that the efficacy of homeopathy is a matter of academic discussion." But the sources are all about how homeopathy doesn't work. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 02:16, 17 September 2022 (UTC)
I predicated my comment on the the assumption that the subject's notability has been established by reliable sources. If those sources completely contradict the content of the article, that is an editorial problem that should be solved by the usual editorial mechanisms, tagging (citation needed, dubious, etc.), bold edits, talk page discussion, dispute resolution, page protection. Our readers need to hear that sources dispute its efficacy. Deletion reviewer shouldn't act as super editors.--agr (talk) 15:33, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
You have a point, but I will say that there are nuances there. The idea that you can tell other editors "Write an entire new article, here's some sources, otherwise the fraudulent article stays" is problematic - we're all volunteers here; no-one gets to tell someone they must do something, or hold the encyclopedia hostage with fraudulent articles unless they do. Especially if the sources that person provided aren't actually that good. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 17:10, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
I would flip your argument around and say we should not remove a set of sources that establish notability and force any volunteer recreating the article to go find them again. Tagging a substandard article takes no more work than PRODing it and trimming it to a stub doesn't seem much harder than a full deletion nomination and discussion. That stub with its sources is valuable to our readers whether other volunteers expand in the future or not.--agr (talk) 15:23, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
That does rather presume A. the sources are decent, B. the article isn't some form of POV fork of a better article, and C. that there's enough usable material to even get a stub. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 17:44, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
A. Yes, I'm presuming that, otherwise notability becomes an issue. B. A POV fork can be redirected to the main article, ideally adding a section on that POV, if it isn't there and isn't totally fringe. C. If A, then for sure C. However, I suspect we may be arguing about thin air. How often does an article with enough good sources to establish notability come up for deletion? If you see one, let me know. I'll be happy to stubbafy it.--agr (talk) 22:54, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
I gave one example up above. Another type is where the article has been deleted as a copyvio. In the case of RAF Shepherds Grove (and several other articles on RAF bases) I petitioned an admin to restore the article for me with nothing but the infobox and the references. Hawkeye7(discuss) 23:49, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
I would love to see a push for more movies nominated for Featured Pictures. Just have Featured Content full of films to watch. GamerPro64 03:53, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
We get them occasionally. One issue is that voters have to put aside up to two hours to review them properly, so too many and they're all going to fail. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 04:02, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
They will watch all three hours of Intolerance and they will like it! GamerPro64 04:06, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Just a month ago, the Swedish government initiated a report on reviewing current copyright. The assignment even has a specific section "The possibilities of reproducing works of art in a public place should be made clearer" with the remark "It is important that the possibilities to freely reproduce such works are not restricted more than absolutely necessary." The report should be concluded in November 2023. Ainali (talk) 21:32, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
@Ainali the review does not seem to be favorable for Wikimedians, however. See c:Commons:Village pump/Copyright/Archive/2024/01#Swedish FoP. Although it may be more favorable in the context of no longer making Wikimedia Sweden a target of artists' groups in the country, it is less so for Wikimedians globally desiring to share Swedish monuments on Wikimedia sites. Expect a small dose of frustration for the upcoming FoP in Sweden soon, to be aligned similarly to architecture-only FoP of Finland, Norway, Denmark, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, and USA. JWilz12345(Talk|Contrib's.) 09:42, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
Man, I love this stuff! Thank you AC for these pics and for the great key throbs!P.I. Ellsworth , ed.put'r there 04:03, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Glad to do it! As I said, I'm poking some theatrical groups to get more for next month, fingers crossed.... Only have like three or four photos of performers on Commons at the moment, so I definitely will need some additions. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 16:08, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
What? No racial or ethnic diversity within the theatre audience? This needs to be re-drawn!BlueRiband► 01:57, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Tagged with [[Category:Images that should use diverse graphics]]FeRDNYC (talk) 03:10, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Looking forward to seeing how this cartoon plays out. Keep it going! ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 12:20, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Based on Charlotte Bronte's account in her novel "Villette", those 19th-century theatre fire panics were not amusing at all if you got caught up in one. In some incidents, people died... AnonMoos (talk) 22:48, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
You may recognise the image from the Gallery two months ago. It's the second time the Covent Garden Theatre burned down to the ground. I'm kind of going with "things more than 150 years ago are probably alright to use for such purposes", since it's guaranteed to be out of living memory. Kind of like how the Titanic gets used for a lot of things now. But I'll try to avoid such things in future. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 00:04, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
@Adam Cuerden: I don't think it's an issue. I personally liked it, and I am irl pretty sensitive to violence (can't even watch those once-popular "fail compilations" where someone could have gotten hurt). As long as you don't use recent pictures (or really tasteless ones), you're fine. And yeah, I chuckled, a lot :D –LordPickleII (talk) 20:06, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Your Lordship may imagine that Freedom of Speech entitles you to express such an opinion, but in any civilized society Freedom of Speech cannot be entirely without limits, and my late great great great great great great great great aunt Cunegunda might well have lost a few shillings through investing in that theatre, and I am therefore offended to the very core of my being that anybody might deem the source of her possible distress a suitable subject for laughter, and I shall therefore be demanding that the cartoonist and his wicked defenders such as yourself be immediately subjected to the Supreme Cabal's ultimate sanction (as described in Note 4 of this learned treatise). Tlhslobus (talk) 13:53, 9 September 2022 (UTC)
Looks like it was already a bit late to be shouting "Fire". But it seems that freedom of speech does not include the right to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre, but does include the right to make jokes about Fire in a crowded theatre (or at least it does for the time being, and provided it happened over 150 years ago, and provided nobody declares themselves deeply offended, and ...).Tlhslobus (talk) 13:21, 9 September 2022 (UTC)
I feel like the clever cartoonist at fault for creating this is subtly calling Wikipedia a fire... hmm... I mean, it's certainly clever! XFalcon2004x (talk) 20:02, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
It's Userboxes, not "Userboxen", which is why the wikiproject is called WikiProject Userboxes, and the pages in WP space all use the word "userboxes". I will die on this hill. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 00:04, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Begun, the Clone Userboxen Wars has.</yoda> Sideswipe9th (talk) 01:24, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I will join you. Goodness knows what madness lies further ahead, I shudder to think of possibly having to read about the heavyweight title match between two elite bexren. Two holdover exceptions and one poetic archaism are enough for me. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
The Userbox kerfuffle I remember is when an admin named "Kelly Martin" thought that userboxes were so inherently stupid a concept that she felt perfectly free to delete any that she didn't like, with no process. I don't remember the "war" described above at all, though it apparently took place shortly afterward... AnonMoos (talk) 04:51, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
That's what I remember too. Katietalk 17:17, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
There's a lot (l-o-o-o-o-t) more history from back then. The userbox wars were messy, and at the height of things, involved a lot of "fait accompli" bold action by many. Oh and I think "userboxen" came from german usage at the time, and has stuck around as an affectation for some. - jc37 15:53, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
While I fully agree with Jimmy on improvements needed against disinformation, I don't think he or anyone needs to worry about what Elon was complaining about. Since it had little to do with "disinformation" and more to do with the fact that Wikipedia actually had accurate properly referenced information that informs and debunks right wing misinformation and conspiracy nonsense. And Elon has gone full in on the latter stuff, so of course he's complaining that we include scientific and fact based information proving him wrong. SilverserenC 00:42, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
As one of the people who was getting yelled at on Talk:Recession for a few days during said imbroglio, I don't know if it was "conspiracy nonsense" so much as a few newspapers jumping on a juicy story and half-assing the background research, surely a time-honored journalistic tradition (albeit an annoying one). jp×g 21:26, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Foundation help with disinformation
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.
I'm not familiar with this effort. Where can I read more about it? czar 01:08, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
@NGunasena (WMF):RMerkley (WMF) was previously pinged to say a little more about this back in 2020 but they never got round to it. Could you as the new Chief of Staff elaborate a little now?
As there wasn't anything public on-wiki about this US elections project (unless I missed it; if so, please provide a link) the impression generated is that there was substantial off-wiki communication between the WMF and a subset of volunteers to coordinate mainspace editing. Best, AndreasJN466 09:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
@Jayen466: Indeed. Very, uh, fascinating if true. jp×g 21:27, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. Interesting (the pdf in particular). AndreasJN466 06:15, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
So to summarize, it looks like the quoted text refers to a specific 2020 anti-disinformation effort specifically in the US and the stats do not link back to a central report or coordination page, whether on Meta-Wiki or elsewhere. Additionally, at first blush and per the Signpost comments, Merkley's statement seems to conflate actions I'd expect editors to take without prompting (watchlisting pages, protecting pages, and reverting edits) with actions that the task force directly implemented (the "18 events" mentioned). Merkley laid out a little bit more about the WMF's investment in a prior post, but I am not seeing exactly where there is hand-in-hand communication between editors and the Foundation to address disinformation (apart from the work that went into those 18 events), conduct research, and build new tools specifically for anti-disinformation. Or if it happened, perhaps it isn't summarized online? Have I missed something? czar 06:43, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
I got the immpression off pages 5–7 of the pdf that this was primarily about improving communication between the WMF, OTRS and functionaries (stewards, oversighters etc.). AndreasJN466 07:30, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
I thought that Biden PDF was some kind of postmortem of a singular incident, not a report on the overall anti-disinformation effort. Merkley's initial October 2020 announcement of the anti-disinformation effort refers to starting efforts two months in advance, which would include this August 2020 incident. Unless there are other classified incidents, it might be that the main effort was the creation of a WMF T&S Disinformation subteam (pamphlet to the right). czar 21:10, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for finding that. AndreasJN466 08:21, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
@Czar: Published today: [1]THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. ... Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.AndreasJN466 00:35, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
Not a fan of that. –MJL‐Talk‐☖ 02:40, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
As detailed here, the bit about Wikipedia is not news at all, the Foundation itself announced that two years ago.
What's more, that Intercept article seems highly dubious in general. The ever snarky but reliable Techdirt (not known as a defender of censorship) has a detailed fisking, concluding:
The [Intercept] article is garbage. It not only misreads things, it is confused about what the documents the reporters have actually say, and presents widely available, widely known things as if they were secret and hidden when they were not.
Also:
In fact, just after this story came out, ProPublica released a much more interesting (and better reported) article that basically talks about how the Biden administration gave up on fighting disinformation because Republicans completely weaponized it by misrepresenting perfectly reasonable activity as nefarious.
The WMF didn't tell us it was coordinating with the DHS as far as I recall; it only referred to "government agencies".
Also note that the WMF's Disinformation job ads asked for Arabic, Persian and Russian speakers and that T&S reportedly claims to be "fighting ISIS". What is not clear to me is how, to what extent and through what mechanisms WMF work in this field impacts content. AndreasJN466 10:38, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
Definition definition
It's curious that USA Today took the definition definition things as the fact to debunk. To my understanding, it was just a small offshoot of the recession saga that never really gained much traction since it's just nonsensical. {{u|Sdkb}}talk 05:09, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Here [2] is another Bloomberg article (originally) on the Recession-WP-war I rather liked. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:24, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Decent article, save for the bit about "although editing bots on Wikipedia engage in sustained and often destructive warfare" which has never been true. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:30, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
Do I smell toast?
The MacMasters saga should be taught to future Wikipedians as a case study. I lose sleep over the possibility of typos as innocuous as the fictitious middle initial of a real politician infecting Wikipedia, and then being massively perpetuated across the internet by the myriad of mirrors, bots and lazy journalists, corrupting the future. When legions of editors can't recognize a hoax because their so-called reliable sources have circularly reported Wikipedia's BS (and because it's nearly impossible to prove a negative or find a reliable source claiming that the fictional MacMasters did not invent the toaster in the face of sources that assert contrary bogus claims) Wikipedia risks playing a large part in the stupidifying of the future. --Animalparty! (talk) 04:45, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
I've seen quite some hoaxes at WP:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia, but most of them don't have this much of a cultural impact outside Wikipedia. News authors and researchers need to stop being lazy and be made aware that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, they should have a knowledge about the tools required to identify hoaxes, for example Google NGrams data prior to Wikipedia article creation. WikiBlame is another great tool, although I'd appreciate a simplification of the user interface, which helps in identifying the date & time of addition of any claim, hoax or not. Only if they did their research. It is their laziness that has helped to bolster the hoax over the year. Otherwise, someone would have certainly put a [citation needed] tag by now which would have stopped the spread of the hoax.—CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X}) 07:38, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
As a general comment, I've tried to use WikiBlame many times and have never figured out how the bloody hell to make it do anything useful. You'd think something that's potentially so useful would be functional enough to actually do something (and no, making me want to throw whatever device I'm using out a window doesn't count). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:32, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
@The Blade of the Northern Lights: https://xtools.wmflabs.org/blame can be a good alternative (example search) but has limited functionality compared to WikiBlame. It only checks additions, no removals; works only for mainspace articles, no other namespace is supported; only wikitext can be searched not the visual part; start/end date range is not supported, an end date can be set such that additions are searched in revisions older than that date; only supports 5 projects, though enwp is one of them. —CX Zoom[he/him](let's talk • {C•X}) 22:38, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
Salaries
"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)," - this would seem to assume that zero was spent on WMF pension contributions, or what the UK would call national insurance, or various benefits and so on. These are fairly often grouped under salary and thus trying to make a pure "take x divide by y" without factoring it in will lead to significant inaccuracies Nosebagbear (talk) 20:19, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Aside from the overhead, which is easily an additional 30% above base salaries, $68k is nowhere near the average base salary for an engineering-focused org based in the Bay Area, which is the highest paid region of the US. I'd recommend taking the estimate out of the Signpost article. czar 20:55, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
I know that at least one of the highly compensated positions listed at the discussion for another section in this issue is filled by a remote worker. We shouldn't automatically make comparisons to Bay Area. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:57, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
For a remote org headquartered in San Francisco, I think it's safe to assume that the highest proportion of their salaries are benchmarked to the Bay Area. But even with the assumption that pay is by geography, $65k per employee is nowhere near accurate for an engineering-focused firm, which Levivich's calculation below upholds. czar 21:48, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Levivich said at 21:01 that salary comp is "perhaps much higher" than $104k per (non executive) employee. It sounds reasonable to me. Engineering median wage is right about $100k per Michigan Technological University, and that's granting many employees are engineering track, but at the same time many are non-technical doing other nonprofit functions. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:22, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Right, I agree that Levivich's $104k is closer to what sounds reasonable than the Signpost's listed $65k, and I agree that it is likely higher once the FTE are separated from the contractors/contingent workers. I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in the Michigan Tech page but it is worth noting that software engineer/developers are paid higher than engineers in general, i.e., much higher than $100k, on average, and I imagine that's including location-based disparities even if it's based mostly in Michigan. czar 23:41, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
@Czar: 65K is what Distractify reported; I was making the point (or trying to make it ...) that the figure reported by Distractify was far too low. AndreasJN466 21:21, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
It's WMF 2020 Form 990, page 10 (Part IX: Statement of Functional Expenses), column A ("Total expenses"):
line 5 "Compensation of current officers, directors, trustees, and key employees": $3,200,369
(line 6 is $0)
line 7 "Other salaries and wages": $52,302,332
line 8 "Pension plan accruals and contributions": $1,445,512
line 9 "Other employee benefits": $8,022,951
line 10 ("Payroll taxes"): $2,886,511
The total ($67,857,675) is also on page 1, line 15 "Salaries, other compensation, employee benefits (Part IX, column (A), lines 5-10)". During that period they had 300-500 employees or so. Not all full time, but 52M / 500 = 104k. But if you divide 52M by the number of full-time equivalents (whatever that number is, idk, but it's less than the total number of employees because not all are full time), it's gonna be higher than 104k, perhaps much higher. Levivich 21:01, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
The number of employees captured in the line 15 figure is below 400. According to the WMF's FAQ on Meta, the line 15 total does not include contractors, so it's only the 320 employees listed in line 5 plus any non-US employees (as opposed to contractors). Now, non-US employees cannot have numbered more than 54, because that is the total number of employees, agents, and independent contractors the WMF had outside of the US that year. $68M divided by 374 is over $180K. 55.5M (total compensation paid) divided by 374 is about $148K; this would be net salaries without benefits and taxes two years ago, but bear in mind that the number of FTE would have been significantly smaller, given that there were well over a hundred people leaving or joining during the year according to the tuning sessions. AndreasJN466 20:29, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
It's a shame the NPP community has to resort to such an action to obtain any engagement from the WMF, particularly while the Foundation is wallowing in money but is making a desperate need for cash a fundraising claim for needing more. There does still seem to be a disconnect between the Foundation and its flagship projects whose voluntary work brings in the donations. Having been involved with NPP for well over a decade, the community's action has my total support. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:12, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I must be missing something. The last sentence but 1 in the NPP section says:"There is a particular need for reviewers who can accurately judge the quality of foreign-language sources" Why can't/don't foreign-language Wikipedia's help out here? It shouldn't be that hard for any language WP to begin an inventory of their language sources, pass some form of judgement and make it available for other WP–languages. Add a section where foreign editors can submit a source for judgement and there's a handy and valuable tool IMO. I'm sure I'm not the first 1 to think along these lines, so what gives? Dutchy45 (talk) 19:38, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
@Dutchy45 multilingual editors who speak English are probably already active on enwp out of necessity, due to enwp's dominance/popularity. That said, enwp's policies on notability may different from other language editions of Wikipedia, so we couldn't easily transpose notability of sources. That could change if a project like meta:WikiCite/Shared Citations became a reality. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 20:12, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
As the author of the Shared Citations proposal, I'm always pleased to see it mentioned and recommended 'in the wild' like this - thank you Shushugah. While I do wish to reiterate the implication of your point Shushugah that this is indeed merely a proposal and makes no promises of funding/prioritisation, all good ideas have to start somewhere :-) I would appreciate if people who are interested in the issues of assessing reference quality on en.wp would have a look at the proposal and see if they think its a viable solution. As I hope is obvious to people who read it - especially the "principles" section - it would permit each language WP to still make its own sovereign choices about the visual display/format of references, and its own policies about what counts as "reliable", but to centralise the task of all the data entry required to maintain and monitor it all. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 10:21, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
Fundraising emails
I'm going to be blunt here, those fundraising emails are awful and misleading. They're the kind of thing you'd expect to show up in your spam email. Even if there wasn't anything ethically wrong about them (which is definitely the case), it also just bad for Wikipedia's overall credibility. I've also met a lot people IRL who find persistant fundraising campaigns in general to be annoying... the more they're asked, the more they feel like they're being forced and the less likely they are to feel like they want to of their own volition. Clovermoss(talk) 01:29, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
@Clovermoss: Thanks. May I ask you – and indeed anyone who has an opinion on these fundraising emails – to please go visit the ongoing RfC at the Village Pump and copy whatever you say here and say it there at the RfC as well:
If we want to have our voice heard, we need to have a well-visited RfC we can point to. Cheers, --AndreasJN466 08:01, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Glad to see the acknowledgement and promise that "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." Which confirms one use of the 31% number referred to in past discussions. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:28, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Nobody seems to have any idea what that number actually includes. However I am certain that what readers imagine does not match the reality.
As I mentioned before on Meta, "31% of your gift" in 2020/2021 would have been 31% of $163 million, i.e. about $50 million. That's an order of magnitude more than all Awards and grants combined. (Note that the total $9.8M "Awards and grants" figure shown on that page includes the annual $5 million to the Endowment at the Tides Foundation, see p. 14.)
When I asked for more information what this 31% figure is supposed to include, I received no reply. AndreasJN466 17:40, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
There is certainly a risk that without a good explanation, the Foundation could be seen as a self-licking ice cream cone by some. I mean, even taking the 31% figure at face value, that means 69% of the gifts do not support volunteers who create content... hmmm. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:08, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
About the self-licking ... the other day, I compared the top salaries in the 2018 Form 990 versus the 2020 Form 990.
I found that from 2018 to 2020 –
the CEO's total compensation incl. benefits increased by 7% (to $423,318),
I just read about what happens with Thomas. That is such a crappy behavior from Wikipedia. It happened in 2021, now is 2022, and nothing had changed. I am sure average people thought that Wikipedia is on the verge of being taken offline and the boards of WMF are paid very low and working so hard to keep Wikipedia running, while the truth is completely the opposite. I didn't expect a change either this year, as long as editors like us kept working to keep the project online. ✠ SunDawn ✠(contact) 07:38, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
I absolutely agree that those, roughly, are the most prevalent (mis)perceptions. And those are misperceptions deliberately fostered by the WMF, using this project as the vehicle to spread them – for financial gain.
VRT/OTRS volunteers have commented on this as well (e.g. User:Ellihere: "I can't go into the specifics, but as a VRT agent I've received numerous emails from people on limited incomes who are donating money they need because they believe that Wikipedia is in trouble and that they need to give money to keep it online. I'm absolutely disgusted by this, and I think it will catch up to us in the long-run, as people won't want to give once they realize how deceptive these campaigns are."). --AndreasJN466 09:30, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
@Jayen466: Done. The Thomas example breaks my heart, by the way. Clovermoss(talk) 17:22, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
The more I hear about the WMF, this as well as the way the new Vector skin is being developed, the more alienated they seem from the goals, concerns, and efforts of Wikipedia and its editors. Good thing they don't own the rights to any of the content. small jarstc 09:33, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
Oh, but they do have a product to be sold for profit! Courtesy of their own editors that are working for free of course. I am sure WMF didn't put this on their email. WMF clearly have achieved their donation target several times over they need, and they are planning for a "profit arm" (using free labor, I must say), but still they seem to be begging for donation. I have received donation requests from Salvation Army or others and they didn't beg this much, despite they may be in need of more money than WMF. ✠ SunDawn ✠(contact) 11:34, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
@SunDawn: this statement is inaccurate, and a failure of assume good faith. A rule that still apply to staffers. product to be sold for profit! - putting aside that it's a service providing, how is it to be sold for profit? The Foundation can't make profit - anything that comes in through that arm is added to the general fundraising pot. It's commercial-generated fundraising, not profit that can go to shareholders. In a sense, Enterprise is the fundraising aspect that is least on the basis of editors' free labour (I mean, no-one else is donating except because they like one project or another, I assume?) - it's generating value on the basis of a more reliable provision of that information in a better format. The WMF has numerous projects where it's been terribly untransparent - but Enterprise is not one of them. It's on Diff, it had multiple office hours, their base document was amended from feedback and you can just talk to the team and they answer. I'd be surprised if they have met their donation target given where they are in their fiscal year. And we've never got to several times the donation target, although it's certainly heavily exceeded. Now, that was the source of one of my other complaints, where they indicated they hadn't met it. Which I believe is correct...but they wouldn't have expected to do so yet. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:25, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
I do assume good faith with fellow editors, but I don't think it applied to WMF. On the other hand, I do understand that there is nothing inherently wrong in making a profit, but the general tone of WMF is that they are "running out of money", "in the brink of shutdown", "can only rely on donations from the readers", while in fact they are not running out of money. I know many charities are running "for profit" - Goodwill, Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, are running "profitable" thrift stores. I have no problem with them because of their tone. ✠ SunDawn ✠(contact) 04:01, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
I'd love to be an admin, but I've been around for only a year and haven't made a single article, and my one AfD proposal went up in flames. I'm not sure my RfA would ever pass. Minkai (boop that talk button!-contribs-ANI Hall of Fame) 12:23, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I don't see why you couldn't pass with some more experience. Time-wise, a year should be enough, but you should probably get some content experience and demonstrate that you understand policies in administrative areas before running. — Mr. Stradivarius♪ talk ♪ 13:11, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I would agree. We've all had AfDs that didn't turn out the way we expected; if that were a disqualifier we'd have no admins at all. SeraphimbladeTalk to me 23:03, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Yeah I think there is barely anyone here these days that really do want to be an admin. RfAs get a bad reputation for a reason. GamerPro64 03:49, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
This would require technical changes, obviously, but could the adminship crisis be averted by further breaking down 'the mop' into more specific permission roles? For example, the area of Wikipedia I am most experienced with is RC patrol and counter-vandalism, but for the brief moment I considered applying for an admin permissions it became obvious that with my lack of article writing I would never even be considered. The standards have only gone up since then, and I would never under any circumstances subject myself to the current RfA process, even if my editing history could support admin rights. But if there was a 'Counter-vandalism admin' who only had the rights to do things like delete recently created pages and block non-confirmed users, it might be something that the community might see fit to grant to people of my profile. In any case, it seems to me that the most fundamental problem Wikipedia has as a project is dwindling editorship, and the dwindling adminship is an extension of that. It seems to me like fixing this should be one of the top priorities for the project to ensure the long-term success of Wikipedia. Melmann 16:56, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
Farsi Wikipedia IP block experiment
Despite what the study's highlights claimed, it appears that disabling IP edits had no identifiable effect on the total number of good-faith edits—the decline that was observed was also observed on other wikis in the same region that did not disable IP edits.
I know this isn't the fault of the Signpost because they were just quoting sco:Wikipedia:September 2022 Writin Drive, but "help out the site's admins by teaching them proper Scots, and generally improve the quality of the Wiki" makes it sound like CiphriusKane (the only active admin) can't speak Scots. They are a native speaker, though. –MJL‐Talk‐☖ 23:32, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Cobra 3000 was reusing the text from 2 years ago, should probably be updated, seeing as the non-Scots writers from that period have left the wiki now CiphriusKane (talk) 15:57, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
My account will be old enough to vote in April 2023. I haven't become an administrator, I've stayed a little more focused on Fraternities and Sororities. I've recently run into editors who are younger than my account, born after April 1995. It is fascinating to deal with editors who have never known a world *without* Wikipedia, and who think it is *normal* for web searches for gigantic companies to show Wikipedia's page about them on the first screen. I've seen people and companies *beg* to have Wikipedia pages about them and others who assume that everything that web searches have about them *comes* from Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Naraht (talk • contribs) 16:01, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Hmm. My account turned 18 back in October 2020, & no I'm not the most senior active editor here. (There are a few more around, quietly lurking in the shadows. I guess we all need to get a life.) My memoirs about my tenure here would be notably less optimistic. -- llywrch (talk) 05:20, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Me too, @Llywrch. My account is a wee pup, a mere 16 years old, but I too would be much less optimistic.
Wikipedia is in general far too reluctant to take a critical look either at the state of Wikipedia's content or the capabilities of editors. This article is yet more of the standard rosy picture. BrownHairedGirl(talk) • (contribs) 13:55, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
39.5% of the clicks coming through in-body external links is a bit concerning, no? I thought such hyperlinks were generally discouraged. W. Tell DCCXLVI (talk to me!/c) 10:28, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
As was commented in the article, the split was "Infoboxes","References", "Other" (also called main body). As such, two EL, one in the lede or in a section outside of a reference and one properly in an EL section would be viewed identically. I would *love* to see the analysis done with an EL section split from "Other/main body".Naraht (talk) 15:54, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Ah, I did not consider that ==External Links== would not be considered under References. Yes, it would indeed be interesting to see such an analysis. W. Tell DCCXLVI (talk to me!/c) 15:02, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Yes - such a frustrating oversight! I have to say though, I'm actually surprised that the overall dolar value came out so low (basically negligeable when spread across so many potential target organisations). I suppose it's actually good news, since it discourages manipulation by companies. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 00:18, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
I wonder if it changes when an archived page from the Wayback machine is used? I fixed a rotted url today regarding an external link to a building preservation group. The structure is being demolished so preservation is moot and while the group has disbanded their domain redirects to a porn site. If the above analysis is correct then having the link in Wikipedia may have increased its value for the domain brokers. Or maybe it now goes down because a click on wikipedia no longer takes one to the porn site. BlueRiband► 04:25, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
I love the idea! I've always felt frustrated at what libraries are like here in the Netherlands, and comparing our list article with a single county of the US is already making it look very weird. I'm not entirely sure how to interact with Dutch libraries, I prefer second-hand bookstores. Maybe I'll take a picture of my favorite ^_^ – I can at least take a picture of the libraries in and around Hoorn for this project, though :) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 11:51, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
This is a superb idea indeed. In Boise, Idaho alone plans are afoot for the Library! (stylized as such) downtown to be razed and replaced in some glorious fashion, and the original Carnegie Library, defunct since 1973, is in private hands and being renovated for the umpeenth time. And then there are such gems the Unabomber's library of choice... https://www.lclibrary.org/145/Lincolnkencf0618 (talk) 14:01, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
I would also like to join in! Im based in London, UK and travel around a bit. It would be good to determine which libraries do not have photos? Can a list of libraries internationally/in regions be created using Wikidata, and either (I dont know this bit) automate a list of which libraries do not have photos OR as volunteers go through and list them? Rhagfyr (talk) 16:18, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
«In February 2020, a volunteer collected data from more than 8000 libraries in Spain and incorporated them into Wikidata. However, not all of them have a free photograph in Wikimedia Commons that can illustrate their item in Wikidata or their article in Wikipedia. The same happens with libraries around the world.
Therefore, from Wikimedia Spain we launched the campaign No library without photography, with the aim of getting images of photographs of libraries under free license. Although it is aimed at the whole society, through it we want to involve especially librarians, as a way to approach the Wikimedia ecosystem and to participate in the dissemination of knowledge.
In addition to creating a specific campaign in Commons, there is also the possibility of participating through the WikiShootMe! tool, where the libraries in Spain that do not yet have a photo are displayed, and uploading the images directly from there.»
Information from: This Month in GLAM – Volume XII, Issue I, January 2022
We need a map on the phone. Anytime I'm in a place I haven't been lately, or ever, I open the WikiShootMe site and look for red dots. It isn't quite the same as a map of places with no Commons pictures, and it doesn't distinguish libraries from playgrounds, theaters, and other targets until I tap the dot, but generally I just walk to the nearest few red dots and photograph them regardless, turning them green. 'Twould be pleasant to replace the dot with a symbol. Anyway I've done a few dozen library exteriors within 20 miles of my Manhattan home, but not nearly a majority, and very few interiors. Jim.henderson (talk) 01:39, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
I'd join in. I would love to have Wikidata items as well as photos, though that is a bit harder. For good WD, you need to distinguish between the buildings and the institutions which occupy and run them (d:Q6133813, d:Q63468534, d:Q111593928), and find historical information for start and end dates. Having the data items could power tools like WikiShootMe, which I confess I haven't yet used. I see coordinating some standards for Data structure and Commons templates could be important related activities. Thumbs-up for both "#1lib2pics" and "Wiki Loves Libraries", though I wonder whether the prospect of a Wiki Loves competition would cause people to hold their pics for competition month instead of uploading them straight away. Perhaps "uploaded in the last year" would be an appropriate entry criterion (or you could have two categories). ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 10:40, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
Actually, a day or two most weeks, I do bits of a much broader project. Today and yesterday, walking through places I don't see every month, I brought up WikShootMe and adjusted my route to hit red dots. I don't like WSM so much for the actual shoot and upload, so when I found a target (many Wikidata items are for a building that was demolished decades ago) I brought up Commons App which supplies a form to fill out. The targets I found this weekend were mostly community gardens yesterday and office buildings today; I already shot the libraries years ago or someone else did. So, yes. Use WSM everywhere and, if you like, Commons App as well. Might be pleasant to have symbols to show which red dots are libraries, or a feature to select only libraries or only churches or street clocks or statues or bodies of water or whatever specialty, but even a map full of red dots for all kinds of potential target is not a reason to shun them.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Jim.henderson (talk • contribs) 21:16, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
There is a libraries-related Wikidata group, which meets weekly, with next meeting tomorrow September 6. Quote from "Wikidata weekly summary #535":
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call September 6, 2022: Dominic Byrd-McDevitt will talk about the Digital Public Library's Wikimedia program, an effort to provide national leadership around access and discoverability of digital collections by leveraging Wikipedia and its sister projects. 2 years ago, DPLA launched a digital asset pipeline to enable participating institutions in the DPLA network to share their collections with Wikimedia Commons. DPLA is continuing to innovate by taking advantage of Wikidata entities and Structured Data on Commons to continually synchronize data and improve discoverability. We'll discuss issues around large datasets, aggregation, reconciliation, and other challenges DPLA has faced. Agenda
Perhaps that group and/or Digital Public Library of America itself, with huge agendas, could be involved in much smaller task of just getting photos of libraries? --Doncram (talk) 00:01, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
Interestingly, KLM's September in-flight magazine has a multi-page photo spread about amazing libraries around the world. There are some pretty stunning libraries out there! MeegsC (talk) 21:19, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
I'm really interested, but in a country like mine unfortunately going around looking for *something* town by town is something that is denied for personal safety reasons until further notice. Personally, wherever I go I take pictures of libraries in Mexico, so I will continue to do so and I remain attentive to ideas that may arise to organize it. ProtoplasmaKid (talk) 16:27, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
Could we at least have a commons category for images that are added under this project? That would provide some minimum organization. Maybe sub cats by nation?--agr (talk) 15:39, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
Splendid idea. Here you go: Category:1lib2pics. Subcats will follow if needed. Vysotsky (talk) 23:34, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
This is a great idea. Here in Roseville, California, we have a very cool library. I'll collect some images.AlexisRUS Z (talk) 19:40, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Wonderful project. I teach a course in library history and one assignment is to document a local library with a photo which I then make optional that it be added to Wikimedia Commons. The students tried to add articles about specific libraries to Wikipedia and these are often deleted by editors many of whom don't think libraries are notable. Because this discourages students, I now encourage posting image and then--as you suggest--add these to articles about counties or cities. It would be grand to have images of all libraries.Kmccook (talk) 12:55, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
Just a note on anyone pursuing this idea (which I consider worthy): I went to my small town's library (which is housed in different rooms on different floors of our village hall; it does not have its own building) and after discreetly taking a picture from the upstairs balcony went downstairs and asked the guy at the front desk if it was OK for me to take a picture down there. He said there were privacy issues and I could only do so if the library director (a woman with whom I am, thankfully, acquainted) gave permission. I haven't yet been able to see her about this, but while I'm optimistic that she'll like the idea, other readers deciding to do this should be mindful that this may be an issue, particularly in smaller libraries. Daniel Case (talk) 19:51, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
I've just uploaded a photo of the exterior of the (brand new) public library in Uithoorn, the Netherlands, on Uithoorn on NL. I've also taken a photo of the interior but I have to obtain permission for publication. (While libraries are open to the public, they are not seen as "public spaces", and it is up to the organisation in charge to allow photos being taken. Also, the architect might well claim intellectual property rights. I made sure that no persons are visible in the picture.) Perhaps it helps that I'm a volunteer with this library: I've asked the lady in charge of coordinating the activities of the volunteers to forward my request to the head of the Department of Unusual Requests. I'll keep you informed. Kind regards, MartinD (talk) 09:21, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
Love this idea - I tried really hard to get library workers to add to a flickr group I set up when working for a national libraries taskforce, to collect free-to-use images of libraries, but most of the photos in that group I think I took! All are cc marked, and all I think have been added to wikimedia. I'm also researching the Carnegie legacy in England and Wales [1] - and would love to work with someone more expert in wikipedia editing than me to improve the wikipedia page on Carnegie libraries in Europe [2] (which is mostly a list at the moment) to incorporate more of the information I've collated from a range of sources including local newspapers and library visits - which I currently publish on a website. Apologies, I haven't got a formal wikipedia ID 146.198.55.57 (talk) 17:51, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
Update on my post of 9 October: I'm still awaiting permission to upload the photo of the interior. It seems that nobody in the management is willing to assume the position of Head of the Department of Unusual Questions. A bit odd, considering that being asked unusual questions is part and parcel of a librarian's job. But the lady in charge of coordinating the activities of the volunteers has assured me that I will get an answer, one way or the other. Hope it will be a positive one.;) KInd regards, MartinD (talk) 11:16, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
Wikimania 2022 wasn't successful for me either. I was able to watch one of the discussions at about the time it was taking place, and it was very interesting. However, the other real time broadcasts of the discussions simply wouldn't work with the interfaces I was using. I therefore had to resort to waiting until a discussion was published on YouTube, sometimes several days later, and watching it then. Not really very satisfactory, especially as I was literally thousands of kilometres away from the nearest of the offline gatherings. Bahnfrend (talk) 01:32, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I signed up for Wikimania 2022 but I never really attended. I couldn't really figure out how everything worked and I didn't feel like going through the sheer frustration of it all. I was interested in potentially being a part of the hybrid IRL meetings too, but I'm Canadian and the two local ones for me were in the United States. I'm close-ish to the border so I kind of get it, but stuff like getting a passport are not the easiest at the moment even if it's getting better [3]. Thousands of km away is much worse, though. Clovermoss(talk) 01:37, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I'm not surprised at this scathing report. I signed up but didn't 'attend' any of the online events because I suspected as much and I'm not a fan of online meetings anyway. There is absolutely no substitute for the genuine conference. No other kind of event can encourage the volunteers to feel more part of the Wikipedia they are editing, and offer them a venue for meeting their Wikifriends and discussing their projects properly in detail, and listening to those of others. It's no one's fault that COVID intervened to break the traditional annual event but it's time to get it back on track and with the original plan to make Bangkok its venue. The vast savings in money by not having to organise one four years in a row, should make the next Wikimania the greatest event ever, and allow not only for planning by experienced event organisers, but also a much greater attendance by volunteers and less monopoly of presentations by paid WMF staff on yet another junket. Every real Wikimania I have attended has been marred in some way by serious planning oversights by its amateurish but well intentioned and hardworking teams of volunteers. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:48, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Re Wikimania 2022. I was among those who looked through the program, found only a handful of sessions that interested me with "meaty topics", then discovered that they were all be held at 2am (or similar) in my timezone or clashed with a real-life commitment if during my daytime. So I never attending a single session of Wikimania 2022. I keep meaning to catch up via videos, but deep down I know it's not going to happen (too busy with other things). The problem with an online conference is that you remain in your home town with all the usual expectations of family, friends, bosses, colleagues, real-world volunteering, etc, to do the things you always do at the times you always do them. This does not allow you the luxury of sitting up all night attending an online Wikimania when you have to function in the real world during the daylight hours without being sleep-deprived behind the wheel of a car, finalising an important report, etc. But when you get on a plane to another city, many of the expectations of your everyday life disappear (or can be managed by not answering your phone and ignoring their emails, later blaming "local technical difficulties"). Being in another city means you are in the same time zone as Wikipedia and free to fully devote yourself to it. But, the opportunity to attend an in-person Wikimania is limited due to cost, visas, and other factors, so there is definitely a role for an online event, but I think the online and the in-person events should not both be branded as Wikimania and should not be trying to do the same thing, but treated as separate activities with separate organisers and and each free to pursue a different audience, a different purpose, in a different way. The online event might do better not to be done as an intensive 3-5 days (which is essential for in-person event) but as a series of presentations and other activities spread over a few months (or all year round) so attendees are more able to squeeze in a session here and there into their otherwise busy lives with sessions repeated across different time zones in different weeks, etc. It is clear that (even ignoring the technical platform issues) there are barriers to trying to replicate a traditional in-person Wikimania in an online format, and two of those are time zones and the competition for the attention of the Wikimedian vs the demands of their everyday life. Kerry (talk) 02:08, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I have the good fortune to live in New York City, big enough to have our own meeting, our "Wiki Worlds Fair" at a small museum and including a preliminary visit to a big museum and an evening at a beer garden. Not exactly a Wikimania culture crawl, but something. We even had visitors from distant New England and Canada, and some food on the big day at the small museum. Our presentations had neither the quantity nor the quality I have come to expect at a real Wikimania, but I learned a few things and had some fun. Unfortunate minor detail, we were in a small hall of nearly perfect acoustic reflection, making chitchat difficult between presentations. On the days we weren't doing much locally I was able to tune into some of the Webcast presentations, and wasn't terribly bothered when many of them could not be found. Perhaps I'll find some of those on Youtube or something.
With all the worldwide academic and technical conferences held every normal year, I wonder whether anyone during the plague years has succeeded in mixing screen participants and physical participants on something like an equal basis. It seems a difficult task and if nobody has done it well, no use expecting success by the Wiki establishment with our usual technical bumbling. Jim.henderson (talk) 10:59, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
It's a tough challenge, for sure. Even 2½ years into this ongoing pandemic, I've been to very few hybrid events where remote attendees are not disadvantaged in relation to in-person attendees. Given I'm disabled and less able to travel myself this is a continuing frustration for me. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk; please {{ping}} me in replies) 07:19, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
I agree, I've not been to any really successful hybrids events. Most were either primarily in-person (with livestreams of presentations to remote attendees but no remote networking), or primarily remote (with a few bunches of atendees effectively sitting in the same cconfrence room so only networking amongst people they already knew). For fully remorte events, the best organised was probably Open Publishing Fest, which has an excellent (open source) webpage and left it up to the organiser of each session to organise what software that session would use. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 00:47, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
I don't think it was necessarily a matter of it being online (I personally rather enjoyed the 2021 Wikimania); rather, it was the lack of any sessions that really interested me (2021 seemed to have quite a few more technical sessions), the registration process being much less straightforward than last time and (while I didn't get the chance to try it myself) everything I heard about Pheedloop being rather negative (Remo (used in 2021) was, in my opinion, much better and allowed you to communicate with others in small, easy to create and farily loose groups, which often led to interesting and engaging discussions) that led to a pretty mediocre Wikimania. Remagoxer(talk) 14:44, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I definitely agree on Remo over Pheedloop; I'm grateful that we just shared the Zoom link for our Queering Wikipedia session, or we would have had zero attendance. It would've been good to know in advance that no recording meant no streaming, as well. Still, the technical facilitator (Mikel Enecoiz) was super helpful, so no criticism on the on-the-day team. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk; please {{ping}} me in replies) 07:19, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Let's hope that 2023 goes live again (I've been urging "Viva WikiVegas2023" for the North American conference in October or so of '23). One thing that held live attendance down, at least in some venues: the requirement to have had a Covid vax (and even, in some venues, a booster) before an editor could attend. That left me out, and probably others, kind of akin to felons not allowed to get into Canada to attend the 2017 conference (I at least cleared the bar on that one), so hopefully the vax "requirement" will be gone by the next live event if not sooner. The next major live conferences (and come on Europe, get a WikiConference Europe organized, maybe in London?) should have plenty of funding, because hopefully the foundation has been feeding the kitty for the last three years so that the next conferences will have a built-up four-year pool of funding to throw the mother-of-all-conferences. Viva WikiVegas2023! Randy Kryn (talk) 15:14, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
@Kudpung and Randy Kryn: Wikimania 2023 will be held in Singapore, which was chosen for reasons including its accessibility and state-of-the-art facilities. More info about the event will be published in due course. Bahnfrend (talk) 03:03, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. My comment was about a possible 2023 North American Wikiconference. Didn't know about Singapore for Wikimania, sounds interesting. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:08, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Well that sucks. I wonder whose brilliant idea that was. Been there often enough for academic conferences. It's just about the most expensive place in Asia even if I live 'only' a 3-hour flight away. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:36, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
There was little incentive for me to attend the online Wikimania session given the scheduling to target different timezones, meaning that a majority of the time things were scheduled at bad times for me. Especially given that most things were recorded, I don't feel like I missed out that much, I'll just catch up on them later. We had a local event in NYC that was mentioned earlier, it was great. I got to hang out and socialize with people, did some editing and hacking and listened to some pretty interesting lightning talks. It was a pretty "low tech" event, which meant it emphasized the human connection over flashy technology. Other conferences like DebConf do a really job with low tech IMO, which we should try to learn from. Finally, I thought TheDJ had an insightful thread about hybrid/in-person attendance. Legoktm (talk) 04:42, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Software sucked, but i just watched the livestream on youtube so that wasn't a big problem. The bigger problem is none of the sessions were particularly interesting or had anything interesting to say (as far as i can tell, i really only attended one). The vast majority were highly focused on affiliate concerns and quite frankly seemed rather divorced from actual wikis (for example, compare the number of sessions presented by people who do wikimedia stuff as their job vs volunteers. It seemed a bit unbalanced). In in person conferences, a major part is the so called "hallway track" and social bonding. That doesn't happen remotely, so its critical that presenters have something interesting or unique to say - and this conference simply didn't have that. Bawolff (talk) 06:11, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
My only experience with Wikimania was as a panelist. In that regard, I will say that despite the software issues; the staff did really good with what they had. I'm extremely grateful for that! –MJL‐Talk‐☖ 00:04, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
My own personal experience during Wikimania was terrible. I wasn't being able to attend any session on pheedloop particularly this is because of network, not streaming or the app misbehaving. Some times you will only have audio and no video and at some point you will not be able to join the live conversation. I suppose to volunteer on the trust and safety. But I couldn't because I can only be able to join any session successful via YouTube. I don't know the much effort being put to consider pheedloop whom I think the group did they homework better. But I strongly believe we can do better even with the experience we have now. But so also I will like to acknowledge the great effort by the core organizing team for allowing as money in-person event as possible. This is because the part I enjoyed most is attending the in-person event we held here. Musa Vacho77 (talk) 08:30, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Hello, thanks for sharing all these impressions! I hope that I succesfully restrained from making accusations of any kind. It just turned out a less than perfect experience for many participants, and we can all learn for next events. I loved to read that local events emphasized the being-together instead of the technology, and Kelly admonished us to think of really different events. For example, I liked the monthly WMF staff conference ("metrics") especially because we lack a periodical kind of medium in the movement. In the old days, an organization had a monthly print medium to catch up with the latest developments. In our movement, the Signpost has that kind of role to a certain degree. Ziko (talk) 13:48, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
August is a bad month to schedule online conferences. I went on a road trip and enjoyed the great out-of-doors and was lucky enough to avoid the worst of the heat waves. January and February would be better months for online. Seems Zoom is the YouTube of online conferencing, why not just stick with the software that's been proven to work and has mass appeal? These conferences have always, even before the pandemic, under-emphasized real-world issues of maintaining the content of the online encyclopedias and over-emphasized peripheral things like Wikidata and Wiki Education. Peripheral things I'd like to see added are fundraising and budgeting. Can someone link me to the recorded keynotes by Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander? I think the responsibility for ensuring successful Wikimanias should fall on the CEO. Thanks. – wbm1058 (talk) 11:09, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
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.
This has been extensively discussed at the Village Pump, and I remain unconvinced that the WMF is testing for the right things to actually show this. For example, with the sticky header, they only test that the sticky header is used, rather than testing whether it makes it easier to navigate within the page. BilledMammal (talk) 01:00, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
The ultimate fix? Not quite! We're 98% there at the end of this article, but what if our brave librarian reader wants to see more about this magazine? What if they've seen another article in The Woman Citizen, but the cover looked different—was it even the same magazine? As this article notes, names are transitory, and are often not unique; "The Woman Citizen" seems pretty singular, but there's a lot of magazines out there with the same name from different time periods or countries, since a name is just an advertisement in its own market and therefore has no need to be convenient for encyclopedias. How then to tell precisely what magazine it is? Well, global librarians have solved this issue for us (multiple times, actually): add an id number. Magazines have two options: the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), overseen by the International Standards Organization, and the OCLC number, managed by an American non-profit that also maintains the Dewey Decimal system nowadays. ISSN is usually more common for magazines, but either uniquely identifies a magazine- in our case, courtesy of OCLC's WorldCat, we can see that the magazine's ISSN is 1937-142X, and its OCLC number is 2395192. Slap either of these on the citation with |issn=1937-142X and/or |oclc=2395192, and then we're at the ultimate fix. --PresN 00:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
That's really if you believe ISSNs and OCLCs have value in citations. And I personally don't. If you follow them, you won't find the article you're looking for. Others disagree, but I find them to be clutter at best and Worldcat to be a very low quality database in general (with multiple redundant OCLCs for the same publication each taking you to variations of metadata). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:09, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
I for one want all of that high-quality metadata in one place, however cumbersome. Otherwise we're just lead to a disambiguation function in... another place... Which is a whole other layer of cumbersome. This may be a philosophical difference, but citations should be one-stop shopping. The fuller, the better. kencf0618 (talk) 12:47, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Fun article! Every once in a while I sort of try to explain to someone what I was so engrossed in for an hour or 2 or 6, but it's hard to express. Headbomb, thanks! --Doncram (talk) 00:38, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Much like "How to research an image," this was a joy to read! Feels good to see a bit of research play out so well. I feel like I've been burned too frequently, not being able to trace back a source at all. Just makes it feel even better to see a success story :) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 11:34, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
Parenthetically, -, –, —, and ― each serve distinct functions –but that way madness lies. Hence I tend my own garden. (Which functions, I leave as an exercise for the reader.) kencf0618 (talk) 12:43, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
Not sure what endashes and hyphens and other things have to do with anything here... ? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:56, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
This is among the best articles I've read in The Signpost. Very nicely done. Jeffrey Beall(talk) 21:24, 2 September 2022 (UTC).
A very nice read. It misdirected me a little because a lot of times we hear a story about someone tracing back an obscure citation on a random page, the conclusion is that the article is a hoax. But I think this shows just how difficult it is to discover a hoax: here, it really looked like the citation couldn't exist for a while, but it did. Disproving the existence of something beyond reasonable doubt is inordinately complicated. We say that readers should be able to verify any fact in Wikipedia themselves, but things are often not so simple. — Bilorv (talk) 11:18, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
What a story! This kind of trial and error until success is what I feel the website is all about 🙂 Johnson524 (Talk!) 20:10, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
Not a fan of that. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 02:40, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
