The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2024-02-13. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Is the joke about a guy getting blocked? - The  Master of  clockHedgehogsclock ^{(always up for a conversation!)} 13:45, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Okay, it's about warnings. I think. - The  Master of  clockHedgehogsclock ^{(always up for a conversation!)} 17:25, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

great work guys!! some of these were pretty challenging, which makes it fun :) sawyer * he/they * talk 19:15, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

• @Cremastra: Did we ever come up with those answers? jp×g🗯️ 22:26, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

  @JPxG: I've got mine written down in a weird way at User:Cremastra/crosswordans, but I didn't update it when you (if I may say, graciously) expanded the crossword. Cremastra (talk) 22:31, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Oh, based, I will add that. jp×g🗯️ 22:33, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

@Smallbones: Well, it's safe to say that James definitely did not mince for words while trying to unmask this guy... : D

But seriously, this is a real problem. Likely even worse than we thought. --Oltrepier (talk) 10:40, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

I tried Googling (in an incognito window) "Can you pay to get a Wikipedia article about you?" to see what the top search results are:

1. Wikipedia:An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing. OK, that's at least from us. But trying to place myself in the shoes of someone being enticed by a scammer, I've probably already made up my mind, so it's not a very enticing result. And if I do click on it, there's nothing on that page about the scam except a link to the scam warning at the very bottom of the see also section, which I have a very low chance of reaching.
2. You don’t need to pay for a Wikipedia article, a WMF blog post. Excellent. (Being from 2018, though, it links to Wikipedia:Simple conflict of interest edit request, which is not a user-friendly page compared to the edit request wizard introduced in 2020.)
3. How Much Does a Wikipedia Page Cost and Why?, a LinkedIn blog post, with the first sentence A Wikipedia page costs £2040, linking to wikinative.com. Curiously, it also links to the WMF blog post — one way to see that is that the "people will believe what they want to believe rather than what has the best evidence" factor is strong enough that the scammer feels confident it won't deter clients.

Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Scam warning appears nowhere in the results. As sleazy of a realm as SEO is, if we want people at risk of the scam to find the warning, then we should probably better optimize our warning so that it has a fighting chance of showing up for the searches they're likely to make. Sdkb ^talk 03:56, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

• No doubt their product jams up the Afc process, but I can't imagine much gets through, and the pretty low prices may actually spoil the market for better quality COI paid editing, which might even be a good thing. Was it India? Johnbod (talk) 05:10, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

  Appeared to be India yes. Or at least that was were they wanted the money send. They claimed they went to Harvard like many of these scammers. It was amazing just how lazy they are. My linkedin page clearly says a few times that i edit Wikipedia. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:12, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

• I still believe that a well-thought public outreach by WMF is overdue and would work wonders. Imagine if they used their ill-gotten gains to put a full page ad in big city newspapers telling the public not to pay for articles. Imagine if they told the public via corporate media that Wikipedia as an information service cracks down on abuses. They won't because the WMF needs new furniture. They get paid, the scammers get paid, and everyone but the little people are happy. Chris Troutman (talk) 15:40, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

  Although you might be right about the office furniture, I suspect a more important reason this will never happen is that the Foundation is unsure which media would reach the largest number of potential victims. (No, advertising in the NY Times would not reach all them, let alone most of the US. But the publicity around such a campaign might.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:32, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

@Sdkb I was just trying to find that page in specific, and the only way I found it through google was... this comment. So, thanks for helping someone from the future. But also, we really do need to do something about the findability of this page. -- asilvering (talk) 00:37, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

This is really exciting. I had no idea the tool existed! Joyous! Noise! 17:19, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Jengod:, an additional step after adding an image should be to check the talk page and remove anything that puts the article into a requested image category. There might be a {{photo requested}} template, but more frequently (at least for organisms) there is a |needs-image= in a WikiProject banner. Talk:Bombus pauloensis is still marked as needing an image via the WikiProject Insects banner. The requested images categories aren't very useful because many articles that lack images were never added to them, but it doesn't help things to have articles that now have images remaining in the requested image categories. Plantdrew (talk) 20:32, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Ooohh! Good info! Never even occurred to me to check WP tags on the talk page but will do so going forward. Now I just need to find the smilax article I added a photo to...sometime...recently? jengod (talk) 20:44, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Have fun dancing through your contributions! Joyous! Noise! 20:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Jengod:, somebody else may have taken care of the image request for the Smilax, or (more likely) it was never in a requested image category in the first place. There is a tool to check for false positives (i.e. articles in a requested image category that have any images), and there are no Smilax articles in Category:Wikipedia requested images of plants that have an image.

Note that using the tool requires adding images to a blacklist; the thumbnail images used in stub-sorting templates will count as images until they are black-listed. I do try to keep the black-list for plants (and ) up-to-date, but there are still some false-false-positives; the article has an image, but it's a range map (or a related species), not an image of the organism itself. I don't think the blacklists for any other categories for requested images of organisms are being kept up-to-date (any most of them were never set-up in the first place).

I've worked some on removing image requests from plants that have images, but have never gotten close to removing all the fulfilled image requests, and it's been a few months since I've worked on it, so now there are more fulfilled image requests I haven't removed (when I was on top of it, I'd worked alphabetically from A through C and in reverse from Z through somewhere in P). Plantdrew (talk) 22:06, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Great article, super cool! Frostly (talk) 02:39, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

• Perhaps Johnson was referring to the Russian Wikipedia. ‑‑Neveselbert (talk · contribs · email) 21:28, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Maybe, but "mixture of semi-masticated Wikipedia and outright falsehood" doesn't imply that the Wikipedia part agrees with Putin's disinformation splurt, but just that articles were adapted or otherwise employed to buttress the propaganda? Sandizer (talk) 22:24, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Or rather, he meant Ruwiki. ‑‑Neveselbert (talk · contribs · email) 22:39, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Anyone remotely familiar with his premiership (or, more importantly, his "journalism" before that) would know better than to assume that BoJo even cared to begin to know what he was talking about. Daniel Case (talk) 05:58, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Fair point. ‑‑Neveselbert (talk · contribs · email) 11:42, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

• To me at least, he seems to be simply referencing the nature of Wikipedia as a place to get large amounts of information on something; Putin was mingling his propaganda with an overly detailed, rather irrelevant, history lesson. Kymothoë (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 02:59, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

• My biggest problem with Johnson (apart from having very different views on many things) is that I can't really take him seriously, especially after that UN speech where he put The Muppets and Sophocles almost side to side... Oltrepier (talk) 11:01, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

• "Conservapedia is laced with falsehoods"... sky is blue, Pope is Catholic, etc. Kinda shocked that an NPR station is bothering to write about Andy Schlafly's blog in 2024. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 20:37, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

What you said aligns with my original bold heading for the item. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:05, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

• Everything in history is going to be a "myth" to someone, how is the Novgorod narrative any different to something like the American Revolution for the US, 1812 and Confederation for Canada, or Bosworth Field for England? Orchastrattor (talk) 00:55, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
  • "Myth" is not the same as "history", even if historical facts occasionally make their way into the myth. What Putin said is not the same as the American myths about Washington chopping down a cherry tree, or even about Washington being a great general. The Rus - who were Vikings trading with Constantinople - were certainly in Novgorod and Kiev about the time mentioned (900 CE), but that doesn't mean that the "Kievan Rus" were the founders of the Russian state, or that they even have more than a slight relation to the Duchy of Muscovy (e.g. Ivan the Terrible) or Peter the Great's creation of the Russian Empire. That would be about the equivalent as saying the Pilgrims founded America. There were long stretches of time when Ukraine had nothing to do with Moscow or St. Petersburg. And there were many times when the Muscovites were slaughtering or starving the Ukrainians rather than governing them. Using that history to claim, as Putin was doing, that Ukrainians have always been the little brothers of Russia, is about as historical as it would be to claim that Canadians are the little brothers of Americans. Except Putin is using his myth to slaughteer Ukrainians once more, while saying that they've always been a part of Russia. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:58, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

We've all seen some pretty lazy media-coverage about WP, but this [1] is in a class of it's own. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:51, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-02-13/News and notes

Nice. I hope nobody gives you grief about WP:COI publishing on Wikipedia. IMHO you are following best practices when it comes to combining WP:OR and Wikipedia-writing. Kudos! PS. I can't see the link to the article you published in your piece above? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:30, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Piotrus: Thanks! No, I'd argue this is in line with Swedish Wikipedia norms (which are less strict than English Wikipedia in some circumstances, as long as the material has been published but a reliable source), and no one has complained so far. (: Here's a link to the article – this Signpost text is partly a translation, but edited and with a different conclusion. /Julle (talk) 09:44, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Julle Btw, your story reminds me a bit of my own recent research and conclusion at Talk:Czesław_Lewicki#Righteous_who_saved_Szpilman?, although I did not need to do a research in primary documents, so no need to publish an article, for better or worse. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:55, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Based on this experience, I'm tempted to believe it's typically for the better if one doesn't have to go hunting for primary sources. (: /Julle (talk) 13:44, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Julle Hmmm? How so? I mean, it is time consuming and can be costly too... is this what you mean? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:55, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Piotrus: And it took me a year to get to the point where I could update the article! /Julle (talk) 02:00, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

But you also got a non-wiki publication credit out of it. Silver lining too :) _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:28, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

I love a research story like this. Beautiful work, and thank you for sharing it in The Signpost as well. It's inspirational! ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 13:00, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! /Julle (talk) 13:44, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Really interesting story. Good to hear there's significant progress but I hope you will continue to search for his place and date of death. Eric Luth is obviously ubiquitous. Maybe one of these days we'll be able to read about Bertil Anzén on the EN wiki.--Ipigott (talk) 15:57, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! And yes, I do enjoy the red links in the article, visual reminders of more work we still have to do. /Julle (talk) 01:43, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Imagine how much it would have cost to hire someone to do this for you. Sandizer (talk) 22:41, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Thousands of dollars, yes, for a few sentences about a forgotten painter. This isn't the kind of thing one can do if anyone is to get paid. /Julle (talk) 01:45, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Brilliant spoiler clickbait hook at the top of the article! Axem Titanium (talk) 23:24, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! /Julle (talk) 01:45, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Fun story! Thanks for your work, Julle. Here are the picures by him, sold on auctionet.com. Could you scan your pictures, to illustrate the article? (I am not familiar with Swedish copyrights, is it allowed?) Huldra (talk) 22:55, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Huldra: Thanks! No, his paintings are still covered by copyright, unfortunately, or I'd have illustrated this article with a photo of the paintings in my kitchen. /Julle (talk) 10:48, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

User:Julle: Even when you own the paintings? When is the earliest they can be uploaded? I assume it is some x years after the painter died, which is a bit tricky if you don't know his death-date? Huldra (talk) 20:57, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Huldra: Yes, one owns the physical work of art, but the copyright completely is separate from the artefact, keeping us from uploading photos to Commons. Unless it has been contractually transferred, it remains with the creator – or his descendants for 70 years after his death. Which might be a tad tricky to calculate in this case, but while we can fairly safely assume he's dead, we know it was less than 70 years ago. So: When will it expire? Not certain. Is there a chance it already has expired? No. /Julle (talk) 22:22, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Really great one, thanks. Unfortunately sounds very familiar.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:12, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! /Julle (talk) 22:22, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-02-13/Traffic report