– all this and lots of other features in this month's issue including The Marshall Plan for Page Curation and Articles for Creation. We continue with our voyage on the Admin Ship and next month's publication will conclude with it docking in home waters, while we briefly report on a Wikimedia project, Simple English, that may be foundering. In the news is also more on the effects and media blowback of perceived Conflict of Interest causing a political storm with a former UK Member of Parliament at the helm. Also in the UK, the Mayor of London launches an editathon. A whirlwind of criticism mounts over Wikimania.
The new editorial team gets shipshape and settles down to a routine with the expected round-the-clock bustle of action in all time zones and tidal waters in the last few hours before deadline. We are all still wondering however, how earlier teams managed to bring out a weekly publication. For all of us still providing much of the content, it's a significant byte out of our regular editing time. With The Signpost developing into more of a monthly news magazine, do remember that anyone can submit an article.
Take to your cabin on your mobile device and curl up in your bunk for some bedtime reading. Enjoy.
Within minutes of ACREQ being switched on, the new rule that limits creation of articles in mainspace to confirmed users, the number of totally inappropriate new pages dropped back to the level of the six-month trial.
As reported in our April issue in Special report, the switch, originally scheduled for 3 May, was urgently thrown a week earlier on 26 April bringing this six-year-long-awaited new policy finally into play.
Promised by the Foundation, based on comments made by AfC reviewers during the RfC, special envoy Marshall Miller has been looking into the way AfC works, how it contrasts with New Page Patrol, and making some suggestions which have since moved to development stage.
Miller's analysis appears to have identified issues surrounding the productivity of AfC which can be addressed with software enhancements, while some editors involved in the discussion for improvement of the system suggest that the problems of AfC are social ones rather than technical: poor reviewing and too few reviewers.
“ | This is less about "overhauling AFC" as it is "reminding reviewers that imperfect drafts are okay" | ” |
Indeed, some are OK, but perhaps many of them are not, and a large number of them could be consigned immediately to the trash can. Many pages are dumped into the draft system by people who appear not to have the slightest intention of contributing anything coherent to a collaborative project, while others simply submit a substandard draft never to return. Since ACREQ, New Page Reviewers are increasingly moving borderline articles to the draft mainspace, thus adding to the workload for AfC but not on the scale that was feared. A dilemma faced by AfC reviewers, however, is that getting rid of even the most clearly unwanted draft is not so easy. Talks are ongoing on the possibilities of either introducing a special Criteria for speedy deletion criterion, a sticky proposed deletion à la Proposed deletion of biographies of living people, or the creation of a "Drafts for Deletion" on the lines of Articles for Deletion.
Although AfC is not the Article Rescue Squadron, many draft creators (and confirmed editors too), especially single-purpose accounts, submit their creation in Wikipedia expecting other editors to complete it or clean it up. They need to be informed up front that not only are notability and sources required, but that the article must also be appropriate for an encyclopedia, and that clean-up attempts by reviewers might not be the best deployment of their enthusiasm to rescue certain kinds of articles.
Dialogue with the creator is an intrinsic part of the AfC template system, and used well, more effective than Page Curation's message feature. Unlike New Page Review, whose principal task as a triage is to either tag articles for deletion or pass them for inclusion with perhaps some minor details needing to be addressed, at AfC the skill is in being able to sensibly recognise whether or not a new article has true validity and potential for the encyclopedia and offer some basic advice – the rest is about not being scared to keep or delete:
“ | Clearly some amount of bravery and humility is required of reviewers as we, in some sense, take responsibility or vouch for the work of others. For me that makes reviewing more worth doing. The community is forgiving of mistakes and lapses or judgement. Failure to admit to or learn from mistakes (often rooted in a lack of humility) is what leads you down the road to sanctions.
—Kvng |
” |
“ | I made some updates to the project page to include seven additional potential improvements that were raised in the discussion here. I also added a couple points to other sections brought up by this group.
There has been a lot of discussion (and changes already!) around the language in templates, around putting templates and comments on talk pages instead of draft pages, and on the comment workflow in general. Those things all seem to me to be related, and perhaps we might want to think about them holistically. One new idea that was brought up was "inline comments" – the idea of having a feature that allows reviewers to make specific comments to different parts of a draft. The team here at WMF thought that was an interesting idea, and I'm interested in everyone's thoughts on that idea. Being able to detect and surface copyvio sounds like it would be a particularly valuable improvement – more valuable than having ORES scores. The idea of routing or tagging drafts so that topic experts (perhaps from WikiProjects) can review them got some good discussion. Many people are positive on the idea of unifying the interfaces of NPP and AfC, but this is likely out of scope for this project, given its size and importance. |
” |
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. |
After the New Pages Reviewer user right was created in November 2016, the effect was to reduce a mammoth backlog of some 22,000 articles down to 3,500 in just over a year, hitting what is probably the lowest level ever of exactly 700 just before the copy deadline of this month's Signpost. Prior to the introduction of the NPR user group, poor patrols and incorrect tagging were frequent; odd uses of tags and deletion criteria still occur, but at a much reduced level.
In an April 2018 article, Foundation chief executive Katherine Maher discussed similar problems, though it was noted that "longtime Wikipedia editors are able to distinguish this kind of activity, and conduct their own investigations to weed such actors out."[2] The problem facing Wikipedia in reality, however, and which the Foundation's research cannot identify, is that many of the older and more experienced editors have long since moved on from the mundane and depressing task of repetitively tagging trash. It's then largely left up to enthusiastic but inexperienced new users who still do not need special rights to apply the tags to the articles and drafts.
Automation may be able to help. Probably hinting at ORES, Maher goes on to say:
“ | We are very interested in how AI can help us do things like evaluate the quality of articles, how deep and effective the citations are for a particular article, the relative neutrality of an article, the relative quality of an article.[2] | ” |
Notability should be as much a part of the process as it is at New pages patrol. However, this tends to be more of an issue of subjective interpretation of notability by the reviewers. Unless they know them by heart through years of creating articles or patrolling them, no one knows the mass of notability guidelines properly or has even read them until push comes to shove. Just not having sources in the article is not a reason for a lack of notability if credible claims of notability are expressed in the article. That said, a raft of sources needs to be carefully examined; chances are that the more references that come with a new article, the majority of them are just Internet barrel-scraping, and what's left is barely reliable. It shouldn't necessarily be the reviewer's job to go searching for sources. Creators need to be pointed to the instructions for reliable and verifiable sources and asked to go back and do it themselves. In this respect the Article Wizard could be improved – currently it directs the creator to Citing sources which is a mind bending page with a steep learning curve for a newbie. A simpler version needs to be written.
Among the other suggestions were the possibilities of:
The third option has been chosen by the Foundation as the one they can address within the resources available at this time. Notwithstanding:
Replying to Miller's question – "Would you say that the biggest benefit with this idea would be 'improve communication between reviewers and authors to decrease iterations', 'increase the speed/ease that reviewers can do their workflow', or both?" – Legacypac says that it "[d]efinitely improve[s] communications between reviewers and authors and between different reviewers. Better communication improves workflow in all contexts."
Based on Marshall Miller's findings, a summary of AfC's challenges, goals, and ideas for improvement, Community Tech and volunteers are already collaborating on developments bearing in mind that knowing what is needed and writing the code for it are very different specialisms. Miller has been posting regular progress updates and asking for community feedback. The collaboration has emphasized creating separate list of drafts in the New Pages Feed for better organisation of the way AfC agents select the drafts they wish to review and finally accept or reject. The entries in the feed will be flagged by ORES for copyright violations.
Miller's list of 18 improvements included: "take steps toward a shared interface between AfC and NPP, since those processes are similar in many ways" and "automated checks for copyright violation as part of the helper script" and "rotate reviewers on repeat submissions instead of routing repeat submissions to the same reviewer".
While their tasks are as similar as they are different, both Articles for Creation and New Page Review are urgently in need of additional, competent hands on deck. If you have the required level of experience and would like to spare some time helping not only to keep the backlogs down, but helping genuine but confused new users, please check out New Page Review and Articles for Creation and apply for the use of the tools.
In last month's Signpost we reported that discussions about adminship had dropped not just to a trickle, but had dried up completely. The article produced a massive 70,000 byte river of comment, positive and objective. It refloated talks again at WT:RfA, once Wikipedia's most popular forum, after its longest period ever without a post, and culminated in the successful bids for captaincy by two new candidates. However, with still only five new admins for the year, as we mark the halfway point through 2018, the seachart painstakingly maintained by WereSpielChequers, continues to predict dismal progress over the sysop waters. In this June issue, we take a look at what admins actually do and why they do it. We asked an ad-hoc selection of some 40 or so of the most active admins to describe their work.
The vast majority of the work admins do comprises operations that get little publicity. Literally swabbing the decks of backlogs of routine issues, it's what give them the name of "janitor", and their tool(s) the "mop". Most of the admins we asked each do a variety of tasks that involve the tools in non-contentious areas. One admin, Diannaa, focuses nowadays almost exclusively on copyright cleanup using the copy patrol Interface. She spends two to five hours a day on this and chose this area because there are very few people working on copyright cleanup in particular. That's a lot of hours and shows real dedication to a single and very necessary chore. Most others, although they have preferred areas, touch on several aspects of the job. Just a few sysops systematically patrol areas for instances where their tools are most useful, AfD closures, and other deletion backlogs, such as RHaworth who sails on a set course through the Category:CSD: "Almost entirely doing speedy deletions from CAT:CSD with blocking and page protection to complete some jobs. Why? Each deletion is complete in itself. There is no need for ongoing monitoring and discussion as is needed if one looks after a specific article."
Others regularly take care of permission requests, or regularly responding to vandalism reports or requests for page protection. Many simply intervene during their normal editing where they can use their tools to resolve the problems they encounter, and occasionally close editing debates requiring admin trust to assess the consensus.
Creating the bow wave with all their spray are the drama boards, blocks, bans and other sanctions. Wikipedia's Hurricane Alley with even hotter waters than the Atlantic Ocean is the poop deck of that dreaded sea dragon, Aunty Ani, more politely referred to as Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents, and woe betide anyone who gets dragged there, whether admin or simple deck hands. Not too infrequently, editors asking for other users to be keel-hauled end up with the wind blowing the spray back in their faces; there's a Wikipedia essay on that too: Boomerang. Not many of the admins we spoke to venture into these dangerous waters – for some, it's more to be feared than the Bermuda Triangle. One admin finds that ANI seems to have developed an "unruly and aggressive culture" that makes it "very difficult to hold a structured productive discussion". Boing! said Zebedee tells us:
“ | [...] I'm trying to keep away from difficult and contentious things now, because they get to be a drain over the long term. So, I'm not really doing anything particularly difficult or challenging these days. As an example, there are civility issues at ANI that in the past I might have tried to address, but these days it seems pointless trying to improve that horrible place. The Discretionary Sanctions area is one I find too complex to spend my time on – lots of rigid procedures and logs and stuff (which might be needed, but I don't get on with bureaucracy) | ” |
One of the admins who rarely participates on drama boards or policy-making believes the growth of policies over the years is the worst change that has ever happened to Wikipedia. MelanieN is another admin who avoids the drama boards as much as possible. She nevertheless participates as a regular editor on contentious article talk pages and is sometimes described as "the grown-up in the room." On Discretionary sanctions, another fairly contentious area that has even led to wheel warring on several occasions, Bishonen, who actually likes working there also believes that people stay clear of all DS because of the paperwork, the logs, and the templates.
One admin replies with one of his characteristic pithy comments: "Keeping my mouth shut and my tools in the box when people piss me off. I find it really hard sometimes to let them have the last word, but I usually do. It's unbelievable how stubborn and/or nasty some people can be. Some people just don't realise that admins, just like all other genuine editors, are unpaid volunteers." Comments from other admins include 'Explaining why I've done something. The explanation isn't necessarily difficult, but attempting to demonstrate to someone that what I've done is proper and completely within the bounds of what an admin should do (especially when they just are complaining and are refusing to listen) is frustrating at times' (Primefac), and Alex Shih (quoting Dennis Brown) says: "[...] the most difficult time would be when you are being personally attacked, but unable to take admin action when you technically could, and unable to receive assistance in time.'
Our admins are almost unanimous in that they derive the greatest satisfaction from using their tools to rescue new or confused users who have strayed unwittingly into deeper waters and nudge them back into the shallows, although some do say that this is often not an easy thing to do. One admin finds the easiest and most pleasant part of their work is "being able to help the overwhelming majority of our responsible, collegial Wikipedians get on with their work by shielding them from troublemakers through administrative sanctions where they are needed." Yunshui enjoys the fact that so many admin tasks can now be completed in a handful of clicks using scripts instead of doing them manually. He gets satisfaction from "consigning vandalism only accounts to the dungheap of blockdom". Like most admins, Anne Delong likes "being able to fix my own problems instead of having to ask for help, and to deal with technical issues such as page moves, history merges, and [revision deletions]". Like most other active admins, she values being able to see deleted content when contributing to discussions.
“ | Working on speedy deletions, I am contributing to maintaining the quality of the encyclopedia. It requires skill and judgement. Perhaps surprisingly, it offers variety: there is a complete spectrum of responses to any one case from 'delete with disgust and block the perpetrator' at one extreme, through 'move to draftspace' to 'remove the speedy tag and reprimand the user who applied it' at the other extreme. Shameful thing to admit: I enjoy giving supercilious replies to 'why did you delete' questions on my talk page. I don't set out to be rude to people but it often seems to come out that way! —RHaworth | ” |
One of the very quirks in our English language is that the phrase 'admin abuse' can be interpreted two ways. Yes, dear Reader, you've got it: either you are one of those editors who hurls insults and offense at sysops, or you are an admin who (apparently) mistreats the editors – or you simply get on with your work and stay out of the firing line whichever way the cannon balls are flying, which is actually what quite a few of our admins do. One admin has twice received nasty emails from editors who found her personal website and email address online, and for a while she was being impersonated by someone who was trying to solicit money for COI edits. She hasn't noticed general hostility towards her personally as an admin.
When asked about whether they have been the target of harassment or personal attacks, Sandstein reports "[...] regularly, from editors who are angry that I sanctioned them, or from their friends. If one works in sanctions-related areas, one has to accept this, to some degree, as part of the job, and one has to be able to ignore it. But I regularly have to remind myself that I need to be able to distinguish valid, good-faith criticism from the sort of reflexive assumptions of bad faith that are sometimes the consequence of sanctions, and this is not always easy."
“ | Of course I've been heckled by people I've disobliged. Doesn't bother me. Also it's worth noting that you don't have to be an admin to be harassed and abused for trying to make Wikipedia better. (Sitush again comes to mind.) I absolutely don't think the non-admin community is generally hostile. On the contrary. There are a very few established users who have made something of a career of panning admins as a group, that's all. —Bishonen | ” |
The author of this Signpost article tells of being abused:
“ | [...] both on- and off-Wiki but possibly not as much as some admins who are also simply doing their job. On-Wiki it mainly comes from trolls, but the deliberate off-Wiki stuff on the Wikipedia hate sites can be particularly distressing. Any admin who is going to work in the trenches is going to have to put up with it. I don't think the non-admin users are generally hostile towards admins but there definitely used to be a significant number of recurring names that revelled in every opportunity to trip an admin up. In the past I've loosely referred to them as the 'anti-admin brigade' – indeed in the past their attacks have clearly been coordinated but since some of the major actors have retired, calmed down, or been blocked, it's very much less acute than it used to be. | ” |
HJ Mitchell "Harry", explains that he has suffered abuse "many, many times":
“ | When I had more free time and was a more active admin I dealt with a lot of our less ... charming vandals. So yes, I've received abuse, some of it grotesque, but I usually take it as a sign that I'm doing something right (I'd rather they came to insult me than go somewhere where they might actually cause some damage!). As for the community, I don't think it's generally hostile to admins. In general, I think we as a community value the work our admins do to keep the wheels turning but some members of the community have negative feelings towards admins, or more accurately towards what they perceive as a specific group of admins. This is not helped by a few admins who throw their weight around, but some friction in a large community is almost inevitable. | ” |
Apparently not. But most of them report a suspicion that some non-admins think they are. According to JamesBWatson, "[...] contrary to what a lot of non-admins think, being an administrator is not much about having more power, much more about spending time on routine cleanup work and therefore having less time available to do constructive editing, which is what I (and probably all of us) came here to do". Beeblebrox concurs, saying: "As always when discussing adminship I'd like to mention that it is not some all-powerful position of godlike authority. When you’ve deleted a few thousand pages of the same promotional garbage you begin to understand that it really is just keeping the place clean."
Generally, our most active admins like their work although some find it sometimes time-consuming and at times not quite so easy. Those who work in the stormier waters accept that they will occasionally bear the brunt of remarks and actions of less pleasant contributors, trolls, and vandals, but they take it in their stride. The questions we asked (for this article) were:
The admins were exceptionally frank and forthcoming with their answers. Readers who are interested in how each admin replied can see the full set of sysop answers for this article, with an introduction, below. We heartily thank the respondents for allowing themselves to be press-ganged into participating in our inquisition without any hesitation. We make no comments as to whether the survey is truly representative of our admins in general.
In next month's issue of The Signpost, we will be sailing into hopefully calmer waters on the last leg of the admin ship's current voyage. Admins will be giving us their thoughts on the RfA process and some advice for potential candidates.
The 32 responses are listed in the chronological order they arrived. Each respondent was able to see the previous replies.The invites went out quite late; ten did not respond but they may be in semi-retirement, on a short break, or did not log in the short time the research was conducted. There was no strict method to the selection other than the investigator's own recollection of the names of some of our more active or prominent sysops. Three responses were submitted by admins who were not invited but who had seen the invite on other talk pages or in their watchlists. Their responses are equally important, have been evaluated, and are listed here. Some questions and their answers are not displayed here as they were asked for use in a further Signpost article in our series on adminship. The replies are otherwise as submitted and unabridged. Apart from some minor formatting for readability, no proof reading or copyediting has been done - any typos or grammatical errors are those of the respondents.
We make no comments as to whether the survey is truly representative of our admins in general. We heartily thank the respondents for their frank and open answers. The research was designed and carried out by Kudpung.
I don't think that there's hostility from "the non-admin community" per se. What I observe is rather that groups of often long-established editors, both admins and non-admins, become so established in their social network or their particular niches of content or policy, that they begin to believe that common rules of conduct don't apply to them any more, or that their network of friends will shield them of consequences if they start behaving much more aggressively towards others than is acceptable. It is addressing misconduct issues in such contexts that generates, in my experience, the most friction and hostility. Of course, as a somewhat veteran editor myself, I regularly need to remind myself not to fall prey to the kind of arrogance that sometimes accompanies experience or routine.
In which areas do you mainly or normally use your admin tools? (such as deletion/undeletion, blocking, page protection, revdel, PERM, etc.). What's the reason for your choice?
Also, reminded by reading Bish's replies above, much as I generally dislike having to block people, I do like blocking advertisers and spammers trying to parasitize on the hard work of volunteers.
(Lourdes is currently not a sysop, having immediately declined to take up her tools following a very successful 2nd RfA, but we include her unsolicited responses here.)
If you type "Rizaeddin bin Fakhreddin" into Google, Google will give you a list of links and a small box to the right. The first link will probably be to the English Wikipedia article on bin Fakhreddin, created and written by me; this can easily be checked by going into the page history of the article. But most likely you'll never bother to actually click on the article because of that small box to the right. "Rizaeddin bin Fakhreddin was a Tatar scholar and publicist that lived in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union", it reads.
I typed that sentence. I also put the birth and death dates onto Wikipedia. I uploaded the picture to Wikimedia Commons and put it into the article – or articles, actually, because I also created the article on the German Wikipedia. But now I find this information directly on Google. There is a link to the Wikipedia article, but that may as well be a result of Father Google's omniscient mercy. Nowhere does the box state that it presents the work of an unpaid volunteer next to Google advertisements. The effect is obvious: In a 2017 study, half of the participants attributed what they found in the Knowledge Graph, which is the name of that small box, not to Wikipedia, but to Google.
The Knowledge Graph has recently been in the news for saying that California Republicans are Nazis. The scandal was reported, discussed, closed, opened again and finally forgotten. Conservatives still think Google is biased against them; Google says the whole thing wasn't its fault.
We regret that vandalism on Wikipedia briefly appeared on our search results. This was not the the result of a manual change by Google.
— Google press release
No, obviously it wasn't. None of the content you presented there was. That was all Wikipedia's.
But the interesting thing is that in the public eye, this was still Google's fault. Read through the Twitter thread; none of the enraged commenters there seem to believe that this wasn't an action by a Google employee. "Google: Republicans are Nazis", read the headline on the Drudge Report article exposing the issue, and Wired magazine made a whole story out of making clear that the vandalism itself happened on Wikipedia. And all of that while more Wikipedia editors quickly did the dirty work; they hunted down the specific edit that caused the problem, corrected the vandalism and placed the page under semi-protection to prevent copycats. Meanwhile, the Knowledge Graph is still humming along, the ideology section removed, the rest still filled with Wikipedia data, and Google can be happy until the next scandal.
And we are left with a question: Why do we let this happen? Why do we let a multi-billion dollar company exploit us as uncredited mules – as long as there isn't a need for someone to shift the blame to? Where is the organization that should be responsible for protecting the rights of its volunteer editors – where is the WMF? Traditionally, Google is one of the biggest sponsors of the Foundation; for example, they chucked Jimmy Wales a $2m grant in 2010, more than they donated the whole last year. A few months later, they acquired the knowledge base Freebase, which was to form the basis for the Knowledge Graph, for an undisclosed sum.
After the recent scandal surfaced, the Foundation took an apologetic stance. "We're sorry", its statement seems to say, "and no, online encyclopedias still aren't a bad thing." But on 15 June, WMF executive director Katherine Maher, writing an opinion piece in Wired, saw the other side: "If Wikipedia is being asked to help hold back the ugliest parts of the internet, from conspiracy theories to propaganda, then the commons needs sustained, long-term support", she says, "The companies which rely on the standards we develop, the libraries we maintain, and the knowledge we curate should invest back. And they should do so with significant, long-term commitments that are commensurate with our value we create."
This is a step in the right direction. At the very least, the platform economies of the world should give something back to the largest source of the information they feed their algorithms with. As Maher concludes, "we shouldn’t be afraid to stand up for our value", but maybe it is time we see Google – and Facebook, and Amazon – not only as partners, but also as the ones making huge profits sustained by our unpaid labor.
The announcement of Wikimania scholarships for 2018 provoked complaints on a Foundation mailing list. Among the raised issues was that of some editors repeatedly being awarded scholarships while others are denied, who claim to have important presentations to make or a real need to meet people with whom they collaborate on significant developments. Indeed, some who fairly regularly attend Wikimania at their own cost mention that they see the same faces every time. There was also a call for more coordination between scholarship committee and programme planners as well as the repeated complaint that the presentations were WMF-top heavy.
A member of this year's scholarship committee replied with changes made to the scholarship process already:
“ | Repeated funding of the same people is a concern. This year, we introduced a rule where those who had been funded in the past year would receive a point deduction on their score this year. This has leveled the playing field a bit, and may be magnified a bit next year. | ” |
This year's Wikimania will take place in Cape Town from July 18 to 22. The Signpost will provide further coverage.
The WMF Project Grants Committee has announced eleven new projects that will be founded in this round of grants. In total, these projects will receive over $320,000.
There have also been several changes to the process of WMF Grants. Rapid Grants will now need a minimum amount of $500, in order to reduce administrative work at the Foundation. Application openings will be from the 1st to the 15th of each month. New Project Grants will "likely" be accepted during a single grant cycle in November 2018 for amounts between $2,000 and $100,000. Conference grants will get two rounds of funding, with existing regional and thematic conferences staying funded. New applications for local or national conferences will be considered up to an amount of $10,000.
Grants are currently in a phase of "major changes to our funding processes in the long term [...] these changes will reengineer the roles of participating organizations (the Wikimedia Foundation, committees, and grantees alike)", according to a Wikimedia announcement. Discussion of these and further changes is welcomed at the Annual plan talk page.
Women in Red (WIR) is seeking coders to help adapt the Koha integrated library system to eBook lending for the project. According to a short interview with members of the project, the project so far attracted funding via World Contest winners' donations to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/The World Contest#Women in Red Book/WIR Subscription Fund, and is now planning to create a eBook and open access book lending library with Koha managing circulation and catalog functions. This effort is spearheaded by WIR members with professional library knowledge, namely Megalibrarygirl, Rosiestep, and SusunW. After an initial beta phase, model and software may be extended to other WikiProjects if they prove successful.
According to a Foundation announcement, this new team will report to the Foundation's CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and include a Cloud Services group and a Technical Advocacy group. Cloud Services will continue maintaining current services, while Advocacy will encourage API adoption through example software, tutorials, and other documentation and work with "groups at affiliate organizations and the larger Wikimedia volunteer community". The Foundation will also hire a new engineer and create the position of Developer Advocacy Manager. Initial reaction has been highly positive, with some expressing hope that the new team would fulfill a current need for code review.
Wikipedia's Arbitration committee was thrust into the media spotlight this month, with several stories being published including "The 15 People Who Keep Wikipedia's Editors From Killing Each Other: Online committee called ArbCom tries to keep the peace at internet encyclopedia".
The much-maligned EU Copyright Directive was passed on June 20 and slated for future consideration by the EU Parliament. A storm of warnings did nothing to prevent the law from passing, not even a dramatic intervention by Cory Doctorow that called out the potential horrible consequences, especially for Wikipedia:
Article 13 gets Wikipedia coming and going: not only does it create opportunities for unscrupulous or incompetent people to block the sharing of Wikipedia's content beyond its bounds, it could also require Wikipedia to filter submissions to the encyclopedia and its surrounding projects, like Wikimedia Commons. The drafters of Article 13 have tried to carve Wikipedia out of the rule, but thanks to sloppy drafting, they have failed: the exemption is limited to "noncommercial activity". Every file on Wikipedia is licensed for commercial use.
John Weitzmann, head of politics and law at Wikimedia Deutschland, also condemned the law ahead of the vote in a talk held at re:publica 2018, saying that if more people do not "take part in the dividends from a market ... with stakeholders that are too strong ... it is the task of cartel and competition law to correct this." Weitzmann expressed concerns that Article 13 "establish[es] a total filtration of all net platforms" with "freedom of speech delegated to complaint mechanisms".
Several media outlets, including German site netzpolitik.org and Gizmodo, also reported on the law. As the title of the Gizmodo article reads: "Memes, news, Wikipedia, art, privacy, and the creative side of fandom are all at risk of being destroyed or kneecapped."
The Trace Prize for Investigative Reporting was given to Simona Weinglass, the reporter who wrote a series of articles about the binary options industry for The Times of Israel, including "Wikipedia vs. Banc De Binary: A 3-year battle against binary options 'fake news'" which appeared exactly a year ago. That article covered The Signpost's February 2017 Special report by Smallbones. (The Times of Israel, "Times of Israel's Weinglass wins reporting honor for binary options exposé")
Smallbones provided this reaction for The Signpost:
Anybody who has edited anything related to binary options knows [Simona Weinglass's] contributions well. She took an organized crime topic where most newspapers fear to tread, if only to avoid libel suits, and opened it up so that the whole world could see it and smell it - the big picture and the smallest details. Her work moved the Israeli government to ban binary options, and just when it looked like political maneuvers would gut the bill, she took on some of the most powerful people in the Knesset and won that fight too. Remarkable journalism. Thanks Simona.
Vice News reported that "GOOGLE LISTED “NAZISM” AS THE IDEOLOGY OF THE CALIFORNIA REPUBLICAN PARTY" in the Knowledge Graph search result as a result of vandalism to the Wikipedia page. A related story appeared on front page of the Drudge Report, and the WMF apologized (?) via Twitter. US House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy criticized Google for the incident, and California Republican Party added criticism of Wikipedia (CBS). Also reported by tech media Search Engine Land, CNET, Wired, Gizmodo, the journalism school Poynter, & mainstream media RT, Fox News, Newsweek, Forbes and USA Today. See also this issue's Opinion.
After the high-profile vandalism event, WMF's executive director, Katherine Maher, wrote an op-ed in Wired magazine titled "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia", contrasting a community garden to a "corporate picnic" and calling attention to the digital commons' exposure to "overuse, exploitation and commodification".
Other contributors: 3family6
A discussion is taking place on Meta on the possible closure of one of the Foundation projects. Tagged with a WMF caveat to '...keep in mind that all project closure discussions are advisory. The Language Committee and WMF Board make all final decisions on project closures', a proposal has been put forward by Piotrus this month for the closure of Simple English Wikipedia.
Simple English which has around 135,000 articles is an English-language edition of Wikipedia, primarily written in basic English and special English. Launched in 2003, its stated aim is to provide an encyclopedia for "people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties, and people who are trying to learn English".
Among the 118 editors who have chimed in so far, are several well known Wikipedians who are on opposite sides of the fence - speakers in defence of SE include Beeblebrox, Andrew Davidson, and Cyberpower, while those supporting the motion to close it down include TonyBallioni, Blue Rasberry, and SMcCandlish. When asked why his name is not among the commenters, Kudpung, who usually takes part in major debates, told The Signpost: "My home turf is the English Wikipedia and that's where I work. Simple English probably doesn't cost any money to run, but its contributors' time might possibly be better spent on en.Wiki. I don't really know; from what I have seen its language level could probably be more accurately targeted and measured, but I'm not overly concerned with an outcome either way." Kudpung is a retired TEFL linguist whose career included training ESL teachers around the world and writing text books and graded readers.
At 64 (against) vs 54 (for), the discussion is still fairly evenly balanced. Comments are thought provoking.
At the time of the Royal Wedding, Jimbo Wales moved Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's pages to match their new royal titles as Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Discussions took place on Talk:Prince Harry and Talk:Meghan Markle about whether the articles should be at their current names or at Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex respectively. There was a strong consensus in favor of using the current names, per WP:UCN. This therefore managed to wreak havoc on the Top 25 Report twice.
On WT:CSD, a discussion is going on as to whether pages tagged with {{promising draft}} should be exempted from CSD G13 (for abandoned drafts). At this time, there are more opposes than supports by a thin margin.
InternetArchiveBot is a bot which replaces dead links with working ones from the Wayback Machine (a site owned by the Internet Archive). Originally, after editing a link, it would post a message on the relevant article's talk page (see here for an example). However, in February, this functionality was disabled as the result of an RfC due to the bot being more accurate and the false positive reporting system being simplified. This RfC asks whether these deprecated posts should be deleted from talk pages, either manually or with a bot. Consensus seems to be against this proposal.
Nixinova created a new version of the Main Page in userspace which replaces the 2nd-level headings with <div> HTML elements. A page containing only these proposed changes can be found here. Implementation of this change was debated on the Main Page's talk page and closed early in favor per WP:SNOW, and the changes can be seen on the Main Page now.
Wikipedia's icons have not changed in a long time, and some users consider them outdated, leading to one user proposing on the village pump that icons be adopted from icon sets such as OOjs, Emoji One, and Google Material Design. Users are divided as to the suggested icons' quality.
To suggest a discussion for inclusion in the next installment of the Discussion Report, leave a comment below or on the Signpost Newsroom's talk page.
18 featured articles were promoted.
18 featured lists were promoted.
Five featured pictures were promoted.
The evidence phase closed 13 June and when the workshop closed on 20 June, it included comments from seven editors (not counting one entry considered unsuitable by a clerk). In some cases, the workshop items call for investigation of content changes such as "intricate detail" removal or excessive article redirection, which remain contentious as an Arbcom matter. Other issues being considered include harassment or following; POV or advocacy editing; and off-wiki discussions of other editors, their content, and associated meatpuppetry.
Another content question under discussion is how to correctly use a biased yet reliable source. This requires careful framing and context.
Proposals floated prior to workshop closure included limiting redirects by an editor; blocks, bans, or a one-way interaction ban on LargelyRecyclable; or a two-way interaction ban and (tentatively) an admonition of K.e.coffman (KEC) for advocacy, downgraded from "battleground mentality".
If Arbcom's decision comes down purely to editor interactions rather than considering content, then this comment by TonyBallioni will be of great importance:
[T]here has been no evidence presented that K.e.coffman has acted inappropriately towards LargelyRecyclable. Multiple administrators have commented here saying that they consider LargelyRecyclable's conduct both towards K.e.coffman to be problematic, and evidence has been presented against them both in terms of how the have interacted with K.e.coffman, and their interactions with Bishonen during this case [...] K.e.coffman should not be subject to [an interaction ban or site ban] if there is no evidence of their wrongdoing.
A great deal of discussion has revolved around alleged long-term "civil POV pushing" by KEC. One commenter at the workshop called this an "insidious" practice. To this, editor Beyond My Ken has replied:
A number of these editors have made complaints about KEC's editing, and some of those complaints may have merit, but what they have consistently failed to do is to show that KEC is atempting to bias articles in a certain direction [...] KEC's editing has the effect of keeping articles properly neutral [...] The same cannot be said for the complaining editors, who, the evidence shows, are—either deliberately or simply by not understanding the effect of their editing—the ones skewing the articles [...] It's worth noting, also, that the editors I am referring to also control WikiProject Military History, which points out the danger which can come about when WikiProjects basically claim ownership rights to articles.
The issue of bias brought about by an editing clique, institutionalized through a WikiProject and its coordinators, is a significant concern brought up by multiple editors in addition to the one quoted above, and may be examined by the committee.
A proposed decision was originally due by 27 June, shortly before The Signpost's publication deadline, but has since been extended to 7 July.
—B
The case was accepted on 8 June with the scope being "the editing of Philip Cross in the topic area of British politics, especially as it relates to potential violations of the Biography of living persons policy and/or the Conflict of interest guideline". The evidence phase closed 22 June.
According to JzG (Guy), who created the case as a spin-off of an Administrators' noticeboard dispute, "this is an off-wiki dispute about Wikipedia, imported to Wikipedia. It is inherently difficult for the community to handle not least because some off-wiki material would result in an instant block or ban if repeated here and we have very blurred lines about linking to off-wiki outing and harassment." (emphasis added)
On 11 June, a large amount of material was suppressed, leaving the impression it involved the off-wiki evidence that Arbcom demanded be sent to them privately.
One of the parties has posted doubts about Arbcom's integrity, especially "the complete concealment of off-Wiki evidence" in reference to the other party's offline identity.
A number of remedies have been proposed, including:
The unusual off-wiki restrictions noted above were not embraced by everyone; whether this is permitted by Arbcom's charter remains an open question.
Some commenters have suggested we are headed for wide-ranging discretionary sanctions for British politics paralleling American politics 2.
—B
Related content: In the media § Arbitration committee thrust into the media spotlight
In a case filed reluctantly by Beeblebrox on 5 June, user Andrevan—who acquired administrator and bureaucrat rights at 13 and 10 years ago respectively—was accused of being from the "cowboy admin" days "retaining an attitude of shooting first and asking questions later." The case was accepted by 11 Arbitrators with one recusal. Faced with a long list of evidence of poor blocks, closing an RfA he had voted on, and numerous behavioral incidents while editing, Andrevan requested the removal of his Admin and Bureaucrat rights while already blocked for another issue. In less than 48 hours of being opened, the case was closed by motion on 11 June with Arbitrators voting 12 to 0 that Andrevan may only regain permissions through new RfA and RfB submissions per the removal "under cloud" policy provision.
—K
Prepared with commentary by Igordebraga
After a few weeks without high profile deaths, June barely started and two celebrities hanged themselves within a few days of each other: Anthony Bourdain got the higher views, but Kate Spade brought in more family members to the list. Otherwise, there are six movies (one from India), two Google Doodles, Netflix programmes aimed at teens, American sports finishing off their playoffs (four entries related to the anti-climactic basketball finals, one of the more competitive ice hockey one) while a sport the U.S. is still learning to like keeps its foothold (the FIFA World Cup, which is expected to dominate upcoming lists), someone who might enter the ever-present death list, and one article that is somehow also becoming a mainstay, the K-pop group EXO.
For the week of June 3 to 10, 2018, the most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Anthony Bourdain | 6,094,775 | The chef famous for food travelogue shows such as No Reservations and Parts Unknown took his own life by hanging himself in a hotel room. Tributes for Bourdain emerged from everywhere, including the current and previous Presidents of the United States. | ||
2 | Kate Spade | 4,231,518 | Three days before Bourdain, another celebrity had hanged herself, namely a fashion designer known for her accessories (i.e handbags and wallets sold for hefty prices). | ||
3 | Andy Spade | 1,318,774 | The widower of Kate (#2), who was also her partner in the company Kate Spade New York. | ||
4 | Virginia Apgar | 1,219,385 | Google released a Doodle homaging the obstetrician who created the Apgar score, used to summarize the health of newborn children. | ||
5 | LeBron James | 979,980 | Sometimes, you can't do everything by yourself. Playing his eighth consecutive NBA final and ninth overall, LeBron was accomplishing the usual high numbers for the Cleveland Cavaliers, but facing a team stacked on all-stars while your teammates are underwhelming (to the point of stupidity) didn't go well, and he suffered a 4-0 sweep. Fans and the media now speculate if "King James" will jump ship. | ||
6 | Asia Argento | 952,199 | This Italian actress, daughter of horror director Dario Argento, was dating Anthony Bourdain (#1) until his tragic death. | ||
7 | David Spade | 939,932 | How many people were surprised to learn that this comedian (known for Saturday Night Live, Just Shoot Me! and movies with friends Chris Farley and Adam Sandler) was actually related to the recently deceased Kate Spade (#2) through his brother Andy (#3)? | ||
8 | 2018 FIFA World Cup | 932,385 | Thursday is the day where most football fans will start having their lives in Moscow Time to follow the biggest event of their sport. | ||
9 | Avengers: Infinity War | 823,796 | It's official, the 19th Marvel movie has broken $2 billion worldwide. In the meantime, wonder if it will still be on this list as the 20th hits theaters in July. | ||
10 | Deaths in 2018 | 776,366 | This week's list is topped by two recent entries on this article, so no surprise it remains in the top 10. |
Prepared with commentary by OZOO
No surprise what the big news of the week is, with ten of the top 25 focusing on the FIFA World Cup, whether that's a look into the past, an eye on the future; or just keeping up with the current year, and the battle for supremacy between Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, or the dramatic late change in the management of the Spain national football team.
Of course, there is other news, with both protagonists from the Kim – Trump summit making it into the list. There's a good number of films, with Hereditary topping the Wikipedia Box Office this week. There's tennis for people who prefer their sport to have a bit less contact; and there's some UFC for those who don't.
For the week of June 10 to 16, 2018, the most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2018 FIFA World Cup | 3,007,166 | The 21st FIFA World Cup has begun, bringing together the giants of world football. Except for Italy, who didn't qualify. And the United States. Also it turns out having our guy pretty much win the 2018 UEFA Champions League Final single-handedly doesn't give Wales an automatic wildcard spot, for some reason. Anyway, expect to see this staying at or near the top for the next few weeks, with host nation Russia getting us under way on 14 June with a 5-0 victory over Saudi Arabia. Article also featured as ongoing at WP:ITN. | ||
2 | Anthony Bourdain | 1,799,523 | American celebrity chef and TV personality Bourdain was found dead on June 8 at the age of 61, following a suicide. Bourdain was known for hosting food-and-travel shows such as A Cook's Tour, No Reservations and Parts Unknown. | ||
3 | Cristiano Ronaldo | 1,213,959 | On the second day of the 2018 FIFA World Cup all eyes were on Portuguese star Ronaldo – regarded as one of the best players in the world – as his side took on Spain. Ronaldo shone in the lime-light, scoring the fifty-first hat-trick in FIFA World Cup history, including a late free-kick to secure a draw between the two highly ranked teams. | ||
4 | Kim Jong-un | 1,025,714 | Kim, the Supreme Leader of North Korea, met with US President Trump in Singapore this week, (meeting pictured) the first such summit to take place between the North Korean and American leaders. Trump agreed to cease all US-South Korea military exercises; in exchange for North Korea pledging to denuclearization. Some have criticised the meeting, given North Korea's significant human rights violations; and it has been suggested that the US has got very little out of the meeting while handing Kim a PR boost. Others would argue that a chance of ensuring peace on the Korean Peninsula and the potential of expanded rights in a less-isolated North Korea would be worth any image issues. | ||
5 | FIFA World Cup | 1,010,708 | The overview article for what most of this Top 25 list is all about. | ||
6 | Michael Peterson (murder suspect) | 926,807 | Peterson, a novelist convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife Kathleen Peterson and whose sentence was subsequently reduced to manslaughter in 2017; is the subject of the 2004 French documentary series The Staircase, which was released, including three new episodes, Netflix on June 8. | ||
7 | 2026 FIFA World Cup | 850,112 | The 2026 FIFA World Cup – the first to feature an expanded field of 48 teams from the current 32 – will be held across Canada, Mexico and the United States, after the United bid beat a rival bid from Morocco in a vote take on 13 June. | ||
8 | Hereditary (film) | 814,566 | Toni Collette (pictured) stars in Hereditary, the feature film directing debut for Ari Aster. The supernatural horror film – released on June 8 in the US – has received positive reviews from critics, but a D+ grade from CinemaScore. The opening weekend gross of $13.6 million is the highest opening for a film distributed by A24. | ||
9 | Avengers: Infinity War | 757,159 | I wonder if the 2018 FIFA World Cup is being held within the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? I like to think it is, although some countries may have (spoiler alert) some selection problems, what with the end of this film and all. | ||
10 | List of FIFA World Cup finals | 753,126 | The 20th FIFA World Cup final (1950 didn't have a final) will be held at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow on 15 July. |
Prepared with commentary by Stormy clouds
Ladies and gentlemen, it is football season, and I, for one, am ecstatic. Since the 14th of June, every remote control in my house has lain idle; the football, and nothing but the football, is on, and that is the end of discussion. And we're not even at it! It's the World Cup, an unstoppable force that lets every soccer aficionado worldwide neglect everything else, even the heinous organisation that is responsible for the footy festivities. However, this week, we were reminded that other stuff exists, with the shocking death of a rap star, which is perched atop this week's iteration of the report. However, the list is still dominated utterly by Telstars and VARs, making it fun for a devout footballing fan to compile.
So, without further ado, for the week of June 17 to 23, 2018, the most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | XXXTentacion | 7,306,664 | XXXTentacion, the 20-year old rapper behind "Sad!", amongst other hits, died in a shooting in Florida. His sudden death through gun violence, reminiscent of other prominent rappers, evoked a large reaction, and propelled a large swell of people to his article. Views on the death are decidedly mixed, between those who admired his music and its outlook on mental health issues, and those who criticised him due to his violent past (he was convicted of domestic abuse). I won't comment on his legacy, but the shocking nature of his death left him atop the Report this week. | ||
2 | 2018 FIFA World Cup | 4,163,410 | Now this is more in my wheelhouse. Six consecutive articles related to football appear in the Top 10 of the report, demonstrating the sheer power of the World Cup to captivate and intrigue. The football has been engrossing thus far, and I have been duly glued to it - between the influx of penalties wrought by the VAR system, to the propensity of players to hit absolute screamers in matches (for technique alone, this remains my favourite finish to date), this World Cup has truly caught the attention. As to who will win, I remain clueless. However, for brevity, let's discuss the footballing reasons behind the following entries, and why they are drawing such attention.
| ||
3 | Cristiano Ronaldo | 1,376,672 | |||
4 | FIFA World Cup | 1,297,469 | |||
5 | List of FIFA World Cup finals | 1,038,969 | |||
6 | Lionel Messi | 994,470 | |||
7 | 2014 FIFA World Cup | 905,222 | |||
8 | Incredibles 2 | 895,572 | This film, above all others released this summer, holds a special interest for me. Pixar has begun creating sequels of late, such as Finding Dory, to its beloved classics from the early 2000's. Given that I was a young child in this timeframe, I absolutely adore these classics, most of all the studio's take on the superhero genre. The sequel entered release in the States last week, but unfortunately, due to the World Cup, I won't be afforded the chance to see it for another month or so. However, all reviews indicate that it is excellent - once again Pixar defies the notion that if all films are super, none of them are. | ||
9 | Money in the Bank (2018) | 827,392 | I'll be honest; I have never comprehended the allure of wrestling. If I wished to witness great acting and faux fighting, I would attend the theatre. However, it draws mega money - who can forget that time that a wrestling bout filled the world's largest stadium, in North Korea, of all places. The appearance of this article, concerning a scuffle to claim a briefcase loaded with dollar bills, is testament to this popularity. Apparently, Braun Strowman won. | ||
10 | Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom | 810,821 | The latest film in Universal's monstrously large series hits US multiplexes this weekend, following a massive, inescapable marketing push. The film was released in Ireland a fortnight ago, affording me to see it in advance of my American brethren. I was not particularly thrilled, despite Andy Dwyer's charisma. At a certain stage, one has seen too many CG variations of a Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex before the novelty wears off. |
Collaboration team is announcing plans to graduate the New Filters for Edit Review out of beta on Watchlist by late June or early July. After launch, this suite of improved edit-search tools will be standard on all wikis. Individuals who prefer the existing Watchlist interface will be able to opt out by means of a new preference.
The New Filters introduce an easier yet more powerful user interface to Watchlist as well as a whole list of filters and other tools that make reviewing edits more efficient, including live page updating, user-defined highlighting, the ability to create special-purpose filter sets and save them for re-use and (on wikis with ORES enabled) predictive filters powered by machine learning. If you’re not familiar with the New Filters, please give them a try on Watchlist by activating the New Filters beta feature. In particular, it would be very helpful if you can test the new functionality with your local gadgets and configurations. The documentation pages provide guidance on how to use the many new tools you’ll discover.
Over 70,000 people have activated the New Filters beta, which has been in testing on Watchlist for more than eight months. We feel confident that the features are stable and effective, but if you have thoughts about these tools or the beta graduation, please let us know on the project talk page. In particular, tell us if you know of a special incompatibility or other issue that makes the New Filters problematic on your wiki. We’ll examine the blocker and may delay release on your wiki until the issue can be addressed. — Kaartic correct me, if i'm wrong (adapted from VPT post)
Thanks to a volunteer-driven initiative, the MonoBook skin is now responsive, meaning it will have a mobile-optimized view for smaller devices (similar to the new Timeless skin). This is primarily targeted more towards the needs of third-party MediaWiki users, but is also available for users of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation wikis.
The initial deployment was made on 31 May with little notice, and had an overwhelmingly negative response at the Village Pump discussion. This was mostly due to the opt-out method not working, and accessibility problems for screen readers. The change was reverted on 2 June, and redeployed the next week after fixing those immediate concerns, and lowering the threshold (viewport width) for devices being considered mobile.
If you use the MonoBook skin, you can try the responsive layout out on a desktop device by shrinking your browser window. If you don't like the new layout, you can go to the Appearance tab in your preferences, uncheck "use responsive MonoBook design", and it will revert to the normal desktop styles.
Feedback, bugs, and suggestions can be reported on the Phabricator task.
(Adapted from VPT discussion)
Hi everyone. The Readers web team has recently begun working on exposing issue templates on the mobile website. Currently, details about issues with page content are generally hidden on the mobile website. This leaves readers unaware of the reliability of the pages they are reading. The goal of this project is to improve awareness of particular issues within an article on the mobile web. We will do this by changing the visual styling of page issues.
So far, we have drafted a proposal on the design and implementation of the project. We were also able to run user testing on the proposed designs. The tests so far have positive results. Here is a quick summary of what we learned:
Our next step would be to start implementing these changes. We wanted to reach out to you for any concerns, thoughts, and suggestions you might have before beginning development. Please visit the project page where we have more information and mockups of how this may look. Please leave feedback on the talk page. —CKoerner (WMF) (talk) (adapted from VPT post)
Potentially untagged misspellings (configuration) is a newish database report that lists potentially untagged misspellings. For example, Angolan War of Independance is currently not tagged with {{R from misspelling}}
and it should be.
Any and all help evaluating and tagging these potential misspellings is welcome. Once these redirects are appropriately identified and categorized, other database reports such as Linked misspellings (configuration) can then highlight instances where we are currently linking to these misspellings, so that the misspellings can be fixed.
This report has some false positives and the list of misspelling pairs needs a lot of expansion. If you have additional pairs that we should be scanning for or you have other feedback about this report, that is also welcome. — MZMcBride (talk) (adapted from VPT post)
Because of maintenance work, English Wikipedia will be read-only for up to 30 minutes on 18 July, at 06:00 UTC. Everyone will be able to read it, but you can’t edit. This is just to give you an early warning. If everything goes well, this should just take a few minutes, but prepare for 30 minutes to be on the safe side. You can read more in the tasks linked to from phab:T197134. — /Johan (WMF) (talk) (adapted from VPT post)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #22, #23, #24, #25, & #26. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
importScript( 'User:Anomie/unsignedhelper.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anomie/unsignedhelper.js
importScript( 'User:Bellezzasolo/Scripts/arb.js' ); // Backlink: User:Bellezzasolo/Scripts/arb.js
importScript( 'User:Bellezzasolo/Scripts/ajaxrollsum.js' ); // Backlink: User:Bellezzasolo/Scripts/ajaxrollsum.js
importScript( 'User:Sam Sailor/Scripts/WRStitle.js' ); // Backlink: User:Sam Sailor/Scripts/WRStitle.js
importScript( 'User:Amorymeltzer/easyblock-modern.js' ); // Backlink: User:Amorymeltzer/easyblock-modern.js
importScript( 'User:Amorymeltzer/crathighlighter.js' ); // Backlink: User:Amorymeltzer/crathighlighter.js
importScript( 'User:Amorymeltzer/oldafd.js' ); // Backlink: User:Amorymeltzer/oldafd.js
Late last year, photographers from around the world were invited to share their photos of people at work on the African continent. Over 18,000 were submitted. Here are the winners and other images.
The 2017 Wiki Loves Africa competition started on 1st October 2017 and closed on 30th November 2017. The original WMF blog post reposted here was edited and expanded to include other images, translations and descriptions not in the original blog post. Barbara Page.
Editor's note: On the morning of 29 April 2017, following news from Turkey Blocks that all language editions of Wikipedia had been blocked in Turkey,[1][2] several websites published articles about the event.[3] Reuters and the BBC reported that the Turkish authorities had blocked all access to Wikipedia in the country beginning at 5:00 AM UTC. Turkey's Information and Communication Technologies Authority simply stated: "After technical analysis and legal consideration based on the Law Nr. [sic] 5651 [governing the Internet], an administrative measure has been taken for this website".[2][4] Users reported that they could only access Wikipedia using tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs).[5][6]
The Wikimedia Foundation is deeply concerned about recent statements attributed to the Turkish Minister of Transport, Maritime, and Communications Ahmet Arslan from Friday, the 18th of May, regarding the block of Wikipedia in Turkey. The Minister’s comments seriously misrepresent Wikipedia’s open editing model and efforts undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation to lift the block.
To address these concerns, the Wikimedia Foundation has issued the following letter to Minister Arslan. We are publishing this letter openly here to further address any public confusion surrounding the Minister’s comments.
For a year, the people of Turkey have not been able to learn from, share, or contribute knowledge on Wikipedia. Without participation from Turkey, the world suffers. We remain committed to restoring access to Wikipedia in full for the people of Turkey. #WeMissTurkey
Dear Minister Arslan:
I am the General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia, whose more than 46 million articles make it the largest, collaboratively-built online repository of free knowledge in the world. I read your recent statements on the access ban of Wikipedia in Turkey, which did not include critical information about the current situation. Unfortunately, the statements did not include any information about the many steps the Wikimedia community of volunteer editors have already taken to improve the articles that are the basis for the block. Nor do they include information about our compliance with Turkish law and many meetings with Turkish officials. To that end, I want to take this opportunity to provide crucial information concerning many and significant efforts to address the block, and to emphasize our interest in understanding how to return access to Wikipedia for people in Turkey.
Before getting into more detail, here are a few very important points.
First, the Turkish block is the most expansive government ban ever imposed on Wikipedia, and includes Wikipedias across nearly 300 languages. The court order imposing the ban is based on two articles in English Wikipedia which the court said damaged the reputation and prestige of the Republic of Turkey. While we respectfully disagreed with the court’s decision as it applied to the articles at the time the block was imposed, we also wish to point out that those articles have been changed substantially by Wikipedia volunteer editors since the block was imposed and urge you to take that into consideration.
Second, it is important to note that, unlike other top internet platforms, the Wikimedia Foundation does not own or control the content of the sites it hosts, including Wikipedia. With respect to the editing process, the Foundation cannot remove or alter content. The originating idea that has led to the unique value of Wikipedia is that it is a collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. Together they make decisions about what information to include in Wikipedia and how that information is presented. The editing process proceeds according to policies developed and overseen by these independent volunteer editors. Wikipedia’s policies require reliable sources to verify information included in Wikipedia, and neutrality, especially when covering controversies in which there are differing views. This is an ongoing process and means that Wikipedia articles are under constant improvement. It is a process that benefits from more editors and differing perspectives, which is one of the reasons why ending the block in Turkey is so important.
This manner of creating and improving content remains to this day the most powerful and unique contribution of Wikipedia to the internet. When more people participate on Wikipedia, the more neutral, reliable, and accurate its articles become. As you may know from the BTK, the Wikimedia Foundation and independent Wikipedia volunteer editors offered to provide open, public training on Wikipedia in Turkey once the block is lifted, as we have done in other countries, with the goal of increasing the number of editors and perspectives on Wikipedia.
Third, I also want to emphasize that Wikipedia has complied with Turkish law; it has not sought to circumvent the court ruling. The Foundation, for its part, has pursued its legal remedies and will continue to do so.
Significantly, and as stated above, independent, volunteer Wikipedia editors have made extensive changes to the articles upon which the court order is based. The Wikipedia articles today are significantly different than the versions that were reviewed by the court more than one year ago when it issued its 2017 decision.
The articles have been improved, in a manner consistent with Wikipedia’s own standards: The articles now include more statements from multiple reliable sources from both within and outside Turkey, cover different sides of controversies, and use more neutral language. These changes also address major concerns expressed by the government, including that the Wikipedia articles provide comprehensive summaries that do not only reflect one point of view.
The articles are and have remained open for editing by anyone around the world in accordance with Wikipedia’s editorial policies of neutrality and reliance on reliable sources. Indeed, the only barrier to Turkish people’s ability to improve Wikipedia further is the fact that the access ban has not yet been lifted.
We respectfully request that the government join us in asking the court to lift the ban so that Wikipedia can return to serving as a valuable, free educational resource on a wide range of topics, including science, engineering, art, and culture. We would like to see the Turkish people able to contribute to the global conversation, including Turkish topics, on Wikipedia. As we have repeatedly noted, we are all made poorer for the absence of contributions by the Turkish people.
In any event, we would like to keep open communication with you so that we can discuss these matters further if that is helpful.
Eileen B. Hershenov
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
Nutzer berichteten davon, wie sie sämtliche Sprachversionen von Wikipedia nur noch mit Hilfe technischer Mittel wie VPN-Verbindungen nutzen konnten. [Users reported how they could use all language versions of Wikipedia only with the help of technical means such as VPN connections.]
Die gängigste Methode für türkische Internetnutzer, die gesperrten Seiten zu erreichen ist über ein Virtual Private Network (VPN). [The most common method for Turkish Internet users to reach the blocked pages is over a Virtual Private Network (VPN).]
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
This paper[1] is thoroughly structured and combines the theory of web genres with dialogue theory to examine Wikipedia talk pages. Since Wikipedia is a web genre, "Wikicussions" (as the authors call them) form a subgenre. In this context, talk pages are examined further, including the quality of cooperation between Wikipedia users, that can be linked to social differentiation regarding roles and statuses of Wikipedians (content- vs. administration-related users). These group-related processes can be seen as a mediating layer between external parameters (system requirements for Wikipedia's user community) and the structure and dynamics of WP's subgenres.
Unlike face-to-face dialogue, the authors argue that Wikicussions stand out due to a publicly available common ground (derived from dialogue theory), which may provide a reason for the structures they found.
The paper is enriched with a number of high-quality figures that support and underpin the findings.
Our intuition might tell us that government censorship causes reduced access to online information. But recent research indicates that the effect can be exactly the opposite. Using data gathered from Wikipedia page views and other sources, researchers William Hobbs and Margaret Roberts found that:
“ | [...] citizens accustomed to acquiring this [forbidden] information will be incentivized to learn methods of censorship evasion [...] millions of Chinese users acquire[d] virtual private networks, and subsequently [...] began browsing blocked political pages on Wikipedia, following Chinese political activists on Twitter, and discussing highly politicized topics such as opposition protests in Hong Kong.[2]: 1 | ” |
Specifically, the authors studied the impact of a block of Instagram in China on September 29, 2014, following protests in Hong Kong, on Chinese Wikipedia pages that were already blocked in the country. (This predates the 2015 total block of the Chinese Wikipedia and the switch of all Wikimedia sites to full encryption with HTTPS around the same time, which made such per-page blocking impossible.) The censored Chinese Wikipedia pages with the largest increase in views "shows that new viewers accessed pages that had long been censored including those related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests",[2]: 12 i.e. "viewing patterns that would be more typical of new users who had just jumped the firewall, rather than of old VPN users who had presumably consumed this information long ago."[2]: 11 Here is an excerpt of the full list examined in the research, the top 10 for the second day of the block, linked here to their English Wikipedia equivalents:
The researchers propose to name this phenomenon the "gateway effect", a "mechanism through which repression can backfire inadvertently, without political or strategic motivation",[2]: 3 because it incentivizes people to learn how to evade censorship and thus "have more, not less, access to information and begin engaging in conversations, social media sites, and networks that have long been off-limits to them."[2]: 15 They distinguish it from the Streisand effect, where individuals specifically seek out information that is being hidden.
The second author of the study, Margaret Roberts, is also the author of Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2018; print ISBN 978-0-691-17886-8, e-book 978-1-400-89005-7).
This study was able to "characterize" the interests of Wikipedia editors and the editors' social media activity on Twitter to facilitate:
“ | [...] building rich user profiles, which can be conveniently used in order to provide personalized contents and offers." and "[...] profiling, i.e., the detection of the user's core interests and, therefore, allows for product and service recommendations far more tailored than those stemming from other (usually) extemporary actions on the Internet, like flight ticket purchases and hotel reservations. In this light, it is important to notice that such a profiling potential associated to social login remains nowadays largely unused and enabling its exploitation is one of the main goals of the present work.[3] | ” |
See the community-curated research events page on Meta-wiki for other upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
Recent presentations at the monthly Research showcase hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation included the following:
Antisocial behavior can exist in online social systems and may include harassment and personal attacks. A new paper[4] by seven researchers from Cornell University, Jigsaw, and the Wikimedia Foundation describes how the prediction of undesirable negative exchanges may be able to prevent the deterioration of a discussion. Prediction may be possible at the start of a conversation to prevent its deterioration. One of the authors also gave an interview published on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog,[supp 1] and the paper was covered in popular media; see In the media § In brief.
From the announcement (by Aaron Halfaker):
“ | ORES is an open, transparent, and auditable machine prediction platform for Wikipedians to help them do their work. It's currently used in 33 different Wikimedia projects to measure the quality of content, detect vandalism, recommend changes to articles, and to identify good faith newcomers. The primary way that Wikipedians use ORES' predictions is through the tools developed by volunteers. These javascript gadgets, MediaWiki extensions, and web-based tools make up a complex ecosystem of Wikipedian processes – encoded into software. | ” |
The presentation covered "three key tools that Wikipedians have developed that make use of ORES": Wikidata's damage detection models, exposed through Recent Changes; Spanish Wikipedia's PatruBOT; and WikiEdu tools from User:Ragesoss that incorporate article quality models.
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
{{cite journal}}
: External link in |volume=
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Plot summaries. Enough said except that they tend to be very funny.
You will want to catch up on all those episodes listed below so set your DVR and catch up on the programming you've missed. This isn't as difficult as it sounds since every program since the beginning of time is being run again somewhere. In all fairness to those editors who work very hard on describing these programs I have to admit that context is everything. I have lifted these excerpts right out of the articles. Aficionados of each of these programs will read this humor article and not find it funny... at all. If you are not familiar with some of these programs or actors, reading these descriptions can be a little disorienting, but that usually is the purpose of this section of the Signpost anyway. I can't account for all the marijuana that is part of some plots. I've heard that watching television (especially The Benny Hill Show) is how many folks around the world learn English. I do hope this isn't true.
"Kate Austen wakes up on the floor of a locker room. Tom allows her to have a shower and afterwards, forces her to change into a dress, after which she is led to an elegant breakfast on the beach with Ben, who tells her to put on handcuffs before she can eat. [...] A teenager, Karl, in a nearby cage initially ignores Sawyer [...] Tom makes Karl, who is now beaten and bloody, apologize to Sawyer before taking the teen away. Sawyer figures out the mechanical puzzle in his cage, though Tom says it 'only took the bears two hours.' Kate is then put in Karl's cage.' "Ben, is revealed to be the leader of the Others. In flashbacks, Jack obsessively tries to find out who his wife Sarah is having an affair with during his divorce settlement. Jack suspects his father and attacks him at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Jack is arrested and bailed out by his wife.[1][2]
"In case of several characters providing lead vocals, the performers are listed in the order in which their characters (of the first of their characters in case they voice several) start singing."
"Baloney tries to cover up the death of Mr. Potato Head's favorite plant as a pair of aliens arrive on Earth seeking a new ruler for their interstellar empire. Meanwhile, Dr. Fruitcake creates the Ham Monster for Mr. Potato Head's monster show which proves to be too dangerous for him to control. [...] Upon finding out that Donkey Waddlefoot's show stole his submarine show, Mr. Potato Head informs the TV Guys about it as he is told to do a spy show. Mr. Potato Head does this as well as trying to find out how Donkey Waddlefoot found the footage to make his own episodes."
"A new case for Chief Justice Commissioner Frank Stolte and Chief Justice Commissioner Ingo Fischer. A bomb disguised as a crabbose detonates at a motorway extinguishment. Two road workers survive with scarce need. Immediately, the perpetrator appears with Richie Weber, who had just threatened with bombs along the highway. Shortly thereafter, a junkyard bursts in. The stolen items are found a little later with a cassette and a tin figure near the motorway. On the cassette, a certain 'Rascar Capac' emerges as the author of the bombing. He calls for 1 million DM in cash and one kilo of gold. In the trumpet, the commissioners find out that 'Rascar Capac' is a figure from a Tintin comic. After a failed ransom transfer, a construction site is converted, so that it comes to a mass carambola. For Frank, a cat-and-mouse game begins. First he is sent by the bomber to a swimming pool, but when Ingo appears, 'Rascar Capac' sends Frank to a museum."[3]
"Beaver won't eat his Brussels sprouts and thus jeopardizes his chance to join an upcoming family outing, to a football game featuring two of the best pro teams, including the Green Bay Packers. June is insistent about Beaver finishing his sprouts. She appeals to Ward, who commands, 'Eat, Beaver.' Eddie suspects their resolve and encourages Beaver: 'Hold the fort, kid. They're cracking.' Ward compromises and says Beaver can go with the family but must eat his sprouts the next time they're served. At a restaurant, Beaver finds the vegetable du jour is Brussels sprouts. The wait staff and another diner notice Beaver's reluctance, and intervene, creating a scene. Beaver reluctantly puts one in his mouth and Wally slaps him on the back. Beaver suddenly swallows the sprout. He decides Brussels sprouts are not so bad. Later, Ward and June tell Beaver that he, too, will ask his kids to do things they don't want, out of love. But Ward admits that sometimes even parents make mistakes. Beaver is impressed that his father can admit to making a mistake."
"The Clampetts travel to Washington DC to give their fortune to the President to fight the smog problem [...] Jethro converts the truck to steam (evidently either wood-fired or coal-fired, producing thick clouds of smoke), then converts it to electricity (requiring a very, very long extension cord). A young (early thirties) Rich Little impersonates President Nixon."
"An elderly businessman, concerned about the welfare of his grandchild, informs Friday and Gannon that his daughter and son-in-law are using marijuana regularly. The young couple make no apologies for their lifestyle, which inevitably leads to disaster."
"Trimbole learns of a massive shipment of Lebanese cannabis from his friend Dr Nick Paltos (Wadih Dona) and makes plans to import it [...] Allison implicates the entire syndicate and provides evidence linking Trimbole to the Mr. Asia syndicate. The prime minister announces a Royal Commission and disbands the Federal Narcotics Bureau; the move ultimately results in Jack Smith and nearly 150 equally corrupt Narcotics agents being demoted to customs agent-status. But due to Trevor Haken alerting his friends in the NSW Police of the impending bust, George Freeman tips off Trimbole, who is able to flee overseas. Brian Alexander, by then having fallen into alcoholism due to stress, is fired from his position and shunned by his former allies Freeman and Trimbole. The NSW police determine that he knows too much and could spill the beans in an interrogation: Dennis Kelly and his partner Jim Egan (Daniel Roberts) lure him to a yacht where they kill him by dumping him into the sea with his feet attached to a stove. Meanwhile, Frank Tizzoni is arrested in Griffith as he was driving a van loaded with marijuana. After some time in custody he agrees to cut a deal with Messina, giving him evidence of Trimbole and Clark's involvement in the murder of the Wilsons. The taskforce furthermore begins suspecting Haken of leaking intel."
"Flight of the Conchords manager Murray (Rhys Darby) brings a reluctant Bret (Bret McKenzie) and Jemaine (Jemaine Clement) to a nightclub to experience 'dancing music', recruiting their friend Dave (Arj Barker) to compel them inside [...] Jemaine goes home with a woman (Sarah Wynter), but when he awakes the next morning, he finds himself surrounded by Australian memorabilia. He suspects he has slept with an Australian, a major taboo for New Zealanders, and attempts to sneak out, calling Bret for help when he cannot unlock the door. However, the woman catches him, introducing herself as Keitha, a rough, crude Australian."
"Leo is a permanently stoned hippie (although he did become briefly cured when the Formans served him a cup of coffee in 'Long Away'), the owner of a Foto Hut shop and Hyde's employer. His marijuana use has left him quite dimwitted, to the point of doing nothing about misdeeds that are about to be performed by the teenagers that should be brought to the attention of parents or authorities, even if he disapproves of these actions. He has little regard for his major duties as a store owner and would rather take the time to play board games with Hyde than work."
"The crew returns from vacation, with Miss Piggy claiming to have gone through a spiritual change after returning from Argentina and adopting a Magellanic penguin chick that she names 'Gloria Estefan', much to the dismay of Uncle Deadly [...] Lucy Royce, visits the show and forces them to work with a consultant named Pizza to 'update' the program. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele gravely warn Kermit and Miss Piggy about the repercussions of following the suggestions, noting that after working with Pizza and implementing his changes, Key & Peele was canceled [...] Pizza visits the show during the night's taping and informs Kermit that he stopped Key and Peele's scheduled appearance due to them pitching their oven mitts on Shark Tank. In order to save the show, Kermit performs 'In Spite of Ourselves' with Miss Piggy, which makes Denise feel awkward. Afterwards at Rowlf's Tavern, she tells Kermit they should re-evaluate their relationship."[4]
New plot summary by Barbara Page:[5]
"As they left the restaurant, I tried warning Scully not to get in the driver-less car that (sure enough) was part of the machines' plan to hurt her unless the restaurant AIs got their 15% tip. But did she listen? NO! All I could think of was 'I told you so!' Meanwhile Mulder is returning to his own home (why do they live separately, again?). Some wiley drones begin their persecution of Mulder for neglecting to tip. And even though they are very small, it looks like they still had the power to inflict much harm. The itsty bitsy ones are getting into the house and chasing him around like a pack of killer bees. He is running out of the house and heads on over to Scully's. He gets there and despite my dire, loud and verbal warnings NOT to enter Scully's house, he isn't listening to me. He breaks down the door and grabs Scully and throws her out the door right before the whole place blows up in a big fireball. Mulder eventually breaks down later in the episode and pays the tip. The machines back off and they are allowed to live.[6]
"In the last sequence of the episode, Mulder and Scully are having breakfast together in a human-operated diner, paying with paper money and still focusing on their smart devices. Scully decides to put her phone aside and gently touches Mulder's hand, to which he reacts by turning his phones [sic] screen down. They both sit contemplating and holding hands."[7]
In the coming months we'll be highlighting and reprinting some of the more interesting/useful/original/pointless/helpful/tasteless essays written by Wikipedians from among the thousands listed in the Essay directory. We thought that this one about essays themselves, "Ignore all essays", short and sweet, written in 2011 by Tom Morris, would be an appropriate lead into the new feature. Thank you Tom.
It is already established that one should ignore all rules. Some essayists believe we should ignore all dramas, others think we should ignore all uses of "ignore all rules". Other things we should ignore all of include rules, except for the one about consensus, or maybe ignore credentials or even more radically ignore all users.
There is a much simpler and easier thing to do: just ignore all essays! This is much easier to follow: you just don't read essays and ignore appeals to them. It won't affect editing articles or fighting vandals or any of the other things you do on the site.
But this may present something of a paradox. If you ignore all essays, you are following the advice given in this essay, and are therefore not ignoring all essays. Wikipedians, you have your own liar paradox! Enjoy it until some mathematician or philosopher makes it disappear in a puff of logic.
In summary:
The topic is in the news again, so although only just over a year old, we're reprinting this article by Smallbones from the 6 February 2017 edition of The Signpost
From 2013 until its demise in January 2017, Banc De Binary (BDB), a financial broker based in Israel, drew an international stream of accusations and regulatory penalties. Following a lawsuit and negative media reports about the company, a cohort of mostly undisclosed paid editors sought to influence the firm's coverage on Wikipedia.
Given the multiple, time-consuming deletion requests, sockpuppet investigations, and content disputes, it is clear the effort took its toll on Wikipedia's volunteer editors and functionaries. Can we quantify how much such an incident costs Wikipedia? Certainly there's the cost in editor time that could be used better elsewhere. There's the cost of administrative time spent in investigating sock puppets, banning editors, and the like. There's the cost of a diminished reputation for accuracy. And there can be significant costs to our readers from trusting an article or acting on the information in it.
BDB advertised itself as a leader in binary options, an industry viewed with great skepticism by many regulators and journalists. Exposés of scam artists in the industry now abound with titles like 80% losses guaranteed!, Ex-binary options salesman: Here is how we fleece the clients and The unethical sellers of dreams. One victim, after losing $113,250, told her BDB broker that she had no more money left to send him, according to computer records obtained by the Financial Times. The broker answered, "Don't you have a kidney? Sell it."
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office has called for a worldwide ban on binary options trading.
A 2013 sockpuppet investigation led to the determination that the initial version of the article had been created by a sock puppet. Scubadoofeck re-created the article, but was then banned as a sock puppet of User:Morning277. Morning277 had been a central figure in the 2013 Wiki-PR paid editing scandal, in which over 250 accounts were blocked or banned. The article has been deleted twice, has been the subject of at least three additional deletion requests, and has been the subject of extensive edit warring. A biography of the company's CEO was also deleted three times in 2013.
The Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) licensed BDB as a broker in January 2013, allowing BDB to trade in many European Union countries. Though BDB was fined four times by CySEC, BDB kept its license until January 2017, when the company closed.
In June 2013 two US regulators, the SEC and the CFTC, filed civil suits against BDB and jointly issued a warning against the entire non-US binary options industry.
An external link to these civil suits was placed in the article two days later, prompting a protracted edit war. In May 2014, an editor nominated the article for deletion; that editor was blocked as yet another sockpuppet the next day. During the intervening 11 months, nearly 500 edits were made. An IP editor (traceable to Israel) claiming to be BDB CEO Oren Shabat Laurent, made five identical edits in the same day, all of which were reverted, to include highlights of Laurent's biography, and lists of products and countries served. He also reduced the coverage of the regulators' lawsuits and buried it at the bottom of the article. The article was protected due to edit warring, and vacillated between semi- and full protection until June 2014.
In May 2014, an editor observed changes in web search results relating to BDB, and asserted that the Wikipedia efforts might be part of a search engine optimization (SEO) effort to remove and de-emphasize coverage of the company's bad press from the web. The Times of Israel later noted, under a headline decrying the "wolves of Tel Aviv", that SEO "expertise has plainly been applied by fraudulent binary options firms, whose affiliated sites show up high in Google searches — sending unsuspecting and naive clients their way."
The article was kept after an Articles for Deletion discussion, despite the participation of User:BDBJack, who had declared he was working for BDB, and eight other editors whose comments were discounted as "obvious single-purpose accounts and socks".
User:BDBIsrael, later indefinitely blocked along with BDBJack, also stated that he was paid by BDB. In June he began relaying messages from the BDB board of directors, clearly stating that BDB had been a customer of Wiki-PR and naming several editors who either worked for BDB directly or through Wiki-PR. One of the editors who worked directly for BDB, User:Notsosoros was indefinitely blocked along with 37 related accounts for sockpuppeting. Most of these socks were apparently "sleeper accounts"—deceptive accounts being prepared to be used later—which hadn't yet edited the BDB article.
Word was posted on Wikipedia that BDB had advertised a five figure fee for "crisis management" of the article. This posting rallied Wikipedia editors to fight for an unbiased article.
A sock puppet started the editing in June 2014 with a request for speedy deletion [24]. 106 edits and six days later, the article was placed under full protection. On June 4 a well-known paid editor, who told the Signpost that he never accepted money from BDB, started another article deletion request, but the article was speedily kept. Three days later, he deleted 88% of the article text. The article talk page was even busier, with about 450 edits that month.
On June 16, 2014 the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new requirement for paid editors as part of Wikipedia's terms of use. Paid editors from that date forward were formally required to declare their paid status, their employer, clients, and other relevant affiliations, so that other editors could easily review their work. Paid editing at the BDB article slowed immediately. Only two banned or permanently blocked editors edited the article until 2016.
2016 was a rough year for BDB. In January Israel changed its law to make trading binary options with its citizens illegal. In February BDB settled the US regulatory cases with $11 million in fines and restitution, and an agreement not to trade with or even indirectly solicit US residents. The Times of Israel ran a series of detailed exposés on the binary options industry, starting with "The wolves of Tel Aviv: Israel's vast, amoral binary options scam exposed" One article focused on BDB. The prime minister’s office condemned the whole industry, and the Knesset scheduled hearings on stopping all binary options trading in Israel. CySEC fined BDB four times and there were other regulatory setbacks in Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, and Belize.
This did not appear to stop the undisclosed paid editing on the BDB article. Four accounts, later banned or permanently blocked, removed content from the article in 2016: FoCuSandLeArN, Tianderni, Beranpolti, and Euclidthalis.
BDB fought hard to push its advertising into the article, and to remove news of its regulatory problems. Wikipedia editors and administrators fought harder and did a good job under the circumstances. Perhaps Wikipedia editors, myself included, could have been clearer: a reader skimming the article might have drawn the erroneous conclusion that BDB was a legitimate business with just a few problems with regulators. Of course we are constrained by what reliable secondary sources say – we could not have written, for instance, "BDB is a scam" unless several sources had printed that.
Coverage of BDB in Wikipedia's German, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish editions was less informative than in the English edition. All the articles were created from 2013–14. They appear to have been translated from one of the English article versions written by BDB; all but one had a small paragraph on US regulation buried at the bottom.
The creator of the Spanish article got his account globally locked as a "spam only account", but the article stayed pretty much the same until December 2016. The Greek and Russian articles stayed much as originally written. The German and Portuguese articles started in 2013 with word of BDB’s regulatory problems in the lede, but those sentences were deleted in June 2014.
A prolonged conflict around an article impacts Wikipedia's most valuable resource—volunteer time—and impacts the quality of information conveyed to its readers. All of these should be regarded as significant costs to the Wikipedia project. Furthermore, to whatever extent Wikipedia's readers take detrimental action based on faulty information from Wikipedia, those individuals share in the cost, as well.
In total, three editors of the English-language article were banned as sock puppets of Morning277, and 17 others were banned or indefinitely blocked. These editors all pushed BDB's point of view. A couple dozen more were blocked as sock puppets of a BDB employee before they could edit the BDB article.
With 781 edits to the article and 870 edits to the talk page, BDB likely consumed hundreds of hours of our editors' time. Eight related deletion requests, two massive edit wars, 20 banned or blocked editors, and years of page protection likely used hundreds more hours of administrators' time.
The Israeli binary options industry is reported to take in more than US$1 billion per year. BDB reported unaudited revenues of $100 million in 2014. How much of that came from Wikipedia readers can only be guessed. But given the time and money BDB spent trying to manipulate the article on Wikipedia, it must have been a very large amount. Maybe we should all count our kidneys, and keep our eyes on the wolves.