Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2019-05-31

An anniversary hit us right between the eyes just before deadline: June 16 marks the fifth anniversary of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) changing its terms of use to ban undeclared paid editing.

This Tuesday, Ad Age revealed that employees of Leo Burnett Tailor Made replaced photos in Wikipedia articles on a dozen national parks and similar sites, with photos of the same sites featuring models wearing clothing from The North Face, complete with the company's logo. The employees who replaced the photos did not declare their paid status on Wikipedia. They violated Wikipedia policies that prohibit advertising, marketing, promotion, and public relations content, as well as the WMF's terms of use. I am not a lawyer, but it looks like they also violated the Federal Trade Commission's rules against deceptive advertising.

The undeclared paid editors then bragged about it in a video now posted on Ad Age. Other news coverage that includes the video are "North Face tried to scam Wikipedia to get its products to the top of Google search" in The Verge and "Wikipedia is mad at The North Face for 'unethically' manipulating pages" in Dazed. The WMF reacted quickly and appropriately with "Let's talk about The North Face defacing Wikipedia".

The North Face's paid editors were honest to the extent that their intentions as stated in the video were perfectly clear. They wanted to use Wikipedia – while avoiding the scrutiny of Wikipedia's editors and administrators – to reach the top of Google searches for images of those outdoor sites for marketing purposes.

They were not honest when they said that they were "collaborating with Wikipedia".

Ad Age, in a new story, reports that The North Face has apologized via twitter:

"We believe deeply in Wikipedia's mission and integrity – and apologise for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles. Effective immediately, we have ended the campaign and moving forward, we'll strive to do better and commit to ensuring that our teams and vendors are better trained on Wikipedia's site policies."

We hope to hear more from The North Face.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the terms of use change that banned undeclared paid editing, the next issue of The Signpost will focus on how paid editing affects our encyclopedia. We want to hear from editors, administrators, arbitrators, bureaucrats, WMF employees and board members. We want to hear from all sides of the issue, including those who oppose paid editing, those who support it, and paid editors – both declared and undeclared. And most of all we want to hear from ordinary Wikipedia editors.

We also invite The North Face to publish an apology here, addressed directly to Wikipedia editors and readers.

We want to know how to fix a system of dealing with paid editors that has not been working very well. We want to know:

• How paid editing affects your work on Wikipedia.
• Has the ban on undeclared paid editing affected your ability to add encyclopedic information?
• Have you interacted with paid editors? How effective has it been?
• What are your ideas on solving the problem?

Send article length submissions to Signpost/Newsroom/Submissions. If you want to simply write a paragraph, please add it to the comments below. If you want to submit material confidentially, please email me directly.

Wikimania 2019 will be held in Stockholm from August 16 to 18 with a preconference on August 14 and 15. The venue is the Aula Magna building at Stockholm University. The theme of the conference is "Stronger together: Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals", based around the sustainability goals defined by the United Nations in 2015.

The program format has been redesigned this year: topics and leaders have been selected for more than a dozen tracks, or "spaces". Individual presentation proposals are selected by the leaders of the spaces. Submissions are due June 9.

The registration process involves both Eventbrite and PayPal. The "early bird" prices for the main three-day conference will be US$175, and are available only until May 31. A limited number of hotel rooms are available at 1195 Swedish krona (about US$125) per night.

Two affiliate-selected trustees will be elected on May 31 to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. This is the first trustee election that gives user groups a vote, rather than just chapters and the single thematic organization. About 107 user groups, 41 chapters and Amical Wikimedia – the thematic organization – have a single vote each. The votes will be tallied using single transferable vote (STV) method using a Droop quota.

Eleven candidates appear on the ballot: Yuri Astrakhan, Shani Evenstein, Christophe Henner, Reda Kerbouche, Richard Knipel, Taweetham Limpanuparb, Maor Malul, Douglas Scott, Gerald Shields, Nataliia Tymkiv, and Kayode Yussuf.

Results will be announced before Wikimania, and must be approved by the Board of Trustees.

Additional contributor: DannyS712

• Three administrators were desysopped for inactivity.
• Vejvančický, Euryalus, HereToHelp, and StringTheory11 all voluntarily relinquished their administrative privileges.

You might think that there's nothing inherently political about writing an encyclopedia. You'd be wrong as several of this month's stories in the media show. There are regimes, political parties – or the people that these parties represent – businesses, and just ordinary people who would like to control the information that Wikipedians intend to be available to every single person on the planet. This month's stories range from the international and national to U.S. state and local politics.

• China blocks all language versions of Wikipedia:
  • The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) first reported that all language versions of Wikipedia were being blocked on May 4, 2019. The Chinese-language version has been blocked since 2015, but blocking all versions is a major escalation.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) confirmed the block to the BBC on May 14, saying that the block began in April. The WMF followed up three days later on its blog, stating that the blocking impacts "more than 1.3 billion readers, students, professionals, researchers, and more who can no longer access this resource or share their knowledge and achievements with the world. We have not received notice or any indication as to why this current block is occurring and why now."
  • Steven Harrison in Slate tells us "Why China Blocked Wikipedia in All Languages Hint: There’s a big anniversary coming up." The 30th anniversary of the violent end of the Tiananmen Square protests will be marked on June 4. Harrison notes a long history of censoring encyclopedias, starting with religious opposition to Denis Diderot's 18th-century Encyclopédie and the French government's 1752 order to stop its distribution. Previous censorship of Wikipedia by China, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela was also noted. One reason for China blocking all language versions, according to Harrison, is that online translation tools have improved, making it easier for Chinese-speakers to comprehend other language versions.
• WMF takes Turkey to the European Court of Human Rights:
  • The Wikimedia Foundation announced it is petitioning the ECHR to stop Turkey from blocking Wikipedia. (See our republication of the Wikimedia blog here). Turkey began blocking the Turkish-language version of Wikipedia in April 2017. The WMF has previously challenged the block through discussion with the Turkish authorities, legal action in Turkish courts, and a publicity campaign aimed at the general public. Both the Financial Times and the BBC have reported the story, following the facts in the WMF blog and expressing doubt that Turkey would comply with any ruling against it.
• Wikipedia and the NSA case
  • The Washington Examiner, a hard-right news-site in the U.S. capital, reports that the Wikipedia case against NSA internet snooping returns to court. The case began in 2015 after Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was recording a large amount of internet traffic. Previous Signpost coverage includes WMF to NSA: "stop spying on Wikipedia users" and Wikimedia lawsuit against NSA dismissed.

• City & State New York reports that the Wikipedia article on New York State Assemblyman Michael Blake was edited by a paid staffer during Blake's campaign for the office of New York City Public Advocate. The staffer, identified by City & State as the campaign's co-director of communications (hint: he looks like a duck) received $3,000 for his campaign work as a "content creator". The campaign reportedly confirmed the identification and responded in part "the campaign member who made the edits complied with their understanding of the Wikipedia editing rules and provided the expected level of transparency in updating the Assemblyman’s page." Apparently Wikipedians need to inform political campaigns that paid promotional editing is against our rules. Assemblyman Blake did not win the Public Advocate office but is now running for a seat in the U.S. Congress.
• Lancaster Online reports that the Wikipedia article on Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was edited by one of his staff who is paid $65,526 annually by taxpayers. Paid staff for Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa and Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman were also reported to have edited articles on their bosses.

• 
  Shapiro
• 
  DePasquale
• 
  Costa
• 
  Corman

Do you have ideas on how Wikipedians can deal with the political pressures shown above? We'd love to see those ideas in the comments section below.

• What Do Bankers Do Online? Edit Wikipedia in The Wall Street Journal reports on the Banker bot on Twitter. The bot tweets the edits of unregistered editors that originate from the IP addresses of major banks. Punters looking for inside information on stocks may have to wade through a flood of information before finding what they are looking for. The Signpost's unscientific sampling of the edits reveals that bankers write about movie stars, video games, playwrights, and historical figures, as well as an occasional small company or entrepreneur.
• Fox News reports that the article on Doris Day was defaced with a graphic image soon after her death was announced. The image was removed several times, the final time within ten minutes of first being posted, the offending editor blocked within six minutes of the first posting of the image, and the article protected within 18 minutes. Our apologies to Miss Day's family and fans.

• Wikipedia has a Google Translate problem in The Verge describes the difficulties of using Wikipedia's translation software. One of the interesting aspects of this article is that it is written by a Wikipedia administrator. It's good that the media now has another reporter who really knows how Wikipedia works.

• The Jewish Exponent of Philadelphia gives a history of Wikipedia's article on the History of the Jews in Philadelphia. Mary Mark Ockerbloom is credited as a Wikipedian-in-residence for her role in running a Wiki-Salon, a series of low-key edit-a-thons.
• Wikipedia edit-a-thon wants to fill in the gaps in Asian American literature on NBC's website reports on an edit-a-thon in New York.

• Do we still need a Collections Online? asks Adam Moriarty of the Auckland War Memorial Museum in New Zealand. The article is a transcript of a video now included on Commons, so you might guess the answer to his question.
  • Museum images to be freely available in Wikimedia according to a press release from Otago Museum, also located in New Zealand. Adam Moriarty must have been very convincing – or was it New Zealand’s Wikipedian at Large, Mike Dickison?

• Differing opinions on how to use Wikipedia in education
  • Times Higher Education Teaching intelligence: putting Wikipedia at the heart of a class encourages critical reading and using Wikipedia in a university class.
  • KQED concentrates on teaching middle school students the skills they need to evaluate Wikipedia articles.
  • Using Wikipedia for assignments? Expect a zero grade in Oman. According to the Times of Oman, professors can be pretty tough there.
  • According to WNEP an Ohio student used Wikipedia to research an important topic for her high school graduation.

In a May 3 tweet starting "Someone update his Wikipedia page" the Detroit Tigers said that their relief pitcher Shane Greene "owned the 9th (inning)" – a nonsense claim that only a PR hack could think was funny. Six minutes later the vandalism appeared on the page, as duly reported by another Tigers' tweet and by Detroit Sports Nation. The vandalism was soon removed. Perhaps the sports blog can be excused for reporting irrelevant vandalism as if it were news. Otherwise, they might need to work hard enough to report a real story. The Detroit Tigers, however, cannot be so easily excused. As a legitimate business that represents the city of Detroit to baseball fans throughout the world, they should not be trying to get cheap publicity by encouraging vandalism on Wikipedia.

There are legitimate ways that sports teams can increase their visibility on Wikipedia. For example, where they own the copyrights, they could donate photos of current players or of historical plays and players to improve the quality of our coverage of their teams. Or they might even post on their own website biographies of new players. If they really wanted to make it easy for Wikipedia editors to cover the team. They could even state on each of those pages "Material on this page is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0". The quality of sports team coverage on Wikipedia can be increased by making it easy for our editors to cover the team. But the quality will never be increased by encouraging vandalism.

The Tigers have not responded to an e-mail requesting clarification or comment.

Accusations of administrator abuse in multiple forms (particularly by Cekli829) led to a proposal by Rschen7754 to remove admin rights from all of azwiki's current admins. The specifics of the proposal are as follows:

• All admins/bureaucrats/interface admins will have their rights removed
• No local admins/bureaucrats/interface admins for 6 months from close of RFC
  • During this time global sysops and stewards will patrol the wiki
• No permanent local admins/bureaucrats/interface admins for 12 months from close of RFC
  • For stewards to assign temporary (or permanent rights, after 12 months), elections must be conducted in a fair manner (allow all azwiki editors to participate), have the necessary levels of support, and not be affected by canvassing.
• Stewards will conduct a review of long-term blocks of users

The proposal lists the following arguments in favor of the mass desysop:

• Copyright violations have not been fully cleaned up, in part due to block threats issued by Cekli829 when users take issue with the copyvios.
• Improper blocks. Cekli829 freely admitted on the RfC page to blocking a user due to a Facebook comment.
• Using admin tools for PoV pushing, including Armenian Genocide denial. The title of azwiki's article on the Armenian Genocide is w:az:Qondarma Erməni soyqırımı, which translates to "So-called Armenian genocide". Admin White Demon says this is "Because many references, which show that it is 'qondarma', are given in the article". An attempt by Winged Blades of Godric to move it to a more neutral title was reverted by Cekli829, who also blocked WBG for a week. This is part of a pattern; the wiki also has a category of w:az:Kateqoriya:Erməni saxtakarlığı, meaning "Armenian fraud".
• Accusations of undisclosed paid editing, sockpuppetry, and canvassing in requests for adminship.

The original proposer wrote that this mass desysop is necessary because azwiki's desysop procedures failed to provide any accountability for these actions (a majority vote of administrators is required to carry out any desysop). He also expressed concerns regarding the role of off-wiki groups in the administration of the encyclopedia.

In "very regretful[ly]" supporting the proposal, TonyBallioni said, "While all wikis have some inherent biases built in politically (en.wiki has many...) playing politics with the attempted destruction of an entire group of people brings our entire movement into disrepute, and the use of admin tools by that community as a whole appears problematic for the reasons Rschen7754 has laid out." Steward Ajraddatz opposed a blanket desysop, but supported desysopping Cekli829 (along with a six-month ban on giving him administrative permissions) "and any other specific admins/crats that have enabled the copyright violations and inappropriate block(s)". While there are several other users who support more targeted desysoppings, the list of users who oppose any action consists almost entirely of azwiki sysops. Cekli829 himself, in voting "strong oppose", said (hat tip to Google Translate), "Your suggestions clearly serve the Armenian interests and show that you are on the side. Instead, I recommend that you initiate an uninterrupted block on hy.wikipedia.org. It should be noted that the views on relevant issues in various language sections of the Wikipedia due to the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict are also part of the information war, and this is quite normal." There is no current timetable for a close.

Controversial deletion of two pages led to multiple policy proposals last month aiming to clarify administrators' power to delete pages in topic areas subject to community and discretionary sanctions. The community general sanctions discussion was started due to the deletion of Universa Blockchain Protocol, which was deleted with the summary "Covert advertising. Page-level sanction under WP:GS/Crypto." Meanwhile, User:Dlthewave/Whitewashing of firearms articles (whose author also wrote an opinion piece for The Signpost on a similar topic two issues ago) was deleted as "Arbitration enforcement action under gun control DS." These deletions caused controversy because of objections to the use of sanctions to delete articles. Both pages went to Deletion Review. The blockchain article's DRV was closed as "no consensus". Meanwhile, a "clear consensus" of users supported the undeletion of the firearms page at its DRV, but the closer noted that the undeletion required the approval of the Arbitration Committee first. The two proposals both prevent using sanctions as deletion rationale. The community sanctions RFC and the discretionary sanctions RFC are both currently open.

The second phase of the Wikimedia Foundation's 2019 talk pages consultation (TPC19) has begun. The Foundation's report said that there were three main categories that new and experienced users identified for improvement: replying, indentation and signatures. Frequent requests from experienced users include section watchlisting; better archiving, search, and notification tools; thread-specific history; and improving the talk page experience on mobile devices. The WMF survey found that new users often had trouble finding talk pages and did not understand the structure (they expected a format more like a forum as opposed to one that looks similar to a regular Wikipedia article). New users were especially confused by the metadata templates (e.g. WikiProject assessments, pageview statistics, archive boxes, arbitration notices) at the top of popular talk pages. After taking under consideration the opinions of these groups, the WMF proposed "that wikitext talk pages should be improved, and not replaced", though they noted that in order to make talk pages more accessible, "small-to-medium changes in wikitext conventions and practices" may be required.

With part 1 of TPC19 having concluded, phase 2 has begun, focused on six questions the WMF is asking regarding its summary of phase 1, namely:

1. What do you think of the proposed product direction?
2. Should there be a more structured definition of what counts as a single discussion, possibly involving making changes to the wikitext conventions on a talk page?
3. Should we make the connection between article content and discussions more visible?
4. Should we move all non-talkspace discussion pages (e.g. the village pumps) to the talk namespace? (Community consensus seems to be against this idea.)
5. What are the pros and cons of having a complete page history or a specific thread history?
6. Should metadata templates be moved somewhere else? Which templates are crucial for the proper use of a discussion page, and which could be moved somewhere else?

Participation in the second phase of the talk page consultation is open to all users.

• On WP:VPR#Video Namespace: should a "Video" namespace or pseudonamespace be created for VideoWiki videos?
• On WT:Harassment: should WP:DOX be changed to prohibit disclosure of personal information "on the English Wikipedia" or "on the English Wikipedia or another public Wikimedia project"? (Current wording is "on Wikipedia".)

• The proposal to make Templates for Discussion more like Requested Moves concluded with a community consensus in favor of implementing the changes.
• Is RfX a vote, or a community discussion? The community has decided it's the latter.

• The Committee declined two cases on May 2, the first focusing on SashiRolls and the second relating to Future Perfect at Sunrise. It also declined a dispute over bad music.
• Last month, the Arbitration Committee opened Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Enigmaman. On May 6 the case was closed, with Enigmaman being desysopped.
• The Committee ends the month with two open cases: Rama and Canadian politics.

As of publication, the Committee has four open requests for clarification or amendment: a request for clarification regarding Palestine–Israel articles, a request for clarification regarding BLP issues on British politics articles, an amendment request relating to DS alerts, and an amendment request regarding Arbitration Enforcement decisions.

This month, BU Rob13 decided to step down from the Arbitration Committee, as well as "semi-retire" from Wikipedia as a whole. On a brighter note, Bradv was appointed as a full clerk of the Committee. The bot that they have created, ArbClerkBot, was also approved by the Bot Approvals Group.

In the aftermath of the Committee's amendment to its standard provision for appeals and modifications, Ivanvector decided to resign as a checkuser.

Both BU Rob13 and Ivanvector have written essays related to their decisions:

• User:BU Rob13/AGF applies to everyone – BU Rob13 reminds editors that they should also assume good faith on the part of the Arbitration Committee
• User:Ivanvector/2019 Arbitration Committee protest – Ivanvector is officially protesting the Arbitration Committee

Avengers: Endgame is understandably still dominating the public consciousness (and for those who haven't seen it, there are possibly some spoilers below, countering some fake ones from last Report), along with Game of Thrones, which is back for its last season. Who back in 1999 would've predicted a world so fixated on superhero movies and fantasy TV shows? There only a few subjects here not related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the HBO series: a deceased director and the dramatization of a crime story.

For the week of April 28 to May 4, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

This week's report, as with the past few, is utterly dominated by the entertainment industry, which should hardly be surprising given the two gargantuan hits currently conquering the zeitgeist on screens big and small. Other entries include a vile serial killer and his biopic, an extremely exuberant and exclusive gala, and the latest member of House Windsor. Not an especially diverse iteration of the report, admittedly, but still an intriguing one.

For the week of May 5 to 11, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

The most prevalent topics of the week are about ends: the conclusion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Infinity Saga (#1, #4), the last season of Game of Thrones (#3, #7), and people leaving the mortal realm (#2) - on that, there's also a killer (#5) and a tragedy (#6) that ended lives, and an actor (#10) whose views owe to him slaughtering people on screen. There's also a YouTuber seeing his reputation threatened to end (#9), and musicians for all over Europe ending up in the continental contest (#8).

Stop me so I can begin. For the week of May 12 to 18, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

• AnomieBOT III was approved to unblock 19966 indefinitely blocked IP addresses.

• ArbClerkBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights)
• Monkbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 13)
• WikiCleanerBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Tasks: 3, 4)
• GreenC bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 16)
• HostBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 9)
• DannyS712 bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Tasks: 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42)
• DannyS712 bot II (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 13)

• DannyS712 bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Tasks: 40, 44)
• GreenC bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 17)
• Monkbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 14)

• DeltaQuadBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 6)
• Hassan.m.aminbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights)
• Xinbenlv bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights)
• DiBabelYurikBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights)
• SportsStatsBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 2)
• PkbwcgsBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 5)

• DannyS712 bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Tasks: 38, 43)
• TheSandBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 3)
• GreenC bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 11)
• WikiCleanerBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 2)
• Qbugbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 3)

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2019 #19, #21, & #22. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

• The report for phase 1 of the talk pages consultation 2019 has been published. Communities are invited to start phase 2 of the consultation on their wikis.
• Special:Watchlist can show the wrong information. It does not always show which edits are read and which are unread. The developers are working on solving the problem. [1]
• The content translation tool on Wikipedia can use machine translations. There is a system to stop translations where the editors do not fix machine translation mistakes. This warns or stops them if they seem to just copy what the machine translation gives them. If this system is too strict or not strict enough you can tell the language team. [2]
• The Wikidata wbeditentity API endpoint will remove all aliases if the request includes an empty alias. This is how it supposed to work. It has not been working this way because of a bug. This will start on 12 June. [3]
• File descriptions for files from Commons were not shown properly on other Wikimedia wikis for a few days. For example the image descriptions and license information were missing. This has now been fixed. [4][5]
• Some diffs show an error message when you try to see them. The developers are working on fixing it. It could be because of some edit comments. [6][7]
• Big changes to the replica database will happen on 3 June. Some tools on Cloud Services will stop working if the maintainers do not update them to use the new schema. This probably affects tools that query for revisions or log entries made by a user. [8][9]

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 4:00–5:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.

This article originally appeared in the Wikimedia Foundation blog on May 23, 2019.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we believe that free access to knowledge and freedom of expression are fundamental human rights. We believe that when people have good information, they can make better decisions. Free access to information creates economic opportunity and empowers people to build sustainable livelihoods. Knowledge makes our societies more informed, more connected, and more equitable.

Over the past two years, we have seen governments censor Wikipedia, including in Turkey and most recently in China, denying these rights to millions of people around the world.

Today, we proceed to the European Court of Human Rights, an international court which hears cases of human rights violations within the Council of Europe, to ask the Court to lift the more than two-year block of Wikipedia in Turkey. We are taking this action as part of our continued commitment to knowledge and freedom of expression as fundamental rights for every person.

This is not a step we have taken lightly; we are doing so only after continued and exhaustive attempts to lift the block through legal action in the Turkish courts, good faith conversations with the Turkish authorities, and campaigns to raise awareness of the block and its impact on Turkey and the rest of the world.

Despite these efforts, Wikipedia continues to be blocked in Turkey after more than two years.

This news was announced in a press call with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director Katherine Maher, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, and the Foundation’s Legal Director Stephen LaPorte.

“We believe that information—knowledge—makes the world better. That when we ask questions, get the facts, and are able to understand all perspectives on an issue, it allows us to build the foundation for a more just and tolerant society,” said Katherine Maher. “Wikipedia is a global resource that everyone can be actively part of shaping. It is through this collective process of writing and rewriting, and debate that Wikipedia becomes more useful, more comprehensive, and more representative. It is also through this process that we, a global society, establish a more comprehensive consensus on how we see the world.”

In our application to the Strasbourg Court, we argue that the blanket ban of Wikipedia violates fundamental freedoms, including the right to freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention. Moreover, these freedoms have been denied to the more than 80 million people of Turkey who have been impacted most directly by the block, and to the rest of the world, which has lost the nation’s rich perspectives in contributing, debating, and adding to Wikipedia’s more than 50 million articles.

Over the past two years, the Wikimedia Foundation has done all that it possibly can to lift the block of Wikipedia in Turkey. The order blocking Wikipedia referred to only two articles, which have continued to be open for improvement by anyone and edited by volunteers around the world despite the block. It is unclear what, if any, concerns remain. The block continues despite numerous good faith discussions with Turkish authorities to understand their views, including through an open letter to the Turkish Minister of Transport, Maritime, and Communication, to discuss Wikipedia’s open editing model, values, and strong opposition to impermissible censorship of any kind.

Immediately following the block, we filed our case in the domestic courts, requesting that Wikipedia be unblocked on the grounds that such a block violated the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press. The lower courts have upheld the block, and there has been no response from Turkey’s highest court in the two years since we appealed the lower court’s decision. Consequently, we believe that this step is necessary.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is the international court created by the European Convention on Human Rights to ensure the enforcement and implementation of the human rights provisions set out in the Convention. Turkey is a long-standing party to the Convention, and the fundamental rights provided by the Convention are guaranteed in the Turkish Constitution, which makes the interference with human rights in this case all the more devastating. Moreover, internet blocks and censorship are a growing concern for Council of Europe states, making this case all the more pressing for consideration by the court.

Today, Wikipedia is one of the most widely-accessed sources of knowledge in the world. It is read 6,000 times every second, and our articles are edited, improved, and debated daily by a community of more than 250,000 volunteers from across the globe. More than 85 percent of those articles are in languages other than English, which includes the Turkish Wikipedia’s more than 300,000 articles, written by Turkish-speaking volunteers for Turkish-speaking people. These volunteers make good-faith efforts to cover all sides of a given topic, even controversial ones, to ensure people can understand topics fully and transparently.

Wikipedia is better, richer, and more reflective of the world when more people can engage with, improve, and edit its content. When one nation is denied access to the global conversation on Wikipedia, the entire world is poorer.

The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to upholding knowledge as a fundamental human right, to be enjoyed and protected for everyone, for our millions of users around the world. We announce our decision to file our application in the European Court of Human Rights today as a reflection of that commitment.

The Wikimedia Foundation is represented by Can Yeginsu, who leads a team of barristers practicing from 4 New Square Chambers in London, and Gonenc Gurkaynak at ELIG Gurkaynak Attorneys-at-Law in Istanbul.

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

A paper in the current issue of First Monday^[1] "analyzes Wikipedia’s breaking news practices and the ways the Internet is changing perceptions of news", based on a case study of the article 2014 Sydney hostage crisis.

The author is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Sydney, and co-organiser of an upcoming academic conference co-sponsored by Wikimedia Australia ("The Worlds of Wikimedia™: communicating and collaborating across languages and cultures"). In a press release by the university, somewhat provocatively titled "Is Wikipedia stealing the news?" (see also podcast, starting at 21:55), she describes Wikipedia as "a competitor to media organisations" and states:

Wikipedia contributors don't undertake the core role of journalists, which is to produce new work. Contributors' news gathering practices are solely "aggregation and assemblage", and it is important to recognise that the journalistic labour that underpins a Wikipedia page has been funded by media organisations and appropriated without economic consideration.

The case study in the paper itself includes:

• a detailed timeline of reactions to the event (e.g. police arriving seven minutes after the hostage-taking, the first journalist tweeting about it after eight minutes, and the Wikipedia article being created within less than two hours)
• an explanation of relevant Wikipedia policies and guidelines (e.g. no original research and WP:NOTNEWS)
• some statistics about the article's revision history and the traffic it received
• a classification of the references used, using the three categories "Local news media", "International news media", and "Non-mainstream media"
• an examination of discussions on the article's talk page, showing "just how closely the behaviour of non-journalists resembles that of a professional newsroom."

The author also interviewed a senior Wikipedian involved in the article.

The paper criticizes the "reasoning [behind some of Wikipedias policies and protocols around news as] contradictory. The claim [in WP:NOTNEWS ] that breaking news should not be emphasized or treated differently doesn’t fit with the specific parameters set by their ‘current event’ template. The entry also claims that Wikipedia is not written in ‘news style’ which also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny ... The 2014 Sydney hostage crisis page clearly conforms: the lead sentence contains who, what, when, and where [Five Ws], is written in past tense and the information is presented according to an inverted pyramid structure."

Alongside the presence of other Wikipedia features such as the "In the News" section on the main page and the use of infoboxes to summarize essential information, the author interprets this as a vindication of traditional news-writing practices: "Over the decades since [Wikipedia's founding], through trial and error and negotiation, the community has adopted a form for presenting information that is readily recognisable as employing news conventions ... . This demonstrates the ongoing versatility of news writing style as an efficient form of communication that extends beyond legacy newspapers, where it originated, and into new forms as they emerge on the Internet." She acknowledges the quality work done by the Wikipedia volunteers, with talk pages "show[ing] just how closely the behaviour of non-journalists resembles that of a professional newsroom."

While these conclusions are backed by detailed observations about Wikipedia, the paper offers few arguments to substantiate the appropriation and competition claims highlighted in the press release. In a Facebook discussions with Wikipedians, the author distanced herself from "stealing" headline, but otherwise seemed to stand by these concerns. Her use of terms like "appropriated", "in the economic sense", "payment" etc. suggests an underlying assumption of property rights about facts that is at odds with the existing legal and economic system that has been underlying the news business in Western countries for a long time. In copyright law, this relies on the idea–expression divide, or specifically in Australia on the seminal court decision Victoria Park Racing & Recreation Grounds Co Ltd v Taylor, which asserted: "The law of copyright does not operate to give any person an exclusive right to state or to describe particular facts. A person cannot by first announcing that a man fell off a bus or that a particular horse won a race prevent other people from stating those facts". It seems that Avieson disagrees with this, at least when the first person is a journalist and those "other people" are Wikipedia editors. Given that journalists themselves routinely rely on the "labour" of other journalists without compensating them (most newspaper articles don't exclusively consist of original reporting) and on that of their sources (paying them is a highly controversial practice even when those sources undergo substantial efforts or risks to provide information to the journalist), it's hard to escape the impression that this paper falls into a common trap of Wikipedia criticism: Berating the open, volunteer community project for practices that are in fact common in traditional, commercial media as well.

See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines, and the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

From the abstract:^[2]

This article analyses five technology-enhanced learning-related terms on Wikipedia, assessing their usefulness in relation to academic journal articles concerning the same terms. Data were obtained about the word lengths of the Wikipedia articles, the numbers of Wikipedia edits and numbers of academic journal publications over the first 5 years after the creation of the first Wikipedia entry. ... The article argues that Wikipedia can be more useful than academic journal articles in the new and emerging phases of a technology, because of the volume of information made available, together with the speed of its publication and the updating of its contents.

From the abstract:^[3]

... we compare the network mechanisms underlying the production of the complete set of featured articles, with the network mechanisms of a contrasting sample of comparable non-featured articles in the English-language edition of Wikipedia. Estimates of relational event models suggest that contributors to featured articles display greater deference toward the reputation of their team members. Contributors to featured articles also display a weaker tendency to follow the behavioral norms predicted by the theory of structural balance, and hence a weaker tendency toward polarization.

(See also our earlier review of a paper by the same authors: "Articles receiving the most attention (by editors) overall lack the depth of quality found in featured articles")

Paper/book chapter in German^[4], title translates as "How does communicative memory become cultural memory? Negotiation processes on Wikipeda talk pages in case of the White Rose"

From the abstract:^[5]

Based on the fact that most of [Wikipedia's] references are web pages, it is possible to get more information about their quality by using citation analysis tools. ... This paper presents general results of Wikipedia analysis using metrics from the Toolbox SISTRIX, which is one of the leading providers of indicators for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In addition to the preliminary analysis of the Wikipedia articles as separate web pages, we extracted data from more than 30 million references in different language versions of Wikipedia and analyzed over 180 thousand most popular hosts.

(See also related earlier coverage)

From the abstract:^[6]

Here we combine a common causal inference technique (instrumental variable estimation) with a dataset on nearly forty thousand biographies from Wikipedia (Pantheon 2.0), to study the effect of the introduction of printing in European cities on Wikipedia’s digital biographical records. By using a city’s distance to Mainz as an instrument for the adoption of the movable type press, we show that European cities that adopted printing earlier were more likely to become the birthplace of a famous scientist or artist during the years following the invention of printing.

From the abstract: ^[7]

We analyze the influence and interactions of 60 largest world banks for 195 world countries using the reduced Google matrix algorithm for the English Wikipedia network with 5 416 537 articles. While the top asset rank positions are taken by the banks of China, with China Industrial and Commercial Bank of China at the first place, we show that the network influence is dominated by USA banks with Goldman Sachs being the central bank.

From the abstract:^[8]

We show that generating English Wikipedia articles can be approached as a multi-document summarization of source documents. We use extractive summarization to coarsely identify salient information and a neural abstractive model to generate the article. ... We show that this model can generate fluent, coherent multi-sentence paragraphs and even whole Wikipedia articles.

See also media coverage

From the abtract:^[9]

... we propose a classification based method for automatic detection of controversial articles and categories in Wikipedia. Next, we demonstrate how to use the obtained results for the estimation of the controversy level of search queries. The proposed method can be incorporated into search engines as a component responsible for detection of queries related to controversial topics. The method is independent of the search engine’s retrieval and search results recommendation algorithms, and is therefore unaffected by a possible filter bubble. Our approach can be also applied in Wikipedia or other knowledge bases for supporting the detection of controversy and content maintenance.