Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2022-11-28

Last month, we reported on discontent with fundraising on Wikipedia. It all came to a head this month, as a widely-participated "Request for Comment" survey rejected the current plans for the fundraising campaign. Luckily for us, given this all happened three days before publication, the closing admin, Joe Roe, provided a thoughtful, nuanced summary of the dispute and decision:

Maryana Iskander, Chief Executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, gave a detailed response to this, quoted below:

I'm sure we'll have an update of some sort next month as well. It's a bit inevitable once the fundraising campaign starts. Hopefully, though, it'll be entirely positive. – AC

In related news, the Wikimedia Foundation this month published its –

• Fundraising Report for 2021–2022
• Consolidated Financial Statements for 2021–2022, complete with an Independent Auditors' Report by KPMG

Note that the Wikimedia Foundation's financial year runs from July 1 to June 30.

In 2021–2022, the Wikimedia Foundation took $165,232,309 USD from over 13 million individual donations, an increase of more than $10 million over the year prior. $58 million, or 35.1% of the donations total, was brought in by banner campaigns on Wikipedia. The breakdown was as follows:

For comparison, the donations total in 2020–2021 was $154,763,121 raised from over 7.7 million donors (a different way of counting was used this year), with banner campaigns bringing in $57.3 million, or 37% of the total.

As in 2020–2021, the Wikimedia Foundation ran a fundraising campaign in India this financial year (see previous Signpost coverage; note that while the 2021 Indian fundraising campaign was cancelled, the 2020 campaign was not held in the spring but in August, thus falling into the 2020–2021 financial year).

The Financial Statements reported an unusual situation: for the first time in its history, the Wikimedia Foundation reported a negative investment income: –$12 million. Investment income had been positive at +$4.4 million in 2020–2021 and +$5.5 million in 2019–2020. At the time of writing, the Wikimedia Foundation had not responded to questions about the precise circumstances responsible for the negative result.

• Total support and revenue was $155 million (a decrease by $8 million compared to the year prior, with the negative investment result cancelling out the increase in donations).
• Total expenses were $146 million (an increase of $34 million, or 30.5%, over the year prior). Some key expenditure items:
  • Salaries and wages rose to $88 million (an increase of $20 million, or 30%, over the year prior).
  • Professional service expenses: $17 million.
  • Awards and grants: $15 million.
  • Other operating expenses: $12 million.
  • Internet hosting: $2.7 million.
• Net assets at end of year increased by $8 million to $239 million (net assets increased by $51 million in the year prior). Interestingly, the third-quarter (January–March 2022) Tuning Session presentation published by Finance & Administration in May 2022 still forecast a net asset increase of $25.9 million for the year.

For the 2022–2023 financial year, the Annual Plan envisages an increase in both income and expenditure to $175 million, representing a planned increase in revenue by $20 million and a planned increase in expenses by $29 million (20%, more than twice the rate of inflation) compared to the year prior (total expenses in 2021–2022 were $146 million).

According to the minutes of the June 2022 Wikimedia Foundation board meeting, WMF board members and executives looking ahead at the 2022–2023 financial year now underway anticipated "moderate growth in terms of staffing. Next year, the fundraising team will be increasing targets in each of their major streams, with a particular focus in Major Gifts." – AK

Much has been said, thought, and shouted about this month's big Request for Comment on the Wikimedia Foundation's proposed banner ads for 2022 – said RfC was closed on the 24th by Joe Roe, citing a "broad, near-unanimous consensus that these fundraising banners should not run on the English Wikipedia in their current form". This interview, carried out a couple days later, is from Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the WMF's Chief Advancement Officer. Questions were submitted by The Land.

1. The Wikimedia Foundation has indicated some significant changes to its fundraising as a result of a recent Request for Comment. For those who haven't been following – what's changed? How much input are English Wikipedia editors going to have in fundraising banners from now on?

The close of the RfC included some clear direction about some of the messaging that we've used in different fundraising banners. We have been following this RfC over the past two weeks and collecting feedback and specific suggestions about how to change the banners based on some of the comments in the RfC. We created a new page where we are sharing banner messaging for the upcoming English Wikipedia banner campaign alongside volunteers. That page includes five options for banners that were written with ideas from volunteers, and a space for volunteers to suggest other ideas as well.

We will be introducing more direct community input into fundraising messaging. That's a commitment that our CEO Maryana Iskander emphasized in her note to the community on November 25. We don't know what that process looks like yet, however the fundraising team welcomes your help and ideas on the banners.

2. Could you explain what happens inside the WMF when Wikipedians raise concerns about something. For instance, concerns about fundraising messaging have been raised one way or another for some time now. At what point does the WMF notice community concern on an issue, and at what point does it act on it?

There are many people across the Foundation who are constantly reading, discussing and responding to the questions we hear from the communities. For example, Julia Brungs, JBrungs (WMF), Advancement's Community Relations Specialist, is dedicated full-time to engaging our communities around fundraising and can usually be found on talk pages answering questions and sharing the latest updates. With such a global movement, community conversations happen in a variety of different spaces, including on and off-wiki, and determining what the prevailing feeling is amongst a majority of volunteers is not always easy.

There are some changes that staff can make on their own in response to community feedback and do so immediately.  However, there are some requests that have far reaching impacts that require buy-in from others. For example, the changes that we are making to fundraising in response to the RfC may have significant budgetary impacts for the Wikimedia Foundation.  A decision of this magnitude is not one that the fundraising team can or would make by itself. The Board of Trustees have been thoughtful partners as we've made changes to the fundraising approach in response to the RfC, with the understanding that this may require adjustments to the budget.

3. In recent years the Wikimedia Foundation's expenditure has grown significantly, but the amount of fundraised income has grown even faster than expenditure. In some ways, this is a great problem to have. But will there come a point where the Foundation has enough money?

We try to fundraise more than we spend because it is a best practice for nonprofits to have operating reserves. For example, in order to receive the highest rating from nonprofit rating agencies like Charity Navigator, a nonprofit must have a minimum of 12 months of operating expenses held in reserve. Recently, the board adopted a working capital policy that defines how much the Foundation should have in reserves, which they set at 12 to 18 months of operating expenses. If the annual budget grows, we have to in turn grow the reserve in order to stay within that target range which is why we try to raise more than we spend.  

But I want to get to the heart of your question of whether the Foundation has the money it needs. We have a vision to share the sum of all knowledge and a 2030 strategic direction. We have a lot more work to do to come close to achieving these goals, whether that is maintaining and improving our sites so more people can access and participate in knowledge, supporting the growth of knowledge in other languages (many of which have far less content than English Wikipedia), increasing awareness about the Wikimedia projects – the list goes on. As Maryana stated in her response, the Foundation has seen rapid growth over the past several years. We're not going to continue to grow at the rate we have in the past. The emphasis will be on better delivering on these goals with the resources we have.

4. What's the purpose of the Wikimedia Endowment, and how can community members be sure that the money in it will be spent in line with our values?

The Wikimedia Endowment's purpose is “to act as a permanent fund that can support in perpetuity the operations and activities of current and future Wikimedia projects.” If you look at the mission statement of the Wikimedia Foundation the phrase “in perpetuity” is there, meaning we are called upon to build something that ensures we can fulfill the mission forever. Until we founded the Wikimedia Endowment seven years ago, we had very little we could point to that was focused on the long term. Currently, we are in the “Endowment Building Phase,” meaning we are building up the principal of the fund. Last year, we hit our initial fundraising goal and are now considering the plan going forward. Last year, we conducted interviews with donors and community members to get their ideas for more focus for what the Endowment should support. The Community Committee of the Wikimedia Endowment includes community members Phoebe Ayers and Patricio Lorento as trustees, and is developing a proposal for what the endowment should support in the short term and it will be shared in 2023.

5. What are the Wikimedia Foundation's internal policies and expectations about ethical fundraising, and are there any regulatory or professional codes of practice that the Foundation follows? For instance – does the Foundation follow the Association of Fundraising Professionals Code of Ethical Standards?

Ethical fundraising shouldn't just be a policy, but part of our overall culture. This year, we conducted a training on the “Culture of Philanthropy,” first for the fundraising team and then as a plenary at our annual all-staff meeting. This is the idea of acknowledging and working for the common good, the same type of intrinsic motivation that I think drives many in our volunteer communities.

Within that overall approach, we follow best practices for ethical fundraising – including those laid out in the AFP policy, such as valuing the privacy of groups impacted by our fundraising, prioritizing mission over personal gain, and staying up to date on various ethical codes in the philanthropic profession. There is one part of the AFP Code that is slightly at odds with how we operate in that we share more data about our overall fundraising revenue and provide more frequent unofficial data than they recommend, in order to be as transparent as possible.  

Further, many staff are members of organizations like the AFP and attend their trainings and conferences. We also have several policies of our own to guide ethics including the Gift Policy which includes a new Anti Harassment Statement, Donor Privacy Policy, the Wikimedia Foundation Code of Conduct, and the Universal Code of Conduct. We train all new fundraising staff on these policies as a part of the onboarding process.

6. How do you see the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising evolving in future? Are there any challenges on the horizon? In the long term, do you expect fundraising to be decentralised, in line with the Movement Strategy recommendations?

Change is the only constant in our fundraising. We keep evolving our fundraising based on the organization's and the movement's needs and external factors.

Over the years, we have diversified our revenue strategy. Increasingly, people are accessing Wikimedia content in other places besides our sites, including through voice assistants. The potential challenges mean that we need to continue to adapt our fundraising model as we have done over the years, shifting from a primary model of readers seeing banners on the desktop version of Wikipedia, to also engaging on mobile devices, over email, and a monthly giving program, among other things. The Endowment, discussed above, and Wikimedia Enterprise, are also strategies to increase our long term resilience.

Both in the long term and the short term, we expect continued changes in how we raise funds for the movement and where those funds go. When it comes to decentralizing fundraising, we are having conversations with affiliates about that now. In addition, the new funding strategy for movement grants embraces a more participatory decision-making model where volunteer regional committees evaluate and make decisions on grants. There are many other discussions happening that will also have an impact on this question, such as the concept of regional hubs and what that means for the role of affiliates, the Foundation, and new structures in the movement. I don't have answers to these questions yet, and this is something that we will need to decide together alongside the communities.

Ladsgroup has actively edited Wikipedia since 2006. On the Persian Wikipedia, he's a bureaucrat, oversighter and check user. He currently works as a Staff Database Architect for the WMF. As a volunteer he helps build tools for CheckUsers. This article was written in his role as a volunteer and any opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signpost, the WMF, or of other Wikipedians.

When you edit Wikipedia, it will be public. We all know that. But do you know what it actually entails?

Some trusted users called Checkusers are able to see your IP address and user agent. Meaning they will know where you live, maybe where you are studying or where you work. They don't disclose such information and it's subject to a really strong policy. However, that's not the only way you can be identified.

The way you use language is unique to you; it's like a fingerprint. There are bodies of research on that. With simple natural language processing tools, you can extract discussions from Wikipedia and link accounts that have similar linguistic fingerprints.

socks

not socks

Here's an example of two socks in Persian Wikipedia and two users that are not, analysed using a simple NLP system.

What does this mean? It means people will be able to find, guess or confirm their suspicions on other accounts you have. They will be able to link between multiple accounts without needing access to private data that could reveal where you live or work.

Wikimedia projects are public: the license means that all information hosted on them can be reused for any purposes whatsoever, and the privacy policy allows for analysis of edits or other information publicly shared for any reason.

That means anyone with resources or knowledge can analyze data trends in your edit history, such as when you edit, what words you use, what articles you have edited. As technology has advanced, tools for analyzing trends in user data have as well, and include things as basic as edit counters, and as complex as anti-abuse machine learning systems, such as ORES and some anti-vandal bots. Academics have begun utilizing public data to develop models for combatting abuse on Wikipedia using machine learning and artificial intelligence systems, and volunteer developers have created systems that utilize natural language processing in order to help identify malicious actors.

As with anything, these technologies can be abused. That's one of the risks of an open project: an oppressive government or a big company can invest in it and download Wikimedia dumps. They can even go further and cross-check it with social media posts. While not likely in most cases, in areas of the world where free speech is limited, one should be conscious of what information you share on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Beside external entities, volunteers have been building such tools to help Checkusers do their job better, with the potential to limit access to private data. The tool we showed graphs from here is being used in several wikis already but is only made available to Checkusers of that wiki by the developer. The tool doesn't give just a number, it builds plots and graphs to make decision-making easier.

Legally, there's nothing we can do to stop external entities from using this data – it's engraved in our license and privacy policy^[1] that it's free to use for whatever purpose people see fit.

Because of this, restrictions on the use of natural language processing or other automated or AI abuse detection systems that do not directly edit Wikimedia projects are not possible. Communities could amend their local policies to prohibit blocks based on such technologies or to prohibit consideration of such analysis when deciding whether or not there is cause to use the CheckUser tool. Local projects cannot, however, prevent use of natural language processing or other tools completely because of the nature of the license and the current privacy policy.

Julle began editing the Swedish Wikipedia in 2004. He's authored a book, Wikipedia inifrån (Wikipedia from the Inside), published in 2022, and currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Department. This text is unrelated to his work, and the opinions expressed are his own.

When Wikipedia took over the world, it wasn't on the basis of article quality. If Wikipedia one day is replaced, it likely won't be because someone does what we do better.

In his widely influential 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, American scholar of business administration Clayton Christensen investigated how dominant technologies are overtaken by new ones, and how the old organisations rarely managed to retain their positions as their industries shifted to a new paradigm. A key observation in Christensen's book is how the new technology, a product that is a break from tradition rather than a continuous improvement of the existing technology, is typically not better than the one it is replacing, but merely cheaper, simpler, more convenient.^[1]

This echoes our experience: while Wikipedia's large language versions have long come out favourably in comparison to traditional printed encyclopedias, this largely happened after we achieved our position as the predominant source of information. In recent years, our reputation has changed for the better in countries like the United States or Sweden, as people belatedly realised that the Wikipedia of 2018 was not the same thing as the Wikipedia of 2004, but this was not necessarily correlated with increased readership in these areas.^[2] It seems largely irrelevant to readers' decision to use us as a source of information – for that, we didn't need to be good. We just needed to be good enough, and then other factors – price, easy access – made all the difference.

There have been attempts to do what Wikipedia does but better, like Citizendium or Everipedia. They seem doomed to fail. Not only because some of these endeavours insist that key aspects behind Wikipedia's success, such as the low threshold of entry, are defects to correct. Most importantly, it doesn't matter if they succeed in their ambition or not: one can't dislodge a supremely dominant entity like Wikipedia – entrenched in the fabric of the internet, with superb name recognition, hundreds of thousands of editors – by doing the same thing but slightly better. No product can win by modestly improving what the users are already doing; as human beings, we put a value on something simply because we are already using it.^[3] There is no oxygen left to breathe for an English encyclopedia competing in the same niche. The strong competitors to Wikipedia exist in languages where the Wikimedia movement has been obstructed, like Baidu Baike in China.

Anyone wanting to dislodge Wikipedia from its place in the information ecosystem can't have article quality as their main selling point. This isn't just because the Wikipedian system of quality control, chaotic as it seems in theory, sort of works in practice, and our articles are often quite good – but because Wikipedia was good enough for the readers to start using it a long time ago. We have years of continuous editing and improvements beyond that point. It's not that Wikipedia is perfect, merely that we're probably way past the mark where additional quality will be attractive enough to change reader behaviour. Whether this is an indication of Wikipedia’s excellence or a reason for bleak despair as we look at how humans handle information may be in the eye of the beholder.

There are, of course, concerns. Wikipedia was created with the assumption that anyone reading it would also be sitting in front of a keyboard. The conflation of the reader and the writer, the erasure of the strict line between the two roles, depended on the readers having the tools to efficiently contribute. Not only does this seem inherently more difficult on a phone – while certain things, such as patrolling, could arguably be equally easy or easier on a phone if our workflows weren't still primarily built for desktop users, most find adding text and references easier with access to a bigger screen and a physical keyboard – but we have over the years erected barriers ourselves. It is increasingly difficult to write new articles. And so we're at risk, when the constant editor attrition in some wikis outpaces the recruitment of new writers.

Many who attempt are thwarted not by the confusing code or technology, but by the sheer amount of norms and guidelines we have produced over the years. Wikipedia's guidelines have, like gneiss, been formed under external pressure, a reaction to attempts to fool or influence the encyclopedia, or in our own recognition of our shortcomings. As we have grown our concerns have shifted, in what seems to be a general pattern on Wikipedias of a certain size and age: from focusing on making sure we have the information to better control of the information. Other changes seem to be our internal definition of who we are. We gradually move towards stricter interpretation of our policies, like English Wikipedia's recent decision to require more sources to prove notability of Olympic athletes or how we prune the lush garden that is in-universe content related to popular culture, defining what is fancruft to be weeded out. This is where English alternatives to Wikipedia can thrive, rather than in the space we so firmly occupy: the corners we explicitly don't want, like the Fandom wikis, serving another purpose.

In their 2014 study, Lehmann et al.^[4] mapped reader behaviour to see how it corresponded to our definition of article quality. Readers behave in different ways: they can read an article with focus, they might explore a topic jumping from article to article, or give it a cursory glance. Whether someone would sit down and spend time reading the entire article or just wanted to quickly peek at it had very little to do with our concept of article quality.^[4] A common interpretation of this seems to be that Wikipedia, where we often invest time in what interests us rather than based on future pageviews, has a problem in misaligning article quality with the topics our readers are interested in – a pattern we see not just in what our audience chooses to read carefully, but also in relationship to page views.^[5]

A different explanation would be that our concept of quality doesn't necessarily coincide with readers' needs. The goal of the encyclopedic article is to arm the reader with the right amount of knowledge. As we try to find the right amount of information to serve, we celebrate ambition and length. This is not necessarily wrong: there seems to be a correlation, albeit weak, between quality, as defined by the Wikipedia community, and reader trust in the article.^[6] It is important that we actively fight disinformation in our articles; requiring sources is our best tool for doing so. However, a featured Wikipedia article has most likely long surpassed what would satisfy the reader.

Wikipedia grew in a symbiotic relationship with the concept of the search engine, not the least of which is Google. The encyclopedia significantly enhanced the quality of information gained when searching, and the search engines escorted readers to Wikipedia. Later, some of that balance has shifted, as Google now retains readers by serving the information they are looking for already in the search result.^[7] Even the limited information in the Google Knowledge Graph, put together from various sources including Wikipedia and Wikidata, is often good enough. But increasingly, new internet users seem to abandon search engines as a way of looking for information.^[8][9] They are happy using TikTok: to them, using the platform where they already spend their time is a simpler and more convenient way of looking for information.

We're not a company. We don't exist to bring value to shareholders and our purpose is not to be a tool for enrichment. When we work on our articles, we don't do it to better position ourselves, but to better fulfil our mission. To some degree, we don't have competitors: if someone is providing the world with information, they are merely doing what we want to be done. There is an argument to be made that we should do our thing, and if someone else comes along and does something else, something better, fine – we have served our purpose. But there are values which might make Wikipedia worth defending, even if information would be available elsewhere. Our belief in neutrality, in transparency and being able to show the reader from where we have collected the information. These are principles which deserve to survive technological shifts.

The day Wikipedia is replaced, it will likely be by something completely different that didn't even set out to compete with the Wikimedia wikis. There will be a niche we don't cover where a new initiative can thrive and find their audience, and grow until they – like we did – take up so much room there isn't enough oxygen left for us to breathe.

Article quality is important, as a method to achieve our mission. But article quality will not in itself save us if technology and user patterns leave us behind.

Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age is a new book by Heather Ford, with a foreword by Ethan Zuckerman. It was published by MIT Press on November 15, 2022. Ford is Associate Professor and Head of Discipline for Digital and Social Media, School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney, as well as a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation advisory board.

Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, and has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2006.

Heather Ford's Writing the Revolution is a timely book. Wikipedia, along with its younger sibling Wikidata, is as influential as it has ever been. Its contents inform the Google Knowledge Graph and are read out by Apple's, Amazon's and Google's voice assistants to millions of people, as definitive answers to users' queries. It's a level of success few people would have predicted fifteen or twenty years ago.

It's also a development worth questioning. While facts can be contested and changed on Wikipedia, this possibility is lost when Wikipedia content is delivered by an electronically generated voice or displayed as incontrovertible fact in a search engine's knowledge panel: You cannot argue with your voice assistant, and Google is famously unresponsive to users wishing to draw the company's attention to errors in its knowledge panels. As Ford says in the first chapter,

Wikipedia is no longer just an encyclopedia. Like Google, Wikipedia constitutes critical knowledge infrastructure. Like electricity grids, telephone and sewerage networks, platforms including Wikipedia and Google provide knowledge infrastructure that millions of people around the world depend on to make decisions in everyday life. Despite their importance, we are usually unaware of the workings of our knowledge infrastructure until it breaks down. When that happens, we get a glimpse not only of how platforms share data between one another but also the attempts of people trying to influence their representations.

Given Wikipedia's near-ubiquity (China being the most notable exception; the country has its own huge, crowdsourced, internet encyclopedias, and Wikipedia is not welcome), it is therefore appropriate to scrutinise how information on Wikipedia is compiled. This applies in particular to current-affairs articles, which, in a departure from the traditional encyclopaedia model, are among the most consulted on Wikipedia, shaping perceptions and thus actually influencing the very events they are reporting on.

Ford focuses her attention on the development over time of a single Wikipedia article, the one on the 2011 Egyptian revolution, from its preparation in the days before the 2011 Egyptian protests even started, through its early Sturm und Drang days on-wiki, and on to the present day.

Retold in meticulous detail, based on both edit histories and interviews with the Wikipedians who shaped the article's contents and development, it becomes a fascinating journey, a microcosm that serves to illustrate the practical operation of Wikipedia's collaborative editing process, the strategies contributors employ to make content "stick", and the functioning and occasional non-functioning of the policies and guidelines supposedly steering and controlling the entire enterprise.

Above all, the story Ford recounts makes clear how much emotion there is in Wikipedia. Writing Wikipedia is not a dry, analytical endeavour designed to arrive at a sober description of consensus reality, but one driven by passion and rewarded by the occasional exultation. As she recounts the actions of Wikipedians like The Egyptian Liberal, Ocaasi, Tariqabjotu, Lihaas, Mohamed Ouda, Amr, Silver seren, Aude and others, it becomes clear that struggle is inherent in the process:

Because of Wikipedia's status not only as an encyclopedia, as one representation among many, but also as the infrastructure for the production and travel of facts, the ways in which decisions are made about which descriptions, explanations, and classifications are selected over others become critical. Wikipedia is authoritative because it seems to reflect what is the consensus truth about the world. How, then, is so-called consensus arrived at? Who (or what) wins in these struggles? What does it take to win? How do battles play out across the chains of circulation in which datafied facts now travel? Does this ultimately represent a people’s history, reflective of our global collective intelligence? Is history now written by algorithms, or do certain groups and actors actually dominate that representation?

These are the questions that the book seeks to answer. Journalists may write the first draft of history, and historians document expert accounts by revisiting those sources after events have occurred. But on Wikipedia, accounts of historic events are being created in ways that are more powerful and more popular than any single authoritative source. Rather than representing global consensus, the facts that are curated and circulated through the web’s most trusted terrains are the result of significant struggles and the constant discarding of alternatives. Some actors and technologies prevail in this struggle, while other knowledges are either actively rejected or never visible from the start.

This is the premise of the book, and it succeeds brilliantly at explaining how Wikipedia works to the general public – and indeed to Wikipedians themselves, who may have become so habituated to Wikipedia's internal processes that they don't consciously perceive them anymore, just like a carpenter who uses a hammer daily generally only has eyes for the structures built, rather than the tool they use to build them.

In the end, Ford argues that our knowledge infrastructure suffers from three key weaknesses: first, Wikipedia is vulnerable to crowds driven by collective emotion; second, algorithms that carry Wikipedia facts to other delivery channels remove the traces of the facts' origins; and, third, knowledge authority is vested in a very small number of platforms, all hosted in the United States.

Ford's Writing the Revolution provides a more clear-eyed explanation of what Wikipedia is, who Wikipedians are, and why it matters, than any other book published to date. It reveals a profoundly human project – full of human talent and human flaws – as well as a writer whose own humanity shines through in the way she relates the stories of the Wikipedians involved.

____________

More about this book has been written elsewhere –

• Financial Times
• Prospect Magazine
• Lit Hub's Andrew Keen interviews Heather Ford on Now.TV (41 minutes; introduction ends at 3:30)

There is also a related article by Heather Ford on The Conversation:

• Shaping history – why I spent ten years studying one Wikipedia article

Sometimes, we all reach milestones in our time at Wikipedia. Sometimes you reach 100 featured articles. Sometimes you get elected to ArbCom. Sometimes you hit 600 featured pictures, which, as far as I can tell, is more than anyone else has ever achieved, about 8.2% of all featured pictures, and the result of fifteen years of work.

And sometimes, no one else cares about this fact.^[1] So how does one write an article about oneself while not appearing completely vain and self-promotional? Well, one doesn't, but let's do it anyway because it'll be at least a couple years until the next milestone.

Why not make a gallery of your favourite restorations, showing off how much work you put into these? For example, you could go to your user page and copy over the conveniently pre-formatted list you made, that shows before and after!

BEFORE	AFTER

It's a good start! But maybe some sort of animation too?

...Perfect!

You could describe how you got into your field of editing. For example, I got into image restoration through an image that I don't even count as one of my "official" list of featured pictures anymore (I do my official count based on the ones featured on Adam Cuerden, which ignores or gives half-value to anything I didn't work hard enough on, leaves out a lot of my very early works, and definitely ignores anything I just nominated). It's an illustration to the play The Princess by W. S. Gilbert. It's not the biggest restoration, nor the most impressive original, but if you look roughly under the "T" of "THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS" you'll see a very obvious white line that shouldn't be there. I spent hours fixing that in Microsoft Paint. 2007 was a very different time. I got better from there.

• 
  Original
• 
  Restoration

By 2009, I was scanning my own books, and doing rather impressive images from Gustave Doré. Would I do it different now? Well, I'd probably fix up the border a bit, but it's not bad. It's also so large that I couldn't upload the original file, because Commons wasn't configured to allow anything as large as a lossless file of that type has to be:

2010 saw the stitching together of the poster of Utopia Limited we saw earlier. 2012 saw this incredibly difficult Battle of Spottsylvania image, which is also about the time I started to get a bit more confident with colour:

• 
  Before
• 
  After

In 2016 I went to Wikimania in Esino Lario, met Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, and got introduced to Women in Red. This was the point I realised that there was rather a gender bias in my contributions, and I began work to improve things. It wasn't that I hadn't done images of women before, but they were a sometimes food, and images of women should be more of a main course. Here's a selection of my favourite images of women I brought to featured pictures after joining Women in Red, in no particular order because Wikipedia galleries work best if you space out landscape images with as many portrait orientation ones as possible:

• 
  Emmeline Pankhurst
• 
  Barbara McClintock
• 
  Shirley Chisholm
• 
  Mary Jackson
• 
  Victoria Clafin Woodhull
• 
  Gabrielle Ray
• 
  Rosalind Goodrich Bates
• 
  Ethel Smyth
• 
  Edmonia Lewis
• 
  Rosa Parks
• 
  Marian Anderson
• 
  Geraldine Ulmar

I was originally planning for Ulmar to be my 600th featured picture. However, the vagaries of "Does Featured Picture Candidates have enough participation for things to pass?" said no, which leads us into our next technique of shameless self-promotion dealing with the issue at hand.

One could discuss the thing that pushed you over the top, and how it relates to your history in Wikipedia. While I don't talk about it much, I have eight featured articles, my first, from October 2006, was W. S. Gilbert, and that really got me into Wikipedia as a whole.^[2]

So, when choosing something significant to my Wikipedia career....

• My 600th Featured Picture: W. S. Gilbert by Elliott & Fry
• 
  Before
• 
  After

I had been looking for a high-resolution picture of him for, well, over a decade, probably. I stumbled upon the Digital Public Library of America, decided to give it a go, and found this, of all places, in the University of Minnesota library collections. But then, I suppose it's always going to be somewhere a little unexpected if you checked everywhere you expected. I think this is one of my featured pictures where zooming in is necessary to really tell the work done, but having an image of him that can be safely zoomed in to about a foot wide or so is probably going to be very helpful to a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan societies out there.

Oh, and to answer the obvious question, Arthur Sullivan is, if anything, harder to find an image of than Gilbert. I mean, I did, he's Featured Picture number 601, but it wasn't easy to find.

Was kind of odd, though: I found him in a collection I thought I knew very well already. Which just goes to show you, I suppose. Anyway, he will hopefully be joining many more in the next months and years. See you for Number 700!

Sometimes life gets messy. Here are a few tips on not sweating the small stuff.

Like most people, I happen to have a life. The pandemic years have been a bit more chaotic for me than most, involving a poorly-timed job loss, moving multiple times, unstable employment, etc. This didn't really get in the way of my editing save perhaps not having access to my computer for a few days here and there. However, most recently, I decided to return to studies, which involve a two hour commute a few times a week, during a period of financial strain mostly due to bureaucratic paperwork hellholes that are yet to be resolved, and lots of homework, projects, on top of class time.

It's this last straw that kind of butted against my Wikipedia priorities. While I wanted to write more Tips and Tricks columns (you might have noticed they were missing in the last two issues), and, if push came to shove, I could certainly have done so, the reality was simply that I just didn't have it in me if I wanted to remain sane and dabble in my other more social hobbies. I needed the famous Wikibreak. I still edited, mostly on weekends, but I couldn't have long periods of time with a clear mind, so I just dabbled in mostly mindless stuff, reference cleanup, etc.

Imagine my stress at the thought of me, being a Vanguard Editor, or, dare I say, a Grand Gom, the Highest Togneme of the Encyclopedia, with over 407,000 edits, reducing my productivity output? I'm currently the 78th most prolific editor on the English Wikipedia, having recently fallen from 77th, overtaken by Liz. What if [Placeholder Editor], with their mere 402,000 edits, surpasses me, and I tumble down to 79th? What then? What then?

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, or have similar thoughts about your own importance to the community, I would invite you to read our article on Grand Poobahs, and realize that my 407,000 edits as of writing, which sounds like a lot (and it is a lot), is really not that much compared to the 1.17 billion total edits made by the community. Mine amount to roughly 0.036% of all edits ever made. I am a drop in the ocean.

This is not to say that you bring nothing to the table. Vandal fighting, DYKs on the front page, new page patrol, adding missing citations, removing poorly sourced content, creating new articles concerning an underrepresented topic or community, fighting copyright violations... these things all matter. But it helps to remind yourself that the world (or worse, Wikipedia) will not end if you take it slow for a while. Maybe it'll be a little bit less awesome if you're not around, but in the long run, Wikipedia will be better off if you take a break when you need it. On your return, you'll be in a better state of mind all around, but you'll also find yourself less prone to get into silly arguments, you'll be less bite-y, and it'll be easier to assume good faith of your fellow editors.

The hardest step to take a Wikibreak, at least for certain Wikipediholics, is to recognize that you need one. Common symptoms involve

1. Having trouble managing work/life/editing balance in general
2. Having a feeling of dread when you log on Wikipedia
3. Being uninspired to edit when you normally have dozens of ideas about what you could edit.
4. Editing until 3AM when you really should be sleeping because you need to get up at 6AM
5. Find yourself neglecting "real life" activities/chores/priorities because you don't have enough time to do everything.

For me, it was simply recognizing that my long term goals were incompatible with maintaining my regular editing habits and commitments. I didn't "actively" decide I needed a break, I just realized over time that I needed to edit less because I simply didn't have as much free time as usual.

Some people like to announce they're taking a Wikibreak, mostly out of courtesy to others that might wonder why they might be slower than normal in their replies, or aren't around for some discussions that would normally interest them. WP:WIKIBREAK contains several examples of templates one might display on their user/user talk pages, such as:

User:Example is busy in real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.

User:Example is away on vacation from 1 December 2022 to late Spring 2023 and may not respond swiftly to queries.

User:Example is currently wikibonked and is operating at a lower edit level than usual. Hitting the wall is a temporary condition, and the user should return to normal edit levels in time.

Some templates offer more insight than others as to the cause of your Wikibreak, but certainly don't feel obliged to divulge more details than you feel comfortable doing so. A generic notice, like:

User:Example is taking a short wikibreak and will be back on Wikipedia in late July/early August.

...is perfectly acceptable!

You can also simply take a Wikibreak and not tell anyone. I didn't announce mine, for example, mostly because I realized over time I needed to pull back, rather than actively making an decision to have a break. That's OK too!

Various tools exist to help you maintain discipline during your Wikibreak. Mine was facilitated by some editing habits. I normally edit Wikipedia from my main computer, which consist of a fairly powerful desktop, with a dual 27-inch screen setup, a high end full mechanical keyboard, and a high end mouse. I won't lie, I'm an extremely privileged editor as far as my setup is concerned. However, when in school, in a entirely different city, I only have access to my laptop, a 13-inch screen dinosaur from 2013 that struggles to open a PDF, with a crappy laptop keyboard and crappy external mouse (if I even bother hooking it up), which is a decidedly less optimal editing experience. But I have kept this crappy laptop around for the express purpose of having a miserable editing experience on it.

Having a "desktop = Wikipedia, laptop = School" separation helps me tremendously in my discipline, and I would highly encourage anyone that struggles to separate work/school from hobbies/home life to have physically distinct setups, one for productivity/work, the other for hobbies. I do recognize that this is not something all people can afford, in which case I encourage you to find another "mental switch", like "laptop in the kitchen = work/school, laptop in the bedroom = hobbies" that helps you with this separation. Or even simply working from a different side of the table to create some sort of distinction that your mind can latch on.

For those that can't self-regulate, there is always the WikiBreak Enforcer user script, which prevents you from logging in until a certain date. You can also ask for a block if you'd rather not deal with scripts.

There's a saying in the video game industry that a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad. I would argue it is the same with our work on Wikipedia. Don't put yourself in a crunch situation if you can avoid it. We're all volunteers, if you need to take a week or four to yourself, take the time off! We'll still be here when you return.

For me, my involvement on Wikipedia (and the Signpost) will wax and wane with my workload, which will alternate between classes and work placement every two months until June of next year. But for you, I hope that when you next encounter high levels of Wikistress, either in yourself or in a Wikifriend, you'll keep the Wikibreak in mind as one possible way to get on top of things and avoid a Wikiburnout.

To end things, I'll invite you to share your own own Wikibreak story in the comment section! Or if you never took a Wikibreak, maybe you can share a moment where, in hindsight, you wish you had taken one.

Tips and Tricks is a general editing advice column written by experienced editors. If you have suggestions for a topic, or want to submit your own advice, follow these links and let us know (or comment below)!

Thirty featured articles were promoted in October.

Twelve featured pictures were promoted in October, including the images at the top and bottom of this article.

• 
  Baryte by Ivar Leidus
• 
  Dalmatian pelican, in flight, by Charles J. Sharp
• 
  Cover of a set of piano transcriptions of Iolanthe. Unknown artist, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Dysmachus trigonus by Charles J. Sharp
• 
  Amphipoea oculea by Ivar Leidus
• 
  Smooth-billed ani by Charles J. Sharp
• 
  Anna Bartels by Ferdinand Flodin, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Mangosteens by Ivar Leidus
• 
  Stephanolepis hispidus by Diego Delso
• 
  Hübnerite by Ivar Leidus

• 
  "Megalithic grave 'Harhoog' in Keitum, Sylt, Germany" by Michael Gäbler

Michael Gäbler was a prolific contributor on Commons, who is now deceased.

I found a draft of a Wikimedia Foundation blog post from 2013 that doesn't appear to have ever reached publication. It feels right to resurrect it now. The original is here and appears to have been written by Alice Debois-Frogé and Matthew Roth for the former Wikimedia Blog.

In the Gäbler family, religion, photography and love for travel have passed from father to son for generations.

Like his grandfather and father before him, Michael Gabler is a pastor and he has the same passion for travel and photography that they did. He was born and raised in Tamil Nadu, in South India, and lived there until the age of 7, when his family returned to Germany. Together with his wife of 38 years, he has traveled through Europe, Asia and North America, pursuing his passion for capturing his travels through the lens of a camera.

In August, 1997, Gäbler traveled with his wife to the U.S. and visited the Kolob Canyons. This part of Zion National Park is accessed by a park road about 20 miles south of Cedar City, Utah, off Interstate 15. The Kolob Canyons are part of the Colorado Plateau region of the Zion National Park and are well-known for their colorful beauty and diverse landscape.

While driving through the canyons, he stopped at a vista point, his Olympus OM-4 in hand. There, he “stood before a vast green valley with towering red mountains.” In the foreground he saw a dead silver-colored tree beside flowering bushes. Among various photos Gäbler took of the deep-red Navajo Formation, the image above would become the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day for July 4th, 2013.

"In my profession as a Lutheran pastor, I often experience the simultaneity of life and death. It is my professional duty to help others, to endure this juxtaposition of life and death and accept it in faith. The simultaneity of the present and past lives in this picture fascinates me." And there, right in front of him was a dead, silver-colored tree beside flowering bushes, surrounded with million of years-old indestructible crimson formation and wildlife.

After his retirement, Gäbler decided to freely share his images on Wikimedia Commons and his knowledge on Wikipedia, where he started editing in 2004 His photo of the Kolob Canyons is the 77th of his images to be recognized by the Wikimedia community as a Featured picture, a designation given to the finest images in the database.

Though Gäbler shoots with a Nikon D300 now, he has kept his slides in dark boxes in an archive room in his house, where he is digitizing them with a scanner. He is pleased that the colors of his slides, like those in the Kolob Canyons photo here, have not changed in decades.

Michael was not particularly active on the English Wikipedia, but has taken many photos which illustrate our articles. Here are some of them:

An anonymous editor gave their thoughts on how they believe "the administration of this free encyclopedia is flawed, and how it may be fixed". See revision 842176683 for attribution. This was written in 2018, and found again on a spelunking expedition in the Signpost annals.

The German philosopher of law Gustav Radbruch is widely credited with popularising and emphasising the concept of legal certainty (from the German Rechtssicherheit). This concept means that everyone who is subject to a certain legal code must be able to know which actions of his are legal (under that code) and which are not. In my opinion, on our encyclopedia, this concept is grossly violated, and I hereby intend to show some of the problems that I perceive to occur, and to offer some ideas on how to solve them.

Quite regularly, an administrator of this encyclopedia may encounter a user that he finds, for whatever reason, unsympathetic. We all know that some people we just can't stand, be they politicians, lawyers, civil servants, chief executives or teachers, just to name a few. Now in the real world, this does not really have any consequences, because we (in many cases possibly quite fortunately) do not have the power to inflict any serious damage to these people. But in the online world, where whole human beings, valuable, special and equipped with their own unique emotional worlds, are disguised as mere non-impressive text-strings with an underscore, this situation changes dramatically. Here, an administrative clique that does not have any substantial legal training in any of its facets (neutrality, the suppression of personal preference, the evaluation of evidence, the reading skills required to understand complex legal codes) or any substantial emotional fortification, decides on practically everything, in particular on user bans, the final version of articles and many more things. Isn't it strange, one asks, that admins basically never get blocked? Is this kind of immunity really implied by the rules of Wikipedia? Why, further, may administrators institute arbitrary blocks against people they themselves have a problem with? Have we not created a clique of overly powerful, nonconstructive superusers who, by aggressively having their way, shoo away large chunks of the Wikipedia community who, in real life, expect from their fellow humans a just and fair treatment and therefore are unable to deal with the realities of day-to-day Wikipedia work?

I have compiled a list of suggestions that may improve the situation as described.

• It is crucial that administrators be elected only for a certain term duration. There is a reason why this is done in real politics.
• Users that have been blocked should, by and large, be able to participate in the elections of the administrators, so that administrators cannot simply block users whom they worry might vote against their nomination.
• One could think about making user groups, so that for each user group, there is one responsible admin. These usergroups would be formed randomly and have a fixed size (eg. 50 users), and only the users in this group vote for the admin responsible for them.
• There should be no immunity for admins. Admins should be held to the same standards as any other user. In particular, administrators must not form "alliances" that serve the purpose of bullying down a perceived outgroup while at the same time ignoring any misbehaviour that occur in their ranks.
• There should be a committee that reviews admin misbehaviour. Whatever is in place, it's not working. It is a statistical impossibility that admins are just so much nicer than the average person that they never get blocked. This committee should have the power to reverse malicious admin decisions, as well as de-admin administrators that have misbehaved. There are several such committees, but in my opinion, they do not operate effectively, since they don't monitor the admins, but rather only act on request. They also may be unknown to many users.
• Administrators should, under all circumstances, be made to follow the guidelines precisely, word for word, so that certainty of law becomes available.
• The value of free speech, which is a cornerstone of the ethics behind the Wikipedia project, should be upheld in the strongest possible fashion.

This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, YttriumShrew, SSSB and anonymous user.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	2022 FIFA World Cup		9,405,304		After a delay, to the chagrin of those who dislike football or call it soccer, the most popular sport in the world is dominating. The group stage of the tournament has had it all, lopsided massacres (England 6-2 Iran, France 4-1 Australia, Spain 7-0 Costa Rica - all three defeated teams won round 2, because this game is unpredictable), hilarious upsets (Saudi Arabia and Japan defeating Argentina and Germany!), pretty goals, and unfortunately, more boring 0-0 draws than one would ever want.
2	FIFA World Cup		3,960,859
3	Jason David Frank		2,346,767		Tommy Oliver, one of the longest-running members of the Power Rangers, was found dead at just 49. It also marks the fourth time a Red Ranger, who is usually the leader, ended up in something shocking, as the original one was arrested for fraud, another killed his roommate with a katana and a third was convicted for domestic assault before killing himself.
4	Qatar		2,004,830		Back to the World Cup: the current hosts, filled with oil money but whose national team is clearly not ready for prime time; the next edition, spread all across North America and bloated from 32 to 48 teams; the Portuguese wunderkind who became the first player to score goals in five editions; and the last edition, whose host country is currently banned by FIFA for what they have done to Ukraine.
5	2026 FIFA World Cup		1,920,068
6	Cristiano Ronaldo		1.773.080
7	2018 FIFA World Cup		1.618.719
8	Wednesday (TV series)		1.298.420		Let's celebrate that Jeffrey Dahmer is off this list, and the room for "imbalanced people on Netflix" is filled by a fictional and comedic case, Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega. Christina Ricci, who revived the role in the 90s, has a cameo.
9	List of FIFA World Cup finals		1,254,460		All bets are on for who will enter the 22nd of those one week before Christmas.
10	Enner Valencia		1,210,321		The leading goalscorer of #1 so far is this Ecuadorian who scored both goals against the hosts (#4) and the one who tied the game with the Netherlands. He also scored thrice in 2014, making an impressive 6 goals in 5 World Cup games!

• 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.

In November 2017, Wikipedia's search boxes got a much needed upgrade, and we reported on Brianboulton reaching his 100th featured article. However, our big story was found in News and Notes, 24 November 2017, by Bri.

KDS4444 [...] was granted OTRS access as part of the volunteer response team in September 2015. OTRS is the ticketing system across all Wikimedia projects and is used, among other things, by companies and individuals who ask for changes to be made in their articles without violating the conflict of interest guideline. It was alleged at the Administrators' noticeboard (AN) that KDS4444 had used his OTRS access to identify candidates for paid editing work, then email them with offers in the 300 dollar range to make edits on their articles. KDS4444 had his OTRS access revoked on 21 October and was community banned from English Wikipedia on November 17. At the AN discussion some editors wanted to use less drastic remedies on ENWP for an editor who had contributed over 150 articles. Others harshly criticized his actions "actively soliciting for paid work" in a position of trust as "completely unconscionable" and "[in] defiance of community norms".

We had four issues in November 2012. In them, we reported on an editor trying to block mention of climate change as a possible cause of Hurricane Sandy's ferocity; and on TimedMediaHandler going live, which gave us a lot of the basic tools that are used for videos to this day. However, there was also a judgement by the German courts that made paid editing all the more dangerous. From News and Notes, 12 November 2012, by Gnom, Sandstein, Jan eissfeldt, and Tony1:

Last week, media outlets reported a ruling by a German court on the problem of businesses using Wikipedia for marketing purposes. The issue goes beyond the direct management of marketing-related edits by Wikipedians; it involves cross-monitoring and interacting among market competitors themselves on Wikipedia. A company that sells dietary supplements made from frankincense had taken a competitor to court. The recently published judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Munich, in dealing with the German Wikipedia article on frankincense products was handed down in May and is based on European Union competition law.

In the judgment, the court first found that editing Wikipedia is "commercial practice" under the German Unfair Competition Act (UWG). The court held that when a company edits a Wikipedia article, the resulting text falsely creates the impression that the edit has no business-related purpose. By implication, the judges found that the average reader of Wikipedia articles expects to find objective and neutral information. The judgment pointed to Wikipedia's mission to provide neutral accounts of third-party research and reliable sources, with an accurate depiction of disputes where necessary.

The company in question had argued it had made its conflict of interest as a market competitor explicit through a comment on the article's talk page. However, the court struck down this argument, saying the average consumer who uses Wikipedia does not read the discussion pages. Significantly, the court did not distinguish between problematic and acceptable contributions. The judgment was explicitly based on the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, valid throughout the European Union.

There were four issues in November 2007, and we'll be jumping around them a bit. First off, the In the news for 12 November details Wikipedia slowly starting to block paid editing:

Why the idea of paid entries annoys Wikipedia – There has been controversy in the past with people being paid to create entries on Wikipedia for corporate entities; a notable incident involved Microsoft paying a blogger to edit technical articles. This article ponders the question, "Why is it so bad to pay someone to write something on Wikipedia?" For example, MyWikiBiz, a service that offered to write Wikipedia articles for businesses, was stopped in its tracks by Jimbo Wales and the changing conflict of interest policy. Despite its apparent similarities with Wikipedia's own reward board, Wales' opinion is that it is "antithetical", and even though people are probably doing similar editing surreptitiously, it is not behaviour that should be encouraged or sanctioned. However, he admits that "It's all tricky, you know".

... whereas News and notes for the week before ... went in a different direction:

The Foundation announced the acceptance of a $20,000 grant, earmarked for the process of creating copyleft illustrations for use within Wikipedia and elsewhere. The grant was given by entrepreneur Philip Greenspun. The project, coordinated by Brianna Laugher (Pfctdayelise) and Cary Bass (Bastique), will involve a list of needed illustrations, to be compiled on the Meta-Wiki, followed by a period in which users can sign up for an illustration, and upon completion and acceptance, earn the amount offered for that illustration (most will be around US$40 per illustration, with some variation). The grant marks the first foray into paid content creation for the Foundation.

In a 2009 retrospective on that last project, Pfctdayelise would call its outcome – a mere 20 illustrations – "disappointing but not disastrous", and, after describing the various difficulties it had encountered, was left "wondering if the idea of paying volunteers is just way more trouble than it’s worth."

Also in November 2007, there was commentary about a French lawsuit that sought to hold Wikipedia liable for damages because of misinformation entered into someone's article which was then removed. (Nice try?)

But, if I'm honest, what's really getting to me is realising that the featured content sections are starting to include images and articles I was responsible for around this time – Thespis (opera) and the illustration of trepanning that's illustrating this section. I feel old.

In the light of long-standing hoaxes being discovered recently – the claim that Alan MacMaster invented the electric toaster, say, or the Chinese woman who created an elaborate fake history of Mediæval Russia, or whatever one we found to report on in this issue by the time this get published (as it happens, the toaster again) – I present to you...

After File:Johannes Moreelse - Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher - 705 - Mauritshuis.jpg and File:Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg