Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2024-01-10

Perhaps I should explain:

At sporting events, political rallies, religious congregations, riots and other recreational gatherings where large throngs of people experience emotions together, you can often find them doing chants. Most of these are pretty simple. Often they are not just simple, but simplistic to boot. There's a number of explanations for that, some more misanthropic than others; ultimately, however, our explanations must come back to physical reality. The bandwidth of the communication channel (a chant in a crowd of mostly-strangers) is fairly low, and the number of steps required for it to sustain itself is fairly high: other people in the crowd must hear the chant over background noise, understand all the words, decide they agree with it, and be able to join in themselves on the next iteration, without it being so long that everyone's voices get out of sync. It's like an Internet meme, except it stops existing if everyone stops saying it for five seconds. So the solution space is quite constrained, and chants at rallies tend to be quite short and simple. "U-S-A!" is a great example: the United States is a vast country, with hundreds of years of history and hundreds of millions of inhabitants. There are many analyses of it, and many opinions to have about it. But those are quite hard to chant at a hockey game (especially after everyone has had a few) — so U-S-A! it is.

One particularly long-lived chant, with a long and distinguished history in the U-S-A!, tends to come back every election year in which an incumbent is running for the office of President. It traces its lineage at least as far back as 1972, in which year a documentary bearing its name was released. Back then, the contenders were Richard Nixon and George McGovern; you may think that their political ideologies matter here. They do not. What matters is that in the 1972 election, Nixon was the incumbent, meaning that voting for him would have resulted in:

As it turns out, many things work this way. Religions, political ideologies, and social movements themselves have similar constraints to the chants that people shout during their gatherings: they must be memorable, they must be comprehensible, and they must align with the principles of the people who espouse them. Over time they tend to change; sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

With that in mind, let's see how well our own chanting has gone. Here is what Michael Snow had to chant say on January 10, 2005, in the first column of the first issue of the Signpost:

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Wikipedia Signpost! I hope this will be a worthwhile source of news for people interested in what is happening around the Wikipedia community. I plan to publish it on a weekly basis, every Monday.

The name, The Wikipedia Signpost, was chosen to be like the name of a newspaper, since a newspaper is what I would call this project. Though it will almost certainly never appear on newsprint paper, it will nevertheless take on this role for our community. It should have some resemblance to the other newspapers you may happen to read in the course of your life (which I venture to guess many of you read online anyway, rather than the paper copy).

With no slight intended to other projects or languages, The Signpost will focus strongly on the English Wikipedia. The news coming from other language Wikipedias could undoubtedly fill its own newspaper. Correspondingly, rather than trying to translate The Signpost for the benefit of other segments of the community, I hope that as other projects develop a need for this kind of resource, they will adapt and develop this idea for their own uses.

The name also especially suits Wikipedia, because it alludes to a practice here and on other wikis, in that we communicate primarily through "signed posts," as on talk pages. While the wiki system may be used to develop and publish articles, because this is original reporting the reporters will use a byline to "sign" their posts. Since this is not in the article namespace, guidelines such as "no ownership of articles", and particularly "no original research", will not necessarily apply. However, The Signpost will strive to maintain its objectivity as would be appropriate for an independent media organization elsewhere.

The need for a community newspaper is tremendous. Already long ago the speed of recent changes on Wikipedia surpassed anyone's ability to follow edits thoroughly. By now, we are well past the stage where, even when considered in broader terms, anyone can singlehandedly stay on top of events here. To attempt this, your watchlist would be unmanageable, your inbox inundated with mailing list posts, your browser overwhelmed with open tabs, and your time spent flitting from reading about Wikipedia in the blogosphere to hanging out on IRC—even when asleep! I hope The Signpost can spare people the effort of trying to be everywhere and read every discussion.

The subjects covered here should be whatever community subjects interest the readers. Some people will be more interested in things happening with featured articles, others will want to follow Wikipedia's statistical trends. Not everyone will share all interests, but I hope to have something for everyone, and to hear from readers what else they want to know. And to those who might call this navel-gazing, I merely ask—so why are you reading then?

Finally, given the size of Wikipedia that makes it necessary, even a small community newspaper is a huge task. I don't plan to do it alone, and anyone interested in writing for The Signpost should get in touch with me so we can organize the work. I especially welcome anyone who's been dying to try their hand at original reporting, but isn't really sure whether they have material worth publishing on Wikinews (and no, this project is not meant to make navel-gazing publishable at Wikinews). And really, what more logical place is there to develop our skills with original reporting than here, where news is being made and people are interested in this news?

With that, I wish you all happy reading!

— Michael Snow

I'd say this has aged pretty well, and almost all of it still holds — except, perhaps, for the "we publish once a week" and "we publish less often than Wikinews", which are now somehow both untrue.

As for myself, I look forward to the future of Signpost reporting: one may notice that, even though this issue is several days late (that's also a storied tradition), there are no blatant formatting issues, or templates that need to be manually updated on each article to make the images render properly. There are also no articles that failed to get published due to them being titled Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next Issue/Serendipity instead of Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Serendipity (NB: this actually happened in August).

Hopefully, we can also look forward to a day when the viral Reddit threads containing screenshots of Signpost source code are no longer in "programminghorror", but rather some other place, like perhaps "programminghappiness" or "stuffthatlooksreallynice".

Until then...

— J

January 1, 1928. A day that will live in... famy? After fears that the public domain (PD) would remain frozen forever, it started... very slowly... moving forward again in 2019 in the United States. This year's Public Domain Day is unusually momentous, as a certain rodent you may know has finally been set loose. One of the driving forces behind multiple rounds of copyright extension in the United States over the last century was lobbying from the Disney corporation. The most recent of them, the 1998 Mickey Mouse Protection Act, was called that for a reason: repeated copyright extensions allowed Disney to keep their grasp on the oldest iterations of Mickey, whose first appearance was in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie. It locked up tons of other harmless photographs and books in limbo as well, which was just too bad as far as Disney was concerned. However, we did not see another extension, and now Steamboat Willie has entered the public domain, along with a massive pile of other works.

More specifically: works published in 1928 are now unconditionally in the public domain in the United States (many lesser works were probably already public domain due to not being renewed, but now there's no need to verify the lack of renewal). In countries that use author's life plus some number of years, that means a few things: in "life + 70" countries, authors who died in 1953 had their works hit the public domain; and in "life + 50" countries, authors who died in 1973 have their works in the public domain. There are some complications here for Wikipedia though, which we will get into shortly.

This topic has been covered in a number of places, so here are some useful links:

• 2024 in public domain, 2024 in American public domain, and Public Domain Day, for the on-wiki articles.
• Welcome to the Public Domain, Mickey Mouse!, a post on the official Wikimedia Foundation blog.
• January 1, 2024 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923!, an article from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University.
• Happy Public Domain Day 2024!, an article from the Public Domain Review.

Works are now free to use! Well. With caution. In general, copyright issues are something that it's best not to start uploading too aggressively on if you aren't sure. Copyright status will affect whether you ought to upload to English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and/or Wikisource.

The above links already include the major works entering the public domain. However, you can go hunting for more obscure works, if you like. Category:1928 works and its subcategories are a good start. You can also browse around the Internet Archive; this is a preloaded query for works from 1928 that you can adjust to taste with other keywords, authors, or titles.

See also: Commons:Hirtle chart and Commons:Copyright rules by territory

• If the work was solely American and published in 1928 (or before), it's public domain.
  • Example: The 1928 animated short film Steamboat Willie!
• If the work was published in 1928 but not in the United States, but the author died in or before 1953 / 1973 (see Commons:Copyright rules by territory to look up the relevant country if you aren't sure whether to use 50 or 70 years), then it's public domain.
  • Example: The 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness; author Radclyffe Hall died in 1943. Or Lady Chatterley's Lover, whose author D. H. Lawrence died in 1930.
• If the work was published in 1928 but is still under copyright in its home country, then uploading to Commons is against policy there. However, such works can be used locally on English Wikipedia. The relevant policy is Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights, where it is indicated that works in the public domain in the US are accepted regardless of the copyright status in the home country. Mark such files here on English Wikipedia with Template:PD-US-expired-abroad, which has some nice effects, such as no longer needing to comply with our non-free content policies such as downscaling resolution. In the source editor, it'll look something like {{PD-US-expired-abroad|out_of_copyright_in=20XX}}; replace the year with when it enters the public domain in its source country.
  • Examples: Metropolis (1927 film), which is public domain in the US but under copyright in Germany. The House at Pooh Corner, which is now public domain in the US, but is still under copyright in the UK, hence why File:Pooh meets Tigger, illustration by EH Shepard.gif is a local-to-English-Wikipedia upload and not at Commons.
• If the work was published between 1929 and 1963, the author died in 1953 / 1973 or before, and the source country uses author's life + X years rules, then... maybe! Was it first published in the US, or published simultaneously around the world including the US? Was it published with a copyright notice in compliance with formalities? If it was, was the copyright renewed in the United States?
  • Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database – You can perform a search here. Quite a lot of works were not renewed in their copyright.
  • The URAA "restored" various copyrights (sometimes to non-existent or unknowing "holders" of these copyrights) in 1994. The easiest way around this is if the work was simultaneously published in the United States and the source country. The other possibility (but a rare one) is if the work was already public domain in the source country in 1994 (unlikely; for many countries, this means the author needs to have died in 1924 or earlier). See Wikipedia:Non-US_copyrights#Five-point_test. Simultaneous US publication is usually the criterion most commonly met for this case.
  • If it's an American work published between 1929–1963 (e.g. first published in the US), you can throw the above author's life calculations in the trash, and skip straight to checking if the copyright was renewed. But that was already true and nothing really changed with this Public Domain Day.
• If the work was published anonymously in non-American countries that use a copyright term of author's life + X, you should check the relevant country's rules at Commons:Copyright rules by territory. Many of them will say that copyright is kept for the same length of time as X, as if the author died the same year as publication; meaning many anonymously published works such as random photographs are public domain if they are from 1953. Just make sure to include in the image description why you believe that the work truly is anonymous and some due diligence to show this; "I found it on the Internet and I'm not sure from where" doesn't make it an anonymous work. The work also will need to be in the public domain by American rules, of course.
• Music has its own bespoke rules, thanks to the mostly public-domain-hostile Music Modernization Act: but luckily, this doesn't matter often on Wikipedia. The short version is that sheet music and lyrics from 1928 and before are public domain,as are new recordings of said music that explicitly release the rights; also, specific recordings from 1923 and earlier are now public domain.

The easiest thing to do is go upload some images! You can flip through those newly public domain books or pause old 1928 silent films, then upload extracted images to Commons. Then use them on Wikipedia.

For largely textual works, this means that long quotes are now permissible to use on Wikipedia, as long as you attribute it. I don't think this will come up very often unless someone finds and uploads a major 1928 reference work – Category:1928 non-fiction books is slim pickings, but perhaps the Small Soviet Encyclopedia? Be careful here, though; back in the day, some Wikipedia articles were preloaded with the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (see Template:EB1911), and sometimes it's better to have nothing at all than to have something a century out of date. Here's a preloaded search of 1928 encyclopedias at the Internet Archive; mostly some 1928 publications of The New International Encyclopedia and World Book Encyclopedia, which are maybe mildly more up-to-date than earlier editions.

For the most deluxe treatment, if you think that there's sufficient interest in a work that digitizing the text is valuable rather than flipping through images, there is Wikisource, our local transcription site (think Project Gutenberg). Basically, you'll want to follow the procedure at Help:Adding texts. Hopefully a PDF of the scanned book already exists at the Internet Archive (for major works, it probably does);^[a] you'll upload that PDF to Commons after making triple-sure that it really is free content in both the US and its source country. (And make sure you upload the 1928-or-earlier scan, not a later printing or edition.) Then follow the Wikisource instructions; you can create a page-by-page transcription as well as combined full-chapter webpages that span across multiple scanned pages. This will be much faster and easier if the PDF already has the text natively, of course, rather than relying on the fallback Wikisource OCR and manually fixing its many errors. Making a Wikisource edition might make sense for the most popular or important texts. After this is all done, go to the External links section of the Wikipedia article on the scanned work, and proudly link your contribution with Template:Wikisource-inline! (See s:The Prose Edda (Brodeur 1916) for an example finished work, or Index:The House at Pooh Corner for an example in-progress work.)

This is the section where we give the usual free content enthusiast whining about copyright law, and how maybe you can do your part by informing your local representative / duke / overlord of the merits of an active public domain. That it would be better if copyright terms were much, much shorter, or if, at the very least, that we went back to a system of having to renew copyright registrations, meaning that orphan works could be freed for general use. Unfortunately, there is a problem here. The Hippocratic Oath says "First, do no harm," but every time politicians have looked at copyrights, it has almost always been to greatly extend them, even when it made negative sense to do so.^[b] The Copyright Act of 1976 passed 316–7 and 97–0; the 1998 Sonny Bono Act passed by a voice vote (i.e. it wasn't controversial enough for a recorded vote). Calling up your local politician and encouraging them to start a new copyright-related bill may well make the problem worse, not better, judging by the track record so far.

You might think based on the above that, even if 95 years is too long, at least we'll see a steady march into the public domain year-by-year. That's a nice thought — and it will be true for a while — but in reality things are much worse. As overly long as the US's copyright term for 1929-1977 works is, life-of-the-author + 70 years is usually even longer, and that's the system we'll be in for works published after 1978, even American works.^[c] Granted, most of the people reading this will be dead in 2072,^{[citation needed]} but that doesn't make it any better. Consider an unknown photograph obviously made in 1980 with a listed creator (so not anonymous), but the name is extremely generic and no information can be found on them. When will this photograph be safe-ish to use, assuming no further changes to copyright terms? Well, maybe a precocious 10-year old took the picture, and maybe they lived a long and full life to age 105, and maybe someone with a claim to their estate is extremely litigious. Math time: 1980 - 10 + 105 + 70 = the year of our Lord 2145 that this picture from 1980 is safely public domain. At least under the classic US system of mostly caring about publication date, at some point tracking down vague authors becomes irrelevant.

So, here is a modest proposal, which "merely" requires modifying international treaties a little. There should be a fallback instituted that says that the copyright term is either author's life + X years or Y years since publication, whichever is shorter. Copyright terms already extend far, far after everyone involved was dead. To avoid hypothetical 10-year old photographers & artists locking up orphan works forever, even a weak rule that said "copyright term is either author's life + 70 years, or 120 years after publication," would be a step forward. Ideally, something stronger would be nice (say, a global 95 years after publication limit? Or even 75 years after publication?), but we'll take what we can get at this point. Does anyone know any world leaders and can get this through?

Notes

This article is an adapted version of a speech given at WikiConference North America in November 2023.

Hello everyone, my name is Selena Deckelmann. I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.

As many of you know, I started my role at the Foundation a little over a year ago, in August 2022. I want to start by sharing a little bit about what this role means to me: it's very much connected to how I learned about sharing knowledge as a kid.

I grew up in Montana, in the western half of the United States, but I also grew up on the road. My stepfather was part of a pipefitter-welder union, and we traveled to where the work was. We traveled so much that the places that stand out were all shared spaces.

I especially loved the shared space at the public library in downtown Kalispell, Montana. It was an incredible place. I truly looked forward to the time I spent there, which was pretty often after school until one of my parents got off work.

I was lucky enough to have a wonderful children's librarian who spent a ton of time with me, recommending books based on what I liked, talking with me about school and explaining how libraries worked. He explained the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System. He showed me all the books in the kids section by Roald Dahl, and showed me an Oxford English Dictionary that was available on a lectern as a reference. I got lots of nerd points when I went to university for aspiring to own an OED myself.

It makes me incredibly proud that Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects contribute to the sharing of knowledge, and that we play as special a role in many people's lives as the Kalispell library played in mine. What Wikipedia has accomplished is the creation of a public space meant for everyone to experience the joy that comes from learning.

Not only that, but Wikipedia also makes it possible to share knowledge at a new and unprecedented scope and scale. We work together to protect these public spaces, and we stand against censorship everywhere. I think it's incredible that we get to do both of those things as a result of the contributions of hundreds of thousands of volunteers worldwide, every month.

Being here builds on my experiences with the many beautiful and useful public spaces I enjoyed as a child.

The importance of public spaces is one of the main reasons that I took this role. The other reason is because of all of you, and the community you represent. I started my career tinkering with Linux and writing Perl scripts, and now I'm on my 3rd 20-year-old open source codebase. I've seen firsthand how powerful it can be when volunteers come together to build something out in the open.

I knew many Wikipedians before I started at the Foundation, and since starting I've been able to revive connections and also meet many of you for the first time. I'm lucky to live in Portland, Oregon, also the hometown of Ward Cunningham, who coined the phrase "wiki," and who is a friend and advisor to me.

I've also been having meetups at a very Portland kind of place: a Book Pub (they sell new and used books, and you can sit in the stacks with a pint and have dinner). I've met up with local Wikipedians there, and some folks from the Cascadia Wikimedians User Group. I've been incredibly lucky to get to attend a handful of in person conferences, and meet hundreds of volunteers online, on wiki, on IRC and in video chats. Some of you have written me letters and I have appreciated meeting (sometimes frustrated) folks who are trying to make things better.

The conversations I've had over the past year have also led me to some big questions. Questions about our future — the future of Wikipedia and the projects, and also the future of our movement and the Foundation. These are about what we need — collectively — in order to meet that future.

In a recent conversation I had with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's first Digital Minister, she compared Wikipedia to fire. Wikipedia is the one place on the internet that has taken potentially destructive debate, harnessed it, and turned it into energy that fuels truth and understanding among people.

Audrey described this as "harnessing fire," something humans have done since the beginning. Along with it, you need all the things that can make fire safer — fireplaces, fire extinguishers, and fire departments — even as you're using it to do something good and useful.

Audrey described Wikipedia as a safe space for debate, a system that helps transform and unite divided people. I think harnessing the fire of passionate debate online is what Wikipedians do. And I'd like your help in using those skills for debate, research and reasoning, to unlock what I believe is a profound challenge we face.

I think it is a unique time for us all. There's a potential for sea change on the internet, driven by generative artificial intelligence. A shocking breadth of the world is touched by the work of artificial intelligence companies and very recent advances in machine learning.

There's increasing regulation, and also censorship threats, that affect Wikipedia.

We are also seeing a decline in a vital group of Wikipedians – our admins, whose work is crucial to how content is produced and maintained over the long term. A report from The Signpost in October shows that "we hit a new record low, going back over a decade, of 448 active admins. To find the last time English Wikipedia had fewer than 449 active admins, we have to go back to 2005."^[1]

An earlier report from The Signpost, in August, says that "99% of our admins made their first edits over four and a half years ago. [...] Over 90% of current admins made their first edit before I wrote that article [thirteen years ago]."^[2]

So, we have options. One might be to change nothing; maybe this project is a one-generation wonder.

Or, we could figure out what we all need to ensure our projects survive the sea changes coming our way. I know that there is a lot of Wikipedia history about how some pundits treat every big tech change as the impending death of Wikipedia. And over two decades later, that just has not been true. That said, I do think we have to face multiple things coming our way all at the same time – especially when our own numbers seem to be shrinking, not growing.

That has gotten me thinking about what kinds of projects and organizations really stand the test of time. My view is that most don't. It is hard to think beyond a single generation and I believe we must begin to do exactly that. We must ask what changes will be needed to make sure Wikipedia can last past this generation. There's enough that Wikipedia has done for the world that it's worth the effort to sustain it, and the world still needs Wikipedia. So how would we ensure this project is multigenerational?

As I've said before, I think it begins with sustainability: How can we ensure that this remarkable project that has been around for nearly 23 years continues to grow and stay relevant? Everyone here knows about how generative AI has seemed to affect every part of our lives over the past year. Our data and the systems that produce it form the backbone for every single commercial large language model. I fundamentally believe that this makes our work more valuable and relevant in this new future. But how can we help ensure that human-powered knowledge creation remains a priority for the world? And in addition, the world is shifting away from purely web-based platforms for searching the internet – with services like TikTok affecting powerful changes in the way people find knowledge. Are we prepared to meet the changing needs for how people find information, in the way that we've met other big technological and social shifts over the past two decades?

We also must determine what appropriate support looks like: How can we, as the Foundation, best support volunteers so that you can do the work of producing more knowledge?

Since coming to the Foundation, I've had a lot of conversations about the Foundation's role. I'll borrow a phrase from our CEO, Maryana Iskander, who is asking us all to examine what "roles and responsibilities" are best, and for who. I want to bring more clarity to that definition when it comes to the Product and Tech work, so that we are very clear on our role and how we can support you. The Wikimedia Foundation focuses on making the work of volunteers easier, and scalable across hundreds of languages and locations. But for us to do that well, I need more help from all of you. I can't tackle every tech issue that everyone wants to see resolved all at once, but I am proud of the progress we have been able to make in the last year.

In the last couple of months, we shipped changes that enabled a better backbone for PageTriage, and worked closely with volunteer developers to ensure future sustainability. Going forward, we have a number of initiatives ranging from projects like Edit Check, Discussion Tools, Dark mode, Patrolling on Android, Watchlist on iOS, Automoderator, Community Configuration, the Wikimedia Commons Upload Wizard, and others.

My team has also been looking into ways to make our bug fixing work more effective and visible. I recently learned that 331 volunteer-reported Phabricator tasks were resolved by Foundation staff and contractors from July 1st to September 30th of this past year.

With the input and help of volunteers and Foundation staff, I've been making and supporting a number of key decisions: First, we're changing how we partner with the community. For example, the Foundation has changed how we create and launch fundraising banners in response to RfCs and with ongoing feedback from volunteers.

In the product and tech space, we're using research methods that solicit prototypes directly from volunteers for informing typography decision making. And we're learning not just the basics of font size and spacing, we're also getting important information about context, devices and cultural aspects of the use of Wikipedia which are vital for helping make our software easier to use as how people use and access it changes (and it has changed a lot over 20 years!).

This year, I re-created a MediaWiki team, with product management leadership under Birgit Müller, tasked with rethinking approaches to development of MediaWiki going forward.

We are changing our approach to the community wishlist survey, with the Community Tech team working to get volunteer requests and needs communicated to all the different teams in product and technology to support the work, not only their team!

We are trying to improve what we do. But this won't really add up to much if I don't get more help from you. Some of what I need help with is resetting how we talk to each other, and work together. Finding better avenues for debate and discussion, and civil ways to disagree when we can't make everyone happy. The Foundation may be an organization, but at the end of the day, we're all just people. Many of you have built connections with individual members of my teams on and off-wiki as we come together to do the work.

How do we maintain strong, lasting relationships so this is more than a single-generation partnership? I don't have answers for all of these big questions. And these are not questions for me to answer alone. They're for us to answer, together.

The Wikimedia Foundation's stated mission is: To empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

I believe that we can't succeed in that mission without being on the same page. I believe this starts with us seeking answers together for these big questions about sustainability, support and the human relationships and connections that enable our work.

In its first 20 years, Wikipedia was built by individuals: individual people making individual contributions, small and large, every day. Wikipedia grew, and simultaneously, a community of individuals became a movement. And look what you made!

A fire doesn't immediately begin as an inferno. Instead, it's stoked by many people over time, with care, passion, and dedication. Now, and always, we are responsible for the future of this mission and for what this project becomes. I'm glad to have the opportunity to stand here today and pose some of our big questions. This is an invitation to work on finding the answers, together.

I'll close with a question I hope I can get help answering from everyone here: what do we all need to make Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects multigenerational in their scope?

We have some examples where projects and institutions can persist in time, like universities or libraries for example. But Wikipedia is different. What are the parts we can emulate, what other things might we need to invent?

Both Maryana and I started our time at the Foundation by taking a listening tour, where we each got the chance to meet so many of you. I deeply valued the time I spent speaking to you about your plans, your hopes for the movement, the roadblocks you met in your work. As Maryana recently shared, we're kicking off another listening tour similar to that first one, called Talking:2024. So: schedule a time to speak with me. I want to hear from you about what you're working on, and what problems we can solve together.

The Wikimedia Foundation last month filed a "friend-of-the-court" brief with the US Supreme Court supporting challenges to laws that regulate online media in Texas and Florida. It says these laws "threaten the right to freedom of expression as enshrined under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Our brief aims to inform the Supreme Court about how those laws also threaten community-governed free and open knowledge projects like Wikipedia."

The Foundation's lawyers, Cooley LLP, said in a press release about the two cases concerned:

The cases address Texas House Bill 20 and Florida Senate Bill 7072, which prohibit website operators from banning users or removing speech and content based on the viewpoints and opinions of the users in question. Although the drafters may have intended to target large, commercially run social media platforms, the laws are written so broadly that they could potentially be applied to volunteer-run projects, like Wikipedia.

Cooley's brief argues that the bills are unconstitutionally vague, as their definitions of "social media platforms" and other terms are so broad that they could potentially be applied to any website or service that allows people to exchange information over the internet – including Wikipedia and its long-standing volunteer-led systems of content moderation. The brief also argues that the bills violate the First Amendment prohibition of compelled speech, and that if these laws were applied to Wikimedia projects, they would violate the constitutional First Amendment rights of volunteer contributors by restricting them from editing and improving information on the platform.

– AK

The 2024 WikiCup began on January 1; since registrations opened, over 120 users have signed up for the competition. The Cup is a yearly editing contest that has been run since 2007. Participants are awarded points for writing and reviewing content. Readers are encouraged to sign up for the competition or subscribe to the newsletter! – F

Politico reports on the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, which aims to prevent the latter from continuing to use its stories to train chatbots.

The Times did not list specific damages that it is seeking, but said the legal action "seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works."

In the complaint, the Times said Microsoft and OpenAI "seek to free-ride on The Times's massive investments in its journalism" by using it to build products without payment or permission.

It is worth noting that Wikipedia is another major source used to build generative AI chatbots. If the Times lawsuit is successful, then the use of Wikipedia content could – conceivably – likewise be found to be infringing the copyright of its volunteer authors. Or the reverse, media companies that aggressively defend copyright could conceivably lead to more AI training from open knowledge content like Wikipedia. – B, AK

Patrick Earley, the Wikimedia Foundation's Lead Trust & Safety Policy Manager, has provided an update about Universal Code of Conduct development on the Wikimedia-l mailing list:

Last year, the Building Committee for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee Charter started drafting the Charter. The initial version was shared for community comment a couple of months ago. After closing the community comment period, the Building Committee met again to finalize some of the details before a community ratification vote.

This ratification was initially planned for late November.

The Building Committee continued their conversations into December so that they could present a more comprehensive Charter for community ratification. The ratification vote is now scheduled to open next week, on January 16. We will provide more information about how to vote as it opens.

Thank you for following this process, and, on behalf of the Building Committee, thanks to all Wikimedians who have provided comments and direction for this document. We look forward to seeing the results.

According to voter information provided on Meta-Wiki, the vote will run from 16 to 30 January 2024. – AK

• Annual reports: Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey, Wikimedia Ghana User Group, Wikimedia Stewards User Group.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Robertsky (January 3, 196–0) and Red-tailed hawk (January 5, 207-6-8)
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week:
  • Dagaare Wikipedia (dga.wikipedia.org) launched in December; see Diff news.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Antacid, followed next week, from 15 January, by Shovel. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!

The Featured Article process has a well-deserved reputation for being a difficult slog. This two-parter is an exploration of that process from the viewpoint of a first-time nominator. We'll look at how WP:FAC compares to other review processes (on-wiki and in real life), try to take some of the mystery out of it, and give some suggestions for what you can do to make things go smoother on your own first submission. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't take advantage of this opportunity to take a few jabs at things that were annoying.

In August 2023, with about a dozen GAs under my belt, I decided it was time to give FAs a shot. I nominated Fleetwood Park Racetrack as a featured article candidate (FAC) which turned out to be a wild ride; I'm writing this retrospective of my experience for the cathartic value and in the hope it might help those who follow me into the FA maelstrom.

I'm new to FA, but not to peer review. I've done a bit of scientific writing which is all peer-reviewed, and lots of software development which undergoes code review. There's much in common (good and bad) and my experiences with other review processes certainly helped me navigate FAC. If you recognize yourself in anything I've written, please don't take offense. I really appreciate all the work my reviewers put into helping me and any of my complaints are presented entirely with the desire to provide constructive feedback to the process.

My first mistake was not availing myself of a pre-FAC peer review at peer review (PR). I had done one peer review a few years ago, prior to my first GA submission; the review was cursory and of so little value I decided not to bother again. Looking at the current FAC peer reviews, I can see that if you specifically ask for an FA review, you get something which is far more useful. Definitely recommended. There doesn't seem to be any urgency to PR requests, so put your request in several months before you want to nominate.

You want a mentor. Ignore where featured articles mentoring (FAM) says, "first-time nominators at WP:FAC are not required to use it". Just do it.

The reviews you get at WP:PR and WP:FAM will be similar to the ones you get at featured article candidate, but done in a lower-pressure environment. Once you submit to FAC, there's a clock running. Reviewers decide which articles to review from reading your nomination statement and a quick glance to see if your stuff is any good. If this is your first submission to FAC, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of not having attracted anybody to review your work after a few weeks, and the FAC coordinators may time-out your submission and archive it (FAC-speak for "fail"). Get the obvious problems dealt with early, before the clock starts.

One thing that totally caught me by surprise was needing to write a nomination statement. This is a short introduction to your article which is intended to attract reviewers to doing a review. I didn't know I had to write one until I was in the middle of the submission process, and was prompted to enter it. I made something up on the spot. I don't know how much difference my poor nomination statement made, but having a good one is probably better than having a poor one. So before you nominate, read the various nomination statements at WP:FAC and think about your elevator pitch to sell your article to reviewers.

Don't fight with your reviewers, or at least reserve your pushback for important stuff. I made a ton of minor changes that I thought were silly or just plain wrong, but weren't worth arguing about. I'm sure in some cases the reviewer was actually right. And I'm sure there were also cases where they were wrong, but at some point your goal needs to be to get through the review and collect your "looks good to me" (LGTM) stamp, so pick your battles carefully.

If you decide to push back, go in armed with evidence. I had two specific comments about diction/grammar. On one, my response was basically, "Yeah, whatev, I'll let the grammar freaks worry about that". I think I only got away with that because that particular reviewer was a softie, and did the research for me. The other one was from a more hard-nosed reviewer, but I came back with a citation to a respected dictionary supporting my usage and heard no more about it. I also found that "I like my way better, but if you feel strongly about this, I'll be happy to make the change" is useful; it lets you express your opinion while showing that you're open to input. Pissing off your reviewer isn't going to help get you to LGTM. Or, as I recently read in another context, "Since you have asked for the [...] review, I encourage you to graciously accept more suggestions."

This one is critical: respond to all reviews promptly. It does a few things. It shows the reviewer that you're engaged. It also throws things back into their court; it may not be good to piss off your reviewer, but a little guilt-trip never hurts :-) The review is going to take longer than you want it to; any delay you add shows up directly on the bottom line, so do what you can on your end to keep it moving.

I need to mention a couple of things that made the process more difficult for me than it should have been.

First: I took to heart the advice I got that the best way to entice other people to review your article is to do some reviews yourself. I was shocked when I got an email from somebody telling me (in rather pointed language) that my review of their article was unwelcome and I should stay away. I'll leave it anonymous, but really? Whatever happened to WP:BITE? I've got a thick skin so I didn't let that phase me. A less experienced editor might have been devastated and driven away from any further participation.

Second: Please, reviewers, try to set reasonable expectations. It does nobody any good to say, "I'll finish this tomorrow" and then not finish it tomorrow. It's really no fun to be in the position of having to figure out if enough days have gone past tomorrow that it's time to bug your reviewer. Much better to say, "I'll do this, but may not get to it until next week".

Lastly: Please, reviewers, make your reviews actionable, and make them understandable. I had several reviews that left me scratching my head trying to figure out what the reviewer wanted. Leading questions are a great face-to-face teaching technique. On wiki, not so much. And some of the comments I got seemed more like crossword puzzle clues than anything else. When I'm doing a crossword, the joy of finally understanding the hidden meaning of the clue is what I'm looking for. When I'm having my work reviewed, what I really want is for the reviewer to tell me what's wrong and how to fix it.

Part 2 will appear in the next issue of The Signpost.

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman must have been very angry after reading Business Insider's story about his wife, Neri Oxman, "Academic celebrity Neri Oxman plagiarized from Wikipedia, scholars, a textbook, and other sources without any attribution". Ackman then wrote two tweets on X totaling over 5,100 words, challenging Business Insider, defending his wife, saying that he would check the work of MIT and Harvard faculty for plagiarism, and even questioning whether somebody could plagiarize Wikipedia.

Can one use a definition from an online dictionary or encyclopedia without attribution [in an academic work]? I honestly don’t know the answer. I have never seen WikiPedia or Dictionary.com cited in any paper. Before Business Insider emailed last night, I never thought about this before. And on this point, what was the standard 15 years ago for citing WikiPedia? Was it different then versus now?
— Bill Ackman on X

Ackman's interest in plagiarism started with his protests against antisemitism at Harvard and other campuses. He called for Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign after she and three other presidents of major universities testified in a congressional investigation on antisemitism on campus. Ackman and many others believed their plans to counter antisemitism were not strong enough. After right-wing sources accused Gay of plagiarism, Ackman also called for Gay's removal based on the plagiarism accusation. These events were widely covered in the national and international press and did not involve Wikipedia. We limit this discussion to the question Can you plagiarize Wikipedia?

Several commentators at the discussion threads on the platform formerly known as Twitter appear to have confused copyright violations with plagiarism. Copyright violations are a matter of law generally decided in civil courts; plagiarism is an ethical matter generally covered by university policies. Most text in Wikipedia is copyrighted, with the exceptions of short "fair use" quotes and a limited amount of text taken from the public domain, for example in articles that state at the end "This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Name of article". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press." Other material is copyrighted by the Wikipedia editor who first added it and is licensed CC-BY-SA, which requires that the text be linked and the author attributed. Attribution can be done by linking to the page history.

Though this reporter is not a lawyer, it appears that plagiarism can be avoided in most, but not all, situations simply by complying with copyright law. Copying Wikipedia text into an academic work has long been viewed as possible plagiarism, even if done by university freshmen, as shown in a 2010 article in The New York Times. The same article suggests that "using words [you] did not write is a serious misdeed" if those words are not attributed. The book Victory at Sea by Yale Professor Paul Kennedy, published by the Yale University Press, is an example of how to attribute. The 544 page book includes references to more than 80 Wikipedia articles.

Academics who wish to check whether copying text from Wikipedia is plagiarism need to check their university policies, but copying text from Wikipedia without attribution generally is a violation of the CC-BY-SA license and copyright law. If you present the words or ideas in Wikipedia as if they are your own, this is generally considered to be plagiarism.

Update: Before The Signpost could publish, I noticed that Molly White (aka User:GorillaWarfare) scooped me on this story with a 9 minute 42 second video published on Youtube. Kudos to Molly! – S

An interesting sidelight to the above story is that Bill Ackman in the same set of tweets also wrote "I also wish I knew how to reach a human being at Wikipedia as my Wikipedia biography needs correcting, and could be meaningfully improved if there was someone I could speak to."

There are several ways you can communicate with Wikipedians fairly directly. If you register an account on Wikipedia you can write on the talkpage, Talk:Bill Ackman, pretty much whatever you would like, but I suggest it be in the form "The following text [blah blah blah] is incorrect, it should be replaced by [yadda yadda yadda]. This can be referenced by [link to a story in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Financial Times – or a similarly reliable source]".

You can also continue using declared paid editors such as NinaSpezz who says they were editing on your behalf through 2021, and FMatPSCM who says they have been editing for you from May 2022 through at least October 2023. They have been fairly polite compared to other paid editors, but you might ask them to be a bit less aggressive. They have no special editing rights that other editors do not have.

If you'd like something more private, you can contact our Volunteer Response Team (VRT) by email at info-en-qwikimedia.org.

Or if you'd like to be interviewed by The Signpost for our next issue I'd be happy to drop off my contact details at your office with my formatting and other requirements. – S

The Times raises many questions in How Wikipedia is being changed to downgrade Iranian human rights atrocities (archive), also available in a slightly abridged version in The Australian. The story claims that an Iranian government cyber army is removing information from Wikipedia about atrocities committed against the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq or MEK, which opposes the government. The article is based on information provided by an unknown Wikipedian identified only as "Marco", which is not their username. Someone claiming to be Marco recently has also contacted The Signpost without offering us any information.

This dispute has a long history with a stop made at ArbCom in the 2021 Iranian politics case, which resulted in Iranian politics being named a contentious topic. The only information we can add is that over the past year several editors of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran article have been given harsh bans or blocks of varying severity. All of them appear to have supported the MEK side of the issue. Alex-h and ParadaJulio were globally banned by Wikimedia Foundation office actions. Stefka Bulgaria, Fad Ariff, and Iraniangal777, have received indefinite blocks from a checkuser, which usually indicates an egregious case of sockpuppetry. MA Javadi received a basic indefinite block for sockpuppetry. – S

• Oklahoma Disneyland hoax: Fake Wikipedia screenshot used to spread hoax about destruction of a Disneyland in Oklahoma (that never existed) ... supposedly "destroyed in 2022 after the International Space Station fell and crushed it", reports the Oklahoman.
• Factchecking: Just in time for the story above, KUOW (Seattle)'s Soundside show provides techniques for "How to sort online fact from fiction", using the SIFT model. Use of Wikipedia for source authentication is first mentioned at 10:30 in the story.
• Shout-out for Wikimedia Malaysia: The Sun (Malaysia) reports on efforts to save some of Malaysia's threatened indigenous languages. In particular, Mendriq is spoken by the Mendriq Orang Asli community, which now numbers only about 600 people. Where to start? "Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia (Wikimedia Malaysia) is involved in efforts to preserve the Mendriq language by inputting Mendriq words into online multilingual dictionary Wiktionary".
• Arabic Wikipedia spreads propaganda, says National Review; examples they give from the Arabic Wikipedia include "such claims as Jews not having inhabited the land [that is now Israel] until around 200 years ago".
• Wikipedia goes to the Moon, almost: Peregrine Mission One was launched on 8 January 2024, with the goal of placing the first U.S.-manufactured lunar lander on the Moon since the days of the space race. Among the items aboard the unmanned lander was a copy of Wikipedia. Alas, Wikipedia did not make it to the Moon—the mission was abandoned less than one day after takeoff owing to a fuel leak. India Today, The Guardian, Indy 100.

Anthony Bradbury (User:Anthony_Bradbury) joined Wikipedia in April 2006. He liked to be called Tony.

Offline, he was born in 1943 and worked as a general practitioner for many years; he lived in Newhaven, England. Online, he served as an administrator on the English Wikipedia for over sixteen years.

Tony's areas of interest were naval and military history, Imperial and contemporary Rome, Ancient Egypt, pre‑Dreadnought battleships, Dreadnought battleships, and battlecruisers, military aircraft, National Socialist Germany, and medical science and practice. He passed away on January 1, 2024.

This issue — I'm sure everybody cares about this and is really interested in reading about it — I have spent some time optimizing the templates for crosswords, including a new several that allow for really easy formatting of the clues and answers. You can see the answer formatting in the last issue, for which I've added them.

I apologize to our phonular readers, for whom this sucks and doesn't work right; I am trying to figure out some CSS stuff that will let the highlighting properly on mobile. One major limitation is that it's impossible to just do what every other website (i.e. TV Tropes, the SCP wiki, etc) does and run clientside JavaScript from Wikipedia's MediaWiki install, meaning that 99% of the available technologies for hiding/displaying inline text are just not available. But surely we can use just vanilla tags like <details> and <summary>, and those wouldn't get roosterblocked by the parser, right?

<details>
    <summary>Open this to read a
    boring go-off</summary>
    Wow, hidden content! These are two of those
    sexy semantic HTML tags everyone forgets
    about the existence of, and would rather
    use a megabyte of JavaScript to do the
    same thing.<br/>

    But since I'm really smart and I know
    they exist, in theory it should be really
    easy to use them to implement behavior
    like collapsible and expandable text,
    even in  browsers that don't use
    JavaScript at all!<br/>

    Then maybe I could use CSS styling to
    modify the display of the details element
    to be inline rather than block, and mess
    around with the positioning and the box
    model to overlay it in the same place as
    the summary element.<br/>

    So then you'd just have a thing you
    could easily click to show the hidden
    content (and have its hidden/revealed
    state persist, even) rather than forcing
    the user to highlight black-on-black
    text to see the information.
</details>

<details><summary>Spoiler alert (click to open)</summary>It doesn't work.</details>

Furthermore, on an unrelated note, it should be noted that if you make a template to display text that's the same color as the background (like a spoiler), no matter what precautions are taken, or what giant red messages there are in the documentation, or how many technical measures have been taken to make it impossible to use the template in mainspace, there are certain names that you should never, ever give to that template... under any circumstances... no matter how innocuous and straightforward it may be — similar to how certain good-luck symbols should never be used in certain European countries — it will resurrect old terrors and cause great strife. You've been warned!

Anyway, amidst all the excitement, I forgot to actually bother to write any crosswords worth a damn this month, so here is some dreck I had lying around in the drafts.

The good news is that there is now a very good and well-documented guide on how to make your own crosswords easily using these templates here, so maybe next issue I will not have to put them together myself...??

I'm not kidding about the templates being easy to use. You basically just type the things into the grid: . is an unused square, 0 is an empty square, and any number is a square of that number. Here, I will show you. This code:

{{Signpost/Crossword}}
{{Signpost/Crossword row|1 |2 |0 |4 |5 }}
{{Signpost/Crossword row|6 |0 |. |7 |0 }}
{{Signpost/Crossword row|8 |0 |0 |0 |0 }}
{{Signpost/Crossword row|9 |0 |. |10|0 }}
{{Signpost/Crossword row|11|0 |0 |0 |0 }}
|}

Produces this output:

And this code, for clues:

{{Signpost/Crossword clues begin}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clues}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clues|Across}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clue |   1|Popular orange vegetable|CARROT}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clue |   3|Bone filling|MARROW}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clue |   5|Popular white flower|YARROW}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clues}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clues|Down}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clue |   2|Reminiscent of bow ammunition|ARROWY}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clue |   4|Characteristic of improper technique|ERRORY}}
{{Signpost/Crossword clue | 451|Mechanical model of the solar system|ORRERY}}
|}

Produces this: