Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2022-09-30

The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the role of WMF-supported organizers recruiting volunteers to work on the projects is of critical importance to growing content and retaining contributors. To date, it says:

the path to organizing has been very organic, loosely supported by grant-making and the work of our affiliate network. But the Movement Strategy asks us to focus on Investing in Skills and Leadership Development and Identifying Topics for Impact. We need to get more deliberate about asking questions like:

• How are we inviting the next generation of editors and volunteers to our movement to help us address a universe of knowledge gaps?
• Are we creating clear pathways for organizers to gain all the skills or knowledge they need to champion the Wikimedia Movement well?

By mentoring and working with organizers over the last three years to understand campaigns around the world, the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation has learned how to help organizers design campaigns that bring in the next generation of contributors. We are going to share those lessons and experiences in an Organizer Lab (beta) focused on campaigns and organizing around “Topics for Impact”. Though we hope to expand to support other topics and themes in the coming years, the first cohort will be themed around a topic of rising interest across the movement: Climate Change and Sustainability.

The Organizer lab will be a 9-week online course running from late October to mid-December. For further details, see the Wikimedia blog post. – AK

The Wikimedia Foundation has launched a sound logo contest.

Take a note – from 13 September to 10 October 2022, everyone, everywhere is invited to help create a sound logo for the Wikimedia projects.

A sound logo is a brief collection of sounds, often between 2 and 4 seconds long. Sound logos have gained popularity with the rise of audio technology globally; the number of active voice assistant users has grown from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021. Wikimedia projects increasingly power other websites, search engines, and general knowledge queries on voice-assisted devices, but many listeners are not aware because the source of the information is not consistently identified. A sound logo is needed to help listeners identify when they are accessing trusted, verifiable knowledge from Wikimedia projects. In harmony with our values and as always curious to experiment and learn, we will have an open contest for the sound of all human knowledge and invite the world to participate.

– AK

Two seats were open in the Wikimedia Foundation's board, and there were six candidates. With a total of 5,922 votes in the election, the two candidates selected were Mike Peel (Mike Peel) and Shani Evenstein Sigalov (Esh77). During the end in round 5, Mike Peel had been elected with 1,995 votes. The second seat was decided in the final round, when Shani Evenstein Sigalov had gotten approximately 1,835 votes. – H

Check 'em – congratulations to NicoV, whose bot has achieved Wikipedia's 1,111,111,111 GET. An anonymous server kitty is claimed to have said "that's an awful lot of 1s in the same place, hopefully nothing similar will happen for about fifteen years when we expect to need the same number of 2s". The Mayor of Vayres, Gironde is probably unaware of the special status his commune has just acquired in the English speaking world. – W

In June and July of 2022, the Wikimedia movement released a community safety survey. This was to find out whether or not a user felt safe and comfortable contributing to Wikipedia. The question asked was:

In the last 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia?

The survey was sent to users on five different languages of Wikipedia: the English Wikipedia, the Farsi Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia and the Portuguese Wikipedia. The answers to choose from were "Yes," "No," and "I'm not sure." The results turned out to be that the unweighted results (there were two versions of responses: weighted and unweighted) on the English Wikipedia showed that 75.3% of Wikipedians felt safe and comfortable on Wikipedia, 15.9% of Wikipedians felt unsafe or uncomfortable, and 8.8% of them were not sure. The proportions of users feeling unsafe were somewhat higher on the Spanish (24.4%) and Portuguese (26.0%) Wikipedias. – H

In February a Call for Feedback was published by the Community Development (CD) team about a Leadership Development Working Group. The Call for Feedback was shared in 42 languages. The Call for Feedback was used to get feedback from the community on the meaning of "leader," the working group's composition, and the need for continued feedback. The Leadership Development Working Group recently published its leadership definition and invited feedback. – H

• New administrators: After a lengthy discussion at RfA whose close numbers prompted a bureaucrat chat to determine consensus, The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, ScottishFinnishRadish. There's also an interview with ScottishFinnishRadish in this month's issue.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Convent. Please be bold in helping improve this article!
• UCOC consultation: Conversation hour for Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines, North America and Western Europe, will be Monday, October 3, 21:00 UTC (your local time)
• Wikimedia Summit: WMF staff are currently still completing their report on the Wikimedia Summit, which took place in Berlin from September 9 to September 11. More in next month's issue.

MB and Novem Linguae took on the task of joint lead coordinators of New Page Patrol this year following the long void left by other coordinators who had moved on. Kudpung was de facto coordinator for many years before retiring from it in March 2017. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication.

Four years ago, in October 2018, the Signpost article "NPP: This could be heaven or this could be hell for new users – and for the reviewers" reported on the New pages patrol process and the challenges it faces. Today, those issues produce new hurdles to keeping the encyclopedia clean – and the need for upgrades to its software is even more acute.

New Page Reviewers use the page curation system to review new articles and pass them for indexing for search engines, or to propose them for further improvement or deletion. Unfortunately, the community has too few capable and competent people at NPP and despite occasional drives to address it, today's backlog still stands at an untenable level. Software improvements, both bug reports and feature requests, that would help and encourage reviewers do this job have been languishing unaddressed at Phabricator for months and even years. Commenting on the WMF's rejection of ACTRIAL in their 2011 article in The Signpost, users Skomorokh, Jorgenev, and Daniel Mietchen suggest that:

Knowing that an appeal was in preparation, a WMF director of product engineering made a pre-emptive post on the task force talk page in which they placed the blame for the lack of software support squarely at the feet of the New Page Patrol team for not having submitted requests to the Community Wishlist. The Wishlist is an annual programme since 2015 where contributors from all Wikimedia projects can ask for those small changes that they would most like to see. Indeed, the NPP group did avail of the process in 2018 and completely swamped it, but that was four years ago. Paradoxically, the response continued by listing other WMF engineering commitments as an explanation of why they don’t have the funds or capacity for NPP. There was also an opaque reference to a need to rewrite the tool: "current projects that we've prioritized above rewriting PageTriage." If they believe it is beyond normal maintenance, that may be another reason why they are providing little support. The WMF's post was made before the letter was published and the NPP team does not consider their comments to be wholly felicitous.

Despite the bold claim in their Annual Plan 2022-2023 Goal #1:

the WMF makes no mention of supporting the trusted knowledge in their flagship project, the English Wikipedia.

During a July live streamed 'Conversation with the Trustees' (see transcript below), in answer to a pre-submitted question from Atsme, a New Page Reviewer: "What is the Foundation doing to protect New Pages Patrol and Articles for Creation from system overload?" the response from the board's vice-chair, Shani Evenstein, stated that PageTriage was 'community developed' (which it was not: Engagement strategy - New Page Triage) and that NPP volunteers should wait for at least six months and request the work through the Wishlist.

While researching for a reply, in contrast to their claim of "...to have honest and meaningful conversations [...] We prepare for these meetings and send an agenda of main topics, and post it on Meta, a week in advance, and make sure to go through these agenda items".[3] they were apparently either misinformed or they misinterpreted the information provided by their source. Insisting that important technical matters are not at all within the board's 'remit', it is interesting to note how unaware the board appears to be of the importance of the flagship encyclopedia to the Foundation's very existence. In a follow up thread on the reviewers' talk page Ms Evenstein offered some words of encouragement, giving hope for future collaboration:

I cannot promise an immediate solution, but I can promise it will be properly discussed. To make sure expectations are realistic, I will add that this topic / issue / problem statement requires further discussions internally, both with our CEO and our new CPTO. As you may know, we have just hired a new CPTO, who will be starting in August. Whatever operational solutions WMF will come up with for this stated problem, it will have to include her. Till she settles in, and till we are able to strategize around this topic (and other related technologically-related topics) further in collaboration with staff, our Product department continues to be aware and continue to work on it to the extent they can; but I hope it is clear that talking about longer-term solutions, a bit more time will be needed to make sure this is properly discussed.

Ms Evenstein has recently been re-elected to the board, while newly elected Mike Peel comes directly from the English Wikipedia community. A user since 2005 and an administrator since 2007, he was one of two candidates campaigning on a platform of more board involvement on the shop floor:

Although there have been hiccups in the past, some serious, the board generally acts within the movement's best interests, but anyone watching the video of the Board of Trustees responding to Atsme's question cannot fail to recognise the board's reply as inadequate and mildly patronising.

Writing in The Signpost Op-ed Wikipedia has cancer about the Foundation's flow of funds, Guy Macon, a financial consultant, states:

…their poor handling of software development has been well known for many years. The answer to the WMF's problems with software development has been well known for decades and is extensively documented in books such as The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams […] This failure is almost certainly a systemic problem directly caused by top management, not by the developers doing the actual work.

Macon's more recent essay, an updated version of Wikipedia has Cancer, is a testament to the runaway spending on pet projects and non-core functions while neglecting the volunteers, and still leaving the Foundation with current disposable assets in excess of US$200 million The volunteers are the project's major stakeholder and the NPP team on whose work the reputation of the articles depends, is hoping for a substantive response and one that comes from the Foundation's senior executive staff, especially CPTO Selena Deckelmann, and Maryana Iskander, the CEO. In view of the rapidly growing surplus of donations, the stock justifications for inaction are wearing thin; the community is trusting in offers of serious engagement on quality control, rather than further rejections and intangible reasons why it can't or won't be done.

As of press time, the New Page Review team has received an acknowledgement by email from the Trustees, but no official public response to the letter from them or the WMF. We reached out to the board and the WMF regarding this article in the Signpost. The board pointed out a minor error in the staff which has been corrected, but the WMF has not offered any comment.

In some months, the weather can just be disagreeable. In other months maybe it's people who seem to be disagreeable. This month it seems like the media all found something to disagree with, either about Wikipedia's coverage or with our policies. Or maybe we disagree with them. It was that kind of month.

In Wikipedia’s Fox News Problem (Slate), author Samuel Breslow – who is listed as a long time Wikipedia editor – explains how a novel-length reliable sources debate decided to allow Fox News to be used for non-controversial facts. "If outlets like Fox News are permitted, Wikipedia’s view of the world will look more like Fox's" was part of Slate's distillation of the importance of reliable source determination on Wikipedia content. Major debates (community Requests for Comment) took place in 2010, 2020 and the most recent debate closed this month. The article's author interviewed Wikipedia administrator and member of the Arbitration Committee Kevin Li, who closed the September Request for Comment, for his interpretation of the process, and the article quotes him extensively. – B

YouTuber and Washington Post columnist J. J. McCullough – a retired Wikipedian who long ago drew the image shown here on the right – has released a 22-minute YouTube video titled "Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)". He criticizes Wikipedia's de facto information monopoly, which he says crowds out other sites and reduces information diversity, and its writing style, complaining about the length and disorganized detail in articles. He really dislikes the anonymity and unaccountability of Wiki-editors – especially of admins and other hard-core editors. He likens Wikipedia to McDonalds: a place to go to get fast, cheap fare when you are hungry but don't really care about quality. There might be some truth in his lengthy and detailed list of complaints, though his description of the editor who has contributed nearly half a percent of all edits to Wikipedia as having written a third of it does seem wildly out.

Indeed, McCullough says that he doesn't read Wikipedia. In the first 30 seconds of the video, he states that in his seven years of creating videos he has never consulted the august online encyclopedia that anyone can edit; that for over a decade he has blocked the site from his browser; and that he uses Google's hide search feature to ensure that he does not see Wikipedia in search results. So how does he know so much about Wikipedia?

In 2008 two articles related to McCullough were deleted: Filibuster Cartoons (his website) and J.J. McCullough. Four further attempts were made to recreate the article about him, either as J.J. McCullough or J. J. McCullough (note the extra space). After the last of these was deleted in 2020, the creation of new articles by those titles was blocked.

The video has attracted detailed comment at the Village Pump, with allegations that McCullough is angry that the biographies of him have been deleted. Others there have speculated that he is a former admin. We reached out to McCullough for further comment, but he has not replied. – S

In Evidence suggests Wikipedia is accurate and reliable. When are we going to start taking it seriously? science writer Liam Mannix in The Sydney Morning Herald uses the case of Queen Elizabeth II's death to demonstrate how fast and accurate Wikipedia is.

this is ... not something we should expect. Wikipedia is free. Its editors are volunteers. There is no expertise or academic qualifications required. We are told again and again that we can’t trust it because anyone could be writing it. It should be the worst place on the internet.

Yet published evidence suggests it is reasonably reliable – at least as reliable as its competitor the Encyclopedia Britannica.

He links to academic studies on six specific subject areas – mostly medical but also one on general political coverage. All of these studies confirm Wikipedia's accuracy. He links to two broader (and older) studies that give Wikipedia better than passing marks. And a linked 2014 meta-analysis of 110 studies concludes '"Wikipedia is generally a reliable source of information" across almost all domains studied.' – S

The term "deaditors"—Wikipedia editors who memorialize the pages of notables who have recently died—was previously mentioned on this page in The Signpost in 2018. As Annie Rauwerda explains in Input, the term started with an article written by a Dutch Wikipedian, which was then reported on in Slate. The term has also been used recently in a few foreign-language reports (Italian, Spanish, Czech).

Other media covering the phenomenon this month include Gizmodo, Metro UK, Yahoo! (which says deaditors are also known as "WikiJackals"), The Sydney Morning Herald, NPR, Kim Komando [4] and The Wall Street Journal.

Most of the reports reflect a sense of wonder, or even awe, at how well Wikipedians perform this task.

Simon Garfield in The death of the door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman in inews recalls a 2020 email from Katherine Maher asking for a £20 donation for Wikipedia. In 2017 he had donated £2, and then he got the email asking for more. At that point Garfield took at least one amazing action. He compared Maher's position to that of an encyclopedia salesman in a 1967 Monty Python comedy sketch.

Of course the self-identified thief later turns out to be an encyclopedia salesman, who would rather people think him a thief.

Garfield is a professional writer who uses Wikipedia extensively. He's written a history of encyclopedias, All The Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia. He thinks that "Wikipedia is one of the greatest things on the internet".

After talking with Maher, he donated £12.

Maher is now a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. She was recently appointed a member of the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, an advisory panel established a decade ago by Hillary Clinton.

The Atlantic Council's abovementioned Digital Forensic Research Lab also reported on Runiversalis. Its article, published on Medium, described the new site as "an attempt to spread Russian propaganda and disinformation in the guise of a wiki. Beyond using the underlying software architecture employed by Wikipedia, it’s a wiki in name only." Runiversalis, meanwhile, has apparently repurposed Wikipedia's "Did You Know?" section into an "I Knew It!" section with trivia such as "American politicians, political scientists, and journalists admit that United States turned into empire of lies". The Medium article also states that Runiversalis, unlike Wikipedia, "does not provide editing options for the general public; when the site still allowed user registration, a message would appear after registration, informing the user, 'You do not have permission to create this page.' It openly acknowledges it operates under Russia's restrictive media laws."

The overarching pattern here, bearing in mind China's own huge internet encyclopedias, Baike.com and Baidu Baike, is that governments everywhere – unsurprisingly, perhaps – take a keen interest in having user-generated encyclopedias that propagate their respective views of the world. Thank God the United States government has never done anything to mess around with Wikipedia... – AK

Wait, shit! Speaking of user-generated encyclopedias that propagate their respective views of the world, Judge Andy Oldham of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas House Bill 20 in mid-September. The law restricts some content providers' ability to moderate (or censor, depending on your point of view) public speech hosted on their sites based on viewpoint, with some exceptions for public safety and compliance with federal laws. Sites that are covered under the law operate in Texas, have "an Internet website or application that is open to the public, allows a user to create an account, and enables users to communicate with other users for the primary purpose of posting information, comments, messages, or images" and over 50 million active U.S. users a month.

The Techdirt analysis "Did The 5th Circuit Just Make It So That Wikipedia Can No Longer Be Edited In Texas?" questions whether Twitter – one of the three companies the state testified was targeted by the law – qualifies, with its many bot accounts. But then Techdirt speculates that Wikipedia might qualify. If so, according to the analysis, the site's owners – Wikimedia Foundation – may not be able to regulate some of the encyclopedia's content without violation of the Texas law.

Given that WMF so rarely directly interacts with site content it's not clear to this editor what the net effect of the ruling would be – assuming they don't block Texas editors to avoid running afoul of HB 20. It's also completely speculative that any judge would view the creation of a fact-based encyclopedia as protected viewpoint speech. – B

• Russia mistreats editors: Doxxed, threatened, and arrested: Russia's war on Wikipedia editors (republished by Nieman Lab)
• Indian engineers: India engineers are helping to keep Wikipedia inclusive
• It's not cricket: India summons Wikipedia officials over cricketer biography tweak and The Indian Express explain how Wikipedia offended a bowler who dropped the ball.
• Explained | Content moderation on Wikipedia, The Hindu [5]
• Sound logo: The Hustle and It's Nice That explore the WMF's search for a sound logo.
• Not a mystery anymore: Wikipedia's page for "2022 Russian businessmen mystery deaths", Boing Boing (about 2022 Russian businessmen mystery deaths)
• Complaints about political bias: Spain's conservative daily ABC, one of the country's three newspapers of record, reports that several Spanish cultural and political figures have denounced the "covert political bias" of the Spanish Wikipedia in a manifesto, claiming its entries "are edited by people who, hiding behind anonymous editor accounts, take advantage of the opportunity to carry out political activism, either by including erroneous or false data, or by selecting news from the media with a clear political and ideological bias." The manifesto is published in Spanish and English.
• Beavers, Cougars, Ducks, and Huskies, oh my: The Northwest Championship meme is legit because it has a Wikipedia page. And because fans of American college football will believe anything. (The Athletic)
• Big Byrd banned? Roger McGuinn recalls how he was banned for editing the article about him. Make that a 24 hour block, Mr. Tambourine Man. See the Grammy's Living Legends interview (a free newsletter subscription is required) and Wiki talk page for details.
• Catnip: An article in grid.news calls a case the Wikimedia Foundation has asked the United States Supreme Court to hear "catnip" for the court, pitting the interests of free information against the interests of the state to limit some communications in the interest of national security.
• Prized students: International Society for Computational Biology Student Council's Wikipedia editing competition prize went to EE/CS students at Ohio University [6]

The Wikimedia Deutschland Movement Strategy & Global Relations Team has published Paper #2 in the WMDE-authored series on Movement Strategy topics.

Titled Decentralized Fundraising, Centralized Distribution, this research report describes the fundraising and distribution practices of eight large international NGO confederations and networks, and puts them in the context of the changing Wikimedia Movement.

2030 Movement Strategy calls on us to change many things - among them how we generate and share funds among regions, affiliates and communities. Subsidiarity, equity, and participation are just some of the key values and principles to be incorporated.

The paper deliberately refrains from recommendations. In addition to the research, it does provide an overview of the history of Wikimedia resource development, discusses the elements of movement strategy related to funding, and finally poses a series of questions helpful to frame the further conversation.

This paper, published in the context of the Wikimedia Movement’s deliberations around its Movement Charter and the implementation of 2030 Movement Strategy, provides an overview of financial practices of comparable large international nonprofit/nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) which are organized as confederations or networks.

Based on interviews and information sharing with staff of eight organizations, including Amnesty International, Oxfam International, CARE International, World YWCA, Greenpeace and the International Cooperative Alliance, the research asks about key practices in the areas of fundraising, decision-making about fund allocation, and in particular, about redistribution policies and mechanisms. This latter topic was given particular focus, because Movement Strategy emphasizes equity in funds distribution across an economically unequal international movement. Yet it leaves open how this should be structured.

The main findings of the research show that the Wikimedia Movement differs significantly in its practices from the screened organizations: All of the organizations are based on their affiliates fundraising independently, online and offline. In several cases the INGO specifically invests in the fundraising capacity of affiliates. Yet fundraising is highly strategic rather than diversified, in terms of markets, fundraising affiliates, and revenue sources.

With one exception, the international entity collects membership dues and is in part funded by them. The international entities have a diversity of roles, with acting as a secretariat and coordination being the most common ones. Only a minority of international entities engage in their own fundraising or fundraise for the movement. Notably, grantmaking from international entities to the affiliates is not a practice, and occurs only in few exceptions when there is third party program funding. Participation in funding decisions, which has been previously researched in a report commissioned by the MS 2030 Resource Allocation Working group, is practiced mostly through democratic and equitable governance and committee structures. While these structures vary greatly, both reports conclude that governance and funding systems are inseparably linked.

Finally, three of the organizations have distinct, policy-based, central funds redistribution mechanisms. These are discussed in some detail, in terms of their principles, formulas and review periods.

The results of this research can be summarized as follows: International NGO confederations practice decentralized fundraising, and those that redistribute funds for equity do so in a centralized manner, based on policies agreed upon by the democratic governance bodies of the confederation. The affiliates that fundraise in strong markets thus support the affiliates in smaller markets.

The research part concludes with a list of insights for the upcoming deliberations of the Wikimedia Movement. In the second part of the paper, readers can find a short history of Wikimedia revenues and resources, and an overview of the elements of 2030 Movement Strategy relevant to revenue generation and distribution. The appendices provide a list of guiding questions for the Movement deliberations to follow, and an overview of the structures of the INGOs in the sample.

This report was written with the assistance of GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. More information on Signpost GPT-3 articles can be found here. Upon generating draft language, the authors reviewed the text and take ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.

Y'all heard about politics? The closure of this RSN discussion, which stretched to 637,011 bytes – long enough to get media attention in this month's In the media – has left the community divided on the reliability of the web publications of the famously contentious Fox News. Some believed that the online version of Fox News should be considered generally unreliable, while others believed that it is only marginally reliable. All believed that posts online were of great importance. The community did not reach a consensus on the matter, aside from agreeing that the reliability of Fox News is unclear and additional considerations apply to its use. The debate is likely to continue.

This letter is from the English Wikipedia New Page Patrol team to the Wikimedia Foundation and Board of Trustees. They express their concern that the PageTriage software, which is essential to their work, is not being given the attention it needs. They explain that the software is outdated and full of bugs, and that there are many enhancements that have been requested but not implemented. They argue that if the software was better maintained, it would improve the workflow of the relatively small number of active reviewers and make it easier to recruit new members.

See related Signpost coverage this month at In focus.

The request for comment is about whether or not to deprecate the entire website Royal Central because it lacks editorial oversight and has been found to plagiarize from Wikipedia articles. There is consensus amongst editors that the website should be deprecated.

This village pump request for comment is about whether to keep the old icon or use the new icon for external links. Closer ScottishFinnishRadish said "There is consensus to keep the old icon, and a weaker consensus that the old icon isn't very good either. I think the real consensus here is that the community would prefer approving a new icon, or having input on the design, before implementation."

• Review of English Wikimedia fundraising emails
• Process for changing Wikipedia's default appearance

Wikipedia has lots to explore, especially for editors. When I was only a reader of Wikipedia, I would just look at the information and not really bother to look further. Now as an editor, I've found that there is so much to be discovered, like Wikiprojects and the Teahouse. But I had never wondered what would happen if an article had to be deleted. In fact, I'd thought all articles were perfect — Featured Article status – so they would never have to be deleted. Articles for deletion has so much to discover. Most of the time, it's only a few people participating, but sometimes, it can turn into a long line of comments and opinions...

I was just scrolling one day to find some Articles for Deletion discussion pages when I came across a discussion for the article on the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, when I first saw the title of the article, I was a bit skeptical. What's an important topic doing at AfD? Then I started to read the nominator's argument, and I looked at the article itself, and so I said to myself: wait a minute, they actually had a good reason for nominating this! There were quite a few opinions there already on what to do, more than I normally saw, so I decided I should have a voice. After making my decision on what to do, I had my say.

Anyway, I like to check up on the discussion after I !vote on an Articles for Deletion discussion. When I clicked the page, here's what I found:

There were so many !votes!

This continued for the next couple of days. More !votes, and more, and more. Eventually the discussion closed, with the result being "no consensus." I didn't think there was going to be any, anyway. I checked recently, and the article is like this now.

Most articles for deletion discussions aren't like this. They have a couple of !votes, and that's it. Like this one:

Then some are longer.. but not super long like the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article.

Some are really, really long!

This deletion discussion is also super long, and I found this one while I was writing this article. It's from when the talk page at WikiProject User Rehab got nominated for deletion. (Which is kind of ironic, because actually I'm a participant in Wikiproject User Rehab, so if this had been deleted then I could have never joined.) The final result to this discussion was "no consensus."

But you've already seen the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article, and you too saw that it had also reached no consensus. Why did these two not reach consensus? I think it has to do with the amount of !votes. Coming to an agreement is really hard when you have so many people voicing their opinions. It's a bit like having a speech and debate contest- except for one person against another there are fifty people on each side. Would it be hard then for the judge (in Wikipedia's case, an administrator), to decide what to do? Yes. That might be why we don't reach consensus with these Article for Deletion discussions... but why do so many !votes get there in the first place? I think the reason why some Articles for Deletion discussions have lots and lots of !votes is because the article nominated for deletion gets lots of views— like a newsworthy item. We can kind of come up with a rule of thumb:

The more views an article that is nominated for deletion gets, the more !votes it will get on its deletion discussion page.

Obviously the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev was a newsworthy event, so the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article got a lot of views, which led to a lot of !votes. But even though these discussions get a lot of !votes, your !vote still counts. So !vote. If you're an administrator, all I can say in these scenarios is— you're going to be scrolling down for quite a while! Thank you.

I like to add photographs to Wikipedia articles. The addition of a visual aspect improves the quality of an article, and gives a better view on a subject. If the photo isn't reflecting reality, it can also influence the opinion of readers. That’s why many Wikipedians try to improve the quality of photos. I have seen astonishing improvements of photographs, but also weird effects. Some photographs are beautified so much, that the new photograph is an improved version of reality.

I have to admit: I crop photographs. I also remove watermarks, or ask skilled colleagues to make that happen (thank you, Wikipedians at the Graphics Lab). I don’t particularly like scratches and blurs, but where’s the limit? Clearing a background, removal of persons or buildings, image restoration: it all happens at Commons. There’s one line I won’t cross: changing the characteristics of a photograph. Yes, I have seen cigarettes removed from the lips of one of my cultural heroes (“just a small retouch”), and the retouched photograph was used in 10 language versions of Wiki, over a period of six years. I pushed the original photograph back in.

• 
  Carly Rae Jepsen (2012) – with watermark
• 
  Carly Rae Jepsen – watermark removed
• 
  Clear copyright claim (right in the middle)
• 
  Frogs web (original)
• 
  Same image, brightened

When money is involved, attitudes change. The management of The Weeknd wanted his image to change in 2020, and thus wanted to abolish the then current photo in Wikipedia. They hired a company to take legal action via a request for removal of this 2017 photograph in Wiki (DMCA Removal Request, 2020). The result was devastating for Commons: not only was the photograph removed, but two great administrators resigned during the resulting row.

I love removing watermarks and copyright signs from photos in Commons– if permitted by the license. Most photographs in Wikimedia Commons have either a PD or a CC-BY-license, and both permit removing watermarks. At the same time, I like to respect photographers. The rules in Wikipedia regarding removal of watermarks are quite clear. I'm inclined to adhere to the most likely interpretation (in short: removal of (copyright) watermarks is in line with CC-BY-SA and not a legal violation), because CC-BY permits changing of files and removal of watermarks. Some Wikipedians say this issue is not an issue of copyright, but is about ethics. They say it would be disrecpectful or insulting to remove the copyright claims. My simple answer: if you don’t want your photo to be touched by others, don’t bring them under a CC-BY-license.

My suggestion: the proposed Commons guideline should also promote removal of visible copyright signs of images under a CC-BY license.

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

OpenSym 2022, "the 18th International Symposium on Open Collaboration" took place in Madrid earlier this month. While the conference had started out back in 2005 as WikiSym, focused on research about Wikipedia and other wikis, this year only a single paper in the proceedings covered such topics - but won the conference's "OSS / OpenSym 2022 Distinguished Paper Award". In the abstract^[1] the authors summarize their findings as follows:

"Through surveys and interviews, we develop and refine a Wikipedia trust taxonomy that describes the mechanisms by which readers assess the credibility of Wikipedia articles. Our findings suggest that readers draw on direct experience, established online content credibility indicators, and their own mental models of Wikipedia’s editorial process in their credibility assessments. "

They also note that their study appears to be "the first to gather data related to trust in Wikipedia, motivations for reading, and topic familiarity from large and geographically diverse set of Wikipedia readers in context–while they were actually visiting Wikipedia to address their own information needs."

The research project (begun while one of the authors was staff member at the Wikimedia Foundation) first conducted two online surveys displayed on English Wikipedia readers in early 2019, asking questions such as "How much do you trust the information in the article you are reading right now?." Among the topline results, the researchers highlight that, consistent with some earlier readers surveys

"Overall, respondents reported a very high level of trust in Wikipedia. 88% of respondents to the first survey reported that they trusted Wikipedia as a whole "a lot" or "a great deal". 73% of respondents to the second survey reported that they trusted the information in the article they were currently reading "a lot" or "a great deal" (94% in the first survey 6 ). In contrast, less than 4% of respondents in the second survey reported distrusting the information in the current article to any degree."

Survey participants were also asked about their reasons for trusting or distrusting Wikipedia in general and the specific article they had been reading when seeing the survey invitation. The researchers distilled these free-form answers into 18 "trust components", and present the following takeaways.

The four components that respondents find most salient (highest agreement) relate to the content of the article: assessments of the clarity and professionalism of the writing, the quality of the structure, and the accuracy of the information presented. The next four highest-ranked trust components focus on one aspect of the article’s context, the characteristics of the article writers: their motivations (to present unbiased information, fix errors, help readers understand) and their perceived domain expertise. Intriguingly, readers do not seem to consider the "wisdom of the crowd" to be a particularly salient factor when making credibility assessments about Wikipedia articles: the three lowest-ranked trust components all relate, in one way or another, to the relationship between crowdsourcing and quality (search popularity, number of contributors, and number of reviewers). This finding suggests that, at least nowadays, reader trust in Wikipedia is not strongly influenced by either its status as one of the dwindling-number of prominent open collaboration platforms, or its ubiquity at the top of search results.

In a third phase (detailed results of which are still to be published on Meta-wiki), a sample of survey participants were interviewed more in-depth about their previous answers, with the goal of "gain[ing] a deeper understanding into the factors that mediate a reader’s trust of Wikipedia content, including but not limited to citations." Combining results from the interviews and surveys, the researchers arrive at a refined "Taxonomy of Wikipedia Credibility-Assessment Strategies", comprising 24 features in three overall categories: "Reader Characteristics" (e.g. familiarity with the topic), "Wikipedia Features" (e.g. its "Pagerank" or its "Open Collaboration" nature), and "Article Features" (e.g. "Neutral Tone", "Number of Sources").

Lastly, the paper offers some more speculative exploratory analysis results "to spark discussion and highlight potential areas of future research":

• "Although the correlation is weak, [one] finding could indicate that readers have a higher threshold for trust when they require an in depth understanding of an article’s topic vs. learning a quick fact contained within the article."
• "We found a (weak) positive relationship between a respondent’s trust in an article and the predicted ORES quality class of that article (Spearman’s Rho 0.067, n=1312, p = 0.014). This provides additional evidence that readers are able to accurately assess the general quality of the article they are reading, and that content-related factors do inform their credibility assessments."
• "On average, trust was highest among respondents in India and Germany and lowest in Canada and Australia, although a large variability in sample size between countries suggests caution in over-interpreting these results."

This paper, presented earlier this year at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)^[2] opens by observing that

"[...] despite the demonstrable success of Wikipedia, it suffers from a lack of trust from its own readers. [...] The Wikimedia foundation has itself prioritized the development and deployment of trust indicators to address common misperceptions of trust by institutions and the general public in Wikipedia . [... Previous attempts to develop such indicators] include measuring user activity; the persistence of content; content age; the presence of conflict; characteristics of the users generating the content; content-based predictions of information quality; and many more. [...] However, a key issue remains in translating these trust indicators from the lab into real world systems such as Wikipedia."

The study explored this "'last mile' problem" in three experiments where Amazon Mechanical Turk participants were shown versions of Wikipedia articles modified by artificially adding warning templates (both existing ones and a new set designed by the authors, in several difference placements near the top of the page), and lastly by "a new trust indicator that surfaces an aggregate trust metric and enables the reader to drill down to see component metrics which were contextualized to make them more understandable to an unfamiliar audience." Participants were then asked various questions, some designed to explore whether they had noticed the intervention at all, others about how they rated the trustworthiness of the content.

Three of the 9 existing warning templates tested produced a significant negative effect on readers' trust (at the standard p=0.05 level):

"As expected, several of the existing Wikipedia templates significantly influenced reader trust in the negative direction. This is unsurprising, as these templates are designed to indicate a serious issue and inspire editors to mobilize. The remaining templates, ‘Additional citations’, ‘Inline citations’, ‘Notability’, ‘Original Research’, ‘Too Reliant on Primary Sources’ and ‘Too Reliant on Single Source’ did not result in significant changes. It is possible that the specific terms used in these templates were confusing to the casual readers taking the survey. Particularly strong effects were noted in ‘Multiple Issues’ (-2.101; ‘Moderately Lowered’, p<0.001), ‘Written like Advertisement’ (-1.937, p<0.001), and ‘Conflict of Interest’ (-1.182, p<0.05)."

Four of the 11 notices newly created by the researchers also significantly affected trust: "The strongest negative effects were found in ‘Editor Disputed References’ (-1.601 points from baseline, p<0.001), ‘General Reference Issues’ (-1.444, p=0.002), ‘Tone and Neutrality Issues’ (-1.184, p=0.012), and ‘Assessed as Complete’ (-1.101, p=0.017)."

There was also strong evidence for "banner blindness", e.g. in one experiment

"The percentage of readers who had not seen the intervention completely was 48.5%. We found this surprising, as our notices (including existing Wikipedia templates) were placed in a high visibility location where current Wikipedia templates reside and multiple task design elements were put in place to help participants focus on them."

In the third experiment, readers were shown articles first without and then with the newly designed trust indicator, which displayed various quantitative ratings (e.g. "Quality rating: official evaluation given by reputable editors", "Settledness: length of time since significant edits or debates"). They were told that it "shows the trustworthiness score of the article, calculated from publicly available information regarding the content of the article, edit activity, and editor discussions on the page", and then asked to rate the article's trustworthiness again (among other question). This resulted in

"reliable increases in trust at top indicator levels [...] This suggests that a trust indicator can provide system designers with the tools to dial trust in both positive and negative directions, under the assumption that designers choose accurate and representative mappings between indicator levels and article characteristics."

Interestingly, neither of the two studies about Wikipedia readers' trust reviewed above appears to have been aware of the other research project's findings, even though both were at least partly conducted at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Until December 16, the Wikimedia Foundation is inviting proposals for the second edition of its Wikimedia Research Fund, which provides grants between $2k and $50k "to individuals, groups, and organizations with research interests on or about Wikimedia projects [...] across research disciplines including but not limited to humanities, social sciences, computer science, education, and law."

This is the second edition of the research fund, whose inaugural edition had closed for submissions in January 2022. Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation also publicly announced funding decisions about proposals from this 2021/2022 edition, and published the full proposal texts of finalists (while inviting the community to "review the full proposal"). The funded proposals are:

• "The Impact of Wikipedia on Science" (January 2022 to December 2022, 40,000-50,000 USD)
• "Slow Editing towards Equity" (June 2022 – June 2023, 30,000-39,999 USD)
• "Social and Language Influence in Wikipedia Articles for Deletion Debates" (March 2022 - August 2022, 5,000-9,999 USD)
• "Wikidata Gender Diversity (WiGeDi)" (01.06.2022 – 31.05.2023, 40,000-50,000 USD)
• "Adapting Wikidata to support clinical practice using Data Science, Semantic Web and Machine Learning" (1 August 2022-31 July 2023, 49,867.21 USD)
• "From the media to Wikipedia: the relationship between Chilean media news and malicious edits made in the virtual encyclopedia during the Social Outbreak of Chile in 2019." (April 2022 - April 2023, 5,000-9,999 USD)
• "Can Machine Translation Improve Knowledge Equity" (June 2022 ~ May 2023, 40,000-50,000 USD)
• "Using Wikipedia for educational purposes in Estonia: The students′ and teachers′ perspective" (June 1, 2022 - May 31, 2023, 30,000-39,999 USD)
• "Grounding NPOV pillar in post-censored information ecology" (September 1st, 2022 - May 1st, 2023, 10,000-19,999 USD)

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

This study^[3] found that a 2011 English Wikipedia policy change to remove the rights of inactive administrators did not reduce the (already low) frequency of admin accounts being compromised.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Elizabeth II		6,224,957		Following her death, the coverage has been turned down some-what, with some normal scheduling returning to British TV, but it's also not over yet. But, before we look to the week ahead, let's take a look back. On September 11, the Queen left Balmoral on the way to Edinburgh, where she stayed for two nights, the first at Holyroodhouse, and the second lying in state and St. Giles Cathedral, where 33,000 people filed past to pay their respect, and the Queen's children (#2, 6, 12 and 15) held a Vigil of the Princes. On September 13, the Queen was flown from Edinburgh to London, which became the most tracked flight in history. Since September 14, the Queen has been lying in state at Westminster Hall (leading to the local phenomenon The Queue), and will remain there until 6:30 BST on Monday, the day of her funeral. While there, both her children and grandchildren have performed the Vigil of the Princes. On the day of the funeral itself, the Queen's coffin will leave Westminster Hall at 10:44 with the funeral service being held at 11:00, a two-minute silence will be held at the end of the funeral, with several major airports even suspending flights during this period. The Queen will then be taken to Windsor, arriving at 15:10, with a second service happening at 16:00 at St. George's Chapel, ending at 16:45. It won't be till 19:45, during a private family service, when the Queen will be buried alongside her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (#7).
2	Charles III		4,139,056		He's had a tough few days. On some good news, he has already exceeded the reign of the (albeit disputed) nine-day Queen.
3	George VI		2,670,912		#1's father and the previous King, born in 1895, and King from 1936 to 1952.
4	Diana, Princess of Wales		2,584,814		#2's first wife. Her funeral, in 1997, holds the viewing figure record within the UK, at 32.1 million people (nearly 55% of the population at the time). The Queen's funeral is widely expected to beat this.
5	Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva		2,502,254		This Bollywood film is again the only thing preventing a top-ten monopoly for the British royals, which I imagine Indian readers will find rather amusing. It is also the only article to appear in this report that is unrelated to the British royal family. Ayan Mukerji's attempt to replicate the MCU in India has gotten off to an okay start, although still faces a daunting task to recoup its massive budget.
6	Anne, Princess Royal		2,151,398		The Queen's second child and only daughter.
7	Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh		1,811,670		Described as the love of her life, Prince Philip was Elizabeth II's husband, the father of the new King, and the longest serving royal consort in history. Philip and Elizabeth were married from their marriage 1947 until Philip's death in 2021, a year prior to Elizabeth's death.
8	William, Prince of Wales		1,800,986		The oldest child of the new King, which makes him the heir-apparent. He also received a promotion to Prince of Wales, a title held by his father until his accession.
9	Edward VIII		1,774,375		The Queen's uncle, who was King for 11 months in 1936. He abdicated his position in order to marry Wallis Simpson, nicknamed the abdication crisis. The Duke of Windsor, as he was known after his abdication, served his life in de facto exile in France until his death in 1972.
10	Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon		1,766,856		The Queen's younger sister, who died in 2002.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Jeffrey Dahmer		8,365,786		An infamous serial killer who haunted the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for years, during which time he killed and desecrated seventeen people. I'd go into more detail, but I don't really need to; for one, it's awful; for two, you could just watch the Netflix series about him (or read his Wikipedia article, as eight million people did this week). Neither are for the faint-hearted.
2	Elizabeth II		4,177,027		After 10 days of mourning, the erstwhile Queen was laid to rest in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, marking a definitive end to the second Elizabethan era. I'm not so keen on the services, but the synchronised marching and music was nice to watch (in a respectful way, of course)
3	Charles III		1,992,713		So I guess this is it. Charles is now the King. That's really weird, isn't it?
4	George VI		1,989,940		#2's father and sister.
5	Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon		1,732,233
6	Christopher Scarver		1,684,441		#1 isn't alive anymore, not because he was executed, but because this fellow convicted murderer beat him to death with a metal bar in prison, allegedly motivated by racial grievances.
7	Edward VIII		1,378,696		#2's uncle, daughter and ex-daughter-in-law.
8	Anne, Princess Royal		1,356,536
9	Diana, Princess of Wales		1,306,363
10	House of the Dragon		1,257,174		<checks data> Yeah, it's still here.

• 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.

Well, here we are in September. Well, you are, anyway. I always do these things ridiculously far in advance because I panic if I wait until the last minute. Or, apparently, for the issue before this one to be out. I just like the feeling of knowing that everything's in hand and I can just take it easy. Anyway, this is the first Featured Content report to benefit from an upgrade to FACBot: see, Wikipedia has a central archive for featured content promotions, Goings-on, a series of weekly pages that go back to 2004, with a new page created every Sunday. Unfortunately, if something was promoted late on a Saturday, but the new Goings-on page was created before the bot ran, it used to just throw an error and ignore the content, and it might end up left out of the Signpost, as nearly happened with three lists last month. It would have affected six lists this month, but thanks to the update, it instead put them into the Goings-on page for August 14th, and then deleted my talk page six times in a row while trying to tell me about the issue.

Luckily, this month my talk page also benefits from a second upgrade to FACBot where it doesn't do that last thing anymore.

Paulus Moreelse's self-portrait makes a vandal's comic artist's job almost too easy:

But never let it be said that the Signpost avoids cheap gags!

Note: CommonComix no. 1 appeared in the 31 August 2022 issue's humour column.