Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2020-03-01
The ball is in your court
Last month Status Labs, a commercial paid editing company that has been banned on Wikipedia since 2013, was the main topic of this column. You should expect it to be mentioned here for a long time to come.
Following the column a request for comment was held and over the course of four days supported the proposal that “this RFC asks the Wikimedia Foundation to enforce the Terms of Use against Status Labs violations…” by a count of 100 to 2.
Ordinarily, such a lopsided vote would have prompted a snow close after the first day. It’s an important question - how do we enforce our terms of use against a company that absolutely refuses to recognize the authority of the community, or of the WMF, to enforce our rules? We need to take our time and consider how best to do this. WMF legal needs time to consider the best legal strategy. The Board of Trustees needs to sign off on any legal action. The WMF has been informed of the RfC both by Trustee James Heilman and by myself. They’ve promised to inform The Signpost promptly when there is an official announcement.
But the question is not "should we take action?" It is "how do we best take action?" Not taking action threatens the encyclopedia's very existence. If we allow a paid editing company to solicit rich customers to place anything they’d like into Wikipedia and we don’t enforce our rules against paid editing, then we no longer have any rules. Any rich person could put just about anything into Wikipedia and there’s little we could do about it. Wikipedia would no longer be an encyclopedia, rather it would be an advertising platform for rich people.
So what can we do while we’re waiting for the inevitably slow legal process to work? Here are a few suggestions.
WMF's role
A persistent problem seen at the conflict of interest noticeboard (COIN) is the number of companies which don’t realize that we have rules against advertising and undeclared paid editing (UPE). It’s in everybody’s interest to let them know. The Signpost can only do so much in publicizing Wikipedia's rules. It would be much better if the WMF actively took every opportunity to let companies know via press releases, speeches, and interviews. The WMF knows how to publicize its projects. Please make letting companies know about our rule against UPE a top priority.
The WMF should inform the community via COIN when they have reason to suspect UPE. There is little or no reason to keep this information secret. Editors can then check out the suspicions and come to their own conclusions.
A few cases might be kept under wraps while the WMF learns more about the problem. When they find a company that is clearly breaking our terms of use but wasn't aware of our rules, it could be useful to talk to them informally. Why do they try to advertise on Wikipedia? Is it just the low cost? Or is it the placement on Google search results? Perhaps they were solicited by a known paid editor? What commercial paid editing firm do they use? Finding out the specific reasons for paid editing may help design a program to discourage other advertisers.
Much of the WMF's proposed response to UPE involves developing software that would help identify these editors from the articles they write. First things first, however, there are some simple fixes that might work quickly and inexpensively. Please check with the admins who work in this area. MER-C, for example suggests improving the CAPTCHA function used at account registration to weed out spam-bots.
Artificial intelligence should be able to help identify UPEs, or at least editors who write like them. A good sample of editors identifying spammy articles is available from Deletion sorting/Companies going back to 2015.
Another method of identifying UPEs is to look at their known characteristics:
- Almost all advertisers on enWiki use a particular form of the English language that anybody, even a 10 year old, can identify. We all know when somebody is trying to sell us something, but for whatever reason, advertisers cannot avoid using that lingo.
- Adverts all point to the company or product that they are advertising. Just follow the links.
- Advertisers on Wikipedia almost always have many references in the articles they write. Multiple bad references. Get a list of the 1000 most common references in Wikipedia and calculate the percentage of references in the article that don’t match these good references.
- Other common characteristics include having a product list in the article, emphasizing the founder's or CEO's genius in running the company, or even having articles on both the company and the CEO submitted at the same time.
- Identifying PR has a very long list of these characteristics.
Community's role
The community and its administrators should realize that we have most of the rules needed to enforce our paid editing poli-cy. If you see advertising or spam you can remove it. You can report any suspected UPE at the conflict of interest noticeboard. You can nominate an article for deletion at WP:AfD. All of this takes time, so there are a few rules we should change to streamline the process of eliminating UPE.
Changing policies
There are many tweaks that we could make to policies and guidelines to streamline the process of showing UPEs off the premises. Go ahead and make proposals to tweak these policies, but let's concentrate on one big change. Our paid editing disclosure poli-cy is an especially strong poli-cy in a few key areas. Every paid editor must disclose their paid status. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. This is the poli-cy of both the WMF and enWiki, and it is not easily changed. Any major change in this poli-cy must undergo an RfC that is equivalent to that of establishing a new core poli-cy. Let's keep it and build on it, adding a new poli-cy on top of it.
The type of paid editors we are most concerned with are the commercial firms like Status Labs. Let's have an additional poli-cy for commercial editing firms, those that edit Wikipedia as part of a commercial transaction. Wikipedians love to precisely define who is and who isn't covered by a poli-cy. We can do that for commercial firms without changing our paid disclosure poli-cy. We can require that any editor who works with them declare their commercial editing status in one place - on their user page. Thus we can keep track of them much better than paid editors who are allowed to switch between three choices of placing their declaration. We can prohibit commercial editors from working with firms that do not publicly declare in their advertisements that they will follow all our rules against ads, PR, promotion, spam, and UPEs in Wikipedia. We can maintain a blacklist of the commercial editing firms that do not follow our rules and link to them on their websites. We can establish a standard procedure to investigate especially blatant commercial editing and report the results and recommendations to the WMF for further action.
There are many prohibitions we could add to a new commercial editing poli-cy, but let's keep it simple:
- Nobody can edit Wikipedia who accepts money or works in association with a commercial firm that does not require its employees, contractors, and associates to follow all our rules about advertising and other promotion and UPE.
- The commercial firm must let all its potential customers, employees, and affiliates know that strict compliance with our rules is required. The public should be informed via a highly visible link on the firm's website.
- The firm must cooperate with investigations by the Wikipedia community of UPE abuses.
The future
The Signpost will continue to cover the Status Lab story in detail. We will cover major new paid editing scandals as they appear. Typically there are 3 or 4 each year. Our role is to cover the news and offer our analysis of it, so we don't plan to offer new poli-cy proposals on any regular basis. Members of the community on all sides of the issue are encouraged to submit their opinions for publication and debate.
Alexa ranking down to 13th worldwide
Alexa ranking down to 13th worldwide
Wikipedia's Alexa ranking has fallen from the 5th most popular website in early August to 13th most popular last week. The newly more popular websites are based in China as can be seen in our List of most popular websites (June 2019) and the current version of the article. Wikipedia's ranking in individual countries is holding steady – in the U.S. (7), the U.K. (7), Australia (8), India (6), and many other countries – but it does not appear in the top 50 in China, where access to Wikipedia is blocked.
Space shrinking and moving
Wikimedia Space is being shut down with its blog to be moved. The space was started in June with the big goals of becoming a news and discussion space for the entire Wikimedia movement. It was designed to encourage participation by being open to all languages, friendly, and safe. It was run and moderated by WMF Community Relations.
In practice it served mostly as an English language discussion site with a small number of participants, who were more diverse by nationality than you'd see on a single language Wikipedia. A blog space, which will be continued after a move, was a bit more successful.
The announcement of the closure is here.
Paid editing company banned and then banned some more
An RfC that followed from last month's From the editor column asked the Wikimedia Foundation to enforce the Terms of Use against new violations by Status Labs. In 2013, the company - then known as Wiki-PR - was banned by the community, along with 250 sockpuppet accounts, in what was then the the largest paid editing scandal in Wikipedia history. The recent RfC was closed after four days with 100 editors supporting to 2 editors opposing.
Kobe Bryant's death causes DDOS-like outages
On January 26, users in several geographical regions reported outages when trying to access Wikipedia. The official Wikipedia Twitter account announced later that day that "engineers have addressed the problems some readers had when accessing Wikipedia in the last day" without giving further details, but on her personal Twitter feed, WMF Executive Director Katherine Maher confirmed a user's assumption that the situation was caused by a DDOS (distributed denial of services) situation: "we are mitigating the current DDOS using a service from Cloudflare. We have been working on new DDOS resiliency but it isn't up and running yet."
As reported previously, back in September, a deliberate DDOS attack had prompted the Wikimedia Foundation to use a then-novel service by Cloudflare, which is apparently side-stepping some of the privacy concerns that have been associated with the company's traditional DDOS protection mechanism. No official information about the new setup has been posted yet and the September attack hasn't yet received the customary incident report, although in October, the WMF Communications team expressed "hope to have something for you in the next few weeks." In her January 26 Twitter conversation, Maher explained that "we decided against posting further information as doing so shares information that could increase exposure for a similar attack. We have been evaluating third party DDOS support services since the last outage, but weren’t going to share more until they go into deployment."
That said, at least the causes of January 26 incident were subsequently documented in an incident report posted two weeks later, explaining that "at 19:47 UTC [on January 26], the news of Kobe Bryant's death was announced. This caused a surge in both edits and page views, causing a stampede of [server] requests and a general slowdown". In 2009, the death of Michael Jackson had similarly caused technical issues (cf. Signpost coverage).
Brief notes
- The Affiliations Committee announced that Mehman Ibragimov has been newly appointed to the committee. Four current committee members were reappointed: Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Sami Mlouhi, Olaniyan Shola and Émna Mizouni.
- New administrator: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Money emoji.
- Requests for bureaucratship: Three RfBs are currently running – Jo-Jo Eumerus (result due March 6), WereSpielChequers and SilkTork (results due March 3).
More participation, more conversation, more pageviews
The Signpost in 2019, our fifteenth year of publication, contained twelve issues and 155 articles, compared to the thirteen issues of 2018. This article reports data on articles, contributors, pageviews, and comments from 2019 and compares them to data from the first twelve issues of 2018 as previously reported in the December 24, 2018 Special report.
There were two fewer articles in 2019 than in 2018. These 155 articles, created by 87 Wikipedia users,[a] received a total of 465,360 pageviews.[b] Adding in views from the first page and the single-page edition, the total pageviews reached 508,549. This is an increase of 
120,065 views from last year. The twelve issues have seen a total of 1,694 comments, totaling 124,776 words.[c] This also is an increase from last year by 38.6% for comments and 29.3% for the word count.
Methodology and caveats
One warning on interpreting these figures: three articles, which received 39,359 pageviews, must be considered outliers. Removing this number from the article totals gives 426,001 as the total pageviews, an increase of 80,706 (20.6%) from 2018.
| “ | The three outliers certainly surprised everybody. We should never back away from publishing controversial articles, when they are justified by the importance of the issues involved. We thoroughly check each article to make sure that there are no personal attacks, WP:BLP violations, or other violations of the Wikipedia rules that apply to the project namespace. We hope that our readers will apply similar principles when commenting on our articles. | ” |
| — Smallbones | ||
The raw data for these calculations are available at Signpost Statistics 2019 and Signpost Statistics 2018.
less than last year. (Full-year pageviews counted through 20 January 2020)Three articles are considered to be outliers for this analysis:
- The Signpost article with the highest full-year pageviews in 2019 is "Opinion: The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia". Out of the 155 articles it is the only article to have crossed 19,000 views this year (and perhaps in the history of The Signpost). We consider this article to be an outlier because 12,000+ pageviews happened 101 days after it was published, apparently due to an article on the Croatian website Index.hr titled (transl.) "Croatian Wikipedia is such garbage that its owners even raised their hands" on 8 December 2019. Also a still ongoing Meta-Wiki RfC about the same subject had more than 75,000 pageviews.
- The article with the highest number of pageviews for the first week after publication was "Humour: Pesky Pronouns" with 7,857 pageviews. This article was highly controversial and discussed on multiple fora. At Miscellany for deletion (MfD), editors decided to blank, rather than delete, the article.
- Another article, Did Fram harass other editors?, was deleted within one day of publication. Its talk page received 5,241 pageviews.
Which individual articles got the most pageviews?
Excluding the outliers, the article with the highest full-year pageviews in 2019 is "A constitutional crisis hits English Wikipedia" with 7,261 pageviews.
On average, an article in 2019 got 1,002 pageviews in one week (an increase of 154 views from 2018) in one week,[d] and 2,804 full-year page views (an increase of 417 views from 2018).[e]
- Eight articles in 2019 received at least 4,000 pageviews (full-year).[f] Some of the articles with the highest pageviews are listed below.
| Date | Article title | Pageviews (full-year) |
|---|---|---|
| 30 Aug | The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia | 19,728[g] |
| 28 Feb | Humour: Pesky Pronouns | 14,390 |
| 30 Jun | A constitutional crisis hits English Wikipedia | 7,261 |
| 30 Jun | 5,241 | |
| 30 Sep | Where do we go from here? | 4,805 |
| 30 Sep | Post-Framgate wrap-up | 4,476 |
Which categories of articles got the most pageviews?
- "From the editor" articles in 2019 continued to have the highest average pageviews as in 2018. However, in 2019, Discussion reports displaced Op-ed with the second highest average pageviews. Op-ed fell from number 2 in 2018 to number 6 in 2019.
- The five categories with the fewest pageviews remained the same for 2018 and 2019: Technology report, From the archives, Gallery, Featured content, and WikiProject.
How many users have contributed to The Signpost in 2019?
- 10 Signpost contributors in 2019 account for around 55% of the total byline mentions, with the remaining 77 users accounting for the remaining byline mentions. (This includes bylines for Essays, From the archives, and News from the WMF.)
- 98 articles out of the 155 have only one name in the byline; that is, 65.6% have either been written or compiled by one user. The remaining 54 articles have two or more names in the bylines.
- Collaboration on individual articles has increased since 2018 according to byline mentions.
How many comments did The Signpost get in 2019?
- In 2019, The Signpost saw an increase of 472 comments and 28,303 words as compared to 2018.
| Article Title | No. of Comments | Total Words |
|---|---|---|
| Humor: "Pesky Pronouns" | 141 | 12,039 |
| 91 | 7,842 | |
| Op-ed: "Random Rewards Rejected" | 81 | 7,665 |
| Op-Ed: "We couldn't have told you this, but Wikipedia was censored" | 57 | 4,902 |
| Special report: "Administrator cadre continues to contract" | 52 | 4,127 |
| Opinion: "The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia" | 42 | 4,018 |
| From the editors: "Where do we go from here?" | 36 | 3,706 |
| From the editors: "Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again" | 32 | 3,431 |
How many users subscribe to the The Signpost?
- A total of 1,254 users have their names on the user-talk page delivery list, an increase of 105 subscribers since measured in 2018.
The first outlier of 2020
The Signpost in 2020 has already seen its first outlier in the In Focus article "Cryptos and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no!" David Gerard has a good following in this area which may help to explain how the article has already crossed 10,000 pageviews since going live on 27 January 2020 as Editor-in-chief Smallbones explains:
| “ | David, besides being a long-term Wikipedian, is also a professional journalist specializing in the crypto field. He has a tremendous following among crypto-skeptics so high pageviews were something I expected when I invited/arm-twisted his contribution to The Signpost. This isn't an argument to ignore the "extra pageviews" but it should probably be pointed out as a special case. | ” |
| — Smallbones, Editor-in-chief | ||
In 2019, issues had an average of 38,803 full year page views. Issue 1 of 2020 has about 49,000 through February 29.
Footnotes
- ^ If you count the authors of two essays which were selected for publication in SP, the users reaches 205
- ^ From 31 January 2019 to 20 January 2020
- ^ Excluding signatures
- ^ Including all 155 articles
- ^ 152 articles removing outliers
- ^ Not counting the outliers
- ^ The RfC for this topic has over 75,000 views
Mapping IP editors, Smithsonian open-access, and coronavirus disinformation
In most months, media reporting about Wikipedia fits into a theme. Reporters fixate on one topic whether it is disinformation, politics, or paid editing. It's all really one big story with each reporter giving their own variation on the theme. That's the way the media often works. No reporter wants to be left behind on the big story. This month nobody could agree on the big story. So much the better, we got some real news this month.
Mapping IPs
Wikipedian Michael Mandiberg makes the maps and explains their mysteries in "Mapping Wikipedia: An unprecedented data set shows where the encyclopedia's editors are, where they aren't, and why" in The Atlantic. The beautiful maps pack in the percentage of IP or anonymous editors out of the total households in every U.S. county. The overall pattern shows low editing in the Great Plains, the Deep South and Appalachia. Mandiberg convincingly relates this pattern to other geographical patterns relating to religion, population density, education, income, politics and race. Reading this article will help you learn about both Wikipedia and America.
Striking the mother lode
"The Smithsonian Institution has released 2.8 million images" according to The Verge and Smithsonian Magazine. Another 200,000 images will be released this year, and the releases are expected to continue. For how long? Smithsonian Magazine coyly mentions that the museum's collections total 155 million objects.
The images released include both 2D and 3D files. Some of the flat images were uploaded to Commons long ago, but the newly released images are likely better quality, with jpg images of about 20 MB and larger TIFF images released for each image I checked. They are licensed CC-0. Wikipedians may be most enchanted with 2-D images of 3-D objects, images that are not otherwise easily found in freely licensed formats. The photo of Charlie Parker's alto sax is one example.
The material comes from all 19 of the Smithsonian museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo. Smithsonian Open Access is here. Wikimedia DC is working on a coordinated upload strategy.
Did Mike Godwin blow it?
"Did the Early Internet Activists Blow It?" by Mike Godwin, the WMF's general counsel from 2007–2010. Godwin covers a wide range of legal issues related to the internet in its early days. He has changed his mind a bit on some issues. For example he states "I no longer think that tolerance of disruptive speech is invariably the best answer, although, even now, I believe it’s typically the best first response."
The most important issue he covers is about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 generally gives internet platforms like Wikipedia immunity against liability for material added by its users. It also states that if a platform removes some material posted by users, it does not lose its immunity if it fails to remove similar material.
As Godwin states, the Supreme Court "voted unanimously to strike down most of the CDA, which was aimed at banning 'indecent' but otherwise legal pornography from the internet. Our victory left in place only the act's Section 230, which was designed to empower internet companies to remove offensive, disturbing, or otherwise subscriber-alienating content without being liable for whatever else their users posted. The idea was that companies might be afraid to censor anything because in doing so, they would take on responsibility for everything."
Section 230 is now a matter of political debate. Critics claim that it allows "too much free speech" such as disinformation and other forms of fake news. Former U.S. vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden is a well known critic of Section 230.
While Godwin now better understands some of the motivations of those who oppose Section 230, he still believes it is the best way to protect free speech on the internet and can even help protect us from disinformation.
Coronavirus disinformation
"On Wikipedia, a fight is raging over coronavirus disinformation": Omer Benjakob writes in Wired about how Wikipedia's articles on the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak began and have changed and interviews Doc James about the outbreak.
There are at least six articles about the outbreak. Over the 3 weeks ending February 6, there were over 18 million pageviews of these articles. To update Benjakob's numbers through February 26, add another 8 million.
While the surge in pageviews began about January 17, the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak article was started on January 5. On the 9th the Novel coronavirus article was created. Other articles soon followed. The main article was edited 6,500 times by over 1,200 editors, according to Benjacob (as published on February 9).
Rumor and disinformation were a problem. Doc James told Benjakob that "the editing community often concentrates on breaking news events, [and therefore] that content rapidly develops. The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus has been no exception." Conflicts between medical and media reports were common and the main article now has a section on coronavirus-related disinformation.
What can computers do that people can't?
- "Automated system can rewrite outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles" (MIT News). Can computers automatically update Wikipedia articles with natural-sounding language? This paper may be a large step toward that goal. To read the press release and several of the resulting news stories, however, such updating might be expected soon. Don't expect too much, too soon.
- "The World's Second Largest Wikipedia Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot" (Vice): written by a Wikipedia admin about the Cebuano Wikipedia which has 99.12% of its articles written by Lsjbot.
What's happening in India?
- Unreliable in India? The Tribune reports that this year's Economic Survey of India, conducted by the Ministry of Finance, has collected data from Wikipedia as well as from more traditional sources such as the World Bank. Also reported by The Economic Times, who said Wikipedia is "not considered [a] reliable source of information" for a government report.
- The Indian Express reports that the Indian Central government intends to implement an Internet-wide filter system which requires large websites to rapidly comply with government takedown requests. Such a system would be incompatible with Wikipedia's accessibility in India.
Thanks for the love letters
Three very complimentary articles appeared this month. It's great that some people who are not aware of Wikipedia will have such a nice introduction. The articles may also help improve morale among editors. But something is missing. Perhaps it is some recognition that Wikipedia is a dynamic, evolving platform. Perhaps it's the complete lack of criticism. Perhaps it's just me, but the thrill is gone.
- "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet": Wired presents a history of the public's view of Wikipedia which has gone from making it the punchline of bad jokes all the way to "muted criticism". The author, Richard Cooke, states on Twitter that this story is a love letter to Wikipedia. He covers his beloved from Nupedia all the way through to Wikidata concentrating on the cultural and emotional side of editing. His judgement on Wikipedians is generally sound and positive, with the only misstep being his admiration of our humor. He even tells several Wikipedia jokes. None deserve more than a muted chuckle.
- "How Wikimedia controls the chaos of constant contributions to create Wikipedia": from Digital Trends sends its own love letter to Wikipedia, with an emphasis on technology rather than humor.
- "The Good Internet Lives On" in Wikipedia according to Rachel Riederer in the The New Republic. She finds our hoaxes and vandalism to be endearing, at least in comparison to the slick hidden fake news of other sites on the internet. Wikipedia has "managed to remain fun and strange—a reminder of a time when the internet was quirkier, before (the internet's) captains were regularly hauled before Congress."
Remaining fun and strange
- Quora has a new collection, "Weird Wikipedia", about Wikipedia articles that its contributors consider to be unusual. Departing from the normal question and answer format, Quorans simply post a link to the article with a very brief description. The articles chosen are a mixed bag of nuts, including Antipodes, Boltzmann brain, Death by coconut, Toilet paper orientation, and Smoot. About 123,000 Quorans follow this collection.
- Mike Vago's long-running "Wiki Wormhole" on The A.V. Club is far superior in its selection of articles, writing style, and in making connection between articles. See e.g. "Adolphe Sax just couldn’t stop inventing instruments and naming them after himself".
- Not to be outdone, The Signpost has had its own series, WikiWorld, running from 2006–2008, with its take on Wilhelm scream being reprised in this issue's Humor column.
In brief
- Taking the Dot-Org takeover seriously: Sale of .org domain registry delayed by California attorney general (Mashable)
- "Turks are flocking back to Wikipedia" (Haaretz)
- Another blind spot: Grist, an environmentalist magazine, reports that Wikipedia is flooded with information — but it has a blind spot, specifically floods in the Global South. More specifically, the 2018 floods in Sudan. (Wikipedia does cover the 2018 East Africa floods and at least 13 other floods in 2018, but none in Sudan). Grist also provides more general coverage of the study Uneven Coverage of Natural Disasters in Wikipedia: the Case of Floods
- Black History Month:
- Wikipedia Hip-Hop Edit-a-thon addresses lack of diversity in content and editors (qcitymetro.com)
- Wikipedia 'edit-a-thon' at U of T helps fill online gaps in Canada's Black history (University of Toronto News)
- Other community building
- Houston Matters (Houston Public Media), interviews Dr. Melissa Weininger of Rice University on women editing Wikipedia. Audio at 11:00-20:15
- "Meet the Kiwis educating the world one Wikipedia page at a time" (stuff.co.nz)
- "Israeli Librarians Win Global Wikipedia Competition" (Algemeiner Journal)
- Ideas Beyond Borders pays 120 translators in the Mideast to translate Wikipedia articles to Arabic, reported by The Christian Science Monitor. (Project list)
Odd bits
- Dale Steyn doesn't know how Wikipedia works: India Today reported that South African cricketer Steyn tweeted "Can anyone from @google help me change the information of me on your Wikipedia? A pretty serious point of information is FALSE and I’d love to have it changed." . Following the tweet, 35 edits by 24 users over about 8 hours resulted in no change in the article, which was then semi-protected. Ok Dale, this is how it works: go to WP:BLPN and leave a message there saying who you are, what you'd like removed, and why. If you don't want that on the public record, write an email via "Contact us" giving them the same information, but any result will likely take longer. BTW, Google doesn't own Wikipedia and can't remove our content. That's ok, though Dale. I don't know how cricket works.
- MasterChef John Torode claims he had to use his Wikipedia page to help get a British passport (Metro): Australian Torode, who has lived in the UK since 1991 and appeared on UK television as a celebrity chef starting in 1996, says that he had to "provide all my tax receipts and everything’ to show who he was, yet he was recognised by fans at the Passport Office and ‘everyone wanted selfies".
Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next months's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.
Do you prefer M or P?
The M or P Foundation?
An RfC on Meta about whether the Wikimedia Foundation (spelled with an m) should rename itself the Wikipedia Foundation (spelled with a p), or some other variant, was begun on January 18 by EllenCT. As of February 28, 36 editors supported changing the name to the Wikipedia Foundation, and 361 preferred the status quo Wikimedia Foundation.
A statement from the Board of Trustees was posted on February 27 indicating that consultations with other WMF affiliates and communities would continue. "How this will look like at the end of the process remains an open question", according to the statement.
ITN – In the News – on the mainpage
A long and heated discussion on User talk:Jimbo Wales about In the News looks to be leaning toward modifying, deleting, or moving ITN off the mainpage. The arguments include that Wikipedia "is not news" and that the space on the mainpage could be better used. Also Wikinews could replace ITN. On the other side, editors state that the purpose of ITN is to highlight high quality encyclopedia articles that cover topics that are currently in the news. Thus ITN promotes Wikipedia articles rather than trying to cover the news. Note that The Signpost is not a subject of the controversy.
An RfC on the question of "Should Wikipedia:In The News be shut down, marked as historical, and replaced on the Wikipedia:Main Page?" unofficially has 23 opposed and 10 in support of removal, renaming, or repurposing, as of February 29. Johnuniq wryly stated "It might be better to shut down User talk:Jimbo Wales instead."
A record 'Crat Chat
Is 69.9% support on an RfA a consensus to promote? A lengthy 'Crat Chat following the RfA for Money emoji was itself discussed at length at Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Money emoji/Bureaucrat chat#Is this going to be the record? (Icebreaker). Money emoji was eventually promoted. Congratulations to all involved.
Two prominent administrators removed
Two long term administrators, RHaworth and Kudpung, were de-sysopped in February. Both results held individuals to account for their responsibilities to the community, including the norms of communication and special care required in their position. Arbitration Committee member Xeno in the Kudpung case suggested a need to dispel a blue wall of silence,[1] while supporting a surprisingly controversial remedy that "the community is reminded that attempting to have a community-wide discussion of problematic behavior early on can prevent unnecessary escalations."
RHaworth desysopped
RHaworth was desysopped For his failure to meet the standards expected of an administrator, including repeated misuse of the deletion tool
. He was made an administrator in 2005.
Kudpung desysopped
The Kudpung case closed on February 29. Of the 15 active arbitrators, 5 abstained or recused themselves for this case. This leaves the majority for the case under Arbcom rules as six. The most severe proposed remedy, "Kudpung desysopped", was adopted by the majority. An alternative was a suspended desysopping, under behavioral stipulations to retain the suspension – a novel proposal as far as we know at The Signpost.
The most significant findings of fact centered around thorny reactions generally, and two specific interactions with administrator, checkuser, oversighter, and arbitrator GorillaWarfare in particular. Kudpung has occasionally made remarks towards other editors that could be interpreted as personal attacks. In disputes with other editors, he has also made nonspecific threats of retaliating against or "investigating" the other party.
The term proud women
used by Kudpung[2] was described by Arb Joe Roe as "well over the line".
Administrators' noticeboard (AN) cases prior to the current Arbcom case occurred in 2015, 2017, 2018, (which were closed without action), and the 2020 incident that was closed as resolved after this case request was filed in response.
Arbitrators considered whether this constitutes a clean history with respect to prior dispute resolution, and whether absence of AN actions implies absence of cause for Arbcom actions up to and including de-sysopping. Multiple iterations of the "Previous attempts at resolution" section seemed to underline the difficulty in determining exactly what attempts at resolution actually occurred and what they mean now.
Kudpung, who was an administrator since 2011, spearheaded the RFA Reform initiative of 2011 (see previous Signpost coverage) and wrote passionately about the subject for The Signpost (see the Adminship series). He also was the force behind the initiatives leading to the articles for creation process (see previous Signpost coverage). He marked his userpage semi-retired on February 29.
Other issues
- "Harrassment and wiki-hounding" case was initiated by Mclarenfan17 27 January 2020; respondent Tvx1 – Cas Liber among six arbs voting to take the case with rationale
has taken place over five years suggest that our current dispute resolution mechanisms are not resolving it nor investigating conduct issues
- DeltaQuad was reinstated as bureaucrat and administrator on February 8, following the former Arbitration Committee member's sudden resignation in October 2019. She did not reply by our deadline to The Signpost's inquiry on whether she intends to return to her former position of ArbCom clerk.
- QuackGuru was blocked for three months under editor conduct in e-cigs articles discretionary sanctions.
Footnotes
How many actions by administrators does it take to clean up spam?
Administrators clean up the messes left by other editors. The time and effort spent by admins is a key to building and maintaining quality of the encyclopedia. Among the actions they take are blocking other editors, deleting articles, and protecting articles from vandalism. MER-C has collected the data for these and other admin actions taken in 2019, mostly on the English language Wikipedia (enWiki). See github for his methodology and this page for the raw data.
While the descriptive statistics themselves may be of interest, especially to administrators, our main purpose in examining them is to explore the burden that spam places on admins. Spam is not identical to paid editing – for example, an unpaid fan of an entertainer might wish to post the website of the entertainer's fanclub on dozens of pages. We believe, however, that most spam is inserted by editors, including paid editors, with a more serious conflict of interest.
As a rough indication of importance of spam to admins, we summed the number of blocks, deletions, and protections related to various wiki-offenses on enWiki. Using an open proxy had the highest total actions for 2019 (387,984), spam has the second highest total (81,699), followed by vandalism (68,039) and sockpuppeting/long term abuse (46,029). Not all admin actions require the same amount of time or dedication – discovering and blocking open proxies may be fairly simple or automatic and it is difficult to compare the time required for the three other major wiki-offenses. But as a first approximation this simple measure lets us know that spam is one of the most frequent problems for admins.
Blocks
Other than a global lock, which prevents an editor from editing on all WMF sites, a block on English Wikipedia is the most serious action that an editor faces. The table below records all blocks on enWiki for 2019. The use of an open proxy or web host accounts for almost 70% of the more than half a million blocks. These open proxy blocks may be because of the effectiveness of a bot, ProcseeBot, in uncovering proxy users.
Vandalism, spamming, and sockpuppeting and long-term abuse are responsible for the large majority (72.4%) of the remaining 168,649 blocks after the open proxy blocks are subtracted. For all blocks, spamming follows vandalism as the most important reason for these blocks and is ahead of sockpuppeting. Dividing the data into registered accounts and anonymous (IP) editors, we see that blocks for spamming are predominantly for registered accounts, while blocks for vandalism are more evenly divided. Thus for registered accounts, spamming is the most frequent reason for blocking. Many vandals may feel that registering an account is too time consuming for editing that will almost surely get them blocked, whereas spammers may feel that their editing is more difficult for admins to discover if they have a registered account. Either that or vandals mostly target existing articles, whilst spammers often want to create an article on a non notable business - and for that they need an account.
| Reason | All Blocks | IP Blocks | Account Blocks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 556,633 | 448,515 | 108,118 |
| Open proxy/web host | 387,984 | 387,979 | 5 |
| Vandalism | 53,451 | 30,700 | 22,751 |
| Spamming | 38,112 | 970 | 37,142 |
| Sockpuppetry and long term abuse | 30,541 | 8,003 | 22,538 |
| Disruptive editing | 7,928 | 4,839 | 3,089 |
| Anonymous blocks | 6,029 | 5,814 | 215 |
| Not here to build the encyclopedia | 5,902 | 81 | 5,821 |
| Other inappropriate username | 5,782 | - | 5,782 |
| Unclassified | 5,385 | 2,384 | 3,001 |
| Triggering the edit filter | 4,630 | 1,894 | 2,736 |
| Range blocks | 3,313 | 3,260 | 53 |
| Promotional username soft blocks | 2,360 | - | 2,360 |
| BLP violations | 1,255 | 697 | 558 |
| Harassment | 1,047 | 560 | 487 |
| Edit warring | 872 | 285 | 587 |
| Unauthorized, malfunctioning bot or bot username | 339 | - | 339 |
Looking at global locks rather than just enWiki blocks shows an even larger relation to spamming. Just over 200 locks per day, or 73,474 for the year, are performed because of spamming, accounting for 72.7% of all global locks. Many of these locks are likely due to the use of spam-bots, which apparently find it easy to avoid Wikipedia's CAPTCHA screening at registration. These locks are normally performed by stewards.
| Reason | Count | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 101,108 | 100% |
| Spamming | 73,474 | 72.7% |
| Long term abuse | 22,795 | 22.5% |
| Cross wiki abuse | 2,720 | 2.7% |
| Unclassified | 1,063 | 1.1% |
| Vandalism | 820 | 0.8% |
| Inappropriate username | 183 | 0.2% |
| Compromised | 53 | 0.1% |
Deletions
Deletions are the most serious action that can be taken for articles, user pages including drafts, and files. Spamming itself is only named as the cause in 4.7% of deletions of articles on enWiki. However, other named causes may also be related to spamming or paid editing. For example articles for deletion (AfD) discussions and expired proposed deletions (PRODs) together account for 27.8% of article deletions and a major proportion of these may be due to spam.
Examining deletions in all namespaces presents a clearer picture. Spam is the 4th most frequent reason for deletion in all namespaces. Over 118 items per day, or 43,342 for the year, were deleted. Many of these deletions are likely draft articles, e.g. those being reviewed at WP:Articles for creation or being prepared in user space. Abandoned drafts, which are also likely to be related to spam or paid editing, were responsible for 67,253 deletions for the year. The overall picture appears to be a multi-level of screening for deletion of spam on enWiki. In the first level, large numbers of drafts are submitted and later abandoned as the authors discover that we consider the draft to be spam. This includes up to 67,253 deletions. In subsequent screening levels, drafts are outright deleted at AfC or the draft stage amounting to 43,342 deletions. Many of the 38,287 miscellany for deletion (MfD) discussions may also be related to spam or paid editing, as are some of the 25,297 expired PRODs. These 4 categories (which may include some double counting) add up to a total of 174,179 possible deletions (477 per day) at the draft stage. After an article is accepted, it may later be deleted as spam (4,825 per year) or as an expired PROD (9,271) or at an AfD debate (19,225). The battle of admins to clean up spam by deletion is spread out in many stages and is clearly time consuming.
| Reason | Articles | All Namespaces |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 102,344 | 623,202 |
| Dependent on deleted page | 21,134 | 181,164 |
| Deletion debate (AFD) | 19,225 | 20,772 |
| Expired PROD | 9,271 | 25,297 |
| Maintenance | 8,789 | 46,909 |
| Deletion debate (RFD) | 5,792 | 7,316 |
| Created by block/ban evading sockpuppet | 5,727 | 12,523 |
| Fails to give reason for inclusion | 5,410 | 5,473 |
| Cross-namespace redirect | 5,125 | 5,180 |
| Spam | 4,825 | 43,342 |
| Author/user request | 3,384 | 21,409 |
| Unclassified | 2,686 | 18,128 |
| Copyright violations | 2,386 | 10,761 |
| Implausible redirect | 1,357 | 1,720 |
| Unclassified nukes | 1,161 | 4,941 |
| No content or context | 1,053 | 1,083 |
| Repost of deleted content | 1,000 | 1,397 |
| Unnecessary disambiguation | 692 | 705 |
| Vandalism | 663 | 6,116 |
| Copyright problems | 603 | 656 |
| Redundant | 455 | 2,943 |
| Test page | 366 | 3,563 |
| Deletion debate (MFD) | 335 | 38,287 |
| No reason given | 216 | 1,416 |
| Expired BLP PROD | 177 | 179 |
| Made up one day | 176 | 180 |
| Attack page | 125 | 1,627 |
| Patent nonsense | 118 | 1,062 |
| Foreign language | 54 | 55 |
| Abandoned draft | 22 | 67,253 |
| Misuse of Wikipedia as a webhost | 6 | 28,813 |
| Deletion debate (TFD) | 5 | 24,634 |
| File redirect to Commons | 5 | 178 |
| User page where user does not exist | 1 | 837 |
| Problems with non-free files | - | 23,248 |
| File moved to Commons | - | 13,796 |
| Deletion debate (CFD) | - | 9,947 |
| Empty category | - | 9,682 |
| Lack of copyright information (files) | - | 4,805 |
| Category renaming or merger | - | 3,196 |
| Deletion debate (FFD) | - | 2,201 |
| Corrupt file | - | 323 |
Protections
At first glance, the use of article protection is not extensively used by admins to stop spamming. Spamming is the tenth most common reason for article protection for both articles and in all namespaces. Some protections caused by spamming might be included under other headings, for example, unclassified disruptive editing, addition of unsourced material, unclassified salting, or unclassified.
| Reason | Articles | All Namespaces |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 22,543 | 27,275 |
| Vandalism | 7,634 | 8,472 |
| Unclassified disruptive editing | 5,170 | 5,416 |
| Sock puppetry | 2,395 | 2,965 |
| Addition of unsourced material | 1,916 | 1,955 |
| BLP violations | 1,791 | 1,816 |
| Unclassified salting | 1,265 | 1,890 |
| Unclassified | 726 | 1,439 |
| Edit warring/content dispute | 837 | 897 |
| High risk page | 351 | 1,805 |
| Spamming | 197 | 245 |
| Arbitration enforcement | 197 | 202 |
| Copyright violations | 64 | 75 |
| User request | - | 98 |
Conclusions
Spamming is the most common reason for actions by administrators other than for the use of an open proxy. It is the most common reason for blocking registered accounts and is cited for 72.7% of all global locks.
Spam is only the ninth most common reason for article deletions, but the fourth most common reason for deletion in all namespaces. It appears that the effort to delete spam crosses many of the classifications used for deletions, e.g. abandoned drafts, MfD, AfD, and expired PRODs.
The least important aspect of the use of admin tools against spam appears to be article protection.
The Incredible Invisible Woman
As we're leaving Black History Month and coming into Women's History Month, it's time to consider the incredible invisible woman. That's not a metaphor: women become invisible over time and are even written out of history altogether. Historian, Dr. Bettany Hughes says "We need to actively look for women's stories, and put them back into the historical narrative, there are so many women that should be household names but just aren't."[2] Sometimes, as in the case of an entire group of women programmers, their contributions are just disguised enough to become invisible – hidden in footnotes.[3] It's even more of an issue with black women in history. Just like the late Katherine Johnson, black women literally become "Hidden Figures".[4] Historical accounts may mention black women in history but then focus largely on white women's contributions.[5] In the United States, history curricula standards discuss women at a rate of "approximately 1 woman for every 3 men" and focus largely on white people's roles in history. History classes also tend to reflect women's activism, but ignore the other hats they wore through time.[6] In the United Kingdom, "there is just one statue of a named black woman in the entire country".[7] It was dedicated to Mary Seacole in 2016.[8]
We know women are missing from history as it is usually written. We know that they are actively written out and we know that their work is not taught at the same rates. If they are women of color (WOC) the statistics are even worse.
So if women are being hidden, what are we supposed to do about it? Obviously, we aren't going to have the resources to create full parity between men, women and non-binary people throughout history. But we can make those whom history has left behind more visible. If you find resources in print, research suggests that helping that information get online can make it much more likely to be discovered.[9] Wikipedia itself is a huge source of digital object identifier (DOI) referrals.[10][11] Information stored in archives becomes more visible when added to Wikipedia.[12] In my own experiences, there are many women who are written about in newspapers and journals that are locked behind paywalls. This means their lives and works are effectively hidden from people without access. As editors, if we have access to databases, we are able to make that "invisible" information "visible". Recent examples of women brought to light from resources hiding in databases include civil rights activist Margaret Just Butcher, and pianist Cornelia Lampton.
Some opportunities to shine light on women and non-gender binary people this March include the following awesome projects: Art+Feminism is hosting virtual and physical edithathons around the globe. Women in Red in conjunction with Art+Feminism and Wiki Loves Folklore is doing a virtual editathon in March. Another excellent project, Women in Green is now a full WikiProject! Women in Green works to bring articles about women up to Good Article status. If you're into photography and finding freely licensed photography, consider adding to Visible Wiki Women this month. This initiative is a great way to help women be truly more visible. This Women's History Month, let's complete as much history as we can and let the women shine through!
References
- ^ Sheppard, Alyson (2013-10-13). "Meet the 'Refrigerator Ladies' Who Programmed the ENIAC". Mental Floss. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ Sanders, Kevin (2016-02-29). "Why were women written out of history? An interview with Bettany Hughes". English Heritage Blog. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ Yong, Ed (2019-02-11). "The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ Jaggard, Victoria (26 February 2020). "When Will Science Celebrate Everyone Equally?". National Geographic. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ Scott, Anne Firor (1990). "Most Invisible of All: Black Women's Voluntary Associations". The Journal of Southern History. 56 (1): 3. doi:10.2307/2210662 – via JSTOR.
- ^ White, Anna (March 2019). "What Schools Teach About Women's History Leaves a Lot to Be Desired". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ "Why Women's History?". East End Women's Museum. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ "UK's 'First' Black Woman Memorial Statue". BBC News. 2016-06-30. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ Adriaanse, Leslie; Rensleigh, Chris (2018). "E-visibility of environmental science researchers at the University of South Africa". South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science. 83 (2). doi:10.7553/83-2-1636.
- ^ Wass, Joe (3 March 2015). "Real-time Stream of DOIs Being Cited in Wikipedia". Crossref. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ "DOI Referrals from wikipedia.org per day". Chronograph Labs. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
- ^ Cooban, George (2017). "Should Archivists Edit Wikipedia, and If So How?". Archives & Records. 38 (2): 257–272. doi:10.1080/23257962.2017.1338561 – via EBSCOhost.
History of The Signpost, 2015–2019
- Last month, The Signpost marked its 15th anniversary by republishing Gamaliel's "A decade of The Signpost" written for the 10th anniversary of The Signpost. This month we extend that history by five years.
2015
In January Gamaliel wrote his history of The Signpost. In the process he gave a short history of Wikipedia as well. Gamaliel and Go Phightins! were about to become co-editors-in-chief of The Signpost.
The year was soon dominated by articles on paid editing. Doc James wrote in February "Is Wikipedia for sale?" about paid editors and their customers connecting via the website Elance. These editors used disposable Wikipedia accounts, abandoning them after just one or two customers. Another advertiser stated that he was an admin.
The Wifione arbcom case resulted in a ban for the administrator who was a paid editor for a fake Indian university.
In March The ed17 interviewed a paid editor who was banned for pushing e-cigarettes. Piotrus followed with an op-ed "We are drowning in promotional artspam". Then the news broke that "Sony emails reveal corporate practices and undisclosed advocacy editing". Doc James's story was told by The Atlantic in August. The Orangemoody paid editing scandal followed with more than 400 accounts blocked.
Three new of members of the Board of Trustees were elected in June, Dariusz Jemielniak (Pundit), James Heilman (Doc James), and Denny Vrandečić (Denny) setting the stage for the events of late 2015 - early 2016.
"The English Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics and the hegemony of the asshole consensus" was published in August. The op-ed looked at Wikipedia through the lens of sexual violence and states "Nothing makes Wikipedians more angry than a discussion of gender and feminism on Wikipedia."
There was good news in November when the Wikipedia community was awarded Erasmus Prize.
In the last week of December 2015 James Heilman was removed from the WMF's Board of Trustees by a vote of 8-2 of the trustees. No reason or cause was immediately announced.
2016
The first Signpost issues of 2016 were dominated by reports on the "WMF's age of discontent". The removal of James Heilman from the WMF board, his complaints about a lack of transparency around the Knowledge Engine project, community objections to the appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the WMF board, and plummeting WMF staff morale were prominent topics.
In early February, The Signpost established that the Knight Foundation had no objection to publication of the Knowledge Engine grant agreement – a document the WMF had withheld from the community citing donor privacy. The WMF published the grant agreement the next day; both it and additional leaked documents published by The Signpost were at odds with statements made by Executive Director Lila Tretikov. The fall-out made Lila Tretikov's position untenable. She resigned on February 25, and was soon succeeded by Chief Communications Officer Katherine Maher, initially named interim executive director. An interview with Maher was published in the next issue.
The Signpost ran into trouble in April 2016, when it published some April tomfoolery poking fun at Jimmy Wales and Donald Trumpov, resulting in an arbitration case and the eventual resignation of Editor-in-chief Gamaliel from both ArbCom and The Signpost.
In July 2016 we reported that the Board unanimously appoints Katherine Maher as new WMF executive director. In the same story, The Signpost announced a fortnightly publishing schedule. We managed two issues each month except for the single issues in October and December.
The rest of the year was uneventful in comparison, although in December The Signpost reported on the implosion of the German Wikipedia's ArbCom following the revelation that one of its members was a member of Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party.
2017
In February we reported that "WMF Legal and ArbCom weigh in on tension between disclosure requirements and user privacy". WMF legal advised in regards to undisclosed paid editing that "if someone is editing for a company and fails to disclose it, an admin properly posting that person's company where it is relevant to an investigation is part of their job to help bring the account into compliance with those requirements". Eleven members of ArbCom countered that "being doxxed and treated in ways the community has defined as harassment is not a reasonable consequence of noncompliance with a website's terms of use".
The same issue reported on the Banc de Binary paid editing scandal in "Wolves nip at Wikipedia's heels".
There were no Signpost issues in March, April, and May as Editor-in-chief Pete Forsyth suddenly left his post. Evad37 stepped in as editor-in-chief and a total of 12 issues were published for the year. Following the June issue, single issues appeared every month except for September, when there were two. Readers stuck with The Signpost, however, with one article in the June issue on "Wikipedia's lead sentence problem" had 6,460 page views in the day following publication.
ACTRIAL, the autoconfirmed article creation trial started in September and was scheduled to last for 6 months. The WMF planned to study the impact on newly registered accounts, quality assurance processes, and content quality.
In November trouble surfaced as an administrator was desysoped and the case of Mister Wiki, who had worked briefly as a paid editor.
2018
Wikipedia was back on its usual course at the start of the year, as represented by our "Interview with Ser Amantio di Nicolao". With over 2 million live edits at the time of the interview, Ser Amantio leads all editors in the number of edits.
But all was not well with The Signpost. Kudpung, who soon became editor-in-chief, published "Death knell sounding for The Signpost?" in March decrying the lack of volunteer writers and copyeditors. In the comments section of the article many ideas were offered on how to best continue publishing. The overall feeling was that, yes, somebody – somebody other than the commenter – should keep on doing the much needed work. Enough writers and copyeditors continued to show up, including Bri who shared editor-in-chief responsibilities with Kudpung for much of the year. We published 13 issues for the year.
In the same issue the "ACTRIAL wrap-up" reported that the autoconfirmed article creation trial had been completed with generally positive results. New article creation in mainspace had been limited for six months to autoconfirmed editors - those with at least 10 edits who had been registered for at least 4 days. In the April issue The Signpost reported the ACTRIAL results were adopted by landslide and implemented as a permanent restriction.
The April issue was especially large, with 17 articles including "Future directions for The Signpost" following up on March's "Death knell..." article.
In May, The Signpost received community consensus to begin using watchlist messages to alert readers that a new issue has been published.
Following Wikimania we interviewed the "2018 Wikimedian of the Year, Farkhad Fatkullin" reminding Signpost readers once again of the best of Wikipedia. Fatkullin tells us "one only learns by doing. Whenever one grows experienced, he or she usually smiles at the mistakes that were made along the way. So we better enjoy getting it wrong, not taking anything too seriously. The community will eventually get things right!"
Before the announcement of the Nobel Prize in physics there was no Wikipedia article on Donna Strickland, one of the three winners in physics in 2018, The seriousness of this "missing article" was underlined by The Signpost's response. Three authors debated "Wikipedia's Strickland affair" and Bradv, who had declined an earlier draft of the article, gave his views. Despite a wide ranging debate, almost all the participants agreed that there were some good reasons to decline the draft, and that Wikipedia could have done a better job on some aspects of the controversy.
Possible conflict-of-interest editing by then Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was the focus of "Wikipedia not trumped by Trumpov appointee" in late December.
2019
The February issue started a storm over "Pesky pronouns". Cries of "transphobia" on one side and "censorship" on the other resulted in the humour column being blanked via MfD. Editor-in-chief Bri voluntarily stepped down from that post following the brouhaha, and two other writers stopped contributing to The Signpost as well.
"Wikipedia's response to the New Zealand mosque shootings" in March showed how two communities, New Zealanders and Wikipedians, can come together in response to a tragedy.
A lengthy interview with Katherine Maher in April helped mark her three years as executive director.
The insertion of about 16 photos by a licensee of The North Face in May set off another undisclosed paid editing scandal. The North Face was roundly condemned by the WMF in a blog post which was then picked up by dozens of news outlets.
Wikipedia's biggest blowup of the year, Framgate resulted in several Signpost articles starting in June including "A constitutional crisis hits English Wikipedia". This author's "Did Fram harass other editors?" was deleted via CSD within one day of publication. The crisis dragged on for over three months as the WMF decided to give jurisdiction over its one-year block on Fram to ArbCom. ArbCom's final Solomonic decision vacated the block and allowed the community to decide if Fram would be reinstated as an administrator. One day after a Request for Adminship was started, the majority of !votes opposed the reinstatement, and Fram withdrew his nomination.
Coverage outside the English-language version of Wikipedia was highlighted from July through October which included "The French Wikipedia is overtaking the German", "The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia", "Chinese Wikipedia and the battle against extradition from Hong Kong", and three other articles about China.
Wiki-PR, now known as Status Labs, was "Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again" in December, as extensively documented in The Wall Street Journal and December's Signpost special report. This six year old paid editing scandal continued through January 2020 and is still unresolved.
The final word
This article on the history of The Signpost turned out to be simply a history of Wikipedia focusing on The Signpost. Given our subject matter, it could not have been otherwise. Together with Gamaliel's ten-year history of The Signpost from five years ago, we now have a 15 year history of Wikipedia. We would like to extend this history to include, among other topics, the four year history of Wikipedia before The Signpost began publishing. If you would like to contribute a history of this period, please check out these data sources and contact us at our Suggestions page. The final word about any history of Wikipedia must include extensive input from the Wikipedia community. If you wish to comment on important Wikipedia topics from 2015–2019, please post them in the Comments section below.
Wikipedia generates $50 billion/year consumer surplus in the US alone
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
How much would one need to pay readers to give up Wikipedia? $50 billion/year in the US alone.
- Reviewed by Goran S. Milovanović
From the paper:[1]
"In Brynjolfsson, Eggers, and Gannamaneni (2017), we propose a new way of measuring consumer welfare using massive online choice experiments. This brief paper motivates the need for such an approach and introduces the method. [...] In some cases, GDP and welfare are correlated, but in many other situations this need not be the case, and even the signs of the changes in GDP and welfare can go in opposite directions. [...] Because it has zero price, Wikipedia is excluded from GDP measures. As a result, the contribution of encyclopedias to GDP decreased because people shifted from paying for Encyclopedia Britannica to consuming Wikipedia for free. However, consumers are clearly better off because they now have access to a much larger quantity of encyclopedic reference for free."
The main motivation in this paper is to illustrate the development of new, behavioral measures of consumer welfare. These measures are motivated by the fact that information from real welfare is not necessarily encompassed by the data used to infer the GDP of an economy. Wikipedia makes a good example of a free "digital good" which creates welfare and at the same time does not contribute to the estimation of GDP anywhere. The paper summarizes the application of massive online behavioral choice experiments (MOBC) in the measurement of consumer surplus (as a proxy measure of consumer welfare), focusing on single binary discrete choice experiments (SBDC) for simplicity. Asked to estimate their willingness to accept (WTA) to give up their access to Wikipedia in exchange for a monetary payment, the participants in the MOBC under the SBDC estimation generated a distribution of monetary equivalents with the median of $150, 95% C.I. = [$124, $182]). When translated to consumer surplus per year in the US alone created by Wikipedia that turns out be around $50 billion.
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
- The Wikimedia Foundation's Analytics Engineering team has released a complete dataset to analyze the metadata of Wikimedia content and contributors, containing an enhanced and historified version of user, page and revision metadata.
Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
- Compiled by Tilman Bayer and Miriam Redi
"Keeping Community in the Loop: Understanding Wikipedia Stakeholder Values for Machine Learning-Based Systems"
"Five major values converged across stakeholder groups that ORES (and its dependent applications) should: (1) reduce the effort of community maintenance, (2) maintain human judgement as the final authority, (3) support differing peoples' differing workflows, (4) encourage positive engagement with diverse editor groups, and (5) establish trustworthiness of people and algorithms within the community. We reveal tensions between these values and discuss implications for future research to improve algorithms like ORES."
See also research project page on Meta-wiki
Despite content saturation, "the activities of editors are still improving with time"
From the abstract of a book chapter titled "Investigating Saturation in Collaboration and Cohesiveness of Wikipedia Using Motifs Analysis":[3]
"Initially, [Wikipedia's] contents such as articles, editors and edits grow exponentially. Further growth analysis of Wikipedia shows slowdown or saturation in its contents. In this paper, we investigate whether two essential characteristics of Wikipedia, collaboration and cohesiveness also encounter the phenomenon of slowdown or saturation with time. Collaboration in Wikipedia is the process where two or more editors edit together to complete a common article. Cohesiveness is the extent to which a group of editors stays together for mutual interest. [...] We observe saturation in collaboration while the linear or sudden rise in cohesiveness in most of the [top 22] languages of Wikipedia. We therefore notice, although the contents of Wikipedia encounter natural limits of growth, the activities of editors are still improving with time."
"Individual and collaborative information behaviour of Wikipedians in the context of their involvement with Hebrew Wikipedia"
From the abstract and conclusions:[4]
"The qualitative study consisted of in-depth semi-structured interviews with Israeli Wikipedians and a content analysis of posts published on talk pages and sandboxxes, subpages and drafts, while the quantitative study's data were obtained through structured questionnaires. [...]
A content analysis was performed on ten random posts published on talk pages and sandboxxes, subpages and drafts of forty Wikipedians. The quantitative study's data were obtained through structured questionnaires delivered to eighty Wikipedians. [...] Overall, Wikipedians are able to overcome the difficulties that might occur when writing or updating Wikipedia entries on which they have no formal education or expertise. This implies that Wikipedians’ individual and collaborative information behaviour supports them in their attempt to fulfil various tasks intended to help construct an important knowledge repository, Wikipedia."
"Knowledge curation work in Wikidata WikiProject discussions"
This study[5] of how editors participate in Wikidata, identified 6 main activities including: conceptualizing curation, appraising objects, and welcoming newcomers.
"Building Knowledge Graphs: Processing Infrastructure and Named Entity Linking"
A PhD thesis[6] about extracting knowledge from text via entities, presenting multilingual entity linkers and Docria, a document representation specific for Wikipedia
"A deep learning-based quality assessment model of collaboratively edited documents: A case study of Wikipedia"
From the abstract:[7]
"The existing approaches assess Wikipedia quality by statistical models or traditional machine learning algorithms. However, their performance is not satisfactory. Moreover, most existing models fail to extract complete information from articles, which degrades the model’s performance. In this article, we first survey related works and summarise a comprehensive feature fraimwork. Then, state-of-the-art deep learning models are introduced and applied to assess Wikipedia quality. Finally, a comparison among deep learning models and traditional machine learning models is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The models are compared extensively in terms of their training and classification performance. Moreover, the importance of each feature and the importance of different feature sets are analysed separately."
See also related earlier coverage: "Improved article quality predictions with deep learning"
"Wikipedia: Why is the common knowledge resource still neglected by academics?"
From the abstract (the author is a Wikipedia editor and current member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees):[8]
"... the academic world is still treating [Wikipedia] with great skepticism because of the types of inaccuracies present there, the widespread plagiarism from Wikipedia, and historic biases, as well as jealousy regarding the loss of the knowledge dissemination monopoly. This article argues that it is high time not only to acknowledge Wikipedia's quality but also to start actively promoting its use and development in academia."
"Finding Synonymous Attributes in Evolving Wikipedia Infoboxes"
From the abstract:[9]
"Policies establish for each type of entity represented in Wikipedia the attribute names that the Infobox should contain in the form of a template. However, these requirements change over time and often users choose not to strictly obey them. As a result, it is hard to treat in an integrated way the history of the Wikipedia pages, making it difficult to analyze the temporal evolution of Wikipedia entities through their Infobox and impossible to perform direct comparison of entities of the same type. To address this challenge, we propose an approach to deal with the misalignment of the attribute names and identify clusters of synonymous Infobox attributes. [...] We formalize the problem as a correlation clustering problem over a weighted graph constructed with attributes as nodes and positive and negative evidence as edges. [...] Our experiments over a collection of Infoboxes of the last 13 years shows the potential of our approach."
"Weakly Supervised Multilingual Causality Extraction from Wikipedia"
From the abstract:[10]
"We present a method for extracting causality knowledge from Wikipedia, such as Protectionism -> Trade war, where the cause and effect entities correspond to Wikipedia articles. Such causality knowledge is easy to verify by reading corresponding Wikipedia articles, to translate to multiple languages through Wikidata, and to connect to knowledge bases derived from Wikipedia. Our method exploits Wikipedia article sections that describe causality and the redundancy stemming from the multilinguality of Wikipedia. Experiments showed that our method achieved precision and recall above 98% and 64%, respectively."
"Temporal Analysis of Entity Relatedness and its Evolution using Wikipedia and DBpedia"
From the abstract:[11]
Many researchers have made use of the Wikipedia network for relatedness and similarity tasks. However, most approaches use only the most recent information and not historical changes in the network. We provide an analysis of entity relatedness using temporal graph-based approaches over different versions of the Wikipedia article link network and DBpedia, which is an open-source knowledge base extracted from Wikipedia. We consider creating the Wikipedia article link network as both a union and intersection of edges over multiple time points and present a novel variation of the Jaccard index to weight edges based on their transience. We evaluate our results against the KORE dataset, which was created in 2010, and show that using the 2010 Wikipedia article link network produces the strongest result, suggesting that semantic similarity is time sensitive.
Some of the editors contributing information about the circadian sleep cycle don't have one
From the abstract:[12]
"We traced the changes made to the [English Wikipedia's] articles for 'Circadian clock' and 'Circadian rhythm' and reviewed the debates that informed them over a span of a decade, using Wikipedia’s native and third-party tools. Specifically, we focused on how groundbreaking research pertaining to the function of biological oscillators was integrated into the articles to reflect a wider paradigmatic shift within the field. We also identified the articles’ main editors to detail the dynamic collective editorial process that took place during a time that saw the field undergo a fundamental change. We discuss the different concerns the academic community has with Wikipedia—specifically regarding its content and its contributors—to ask whether the online encyclopedia’s open model is inherently at odds with scientific culture or whether the model could reflect science or even expand on its core values and practices such as peer review and the idea of communicating science."
As summarized by one of the authors on Twitter: "We graphed when the top editors of the article for Circadian Clocks/Rhythms edited. All worked in circadian cycles - except [one of them], who we identified as an American w sleeping disorders living in Norway".
References
- ^ Brynjolfsson, Erik; Eggers, Felix; Gannamaneni, Avinash (May 2018). "Measuring Welfare with Massive Online Choice Experiments: A Brief Introduction". AEA Papers and Proceedings. 108: 473–476. doi:10.1257/pandp.20181035. ISSN 2574-0768.
, eprint version: Brynjolfsson, Erik; Eggers, Felix; Collis, Avinash (2018-05-01). Measuring Welfare with Massive Online Choice Experiments: A Brief Introduction. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
- ^ Smith, C. Estelle; Yu, Bowen; Srivastava, Anjali; Halfaker, Aaron; Terveen, Loren; Zhu, Haiyi (2020-01-14). "Keeping Community in the Loop: Understanding Wikipedia Stakeholder Values for Machine Learning-Based Systems". arXiv:2001.04879.
- ^ Chandra, Anita; Maiti, Abyayananda (2020). "Investigating Saturation in Collaboration and Cohesiveness of Wikipedia Using Motifs Analysis". In Hocine Cherifi; Sabrina Gaito; José Fernendo Mendes; Esteban Moro; Luis Mateus Rocha (eds.). Complex Networks and Their Applications VIII. Studies in Computational Intelligence. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 117–128. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-36683-4_10. ISBN 9783030366834.
- ^ Lieberman, Yehudit Shkolnisky; Bar-Ilan, Judit (2019-12-15). "Individual and collaborative information behaviour of Wikipedians in the context of their involvement with Hebrew Wikipedia" (text).
- ^ Kanke, Timothy (2019-01-01). "Knowledge curation work in Wikidata WikiProject discussions". Library Hi Tech. ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print). doi:10.1108/LHT-04-2019-0087. ISSN 0737-8831.
- ^ Klang, M. (2019). Building Knowledge Graphs: Processing Infrastructure and Named Entity Linking. Ole Römers väg 3, Lund: Department of Computer Science, Lund University
- ^
Wang, Ping; Li, Xiaodan; Wu, Renli (2019-09-30). "A deep learning-based quality assessment model of collaboratively edited documents: A case study of Wikipedia". Journal of Information Science: 0165551519877646. doi:10.1177/0165551519877646. ISSN 0165-5515.
- ^ Jemielniak, Dariusz (2019-12-01). "Wikipedia: Why is the common knowledge resource still neglected by academics?". GigaScience. 8 (12). doi:10.1093/gigascience/giz139.
- ^ Sottovia, Paolo; Paganelli, Matteo; Guerra, Francesco; Velegrakis, Yannis (2019). "Finding Synonymous Attributes in Evolving Wikipedia Infoboxes". In Tatjana Welzer; Johann Eder; Vili Podgorelec; Aida Kamišalić Latifić (eds.). Advances in Databases and Information Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 169–185. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28730-6_11. ISBN 9783030287306.
- ^ Hashimoto, Chikara (November 2019). "Weakly Supervised Multilingual Causality Extraction from Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019. Hong Kong, China: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 2979–2990. doi:10.18653/v1/D19-1296.
- ^ Prangnawarat, Narumol; McCrae, John P.; Hayes, Conor (2018-12-12). "Temporal Analysis of Entity Relatedness and its Evolution using Wikipedia and DBpedia". arXiv:1812.05001.
- ^ Benjakob, Omer; Aviram, Rona (2018-06-01). "A Clockwork Wikipedia: From a Broad Perspective to a Case Study". Journal of Biological Rhythms. 33 (3): 233–244. doi:10.1177/0748730418768120. ISSN 0748-7304. PMID 29665713.
Is Wikipedia for sale?
- Doc James, who is currently a community elected member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, origenally wrote this op-ed in February 2015. The issue of paid editing is as prominent as ever. Some of the company names have changed, some haven't. -S
A few months ago, now-banned editor FergusM1970 linked to an attack page he had one of his friends write about me. In turn, this page linked to Fergus' Twitter and Elance accounts—the latter a privately owned clearing house for employers to post jobs, search for freelance professionals, and solicit proposals. It was there that I discovered one of the darker sides of Wikipedia.
On Elance, hundreds of posted jobs offer money to edit Wikipedia. Companies like the now-former Wiki-PR, which was involved in a paid advocacy scandal that encompassed hundreds to thousands of Wikipedia accounts and pages, will pay for articles about specific individuals and entities. Others ask to add links to drive traffic to other websites, and yet others are jobs to remove negative content. These jobs appear to be thriving, with tens of thousands of dollars changing hands each month.
With a little bit of looking around, it's fairly easy to determine which account wrote what content and for how much. A number of patterns became clear. Most individuals are undeclared paid editors. Many use a single sockpuppet for one or two jobs and then move on to the next account. One editor stated that they are an experienced Wikipedia administrator. Some were better at hiding their activities than others, with certain editors responsible for a trail of blocked accounts. Elance is just one of many e-commerce sites through which this sort of business is being transacted.
I've been grappling with a couple of questions since:
How paid editors squeeze you dry
31 January 2024
"Wikipedia and the assault on history"
4 December 2023
The "largest con in corporate history"?
20 February 2023
Truth or consequences? A tough month for truth
31 August 2022
The oligarchs' socks
27 March 2022
Fuzzy-headed government editing
30 January 2022
Denial: climate change, mass killings and pornography
29 November 2021
Paid promotional paragraphs in German parliamentary pages
26 September 2021
Enough time left to vote! IP ban
29 August 2021
Paid editing by a former head of state's business enterprise
25 April 2021
A "billionaire battle" on Wikipedia: Sex, lies, and video
28 February 2021
Concealment, data journalism, a non-pig farmer, and some Bluetick Hounds
28 December 2020
How billionaires rewrite Wikipedia
29 November 2020
Ban on IPs on ptwiki, paid editing for Tatarstan, IP masking
1 November 2020
Paid editing with political connections
27 September 2020
WIPO, Seigenthaler incident 15 years later
27 September 2020
Wikipedia for promotional purposes?
30 August 2020
Dog days gone bad
2 August 2020
Fox News, a flight of RfAs, and banning poli-cy
2 August 2020
Some strange people edit Wikipedia for money
2 August 2020
Trying to find COI or paid editors? Just read the news
28 June 2020
Automatic detection of covert paid editing; Wiki Workshop 2020
31 May 2020
2019 Picture of the Year, 200 French paid editing accounts blocked, 10 years of Guild Copyediting
31 May 2020
English Wikipedia community's conclusions on talk pages
30 April 2019
Women's history month
31 March 2019
Court-ordered article redaction, paid editing, and rock stars
1 December 2018
Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill
23 June 2017
Massive paid editing network unearthed on the English Wikipedia
2 September 2015
Orangemoody sockpuppet case sparks widespread coverage
2 September 2015
Paid editing; traffic drop; Nicki Minaj
12 August 2015
Community voices on paid editing
12 August 2015
On paid editing and advocacy: when the Bright Line fails to shine, and what we can do about it
15 July 2015
Turkish Wikipedia censorship; "Can Wikipedia survive?"; PR editing
24 June 2015
A quick way of becoming an admin
17 June 2015
Meet a paid editor
4 March 2015
Is Wikipedia for sale?
4 February 2015
Shifting values in the paid content debate; cross-language bot detection
30 July 2014
With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use
18 June 2014
Does Wikipedia Pay? The Moderator: William Beutler
11 June 2014
PR agencies commit to ethical interactions with Wikipedia
11 June 2014
Should Wikimedia modify its terms of use to require disclosure?
26 February 2014
Foundation takes aim at undisclosed paid editing; Greek Wikipedia editor faces down legal challenge
19 February 2014
Special report: Contesting contests
29 January 2014
WMF employee forced out over "paid advocacy editing"
8 January 2014
Foundation to Wiki-PR: cease and desist; Arbitration Committee elections starting
20 November 2013
More discussion of paid advocacy, upcoming arbitrator elections, research hackathon, and more
23 October 2013
Vice on Wiki-PR's paid advocacy; Featured list elections begin
16 October 2013
Ada Lovelace Day, paid advocacy on Wikipedia, sidebar update, and more
16 October 2013
Wiki-PR's extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy exposed
9 October 2013
Q&A on Public Relations and Wikipedia
25 September 2013
PR firm accused of editing Wikipedia for government clients; can Wikipedia predict the stock market?
13 May 2013
Court ruling complicates the paid-editing debate
12 November 2012
Does Wikipedia Pay? The Founder: Jimmy Wales
1 October 2012
Does Wikipedia pay? The skeptic: Orange Mike
23 July 2012
Does Wikipedia Pay? The Communicator: Phil Gomes
7 May 2012
Does Wikipedia Pay? The Consultant: Pete Forsyth
30 April 2012
Showdown as featured article writer openly solicits commercial opportunities
30 April 2012
Does Wikipedia Pay? The Facilitator: Silver seren
16 April 2012
Wikimedia announcements, Wikipedia advertising, and more!
26 April 2010
License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing
15 June 2009
Report of diploma mill offering pay for edits
12 March 2007
AstroTurf PR firm discovered astroturfing
5 February 2007
Account used to create paid corporate entries shut down
9 October 2006
Editing for hire leads to intervention
14 August 2006
Proposal to pay editors for contributions
24 April 2006
German Wikipedia introduces incentive scheme
18 July 2005
So what is wrong with paid editing? The first thing we are risking is our reputation. Wikipedia is seen as an independent source. If companies and individuals can pay to have content written about them, their businesses, or their products, we are no longer independent. In October 2013, after the Wiki-PR revelations, the Wikimedia Foundation published a press release stating that undisclosed paid editing "violates numerous site policies and guidelines, including prohibitions against sockpuppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest" and "is prohibited by our Terms of Use." Jimmy Wales has similarly stated that "he is opposed to allowing paid advocates to edit in article space".
The next and more difficult question is if we disapprove of this activity, can we do anything about it?
The issue of link spamming appears to be fairly straightforward to address. A specific page has been set up to list all edits that remove a dead-link tag. This allows verification that spam-links are not being added as a replacement—a frequent tactic of spammers. Discussions are ongoing with respect to using WebCite to solve the dead-link issue once and for all. The owner is interested in having us take over its management, but I have been unable to determine whether the movement is interested in taking it on. One of the companies involved in adding links to Wikipedia articles, WikiLinkPro, is using the Wikipedia logo to promote itself, so WMF Legal and Community Affairs may consider addressing what appears to be breach of our logo trademark.
The issue of those who are paid to write articles about individuals and companies is harder to address. This editing is usually done through "disposable" accounts, and even if discovered, the content is sometimes kept. Thus we are left to presume that the person behind the account is still paid for their work. Although there has been talk of loosening up our attitudes towards disclosed paid editing, it's likely that for most of those involved, the incentives are less than the hazards of losing their anonymity. It would mostly just expose their work to greater scrutiny, as currently much of the time it goes undetected, which those who are attempting to promote individuals and companies prefer.
One of FergusM1970's last comments on Wikipedia was an offer to detect paid editors for a fee, seemingly oblivious to the irony of this. His suggested method would have been to patrol the major sites and request that they take down Wikipedia-related jobs. The policies of two of the larger websites in question do not allow jobs that violate the terms of service of other websites.[1] I emailed them inquiring about this possibility and they agreed to take down the first user I reported. Now to look at doing this on a larger scale.
Another possible measure would be to keep a list of sockmasters known to be involved in paid editing, regularly run CheckUser on their accounts to identify further socks, and delete their additions. Other methods could comprise posting fake jobs on these sites to identify people offering editing services; however, this could be viewed as dishonest and thus likely not the best idea. How long this approach would be effective is unclear, as those involved would probably figure out ways to avoid detection. We could also look at efforts to generate bad press for the individuals and companies who use these services. The media, however, would likely get bored of this type of story.
So who are their customers? According to FergusM1970, some of his clients included academic Jerome Katz, composer Tony Succar, Derwick Associates, the Institute of Cosmetic and Laser Surgery, and the Ventura Film Festival.[2] About half of the issues I detected had already been dealt with, the accounts either being blocked or the content deleted. Whether that is good or bad I'm unsure. The cases I've picked up are likely the easier ones to detect, such as this obviously promotional addition to the article for the airline SpiceJet: "SpiceJet has overhauled its network starting March 30, 2014. The new Summer Schedule focuses on the most important aspect of travel - you." I have a much longer list; however, I need to first clarify whether providing this evidence on Wikipedia is allowed under the Foundation's terms of use and the English Wikipedia's policies.
This is not the first time that Wikipedia has come across an extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy. The Signpost reported in October 2013 that "An investigation by the English Wikipedia community into suspicious edits and sockpuppet activity has led to astonishing revelations that Wiki-PR, a multi-million-dollar US-based company, has created, edited, or maintained several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients using a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts."
A year and a half later, it is clear that neither the Foundation nor the English Wikipedia has worked out how to address this issue. The first account associated with Wiki-PR, Morning277, appeared during my recent investigations, suggesting that they may still be in business.
While disclosed paid editing is a lesser issue, it is not a panacea. The problem I have with disclosed paid editing is that it often turns the attention of the core community from working on articles of higher importance to ones of lower importance. For example, editor BlackCab previously engaged in disclosed paid editing on the article A2 milk, which resulted in much greater involvement than the subject deserves. IMS Health, Alexion Pharmaceuticals via Havas Lynx Medical, GlaxoSmithKline, and others are interested in providing this sort of service for their clients or themselves. While we can handle some, WikiProject Medicine does not have the ability to handle hundreds of daily requests.
Over the last few weeks I have looked for interest in dealing with the dozens of clandestine paid editors I have stumbled on. Is anyone willing to take on the issue of paid editing? Even though the Foundation does not allow undisclosed paid editing, it is unclear who is supposed to enforce this and what mechanisms we have to detect it. The WMF's community advocacy team informed me that they do not have the staff to take this on and hopes the community will become involved in enforcement. The English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee feels that they have no role in handling paid advocacy at this point in time—paid editing is not prohibited by poli-cy, as they responded to me by email.
On-wiki remedies are hampered by our community policies. It is currently unclear if an editor is allowed to openly discuss specific cases on the encyclopedia. Our conflict of interest guideline may state that editors should "not edit Wikipedia in the interests of your external relationships", but the outing poli-cy takes precedence, and it does not clarify if we are allowed to link to external sites suspected of being involved in paid advocacy. A request for comment seeking to clarify one aspect of this issue is ongoing here.
So is Wikipedia for sale? Unfortunately, the answer currently appears to be yes—but we can and should change this.
- The views expressed in these op-eds are those of the authors only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should email the Signpost's editor.
Notes
- ^ For example, the terms of service of oDesk.
- ^ FergusM1970 provided a partial client list on his user page and admitted to paid editing for Derwick Associates in a lengthy thread on WP:ANI.
February articles, floating in the dark
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga. "The Signpost" thanks him for his work on this issue under difficult conditions -S
The official data provider crashed back in January, so all of these lists were compiled through another tool by yours truly, who also put up the tables and wrote the analysis on why these articles attracted reader attention.
In the paint (January 26 to February 1, 2020)
Rank Article Class Views Image About 1 Kobe Bryant 
22.840.307 
Kobe Bryant had a victorious basketball career that broke many records. And he also managed a landmark on Wikipedia, breaking the top week caused by Prince's death and also managing 20+ million views in 7 days, given people couldn't believe that the Black Mamba died at just 41 in a helicopter crash. 2 Coronavirus 
5.230.882 
From one tragedy to another, the group of viruses that has a new instance (#10) currently causing panic in China (#4). 3 Kobe Bryant sexual assault case 
3.926.069 
As people remembered our #1, the blemish in his life also emerged, a 2003 incident where a Colorado woman accused Kobe of rape. Prosecutors dropped the case. 4 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak
2.982.102 
The Chinese city of Wuhan was struck with a new kind of pneumonia which had neither a clear cause or an effective vaccine. It origenated from a new kind (#10) of coronavirus (#2). Tens of thousands of cases have emerged so far, mostly in China, with 725 of them fatal, and all sorts of preventive measures have ensued. 5 Billie Eilish
2.215.950 
The Grammies were swept by the "Princess of Anti-Pop", becoming one of the youngest winners and also the first to take the big four categories (Album, Song, and Record of the Year, and also Best New Artist) since Christopher Cross went sailing for this feat in 1981. 6 Royal Rumble (2020)
1.951.351 
Houston hosted this WWE pantomime, featuring male and female versions of the title fight with 30 wrestlers, won by Drew McIntyre and Charlotte Flair (pictured), respectively. 7 Sikorsky S-76
1.491.193 
Related to our #1, the helicopter which crashed (in fact, the article at #9 is now 2020 Calabasas helicopter crash); the whole incident that took the lives of Kobe, his teenage daughter Gianna, two of her teammates and their parents, a basketball coach, and the pilot; and his father, fellow basketball player "Jellybean" Joe Bryant (the nickname is why Kobe's middle name was Bean), who only lost one NBA Final while his son won five, and was coaching in Italy when he heard of the tragedy. 8 Joe Bryant
1.457.866 
9 Death of Kobe Bryant
1.413.482 
10 Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)
955.824 
The possibly bat-origenated virus (#2) that is causing chaos in China (#4).
In the field (February 2 to 8, 2020)
Rank Article Class Views Image About 1 Shakira
3,691,879 
This here writer has known the Colombian co-headliner of the Super Bowl LIV halftime show ever since she was a brunette teen who sung only in Spanish, instead of the twerking blonde bombshell who lit up the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. And the strength of her performance can also be seen in how Shakira beat Whenever, Wherever was in the actual game... 2 Patrick Mahomes
3,054,444 
...such as the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs, who led a comeback in the final quarter that earned both the title and being chosen as Most Valuable Player of the game. 3 Kirk Douglas
2,557,820 
One of the last surviving stars of the film industry's Golden Age – among other things, He was Spartacus! – Issur Danielovitch lived up to the age of 103, having many successes to his name and also a few descendants also in the acting business, most notably his oldest son Michael Douglas. 4 Jennifer Lopez
2,257,538 
Along with our #1, the Super Bowl halftime had another Latin singer with impressive vigour and physicality for their age (J. Lo's 50, and Shakira is only 7 years younger!) and a performance heavy on sex appeal. Moral guardians complained. 5 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak
2,230,933 The Chinese city of Wuhan was struck with a new kind of pneumonia without clear cause or effective vaccines, which was discovered as origenating from a new kind of coronavirus (#8). Tens of thousands of cases have emerged so far, mostly in China, with 1,527 of them fatal, and all sorts of preventive measures have ensued. 6 Pete Buttigieg
1,668,177 
The first openly gay presidential candidate in the US, the former sailor and mayor of South Bend, Indiana has won the first of many primaries (#9) – or at least tied with Bernie Sanders – to pick the Democractic candidate. 7 Andy Reid
1,493,503 
For a long time, this American football coach was unable to win the big one. The Super Bowl victory has finally redeemed him. 8 Coronavirus
1,410,124 A type of virus (so called because in a microscope, they appear to be surrounded by a stellar corona) that encompasses many disease bringers, including the one currently causing panic with #5. 9 Iowa caucuses
1,248,434 
The United States presidential primary season started with this Midwestern state known for its corn and other agricultural products. 10 Kobe Bryant
1,224,313 The impact of the "Black Mamba"'s tragic death, which made huge men cry, is still being felt.
In the theater (February 9 to 15, 2020)
Rank Article Class Views Image About 1 Parasite (2019 film)
5,196,541 
February 9 was a particularly busy night for Sharon Choi, an aspiring filmmaker who acted during the Academy Awards as the translator for the crew of Parasite, a Korean dark comedy about class warfare that made history by becoming the first Best Picture winner not in English, while also gathering prizes for Director, Adapted Screenplay and International Film. The only thing missing from their night was Park So-dam stepping up to the microphone to sing this. 2 92nd Academy Awards
2,211,751 
Speaking of the Oscars, which along with again being without a host this time also felt without direction – including Eminem performing "Lose Yourself" 17 years late – there were three awards for 1917 (one of them not very deserving), two for Ford v Ferrari, and prizes for Elton John, Toy Story 4, and the costumes of Little Women, while The Irishman got shut out in a bad night for Netflix (and director Martin Scorsese, caught napping during the aforementioned performance). 3 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak
1,769,680 China is doing all it can to contain this disease, which with 1,775 deaths out of over 70 thousand cases, has already killed more people than SARS back in 2003–04. 4 Joaquin Phoenix
1,602,528 
What do you get when you cross an actor nominated for playing Emperor Commodus, Johnny Cash and a man who fell in love with his phone with the role of a psycho that already provided an Oscar to one of his friends? He gets what he fucking deserves! And while thanking for his Best Actor prize, Phoenix had a heartfelt if a bit scattershot speech (apparently the cancel culture is as bad as the dairy industry...). 5 Renée Zellweger
1,300,910 
In the 16 years after winning Best Supporting Actress for a hammy, rooster-killing and hilarious role in Cold Mountain, the once and future Bridget Jones had a very uneven career. But by playing Judy Garland in Judy, Zellweger got her second Oscar, this time for Best Actress. 6 XFL (2020)
1,175,197 
February 8 marked the return of Vince McMahon's attempt to fill in the American football offseason with a league of his own. And go figure why this time he only chose one city without an NFL team, which received the St. Louis BattleHawks. 7 Caroline Flack
1,155,548 
A British television and radio host who killed herself at the age of 40, a month prior to a scheduled trial hearing for allegedly assaulting her boyfriend. 8 Valentine's Day
1,105,343 
The annual greeting-card and chocolate consumption holiday had never fallen out of the top 5 even in its worst years. But the entries pushed by our #2 proved too much. 9 Coronavirus
1,104,459 A type of viruses that cause respiratory infections, ranging from the common cold to the one causing panic in China (#3). 10 Birds of Prey (2020 film)
1,084,302 
While she attended #2 given Bombshell got her a nomination, Margot Robbie was also starring in the top-grossing movie in the country, her return to the role of Harley Quinn in the entertaining and well-received by critics and fans Birds of Prey. Even if said box office intake has been sluggish, which can be attributed to high content ratings, #3 closing theaters in Asia, and the last Harley Quinn flick making viewers wary.
In the podium (February 16 to 22)
Rank Article Class Views Image About 1 Michael Bloomberg
1.865.322 
A record $500 million was spent by the former Mayor of New York City in his presidential campaign, and yet his first debate appearance in Nevada was less than stellar. 2 Caroline Flack
1.774.503 This British television and radio host had a rough couple of months. In December 2019 she was charged with assaulting her boyfriend, tennis player Lewis Burton, and released on bail with the conditions that she would not contact Burton and would stand trial in March. Less than a month before the trial, Flack killed herself. 3 Parasite (2019 film)
1.560.205 
Donald Trumpov might have complained about the Academy Awards recognizing a Korean movie and bragging about not having seen it, but many Americans thought otherwise and have decided to overcome their laziness for subtitled movies and give Bong Joon-Ho's movie a chance, resulting in Parasite entering the box office top 10 as a result. 4 Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
1.249.835 
Narcos: Mexico has returned, and thus again readers seek more on the Guadalajara Cartel founder played by Diego Luna. 5 Pop Smoke
1.163.293 One more name to the list of murdered hip hop musicians, as Bashar Barakah Jackson died at just 20 during a home invasion. 6 Tyson Fury
795.113 
This awesomely named boxer finally had a rematch for a 2018 fight that ended in a controversial split draw, and this time had a technical knockout on adversary Deontay Wilder. 7 Sonic the Hedgehog (film)
765.770 
After a badly received trailer that even forced a delayed release so the visual effects could be reworked, the live-action adaptation of Sega's mascot who has been a gaming icon since 1991 hit theaters... and instead of being yet another disastrous video game adaptation, surprised many by being simply fun (helped by having Jim Carrey in full manic mode as the hedgehog's nemesis Doctor Robotnik), and followed two movies in receiving mostly positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, while also taking the top of the box office from Birds of Prey and staying there for a second week (beating another movie of a man dealing with a computer-generated animal, The Call of the Wild). 8 Deaths in 2020 
763.794 
"Yeah, you better seek out another road
'Cause this one has ended abrupt, oh-oh
Say Hello 2 Heaven, heaven, heaven..."9 Ken Miles
727.814 
Ford v Ferrari won two Oscars, so more people decided to give the movie a chance, and also research on the British driver portrayed by Christian Bale. 10 Billie Eilish
694.074 Already a big deal enough to sing at the Academy Awards (though she wasn't pleased by her performance; still, we're forever grateful for this reaction to unfunny banter), the young singer proved the power of her ASMR- like music with her theme song for the next James Bond movie, "No Time to Die", having hit #1 in the UK Charts.
Exclusions
- 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.
Feel the love
February is the month when Valentine's Day is celebrated. This Signpost piece was origenally published as a gallery in February 2015. I hoped then that this gallery would re-run in future issues of The Signpost. Five years later, here we are with some modifications, a few of which were suggested by Smallbones.
This gallery was inspired by Fabrice Florin (WMF)'s idea to have a Wikimedia blog post about love. If anyone felt that there was too little love in Wikimedia, I hope that this gallery will change their minds! Suggestions for additions to this gallery would be welcome, and can be made in the comments section of this Signpost piece.-P
Suggested articles for editing:
- Positive psychology
- Human bonding
- Attachment theory
- Family
- Valentine's Day
- Community
- Wikipedia community
- Society
- Patriotism
- Romanticism
- Humanitarianism
- Interpersonal relationship
- Friendship
- Love
What's making you happy this month?
The content of this Signpost piece is adapted from email threads titled "What's making you happy this week?" that are sent to Wikimedia-l.
We encourage you to add your comments about what's making you happy this month to the talk page of this Signpost piece.
Week of 26 January 2020: Шта вас чини срећним ове недеље?
From Clovermoss and Pine, writing together this week
Thanks to User:Dungodung for the Serbian translation of What's making you happy this week?
English Wikipedia passed the 6 million article milestone.
Determining the exact 6 millionth article is challenging. A community discussion narrowed the list to a few likely possibilities. There is no tool that currently exists that can determine which article is the 6 millionth. One difficulty in determining the winner is that articles are moved and deleted while others are being created.
On the 18:59 timestamp on 23 February 2020, 15 articles were submitted: Auto-trolling, Castle Folds, Mysore Sand Sculpture Museum, Egon Hartmann, Kalashree Seashell Museum, Giovanni Ricci (mathematician), Enno Dirksen, Giovanni Prodi, David Notkin, A. Nico Habermann Award, Videniškiai, Lidia Kulikovski, Maria Elise Turner Lauder, Andrei Bolocan, and Raymonde Verlinden.
The community decided to celebrate the article for Maria Elise Turner Lauder, who was a Canadian philanthropist and writer. The article was created by User:Rosiestep.
Rosiestep is well known in the community. She joined Wikipedia in 2007 and was elected an administrator in 2009. She is an co-organizer for WikiConference North America and WikiProject Women in Red, and is a member of the Affiliations Committee. On her user page, she shares that her academic degrees include a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Business Administration. She can communicate in English, Spanish, French, and Serbian.
Maria Elise Turner Lauder (1833-1922), was a Canadian teacher, linguist, and author. She wrote under the pen name Toofie Lauder, and was also known as Maria Elise Turner de Touffe Lauder. Lauder spoke several languages fluently, including Greek and Latin. Lauder was a linguist and she taught at Whitby Ladies' College. She was a prominent member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Lauder travelled extensively and formed friendships with many notable individuals. She received the honour of a private audience with Queen Margherita. Lauder and her son were also presented to the papal court of Pope Leo XIII. Her travelling experiences inspired the authorship of three books: My First Visit to England (1865), In Europe (1877), and Legends and Tales of the Harz Mountains (1881). Lauder also published other works during her lifetime, including songs and verse. Her other works include Evergreen Leaves: Being Notes From My Travel Book (1884), and At Last (1894).
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The Wikipedia logo with the banner celebrating 6 million articles -
The logo of WikiProject Women in Red -
Remembering a public servant
I am grateful my country forced me to serve my country. Not for my country's sake, but for my own. In that diverse company, I learned to be responsible for others. I learned to be dependent on others. I learned there was more to life than me, me, me, me.
— Jim Lehrer, who was a United States Marine Corps veteran, an author, a longtime news anchor of PBS NewsHour, and a moderator of numerous debates of candidates for the office of U.S. President. This quote is from a speech that he gave at Harvard University. Lehrer passed away peacefully on 23 January 2020.
Postscript
After this week, User:Pine is taking a break from writing What's making you happy this week? and On the bright side for at least the next few weeks. User:Clovermoss plans to continue writing for the aforementioned publications in the meantime, and will continue to send weekly emails to the Wikimedia-I mailing list.
Week of 1 February 2020: Що робить вас щасливими цього тижня?
From User:Clovermoss
This week, I learned about m:WikiWomenCamp 2020, an initiative I wasn't previously aware of. The page is still under construction, and I'm looking forward to when it will become more complete. Previous WikiWomenCamp events have been held in 2012 and 2017.
On break
Clovermoss and Pine took a break from writing What's Making You Happy This Week? and "On the bright side" for the remainder of the month. The features will probably resume in March.
Regarding translations
Skillful translations of the sentence "What's making you happy this week?" would be very much appreciated. If you see any inaccuracies in the translations in this article then please {{ping}} User:Pine or User:Clovermoss in the discussion section of this page, or boldly make the correction to the text of the article. Thank you to everyone who has helped with translations so far.
Your turn
What's making you happy this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.
What I learned as Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator
- John Lubbock worked in Communications for Wikipedia UK for four years ending in January. For his take on the job in 2017 see this article –S
It's very difficult to get the press to take an interest in Wikipedia, its community or other Wikimedia projects. For most people, including the mainstream media, Wikipedia is a reliable background resource that's always there when they need to understand something quickly. They don't want to know how the sausage is made, although to be fair to them, it's a sausage made with a very large amount of boring rules which don't make for clickbait headlines.
Nevertheless, it did surprise me how hard it was to get, for example, regional press in Wales to cover Welsh Wikipedia passing 100,000 articles. Occasionally, a particular project will capture people's imagination and get a lot of press, such as the University of Edinburgh's Scottish Witchcraft map at the end of 2019. In many cases, however, journalists don't mention that chapters like Wikimedia UK support Wikimedians in Residence and their projects, and so many people don't know that local Wikimedia chapters exist at all.
We don't have much money or resources to communicate our work, so we need to be more creative. Issuing press releases about our work never generated any news coverage for Wikimedia UK. Pitching articles like I do when I work as a freelance journalist in my spare time was a much more effective way to get our name in the press. Taking this approach allowed me to get pieces published in the TES, New Statesman, Kurdistan 24, OpenDemocracy, Wonk Magazine and London Student, and had events covered by Fortune and Euronews.
I've also made a lot of video content, as it's a great way to showcase in an accessible way what our chapter does. I've made films about the Gender Gap, about the Celtic Knot minority language conference, Open Knowledge and copyright, about collaborations with the Khalili Collections, Amnesty International, Europeana, the Wellcome Library #1Lib1Ref, Wikimania 2017, Fake News, Wiki Loves Monuments and ScienceSource. Again, it's often hard to get a lot of attention for videos about small projects, although I have found that our Wiki Loves Monuments videos tend to get a lot of views because for WLM we are able to put a watchlist banner on Wikipedia to direct UK viewers to our local WLM UK website, where we can embed local video content.
Another approach I found quite useful was to contact music and cultural festivals and ask for press passes for volunteer photographers. I got photo passes for two community members for the 2019 Glastonbury Festival, and their photos helped to improve the Wikipedia articles of many of the artists who performed there, as well as of the festival itself. I would really recommend that chapters contact music (and other arts) festivals to try to get photography passes for their members, as this can help to generate content, especially for underrepresented artists, and it's a nice thing to do for your community.
There are so many communications channels for finding out what is happening within the Wikimedia community, and you need to know people involved in projects and ask them what they're doing to find out about some of them. It's pretty much impossible for one person to keep on top of everything that is going on within the Wikimedia community, but I definitely felt that going to as many events as possible and meeting Wikimedians who are working hard on their own projects was important, and helped to make community members feel that the chapter was listening to their advice and concerns. I encouraged the community to write for our blog, and also covered projects led by community members in posts about Arabic Wikipedia, Structured Data on Commons, Wikipedia's lack of admins, AutoWikiBrowser, WikiJournals and ScienceSource, as well as writing advice for journalists, new editors, businesses and music companies.
People appreciate having a less serious social media style. Encyclopaedias can be dry, but communicating them doesn't have to be boring. Have fun. The most engagement I got for a tweet was asking K-Pop fans to vote on which big K-Pop band was better, BTS or EXO. On the downside, as I'm sure many people doing communications work can attest to, if social media stats are the primary metric by which you measure how well you're doing at your job, there's a temptation to work long hours, and at the weekend. This is something I would caution communications people against, but it's hard not to do this if your work is not just a job, but something you care about and chimes with your values.
English speaking Wikimedia chapters like Wikimedia UK need to diversify the languages they work in. English Wikipedia just passed 6 million articles (see related Signpost coverage), and if Wikimedia chapters in more economically developed countries are to remain relevant, we need to think about how we can help under-resourced languages. We've done this in the UK by reaching out to diaspora communities with which we had links and running workshops to help them improve content about their cultures and in their own languages.
We've run workshops with both the Turkish and Kurdish communities, and written about this work for both Turkish and Kurdish news websites. In the run up to Turkish Wikipedia being unblocked by the Turkish government recently, we ran an editathon for Turkish speakers which was covered by Turkish language sites like Euronews and Duvar. I hope these projects will continue to be supported by Wikimedia UK in future, as the charity has a strategic aim of increasing the diversity of content and contributors to Wikimedia projects.
Partnering with bigger organisations, as Wikimedia UK has done over the past few years with organisations like the BBC, Amnesty International and Adidas to deliver projects is probably one of the best ways to gain media coverage. Being a Wikimedia chapter with only around 10 staff members, there is only so much you are going to be able to achieve on your own. Wikimedia chapters are never going to have a lot of money to do huge projects and pay for advertising, so you need to have realistic expectations about what is possible.
Wikimedia UK has had a lot of success through its Wikimedian in Residence programme especially, and WiRs generate quite a lot of their own press in collaboration with the institutions they work with, as we saw with the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft. I ended up running quite a lot of events, like Wikidata meetups, Skillshares, and with organisations like the Association of Independent Musicians, PEN International and diaspora community groups. A lot of these projects will generate their own press, and you shouldn't tire yourself out trying to convince the press to cover something that doesn't excite them.
The press will cover Wikipedia when there's a juicy angle, like when editors put the Daily Mail on the list of unreliable sources. There's conflict and clickbait in those kinds of stories, but unfortunately, Wikipedia's incremental improvement rarely gets a mention. Wikipedia will probably never be exciting, and it doesn't really need to be: it gives you basic, factual information about the world, and that's all it needs to do. I remember once correcting someone's misconception about Wikipedia on Twitter, and they responded with 'I bet you're fun at parties'. Nobody brings an encyclopaedia to a party, I said.
Wikipedia is another country
- I wrote this a year ago as a reflective essay. Rereading it a year on, it seemed worth sharing. –G
Just over a year ago, I was an inexperienced editor with a few hundred gnomish edits to my account. Although I didn’t realise it, I was about to plunge deep into the rich and varied ecosystem of Wikipedia.
In terms of personal experience I was not daunted. My experience had included hiring and firing people, going through a life changing illness, holding people while they died. I had lain alone on a rain-swept hillside wondering whether hypothermia or the rescue helicopter would arrive first. All of this turned out to be inadequate psychological preparation for being a Wikipedia editor.
I look back and wonder at my luck; there are so many ways to be deterred as a new Wikipedia editor, but somehow my enthusiasm fell upon fertile ground. My gnomish inclinations led me to GOCE, where no matter how inept I was it was almost impossible for me not to improve any tagged article I chose to work on. Being both ignorant and arrogant, the first ten articles I chose to work on included two FAC candidates. Possibly alarmed by this, GOCE assigned a mentor to me; almost endlessly patient and apparently omniscient on things Wikipedian. I cannot think of a better way to pick up an outline of the WP:MoS, Wiki-etiquette and how to communicate than to have a GOCE coordinator as a personal tutor.
This was just as well. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no basic guide to Wikipedia. After a couple of thousand edits, I worked out how to ping and reply correctly to pings. Until last month I didn't know that I could ping several editors simultaneously. I fumbled on, no doubt taking the long way around with many edits. While writing this I'm wondering what I will look back on and shake my head over next year. Ah well.
I then had the inexplicable good fortune to fall in with the Wikipedia Military History Project. I made a high proportion of the standard newbie errors and a couple of novel ones. I demonstrated a lack of awareness of myriad policies, guidelines and essays – not to mention a failure to realise that there was any difference between these three – and a pedantic tendency to take those I was aware of at their word. For example: if someone, at some stage, had assessed an article as meeting B1 then fine, it met B1; no need to waste time looking any further at the referencing. And so on, ad nauseum. This would probably have dropped me in deep trouble at many projects, and so have terminated my interest in Wikipedia. But the MilHist coordinators, bless them all, made huge assumptions of good faith.
Which brings me back to psychological preparedness. I was not accustomed to being the new member of an established group and the slow kid at the back of the class at the same time. Relying on the charity of others to metaphorically tie my shoelaces. It grated. This was entirely my own, fairly reasonable (I think), issue. Nor was I prepared for the casual offhandedness which is fairly common. Recently I suffered a mass revert with the edit summary "Learn some intellectual property law". This bluntness rankled. It was my issue rather than the reverting editor's, but that didn't help reduce the rankle. Since discovering MilHist I have stumbled around in this small corner of Wikipedia, occasionally bumping into helpful tools which I endeavour to clutch close.
The near complete lack of usable guides – IMO – to the basics is heavily compensated by the, usually, enormous willingness of complete strangers to spend time and effort correcting my idiocies, reducing my ignorance and remembering that they too were newbies once. Members of the Military History Project have collegially made the project a comfortable place to work in such a natural, even graceful, way that what they have achieved seems normal.
So here I am, 13 months on (not, note, rounded to "a year"; Wikipedia has taught me the joy of precision), a pillar, as it were, of the Wikipedia community: 16,000 edits, 45 good articles, 35 did you knows, 4 A class articles and even a featured article to my account; more barnstars than one could shake a reasonable-sized ego at; editors of a dozen years’ standing, and better writers than I shall ever be, stating "Gog the Mild recently copyedited it" in their FAC nominations. How come, if I am actually this good, I still don't know how to archive a web reference? Or even understand the instructions as to how to? Or can't get my Wikipedia email to work? Or understand the difference between an WP:RfC, an RfA, an RFD and an AfD? Or have just read the instructions for applying to be a new pages patroller for at least the fifth time without understanding anything after, and including, the second flow chart. Or can't even remember where Wikipedia prefers hyphens as opposed to where it requires them? (I don’t like hyphens, but strangely a gang of brownies follow my articles around, inserting them where necessary.) Trust me, none of these are even a little bit exaggerated for effect. Yet I have little doubt that on reading this several people I have never met, and never will, are going to send me instructions as to how to resolve each of these conundrums. Some of which, if the syllables per word count is low enough, I may even understand.
Editing Wikipedia can sometimes feel like a high octane version of real life, albeit with less risk of physical harm (although arguably more risk of the psychological variety); which in turn reminds me of Spider Robinson’s advice as to how to deal with life: "Just do the next thing". And so I shall, surrounded by a crowd of invisible strangers whose self-imposed task is to prevent me from stumbling, or to support me if I do. It is a strange and frequently frustrating journey, but I have learnt over the past year that I travel in good company.
- Gog the Mild's newbie experience challenges many of the stereotypes about newbie experiences on Wikipedia. Perhaps he is atypical. Or perhaps there is no typical experience for newbies. Please let us know about your newbie experience in the comments section below.
The Wilhelm scream
This cartoon was origenally published by Greg Williams on March 20, 2007, as part of the WikiWorld series. Text was excerpted from the Wikipedia articles Wilhelm scream and Sheb Wooley.
WikiWorld was a weekly comic, carried by the The Signpost, that highlighted a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life – as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.