Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2020-01-27

Wikipedia is the jewel of the internet. We're an educational website, an encyclopedia, designed to be free of advertisements and commercial influence, trying to provide every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. We should celebrate all of our achievements. The English language Wikipedia marked the creation of its six millionth article this week (see News and notes, Community view and Humour) and its 19th birthday this month. Wiki Loves Monuments has announced the winners of one of the world's largest photo competitions (see Gallery). My personal favorite achievement this month is the 15th anniversary of this newspaper, The Signpost.

Commercial organizations and their undeclared paid editors are overrunning Wikipedia, using our educational content as camouflage for their hidden advertisements. The Wikimedia Foundation seems unable to do anything about it. It's time for the community to take action to protect our encyclopedia. Among other actions we can take is a moratorium on all new articles about businesses until the WMF takes action against the most notorious spammer, Status Labs, or until we can remove all the spam that is most dangerous to our readers.

The WMF has a difficult job. It supports the servers that provide over a billion people a month with immediate access to the encyclopedia, maintains and upgrades the software, and provides grants to editors' projects throughout the world. Their budget is about $100 million per year.

Taken together, the hundreds or thousands of businesses who commercially insert advertisements into the encyclopedia likely bring in many times that amount. Just one of the more notorious companies, Wiki-PR – now known as Status Labs – declared operating revenues of over $7 million for 2017, had 200 active clients in August 2018,^[1] and currently employs 48 staff members[1]. In 2014 CNBC reported that Status Labs was apparently a "small shop" and that one of CNBC's freelancers was solicited by email for payment by Status Labs to slip "a client's name into copy."^[2] If Status Labs will spam a large national cable news organization, they'll likely spam anywhere they think they can get away with.

Its clients pay high fees for their services. "Fees for reputation management can range from a few thousand dollars a year to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, depending on the clients and his or her needs," according to Status Lab CEO Darius Fisher.^[3] One of their clients, Jacob Gottlieb, was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal during a recent investigation, and said he paid $4,000 to $5,000 per month.^[4]

Status Labs was contacted for comment for this article but did not respond before publication.

Paid editing has long been a problem on Wikipedia. The subject even has its own article Paid editing on Wikipedia citing dozens of well documented incidents. The Conflict of interest noticeboard used by Wikipedia editors to report ongoing problems, reports that many incidents per month. Many of the worst offenders have been questionable financial firms such as retail foreign exchange traders, or outright scam artists like binary options traders and some cryptocurrency firms.

Wiki-PR/Status Labs is likely the best known of the commercial paid editing firms among Wikipedians. They first came to light in 2013 when Wikipedias and the WMF blocked 250 accounts in the then-largest paid editing scandal in the history of Wikipedia. The community banned the firm – and not just the firm – in these terms:

Employees, contractors, owners, and anyone who derives financial benefit from editing the English Wikipedia on behalf of Wiki-PR.com or its founders are banned from editing the English Wikipedia. This ban has been enacted because Wiki-PR.com has, as an organization, proven themselves repeatedly unable or unwilling to adhere to our basic community standards.

The WMF later issued a cease-and-desist letter telling them not to edit Wikipedia, using the same language as the first sentence of the community ban. When Wiki-PR started advertising using the Status Labs name, the community ban was extended to Status Labs. When they began advertising under yet another name, that name was included in the ban.

The Wiki-PR scandal was widely covered in the mainstream press, including articles in the Daily Dot, Vice, Verge, the Independent, Ars Technica, AdAge, and many others.

Following Wiki-PR's activities, the WMF changed the Terms of Use stating that every paid editor must declare their paid editing status as well as their employers, clients, and other affiliations. This change was voted on by 1,389 Wikipedians, probably the largest such vote in Wikipedia's history and was supported by 79% of the voters.

Darius Fisher's firm Status Labs, the successor firm of Wiki-PR, has continued editing for six years after they were all banned by the Wikipedia community. The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth investigation of Status Labs activities and documented their Wikipedia editing in the December 13, 2019 article titled "How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online".^[4]

The WSJ documented Status Labs "reputation management" for five firms and individuals including Jacob Gottlieb, former owner of the defunct hedge fund Visium Asset Management, billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, owner of Citadel LLC, Omeed Malik, Betsy DeVos – before she became U.S. Secretary of Education, and Theranos, a failed blood testing company, whose former CEO is now facing criminal charges.

Citadel LLC admitted Griffin's use of Status Labs to edit Wikipedia, according to the WSJ. Gottlieb and Theranos were directly tied by the WSJ to Wikipedia edits by banned sock puppet jppcap. DeVos's link to Wikipedia was not made explicit. Malik can be tied to editor Stevey7788 who was banned for "excessive involvement in reviewing articles created by" sock puppets. Stevey7788 reviewed the Malik article at WP:Articles for Creation and promoted it to article space. The article was later trimmed and redirected, apparently as part of an investigation by Wikipedia editors requested by the WMF.

An investigation by The Signpost, focusing on the accusations against Theranos, detailed the extensive editing by jppcap to that article.

Other than the redirected article, The Signpost could find no evidence that an investigation by Wikipedia editors had taken place before the WSJ article was published.

When contacted by The Signpost this month, the WMF said they would continue to monitor the situation but that they were not planning on taking any action against Status Labs at this time. They received an inquiry from The Wall Street Journal reporter in October and sent that information to the community per the Paid editing policy.

All the information they got from the WSJ reporter was sent to volunteers as soon as they received it. The information was sent to the Arbitration Committee, the OTRS mailing list for monitoring paid editing (paid-en-wpwikipedia.org), and the volunteers who were speaking with the WSJ. In January they also provided it, when requested, to The Signpost.

This information provided to The Signpost on this particular matter is very short, 120 words long. Two arbitrators contacted by The Signpost did not remember receiving the information. When contacted at short notice, paid-en-wpwikipedia.org did not respond. Only one of the other volunteers who was sent the information could be identified by The Signpost, and she has not replied to an email request for comment.

The WMF does not expect to issue a report on the investigation.

Any community members who have information on this investigation are requested to contact The Signpost, or include the information in the Comments section below.

The WMF position is that they will only take action, based on requests made by the English Wikipedia community through its usual governing processes.

Please understand that The Signpost is not accusing the WMF or any Wikipedia editor of intentional wrongdoing, but the current systems used to protect the encyclopedia against abusive undeclared paid editors clearly are not working.

Since Wikipedia volunteers are now overwhelmed with advertisements masquerading as encyclopedia articles, and since the WMF seems to be unable to take any action against even the most obvious purveyor of this dangerous material, the responsible path open to Wikipedia editors is to just stop publishing all new articles about businesses.

Make no mistake about it, Wikipedia's business articles are dangerous to the finances of any reader who might be persuaded to invest based on articles written by scam artists like binary options companies or some cryptocurrency companies. Our articles are dangerous to investors who might be persuaded by the unethical executives of companies like Theranos who used Status Labs to manipulate the article on the company. Since Theranos was a medical testing company, the paid edits by Status Labs might have even turned out to be dangerous to people's health. In an everyday sense, our articles are dangerous to readers who might base even a simple decision on article content.

If the WMF does not take swift action to protect Wikipedia from already banned firms like Status Labs, nobody should trust any business article on Wikipedia. I wouldn't base any decision – not even a $3 purchase of canned meat – on a Wikipedia business article. Rather than trust any business article, it would be better to delete them all. But we don't need to go quite that far, I propose that we place a moratorium on all new business-related articles until we have time to clean up the mess we already have.

Formally, a moratorium requires a request for comment that may take a month or more to complete. In the meantime there are actions that any editor can take. Don't promote abusive business articles from Articles for Creation. If you see a new business article, you can remove all of the promotional material, even if that is the entire content of the article. Taking the article to WP:Articles for deletion is the more common practice. And here are 24,164 old articles you can start with right now.

The article count on en-Wiki surpassed 6,000,000 at about 18:59 UTC on January 23. Due to the limitations of the software and the volume of article creations at about that time, it is impossible to determine exactly when the milestone was reached. The symbolic 6,000,000th article was decided by consensus to be Maria Elise Turner Lauder written by User:Rosiestep. She told The Signpost

I woke up at about 3:30 AM the morning of January 23rd. Unable to go right back to sleep, I went into the living room. I opened up my laptop to Wikipedia and noticed we were a few hundred articles shy of the 6 millionth article. I decided to create an article about a woman writer, my preferred focus, on the chance that when I would be ready to click Save, it would miraculously be the right moment.

Why do I focus on women writers? Well, my grandmother and my mom were writers, and I've become one too – an encyclopedist. I founded WP:WikiProject Women writers. I'm a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University's Women Writers Project.

Without a particular article in mind, I reviewed this list for inspiration, and considered the redlinks. When I checked out Maria Elise Turner Lauder, I noticed that there was a substantial article about her on Wikisource, plus a photo. I googled her and found enough to create a decent article, what would become the first edit; but, I didn't Save it yet. If I had saved the article, I would have felt compelled to improve it before going back to sleep, but I was too tired. The article counter was moving up slowly, still a few hundred articles shy of 6,000,000.

I went back to sleep. When I got up, I checked the counter, and saw that we hadn't reached 6,000,000 yet. When it reached 5,999,996, I clicked Save on the Lauder article, but it didn't save, forcing me to click a second time. That was it. Then I went about my regular business of improving the article. Eventually, I knew, there would be an announcement on article #6,000,000. The Lauder article would be the lucky one, or it wouldn't. Of course, I was very happy with the news that it was the milestone article. Congratulations to you, Wikipedia, and to all the editors who contributed articles on January 23, 2020. Six million is a "drop in the bucket," there are many more articles still to write. I look forward to working with editors from everywhere as we write more, edit more, and collaborate more. Look out, article #7,000,000; we're headed in your direction.

Congratulations to Rosiestep and to all editors who contributed to the last million new articles.

Coffeeandcrumbs told The Signpost in detail how the symbolic article was chosen, saying it is impossible to exactly identify the 6,000,000th article. "We don't know if a redirect (with an old creation date) that was converted to an article or disambiguation page was what brought us over the threshold, or which of the new articles created that same minute was the one. Like in all things on Wikipedia, consensus should reign supreme and consensus determined that Rosiestep's article deserved recognition."

Fifteen articles which were created at 18:59 UTC on January were screened for quality. The entire decision process may be viewed at Wikipedia talk:Six million articles.

What can be said about six million articles? As usual, Wikipedia's editors provide the answer. A chance view of a user talk page told us:

"6 million is starting to get to be a serious figure, but only a tiny fraction of what is possible of course. A truly resourceful comprehensive encyclopedia in which every article is the highest possible quality is going to take hundreds of years without a doubt. I am certain that Wikipedia will still be around in 2100, even if this evolves into something like a 3D encyclopedia ... You never know!" –Dr. Blofeld

To which another editor responded:

"I keep marveling at how poor our coverage even of American topics is, and of course that's light-years better than our coverage of many other countries. If our American coverage is so spotty, imagine what that means for the rest of the world. We have a long way to go yet..." –Ser Amantio di Nicolao

Your answers and comments are requested in the comments section below.

Fourteen heritage sites, known collectively as Paris Musées, announced that 100,000 digitized files in its collections are now licensed CC-0.

Paris Musées, which holds many masterpieces, is the first Parisian institution to so license its public domain files. They can be downloaded in High Definition via a dedicated API. Wikimedia France (in French) has a formal partnership with Paris Musées and will help import images and data to Wikimedia commons and Wikidata.

The Creative Commons annual summit will be held from May 14–16 in Lisbon, Portugal. Proposals for presentations are due February 12. The overlap of Wikipedia's goal with those of CC, which provides Wikipedia with our free content licenses, is shown by the tracks for the presentations: "Creators of the Commons; Powering the Commons" (about tools, technology and communities); "Open Education and Open Scholarship"; "Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums"; and "Policy and Advocacy promoting the Commons".

Citizendium, one of Larry Sanger's failed encyclopedia projects, may be officially closing. Two of its four active editors have agreed that Citizendium "is simply not going to be a viable project as an encyclopedia." They wish to "deliberately wrap up this project by exporting any useful content to Wikipedia, closing the wiki to editing, posting an archived copy to the Internet Archive and directing possible readers there, and use remaining funds to secure the domain name for a long time with some small hosting overhead for a single landing page."

The Signpost recommends care in importing Citizendium articles into Wikipedia. WikiProject Citizendium Porting may be useful in these imports, but the WikiProject has been mostly inactive since 2010.

Angus Merker McLellan was a Wikipedia administrator and long-term contributor to the project, known for his work on articles about related to Scotland, and about the Middle Ages. He passed away on November 15, 2019 after a brief battle with lymphoma.
— Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians

Brianboulton's obituary may be viewed here.

The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's four newest administrators who passed RfA this month:

• Wugapodes
• QEDK
• Nick Moyes and
• Ergo Sum

Robert Fernandez contributed this essay to Wikipedia@20, a CC BY-NC 4.0 project collecting essays in anticipation of Wikipedia's twentieth anniversary. Robert graciously agreed to publish this piece (CC BY 4.0) on the 15th anniversary of The Signpost. Thanks to Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner at as well for assisting in the publishing arrangements. -S

As the largest and most successful online volunteer project, Wikipedia is rightfully celebrated as a triumph of crowdsourcing and volunteerism. However, Robert discusses the downsides of volunteerism and how volunteers can contribute to stifling innovation.-Editors of Wikipedia@20

At the turn of the millennium, the online encyclopedia, like hovercraft and jetpacks, was an unfulfilled promise of the future. Microsoft Encarta made it to the web in that year, and the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica had been on the web since 1994. Yet their subscription models, limited scope, and Web 1.0 functionality were not what people raised on Ford Prefect and Hari Seldon — touchstone characters of geek culture^[1] — had in mind. A real, universal online encyclopedia was an inevitability; the only question was what form this encyclopedia would take and how it would be created.

When Wikipedia appeared a year later on January 15, 2001, with its funny name and origins in a company otherwise dedicated to access to pictures of scantly-clad women and not open knowledge, its role as the world's encyclopedia was far from a fait accompli. In his PhD dissertation, Benjamin Mako Hill took a deep dive into the early workings of eight web encyclopedias.^[2] Wikipedia could have just as easily become a forgotten novelty of the dot com boom just as the other seven have become.

Interpedia was the oldest of the eight and was able to draw on the preexisting participant base and infrastructure of USENET. h2g2, with its famous branding from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and backing by the BBC, seemed an even more likely candidate for success. Everything2 was flush with money and attention from Slashdot, an early web driver of traffic and viral attention comparable to Reddit today. A teenage Aaron Swartz, now considered an open content legend and martyr, started The Info. Looking from the vantage point of 2001, who would have guessed that all these projects would be forgotten and Wikipedia would be a household name?

Hill concludes that Wikipedia succeeded in three key factors and none of the others succeeded at more than two of them. The first is the familiarity of the goal or product. Everyone knows what an encyclopedia is and should look like. (Though those born post-Wikipedia now have a different definition of encyclopedia.) But many of these projects were not quite encyclopedias, or not just an encyclopedia. Before I joined Wikipedia, I was an "editor" (the equivalent of a Wikipedia administrator) on Everything2, a project that seemed to encompass (almost) everything. This was a prospect that offered an intoxicating freedom but also served to confuse people unsure about how to contribute given a nearly unlimited choice of topic, format, and style.

This broadness of scope also served as an endless source of controversy and debate about how to define Everything. One of the site's longest-running controversies was a debate about the quality and appropriateness of a brilliantly incoherent and delightfully juvenile tone poem written about the Butterfinger McFlurry, a now-discontinued dessert product from McDonald's.^[3] More prosaically, the debate meant an ever-shifting series of goal posts as the site's possibilities narrowed, accompanied by lofty but vague rhetoric about quality and slogans like "a writer's site for writers." What could have been a rival to Wikipedia became the functional equivalent of a third-rate literary magazine.

If nothing else, Wikipedia's accidental genius is its branding. The branding is not just name recognition and puzzle globes and big Ws and stroopwafels. It's a shared goal that is specific enough and familiar enough that everyone can grasp and large enough that it can encompass everyone's individual interests and quirks. It's "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." What are we doing? Editing — a specific and familiar task, yet one that can accommodate anything from fussing over Oxford commas to writing lengthy essays. What are we editing? An encyclopedia — something specific that everyone can easily identify but something that can be literally about anything, from plants to trains to Pokémon.

The second factor cited by Hill was a relatively low barrier to entry. In order to achieve a critical mass of contributors, it needs to be easy to contribute. This includes all sorts of technological, social, psychological, and even aesthetic factors. Anyone who has watched a student wrestle with logging into a library proxy and try to search an unfamiliar database, then give up and just Google something knows that these barriers matter. Anyone who has given up halfway through the purchasing process on an e-commerce site has experienced the problem for themselves.

Wikipedia succeeded in lowering these barriers due to a number of factors. The innovative wiki software allowed essentially real-time collaboration. The markup language was simple enough to easily grasp, at least for the tech-savvy users of Web 1.0. The fact that you didn't even have to log in to edit meant you could quickly edit a typo with little learning curve and no commitment. Wikipedia had yet to develop the large thicket of policies and procedures that stymie new users today. Whether or not this is all still true has significant bearing on the future potential of Wikipedia, but it was true then, and was a large part of its explosive growth.

The final factor was the low social ownership of content. Many sites assumed that some sort of social reward in the form of recognition would be an incentive for people to participate. On Everything2, for example, this took the form of a video-game like system of experience points and levels. At the top of each article (called "writeups" on E2), the name of its contributor was prominently featured and the contributors could be rewarded with points by other users in the form of voting.

Intuitively it seems the lack of recognition and control of your contributions on Wikipedia would be a disincentive, as it was for me at first. Wikipedia records the author of every single contribution, down to punctuation, but finding that information requires some knowledge and experience with wiki software, rendering the authorship essentially opaque. It didn't hurt that Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality has caused the writing to develop an emotionless tone largely bereft of an authorial voice.

However, deemphasizing the idea of authorship has served to emphasize the existence of Wikipedia as a common, shared good. It also made many people more willing to contribute due to the absence of territoriality and implied ownership of content. People are more willing to alter and improve writing if they don't perceive it as belonging to another person. "Ironically," Hill writes, "the fact that Wikipedia made authorship less scrutable opened the door to deeper and more widespread collaboration."^[4]

Why is all of this important? If Wikipedia is able to change to meet the challenges of our jetpack-less future, it must know how to change, and to know how to change you must know how you succeeded in the first place, whether you examine the matter through Hill's framework or some other lens. However, Hill's conclusions are largely unknown even among specialists, and certainly to most of the core editor base of Wikipedia. As Hill notes, it's common to attribute Wikipedia's success to some combination of luck, timing, and technological superiority, despite the lack of empirical data for these conclusions. Even Joseph Reagle, in Good Faith Collaboration, concludes his book-length examination of Wikipedia by writing that it was "born almost as a happy accident."^[5]

Besides, you can't empirically measure luck in any case, so if you conclude that Wikipedia succeeded through sheer luck, you are basically concluding that the matter is inscrutable or unexplainable. This has more significant implications than a mere academic debate. When confronting new challenges for the encyclopedia, it's a case of the classic problem having a hammer and treating every problem as if it were a nail.^[6] The temptation amongst Wikipedia editors is to simply do the same thing all over again, even if the solution has no relationship to the problem, and wasn't even the solution in the first place.

On Wikipedia, the solution is to throw volunteers at it until it is fixed, somehow, eventually. Wikipedia is the world's most successful example of a crowdsourced volunteer project, of course, but we forget that many crowdsourcing projects simply fail. Crowdsourcing isn't the reason Wikipedia succeeded and we can't simply throw it at every problem as if it were magic. It's very much like today's technological hucksters who claim adding blockchain to everything will somehow result in a more successful and innovative product. This has even spread to include, amusingly, a recent Wikipedia competitor called Everipedia, which hired Larry Sanger as its CIO in 2017 in one of his desperate bids for post-Wikipedia relevance.

Without volunteers, of course, Wikipedia would have been impossible. The largest and most sustained volunteer mobilization in human history has resulted in the largest and most widely used information resource in human history. It has been so successful that any attempt to accurately describe the scope of what has been achieved inevitably resembles hyperbole. The entire project (or more accurately, collection of projects) has been driven entirely by those who volunteer their labor to generate the content or money to keep the servers running.

Naturally and appropriately, much of the discussion about Wikipedia has revolved around the dedication, ingenuity, intelligence, and other positive traits of volunteers. What this discussion omits is that, often, volunteers are terrible. They act out of their own self-interest, their social and psychological needs, and their biases and grudges. Some of this is perfectly appropriate, as no act can be purely selfless, and many volunteer projects are successful precisely because they have found a way to harness volunteer energy and satisfy the healthy needs of volunteers, and these needs can serve as incentives to continued volunteer participation. In practice, however, many volunteers, consciously or not, put their own needs ahead of the mission they purport to be serving.

The most widely cited example of a discussion of this problem is probably Yochai Benkler's seminal paper "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm."^[7] Benkler coined the word jalt to describe the combination of jealousy and altruism affecting those working on volunteer projects. Though it is seldom discussed in that context, jalt has become one of the most powerful factors shaping the behavior of a number of the most active participants on Wikipedia. Jalt is a natural, understandable impulse. After all, if you're a pizza delivery guy or IT help desk employee who has contributed thousands of unpaid hours to Wikipedia, it's natural to get a little annoyed when Jimmy Wales gets to honeymoon on Richard Branson's private island.

A little green-eyed jealousy is harmless, but real problems begin when that altruism blossoms into a sense of entitlement. In 2011, an episode of This American Life focused on Daniel H. Weiss, the former manager of the gift shops at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC.^[8] (Weiss is now president and COO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City). The gift shops were staffed entirely with volunteers, and the Kennedy Center had some three hundred of them. "Many of them," Weiss noted, "simply wanted to be in the Kennedy Center to support the mission," an admirable, altruistic impulse.

The well-stocked and well-staffed gift shops were somehow not generating that much money for the Kennedy Center, and it was estimated that the shortfall was about 150 thousand dollars. Weiss was charged with getting to the bottom of the matter, taking him from investigating the books to undercover stakeouts with a United States Park Police detective. The cause was not one or two thieves or a ring of crooks, it was everyone. Despite (or as we will see, precisely because of) the altruism of all involved, theft of both cash and merchandize was rampant amongst the hundreds of volunteers who staffed the gift shops.

Weiss recalled that:

There were some volunteers who were taking money. There were some young employees who were taking money. There were lots of people who were taking merchandise, at every level. People were all stealing from this wonderful, uplifting organization because they could. Because it was easy and it was available.
— This American Life, 431, See no Evil, Act Three

According to This American Life:

...people weren't just grabbing t-shirts. Some had been taking cash-- mostly small amounts, like a cab fare home. After all, they'd just worked three hours for free. It's just a few dollars. What's the harm? But still, they put their hands in the cash box, took some bills out, and put the money in their pockets.
— This American Life, 431, See no Evil, Act Three

The altruism of these volunteers has grown beyond petty jealousies and grown into a sense of entitlement that provides a self-justification for acts that cause direct harm to the mission that they profess to be working to support. The harm need not be physical or monetary to directly impact the mission, it can be a harm to morale or harm that prompts volunteers to leave a project, or never engage with it in the first place.

Likely hundreds of examples of this kind of harm can be found a day on Wikipedia. The most common is what's referred to as "biting the newcomers," or hostile engagement with editors new to Wikipedia.^[9] This has been cautioned against since the earliest days of Wikipedia, but if anything the practice is accelerating as Wikipedia's policies, procedures, and the use of jargon and acronyms for both grow like kudzu. It's an easy enough practice to fall into even for well-meaning editors, who tire at having to deal with the same issue a hundredth time, and even easier for the many editors who proudly proclaim their abrasiveness and, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, imagine themselves paragons of frankness.^[10]

This is, of course, another example of entitlement promoting volunteers to place their own personal needs over the health of the project. For all the triumphant citing of metrics by proponents of Wikimedia projects, one unmeasurable metric that is never cited is the loss of the volunteers who depart or never engage in the first place because of the barriers to entry, one of the most cited of which is hostile editors.

As we've seen from Hill's framework, a low barrier to entry was a key factor in the explosive growth and success of Wikipedia. The editors needed to create, maintain, and update millions of articles will not continue to join the project if the existing ones are hostile. This is all the more critical as Wikipedia grows into a part of the online and information infrastructure and fewer people see it as a distinct project they can participate in themselves. Elsewhere I've called this problem the "conceptual barrier," the inability or resistance of people to seeing themselves as having the ability and capability to edit Wikipedia.^[11]

Studies have shown that many readers see Wikipedia as one of many search engine results, not as a distinct resource they could search on their own.^[12] This problem will only grow as more people interact with information from Wikipedia in different ways: on mobile devices, through the Google Knowledge graph, read to them by an Alexa or other smart device. New editors cannot be recruited to volunteer on Wikipedia if they cannot overcome the barriers to entry, or even conceive of Wikipedia in the same way as its existing editors do.

Yet most of those existing editors, at least the most vocal ones, refuse to acknowledge dwindling volunteer recruitment as a problem. Much of this refusal is likely a result of the culture of Wikipedia itself. It's been well established that the culture of an organization is derived from its original participants and persists long after those individuals depart.^[13] Wikipedia grew out of early online and open-source communities, and undoubtedly this has contributed to its flexibility and dynamism. However it has also contributed to its exclusionism. Paradoxically, the encyclopedia "anyone can edit" grew out of a community hostile to outsiders, where new participants were unwelcome because they were unaware of or thought not to share community norms and values. Recall the concept of "eternal September" from USENET, when new users were perceived to swamp and disrupt online communities at the beginning of the fall semester when they regained internet access after returning to school.^[14]

This inherited culture has also influenced how decisions are made and who gets to make them on Wikipedia. Decision-making on Wikipedia revolves around "consensus," where those participating collaboratively come to a conclusion, through a process of voting and discussion. This is justifiably celebrated as transparent and democratic, but there's also a deliberate process to exclude people from the discussion. New editors arriving to participate in a discussion are rejected as "meat puppets" and even the opinions of established editors are rejected if they've been asked to participate or become aware of the discussion through certain channels, such as a social media post.^[15]

The principle of decisions being made by those who are doing the work and supporting the mission grew out of those online communities that gave birth to Wikipedia's organizational culture, and the principle seems logical enough for an open-source software project. Can this kind of exclusion be justified by an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" and is the world's largest information resource? Why should decisions that affect how information is disseminated around the entire world be made by a handful of participants who are almost certainly English-speaking white males privileged by their access to computer literacy, free time, and awareness of a particular discussion?

In practice, to have a voice in a Wikipedia discussion requires a combination of stubbornness and privilege. It requires the knowledge and experience of how to monitor these discussions and the free time to participate in them before they conclude. Even well-established Wikipedia veteran editors don't have a voice in these discussions, because they don't constantly keep tabs on particular discussion forums. Effectively, Wikipedia decision-making has been ceded to a small group of obsessives whose hobby is Wikipedia governance.

In 2015, an article about a Wikipedia editor named Bryan Henderson was widely discussed in American media outlets,^[16] and Henderson was even interviewed for a brief profile on CBS News. Henderson, who edits Wikipedia under the user name Giraffedata, is obsessively focused on one thing, removing the words "comprised of" – a phrase he considers grammatically incorrect – from all Wikipedia articles. In the media and on Wikipedia, Henderson's quest has been largely treated with bemusement.

It's more serious when you realize this is the basic dynamic for Wikipedia decision making and control. The logical, sane response to disagreeing with Giraffedata is to shrug and move on. Since decisions are by those who participate in a localized discussion, leaving cedes the decision-making power to those willing to engage in the least logical and sane response. This incentivizes not just obsessive but also belligerent behavior and even harassment, and empowers those privileged with the time and resources to engage in this behavior. Minor quibbles about grammar is one thing, but these techniques are frequently used by political ideologues, ethnic nationalists, and conspiracy theorists. Professor Bryce Peake called this the "hegemony of the asshole consensus."^[17]

Even without a particular agenda, a potent sense of volunteer entitlement is a key driver of the asshole consensus. This is directed not just at new editors; in many cases the worst of it is directed at volunteers in key positions and employees of the Wikimedia Foundation. An exemplar is a comment unironically directed at a volunteer MediaWiki software developer: "We, the community are the souvereign [sic]."^[18]

If it were only a matter of it being an unpleasant or even hostile experience for many contributors, that unpleasant reality could be arguably dismissed if it resulted in a successful encyclopedia for both volunteers and readers. This is exactly what the asshole consensus argues. A quote frequently deployed in this context is this: "We are here to build an encyclopedia, not to sing kumbaya, and this is a shop floor."^[19] The intellectual labor of encyclopedia creation is likened to a fetishized male, blue collar workplace, diminishing and dismissing other modes of contribution, styles of communication, and types of volunteers.

The framing of the asshole consensus rests on a priori assumptions that this behavior is necessary for a successful project, and actually results in one. By their standards, it is successful, successful for them. When measured against the publicly stated mission, norms, and principles of the project — "be bold," innovate, treat one another with civility — it is an utter failure.

Innovation in particular suffers from the established consensus. One infamous example is a notorious controversy in Wikipedia's recent history that revolved around something called "superprotect," briefly instituted in 2014. Wikipedia administrators have always been able to protect pages, everything from articles to pages containing programming code, from changes due to vandalism and other mischief. When the Wikimedia Foundation wanted to prevent administrators on the German Wikipedia from removing a new feature they had developed called Media Viewer, they created a new type of protection that even administrators could not override, only some WMF staffers.

As you might imagine, this created a gigantic uproar from not just the German Wikipedia, but the entire Wikimedia community. There's no question this was a serious misstep by the WMF. They acknowledged as much when they removed it a year later, with the then-executive director stating that it "set up a precedent of mistrust."^[20] To this day, superprotect is constantly invoked in response to a perceived threat of WMF overreach or to assert the privileges of established editors and administrators over the Foundation.

It's worth examining what this event illustrates about Wikipedia community dynamics. While it is framed as a triumph of the community over oppression, the reaction is part of a pattern that constantly reoccurs in situations that lack any oppressive acts by the WMF or other forces: An improvement that provides new functionality is introduced and it immediately faces hostile resistance from entrenched volunteers.

Not coincidentally, the innovations that bring the most vociferous resistance are ones designed to improve the reading and editing experience for those outside the established community: Media Viewer was designed to make viewing images and media on Wikimedia projects easier; Visual Editor introduced a WYSIWYG editor so new contributors didn't have to wrestle with confusing wiki markup text; the content translation tool was designed to make translating articles between different language Wikipedias far easier. It is no accident that the text-heavy interface of today's Wikipedia looks much like it did in 2001 and is not geared towards today's internet users; it is a direct result of this resistance to change and innovation.

Wikipedia's community has inherited an antipathy to new contributors from the early internet projects it grew out of. Sometimes that antipathy is expressed in the form of direct hostility towards the contributors themselves, other times it is in resistance to changes and improvements that improve the recruitment or experience of new contributors.

Even in the form of indifference the antipathy is not benign, as established contributors center their own experience over that of the new contributor or reader. The actual mission of the project is secondary, the sense of entitlement of the volunteer is paramount. The entitled volunteer resists improvement because it upsets their comfortable vision of how things should be done in a way that accommodates them, regardless of the harm this does to the project and mission they are supposedly volunteering on behalf of. They are indifferent to examinations like Benjamin Hill's of how and why Wikipedia succeeded; they prefer an explanation involving serendipity or inevitability because what matters is not the success of Wikipedia's mission, but their own gratification and entitlement.

Wikipedia was able to surpass projects like Microsoft Encarta and the Encyclopedia Britannica because it brushed aside the gatekeepers in favor of flexibility and innovation. Over the last two decades, however, Wikipedia's institutional culture has exchanged flexibility for bureaucracy and established volunteers have set themselves up as the new gatekeepers. Collectively they form a Team Encarta stifling innovation in favor of ossification.

Footnotes

In November 2019, the nonprofit Internet Society announced that it had reached a $1.1 billion deal with a fledgling private equity investment firm, Ethos Capital, to sell the Public Interest Registry and thus its control of the .org web domain. Dot-org has been under the stewardship of the Internet Society since it was founded in 1985 for use by nonprofit organizations, and managed through the PIR since 2003. The domain has been available to for-profit enterprises in recent years. The sale blindsided many web leaders, while the Internet Society explained that it was focusing on other goals and was not keen on spending its time managing domains. Hundreds of nonprofits voiced their objection, raising fears that Ethos would raise prices or attempt to censor information or sell data gleaned from hosting their websites.

In 2013, wiki and open source websites made up the largest share of users of .org, holding 22% of the registered domains.^[1] According to Alexa Internet, as of the time of writing Wikipedia has the highest volume of traffic of any global website that uses the .org domain, ranking as the 13th most used website.^[2]

Reuters broke the news early this month that a group of concerned internet nonprofit leaders were appealing to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to block the sale, and had moved to create a nonprofit cooperative, the Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants, as an alternative buyer of the .org domain. Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Katherine Maher has offered herself to be one of seven directors of the new cooperative. She told Reuters, "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit." Maher also said that the organization was not offering a competing bid for .org, but wishes to obtain it to safeguard its integrity and ensure that the sites it hosts are not subject to censorship. The NonProfit Times added that a few members of the United States Congress have declared their opposition to the sale.

Last month's Constitutional Court decision in Turkey did not have immediate effect, as pointed out by Wikipedian John Lubbock in the Ahval News story "Wikipedia is good for the Turkish economy and education sector - but it's still being blocked". Five days after Lubbock's article and three weeks after the Constitutional Court ruled against the ban "Turkey Lifts More Than 2-Year Block of Wikipedia" according to the Associated Press.

Other sites reporting on the ban being lifted include WMF News "Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years".

Snøhetta Selected to Design the New Visual Identity for the Open-Source Platform Wikipedia: Snøhetta is a successful Norwegian architecture/design firm. Eight companies competed for the contract, according to Aftenposten (in Norwegian). A joint WMF-Snøhetta webpage has been set up. Community consultations will be held.

• Techcrunch is the first to notice that the English Wikipedia has six million articles, with their story soon translated into Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish. Other English-language media including The Economic Times of India covered the story.
• We're number 2 (we used to be number 1) YouTube's Organic Visibility Tops Wikipedia in Google SERPs. That's Search Engine Results Pages, meaning that YouTube now appears more often than Wikipedia on the first page of Google search results.
• Beware of malware: Gadget and some other outlets have reported on recent, unsettling findings by Kaspersky Lab researchers into Shlayer, a group of Trojan horse malware programs that target macOS. One method by which the malware was spread was through links which, when clicked by unsuspecting victims, downloaded the program. The researchers found that even Wikipedia had been affected, as "such links were hidden in the articles' references. Users that clicked on these links would also get redirected to the Shlayer download landing pages." The full report on the findings can be found here.
• The Sum of What? On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia: Author Kirsten Menger-Anderson reviews the number of women academics cited in Wikipedia articles on literature and mathematics on Undark. She finds that women are generally cited much less often than their male peers in both categories, and noted that Wikimedia's list of 31 writers essential for every language Wikipedia includes no women. Ultimately, she suggests that Wikipedia's gender bias is a product of both its own features and pre-existing disparities in the academic community.
• Fighting fake news: Omer Benjakob of Haaretz writes about Wikipedia cracking down on misinformation and blocking sources deemed untrustworthy, and thinks we do a whole lot better job of it than social media giant Facebook.
• Wikipedia caught up in Indian liability changes: Tech Crunch reports on proposed changes to Indian liability regulations that require web "intermediaries" to better identify content creators and filter what they produce to avoid legal liability. The move has generated an outcry from the tech community, including WMF general counsel Amanda Keton, who warned that such action could interfere with the functioning of Wikipedia.
• An Introduction to Python for SEO Pros Using Spreadsheets: An article on how Python can be used to manipulate data extracted from Wikipedia, another example of Wikipedia being used to teach programming. Cf. Recent Research: "Wikipedia as a learning resource (for programmers)".

• External audio
  The Story Behind Wikipedia, 23:37, Innovation Hub (WGBH and PRX)[3]

  Wikipedia's Volunteer Army: Media expert Andrew Lih is interviewed by WGBH (FM) (Boston) on how Wikipedia works.
• Meet the 9 Wikipedia bots that make the world's largest encyclopedia possible (see also our earlier review of the underlying research paper: "First census of Wikipedia bots")
• Katherine Maher interviewed: The WMF Director shares her thoughts (in Spanish) on Wikipedia's usefulness and its future with artificial intelligence to The Clinic.

There were four main instances real-world politics and allegations coming up on Wikipedia this month in the form of vandalism or sharp content alterations, accompanied by an unusual enthusiasm for criminal investigations. The Signpost would like to advise political actors that Wikipedia is not a court of public opinion.

• Policing vandalism or ownership by the police? In a strange display of both vandalism and apparent government assertion of ownership of content, an IP editor "cyber criminal" inserted disparaging language into the Uttar Pradesh Police article, which the real-world department discovered and reverted, as reported by The Times of India. The apparent police editor account, User:Patroitwarrior, also took the chance to insert that the department is "one of the finest and technologically advanced police forces in the world". Director General of Police for technical services Asim Arun confirmed to the Times that the department was responsible for the reversions, saying "Within hours [of being notified], the department removed the objectionable content." Arun continued, "We value the Wiki principles of sharing of information, but will take steps to prevent such vandalism. We are trying to identify the culprit and will lodge an FIR." An admin stepped in to admonish Patroitwarrior to disclose any COIs and protected the Uttar Pradesh Police page to prevent further vandalism.
• "Sunda imperialism" or trolling overblown? CNN Indonesia and Tempo have reported on what appears to be an overblown incident of vandalism. An IP editor altered the article for the United Nations to say that the first session of the UN General Assembly was held in Indonesia instead of the United Kingdom. Though the vandalism was quickly reverted, politician and self-proclaimed internet "expert" Roy Suryo decided to bring it to the attention of the Jakarta Police, accusing a mysterious social media group known as the "Sunda Empire" of being responsible. Spreading fake news across electronic media is illegal in Indonesia, and police have opened an investigation.
• Aspersions against a Dutch politician lead to Maltese parliamentary inquiry: The Shift News reported that an IP address added information to the article for Pieter Omtzigt in October 2019, accusing him of paying bribes while investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to secure fake evidence that the plane's crash was Ukraine's fault and absolve Russia of suspicion. The IP address is used by a government ministry in Malta. Omtzigt suggested that this was related to his investigation into the death of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, which was not warmly received by the Maltese government. The accusation has since been removed from the Wikipedia article. Later, the Times of Malta wrote that the incident led to questions being raised in Parliament, following which the Ministry of Education declared that it had, after conducting a "technical investigation", located the responsible editor, a contract employee, and dismissed them. Maltese MP Jason Azzopardi took to Twitter to demand that the culprit's name be made public and that they be brought up on criminal charges. Minister for Home Affairs Byron Camilleri assured Parliament that police had concluded that no crime was committed. The Signpost surmises that Azzopardi might have to contact authorities in Uttar Pradesh or Indonesia to get his wish.
• British politician apparently COI edits out mentions of his financial conflicts of interest: According to an article in The Independent, British Member of Parliament Stuart Anderson "appears to have edited his own Wikipedia page". An account named "Stuart Anderson MP" removed "references to funding that one of his companies received from the EU and information about illegal dividends that he was paid". The account was warned about conflict of interest guidelines and then blocked pending a change of username or confirmation of identity. A Signpost request for information from Anderson's new parliamentary e-mail account received an automated response saying that since Anderson was newly elected, a response would be delayed.

• The tax man says Strass: What do Australians and New Zealanders call a Boloney-like substance that before WWI was called "German sausage". According to the Wikipedia article it's "polony," "luncheon sausage," "Belgium," "devon," "Windsor sausage" and "fritz". "Bung Fritz" is incorrect because that delicacy includes sheep appendices. According to Gizmodo Australia on January 16 someone at the Australian Tax Office added another name variant that same day, "Strass". The ATO issued a gentle reminder that their employees should confine their use of office computers to official business. The article raises three important questions. Don't ATO employees have anything better to do than put "Strass" into Wikipedia articles? Don't Gizmodo journalists have anything better to write about than this? And what do Ozzies call salami?
• The tax man knows where all the skeletons are buried: In the latest incarnation of the meme "He doesn't have an article on Wikipedia, so he must not be very important," CNN announced Mikhail Mishustin didn't have an English Wikipedia page on Wednesday morning. A day later, he's Russia's prime minister. The Russian-language Wikipedia has had an article on Mishustin, the former head of the Russian Federal Tax Service, since 2010.
• Captain America thinks Wikipedia articles are too long: Chris Evans, who has played superhero Captain America in ten films, is founding a new website dedicated to showing one-minute videos of politicians explaining basic topics in the news such as DACA and NAFTA. According to Slate, Evans's motivations include the belief that people would rather get the information from politicians in a short video than in Wikipedia articles, which are too long to read. The Signpost suggests that he freely license the videos so that Wikipedia can put them in our articles if his website is taken down.
• Obsessed with Wikipedia 'personal life' entries? You're not alone. by Emily Yahr in The Washington Post. Did you know that Joe Pesci broke the same rib, 15 years apart, both times while filming a Martin Scorsese directed movie? And that Pesci's second wife was convicted of attempted murder-for-hire aimed at another of her ex-husbands. Wikipedia's personal life sections have got to be better than soap operas.
• We don't usually cite the crypto press here, but Decrypt's Do "no-coiners" gate-keep Crypto Wikipedia? send up of admin and crypto-skeptic David Gerard is almost as good as Gerard's Signpost contribution this month.

There are three open cases, all involving administrators, now in different phases at the Arbitration Committee.

A case against RHaworth, who has been an administrator for over 14 years, was proposed by Tony Ballioni for improperly unblocking an editor who had been blocked by a checkuser. The workshop phase has now closed, with the proposed decision set to open today.

The Proposed decision is progressing quickly. All 15 arbitrators are active on the case, including the newly elected arbs. The two participants are BrownHairedGirl, who argues strongly against portals, and Northamerica1000 who has been editing them. Votes for proposed remedies suggest that BrownHairedGirl could be desysopped and admonished for incivility. There are currently no proposed remedies targeting Northamerica1000.

A case against Kudpung has opened and is in the evidence phase. The original case was brought by Guerillero for alleged incivility by Kudpung. That matter appeared to have been solved by an apology, but as sometimes happens other editors made other complaints, including incivility and conduct unbecoming of an admin. Kudpung is a former editor-in-chief of The Signpost. Chris.sherlock cited the alleged incivility in the evidence phase. Recused arb GorillaWarfare contributed the longest section on the page. Four other arbs have recused themselves, Beeblebrox, Newyorkbrad, Worm That Turned, and DGG. The evidence phase is scheduled to close on January 28, 2020. The workshop is scheduled for a February 4 close, with the proposed decision to be posted by February 11.

Money emoji has been appointed as trainee clerk for ArbCom.

Correction: Guerillero proposed the case against Kudpung, rather than Chris.sherlock, as earlier reported.

Wiki Loves Monuments is a photo contest that has been run every year since 2010 on our sister project Wikimedia Commons. Since 2011, hundreds of thousands of photos have been uploaded each September for the contest. The project is dedicated to documenting the world's cultural heritage, and is one of the largest photo contests in the world. After judges award prizes in each country represented in the contest, an international jury picks the international winners. You can see the 2019 winners below or at Wiki Loves Monuments 2019 winners.

This article was first published at Wikimedia Space on January 15, 2020. Kelsi Stine-Rowe is the Community Relations Specialist for the Movement Strategy Core Team, at the Wikimedia Foundation. The movement strategy recommendations are available on meta. They include topics such as capacity building, governance, and resource allocation. You can add to the conversations there from late January to early March. Everybody is encouraged to review the recommendations and describe the impact the recommendations might have on them and their community. Other on-wiki discussions are happening many languages versions, in discussion groups on off-wiki platforms, and within movement-related groups. -S

Capacity building is the process by which a community or an individual acquires skills, knowledge or resources, allowing them to grow and thrive. As Wikimedia communities develop around the globe, our movement needs to ensure they are given the necessary tools and resources to be able to strengthen their capacities. Capacity building has hence been one of the 9 topics discussed in 2019 community conversations within the Wikimedia 2030 movement strategy process… and it turned out to be the most popular theme!

From Nigeria to Venezuela, from France to India and from Morocco to Macedonia, hundreds of comments and suggestions were shared across languages and cultures. This Top 5 gathers the main ideas discussed by communities, which insisted on the need for both efficient and contextualized tools and support, with a special hint at peer-learning.

1 Multilingual Online Learning The idea of online capacity building has been widely advocated for across numerous Wikimedian communities – most likely because our movement has a lot to do with online learning! Contributors from the French Wiktionary and the Arabic Wikipedia, for example, explained that they already work to create online resources like MOOCs or video tutorials.

In addition to such resources, people have also suggested clarifying help pages or promoting online mentorship programs. The idea of a learning platform featuring multiple formats was often cited and supported. And systematically, people have emphasized the need for these resources to be localized in various languages and cultural contexts, so that people and communities from all over the world are equitably empowered to learn and thrive.

2 Capacity Building for Affiliates Just like people, organizations need to learn and grow. Our movement is composed of dozens of affiliate organizations, and they all need to build their capacities. How do you run an awareness campaign? How do you manage a project? How do you attract and retain volunteers? How do you obtain a legal status for your organization?

All of our affiliate communities broadly share these general questions, as well as some more specific concerns. For example, Arabic communities are especially keen on receiving governance and conflict resolution training, while South Asia communities are really eager for capacity building to help them apply for and receive grants.

Wikimedians have shared a number of ideas, some of which already exist to various extents, to improve organizations’ capacities. These include train-the-trainers programs, which are seen as an indispensable starting point, as well as specific training for leaders, not forgetting tailored, sustained support for organizations growth with the help of dedicated staff.

3 Peer-based capacity building Wikimedia is all about collaboration. No wonder, then, that peer-support and peer-learning are globally praised by Wikimedians. To them, horizontal learning is more efficient than vertical teaching, especially because it allows for more contextualisation.

Mentorship and exchange programs are seen as great ways to build capacities for individuals and organizations alike, as well as editathons or hackathons, where Wikimedians can learn from each other. Larger international events are also cited as a booster for participants and for hosting countries, as they allow communities and people to connect and share experiences and knowledge.

4 Movement Knowledge Accessibility Individuals’ and organizations’ capacity to take part in Wikimedia activities greatly depends on their access to knowledge about the movement itself. Are people aware that they can have access to grants? Can they easily find technical support if they need it?

Communities around the world feel that, as of now, a lot of this information can only be accessed through informal channels or in English only, creating inequities in our movement. Thus, they would like our internal knowledge to be better managed and more transparently, systematically shared, in multiple languages and formats, including through videos (for example about how WMF departments are organized, what is Wikimania, etc.), so that everyone is empowered to take part in our movement.

5 Motivation Across discussions, many communities have shared that, if we want to build people’s capacities, we need to keep them engaged and motivated. Both online and offline, rewards are seen as a great tool to boost motivation: it can be barnstarns rewarding on-wiki achievements, open badges to recognize skills, posts on social media to appreciate volunteers’ efforts.

Contests and campaigns are also seen as a great way to motivate contributors to improve their skills, be it in Venezuela, France or Benin. Local groups also acknowledge that growing their members’ capacities works better when they plan regular offline events, focusing on various themes and with varied approaches, because it allows participants to keep motivated, connected, and to develop a wide range of skills.

And here we come to the end of this Top 5 about Capacity Building. Do you think these ideas are what the Wikimedia movement needs? Have you already tried some of these methods in your community? Or does this article inspire you to experiment with them in the future? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Kelsi Stine-Rowe wishes to thank Diane Ranville for her writing assistance in this piece.

Wikipedia has now reached its 6,000,000th article, a symbolically important achievement. Congratulations to User:Rosiestep for creating the article Maria Elise Turner Lauder, but let's take a moment to recognize that this is not the only important new article out of the one million that have been created since November 1, 2015. Some might say that every article created since then is equally important. Others might argue that there is some article that really truly is the most important article out of the last million created. They might say that their favorite article is the most important, or even their favorite article from their own creations. In short, the most important article out of the last million is completely subjective. A collection of a couple of dozen or so of these articles may, however, show what we as a community consider to be important.

Note that the editors who added their most important article were not randomly selected. To get this started I invited the Signpost staff, folks who commented on previous Signpost articles, and a few others who haphazardly (not randomly) popped into view. To get a better sample of Signpost readers, please add your own most important article in the comments section. Just follow the format of the example, putting the name of an article created since November 1, 2015 and explain, in 110 words or less, why you think it is the most important. You may add a 180px photo if you wish, with a short caption.

With more examples we can view a wider range of what Signpost editors view as the most important article out of the last million new articles.

2019–20 Australian bushfire season is as a globally significant page documenting a tangible and emotive result of climate change – Hell on Earth. Climate and fire experts agree climate change is a factor known to result in increased fire frequency and intensity in Australia, and although it should not be considered as the sole cause, it is considered very likely to have contributed to the unprecedented extent and severity of the fires. Articles such as this, plus news pictures, seen around the world, serve to highlight and educate on the danger of ignoring climate change. -G

Taylor oil spill. You haven't had enough depressing news about the environment lately? There's an ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that's been polluting so long that if it were a person, it could drive an automobile in many countries. Standard news sources tend to focus attention on stories when they are new and ignore them when they are ongoing. Wikipedia articles have the potential to provide a stable and ongoing source of information about topics like the Taylor oil spill, less subject to the up-and-down news cycle. Someone just needs to care enough to regularly monitor and update the article.

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish environmental activist on climate change whose campaigning has gained international recognition. Known for her assertive speaking manner, she urges governments to take immediate action to address world climate change. Her exposure to the masses has had a significant global impact on making younger people conscious of the pressing issue, described in some sources as the "Greta effect". In 2019 Time named Thunberg one of the 100 most influential people and the youngest individual Person of the Year. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.-DrB

The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Swiss organization founded to stop the use of nuclear weapons. As in all years, but especially that year, the Nobel Peace Prize is one of the big important recognitions that are given to people who strive to promote peace and human welfare, and the 2017 Prizes were exceptional in my opinion. -P²

Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London, researching organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

In 2018 she started a personal project to raise awareness of women scientists, creating one article every day about notable academics. She has now written over 850 new articles, and inspired others to do likewise. The Wikipedia article about her was created by a fellow academic in 2018. Wade was named UK Wikimedian of the Year in 2019.

As a science communicator, she has helped encourage a wider awareness of Wikipedia and of science. Sadly, she has also attracted more than her share of trolls, demonstrating how Wikipedia reflects society's blindspots and biases. In 2019 Wade was awarded the British Empire Medal for her services to gender diversity in science, and was listed amongst the top 50 'Most Influential Woman in UK Tech' by Computer Weekly Magazine. -NM

Donna Strickland is a Canadian optical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 for her research into chirped pulse amplification. This article was not created until after she won the Nobel Prize, a fact which generated an outcry now commonly dubbed the "Strickland Affair". The news coverage on the incident demonstrated the lack of knowledge the media has on the inner workings of Wikipedia, while also signifying the importance the public attaches to the existence of a topic on this encyclopedia. But the activity in the following hours exemplified the best of our community's abilities, as editors from around the world contributed to the creation of a Strickland article in 36 different languages. -Ib

Women in Red is a group of Wikipedians dedicated to creating articles about women, and addressing the gender bias on Wikipedia. Project founder Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, alongside Emily Temple-Wood, earned the 2016 Wikimedian of the Year award for their efforts to address the "gender chasm" on Wikipedia. Women accounted for only 15.53% of biographies before WIR got started. Their hard work has increased that to 18.21%, but many women remain in red. Still, because of the efforts of WIR, many more of the last million articles were on women. With luck, even more of the next million will be too! -CE

The 2017 Women's March pointed out that women exist, which is a little startling, considering that approximately half the world population of 7.7 billion people are women. In addition to being the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, there were marches worldwide. The march and its successors have emphasized the importance of uniting to address a broad range of the world's problems, including issues of human rights, the economy, inequality and justice, the environment and climate change. The march also enabled women to combine political advocacy and fashion by sporting Pussyhats with cat ears.-MMO

Matrilineal society of Meghalaya is a recognised good article which ticks many boxes for topics under-represented due to Wikipedia's systemic biases. It's about sociology rather than politics or popular culture. It's about women rather than men. Instead of the bias to OECD nations, it's about a rural, lesser-developed part of a developing nation. It's a product of a 2016 collaboration between Women in Red, ArtAndFeminism, Women's History Month, WikiProject Women artists, a series of initiatives where women have developed new ways of working, recruiting and supporting women on Wikipedia. -BHG

The Me Too movement sends the message that powerful people are not immune to consequences for their actions. RAINN reports that, in the United States, only 5 out of every 1000 perpetrators of sexual assault are incarcerated. Where other systems are failing, the Me Too movement gives a voice to those who have been denied one. It also addresses small scale issues of harassment or unpleasant actions, including stories from people of every gender and culture. There is something we can all learn from the movement, whether it's realising that something we are doing might be hurtful, or realising that we have the power to stand up for ourselves. -B

Fanny Eckerlin (1802–1842) was an Italian operatic mezzo-soprano of the nineteenth century. I've never found an entry for her in any of the standard operatic reference works; evidently well-regarded during her lifetime, she has been reduced, today, to a footnote in critical surveys of the work of Gaetano Donizetti and Gioacchino Rossini and histories of the bel canto era. To me, this article shows the potential Wikipedia has to go beyond standard reference works in its scope; figures like Eckerlin may have been marginalized in print, but we have the opportunity to reintroduce their stories into the historical conversation, at the same time expanding scholarship on all manner of specialist topics.-SAdN

It is not too strong to say Wikipedia is part of a broader ongoing war of information and disinformation. The Block of Wikipedia in Turkey was a period from 29 April 2017 to 15 January 2020 during which the Turkish government prevented access to Wikipedia. The Turkish government objected to content on the English Wikipedia's article State-sponsored terrorism which said that Turkey had supported ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Wikipedias in all languages were blocked provoking condemnation from Turkish politicians such as Eren Erdem. Many Wikimedia communities protested the censorship, and in 2019 the Wikimedia Foundation petitioned the European Court of Human Rights for redress. On 26 December 2019, the Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled that the block of Wikipedia violated human rights, and on its order the block was lifted on 15 January 2020. -W

The Pizzagate conspiracy theory article created in late 2016 had a rocky start, but now exemplifies the way that Wikipedia resists and shines light on fake news that pollutes much of the internet in this era. The allegations about nefarious activities in the nonexistent basement of the Comet Ping Pong Pizza restaurant even resulted in a gunman turning up and trying to find the basement. The first twenty edits, which are no longer available to view, were cleaned up by Ian.thomson with an edit summary that includes "this BLP-violating bollocks needs to change". Future generations will need to know that millions were duped into believing this fake news. Wikipedia's article will help people understand that. -WSC

Had it been created two days earlier, Wintertree (userspace copy) may have been Wikipedia's five-millionth article. Its sorry pattern will be familiar to many editors – an article promoting a product (a spellchecker "proudly serving ... in many Fortune 500 companies"), unreferenced beyond an official website, and created by an obviously biased single-purpose account, then over-tagged and left to rot in bottomless maintenance categories. We tell our readers "Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising", yet we're running 24,000 ads right now – and that's just the ones we know about. These articles remind us we must do much better to become a neutral, trusted encyclopedia. -T

2019–20 Hong Kong protests. With national populism on the rise worldwide, it would be tempting to point to articles on national elections in the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, or the Philippines as some Wikipedia's most indispensable up-to-date coverage. But despite the conflict it entails, the protests triggered by the 2019 Hong Kong extradition bill somehow seem like a more optimistic choice. This is an area in which Wikipedia must continue to strive to live up to its standards as an unbiased, uncensored source of essential information; and the article covers a topic that reinforces how people everywhere continue to question and challenge the conditions under which they live. -D

2017 Laurence Olivier Awards. The seven Harry Potter novels sold 100s of millions of copies, but Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – the so-called "eighth story" of HP – is absurdly and irreconcilably incompatible with the rules/plot of the books. That it received a record 11 nominations and record 9 wins reminds all on Wikipedia and beyond that the childhood dreams of countless millions about "what came next for the characters" can be shattered in absurd fashion to thunderous applause by those who look no deeper than flashy stage effects and the labels "Harry Potter" and "J.K. Rowling". How to grapple with realities far from what we imagined is a skill with which all who come to Wikipedia must learn to cope in life, since for good or ill, rightly or wrongly, life seldom turns out quite how we imagined it.-NH12

The Indian Citizenship Amendment Act protests is one of the largest student-led protests of this decade. It is not often you would find students at the forefront of resistance, but they persist still. With a sitting right-wing government, and a country showing the earliest signs of a curbed democracy, the Human Rights Watch found that the police have used excessive force only against demonstrators protesting the law, including many students. All the deaths have occurred in states governed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which in itself is a huge blow to the values of equality and secularism India has always stood for. —Q

Unite to Remain. Several events in electoral reform history have shaped the United Kingdom – the Battle of Peterloo, the end of rotten boroughs in favor of urban boroughs, and the growth of suffrage to working-class men from the towns to the sticks, to women over 30 to 21, and eventually to everyone over 18 – but perhaps the next one could involve the end of first-past-the-post voting to join the rest of Europe in using proportional representation. In this year's election, the pact to Unite to Remain was a textbook example of escaping the problem of the spoiler effect associated with FPTP, even if it was not completely successful. —P

Wikipedia's article on the Impeachment of Donald Trump not only provides information about a significant current event, but also serves to demonstrate the success of Wikipedia's model and its openness. The article is not protected, though it has been in the past to prevent vandalism. The talk page is highly active, with multiple discussions between editors working toward a consensus. In short, it demonstrates that Wikipedia's vision of people from all over the world, often with diametrically opposed views, can work together to improve an article, no matter how controversial the subject. —D

As well as editing on Wikipedia since 2004, David Gerard wrote a book on why cryptocurrencies and blockchains are terrible — all of them — which he's too modest to link here. David apologises for the usage of the short form "crypto" in this article, which, sadly, is accepted finance jargon now. You can treat it as short for "cryptosporidium".

Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of magical Internet money: cryptocurrency. The idea is a form of currency that has no central controller — you can just trade it as digital cash, directly. And no-one can stop you.

Of course, it's all a lot more complicated than that: the crypto world has attracted an unholy melange of idiosyncratic economics, ultra-libertarian politics, bright-eyed naïve hopefuls ... and scammers, to prey upon them. So, so many scammers.

Whenever there's a whole new paradigm of money, and the old rules of finance just don't apply any more — the promoters show up on Wikipedia as well! And we delete their spam, and block the worst offenders. But there are always more.

Blockchain, as a buzzword, is the enterprise-friendly version of the Bitcoin idea — that a decentralised database something like this, with or without a central controller, could make business work better.

Enterprise "blockchain" has serious problems. The hype was literally copied from Bitcoin hype with the buzzword changed, the press releases don't distinguish "actually does" from "could hypothetically", there's still no real-world production systems where the blockchain bit actually does anything ... and its promoters are just as enthusiastic about getting their vapourware into Wikipedia.

I write about this stuff, go on TV as a public expert, and have strong opinions on the topic — but here, I'm just another Wikipedia editor who knows the area, would like it properly covered by Wikipedia, and has to cite his claims like anyone else.

I don't have any special powers to declare how a topic area should be edited — even one with floods of financially-conflicted drive-by editing. Many others on WikiProject Cryptocurrency will disagree with my opinions here! But we all want the area to be good, and not spammy.

This is a good worked example of a perennial Wikipedia issue: how can we properly cover an area with notable topics, but that has a massive spam problem?

The answer that worked for the cryptocurrency area: strong reliable sources.

Scams with real victims

Despite the past hype, cryptocurrency doesn't affect the real economy that much — and media interest is through the floor since the 2017 cryptocurrency bubble popped. (At least until Facebook foolishly thinks starting a crypto is a good idea.)

But covering it properly is actually important — because people look stuff up in Wikipedia, and they trust us, and assume we've done our best.

The usual way to do financial fraud is to make your target feel like they're more of a big shot than they are. They put their money into your ill-regulated financial scheme, where they could win big!! ... and they get burned, and lose everything.

The cryptocurrency world plays at doing finance — but it's pretty much unregulated, with none of the safety nets that most people assume any reasonable financial product would have. You can get rich from cryptocurrency! And you can also lose your shirt.

Some crypto disasters, like the collapse of Mt. Gox, seem to be from well-meaning individuals being seriously out of their depth. Quadriga seems to have been a money laundering chop shop run by a serial scammer who may have faked his own death. (It's sadly unsurprising how often crypto scammers turn out to be serial scammers.) Others, like OneCoin or Bitconnect, were straight-up Ponzi schemes. ICOs are unregulated, and frequently fraudulent, unregistered penny stocks that only work as long as the whole market is on the upslope of a bubble.

One of the reasons we have financial regulation for retail investors is that, without it, the mum-and-dad investors get skinned — every time.

User:MER-C notes that in a world with financial predators, "this is a topic that is almost as sensitive as medicine."

But you gotta hear about this one!!

The crypto bubble of 2017 brought such a stupendous flood of promotional rubbish that the administrators' noticeboard was flat-out dealing with the proponents. Even after the 2018 crash, the ongoing firehose of spam and spammers was such that the call for general sanctions on cryptocurrency and blockchain articles got unanimous support.

And so we have: General sanctions/Blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Look through these restrictions — where promotional or tendentious editing risks a general topic ban or even a year's ban from Wikipedia, and pages may be protected or semi-protected, or "any other reasonable measure that the enforcing administrator believes is necessary and proportionate".

Contemplate, for a moment, just how bad an area must have become to need that level of sanction.

Our entire crypto problem — and the reason the general sanctions for crypto articles exist — is a stupendous conflict of interest: how desperately these guys want to spam Wikipedia.

They'll even hire PR firms, expecting them to generate an article that sticks. (That agency was wise enough to demur — though they tried to blame a cabal of "no-coiners.")

There's good reason that "holding a cryptocurrency" is listed as a financial conflict of interest for Wikipedia editing about that currency.

Reliable sources are your best friend

But plenty of crypto and blockchain stuff is genuinely notable, and we should cover it properly. How do we hold off the flood of financially-interested spammers, while we try to write an encyclopedia?

Regular editors in the crypto area have come to a rough working consensus on sourcing — we stick to strong reliable sources (commonly abbreviated WP:RS) only. Mainstream press or peer-reviewed academic sources. Since the 2017 bubble, there's plenty of mainstream press coverage — the financial press is increasingly well-informed on the topic — and academics have always found the area interesting.

No crypto blogs, no crypto news sites — because these look like specialist trade press, but they're really about advocacy: promoting their hodlings. Many are blatantly pay for play, and very few ever saw a press release with "blockchain" in it that they wouldn't reprint.

This isn't a written sourcing rule — but the editors following crypto tend to enforce it in practice, and anything other than solid third-party RSes in an article is a death sentence at articles for deletion. But, solid sourcing means it'll live!

Off-wiki crypto advocates complain regularly, but the rule has stuck — because the Reliable Sources principle is solid, and what we're applying here is basic Wikipedia rules.

(I'm arguably speaking against my own personal interest there — I make some money as a crypto journalist, often publishing in these very sites. I know my stuff is good, and my editors are good, and my friends are good journalists! But I also know that if some subject or fact isn't noteworthy enough to make it into mainstream or peer-reviewed sources, it's probably not noteworthy enough for Wikipedia.)

Wikipedia also has many editors who are fans of cryptocurrency and blockchains, who have realised that WP:RS is an excellent and effective way to make our articles better! Because they're tired of the crypto spammers too.

If you love cryptos and I hate them, WP:RS lets us work together.

If your own favourite topic area has a spam problem, get strict on sourcing.

Scammers and spammers are eternal — but we don't have to let them ply their trade on Wikipedia. Neutral Point of View, informed by Reliable Sources, is — as always — our best protection against promotional nonsense.

Reviewed by Isaac Johnson

"Understanding Wikipedia as a Resource for Opportunistic Learning of Computing Concepts" by Martin P. Robillard and Christoph Treude of McGill University and University of Adelaide and published in SIGCSE 2020 examines the utility of Wikipedia articles about computing concepts for novice programmers.^[1] The researchers recruit 18 students with varying computer science backgrounds to read Wikipedia articles about computing concepts that are new to them. The authors use a sample of four Wikipedia articles that appear frequently in Stack Overflow posts (Dependency injection; Endianness; Levenshtein distance; Regular expression). Side note: in a sample of 44 million posts on Stack Overflow that the authors process, 360 thousand (0.8%) have a Wikipedia link, pointing to 40 thousand different Wikipedia articles in aggregate. They indicate that this rate of linking to Wikipedia is similar on the Reddit subreddit r/programming as well. The participants are instructed to use a think-aloud method where they talk through what they are doing and thinking as they try to learn about the concept. The authors then analyzed the transcripts from these interviews to determine what themes were consistent across the students.

The researchers identified the following challenges to learning from Wikipedia:

• Concept Confusion: if vocabulary or notation has a different meaning in other contexts, this can confuse those readers who think they know what they're reading (but don't).
• Need for Examples: explanations are not always enough. Examples are often desired.
• New Terminology: encountering too many unfamiliar terms can be frustrating for readers.
• Trivia Clutter: peripheral information that is not core to learning a concept can make it hard to find the most useful information, especially for non-native readers.
• Unfamiliar Notation: math notation and code in articles is generally not explained, which can create confusion for the reader if they are not familiar with it.

While the authors conclude that linking to more structured learning resources from Stack Overflow and related forums might be beneficial, this research clearly provokes some thought about how Wikipedia might be a more effective learning context. For instance, page previews are a clear improvement for readers who are not familiar with the concepts mentioned in an article. The other concepts emphasize the value of surfacing examples in articles, not relying on mathematical notation to explain a concept, and having a clear lede paragraph. Two other thoughts about this research:

• The authors describe how computer programmers often end up at Wikipedia by way of Stack Overflow posts that link Wikipedia as a means of better understanding concepts mentioned in an answer. The ability of these communities to build on Wikipedia is a really lovely example of beneficial re-use. It has been examined more widely in work by Vincent et al. (see this past write-up).
• As machine translation is explored as a means of supporting content creation (e.g., via the content translation tool) or of providing access to knowledge in other languages (e.g., automatic translations in search), it is useful to understand what articles are particularly difficult for novices to learn from, such as the computing concepts studied in this research. This is content that likely becomes even more confusing if imperfect machine translation leads to odd sentence structure or word choice. Perhaps it should be prioritized for cleanup by native speakers.

• A new public dataset on active editors by country has been released by the Wikimedia Foundation. (See meta:Research:Data for other data sources available to researchers)

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

From the abstract:^[2]

"Despite Wikidata’s potential and the notable rise in research activity, the field is still in the early stages of study. Most research is published in conferences, highlighting such immaturity, and provides little empirical evidence of real use cases. Only a few disciplines currently benefit from Wikidata’s applications and do so with a significant gap between research and practice. Studies are dominated by European researchers, mirroring Wikidata’s content distribution and limiting its Worldwide applications."

See also earlier coverage of a related paper by Piscopo et al.: "First literature survey of Wikidata quality research", and the following preprint

From the abstract:^[3]

"[We conduct] a systematic mapping study in order to identify the current topical coverage of existing research [on Wikidata] as well as the white spots which need further investigation. [...] 67 peer-reviewed research from journals and conference proceedings were selected, and classified into meaningful categories. We describe this data set descriptively by showing the publication frequency, the publication venue and the origin of the authors and reveal current research focuses. These especially include aspects concerning data quality, including questions related to language coverage and data integrity. These results indicate a number of future research directions, such as, multilingualism and overcoming language gaps, the impact of plurality on the quality of Wikidata's data, Wikidata's potential in various disciplines, and usability of user interface."

From the abstract:^[4]

we present an approach for extracting numerical and date literal values from Wikipedia abstracts [apparently a reference to the lead section of Wikipedia articles or their first paragraph]. We show that our approach can add 643k additional literal values to DBpedia] at a precision of about 95%.

From the abstract and accompanying note:^[5]

"A major challenge for bringing Wikidata to its full potential was to provide reliable and powerful services for data sharing and query, and the WMF has chosen to rely on semantic technologies for this purpose. A live SPARQL endpoint, regular RDF dumps, and linked data APIs are now forming the backbone of many uses of Wikidata. We describe this influential use case and its underlying infrastructure [...] The data used in this publication is available in the form of anonymised Wikidata SPARQL query logs. [....] The paper has won the Best Paper Award in the In-Use Track of ISWC 2018."

From the abstract:^[6]

" we study the relationship between different Wikidata user roles and the quality of the Wikidata ontology. [...] Our analysis shows that the Wikidata ontology has uneven breadth and depth. We identified two user roles: contributors and leaders. The second category is positively associated to ontology depth, with no significant effect on other features. Further work should investigate other dimensions to define user profiles and their influence on the knowledge graph."

See also comments about the paper by Daniel Mietchen, and earlier coverage of a related paper: "Participation patterns on Wikidata"

From the abstract:^[7]

"We ... study the evolution that [Wikidata] editors with different levels of engagement exhibit in their editing behaviour over time. We measure an editor’s engagement in terms of (i) the volume of edits provided by the editor and (ii) their lifespan (i.e. the length of time for which an editor is present at Wikidata). The large-scale longitudinal data analysis that we perform covers Wikidata edits over almost 4 years. We monitor evolution in a session-by-session- and monthly-basis, observing the way the participation, the volume and the diversity of edits done by Wikidata editors change. Using the findings in our exploratory analysis, we define and implement prediction models that use the multiple evolution indicators."

This study^[8] found that the migration place for historically relevant people is limited to few locations, depending on discipline and opportunities.

This preprint^[9] presents a tool for extracting multilingual and gender-balanced parallel corpora at sentence level, with document and gender information.

This study^[10] found that on Wikipedia, controversial and high-quality articles articles differ from others, according to metrics quantifying editing and linking behavior.

This preprint^[11] presents a new graph-based recurrent retrieval approach to answer multi-hop open-domain questions through the Wikipedia link graph.

From the abstract:^[12]

"we compared articles about the same intergroup conflicts (e.g., the Falklands War) in the corresponding language versions of Wikipedia (e.g., the Spanish and English Wikipedia articles about the Falklands War). Study 1 featured a content coding of translated Wikipedia articles by trained raters, which showed that articles systematically presented the ingroup in a more favourable way (e.g., Argentina in the Spanish article and the United Kingdom in the English article) and, in reverse, the outgroup as more immoral and more responsible for the conflict. These findings were replicated and extended in Study 2, which was limited to the lead sections of articles but included considerably more conflicts and many participants instead of a few trained coders. This procedure [identified] a stronger ingroup bias for (1) more recent conflicts and (2) conflicts in which the proportion of ingroup members among the top editors was larger. Finally, a third study ruled out that these effects were driven by translations or the raters’ own nationality. Therefore, this paper is the first to demonstrate ingroup bias in Wikipedia – a finding that is of practical as well as theoretical relevance as we outline in the discussion."

From the abstract:^[13]

"[We study] two planetary-scale collaborative systems: GitHub and Wikipedia. By analyzing the activity of over 2 million users on these platforms, we discover that the interplay between group size and productivity exhibits complex, previously-unobserved dynamics: the productivity of smaller groups scales super-linearly with group size, but saturates at larger sizes. This effect is not an artifact of the heterogeneity of productivity: the relation between group size and productivity holds at the individual level. People tend to do more when collaborating with more people. We propose a generative model of individual productivity that captures the non-linearity in collaboration effort. The proposed model is able to explain and predict group work dynamics in GitHub and Wikipedia by capturing their maximally informative behavioral features."

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.

This week, I'm thankful that I am going to start collaborating with Pine for On The Bright Side. I have been a fan of this Signpost feature for a long time and I'm excited to help make it happen. I'm also thankful for the photo displayed above. I find that photographs of nature have a tendency to appeal to me, and I think that this one is stunning. I like moss for its unique texture and just for being something that exists. I adore the leaves that can be seen every autumn where I live, and I miss seeing them everywhere I go. However, I'm also thankful for the comforting aspects of winter: hot chocolate, candy canes, and the warmth at home.

I am grateful to Clovermoss for agreeing to collaborate. I think that readers will appreciate seeing a new perspective and a new writing style. Also, because I will spend less time writing WMYHTW, I think that I will be able to spend a little more time on the pilot phase of NavWiki. NavWiki is progressing slowly but well.

The topic of writing reminds me of a video clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this scene, Captain Jean-Luc Picard receives a visit from the alien "Q". Q is powerful and unpredictable. Here, he offers to help Picard with drafting a speech (Youtube link).

• 
  Patrick Stewart, the actor who portrays Captain Picard
• 
  John de Lancie, the actor who portrayed Q

Finally, some thoughts about listening. Listening can be done casually, aggressively, carefully, poorly, well, and any number of other ways. Clovermoss appears to invest a lot of time and effort in listening. Captain Picard did too.

"One of the things that I’ve come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is I’m talking about myself. There was a sort of double action that occurred. In one sense Picard was expanding like this and at the same time he was also growing closer and closer to me as well and in some respect I suppose even had some influence on me. I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean-Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well."
— Patrick Stewart, quoted in BBC America

I wrote a proposal to make it possible for templates on Wikimedia sites to be global. It's not a new idea; in fact, it has been requested since 2004, which, if I'm not mistaken, is also the year that templates became available in the first place. But I do think that my proposal to make the global is the most detailed ever.

Now, what makes me happy this week is that the short version of this proposal is now available in 12 languages, including the six official languages of the United Nations, which is nicely symbolic: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates/Proposed_specification,_short_version

Even though I wrote most of the original text, I really, really want this idea to be "owned" by the whole Wikimedia community and [not] just by myself, so I'm glad that people are helping with translations, corrections, and comments, including negative comments. It is an important thing, and the more people participate in it, the better.

Happy new year! Let's make 2020 the year in which the first global modules will finally start appearing, and make the development of various community tools easier and more efficient for everyone. Cheers!

I have smiled several times this week, and I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful for the start of another year and another decade. I have observed and participated in a lot of WikiLove between editors wishing each other a happy new year. I'm excited for what 2020 will bring, as I'm anticipating some important milestones being reached this year in my life.

I saw an interesting thread on the mailing list about an astronaut editing Wikipedia from the ISS, and I'm thankful that my curiousity about Earth and beyond has been piqued. I was one of those kids who used to dream about being an astronaut. I still think of that career path as fascinating, although not one I am likely to take myself. I admire people who follow their dreams, whatever those dreams happen to be.

Announcement about the availability of statistics for media file requests:

Hi everybody,

Just in time for the holidays, we're announcing the addition of Media Requests to our metrics catalog. Over the last few months we've been working on a dataset offering request numbers for every single image, audio, video and document in the Wiki universe, since 2015.

This means we have 3 new metrics available in the Analytics Query Service:

• Media requests per referrer: e.g. how many images, audio, videos... have been accessed from English Wikipedia in the last month? 73 billion for November.
• Media requests per file: e.g. how many hits did this cool painting get in November? The answer is 483,791 hits.
• Top files by media requests: e.g. what was the most popular video yesterday, December 22nd? Fred Rogers testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications. Fun! You can check out the top 1000 media files for any month or day, for any media type.

Media requests is, in terms of absolute numbers, a huge dataset, so the per file and top metrics are still being loaded with data all the way to 2015. We expect this loading to finish in mid January.

You can read more about this in Wikitech. As usual if you have any questions about the dataset or the new metrics please send them our way here on the list or via Phabricator.

Happy holidays!

Francisco + the A team
--
Francisco Dans (él, he, 彼)
Software Engineer, Analytics Team
Wikimedia Foundation

— Email from the Analytics mailing list

I'm thankful this week for discovering an interesting task force: Wikipedia:Women in Green. The goals of this task force involve creating GA-class articles on women and women's works. One of the goals for this year is 20 new GAs. I've known about Wikipedia:Women in Red for a while now, and I'm thankful for the work everyone has put into both Women in Green and Women in Red. I'm amazed at the hard work that went into the creation of 14,480 articles for January–July 2019, and I'm looking forward to updated statistics for WiR for August-December 2019.

• 
  Logo for Women in Red
• 
  Logo for Women in Green

This week marks the 19th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia. I would like to highlight a 2019 editorial by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, that was published in The New York Times. The title of the editorial is, "I Invented the World Wide Web. Here's How We Can Fix It." Berners-Lee writes, "I wanted the web to serve humanity. It's not too late to live up to that promise... I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the world of open source software are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the web." Berners-Lee goes on to advocate for making improvements to the Web. I invite you to read the entire editorial.

Wikipedia is a high profile success story for the Internet and for humanity. Concidentally, next week English Wikipedia is likely to have its six millionth article. Here's a toast to honor those who have made this place be as amazing it is.

• 
  The world's first web server
• 
  A cluster diagram of websites' relations to Wikipedia in 2004
• 
  The current Wikipedia logo
• 
  The current OpenStreetMap logo
• 
  Tim Berners-Lee announcing the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation
• 
  Web servers of the Wikimedia Foundation

This week, I learned about Wiki Loves Monuments. The wording kind of sounded familiar at first, but I wasn't sure why. I didn't really know what Wiki Loves Monuments was and now I'm thankful that I do. A lot goes into a good photograph and really good photographs have a way of striking me with awe in a way that's hard to describe with words.

There were 25 announcements for the top winners and the winner was announced on January 14th. I love the way the sunlight shines in through the windows – it seems surreal, and it's almost like I'm standing there myself. I don't know what the temperature would be like inside the church, but I felt slightly cold looking at it. I'd imagine there isn't any heating currently in the building because it's abandoned, although maybe I'm thinking too much about details like that?

The 15th of January is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a civil rights leader in the United States. Every year, the first Monday after his birthday is a U.S. national holiday. English Wikiquote selected a quote from him as its Quote of the Day for 15 January 2020. Although my memories of this are vague, I think that my elementary school used the holiday as an occasion for students to learn about history. I am thankful for my teachers who taught us civics and the responsibilities of citizenship in a republic.

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 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.

What's making you happy this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.

For the WikiProject Report this month, we interviewed WikiProject Japan, a quality collaboration focused on improving, you guessed it, Japan related articles. This interview serves as the first in a series of country-related interviews. This series will appear every other month, and by the end of it, we will have seen how five different Projects edit and conduct their improvement to country-related articles. for this issue, we interviewed 4 users, Nihonjoe, WhisperToMe, Hoary, and Lullabying.

What motivated you to join the Project? Do you have any experience covering/learning about Japan and its history?

Nihonjoe: I founded it back in March 2006 because there wasn't a WikiProject covering Japan at the time. I thought it would be helpful to organize the efforts of maintaining Japan-related articles. I've lived in Japan and studied Japanese, so I have some experience with the topic (though I'm not an expert on anything, really). I enjoy learning more about a culture and history that is different from mine. It helps me better understand the world, and helps me learn to see things from differing perspectives.

WhisperToMe: I had an interest in Japanese anime and manga from when I was around 10 (when Pokemon aired on TV in Houston), and it led to an interest in Japanese culture in particular and East Asian cultures in general

Hoary: I really don't remember what motivated me. I live in Japan, so it might be expected that in some sense or other I'm learning about it all the time. (Such an expectation would be wildly optimistic.)

Lullabying: I don't think myself as an "official" member, per se, but I guess I am now! I noticed a lot of Japanese pop music articles were outdated and in major need of clean-up/synthesis, so I started helping out by translating news reports/research to help aid a better understanding of music releases and careers as a whole while trying to bring them to meet Wikipedia standards.

Do you participate in any task forces/subprojects under the main Project? If so, Does this affect how you help the main Project?

Nihonjoe: Yes. I've probably helped in all of them at one point or another. It doesn't really affect how I help with the main project. I mainly edit where my interest takes me.

WhisperToMe: I helped start a Tokyo task force back in the day, and from time to time I still contribute to Tokyo-related articles

Hoary: No.

Lullabying: I am active on the Anime and Manga WikiProject.

Does working on articles relating to a country differ from covering something like biology or military history? If so, how?

Nihonjoe: Probably, because a country-specific topic can cover all of those things. I've worked on articles related to military history and Japan, animals and plants of Japan, and many other topics. It lets me dip my toe into many different topics, and gain a broad appreciation of the overall topic of Japan. As far as the technical aspect goes, however, it's very similar to working on any other topic. You have to make sure you have enough reliable sources to show the notability of the topic, you have to learn how to properly structure an article so the information is presented logically and clearly, you have to make sure the information is presented in a neutral manner. All of the things that make solid articles are the same across the board, really.

WhisperToMe: Each country and culture has its own conventions and foibles, and therefore country-specific projects have to take into account specific history, conventions, and cultural practices. With biology and hard sciences the subjects are often similar or the same no matter what country is involved.

Hoary: Somebody writing about biology really ought to have made a systematic study of it, in class, with critical teachers. (Bluntly, I want the material I read about biology to come from people with higher degrees in biology. And not from degree mills either.) Ditto for a great number of other subjects. And very likely ditto for articles in particular areas related to Japan. This isn't true for relatively humdrum stuff about Japan: an article about a particular city, for example. So in this sense, it's easier. Unsurprisingly, the huge majority of material about Japan is in Japanese. My own ability in Japanese is alas fossilized at an intermediate level. More surprisingly, there's little from Japan that's freely available on the web: look up a given subject, and typically all one sees are entries in anonymous blogs, PR puffs, or the first paragraphs of news articles whose full visibility costs money. If one wants the kind of material that might appear in a newspaper, one has to go to a major library and look it up in the databases of Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi....

Lullabying: I would say that the main issues I encountered really narrowed down to difference in culture and trying to see if the information I would include could match the formats standardized by other WikiProjects. For example, a lot of music releases are double A-side singles, which aren't a thing anymore in most countries... and there's also the general assumption that Japanese TV broadcasts make a set number of episodes for a show and don't announce if a series has been cancelled after its ending. There's also the fact that most in-depth coverage of Japanese media is usually in print, which makes sources difficult to access.

On a whole, are there any large problems that this Project faces right now? If there are, do you think they are possible to address? If not, are there any problems you see arising in the future?

Nihonjoe: I agree with WhisperToMe: the jawiki doesn't have as many good sources, so it makes it more difficult for us if we're trying to port information over from there. As most of the people on jawiki are living in Japan, they have much easier access to sources there than we do. There have been many articles on notable topics deleted here simply because we didn't have access to the sources in Japan. The deletion process here is extremely biased against non-English sources and topics. If it hasn't been discussed in an English-language source, there are a fair number of editors who have to be reminded that sources are not required to be in English, and that it is much more difficult to get sources from a country where there has been less effort at getting older sources online (or even more recent ones...some newspapers in Japan remove online articles after only a short period).

WhisperToMe: I haven't been involved in Japan-area articles as much now as I have been in the past. One issue is that JAwiki does not have as much referencing for articles and therefore if Japan-subject articles on ENwiki are put on AFD, it becomes harder to find supporting sources to keep the article. I think the JAwiki community should be asked to consider increasing general article sourcing. Getting familiarity with CiNii (Japanese research database) and having friends in Japan get scans of freely available materials in Japanese libraries (I took a trip to Tokyo in October of last year partly to get access to a document at a Tokyo library) really helps!

Lullabying: My experience with editing is mostly about Japanese music and film, so I'll talk about this part only. I don't think there's enough people agreeing how to synthesize the articles (i.e. member birthdates and official colors) -- because the majority of Japanese music is available in Japan services only, the articles are mostly only maintained by hardcore fans. I also think it's very difficult to get feedback because some music groups are niche and information outside of Japanese is often unavailable. I often find myself going to WikiProject Korea (because some groups cross over to that country) for advice because they are more active. I think it might be helpful if we had a list of reliable online sources even, because it would be resourceful as a starting point to weed out any websites with a dubious reputation (since some articles are listing gossip websites as a source

What are some of the Project's main goals? Do you think they will be met in the near future? If so, how? If not, why not?

Nihonjoe: The main goals have always been to:

• Increase coverage of Japan-related topics on the enwiki
• Create a body of articles that accurately depicts the history and culture of Japan and the Japanese people
• Bring as many articles to Good or Featured status as possible. As of 23 July 2024, there are 93,348 articles within the scope of WikiProject Japan, of which 183 are featured. This makes up 1.36% of the articles on Wikipedia and 1.67% of featured articles and lists. Including non-article pages, such as talk pages, redirects, categories, etcetera, there are 240,152 pages in the project.

WhisperToMe: I'm not and haven't been the main spiritus movens of the project, but I would assume that a big goal would be to increase knowledge about Japan in the English-speaking world and to make available information previously only known in Japanese.

Lullabying: The general goal of this WikiProject is to improve understanding of Japanese culture and to provide more information. I'm fairly certain that they will be met in the near future, especially as more Japanese sources are moving to web and making it easier to archive. Also, Japanese media is slowly but surely getting more accessible as they're now making the move to marketing themselves globally.

How can a newer user looking to help with the Project do so? What advice would you give to such editors?

Nihonjoe: Definitely learn how to properly source an article using verifiable and reliable sources. Once you know how to do that, we have a big list of items needing attention. Some are easy to do, and others will take a bit of work to fix. Any progress, however, is progress, so contributing in any positive manner is appreciated.

WhisperToMe: After becoming familiar with sourcing requirements, he/she can use Wikipedia:RX to get access to journal articles or book chapters that can be used to build content often seen in academic circles. Also I would suggest that if he/she has ample time and money as well as a keen interest, learning Japanese in order to access Japanese sources would be awesome!

Lullabying: Use archiving tools to archive your sources, especially since Japanese news outlets tend to not keep them online for very long!

Do you have any last words you would like to share with our readers?

Nihonjoe: Japan has been a passion of mine for decades now. I enjoy learning about its culture, people, history, language, and so on. I hope the work I do will be helpful to those just starting on a journey to learn more about Japan. I also hope people will join the project and help improve and expand the articles we have here on Wikipedia.

WhisperToMe: I'm very happy to support East Asian and Southeast Asian Wikipedia communities. In the Hong Kong area I've been looking for a core of Japanese expats who could serve as a bridge between the Japanese and Hong Kong communities, and I encourage more expats to get involved with Wikipedia in general.

Lullabying: I'm glad to have helped in making information about Japanese music, media, and pop culture more accessible to you! I hope it has sparked your interest in some way and inspired you to share your support!

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Do you want to see a particular WikiProject interviewed? Any questions you want answered? I want your suggestions! Please feel more than welcome to post advice on the talk page!

Sooner or later every Wikipedian will enjoy their 15 minutes of Wiki-fame. Mercurywoodrose is now getting his, having won the 6,000,000 pool by most closely predicting when Wikipedia would record its 6,000,000th article. He predicted that the milestone would be reached on December 1, 2019. Second place goes to ϢereSpielChequers who predicted September 12, 2019. The Signpost proposed a serious interview with Mercurywoodrose. He did not cooperate. -S

• Signpost: What are you going to do with the $6,000,000 prize? (just kidding!)
• Mercurywoodrose: I don't know, but if i get in a catastrophic test plane accident and have my legs, one arm, and one eye destroyed, I know what I am doing with $6,000,000. Gentlepersons, they can rebuild me. They have the technology. They have the capability to build the world's first bionic Wikipedian. Mercurywoodrose will be that editor. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster, with more reliable sources.
• SP: Do you remember why you made the December 2019 prediction 6 years ago?
• MW: I figured I knew just enough about mathematics to make a somewhat accurate back of the napkin estimate for the date, factoring in a bit of the slowdown in new article creation, and believing that this downward trend in new articles would continue. I'm sure I must have done an actual calculation, but the methods I used would probably give an actual statistician apoplexy. It was a miseducated guess.
• SP: What's the biggest change you've seen in Wikipedia in that time (other than a couple of million articles)?
• MW: A team of editors with way too much time on their hands created an automation system for creating new Portals. What's a Portal, you ask? Exactly... On a side note, the biggest change that did NOT occur is that the Deletionists and the Inclusionists are still engaged in a Manichean struggle, with neither side winning. The proof of this is that the number of articles has not gone to zero, decreased by a factor of Thanos, or expanded to infinity and beyond.
• SP: How many articles have you created?
• MW: 310 using created by me, and adding up the total articles by HAND. Computers! Ha! Who needs them! I did get into the top 400 editors by edit count, which of course is a meaningless measure, but it was fun while it lasted.
• SP: What's your prediction for the 8,000,000th article? (the 7,000,000 pool is closed)
• MW: I cannot predict that, it's beyond my processing capacity as a quasi-quantum computer, but I know what i would LIKE it to be. An article about ME, of course. Hopefully for something worthwhile, not notorious. First Wikipedian to be shot into the Sun for being too sarcastic? Well, that's sort of both...
• SP: What's your favorite article out of the last million created (since November 1, 2015)?
• MW: Aside from my own articles created during this time, of which my favorite subject is Jen Bartel (she rocks), I don't know. How about new articles on things I like? My first thought, I really loved Joker. That article was created, oh, wow, on my birthday! I didn't expect that!.
• SP: Anything else you want to add? Feel free to be serious, philosophical, sentimental, humorous, thank your mother, etc.
• MW: I'm a little sad that new editors will be facing an ever more complete work, with fewer areas to expand without being an expert. Perhaps we should consider erasing Wikipedia every few decades, and recreating it from scratch, to give new editors that initial experience of joy and wonder that they can be part of this, not just an observer, by clicking that innocent little "edit" tab. But maybe there is hope, maybe that sense of wonder will persist into the future. I know I fell in love with Wikipedia, and while I'm no longer obsessed with editing, I may fall in love all over again.

In December, Wikipedia lost one of the best editors in its history, Brian Boulton. With over 100 featured articles to his name and more than 14 years experience, Brian was certainly an editor to look out for. Today, we delve into his life and great contributions to this project.

“	I cannot begin to say how sorry I am. I had the privilege of meeting Brian and his daughter in London once, and this news breaks my heart. Brian was an amazing man and a true scholar, and the world is a lesser place without him. If his family and friends are reading, please accept my heartfelt sympathy for your loss. He is a man I will truly never forget.	”
— Kafka Liz, source.

Brian Boulton was born on 4 July 1937. When he was 7 years old, he and his brother David lived with their Aunt Ena in Liverpool. This was at the end of World War II, and that year in Liverpool would leave a profound impact on him. Despite only living there a short time, as recently as 2011 he still considered himself Liverpudlian.

He married his wife Barbara in 1958, and in 2018 they celebrated 60 years of marriage. Together they raised three children.

“	Brian Boulton, a retired academic, died on 9 December 2019. He joined Wikipedia as early as 2003, editing as an IP until late 2007. At first he worked mainly on polar history articles and biographies, but later branched into classical music, literature, politics and history, with a curious taste for marine disasters from time to time. He was responsible for getting more than 100 articles to FA, and at the same time was a tireless, patient and immensely helpful reviewer. He was unfailingly courteous, even to the few editors who persistently irritated him: he had private nicknames for a few of the worst offenders, but never let his exasperation show in his contributions. A fair few London-based Wikipedians had the pleasure of meeting him, and he was as convivial in real life as he was kindly and wise on Wikipedia. "He was a mentor to us all", said one tribute on his talk page, and indeed he was.	”
— SchroCat, source.

Before registering an account on Wikipedia, Brian Boulton made this edit to add some information to Kenneth Baker. Though, after suffering from a serious illness in real life, Brianboulton would soon register his username in November 2007. His first user page stated his intentions quite clearly.

It was not particularly long before Brian managed to get his first two articles to Featured article status; though he was not without guidance from SandyGeorgia.

“	Dear Brian, I want to thank you for all the most excellent work you have done recently to rewrite the article on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition; it was epic in its own right! I, for one, very much appreciate the many improvements you have brought to the article. Thank you for all your contributions to our encyclopedia. With kind regards; Patrick.	”
— Pdebee, source.

Until the week of his death, Brian Boulton continued his long history of contributions to Wikipedia. On 30 November 2019, he received his last token of thanks from Pdebee: the Epic Barnstar (depicted above).

One of Brianboulton's long-term projects was trying to bring Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration to featured topic status. As of the time of writing, the following reflects the progress that has been made so far:

Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration
Southern Cross Expedition Discovery Expedition Scottish National Antarctic Expedition Australasian Antarctic Expedition Swedish Antarctic Expedition	Nimrod Expedition Terra Nova Expedition Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition Second German Antarctic Expedition Belgian Antarctic Expedition French Antarctic Expedition	Ross Sea party Shackleton–Rowett Expedition Amundsen's South Pole expedition Japanese Antarctic Expedition Gauss expedition

Brianboulton's family has set up a memorial site dedicated to remembering his life. Those who feel inclined to do so, are encouraged to donate to Mission Aviation Fellowship in honor of Brian here.