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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2021-02-28. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Disinformation report: A "billionaire battle" on Wikipedia: Sex, lies, and video (8,840 bytes · 💬)

  • Crazy stuff. ~ HAL333 22:09, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
  • The most bizarre bad neighbors dispute I've ever heard of. -Indy beetle (talk) 23:58, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
    • You gotta admit blasting out your neighbor's party with industrial grade speakers (if that's what really happened) has a certain something to it. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • So we're allowed to WP:DOX editors now as long as it's in a Signpost article? Let's just wipe our ass with civility policy and legalize doxxing for SPAs now I guess. They don't deserve any rights here and can go fuck themselves. The Signpost has really fallen from what it once was. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 03:54, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Not sure if this qualifies... Firestar464 (talk) 04:49, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Totally agree. ~ HAL333 04:21, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Pardon me if I don't shed many tears for "editors" who are WP:NOTHERE. Ntsimp (talk) 13:25, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • @Chess: Can you explain where you see the doxxing here? I guess I'm not reading closely enough because I don't see where The Signpost is revealing any editor's legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organisation, telephone number, email address, other contact information, or photograph (per WP:DOX). I don't think "this SPA is probably John Doe, or someone being paid by John Doe", counts as doxxing. If it is, then Wikipedia would need to give up the fight against paid editing and COI editing. ``` t b w i l l i e ` $1.25 ` 18:24, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
      • These are definitely not likeable people, but it's the principle that counts. ~ HAL333 23:45, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
      • You said it yourself. Revealing an editor's legal name or their work isn't ok. There's SPAs in this article who are called out as working for or being "John Doe".
      • For that matter, them being SPAs doesn't fucking matter. SPAs aren't banned. SPAs aren't exempt from civility or doxxing policies. They're not second class editors that are not entitled to protection. SPA is a vaguely defined pejorative term used by the more equal editors when they want to shit all over another editor's motivations but want to pretend like they're not violating the civility policy in doing so. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 02:23, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
        • @Chess: Please forget I said "SPA" -- I only used the term because it's in the article. I didn't mean to imply that anyone is less worthy of protection. Agreed, so-called "SPAs" are not exempt from civility, DOX, AGF, etc. My argument is that there's no doxxing here. Based on what's presented in this article, I still have no idea what is the legal name, place of residence or employer of the editor(s) behind the usernames cited. Is a multimillionaire likely to be doing his own dirty work on Wikipedia? I'd give it no better than 50-50 odds. Can we even narrow the identity down to salaried employees of the multimillionaire? No. I think it's just as likely that the cited usernames belong to (a) a "reputation defender" contractor who does regular work for the principal; (b) an independent pay-editor hired for this purpose only; (c) a friend or relative of the principal, doing him a favor or currying a favor; (d) more than one person, possibly some combination of the foregoing. Any of these could be any person anywhere in the world, and I see no attempt in this article to identify any off-Wiki attribute of any editor, aside from the observation that whoever's behind these usernames seem(s) interested in promoting or denigrating certain specific individuals. Even if moved to do so, I'd have no idea how to contact, harass offline or publicly expose any actual Wikipedia contributor. The only people I can identify in this story are the principals, and the only facts I can confirm or even assume about them are the same things that were already reported publicly in the cited mainstream press articles. ``` t b w i l l i e ` $1.25 ` 03:17, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
  • There should be broader&softer protection to prevent libel and vandalism on BLP articles. Implement WP:Timed flagged revisions -- Vis M (talk) 07:53, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Only no one has proven that Flagged revisions works, let alone is worth the effort to maintain it. For one thing, implementing it would require all active volunteers to review changes on tens of thousands of little-trafficked articles for it to work -- on top of their current voluntary contributions. -- llywrch (talk) 21:14, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
      • This proposal does not need it. All newbie edits will get autoreviewed after about 2 hours, if no reviewer revert or accept them. It just adds a delay of 2 hours.- Vis M (talk) 04:38, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
        • My original point stands: no one has proven this or any similar technology makes a difference. It was implemented on an experimental basis some years back, but instead of evaluating the results -- which could have supported adoption -- Jimmy Wales insisted that it simply be adopted; when the required 75% threshold for adoption was not met, he then urged that we follow WP:IAR & put it in force anyway. Of course that did not happen, but Wales lost a lot of clout in unsuccessfully pushing for it. Provide evidence that any form of flagged revisions helps to fight vandalism, & we will consider the proposal. -- llywrch (talk) 18:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
          • Maybe there's evidence of the effectiveness of sighting on German Wikipedia? - Bri.public (talk) 22:59, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
            • There very well could be evidence on de.wikipedia. However, during the debate to implement it on en.wikipedia no one bothered to share any of it, let alone evaluate the results of the test. And I want to be clear about this: I'm agnostic about the effectiveness of Flagged revisions; it might actually help with managing content on Wikipedia. But no one has bothered to provide any evidence to support this. Only handwaving & belief worthy of religious conviction that it will work. -- llywrch (talk) 10:26, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

Update, November 2023 conviction

According to the NY Times [1] Nygard was convicted in Toronto of 4 of 5 counts of sexual assault, which seems to call for a sentence of only 10 years. But his is 82 now, so it might be a life sentence. He faces 2 other trials on similar charges in Montreal and Winnipeg. Then he is set to be extradited to NY for a very serious 9 count charge (underaged rape, etc.) He at one point agreed to the extradition, but is now fighting it. He lost a civil case to Bacon in May for $200+ million, but I think he's broke and can't pay it - so it's mainly symbolic now. There seem to be other civil cases outstanding as well. At least now we can say he is a convicted felon. Smallbones(smalltalk) 03:43, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Featured content: A Love of Knowledge, for Valentine's Day (687 bytes · 💬)

"1 January through 9 January." What? GamerPro64 07:33, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

That is correct, the previous issue covered 12 December through 31 December. Bri.public (talk) 17:40, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
The plan is to be one month behind. As explained in the introduction, not been a good month, so it's the bit I had done in advance, with catchup planned. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.8% of all FPs 17:50, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Gallery: What is Black history and culture? (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-02-28/Gallery

In the media: Corporate influence at OSM, Fox watching the hen house (13,749 bytes · 💬)

  • How ironic that the people complaining about Wikipedia's "left-wing bias" do so from a very pro-american and anti-left wing perspective. They also usually only cite American political articles as examples of Wikipedia's supposed bias. Believe it or not, politics EXIST outside of the United States. X-Editor (talk) 22:49, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
It's also an easy excuse by Wikipedia to avoid answering claims of bias on American political topics, as we just saw. Sir Joseph (talk) 23:09, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
The Fox News article's accusation was discussed on the talk page of the Communism article and the consensus seemed to be that Fox's arguments were biased nonsense and that they completely ignored basic Wikipedia rules when accusing us of a bias. Don't fall for their nonsense, It's just conservatives playing the victim. I don't deny that there are bias problems when it comes to Wikipedia, but one of those problems sure as hell isn't that we're biased against conservatives. X-Editor (talk) 04:48, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
They are also the same people who claim that social media is biased against them, despite all of the reliable evidence showing the exact opposite is true. If that's the case, which it is, then why should we trust them when they say the same about us? X-Editor (talk) 04:59, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
True, politics does exist outside of the USA, but here in India as well, it is the conservatives who are babbling about Wikipedia's "bias". I have a theory that it is those who support authoritarianism regardless of their ideology and country, who are babbling. 45.251.33.136 (talk) 13:23, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
I made two points. One, yes we have a bias problem. Two, the aforementioned publications have an even worse bias problem. I think those points still stand. -Indy beetle (talk) 01:23, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
The Washington Post article doesn't say anything about us being biased against conservatives, which is the particular claim made against us by the Fox News article. X-Editor (talk) 05:09, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • I find many discussions of bias to be way off. They start with the assumption that they *know* the truth. But we almost *never know the complete truth*. What we need is something fairly easy to measure, assuming opinions on what is the truth of an issue can be fairly easily quantified. So say the issue is the truth of the sentence "Barrack Obama was a great president". I might score the truth of that statement as, say 80 out of 100. Others might rate it much higher, say 99. Still others might score it much lower, say 3. After getting scores from a given population you can then find the median and declare that "unbiased" for the given population. Unbiased here doesn't mean the truth. In fact the person holding that view might be a complete ignoramus and a dunderhead. Also the meaning of "unbiased" will change over time and across age groups and geography. The unbiased position on Wikipedia, in this conception will likely be completely different from the unbiased position in the US, and is certainly different from the unbiased position among Fox viewers. Smallbones

(smalltalk) 01:00, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Well said. X-Editor (talk) 05:01, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Larry Sanger
@lsanger
 Twitter logo, a stylized blue bird

All, if I happen to be caught up in this purge—not that I’m a big Qanon supporter, but I’m interested and I’m friends with many who are—then go to LarrySanger.org for future updates from me.

22 Jul 2020[1]

References

  1. ^ Sanger, Larry [@lsanger] (22 July 2020). "All, if I happen to be caught up in this purge—not that I'm a big Qanon supporter, but I'm interested and I'm friends with many who are—then go to LarrySanger.org for future updates from me" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 23 July 2020 – via Twitter.
— Newslinger talk 02:13, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Oh great. Larry's officially an idiot. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:55, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Either that, or he's sold his soul to the devil aka the far-right (except that Faust gains knowledge and worldly pleasures while Sanger gains the ability to naturally behave like an idiot). 45.251.33.136 (talk) 13:49, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Who would win, the Ayn Rand reader Jimbo or the "my friends are Qpeople" Larry? -Gouleg🛋️ (Stalk • Hound) 14:49, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Chad Jimbo vs. Virgin Sanger. X-Editor (talk) 20:42, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Anytime a news source quotes Larry Sanger like he's an authority on Wikipedia being "biased" my eyes roll so far back into my skull that I think I'm going to tear my optic nerves. Hemiauchenia (talk) 02:59, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
A real news source would never quote Sanger (unless they also quoted Wales or someone who disagreed with Sanger to make their news article show both sides of the story). 45.251.33.136 (talk) 13:49, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Sanger fell down alt-right pipeline and has lost it completely. It's really sad to see people fall victim to the pipeline, especially our co-founder, but It's never too late to get out of the pipeline either. X-Editor (talk) 05:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
So he's a moderate supporter? Nardog (talk) 21:02, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Sanger was discussed at the Fringe Theories noticeboard last summer. His Twitter feed these days is retweets of "stolen election" propaganda, support for Rand Paul's transphobic remarks, boosting Zero Hedge, whining about Kermit the Frog being "cancelled", calling Naomi Wolf "one of the good gals", etc. I stopped scrolling when I got to Trump is the only president to have been acquitted twice of utterly ridiculous charges brought by a corrupt Establishment [2]. Not only is he a crank, he's a boring crank. XOR'easter (talk) 20:03, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Oh god, he's transphobic too. X-Editor (talk) 20:41, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • The story Lena is entertaining and thought-provoking – thanks for the link. Note that the author supposes that a Wikipedia article of 2075 will not have any obvious sources or citations – presumably the fact-checking has been automated using brain scans of suitable gnomes. See also: our article Lenna, which inspired the story's title. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:57, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • I find it funny when a conservative blames leftists for getting their way because they "work harder" than conservatives. Perhaps if conservatives just worked harder online, and pulled themselves up by their lan cables, they would succeed. Some have already started their own "Conservapedia" in response, but it's a shadow of Wikipedia and it seems they will not be satisfied until they control the narrative on all platforms. I'd suggest the Washington Times make the first move by examining their own partisan news bias. I suspect it would be similar to what this article alleges but in the opposite direction. Ottawajin (talk) 04:14, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Gentrification captures part of what's going on in OSM, but doesn't really get to the root of it (although it provides a convenient, time-worn narrative so that everyone knows which side to line up on). OSM has been very effectively gatekept for years, not just in favor of individuals over corporations, but in favor of a very artisanal style of mapping. If you're biking around your neighborhood with a GPS and a Go-Pro, you're doing it "right". Any other approach? You're an "armchair mapper" and a second-class citizen. This has some advantages (experts can't pop out of a narrow silo and impose an impractical tagging scheme on everyone else), but it also condemns OSM to an ontology that's perpetually in flux, because fixation of any part on it would infringe on the local mapper's sacred right to tag things as he or she thinks best. In addition to corporate mapping and the issue of attribution, there's been a certain amount of agita simmering since 2019 over the role of iD, which is by far the predominant editor used on OSM. It has preset support for any number of tags, so developer choices in that regard will strongly influence the tagging used by new mappers, and hence the "facts on the ground" of what tags are actually used in OSM. That's shifted the balance of power to control tagging towards iD developers and away from active local mappers with social capital, and has been bitterly resented. Ultimately, I suspect the gatekeeping is going to collapse simply because OSM has set expectations that can't be delivered under the artisanal model. It can create an extremely rich map, but it can't scale to reliably deliver that richness across the entire map. I think eventually the pragmatic goal of "We want a super-detailed map of the world", backed as it is by both corporations and the map consumer in general, is going to roll over the "and it must be lovingly hand-built by individuals on the ground" part of the OSM philosophy. Choess (talk) 06:30, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
  • This is the first I heard that Commons actually hosted child pornography. I remember back in the day Sanger making that claim, & the resulting uproar (documented here), but when all was said & done, no one ever found exploitive pictures or videos of children that were clearly created for sexual purposes. In other words, I've yet to see any constructive criticism from Sanger concerning Wikipedia since he left. He appears to be unhappy that Wikipedia has thrived without him, & bashes it at every chance. (Not to say Wikipedia doesn't have its faults, but so far Sanger has managed to fail to identify even one of them.) -- llywrch (talk) 21:43, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
Agreed. If Sanger complained about Wikipedia's actual faults, such as systemic bias and gender bias, then I'd be much more willing to give his criticism a chance. X-Editor (talk) 04:53, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

"Lena" was very interesting and quite fascinating.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 21:09, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

  • "Over the years [Larry Sanger] has made a few good points". That's a very generous statement. Kaldari (talk) 22:32, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

News and notes: Maher stepping down (3,678 bytes · 💬)

  • In my view, Maher did a great job. There will always be some disagreements between the WMF and Wikimedians, but on the whole her tenure was productive and effective. Can only hope her replacement is equally committed to the idea of Wikipedia. Ganesha811 (talk) 21:38, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
    • I'll second that. I'm very sorry to see her go. Smallbones(smalltalk) 21:48, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
  • I honestly can't think of anything she's done for the other non-Wikipedia projects. They're just as ostracized as before. ~★ nmaia d 23:44, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Maher's tenure will always be a mixed bag. Most editors will probably remember FRAMBAN when they think of her, though things were mostly smooth the first few years she was here. I think she chose the right time to leave. UCOC was controversial idea, and its probably for the better that a new executive director will have the chance to shape its implementation. -Indy beetle (talk) 23:53, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
  • She's been a particularly good spokesperson when representing the projects to a non-wiki audience. I saw her speak and answer questions at Melbourne Knowledge week back in 2017 and she did a good job of advocating for the movement and community to an audience that was still relatively suspicious of the concepts. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 04:39, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • I don't have an opinion either way, but I wish her well. Regarding the image up above, Carlos Figueroa is a great photographer. I would like to see more from him. Viriditas (talk) 07:57, 6 March 2021 (UTC)
  • The strangest thing about Maher to me was hiring Victoria Coleman as CTO. Why was a DARPA official who had built surveillance circuitry into Intel coprocessors after being involved in privacy scandals considered a good choice? Coleman went off to a NGO nominally about Africa, and then on to lead DARPA until the end of the Trump administration, and now is back at the NGO. 2601:647:4D00:2C40:5DE9:6342:9B8:27CC (talk) 19:27, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Maher did a very good job as a roving ambassador for the WMF and was certainly a good talker and understood Wikipedia policies, but she obviously got bored with being grounded. She was probably not so good at engaging in day-to-day management tasks in the way that the community expected her to be, but to go by her talk page, perhaps she didn't consider ground control as part of her brief - and maybe in fact it wasn't, and it left D/B Level running around with no practical guidance and making up their own rules on an ad hoc basis. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:25, 17 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Despite some of her questionable decisions at WMF, I still respect Maher and wishing her all the best.--Vulphere 05:58, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

News from the WMF: Who tells your story on Wikipedia (10,969 bytes · 💬)

  • Happy to hear that the author's paternal family hails from La Grange, North Carolina. I spent a lot of time there fishing this past summer. I see the point that "who tells your story matters" repeated a lot, especially in regards to Wikipedia. There's no doubt that our contributor base has resulted in the selection of the content we've covered (i.e. a preference for representing Western topics), but I'm curious if there's actually any empirical evidence if the race of the editor (since that's the salient factor here in the context of African American history) effects how a topic on Wikipedia is covered. Would the Barack Obama article (useful because as an FA it should represent our best work) look any different if it were written by 90% black Americans instead of the probable inverse? -Indy beetle (talk) 01:14, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • @Indy beetle: Our articles on unarmed black people who have been killed by the police typically favor the POV of the police, go to great lengths to avoid any mention of race (although this has changed somewhat in the past year), and emphasize any criminality or alleged criminality of the victim. I think that's one example of how our coverage might be different "if it were written by 90% black Americans instead of the probable inverse". Kaldari (talk) 00:06, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
      • Here's an even better example. Traditional Maya medicine is still practiced by thousands of Maya people in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. If you travel to these places you can readily find locally published books on the subject which detail the contemporary practices. If you read our article, Maya medicine, however, you would conclude that no one has practiced Maya medicine since the 16th century and you would likely infer that the Maya people don't even exist anymore. That's a great example of how lack of editor diversity hurts how we cover topics, not just whether we cover them at all. Kaldari (talk) 01:35, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Interesting piece but the author seems to misunderstand that editors are not supposed to bring their own individual perspectives to articles and are meant to summarize what reliable sources have to say on the subject. We are not looking for editors that wish to contribute their own knowledge and someone with these lofty credentials should understand that. For that matter, while I am happy the OP has had a good relationship with his father; his stories don't really count as a reliable source for the purposes of Wikipedia. I would hope that this doesn't signal that the WMF wishes to mandate that Wikipedia begin to accept storytellers as appropriate sources for writing articles. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 04:04, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • *her. My impression is that the WMF has disliked both the RS and notability policies for a while now, though fortunately they aren't able to do anything to them. --Yair rand (talk) 04:56, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • I don't think the author misunderstands policy at all, but is simply making a point that Wikipedia's editor demographic shapes the depth and breadth of content that we cover. Wikipedians don't make up the content on the project, but we certainly determine (inadvertently) what is covered and in how much detail. WP:SYSTEMICBIAS is a real phenomenon, and not everything is a battle between editors and the foundation.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:53, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Of course we want editors to contribute their own knowledge. Do you think the people who work on articles like SKI combinator calculus and Chemically induced dimerization and Porphyrian tree have no relevant knowledge about the topic before they start reading sources? That anyone with access to the sources could write those articles? I didn't see anything weird at all about the clause contribute your knowledge to Wikipedia to build our global history but the focus of the article is more on who tells your story matters, which is indeed very directly relevant to a project where editors are summarising sources rather than writing off the top of their heads about a topic. — Bilorv (talk) 11:16, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
      • We want editors to contribute knowledge they have access to. That's different than an editor contributing their own knowledge. For many specialized topics it can be helpful to have a personal knowledge of the topic in question but editor's should be using their own knowledge to summarize and coalesce reliable sources into a Wikipedia article, not to directly incorporate their own knowledge into an article. The ultimate goal of Wikipedia is to make existing knowledge more accessible; not to engage in knowledge creation by being a publisher of primary sources (editors' own experiences). That being said there are many cases where marginalized communities can use their own access to knowledge to contribute to Wikipedia (I'd imagine there are a lot of RSes currently being ignored by the avg Wikipedia editor) but that needs to be distinguished from contributing their own knowledge itself which is original research. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 19:41, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Once upon a time there was a wikimedia editor who read Janeen's article. They weren't very clever, but they knew what they liked. One of the things they liked was acronyms. They loved to know what acronyms meant. So they followed the link for OKRs, and found another wonderful page "A Foundation for Inclusion With OKRs". When I say "wonderful" this is because they found themselves wondering "What are OKRs?" So their next step was click on a link for "OKRs 101". Here they were offered 2 hours of videos, including the first one by John Doerr, a Menlo Park Venture capitalist who sadly has not quite made it into the 100 richest americans. The page did not reveal what OKR stood for, although there were a number of clues. For example they are not KPIs. Our intrepid editor knew what they were Key Performance Indicators. They had worked for a social landlord who used them to hide the atrocious quality of the service they gave their residents. For example, "If the door entry breaks, it will be fixed in 24 hours". Translated into reality this means that if the door entry is not fixed within 24 hrs the social landlord had no incentive to get it fixed, it would then be made a low priority and often was not fixed for several weeks. Our editor was left still in a state of wonder: why use three letters where two would do: BS.Leutha (talk) 11:31, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    This mystery Wikimedian could always have just saved those two hours and gone to our page on the subject 😛 It's not perfect, but seems to be a mostly-sourced starter explanation...  — Amakuru (talk) 13:34, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    As I said the mystery Wikimedian were not very clever. However, they know they aren't very clever, which is an advantage over the people promoting this rubbish who think they are clever. They could have put a link to OKR, but that would be a different story. If we reserve the term "very clever" for, say the most clever 10%, then an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" needs to cater for the vast majority who do not fit this category. Indeed, why waste time on the "very clever": their enhanced abilities means they can sort out all these issues very easily!Leutha (talk) 17:57, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Where is this survey that actually finally tried to quantify how many US editors were black? And no, I don't buy this line that "we value privacy" and therefore we don't want to ask editors in an anonymous survey whether they're black, gay, Muslim, Mormon, Latino, etc. That mostly comes off as saying "we value diversity, but not nearly enough to actually do anything about quantifying it." It comes off a bit like implying that we expect the underrepresentation is absolutely massive and we'd rather not have the bad press. GMGtalk 14:07, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • So more diversity would be good, both because expert knowledge makes it easier to find good sources, and also people write about what interests them. However, it does have vague connotations of wanting a change in RS/notability rules, though I still think that if they genuinely want that, make a new project with different rules. Nosebagbear (talk) 15:38, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Given the title, the picture is misleading as it is not representative of the known editor demographics... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:15, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
  • "If major media outlets aren't giving equal coverage to topics such as women in STEM, or to milestones in Black history, for example, then there will be no Wikipedia article on those topics, because there will be no citations to build from." -- Uh, many of us don't use content from "media outlets". We use books & articles, often but not always printed on paper & bound into volumes. The problem I often encounter in working on topics that are not either mainstream or popular on the Internet is gaining access to those books & articles, either in print or electronic form. (And if an admittedly upper-middle-class white male in the US has problems getting ahold of these materials, I'm sure BIPOC people around the world encounter even more difficulties. Public libraries are an endangered resource.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:38, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Simply wanted to say thank you for the work you have done and your thoughtful comments.174.250.65.10 (talk) 05:31, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Opinion: The call for feedback on community seats is a distraction (5,334 bytes · 💬)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:18, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Playing devil's advocate for a moment, the board has certain legal duties (under American law, since the WMF is incorporated in the United States) to ensure the organisation is properly run and the money is going where it's supposed to go. This makes sure things happen like the staff get paid and the servers stay on. Being a good or popular Wikipedia editor or being able to win an election is not necessarily the same skill set. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 22:45, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
    • Yes, HJ, it's fine to have appointed board members with auditing expertise who can assure that the money went where it was supposed to go, but we should have good or popular Wikipedia editors who can win an election deciding where it should go. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:36, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • What kind of diversity? Gender and ethnicity diversity? Diversity of wikis (i.e. have a lot of people on the board from small wikis)? My first thought is that the composition of the board should be proportional to the composition of Wikipedia users, both in terms of gender/ethnicity and of size of Wiki. For example, en-wiki has 41 million users, and all Wikipedias summed together have 94 million users, so one idea would be to give en-Wikipedians 44% of the seats. Fair? Yes. Diverse enough? Dunno. Guess that's for the people to decide. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:23, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • This piece is fair criticism. I've said for a long time that Wikipedia desperately needs actual leadership, in place of the ignore all rules "consensus" process that serves to continue a status-quo of endless fighting where the most persistent win, regardless of supposed policy. However the expansion of non-community board seats in combination with a Universal Code of Conduct that has been approved by the board, but which I'm sure a large proportion of the community will not approve in its current form, has me concerned. It seems to me that this, especially in light of their metastasized budget, looks more like a takeover by corporate bureaucracy than actual leadership, let alone leadership the community wants to follow. There's already talk about the worst case, where the community forks the project and runs it on their own servers... ··gracefool 💬 10:17, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Recent research: Take an AI-generated flashcard quiz about Wikipedia; Wikipedia's anti-feudalism (7,058 bytes · 💬)

  • @HaeB: if I get 8.5/9 do I get a barnstar? I understand that you can't give everybody a barnstar - but I'm the first to claim it! Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:02, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
    • Is that without looking at the article? I was very proud of getting 5.5/9 without looking (gave myself half a point for guessing 6.2 million) given that two are very specific statistics and at least three are not really unambiguous clearly-expressed questions. — Bilorv (talk) 23:30, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
      • I have to admit that I briefly copy edited the article, but that's not really reading for comprehension. I agree that some of the questions are ambiguous, so I answered to mysekf "If they mean W then my answer is X, if they mean Y the my answer is Z." Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:46, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Re: The article "Most scientific articles cited by Wikipedia articles are uncited or untested by subsequent studies" is surprising given our favouring of secondary sources (which are more highly cited on average). Although it's higher than the literature as a whole ("28.5% of articles referenced in Wikipedia have a supporting citation vs. 11.7% of articles in Web of Science"), I wonder to what extent it is an artifact. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 05:47, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Ah, it may be something to do with the way that they define "untested by subsequent studies". In the Smart Cite system they use from scite.ai, only 2.99% of citations are indicated as "Supporting citations" (i.e. "provide supporting evidence"). I suspect that most secondary sources don't get these sorts of citations as often as primary research. It'd be more interesting to separate out primary/secondary/tertiary sources cited by WP and specifically ask what percentage of those sources have Supporting citations. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 06:02, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • This paper includes a "supporting evidence" section which appears to include an xls file containing a list of "retracted" sources cited on Wikipedia. Presumably we could use that list to remove sources that been retracted, but I have not opened the xls to verify. -- GreenC 16:16, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
      • @Evolution and evolvability and GreenC: Ooh, that sounds like a good task for a bot, actually: Retracted citation patrolling. Perhaps with any articles found to be citing retracted papers added to a hidden tracking category, and/or templated with a cleanup notice to that effect? I wonder if the data set for that (the list of retracted papers to be flagged) could be maintained programmatically / updated periodically based on some machine-readable list of retractions, assuming there even is such a thing? -- FeRDNYC (talk) 01:09, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
        • FeRDNYC, I agree retracted sources could be monitored programmatically and flagged with a trackable inline template. WP:RSN would be a good place to open a discussion and if consensus open a bot request at WP:BOTREQ. -- GreenC 01:17, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
          • @GreenC: Mmm, lest we imagine this is a bigger problem than it actually is, though, I did open that Excel file. It's a list of 50 citations (total!), divided into three categories:
            1. 15 are listed as "Acknowledges retraction", so IOW they're not the problem — there's nothing inherently wrong with referencing a retracted study, when it's done in the context of it being a retracted study.
            2. Another 10 are listed as "No longer referenced", which sort of undermines the title of the dataset, no?
            3. Of the remaining 25 listed as "Not acknowledged", there are actually only 13 retracted papers there. It's just that one of them happens to be cited in TWELVE different articles (and another one is cited in two). Nearly all (> 80%) of the articles in question are hyper-specific stubs on individual chemical compounds, like OLIG1, PTF1A, MED24, GCN5L2, etc. (Which IMHO is just further evidence that such articles have no business being part of Wikipedia in the first place, but that's just my bias talking.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 01:33, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
            @FeRDNYC and GreenC: It's also wirth noting the meta:WikiCite/Shared_Citations proposal as a relevant avenue for this sort of monitoring and notification. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 02:20, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Based on the title of this piece, I was assuming I'd find an article about how we're biased against creating articles about nobility. signed, Rosguill talk 16:16, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
    • I noticed that the entire corpus of scientific article did no better. So WP is doing in this respect about as well (or as poorly) as the world scientific community as a whole. analogous to the old finding that we were about the same as Brittanica. DGG ( talk ) 07:41, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Surely the opposite is true, if anything. I've always been surprised that WP:GAN has these two categories for history: "World history" and "Royalty, nobility and heraldry". But to each their own and there's plenty of interesting content in that category. — Bilorv (talk) 11:22, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
      • Oh I don't disagree, I just wasn't expecting an article about our "anti-feudalism" to be about our community governance. signed, Rosguill talk 16:35, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Question: What does Wikipedia use to maintain it's [sic] content? Sorry, that thud was the sound of my head hitting the keyboard. An algorithm came up with these? And even our computers aren't capable of differentiating between "its" and "it's"? Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Methinks they've learned to emulate humans a bit too well. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 01:13, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Traffic report: Does it almost feel like you've been here before? (3,039 bytes · 💬)

  • Really glad the picture for Captain Tom's article was finally changed to how he was mostly recognized as, his British army picture is a good addition but I thought it was kinda misleading for his article -Gouleg🛋️ (Stalk • Hound) 15:23, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
Also proud to say I liked Kathryn Hahn before it was popular! -Gouleg🛋️ (Stalk • Hound) 15:23, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
  • Political attacks in the commentary aren't a good look for Wikipedia... please, try keep it neutral if you can't be positive! Sir Magnus has spoken! (So can you!)
  • I found the commentary on Gina Carano to be particularly distasteful. You say that she compared the Holocaust to how conservatives were being treated, but that isn't even what is being said in her instagram post? Then you compare US migrant detention centres to Holocaust camps. Last I checked, they weren't gassing migrants by the millions. You then say she made transphobic remarks, but the Wikipedia page says that "Carano was later accused of transphobia". There's quite a difference between being accused of transphobia by some random people on Twitter and then a Wikipedia editor, who should speak the truth, saying that their comments are transphobic. Sure, The Signpost isn't supposed to be neutral or boring, but it isn't supposed to push some kind of narrative, especially when it is harmful and misleading. Kind regards, Willbb234Talk (please {{ping}} me in replies) 08:53, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Oh my god, I had no idea Gina had a Wikipedia account! Hey, girl! How's that new movie with Ben Shapiro coming along? /s benǝʇᴉɯ 08:01, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Given we're adding the controversies of everybody's lives in these along with what they're notable for, and this one was notably missing, I want to add that the Weeknd song "Lost In The Fire" has lyrics about raping lesbian women or otherwise "turning" lesbians straight by having sex with them. Please see: https://www.newsweek.com/weeknd-slammed-twitter-users-new-lyric-claiming-he-can-f-you-straight-1288527 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:6000:F042:5B36:4839:BE78:E222:928 (talk) 21:16, 26 March 2021 (UTC)


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