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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2022-09-30. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

CommonsComix: CommonsComix 2: Paulus Moreelse (464 bytes · 💬)

Discussion report: Much ado about Fox News (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-09-30/Discussion report

Featured content: Farm-fresh content (1,255 bytes · 💬)

Seems like the September 4 batch was mostly skipped. SounderBruce 00:11, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

@SounderBruce: Sorry, I'll try to get them added to the October FC. This month was not a good month. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 05:02, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
@SounderBruce: oh, wait, we do these a month behind, so September promotions were always intended for October. Not enough time to meet deadline if you're adding stuff to the last minute. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 10:09, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

From the archives: 5, 10, and 15 Years ago: September 2022 (1,197 bytes · 💬)

  • With respect to the lawsuit against DocJames and Wrh2, since it was a civil action, they would have been found "not liable"; "acquitted" is for criminal cases. Mr Serjeant Buzfuz (talk) 14:42, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
  • {{POV}}, {{Format}} and {{Current}} look absolutely unseemly when placed next to their 2007 counterparts. I think we need a return to those days. Less is more. I can't believe that a casual reader would ever read the whole of {{Current}} or gain anything more than they would from reading the straight-to-the-point 2007 version. — Bilorv (talk) 21:09, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
    Honestly, I rather agree. We got a bit of text-bloat going on there. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 05:32, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Gallery: A Festival Descends on the City: The Edinburgh Fringe, Pt. 2 (2,478 bytes · 💬)

That this is unfinished is probably obvious. I had asked for this to be held back, but.. it wasn't. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 04:47, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

a lot of the shows from past years were not particularly well documented on Commons. Hopefully, I can document them before publication oof, that's unfortunate. —⁠andrybak (talk) 19:37, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
  • This puts me in mind of a brief conversation you and I had about the effects of the Festival on Edinburgh back at Wikimania 2016 in Italy which it would be fun to bring up again now—you had mentioned how you were unable to get to Wikimania 2014 because it conflicted with the Festival, and I mentioned Charles Stross's novel Singularity Sky (an article which I mostly wrote). He also lives in Edinburgh, and recalled on his blog how, while writing the book, he'd been stuck trying to find a truly disruptive antagonist for the society where most of the novel is set, a confederation of worlds that are an authoritarian state with mostly late 19th-early 20th century technology (save where they use the advanced tech of his universe several centuries from now) and social mores.

    He was out one night during the Festival with some friends; they'd had to go to a pub in Leith to escape the crowds at their usual watering hole. He wanted this antagonist culture to be an outside-context enemy, "someone they can't understand or figure out". One of the friends suggested, "Why not the Festival"? He noted how that makes Edinburgh in August the sort of place where the unusual is mundane, where encountering bagpiping elephants, say, is not big deal.

    So, that's exactly what he did: The aliens in the story are, basically, the Festival with technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, and the novel is about how their arrival terminally disrupts this rigidly organized society far beyond anything the resistance could have ever done. Daniel Case (talk) 05:32, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

In focus: NPP: Still heaven or hell for new users – and for the reviewers (25,578 bytes · 💬)

Well, this is very discouraging to read. I know the project has to prioritize some projects over others but it's the patronizing attitude and the ignoring legitimate inquiries that are the most annoying. The problem is that there is no obligation for WMF to pay any attention to editors' concerns, I think they mainly respond because they don't want negative optics that would result to complaints that aren't met with some kind of response, even if it is pro forma. As far as the Board goes, I think they are so involved in big picture subjects that improving tools that some editors rely upon to do their work doesn't rank up there in what gets their attention. But, I've found in similar situations that persistence in asking questions until one gets a truthful answer can bring some results, even if one doesn't like the answer one gets. Liz Read! Talk! 00:52, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Not to dispute the larger point that WMF may have trouble prioritizing high-impact work, but what are some concrete examples for the "Software improvements, both bug reports and feature requests, that would help and encourage reviewers do this job [but] have been languishing unaddressed at Phabricator for months and even years"? "Show, don't tell" might also work better in convincing board members, and enable them to ask more pertinent questions in their conversations with the WMF executives that they oversee. Regards, HaeB (talk) 01:59, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi HaeB, this is a newspaper article about the Open Letter campaign. The WMF is fully aware of the bugs and features that need addressing, and have been for a long time. This article addresses the fact that the board stated publicly that they are not involved in worflows of individual projects. You can watch the linked video yourself or read the transcript provided in the article. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:03, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
The worst bug is that it doesn't always create AFD pages. phab:T238025 Another bad one before I fixed it recently was prod tagging was broken; the reason was always blank. These bugs are so bad that many patrollers have to use Twinkle. There are also over 100 tickets open on phabricator. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:21, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Before you fixed it? Hope you billed the WMF for it - are you aware of the salaries and perks their devs are on? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:58, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
HaeB, I had to smile at this attempt to complain about the article in an edit summary: ...not all Signpost readers might be steeped in the history of ACTRIAL, they only have to look to the right at the list of articles in the Series table of contents - there are links to two Signpost articles about ACTRIAL. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:04, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
The Series ToC doesn't appear in new Vector until the last section and not at all in mobile. Given we've discovered the hard way that this piece is rather sensitive to layout adjustments, what do you think of a note that this is best experienced in desktop mode and a link to force desktop like so? Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 02:49, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
Hi Rotideypoc41352, Thanks for pointing that out. Any post-publication issues are best discussed with the Editors-in-Chief or their colleagues such as Bri or Headbomb on the newsroom talk page. A large number of editors have read the article already and you were the only one to point out the fmt bug on mobile. It's certainly worth considering for future articles that have a lot of sidebar content and quotes. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:34, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
I echo the sentiments of frustration, and concern. The direction the WMF has taken is reminiscent of a RGW, political soapbox for social justice, and a voice for developing countries. While it is commendable in the context of humanity, it is not what the hand that feeds the WMF is needing. We need a focused tech team to develop the tools we need to do our job. We needs stats so we can determine what areas need the most work and help us further determine the best remedies. The shovels and wheelbarrows aren't working, we need a backhoe, frontend loader and dump trucks. We need the WMF to provide the tools we need or risk the encyclopedia being buried under mountains of garbage. Atsme 💬 📧 16:09, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
You mean the sidebar headed "RELATED ARTICLES / NEW PAGES PATROL"? It’s not visible on Timeless at tablet-portrait width, either. I didn’t know it existed until I read @Rotideypoc41352's comment. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 03:37, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Reply from WMF product staff (and invitation to continue the discussion!)

Hello everyone – I’m Marshall Miller; I’m a Group Product Manager at WMF, and I’m one of the people at WMF who has spent time working on and thinking about New Page Patrol on English Wikipedia. I’ve gathered up notes from the rest of the team and checked in with Selena Deckelmann (the WMF's new Chief Product & Technology Officer), so that we can respond to the open letter from the New Pages Reviewers, and this Signpost “In focus” piece. Thank you all for working hard on the difficult task of reviewing pages, and to those of you who have made improvements to the software by submitting patches, and I hope we’ll have good conversations going forward.

We definitely agree that New Pages Patrol's work is important: keeping out newly-created articles that are bad-faith, self-promotion, or simply not ready for inclusion in the encyclopedia. We can see that there's lots of support in the community for improvements to lighten the workload for New Pages Patrol's hard-working reviewers, and so we'd like to invite New Page Reviewers, and whoever else is interested in the PageTriage software and new page processes, to a meeting to talk more about the specific needs and work together to improve the process (more information at the end of this reply).

For those that may be newer to this topic, we’d like to share some information about WMF's support for the PageTriage extension:

  • The PageTriage extension was developed by the WMF's original Features Engineering team in 2012, in partnership with English Wikipedia editors. Over the years, the New Page Reviewers have built extensive workflows and processes around the original tools.
  • In 2017-2018, at NPP’s request, the Community Tech team ran the ACTRIAL research study to evaluate the impact of restricting page creation to registered users. As a result of that research, the restriction was made permanent.
  • Following that study in 2018, in response to community requests, the Growth team made some improvements to the extension by adding quality assessments and copyright violation scores for each page, and allowing people to filter based on those qualities. This work also made part of the toolset usable by the Articles for Creation process.
  • In the 2019 Community Wishlist Survey, User:Insertcleverphrasehere posted a proposal: Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements. New Page Reviewers and supporters came out in force to vote for that proposal, and it ended up as the #1 proposal for the year. (Here are the results.) Because of the high number of votes, the Community Tech team worked for more than six months making improvements to PageTriage, completing 13 different wishes that were prioritized by the NPP members.
  • There have been two Community Wishlist Surveys since, in 2020 and 2021, but those years didn’t have a Community Wishlist proposal about PageTriage.
  • In the recording for the 'Conversation with the Trustees', we wanted to clarify that the trustees said that New Pages Patrol and Articles for Creation workflows are community developed, not that the PageTriage extension is.
  • There are some more details about the WMF's support for PageTriage in a previous response posted before the letter was published.

We understand that the people who worked on the open letter would prefer ongoing dedicated resources rather than relying on the Community Wishlist. As we continue this discussion going forward, we just wanted to say that the Community Wishlist remains an opportunity. Given the success of the NPP proposal in 2019, and the strong show of support from the signatories of the open letter, it's likely that a proposal to the next Wishlist Survey in January 2023 would be successful, and would result in more improvements to PageTriage.

But thinking more broadly, (like we mentioned above) we'd like to talk further about what the group considers to be the top priorities for improving the extension. When we invest in tools and features, we want to build things that work well for as many people and communities as we can – we’re trying to think about the reviewers, the new editors, edit-a-thon organizers, and the different languages and wikis around the world. We will be inviting anyone interested to join us for a conversation where we can hear about your priorities and get perspectives from other wikis and parts of our communities that are interested in new pages work. We will work to find a convenient time in the coming weeks where we can all meet to discuss and will follow up at NPP's talk page with an invitation. Please feel free to share it with anyone who may be interested in the discussion.

We're looking forward to continuing the discussion, and also please let us know if this reply should be posted in other places! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 01:49, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Marshall, thank you for reacting, but this is a newspaper and a place for user comments on the article. It is not the organ of the authors of the Open Letter or the NPP team. You were specifically requested by them some time ago to place any WMF comments on the letter to a designated page for any replies you wish to be considered as official. There is no guarantee that the 444 editors concerned with the Open Letter action are all readers of The Signpost. In fact when I was E-in-C I was surprised to discover just how many editors are not even aware that The Signpost exists, it was only my initiative to include a watchlist notice that brought it to the attention of a few more users. If you want to be sure that your post receives the attention it deserves, you may wish to repost it at the page you were linked to, but the NPP is really expecting some response there from some very senior staff, among whom are those who allocate the vast surplus of funds. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:20, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Now that I have read your long comment Marshall, I do want the readers to know that you and I collaborated on some PageTriage developments a few years ago and how pleased I was of the excellent experience working with you after the abuse and personal attacks we have received in the past at Bugzilla, the precursor to Phabricator. You can read about that collaboration in a Signpost article I wrote in 2018 at NPR and AfC – The Marshall Plan: an engagement, or a marriage? which credited you with that work, but at no times has PageTriage been a community initiative or development. Most scripts written since by community volunteers are workarounds for bugs or to plug holes left in the tools - effectively this has been doing the WMF engineers' work for free. As far as the Wishlist is concerned, the NPP team received a comment from Product that in the same message accused thed NPP of not availing of the Wishlist but that on the other hand hat they don't have time or money to address the NPP concerns anyway - it's all in the article above, Putting ACTRIAL back in its correct context, Mr Horn only acquiesced following a long essay from me and a community threat to end article creation through the implementation of a local filter. The results of the ensuing trial were a staggering confirmation of how completely wrong the Foundation had been in its assumptions. Let's not forget that PageTriage was developed by the Foundation as a consolation for their brutal condemnation of the massive community consensus for the first ACTRIAL attempt (at the time one of the most heavily participated RfC in Wikipedia history). There have been many software developments that the various communities have not approved of and sorry to say, but it is hardly surprising that the communities who have no other voice are sometimes obliged to recourse to radical action. The NPP community still has a blank page waiting for WMF and/or BoT response. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:03, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
I will also just add, in an attempt to contextualise your comments about the Wishlist, that readers who are really interested in what went on there should read the whole discussion, including, but not only these responses to FF-11 and Jo-Jo Eumerus who opposed it:

We were not that keen to take up a slot in the community wishlist either (although the wishlist is not just for proposals that help 'all users', this is the 'Admins and Patrollers' section after all). We have been forced to come here as a last resort as we have been told in no-uncertain-terms that they won't even do bug fixes to the existing tools unless we come here. It's a crappy situation, but we don't have an alternative. As for a potential for over-proceduralization of NPP, I'd be keen to discuss in more detail elsewhere (please contact me on my talk page). Cheers, — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 16:28, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
[A}s can be seen, many of the various wish list requests do not address all users. However, the impact of New Page Patrolling/Reviewing affects all new users who wish to create new articles. The current level of 'proceduralization' has never changed since NPP was introduced at the very beginning of the Wikipedia. These requsts do not over-proceduralize the process, nor do they even add any more layers of bureaucracy to it. They simply improve the work flow for the users who do this thankless task and who are unable to keep up with the flood of junk that will fill the encyclopedia if they don't. Kudpung (talk) 06:38, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

And the patrollers are still unable to keep up with a new kind of junk (very recent classic examples available, you only need to ask - or do some patrolling yourselves!) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:42, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF): I spend several hours reading through, voting on and advocating Wishlist proposals most years, but I find your references to it here to be quite bizarre. Due to the extremely limited proportion of resources that the WMF gives to Wishlist implementation, the project is largely a failure on the WMF side, and year on year you have had to water down pledges to implement the top 10 proposals, to implementing the top 5 proposals, to "no promises but we'll try to implement something, but not the ones with the most votes".
NPP can only succeed in the Wishlist at the expense of some other area of Wikimedia that desperately needs it as much, or moreso. Your suggestion is that the we fights over scraps, dividing our community in the process. My suggestion would be that the WMF stops acting like a dragon guarding a pile of gold and spends its overabundance of money on bugfixes rather than on paying its employees to write written feedback on why the WMF is declining to fix high-priority bugs. Examples of "wishes" are improvements to watchlists, new translation features and expansion of the notification functionality. A non-example of a "wish" is that the button in your software that's supposed to create an AfD page reliable does create an AfD page—this is essential maintenance. — Bilorv (talk) 18:11, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
In general, I'd love to see the community tech team, the team that does the wishlist, receive around triple the devs it currently has. And also for the wishlist to run twice a year. Tools for editors and power users, requested by editors and power users, should be a very high priority. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:30, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Bilorv, I think most of us on en.Wikipedia will concur with you 100% - you have summarised boldly what the authors of this article avoided spelling out so clearly for fear of retribution - indeed emails from some quarters led us to have genuine fears that the powers that be would order the E-in-C not to publish it; indeed as there had been no reference in the newsroom to the article from the editorial team, we were not sure about anything until we actually saw it in print.
The NPP people were embarrassed in 2019 at having squatted the Wishlist's bandwidth for six months where other users' requests were just as valid but did not have such a powerful voice. This is the failure of the well intended voting system. A reason why use of the the Wishlist was not heavily pursued in later years was to avoid provoking the ire of others by squatting it again - which is probably what would have happened, and partly because at the time, despite huge backlogs NPP did not have a particularly strong leadership - any de facto coordinators were caught up in RL or other Wikipedia stations that demanded more of their attention. It's only now in recent months that a couple of users have picked up the thread and decided to take action which has long been overdue.
The NPPers' main contention however, is the WMF's constant claim of not having enough cash, which everyone, absolutely everyone, knows to be total hogwash. This is why NPP is expecting a few personal words of engagement and reassurance from the CEO and Ms Denkelmann on the designated response page rather than them telling their staff to reply and here in the readers' section of a newspaper. But those at the top are probably too aloof to address us unwashed hordes, and we've seen it all before from their predecessors. It looks very much like a "Someone please do something about this rubbish from the rabble" command (but probably more like: 'Selena, can you tell Danny to tell Marshal to say something to these people'). In the meantime, the BoT is still deliberating what to say on the response page and emails from them suggest only that NPP representatives should take part in their next videoed state-of-the-nation speech. (a bit like the Wishlist all over again...). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:36, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
  • Novem Linguae, the WMF staff structure is very opaque, but as far as I can see, the Wishlist is part of Community Tech which is a sub-division of the Growth team, which is somehow governed by 'Product' . Because the PageTriage software isn't the only thing at stake here for the quality of new articles, at least doubling or tripling the number devs is the only real solution The WMF has more than enough funds to afford it. You will know what's involved with coding in MediaWiki from the hours you have spent on having to do the devs' work on NPP for them for free. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:23, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
    Hello @Kudpung @Bilorv @Novem Linguae -- thanks for reading my reply and writing out your thoughts. Like Kudpung recommend, I've now posted the reply to the talk page for the letter itself, where hopefully lots of people will see it. So I suppose going forward we should continue the conversation there? Either way is fine with me.
    Thank you, Kudpung, for giving me additional background and detail both here and on my talk page. I'm glad you're optimistic that WMF staff and volunteers can work well together in the future. The main next step will be this meeting that I mentioned, and I hope you all (Bilorv and Novem Linguae, you too) want to attend. I think in that talk, we'll be able to touch on some of why it's more difficult than it seems for us to dedicate ongoing resources to PageTriage.
    It was interesting to hear what Kudpung said about not wanting to monopolize the wishlist for multiple years. I hadn't heard that perspective before (but maybe others at WMF had).
    I also just wanted to add a little bit of clarity about our structure in the Product department, so that it's not so confusing. The department is made up of "feature teams" which have responsibility for building user-facing features (like the Growth, Editing, Language, and Community Tech teams). There are also the "functional teams" which provide support to the feature teams (like the Product Analytics or Design Research teams).
    For historical reasons, the Growth team is the owner of PageTriage -- that's because the team used to be the "Collaboration" team, which was responsible for many of the tools editors use that are not the visual editor and wikitext editor (which are owned by the Editing team). For the last few years, the Growth team primarily focuses on experiences for new editors, and tries to provide some maintenance support for things like PageTriage. That team is one of the three teams that I manage, along with Editing and Web.
    Community Tech is the team that does the Wishlist. They're a unique team because instead of owning a specific domain, they are responsive to the wishlist survey, and therefore can work on lots of different domains. They are one of the teams that Danny Horn manages. And so this is why you hear from both Danny and me about PageTriage -- both our teams have worked on it. I hope that helps! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for replying Marshall. Different managers within the same groups have very different opinions as to the importance of a process such as NPP. That's why the community looks forward to working with you as soon as the Foundation staff who have their fingers on the purse strings commit to funding a few more salaried code writers and not with employees who state these requirements should be ported through the Wishlist and in the same breath say there are not enough resources anyway. The English Wikipedia community knows full well that the Foundation's claims of being short of cash are total hogwash. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:12, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

In the media: A few complaints and mild disagreements (23,643 bytes · 💬)

Russia

Interesting to see mention of the Russian businessmen's death article, I commented in the AFD for it this summer. It came close to being deleted and after this attention, it could be nominated again. Liz Read! Talk! 01:04, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Regarding "Runiversalis, Russia's Wikipedia alternative", it might have been worth mentioning Putin's longstanding plans to replace Wikipedia with the Great Russian Encyclopedia (earlier coverage: September, October, November 2019) or other such announcements (2014 coverage: "A Russian alternative Wikipedia"). Regards, HaeB (talk) 02:44, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Speaking of Runiversalis's take on Ukraine ... Currently making the rounds on Twitter is a 2014 (!) article in The Guardian by John Pilger, titled, "In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia – Washington's role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime's neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world". Needless to say, the Guardian is publishing nothing like this today, and if it did, it would be accused of spreading Russian propaganda. Pilger, however, still seems quite convinced he got it right then. Andreas JN466 10:09, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Maybe such decisions by the Guardian and other RS have less to do with censorship than with the fact that John Pilger's conspiratorial thinking has been proven so obviously and disastrously wrong earlier this year (see e.g. this summary from March 2022: "Pilger has not once, not twice, not three times, not four times but five times mocked the idea that Russia would invade Ukraine in recent months — as well as spelling out in an article two weeks ago that claims of an imminent invasion were pure hysteria. Indeed, a month ago Pilger claimed “the war mongering of Biden and his UK echoes is exposed, like Blair’s, as a crime”, and followed that up just a fortnight ago with the sneer “the absence of a Russian ‘invasion’ a bitter disappointment to its most avid promoters in London” and compared the Biden administration’s rhetoric to the Bush administration’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.").
Back to the Euronews statement you quoted in the article (that Runiversalis "repeats the Kremlin's narrative that Russia wants to 'denazify' and 'demilitarise' Ukraine"), are you saying it would be wrong to characterize the argument that Russia had to invade Ukraine to topple a neo-Nazi government as propaganda? (cf. Denazification#Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine: "The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem condemned Putin's misuse of Holocaust history; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish, with much of his family being victims of the Holocaust, and a native Russian speaker. The organisations described Ukraine as 'democratic' and the Russian claims of Nazism and genocide as 'imaginary'.") Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:08, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
Well, have a look at what The Nation reported in 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine – Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant. ... These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Of course Putin uses this as propaganda to justify his war but I don't agree with your airbrushing any such concerns out of history, dismissing them as nothing but Russian propaganda. It's just not borne out by the pre-2022 historical record.
People like to have things black and white, especially during a war; they rarely are. Best, Andreas JN466 03:41, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
I wasn't expressing my own opinion, but quoting the Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem - it's them that you are accusing of "airbrushing any such concerns out of history." And I find that accusation unconvincing based on the Nation quote that you are offering, which after all stresses the distinction between those far-right gangs and the government ("Kiev").
I sympathize with the notion that it's important to retain a reasonable level of skepticism during wartime, and for sure things aren't always black and white - but they also aren't always the same level of grey. Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:34, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
When I offered the Nation quote and link, I was hoping you'd read the entire article. The Nation piece also mentions, for example, that—
In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation making two WWII paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes of Ukraine, and made it a criminal offense to deny their heroism. The OUN had collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, while the UPA slaughtered thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles on their own volition.
The government-funded Ukrainian Institute of National Memory is institutionalizing the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators. Last summer, the Ukrainian parliament featured an exhibit commemorating the OUN’s 1941 proclamation of cooperation with the Third Reich (imagine the French government installing an exhibit celebrating the Vichy state!).
(This was the government preceding Zelenskyy's.)
When you asked me above whether "it would be wrong to characterize the argument that Russia had to invade Ukraine to topple a neo-Nazi government as propaganda", accompanied by that quote, I understood you to be daring me to disagree with what I assumed was your view, i.e. that it was propaganda, and nothing but propaganda. I agreed it was propaganda but not nothing but propaganda.
English-language mainstream media reports expressing concern about neo-Nazis in Ukraine continued right up until last year: see this January 2021 TIME report for example ("The main recruitment center for Azov, known as the Cossack House, stands in the center of Kyiv, a four-story brick building on loan from Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. ... On the ground floor is a shop called Militant Zone, which sells clothes and key chains with stylized swastikas and other neo-Nazi merchandise."), or see the Jerusalem Post's Western countries training far-right extremists in Ukraine, published in October 2021 based on a report from George Washington University. I'd argue that the portrayal in the Wikipedia section you linked to, Denazification#Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine, is substantially misleading when compared to such earlier reports and I wouldn't quote it approvingly. I say this as someone whose sympathies are more with Ukraine than with Russia in this conflict. Best, Andreas JN466 10:57, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Curious about the last sentence here:

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

Andreas, which actions of the US government "to mess around with Wikipedia" do you think are comparable to the control the Chinese government is exerting over the content of Baike.com and Baidu Baike? Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:08, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

I think he was referring to HB 20 in Texas which is part of the United States last time I checked. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:24, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
Yes, it seems so from Andreas' wording, but in that case it was a very misguided comparison. A state's legislature creating a bad law that may restrict user-generated encyclopedias from moderating (removing) content posted by individual users is very different from a state's government (executive) forcing such user-generated encyclopedias "to propagate [that government's] views of the world" (which China's case is actually mainly done by requiring them to remove content that is not in line with these government views, i.e. pretty much the opposite of what HB20 does). Regards, HaeB (talk) 23:49, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
I didn't actually write that sentence. It was added here by JPxG: [1] I'm pretty sure he just meant it to function as a bridge to the next piece.
This said, Hillary Clinton's US State Department made an open approach to Wikipedia at Wikimania 2012; a close Clinton associate was chosen to guide the 2017 strategy process, another advises the WMF on PR, etc.; so while there are no government-imposed limits on content here, we can't really say the US government has never expressed an active interest in Wikipedia either. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-06-27/Forum for links. Andreas JN466 04:13, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
My bad, I was relying (as did Bri, presumably) on the "– AK" section byline. (JPxG: I think these should be updated when making such additions, I've been trying to do that with the section bylines in RR too in that kind of situation.)
But, to address just the first of your tenuous examples here, if a representative of the hosting country's government offers a brief address at the opening session of Wikimania (on the invitation of the organizing team of volunteer Wikimedians) and reads out a letter from a minister who regrets not being able to attend in person etc., that's not "messing around with Wikipedia". (It's routine at Wikimania and indeed many large international conferences; I guess you are not leveling such charges at the governments of any other past Wikimania-hosting countries. I do understand that Hillary Clinton is unusual as a politician in that there is an exceptionally large amount of conspiracy theories surrounding her, I sincerely hope you are not getting sucked in by them.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:34, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
@HaeB: If you'd like to know what I think of QAnon, please just ask me rather than blowing into a dogwhistle. I have no interest in QAnon, and what little I've read of it makes it fairly obvious to me that it's nonsense. (And for good measure, if I were a US citizen, I'd have supported Sanders over Clinton and Clinton over Trump in 2016.)
Now, I won't repeat the entire argument I made in the Signpost piece last year, but the representative of the Office of eDiplomacy who gave that speech at Wikimania 2012 literally had "advancing US foreign policy interests" in his job description. Tech@State was an official partner of Wikimania 2012 and there was a whole "Tech@State: Wiki.Gov" track at the conference that people could register at via wiki-gov.eventbrite.com. (I recall zero messages from UK politicians or the UK Foreign Office at Wikimania 2014 in London, the only Wikimania conference I went to. If there had been, I would have found them profoundly distasteful.)
I am generally not a fan of government involvement in the media. And Wikipedia to me should be part of the media rather than a "wiki.gov". I have said exactly the same when it was the Azeri, Kazakh, or Iranian government muscling in on communities at Wikiconferences and take exactly the same dim view of the Russian, Chinese or any other government wanting to exercise organisational or editorial control over wikis. Andreas JN466 13:13, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Russia, China and Texas

I made the same error – although I knew the bridge was added during pre-publication workup, I got the authors switched in my mind. I think an editorial insertion for a bridge is pretty harmless, though in this case the geopolitical (?) overtones may have gone a bit too far for attribution to the original author. I had a longer reply prepared but it got discarded in a session reset or something, so I'll just conclude by saying this is a pretty touchy subject and I expected strong opinions to it and understand where people are concerned about upsetting the delicate balance of government-media owners-the public that makes democracy possible. Readers should also understand it's concern over exactly that same balance that led to the adoption of the Texas bill in the first place. Finally, I think normal readers will understand the State of Texas isn't China CCP, editorial injection to juxtapose the two was for interest/impact that is part of newspaper writing, and we should take care with attribution going forward but this isn't really a big deal. ☆ Bri (talk) 15:55, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

J.J.McCullough

I really don't know what we were thinking here. An entire section I spent weeks researching was cut in an attempt to protect McCullogh's Wikipedia username from coming out - while linking all the sources that included it - and then we decided the opening should make it very clear he did edit Wikipedia, while the closing acts as if it's in doubt as to whether he was a Wikipedia admin. That's a lie, and we knew it was a lie when we published, and worse, it didn't even serve a purpose to lie because we link all the sources that show what his account was. In the first sentence, state he was a Wikipedia editor, and state the image was by him. And this can be confirmed by looking at any of the POTD attributions. In fact, the identification is all over early Wikipedia, and I also checked an archived copy of his userpage to make absolutely sure he was self-outed (and, suffice to say, he was very, very open about it). Further, we later link the first J.J. McCullough deletion debate, which starts off calling him out for being an admin writing an article about himself.

Given WP:RTV states " It is not a way to avoid scrutiny or sanctions. It is not a fresh start and does not guarantee anonymity." - and given we outed him anyway, and link to pretty much every page I quote from anyway, here's my research, which was cut:

J.J. McCullough was in fact a Wikipedia editor and was made an admin in 2003 when the Request for Adminship process was a lot less onerous.

He had at least three (now-former) featured pictures based on vectorised versions of his art. The one next to this article was a featured picture 2004 to 2007, appeared on the Main Page three separate times as Picture of the Day, and proved horribly controversial as to copyright status as everyone - including the copywriters for two of those main page appearances - presumed it was meant to be Snidely Whiplash. Less controversially, File:Mad scientist.svg also appeared on the main page three times, and File:Piratey.jpg only once, but also lasted the longest, only being delisted in 2012. All the main page appearances attributed under his full name, which was never redacted. A check of archive sites confirmed that he was the one who linked his account to his name.

However, around 2008 things soured with two big deletions: Filibuster Cartoons, his website, and J.J. McCullough, following a deletion debate in which Laval stated:


This led to four further attempts to recreate his article, either as J.J. McCullough or J. J. McCullough (note the extra space). After the last of these was deleted in 2020, the creation of new articles by those titles was blocked. His contributions, at least the ones that haven't been deleted, slowed after 2008, finally stopping in 2011.

The video has attracted a lot of speculation at the Village Pump, which has proven a valuable source for this article, and where it is speculated that McCullough is angry that the biographies of him have been deleted. As previously mentioned, he claims in the video that "well over a decade ago" he set up a website-blocking app to stop him from being able to go to Wikipedia, which, if accurate – humans are not good at remembering exactly when they did things – would be just after his last known contributions. Given the second of the deletion discussions happened in 2017, this might absolve him of the article recreations, at least. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 04:57, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Hearing him repeatedly say "aboot" I thought, "Eh? How does this fellow know this cartoon character? Wasn't Snidely Whiplash banned in Canada?" Anyway despite his polite demeanor the video is mostly a rant, presumably trying to stand out in the noisy Youtube marketplace. However, it contains a few valid points, such as that the prose in our articles tends to an awfully leaden style, laden with jargon and failing to organize paragraphs and sentences for readability. I recall that many years ago our biographies of Audrey Munson and Truman Capote had bits of sexual innuendo that actually contributed to understanding but were edited out as POV or some such thing. And look into articles about education in the United States. Most are eager to use a long paragraph to express an idea that could be handled by a short sentence. So, swept along with our foe's flood of foolishness we can find wisps of wisdom. Jim.henderson (talk) 15:15, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Surprisingly, the comment section for that video is overwhelmingly in Wikipedia's favor; usually on Wikipedia criticism videos it's much less complimentary (and boils down to "NPOV is a fucking sham, everything is wrong"). I suspect it both has to do with his existing viewer base, and the video's acrimonious title. But even with all the flaws of YouTube's comment system, I think it's still a net positive for honest discussion. Ovinus (talk) 19:30, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

  • I added Template:User TINC in my userpage in reponse to that video because a lot of his complaints sound like he believes there is a cabal and it's ironic to learn he drew the illustration featured in that userbox, but even more hilarious is the possibility that his disdain for wikipedia stems from the fact he had his pages deleted, anyway they're not a real country -Gouleg🛋️ harass/hound 13:31, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Fox

Must say, the Slate article on the Fox News RfC is pretty nice. Good to see well-researched articles in the wild. And props to Kevin for being a good representative. Ovinus (talk) 11:10, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, brilliant work from Breslow and well done to Kevin. Some of the kudos has to go to Slate for publishing accurate accounts of Wikipedia, a rare thing even in the RSP-green press. — Bilorv (talk) 18:45, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Interview: ScottishFinnishRadish's Request for Adminship (7,420 bytes · 💬)

It would be an interesting series of interviews if you talked to every candidate who had had such a contentious RFA that they had been the subject of a crat chat. Painful, painful memories of my RfA although they gradually fade over time as you focus on all of the work that needs to be done and less on the random comments that come with any type of intense scrutiny. Congratulations, SFR, on weathering the storm! Liz Read! Talk! 01:23, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

I would definitely be open to an interview like that. Thank you to SFR and Formal for this. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 06:45, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
  • This is an illuminating interview and I thank SFR for the frank answers. I had a fairly easy RfA but even so, it dominated my thinking for a week. I can only imagine how grueling a borderline RfA must be. I support the proposed reform of bringing RfAs to a prompt end after exactly 24X7 hours. The art museum analogy has some merit, but on the other hand, this is more like a gigantic project to create works of art. Museums curate and display instead. Cullen328 (talk) 05:00, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
    I agree the analogy isn't perfect, but we do creation, curation, and exhibition, and all are important. None can succeed without the others. I think an administrator should have broad experience on the project, since they're going to have to deal with issues in a lot of different corners of Wikipedia, but that doesn't have to mean extensive experience in specific parts. I also wanted to work out a way to reference this discussing experience in curating content, but I couldn't come up with a good way, so let's imagine I did. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:49, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
I have to agree with our new Admin that curatorial experience is a more important qualification than content creation. There is more repair, deletion and improvement happening every day than growth, and from where I stand, adminship seems far more a curatorial job than a creative one. Jim.henderson (talk) 05:59, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
It's not that it's more important, it's just as important. It's become even more obvious to me in the short time I've been patrolling RFPP and AIV that there's a constant flow of some of the most horrible shit, and I don't think someone needs to have written a certain number of articles to revdel, block vandals, and protect pages to stop crazy disruption. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 12:52, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
I get the argument that there have been admins in the past whose treatment of content contributors might have been different if they had skin in the game, and therefore all new admins need to have contributed some content. I also accept the argument, and think that the RFA crowd have mostly accepted the argument that anyone going for adminship needs to have demonstrated that they understand what a reliable source is and that they know how to do an inline cite. What was odd about that RFA was that a number of people were disregarding those two GAs, opposing for lack of content contributions, but without in most cases giving any indication why those two GAs didn't qualify. ϢereSpielChequers 05:21, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
With all respect to SFR, I thought the answer to that question was rather obvious, and was in fact touched on by SandyGeorgia and others: writing two GAs isn't actually that much work. For me it was rather hard to tell how much article editing SFR has actually done, but it was undisputed that the balance of his activity didn't favour mainspace, and I think that was the main reason for opposition. – Joe (talk) 08:35, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
  • Congratulations to SFR on passing a very difficult RfA. I'm sure there are lessons we can learn from it, but before we start can we please retire the janitor/mop analogy? If the janitors at the museum could decide when to take works down to storage, suspend and fire curators, and had a majority of seats on its governing board, the qualifications demanded probably would be quite high. – Joe (talk) 08:41, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
  • I love the points SFR raised about RFA and adminship in general. I have always felt that being an admin is more of a anti-vandalism specific role (blocking users and IPs, ability to rev del, delete articles and pages) rather than content creation (something pretty much anyone can do). I also love that he stated that (I can't seem to find the exact quote he used... maybe I'm having a Mandela effect situation) RFA kinda shows if you are truly ready to be an admin by basically allowing you to show your restraint in countering other users who disagree with you just because you disagree with them. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 13:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
    It's this what you're looking for? A lot of the time you're left just shrugging and leaving incorrect assumptions or false statements unchallenged. Maybe that's part of it? Making sure you can sit and take abuse, because that is a common position for admins to find themselves in. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:15, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
    That's the part I most disagree with, though it is a common suggestion. None of us would design a system in which people are deliberately subjected to highly personalised criticism from the en.wiki community in order to see if they can handle possible future abuse of a completely different kind as an admin. This is just backwards justification for the bad environment of RfA that has arisen. — Bilorv (talk) 19:09, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
  • SFR's responses display a remarkable depth of perception and reflection that is exactly what I'd hope for in an admin. A very nice read. Congrats and good luck going forward. Eddie891 Talk Work 16:10, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
  • Nice interview! I was interested to read this after the contentious RfA. Suriname0 (talk) 15:40, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

News and notes: Board vote results, bot's big GET, crat chat gives new mop, WMF seeks "sound logo" and "organizer lab" (5,677 bytes · 💬)

  • There's currently no link to the results of that "safety and comfort" survey. Those results appear to be at m:Community Safety/Reports/Wave 2/enwiki. Also, I find myself curious about the results as it doesn't measure why people feel unsafe. For example, the UCOC might make some feel safer while making others fear future Frammings. Anomie⚔ 13:52, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Indeed. Thanks for the results link. Have now linked to m:Community_Safety/Reports (this has the other languages as well). Best, Andreas JN466 14:38, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
For 16% of editors to feel “unsafe” on Wikipedia, whatever they mean by the term, is a disgrace. I think we need admins to focus more on enforcing collegiality and shutting down trolls. Maybe also emphasize in the newbie tutorials that WP is unlike other social media which allow (and encourage) personal attacks. --ChetvornoTALK 18:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
  • From the WMF's appeal for a "sound logo":

    the number of active voice assistant users has grown from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021.

    Those are some pretty implausible numbers, unless (a) that's actually the number of active voice assistant uses per year, or (b) they're counting any person who uses any text-to-speech technology, even just a single time, during a given year as one of those yearly "users" of the technology. It's pretty hard to avoid some machine, somewhere, speaking something at you at some point, but whether that makes you an "active voice assistant user" in the eyes of anyone but the marketing department is, to say the least, debatable.
...But there's no way for me to know, because the stats they apparently draw from are locked behind an accountwall that requires a "company email address", and won't take my GMail address for registration. So I'll just call bullshit by default, on those preposterously inflated statistics. FeRDNYC (talk) 17:09, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Those figures seem somewhat odd indeed. Two striking things about the data this refers to is
1) that the study refers to consumer virtual digital assistants rather than voice digital assistants, and the source given by Statista explicitly mentions chatbots as an example, and
2) that the underlying data that is supposed to document an increase in users between 2015 and 2021 has according to Statista actually been surveyed between 2015 and 2016, with the remaining numbers being forecasts (see side panel on the Statista website)... Felix QW (talk) 15:25, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
@Felix QW: Yeah, I think there are some more telling reports than the one WMF linked to, even right there at Statista. (Which sounds like a numbers-obsessed splinter group of the Sandinistas; are we sure they're not based out of Nicaragua?)
That second one sounds much more realistic. And it's also three orders of magnitude smaller than then nutso numbers from the WMF post. (Though I don't know what their 2016–2021 trending would look like. I see that in various other, more recent reports, they've adjusted post-2020 forecasts downward precipitously, #BecauseCOVID.) FeRDNYC (talk) 05:57, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
  • re 111111111: way before 2,222,222,222 will will see 1,234,567,890. :-) And then 1313131313 ;-)).23:41, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
    • 1,234,567,890 is currently due in April 2024 or thereabouts. Nudge me at the time and I'll see if I can get another quote from that server kitty. ϢereSpielChequers 18:37, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
  • "Investing in Skills and Leadership Development" – what a weird way to phrase something. It's not clear whether it's [[Skills and Leadership] Development]] or [[Skills] and [Leadership Development]] at first glance. Nardog (talk) 01:26, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Opinion: Are we ever going to reach consensus? (6,914 bytes · 💬)

  • Um. Not to be mean, but is there any point to this other than the author realizing that long discussions are harder to summarize? I may be missing the message somewhere. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 08:11, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
There's nothing to miss. He's making a very valid point which some readers might not have considered or need reminding what hard work closing some AfD is. The backlog is full of ones nobody wants to touch. Sometimes I would spend an hour or more trying to reach a conclusion and I usually did, but I don't close AfD any more, for good reason. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:48, 1 October 2022 (UTC) .
  • I'm not so sure the !vote count necessarily is related to page views as much as related to how many editors have an article on watch. The way our AfD process is set up, if there is no clear consensus for deletion then by default the discussion is closed as "keep". As one example I saw this in an AfD for a corporate CEO biography which (to me) appeared to have greatly exaggerated passing mentions and was full of vanity sources of questionable editorial oversight. His cavalry had already rode in for the rescue. Several editors, whose history suggested that bios are their line of work, came to its defense and bludgeoned the "delete" votes. And, with no clear "delete" consensus, the article remained. Sometimes these decisions are in the eye of the closing administrator. When there's a wall of text the path of least resistance is to just close as "no consensus" so as not to deal with yet more discussion at deletion review and/or talk page "Why did you do this?" pleas. Blue Riband► 13:00, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
  • A different possible conclusion is you are likely to have a short discussion when consensus is within reach. You may still have a lot of editors see the discussion for a popular topic but don't bother to comment because they agree with the already evident consensus. A discussion may get closed before it gets too long due to WP:SNOW. You see long discussions for borderline situations where you were headed towards no consensus from the start. I actually wish administrators would try to recognize and close these non-converging discussions earlier. Avoiding long AfD discussions would conserve a lot of community goodwill. ~Kvng (talk) 22:18, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
  • Relevant graph from the golden age of battles between deletionists and inclusionists: https://notabilia.net/ Altamel (talk) 04:24, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
    @Altamel: Daaaaamn! There's some craziness there for sure. The one that really stuck out to me, though, wasn't because of the length of the discussion. No, the impressive thing to me is that the article (and some may find this title offensive, so I'll poor-man's spoiler-tag it by using white text on a white background, select if you want to be able to read it — if my text-color shenanigans fail you and the text is visible anyway, just know that I'm lusciously sorry) ...the article "Gay Nigger Association of America" bit the dust after a long discussion on its EIGHTEENTH nomination! FeRDNYC (talk) 07:16, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
  • I intensely dislike the shorthand "!vote" to mean, "we don't vote." That's not what registers in the brain, and based on the content of many of these purportedly consensus-driven discussions, many editors in fact do believe that voting is what's happening. Shorthand that fails to summarize a complicated concept should not be used.~TPW 17:26, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
    @True Pagan Warrior, do you have a suggestion? ~Kvng (talk) 13:38, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
    I think this is one of those cases in which using all the words is just better. "I shared my views" might be one appropriate phrase. Given that we don't have practical limits to the number of characters we write, and the shorthand saves only a second or two in most cases, taking the time to use words is a better option. It not only minimizes misunderstanding, it helps chip away at the ever-increasing barriers to editing. ~TPW 14:35, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
    @True Pagan Warrior: {{citation needed}} on the ever-increasing barriers to editing, BTW. I mean, this is a time when Wikipedia has gained not only the Visual Editor, but also the companion TemplateData system that attempts make the process of inserting template transclusions far more guided and intuitive (or at least, intuit-able). I'm not disputing that there are still barriers to editing, but if they're increasing then something is clearly wrong. FeRDNYC (talk) 21:30, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
    @True Pagan Warrior: The shorthand, if we're being literal, is technically "not-vote". "!" is a common syntax for negation (used in algebraic notations and some programming languages). When discussing someone's contribution to a consensus discussion, what you're discussing is not a vote (though it looks like one) — hence, not-vote, or !vote for (too?-)short.
    On one hand, as the Wikipedia community has grown and become less skewed towards the technically-minded, that association — and therefore the "obvious" common interpretation of the shorthand it would invoke — has probably become increasingly obscure and inaccessible to a greater percentage of the intended audience. I can see that argument.
    On the other hand, the fact that consensus discussions aren't votes is something new editors often struggle with on philosophical grounds, more than technical or definitional ones. They tend to duck-type the discussions: If it walks like a vote and talks like a vote, they assume it must be a voting process. I'm not convinced it's the "!vote" shorthand that causes that confusion, nor am I convinced their (mis-)understanding would substantially change simply because we stopped using the term "!vote". (Though, as I said on the first hand, there may be reasons it should be abandoned anyway.) FeRDNYC (talk) 21:22, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Recent research: How readers assess Wikipedia's trustworthiness, and how they could in the future (28,039 bytes · 💬)

"Why People Trust Wikipedia Articles"

Overall, respondents reported a very high level of trust in Wikipedia. This should be a concern for us as it shows low media literacy around Wikipedia. We are not meant to be trusted: we are meant to be verifiable and to have readers scrutinise us. It is somewhat flattering that our readers have high trust rather than low trust, but each is dangerous. The level of trust I have in Wikipedia is healthy skepticism. I don't take Wikipedia as gospel, and if it's important for me to be confident in a fact then I need to use the article's sources or find my own, but I believe most statements unless there are clear reasons for doubt. — Bilorv (talk) 18:50, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Wikimedia Research Fund

I have some serious concerns about the Wikimedia Research Fund. I have been a reviewer for some projects, and in my view a lot of them are asking us to fund what is otherwise a regular activity in academia that would be done anyway. I am pretty sure I reviewed meta:Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Research Fund/Using Wikipedia for educational purposes in Estonia: The students′ and teachers′ perspective, and while I can't recall the details of my recommendation, I am pretty sure that as an expert in that field (i.e. someone who published nearly identical research to the one described here), my conclusion would be as follows: "While it is good to understand how Wikipedia Education program is done in Estonia - as vast majority of published research on this is from USA - this research is asking for 30k USD to do work that most scholars, including myself, do without any grants." Consider this: "Salary or stipend: 22.586$". Errr, but scholars are already employed by the university, they already get salary or stipend, and they are hired for the explicit purpose of doing such research. We are effectively giving them double salary for what they should be doing anyway, and for what most scholars I know do without receiving such a grants (You don't need any money to do "a multi-part questionnaire" (I've done many, for the cost of 0$), ditto for interviews (newsflash: they can be done via Zoom or such, and such tools are also available at no cost!). Then "Open access publishing costs" budgeted for 6k. Most journals I am aware of that offer OA pubishing in social sciences tend to do it for much less (just google for "cost of open access publishing", the cost is half or a third of the asked and awarded amount). Also, realistically, the cost here can be 0$ - publish without OA, just make a copy of the paper available as a pre/post print. That's 6,000 bucks we are spending for exactly no benefit to anyone (and if you disagree on official OA vs pre/post print, well, there's still the case of vastly inflated budget item here). While I think it would be good to have a fund to make reserch on Wikipedia open access, I think the current edition of WRF is wasting a lot of money on dubious projects, where the costs are very, very inflated for no good reason except, well, do I need to spell it out? I am sorry, but we are paying $40k for a poorly laid out plan for some folks to do what they are being paid for (by their institution) anyway? This needs to be stopped ASAP. Ping User:Pundit, User:Bluerasberry... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:11, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

I can't comment on any of these, as a trustee - but I am quite confident that, even though there may be many applications of all sorts, most successful ones are legit. Of course, oversight is always useful and can improve the process. Pundit|utter 07:24, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
I share Piotrus concerns, Pundit. Maybe those fake demands for grants are why the WMF tells the volunteers there's no money left for upgrading essential software, forcing the volunteer editors to improve the software for free. Perhaps the Trustees could look into this and not ask, but tell the WMF to spend the money not just on worthy causes, but on essential ones. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:12, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Wish for WMF sponsorship of a wiki volunteer research committee @Piotrus, Pundit, Kudpung, and Bilorv: Regardless of whether the issue that Piotrus raises is a problem, the more fundamental problem is that we have no community process which would identify and address it if it were a problem. There are dozens of projects at meta:Research:Index and hundreds more that occur but without any particular community review option. Surely some of these have raised problems over the years, but we are not tracking or discussing them.
If social and ethical review were a goal, then I think asking WMF to sponsor a research review committee is the most likely way to begin. Such a committee will not spontaneously appear from crowdsourcing, and even if we had a heroic team of volunteers, I think it is just too much work for volunteers especially considering that they would interact with paid researchers at universities and companies. Research ethics takes sponsorship, and right now, there has never been either a community request for that nor a WMF offer for it. I like the idea of community ethics review, not WMF staff ethics review, but still the community needs some money.
Now might be time for this. Facebook / Meta recently did a major Wikipedia research project which included recruiting human subjects for usability testing. See this -
Human subject research at universities requires ethical review (typically through an institutional review board). I am not saying that Meta / Facebook did anything wrong here, however, this is the first time that a big tech company has done Wikipedia research like this. There will be many more such data science projects, and if any cause a problem, we will not be prepared.
The usual route for establishing a paid process is forming a user group, requesting funds, then having annual planning. I am not keen on doing the administration, but if a research ethics committee existed, then I would join it. Thoughts from others? Bluerasberry (talk) 18:14, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry, Bilorv, Piotrus, and Pundit:, a couple of points: It's seriously time to investigate the WMF's staff ethics. Any research that they carry out appears to be done in a way that it produces the results they want to hear (I have proof of at least one example that from about 12 years ago). They are hardly likely to fund research that will risk going the wrong way for them. They learned their lesson on that with the ACTRIAL which they paid for and which the results, despite their remonstrations, proved their claims completely and utterly wrong. It is unthinkable that the community volunteers should be expected to write the articles, police the content, and repair the bugs in MediaWiki software themselves all for free. The volunteers have no official voice, the BoT is a WMF rubber stamp, and the volunteers have no funds themselves even if they had an established 'user group' - which would need incorporation as a registered charity if it were going to manage money of its own , and who would take care of the bureaucracy? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:28, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I think your concerns, while valid, are a bit different from mine. You seem to worry that WMF is wasting money on research that is biased towards what they want to hear. It's possible, since we don't know what oversight is there and who is making decisions. What I worry for is that WMF is being abused by (or, if you prefer, our budget is being wasted on) people who are effectively trying to scam WMF/us, by getting funds for stuff that is either irrelevant to Wikimedia projects or stuff that would get done for free or is alraedy paid for (people applying for grants to double/triple their salaries, which they get to do this kind of research anyway). I think Bluerasberry mentioned another dimention, that is that we have little ethical control over the studies themselves, although frankly that's the one I am least worried about. I'll finally mention something else, that another person suggested to me, which is that a possibility of corruption in the process, due to poor oversight. Given how poorly designed some of the accepted projects are, everything is possible, but bottom line is that WMF is giving out money for stuff that is of little use to the community and poorly justified. Something should be done before this gets worse and generates some serious scandal down the road. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:24, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
@Piotrus: I co-chaired the grants with LZia (WMF) and am doing so again this year. For several reasons, I won't speak to any of the specific proposals that were/weren't funded. I will speak to the claim the funding for academic effort is being used to increase salaries and that the work would be done without the grant. In almost all (all?) cases, research grants are to institutions not individuals. For every university and/or research institution I've ever been involved with, grants used to pay salary are used to "buy" time/effort and can not be used to supplement salary in the way you suggest unless the supplement somehow increases the total effort that the person is spending on their overall work for the university.
I have never received a grant from WMF but I've used other grant funding to "buy out" of teaching classes and certain service or administrative obligations. I have paid my own salary during the June through August when I am not given a salary at all and would otherwise engage in consulting or extra teaching (US academic appointments are typically for only 9 months/year).
Most commonly, I will pay a graduate student or staff member to work on a grant-funded project instead of teaching or other research work they would do to make ends meet. All of these are completely normal and research universities typically have systems for tracking individual "effort" to prevent the kind of fraud you suggest. If you have concrete evidence of people being paid twice for the same effort, please report that to the grants team at WMF or to the research institute involved. If you do not, accusing people of fraud in a public forum seems wildly inappropriate.
If your concern is limited to the more subtle point that "they would have done it without the grant", the best any of us can do is speculate about this for anything that is funded. It's absolutely the case that the counterfactual you are worried about is discussed as part of the grant decision process. And in fact, it was discussed for the WMF research grants by a group that included you. Not everybody agrees with your opinion about whether or not funded work will/would happen in the absence of funding, either in general or in these specific cases. And nobody ever gets to know the answer unless we never fund anything.
Perhaps it is because I am from a more grant-funded part of academia than you are but I can say that I strongly disagree with your general skepticism about the using of grants and external funding for academic salaries. As someone who has overseen more than a million dollars of grant-funded salary to academics, I can promise you that the vast majority of that funded work—thousands of hours of effort—would never happened in the absence of external funding. Grant-funded salary has created new research resources by allowing me to hire staff or bring on graduate students. It has freed up hours that would have spent on teaching, administration, and other activities. It has allowed me and my lab to produce more Wikimedia research that I would have been able to do have otherwise. The WMF research grants program is on a smaller scale but I believe it has the potential to do something similar. —mako๛ 20:57, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
@Benjamin Mako Hill To keep it short, I am sure what you say is right, the problem is that AFAIK your experiences are from "First World", institutions, where standards, ethnics consideration, and oversight are high. You may be less familiar with the "Second World" reality (not to mention the "Third World"), where controls over how things are spent are fewer, and corruption, or at least the concept of, to say it bluntly, milking naive First World donors for second-third-fourth-etc. salaries by, for example, inflating costs, is not uncommon. I am sure that you yourself represent very good ethical standards, but you have to be careful when dealing with grant applications from the rest of the world - many do not share your ideals, best practices, and like, and will simply try to abuse the system. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:26, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
@Piotrus: Fair enough. One of the stated goals of these grants are to fund research being done in places that are not (already highly-resourced) institutions in the wealthiest countries. We are already asking members of the regional committees to review and give feedback on any proposal in "their" region with this in mind. If you have other ideas for how we can better checks-and-balances in this way to prevent abuse, it would be great to hear them! —mako๛ 21:58, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
@Benjamin Mako Hill Sanity checks for individual budget items would be good, for example, one approved entry asks for 6k for open access publishing costs, a simple google query tells us the average cost of open access publishing in related fields is 1.5k-2k$. What will happen to the other ~4k$? Other dubious estimates (or no estimates at all) can be found in some accepted grants. We need a stricter control of this. I also wonder, will there be receipt control? At my university, I am required to prove that I actually spend the money budgeted for X on X, and RETURN the amount that wasn't used. What about our case? PS. Another point - at my university, I am required to publish the research within ~2 years or return the whole amount. What kind of accountability do we have if a grantee fails to deliver? And what are they supposed to deliver, exactly? When I apply for a grant at my institution, I am required to publish at good journals, as defined by being indexed in reliable indices. Do we have such requirements? Or will we accept an open access publication in semi-predatory journal, or a conference presentation at Wikimania, or a non-peer reviewed pre-print? What are our standards? The project I noted as controversial is promising "writing and submitting two articles for publishing them in the open access journals (e.g. Classroom Discourse)" and budgeting ~6k for that. I know that in this field (education) there are open access journals with zero fees; at the same time there are also low-impact journals in which publication is mostly inconsequential. PPS. This is related to the toothless https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_access_policy which, a, allows green OA/preprints (so it is ok to publish at no cost), and b, it doesn't seem to require publication in "good" or even "mediocre" journals. I am sorry, but this ripe for abuse, people can budget thousands of dollar for OA, and then publish at no fee, and keep all the funds. This is just an example of how abusable the system is. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:59, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
@Benjamin Mako Hill: you say that you have overseen more than a million dollars of grant-funded salary to academics—if I'm reading correctly, that's a million dollars donated by Wikipedia readers. Can you explain what improvements this academic research has made to the Wikimedia community that is worth a million dollars to us? How would you explain the value of these projects to a small donor that read a fundraising banner and was led to believe that Wikipedia is barely surviving or needs money for servers? — Bilorv (talk) 23:12, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
@Bilorv: I have never received (nor applied for) any grant funding from WMF. I'm a volunteer working with the foundation to help run the research fund and was speaking about my experience with grant funding in general as a way of responding to Piotrus. I apologize for the confusion. For context, you should know that the Research Fund just announced its call for a second year and has not distributed anywhere near a million dollars across all funded research grants put together.
As a donor myself, I think a lot about your questions. It's far too early to know how the first round of funded projects will turn out but potential impact to community was one one of the primary criteria for evaluation. I believe the grants are all valuable use of WMF's existing resources. Questions of whether WMF's fundraising messages are in line with organizational expenditures (implicit in your final question) seem like things you should direct to the fundraising team and foundation leadership. —mako๛ 20:43, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
@Benjamin Mako Hill: I understood the first sentence, but okay, your "million dollars" was based on other grant funding roles.
Can you link me to a page that outlines the potential impact of funded projects to the community? Where are these projects documented? From my experience—about 9 years as an editor and several years of "Recent research" Signpost reading—I could not confidently name an academic project that has provided any value to the community. Was ORES originally academic research? So I'm just confused as to what impact we would expect these projects to have. Is it going to improve NPP? Lua? Automate some repetitive AWB activity? Suggest action points on how the community could be more welcoming to newcomers?
As for the fundraising messages, the WMF fundraising team and foundation leadership are well aware of community objections, but generally choose not to respond to them. I raise it because if you choose to work with the research fund, you should consider whether you are happy with the money came from and under what pretenses it was given. — Bilorv (talk) 21:45, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi all. This is Leila, Head of Research at WMF. I'd like to share some perspectives and information on my end that may help this or other related conversations:

  • First and foremost: I kindly ask that we try hard to refrain from comments or phrases that can put a shadow of doubt on others' intentions unless absolutely justified or necessary in a particular situation. I find a word such as "scam" accusatory towards others. I feel hurt reading it as I put myself in the shoes of the researchers who applied for the fund: we are a community and our choice of words is an indicative of who we are and how welcoming we are towards one another.
  • One of the mandates of the Research team at WMF is to nurture the Wikimedia research community. To that end our team is involved or leads a variety of projects (Research Fund being one of them). You can learn about the depth and breadth of these projects by reviewing our bi-annual Research Report (check under Conducting Foundational Research section). I share this information with you because I find that sometimes it is helpful to step back and see what we're trying to achieve in the big picture (nurturing the WM research community) and look at the portfolio of investments that we do on top of narrowing down on specific initiatives.
  • With regards to the Research Fund specifically, I have a few points to share:
  • This past year was the first iteration of the Research Fund. Like any other first time projects or initiatives I expect that we need to make improvements to the project over time. In July 2022, the team involved in the operations of Research Fund met for a retrospective. As you may imagine, we identified many areas for improvement (too many in fact to tackle all at once) and we have chosen a few of those to focus on and improve for the upcoming cycle. For example, Mako and I (as the Fund Committee Chairs) have prioritized to bring in dedicated Technical Review Chairs for the upcoming cycle because the load of operations on the two of us was too heavy to be repeated. This is to say that retrospectives will need to happen every year and we need to continue improving things for this and other processes.
  • The suggestion for having a dedicated Research Fund came to me from the Community Resources team. The team used to receive funding requests for proposals that could be considered research heavy proposals, however, the team did not have access to technical reviewers who could give appropriate research feedback to the applicants. On the other hand, all the research scientists in my team were already involved in providing research review to researchers in places outside of the WM Movement. At the point when my team could manage to have a dedicated person to focus on the research community I assessed that it's the right time to support the Community Resources by accepting more responsibility for research applications and also explicitly dedicating an entry point to them: Research Funds.
  • Every application that was submitted during the last cycle that was not desk-rejected in Stage I received at least 3 technical reviews. When we had all accept or all reject assessments, our job was straightforward. When we didn't, we invited the reviewers to discuss among themselves the challenges and merits that they observe with each proposal and assess whether they want to update their assessment after the discussions. After the discussion period was over, it was the job of the Research Fund chairs to make the final call when convergences was not achieved. This is in-line with the scientific review processes I have been part of or led in the past. What this means is that a reviewer may have said No to a proposal, but if they have not convinced their two other colleagues that the proposal should receive rejects from them, and if others have assessed the proposal positively, we may decide for the proposal to move to the next stage.
  • With regards to oversight, I am open to receive suggestions for improvement. fwiw: One of the first things I did was to make sure a respected member of the Wikimedia research community joins me as the Research Fund chair and we make every key decision together. I'm really thankful to Benjamin Mako Hill for accepting to work with me on this front last year (and this year). I consider Mako's partnership with me as one way that I can assure the volunteer Wikimedia research community has direct power and voice at the highest level of the Research Fund process.
  • It is my assessment that it is important for WMF to invest in nurturing the WM research community in a variety of ways, one of which is through the Research Funds. fwiw, I am also a strong supporter of the Technology Funds (to support the developer community). I do believe that in order for us to achieve our mission effectively, we must be willing to explore new options and navigate non-trivial trade-offs. As a result, you see me many times making decisions that are not at the extremes. For example, many years ago I advocated for the creation of the Formal Collaborations program in WMF. The program is designed to bring research expertise to WMF and the WM projects without direct financial investment by WMF. The program is one of the most successful programs in the Research team and has enabled us to deliver what would have been otherwise impossible to deliver given the relatively small size of our team. However, the success of this model doesn't mean that this is the only model we should experiment with or invest in.
  • One of the 4 groups that the Research team at WMF serves is the WM Research Community and one of the asks of some folks in this community to us has been dedicated funding. I understand that some members of the research community may not need funding to conduct research on the WM projects. That is amazing and I encourage those of you who are in that position to continue offering your time and expertise to the WM projects in the way that suits your particular affordances. However, it is also my responsibility to assure that we experiment with ways to support others who may not be in these positions. There is no one solution that fits everyone and that is okay.
  • With regards to the ethical control I'd like to share the following:
  • As WMF's Head of Research, I am accountable for the ethics of research conducted by the Research team at WMF. If you have specific concerns about research conducted by the team, please reach out to me.
  • I want to be transparent that WMF has received at least one request from one of the groups in the WM community for exploring options for ethical oversight of research conducted by WMF. We had a few good exploratory conversations with some of the members of this community a while back. However, the leadership transitions in WMF over an extended period of time limited my capacity to engage at the extent that I would have liked to see on this topic. I communicated to the group that I needed more time due to the transitions, and my intention is to go back to this topic as I find it important to explore and develop a solution (or at least a definite answer) on this topic.

--LZia (WMF) (talk) 23:42, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Serendipity: Removing watermarks, copyright signs and cigarettes from photos (1,613 bytes · 💬)

but two great administrators resigned during the resulting row - Link to relevant discussions? TrangaBellam (talk) 05:25, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

I was hesitant to dig up old dirt, but you are right in asking. Here are two refs: Discussion at Commons about the DMCA notice and the unfortunate discussion leading to two admins resigning. Vysotsky (talk) 09:55, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Careful now

The whole "removal of visible copyright indicators" has caused loads of problems for historic media in the past. Postcards that had text on the image identifying the publisher, the cabinet card mounts of old photographs, and many other things are an intrinsic part of the design of the media. I know what you're advocating for (and, for those situations, it's perfectly fine), but be careful exactly how it's phrased.

Also, the attempts to remove a cigarette from a photo are nothing new. Look closely at the hand on the table in http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.12045/ from c. 1907 Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 05:38, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Special report: Decentralized Fundraising, Centralized Distribution (7,768 bytes · 💬)

  • I was glad for some of the discussion about this at the Summit, and surprised to hear some attendees suggest, using this as a jumping off point, that affiliates should be expected to do their own fundraising in some part. The idea of a volunteer organization (as most affiliates are), or even those with a small staff, competing with the fundraising behemoth that is the Wikimedia Foundation is... intimidating. The big challenge, of course, is that so much of affiliates' labor is to support activities which improve Wikipedia and its sister projects -- centralized projects which already have a donation banner going to the WMF. Sharing the responsibility for fundraising would necessitate sharing e.g. banner time, and that would get messy. Something I'd love to see the foundation do, however, is to provide training, resources, and access to funder networks for those affiliates that want to do their own fundraising. WMF has a skilled fundraising team that could really empower smaller organizations to tackle projects that might get overlooked in the WMF grantsmaking process. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 04:22, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
    • WMF staff have been compiling a report on the Wikimedia Summit on Meta. A pdf file was also uploaded to Commons on September 29 – too late for this issue, unfortunately (we'll cover it next month). But the report contains a write-up of the relevant presentation, which I copy below:
Money, Where is the Movement now?

The Wikimedia Movement operates under a system of mostly centralised fundraising, combined with central grantmaking. Over the years, the Wikimedia Foundation has added participatory features to the grantmaking processes. Still, there are large inequities in terms of how and where funds are spent. The Movement Strategy states:

In our current setting, the vast majority of funds and staff are located in the Global North, causing an inequitable distribution of resources. We are missing the potential that comes with a diversified global approach, technological advances, and various revenue possibilities related to the use of our platform and product. With almost all revenue streams passing through few Movement organisations, there are missed opportunities and continuation of inequity.

Movement Strategy recommendations on revenues and resources

What do the Movement Strategy recommendations say?

Distribute the responsibility of revenue generation across Movement entities and develop local fundraising skills to increase sustainability. Increase revenue and diversify revenue streams across the Movement, while ensuring funds are raised and spent in a transparent and accountable manner. (Recommendation 1) In the near future, the Movement should play a guiding role in resource allocation. The processes for allocation should be designed through consultation and described in the Movement Charter. This transition to Movement-led guidance should occur in a timely fashion. (Recommendation 4)

The following principles should guide the work along the way and have strong implications in how resources—not only financial—are obtained and allocated.

  • Equity & Empowerment
  • Inclusivity and Participatory Decision-Making
  • Subsidiarity and Self-Management
  • Contextualization
  • Collaboration and Cooperation
  • Transparency and Accountability
Where do we go from here?

Nikki mentioned some pathways explored by other Movements are doing that can offer guidance in implementing the recommendations in the Movement Strategy:

  • Looking at existing practices, good and bad
  • Understanding the interconnectedness of funding systems with movement governance
  • Deliberation
  • Drafting, discussing and completing the Movement Charter and the Fundraising Policy, as well as other agreements like, for example, policies on redistribution and grantmaking

Learnings from a Wikimedia Deutschland research of how other similar global movements deal with revenues and resources indicate:

  • International NGO confederations practice decentralized fundraising.
  • But not all affiliates fundraise from the same positions in terms of their home markets and their capacity.
  • In response, some INGOs redistribute funds for equity in a centralized manner, based on policies agreed upon by the democratic governance bodies of the confederation.
  • The affiliates that fundraise in strong markets thus support the affiliates in smaller markets.
Some helpful concepts
  • Allocation - any decision to move movement financial resources from one entity to another, or from one region to another
  • Fundraising - any activity designed to generate resources for a member or a confederation, includes all revenue sources.
  • Grantmaking - an impermanent, transactional transfer of funds between a giving entity and a receiving entity based on a process that includes a proposal/application, a review/decision, as well as accountability through financial and impact reporting.
  • Home Donor Rule - a policy assuring that an affiliate has the first right of fundraising in its geographic area or country.
  • Redistribution - any permanent, policy-based mechanism designed to move financial resources from entities or geographic regions with high revenues to entities or geographic regions with lower revenues.
  • The one thing that is missing from the report on Meta so far is the event budget. But overall, the event, with about 150 people attending on site in Berlin and another 200 or so online, seems to have been a lot more successful than the recent hybrid Wikimania (see "Wikimania 2022: No show, no show up?" in last month's Signpost). What did you think of it, Rhododendrites? --Andreas JN466 13:31, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
The WMF's foreign-language fundraising banners on Wikipedia are often very ineptly done. Time and again they feature elementary grammar mistakes. Added to this comes a very pushy, very American writing style that does not go over well when translated literally (witness discussions at m:Talk:Fundraising and nl:Wikipedia:De_kroeg in recent months).
The precise look and feel of the banners ought to be a minor issue in the overall scheme of things. But because of the WMF's decade-long refusal to involve communities more in foreign-language messaging design before the start of a campaign, they're a frequent flashpoint. Andreas JN466 13:00, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Traffic report: Kings and queens and VIPs (3,198 bytes · 💬)

Does anyone know what the record page views for an article in one week is? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:42, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

I believe it is Elizabeth II, with 16.1 million views in the week in which she died, as noted above. As I recall, the previous record was held by the Michael Jackson article, but it had 12.5 million views in all of June 2009. The pageview function only provides information back to 2015, so it is difficult to verify exactly what happened at that time; it's possible that the Jackson article received more pageviews in the entire week following his death, but I couldn't [quickly] find a source to verify. Risker (talk) 03:34, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
I'm going to elaborate further. Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022 at 1510 BST (1410 UTC); her death was announced via the media at 1830 BST on the same date. Earlier in the day, there had been reports that the queen was unwell, as well as reports that family members were traveling to be at her bedside. The article received 8.4 million views on September 8, the date of her death, even though the death had only been announced very late in the day. The total number of pageviews from September 8 to September 14 inclusive was 19.9 million views. Risker (talk) 03:55, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Elizabeth is the second most viewed, Kobe Bryant broke 20 million when he died. igordebraga ≠ 04:18, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Hmm. That page only goes back to 2013. Michael Jackson had 5.9 million views in 2009. Makes me wonder what other articles got multi-million views in the interim. Risker (talk) 06:05, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Price of Wales? (11-17th Sept, No. 8)

No, my mothers’ family were Prices, and lived in Wales! Arwel Parry (talk) 08:21, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
"For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world...but for Wales!" - Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons. Sorry. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 03:23, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
I was going to say up to $140 a kilo but I was thinking of whales. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:16, 3 October 2022 (UTC)


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