Climate change denial on foreign-language Wikipedias

External audio
The Denial Files 5. 'We fight climate denial on Wikipedia', BBC, 20 November 2021, 19:40

The BBC report Climate change: Conspiracy theories found on foreign-language Wikipedias says that "several foreign-language Wikipedia pages seen by BBC News are promoting conspiracy theories and making misleading claims about climate change". The languages in question include Belarusian, Chinese, Croatian, Kazakh and Swahili.

WMF senior program strategist Alex Stinson is quoted as saying "we need more people involved in this project", and that additional volunteers on those projects would help keep out "conspiracy theories and bad information". Yumiko Sato, a US-based Japanese writer who previously wrote on the issue for Slate, said that "Wikipedia only works if the editing community is large and diverse."

"As bad as Holocaust denial"

Wikipedia may delete entry on 'mass killings' under Communism due to claims of bias, published in The Telegraph reviews this AfD entry. Mass killings under Communist regimes was nominated for the axe for the fourth time under this name (and had been nominated twice before under the name Communist genocide). All previous nominations were 10–11 years ago. More in-depth reporting on the AfD can be found in this Signpost edition's deletion report.

The Telegraph quotes University of Cambridge historian Professor Robert Tombs, saying

(Deletion) is morally indefensible, at least as bad as Holocaust denial, because 'linking ideology and killing' is the very core of why these things are important.

I have read the Wikipedia page, and it seems to me careful and balanced. Therefore attempts to remove it can only be ideologically motivated – to whitewash Communism.

One editor dismissed the professor's concerns, saying "I fail to see why his view is important on this subject, being a historian in one subject does not automatically make you an authority on all historical subjects".

The story has been reported in multiple other publications, and the AfD received nearly 70,000 page views in the last week. The length of the AfD will soon surpass twice the length of the previous record holder. Currently, !voters are strongly in favor of keeping the article, and a snow close has been proposed.

Disclosure – the author of this section voted Strong keep at the AfD and has previously edited the article extensively. –S

Richard Desmond doesn't like being called a "former pornographer"

Make no mistake about it: British publisher businessman Richard Desmond indeed used to publish magazines with titles like Asian Babes, and Readers’ Wives, as well as operate a cable channel titled Filth, according to several reliable sources such as the BBC ^(link), The Times ^(link), the Financial Times ^(link), and The Guardian ^(link). The imbroglio originates from Desmond's claim that material must be illegal for it to be classified as "pornography", instead preferring the use of the term "adult material".

Early this month, The Guardian reported that they'd seen a legal document stating that Desmond would take action against Wikipedia.

(He) has now hired lawyers to demand Wikipedia permanently deletes any mentions of the word “pornographer” from his biography.

Lawyers acting for the businessman this week asked Wikipedia administrators to investigate edits to the page, actively monitor it in case the word is reinstated, and keep “genuine, factually correct, edits by Mr Desmond” on the page.
The use of the term ‘pornographer’ when applied to our client is at least factually wrong, gratuitous and insulting, and at most commercially damaging,” they wrote.

It is not clear which "Wikipedia administrators" he asked to monitor the article. Due to a belated request for comment, and the Thanksgiving holiday, the WMF legal department was unable to state whether Desmond or his representatives had contacted them.

While the term "pornographer" was removed three times from the article in the days following The Guardian story, it was quickly restored, and currently remains in the article. None of the editors who removed the word appear to work for Desmond. Several prominent editors have been single-purpose accounts tending to favor Desmond's point of view. Perhaps the most surprisingly prolific editor on the article has been Philip Cross, espousing a point of view in opposition to Desmond's. While there is little or no evidence that he violated policy in his editing of the article, Cross received a short-term block for violating a topic ban on editing articles pertaining to post-1978 British politics.

Signpost's story on false serial killer photo makes waves

Le Monde ^{(link, in French)} cited Andreas Kolbe's October Signpost article about a police photo of Floridian Nathaniel White being mistakenly placed in the Wikipedia article on totally unrelated New York serial killer Nathaniel White for more than two years.

Other media outlets who covered the story include Motherboard (Vice) ^(link), who added some of their own original reporting, Slashdot ^(link), Gigazine ^{(link, in Japanese)}, and 10 sites in various European languages. Even Elon Musk managed a throat-clearing tweet on the subject.

Kolbe told The Signpost: "A good thing to have come from this coverage is that after being contacted by Vice, Google finally tidied up their Knowledge Graph panel, removing Mr. White's picture from it. A number of social media posters were also good enough to take the wrong picture down, so things now look slightly better."

Admin questions Creative Commons NFT "promotion"

Long-time Wikipedia administrator David Gerard, a respected cryptocurrency commentator, has raised doubts on his blog Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain about the propriety of the Creative Commons organization (CC) engaging in what he calls "promotion". He believes that CC is promoting non-fungible tokens (controversial financial instruments used by the cryptocurrency industry to sell certificates of authenticity in electronic works of art). CC denies that they are promoting NFTs, saying instead that they are simply encouraging discussion on their merits.

In brief

• Getting away from the algorithm: Outside magazine writes: Why You Should Scrap Your Instagram for Wikipedia (subscription required). Simply put, getting into arguments with strangers here is much more socially healthy than getting into arguments with your friends on social media.
• Wikipedia is a trustworthy source: The Conversation, a magazine written by and aimed at academics, opines: Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it's a trustworthy source. "In the future, we hope first-year university students enter our classrooms already understanding the value of Wikipedia. This will mean a widespread cultural shift has taken place in Australian primary and secondary schools. In a time of climate change and pandemics, everyone needs to be able to separate fact from fiction. Wikipedia can be part of the remedy."
• Most of the time: Daily Trojan, USC's student newspaper, writes: Progress Without Profit: Don’t count Wikipedia out. A college senior discovers that Wikipedia is a good source—most of the time—and is particularly attracted to its non-profit status.
• Crash? Incident? Rampage? Redirect? Fox News writes: Wikipedia users try to change Waukesha 'parade car rampage' entry to 'parade incident'. Fox analyzes the wording used in the name of Wikipedia's article on the 2021 Waukesha Christmas parade attack. The page was fully protected for a time because of "unregistered editors flooding this page with excessive requests for a page rename".

• The Game Console 2.0 When Wikipedia editors or off-wiki publications need photos of video game consoles, they get them from Evan Amos' Vanamo Online Game Museum. The on-wiki collection is available to all, but for those who want to purchase a paper copy, No-Starch Press has published a follow-up and expansion to the 2018 edition. This remains the first and only commercially successful model of a photographer publishing in the Wikimedia platform and also selling that same collection.
• "Major mistakes": Celebrity chef Rachel Allen went to the Irish Mirror to get some longstanding errors in her Wikipedia biography fixed. The items in question, birth date and middle name, were unsourced and added by IPs years ago, in 2007 and 2017. Allen said she had tried to correct the errors on Wikipedia, but had been unsuccessful.
• Wikigifs: Boing Boing writes: Fascinating website shows all the gifs on Wikipedia. Author Annie Rauwerda reports positively on Wikigifs, a "website that shows you each gif on Wikimedia Commons one at a time", and calls it "my new favorite bookmark".

After ten months of near-constant article creation, expansion and review, the 2021 WikiCup drew to a close on October 31, with our new champion, The Rambling Man, claiming the trophy. Lee Vilenski achieved second place, forcing Amakuru into third position during the last few hours of the contest.

The WikiCup began humbly in 2007 with 12 competitors, scoring being based primarily on edit counts and unique page edits. The competition adopted its present form in 2009, with points awarded for featured articles, lists and pictures, along with good articles, In the news and Did you know. There were 60 contestants that year and 120 the next, and the contest has taken place annually ever since. Good article reviews were added in 2011 and featured article reviews in 2020. Over the course of the 2021 WikiCup the following content improvements have been achieved by participants: 88 featured articles, 19 featured lists, 528 featured article reviews, 493 good articles, 689 good article reviews, over 500 "Did you know" and 417 "In the news" items.* A thank-you goes out to all competitors for their hard work and the great benefit Wikipedia has received from their contributions.

The WikiCup will be held again next year, and editors may sign up now by adding their username and a flag of their choice to the signup list.

Some examples of the finalists' work in the last round....

• 
  The Rambling Man managed an incredible eight featured articles in the last round, all related to football and covering key matches from various seasons. Seen here is the Stade de France which hosted the final of one of these, the UEFA Euro 2016. In addition, he achieved three good topics (86 articles in total), and performed nearly 300 featured and good article reviews.
• 
  Cue sports featured heavily in the interests of finalists. Last year's WikiCup winner, Lee Vilenski was in second place this time, and certainly made a memorable showing! By his efforts, Lee managed to bring five articles on snooker to Featured Article status, including Snooker, a challenging task that brought him maximum points.
• 
  Amakuru, who finished in a close third place, was another soccer enthusiast with six featured and nine good articles. Not to be monotonous by showing only pictures of sport, here is the Coventry ring road at sunset, the subject of one of Amakuru's good articles.
• 
  Fourth-place Epicgenius had two featured and fourteen good articles on locations in New York City, including both skyscrapers and historic places such as the Surrogate's Courthouse (pictured). Wikipedia's coverage of New York's buildings has benefited greatly from the 130 or so high-quality articles created by Epicgenius during the course of the contest.
• 
  Fifth-place Gog the Mild concentrated his efforts on articles related to battles. He raised four articles to featured article status and nine to good article, and also achieved a thirteen-article featured topic on the Hundred Years' War, 1345–1347, the Battle of Caen being pictured here.
• 
  Cue sports were also the focus of sixth-place BennyOnTheLoose, who achieved three featured and fourteen good articles in the last round. Benny has other interests however, including bringing Cornelia Sorabji (pictured), a very determined woman, to good article status.
• 
  Seventh-place Hog Farm did a lot of work related to the American Civil War, achieving three featured articles and seven good articles. One of the latter was Black Terror (pictured), a fake warship used to bluff Confederate forces into destroying the partially-salvaged remains of the ironclad USS Indianola.
• 
  Eighth-placed Bloom6132 concentrated his efforts on the In the news section of the main page; he garnered thirty-four ITN credits in the last round (two hundred and eighty-four in the competition as a whole). All of these were for recent deaths, such as the death of the jazz musician Lonnie Smith (pictured), who died on 28 September this year.

• Note: these figures differ from this unofficial tool because Round 1 was improperly recorded by the bot.

Most editors are familiar with the existence of Articles for Deletion (AfD), the process by which we determine the suitability of articles for inclusion in Wikipedia. Indeed, many of us have had direct experience with the process, whether we liked it or not: working your ass off on an article only to see it flushed down the drain is close to an official rite of passage around these parts. That said, there are plenty of articles that have no place on Wikipedia, and plenty of subjects that have no business getting an article written about them. Love it or hate it, AfD is one of the most publicly-known processes on Wikipedia; it's referenced often enough in mainstream publications for us to have an article about it. And it looks like the largest AfD of all time has graced us with its presence this month.

But what do we really know about it? Statistical analysis is rather hard to come by. Earlier in 2021, I wrote a piece of software that analyzes AfD logs, from which I was able to create a live dashboard of current deletion discussions. I was also able to analyze all 480,000 AfDs (statistics on which can be found here). There were some interesting revelations, including a sortable list of the longest AfDs of all time for the drama-minded.

The topic of this report, however, is what was going on with AfD in November 2021, including the monthly statistics and sortable tables of each AfD.

Overall statistics

These figures are current as of November 28. More detailed statistics can be seen at the monthly Oracle page for November 2021, including numbers and percentages for all closes in the month.

There were 1,767 AfDs listed in November, of which 1,172 have closed and 595 remain open. This is slightly below the 2021 average of 1,794 per month (and well below the 2005–2020 average of 2,400 per month).

This comes out to an average of 63.1 per day, with the least on the 5th (35) and the most on the 27th (92); the average for 2021 has been around 54 per day.

205 of the November AfDs were relists from October, meaning 1,562 new nominations have been made since the beginning of the month. Additionally, 15 were closed without a !vote being cast (one was withdrawn, one was deleted, four were speedily deleted, and the rest were closed as no consensus).

The most common outcome was "delete" (as has been the case for all months since August 2005); "delete"s and "speedy delete"s combined made up 61.8% of closes. Meanwhile, 19.2% closed "keep" or "speedy keep", slightly below the 2021 average of 20.5%. There was only one type of close that didn't happen a single time in November — the elusive unicorn of deletion, the "transwiki" close to move content to another wiki, has occurred only 324 times in nearly 500,000 AfDs.

Mass killings under communist regimes: The largest AfD of all time

• The most !voted on AfD this month, and the largest by a wide margin, isn't even closed yet. The discussion for Mass killings under communist regimes is currently at a gargantuan 499 kilobytes, 172 !votes, and 1,096 total revisions by 204 editors. Even disregarding the 117 kilobyte talk page for the nomination, this is by far the largest AfD of all time.

Note: The discussion's final size was 510,874 bytes, with 174 !votes across 217 editors. It had the ((closing)) template added by Jo-Jo Eumerus on November 29; !votes continued to trickle in (reaching a maximum of 511,852 bytes) until post-close !votes were removed and the page was fully protected by Joe Roe five hours later to allow the closers to work. It was closed as "no consensus" on December 1, by a four-administrator panel consisting of Jo-Jo Eumerus, Joe Roe, Rosguill and Seraphimblade.

The previous champion (the third nomination of List of notable converts to Christianity in 2007) was a paltry 234 kilobytes. It is not the AfD with the most !votes, however: that would be the 60-article batch nomination at Esoteric programming languages in 2006, which garnered 301. Or at least, it isn't the one with the most !votes yet. It still has a few more days to run, and it's apparently been picked up by a few blogs and media outlets. It's had 65,696 pageviews so far, which probably puts it high in the running for the most-viewed AfD of all time.

This is the article's fourth stint at AfD: the first three discussions (one from 2009 and two from 2010) were no less contentious, weighing in at 31, 67, and 206 kilobytes respectively. Prior to that, the article was nominated twice in 2009 under its previous title, Communist genocide.

This Polyphemian (or, if you prefer, "huge-ass") discussion concerns a similarly massive article: currently 297 kilobytes, it's existed since 2009, and in that time has had over five hundred distinct editors. The talk page is festooned with twelve talk page headers, and links to 52 archive pages. In fact, the thread about the article at the dispute resolution noticeboard was so long it got moved to its own subpage (with its own shortcut, WP:DRNMKUCR, whose incomprehensibility seems apt for the situation). This subpage is, itself, 184 kilobytes. And it's on hold because the article is at AfD!

The current AfD, nominated on November 22 by cygnis insignis, has seen a variety of established editors coming down on both sides. In the interest of full disclosure, the writer of this article is one of them, and will do something smart for once in his life by refraining from giving further commentary.

Other discussions of note

• The second most !voted-on AfD was the fiercely debated third nomination of ARS Public School, in which 30 !votes were cast in 51 kilobytes of discussion among 33 editors. Closer Daniel noted that "this debate obviously has caused fractures across the wider community, in other places than simply this discussion page". Indeed, this AfD featured in the latest in a series of content and conduct disputes over deletion at AN/I centering around the activity of the controversial Article Rescue Squadron. The article itself was about a school in Jharkhand, India. The third nomination for the page, submitted by Dronebogus, was made two days after a no-consensus close of the second. Ultimately, the ARS failed to save ARS; Daniel, in closing the debate on November 16, cited a clear consensus to delete, saying that "ultimately, it has come down to an interpretation of our relevant notability guidelines, and there is a strong consensus that this article does not meet those requirements".

• The third most active AfD, with 23 !votes in 43 kilobytes, was Herbert V. Clark. The AfD, nominated by Mztourist on October 23, was closed as "no consensus" by Scottywong on November 11. Discussion focused on interpretations of what constituted independent and significant coverage, as well as whether Clark was independently notable in his own right or merely inherited notability from his status as a Tuskegee Airman.

• Four discussions, each with 21 !votes, are tied for the spot of fourth most-active:

• Irish actor Stephen Hogan had the second largest AfD of the month in terms of page size, weighing in at a hefty 66 kilobytes. Nominated by DGG on October 24th, this month-old discussion has so far spawned one very long thread at COIN, as well as a second and third at AN/I. With 21 !votes, it closed on the 26th as "no consensus" by Jo-Jo Eumerus, who said: "It seems like there are arguments on both sides of each side and no argument is clearly superior to the other. I note that the discussion was full of offtopic commentary, sockpuppetry and that some participants were sufficiently irritated by one participant that they struck out their !votes".

• 106 articles pertaining to the ongoing Tigray War in Ethiopia were batch-nominated at 2020 May Kado massacre, the third largest AfD of the month (at 51 kilobytes). The nomination was made by WMSR on November 8, and closed as "procedural keep" by Vanamonde93 on November 15. Two days later, a second nomination was made by Dawit S Gondaria, featuring 25 from the previous batch. This time, all 25 were deleted; closer Missvain cited "a variety of reasons presented - WP:NEVENT, failure to present WP:RS and WP:SIGCOV and the looking sockpuppet investigation taking place around link spamming".
• Wikimedia UK trustee and marketer Monisha Shah had her article nominated for deletion on the 18th; her close relationship to the editing community made for a fairly contentious deletion discussion, with a long thread on COIN running in tandem with the AfD. It was closed as "delete per consensus" by User:Doczilla on the 26th.
• The biography of unsuccessful Buffalo, New York mayoral candidate India Walton, on its second nomination, was closed "keep" by Daniel after 21 !votes. Retention arguments mentioned the "historic" nature of her loss, and Walton's status as a "prominent example of a divide within the Democratic Party in 2021".

• The largest unanimous AfD was Washington Football Team vs. New York Giants Game September 2021 (boy, that's a mouthful). Of fifteen !votes, all were to delete; most arguments invoked the notability guidelines at WP:SPORTSEVENT, which says that "regular season games in professional and college leagues are not inherently notable [...] games should be extraordinary and have a lasting impact on the sport". The article's creator, Wiki Ed student editor Pippalenderking, was sanguine about the experience, saying:

"I just want to offer my thanks and appreciation for all of the advice on my article. This is the first article I've ever written for Wikipedia and I am grateful for all the suggestions you have provided! I am going to look into contributing to other related articles -- thank you for including me in this valuable discussion!"

Well, Pippalenderking, here's hoping you find something good to write about -- there's always geostubs!

• The shortest AfD was the second nomination of Pulock Deb Roy, closed as speedy delete when the article was deleted just an hour and thirty-seven minutes after being listed. It was not the quickest-closed, however: that honor goes to Habibganj railway station, a pagemove request mistakenly filed as an AfD and non-admin closed after a whopping five minutes.

• The oldest AfD closed in November was L'Oreal Hair Zone Mall Tour, opened on October 7 -- although it was by no means the longest-running, being closed by Barkeep49 as "redirect" on the second day of November. The oldest article nominated was Right Livelihood Award, which was created in August 2002.

• The longest-running AfD from November was a tie between two nominations with remarkably similar stories: they were both open for 39 days, from October 10 to November 18, and closed by Scottywong within an hour of each other. Relationship anarchy, with sixteen !votes, was closed as "no consensus". Hearns Crossroads, Delaware, a batch nomination of four GNIS-based stubs of alleged unincorporated communities in Delaware, was closed as "delete all" after seventeen !votes.

Matt Amodio is a computer science PhD student at Yale University who specializes in artificial intelligence (AI). He won 38 consecutive appearances on the Jeopardy! quiz show, which is the second highest all-time regular-season number of victories. He earned $1,519,601, the third highest amount following James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings. The show's unique feature is that all responses must be in the form of questions. Amodio's unique strategy on the show was that all his responses start with "What's ..."

Open-source information democratizes the knowledge landscape. In a world with tightly gated access to information, those without resources face an uphill battle learning about the world. I have recently come to national attention for my demonstration of knowledge. That knowledge comes not from a privileged life exposed to international wonders through expensive experiences, but from a curious mind given access to a virtual tour of the world at my fingertips. Through relentless questioning and access to the highly structured information reservoir that is Wikipedia, I've equipped myself with a vast array of knowledge and entertained myself along the way.

In Slumdog Millionaire, Dev Patel knows trivia answers from deeply personal memories relating to the underlying facts. Did I recall my trip through the Canadian prairies to help me answer a question about the provinces separated by the Continental Divide? Did I identify a skink because of the family safari I was taken on as a kid? Did I reminisce over seeing Cats on Broadway when I responded with "What's 'Memory'?" No, no, and no. I have been able to experience some things in my lifetime, but through Wikipedia I have free access to the experiences of millions of other lifetimes, too!

There is no resource I use more than Wikipedia. By perusing information at varying levels of depth, I can introduce myself to an entirely foreign concept without getting overwhelmed or I can obtain key details deep in the weeds on a specific topic. A person unfamiliar with Jeopardy! can take an initial reading of its page for general understanding of what it is. That person may run across the word "syndicated" and be unfamiliar with the concept of syndication. On first reading, they needn't be. But on the second reading, that person may choose to dive into the world hidden underneath the blue underlined text. The page on broadcast syndication then discusses business considerations like broadcast networks, technology development like videotape, and even specific popular culture like Abbott and Costello. By dipping one's toes a little deeper each time, somebody can start out curious about an individual game show and come out with a broad picture of the evolution of television over the decades. Wikipedia’s structure serves people at every level of prior knowledge.

Beyond learning trivia, I use Wikipedia in my research. My work often places me at an intersection of multiple disciplines, for example artificial intelligence and biology. While I have expertise in the AI side, I sometimes lack even basic understanding of the biological domains that my colleagues who are experts in that side think are common sense. They usually gained their knowledge through expensive years of academic study with dense textbooks and professional educators. I can catch up with a free online resource!

Wikipedia provides everybody who has basic internet access with more knowledge than was available to the best-educated princes of yesteryear. The 18th century image of educating your child was sending him to a famous master or of having him embark on the Grand Tour. Neither of these options were available to any but the upper classes, and they only provided a well-rounded education in the cramped sense of the term used at the time. The 21st century image needs only the barest of modern equipment and is available nearly universally across nationalities, classes, genders, and every other dimension. We live in a world that is increasingly focused on what skills and knowledge you have, as opposed to what formal qualifications like degrees you have. This is empowering to a cohort of brilliant young minds eager to take on the future.

With a little bit of curiosity and initiative, anyone can expose him or herself to much of the aggregate knowledge of the world and start building an information base or a useful skill set through Wikipedia. I know I did!

With the Arbitration Committee elections for 2021 currently underway, it seems unfitting that the Signpost hasn't had a full arbitration report all year. A lot has happened in the last year: twelve motions were made, twenty-two cases were declined, one was dismissed, one was suspended, and six were closed. Three admins were desysopped, and one seemingly-nascent RfA candidate was indefinitely blocked as a sockpuppet of a Foundation-banned user. Additionally, the most active area of discretionary sanctions (American politics 2) had its scope redefined significantly. All in all, a total of 809 arbitration enforcement actions were logged, including in relatively new enforcement areas like COVID-19.

Without further ado, let's go over it!

ACE2020

Eleven candidates stood for the December 2020 Arbitration Committee Elections (with twelve nominations, of whom one withdrew prior to the start of voting). Among them were two non-administrators, two current arbitration clerks, and two sitting arbitrators from the December 2019 term.

In order of nomination, the candidates were:

• Bradv, a sitting Committee member who was also a drafting arbitrator for Medicine, as well as Portals in January and Motorsports in March
• Primefac, an admin and bureaucrat editing since 2012
• Scottywong, an engineering manager who had been an editor since 2007 and an administrator since 2012
• Maxim, another sitting member on the last Committee, who was a drafting arbitrator on RHaworth in January and Medicine in April
• BDD, a librarian who had been an administrator since 2013
• Barkeep49, an administrator since 2019 whose statement included a full platform

• TonyBallioni, administrator and CU/OS since 2018 (who withdrew prior to the start of the election)

• L235, an active editor since 2014 and an arbitration clerk since 2015
• Hawkeye7, former administrator and MILHIST coordinator
• CaptainEek, an OTRS agent and administrator since May 2020
• Guerillero, arbitration clerk and administrator
• SMcCandlish, technical editor and non-administrator

The seven candidates elected included five new arbitrators (Barkeep49, BDD, CaptainEek, L235, and Primefac), as well as the reelection of both sitting arbitrators (Bradv and Maxim).

ArbCom in 2021

In January, Tranche Beta arbitrator Xeno resigned, saying:

I have very recently accepted an upcoming role with the Foundation to help facilitate the second phase of the meta:Universal Code of Conduct consultations investigating key enforcement questions. To protect the integrity of internal committee deliberations, I am humbly tendering my resignation from the Arbitration Committee.

Since then, the Arbitration Committee has consisted of fourteen members (the above-mentioned Tranche Alpha, in addition to Casliber, Beeblebrox, David Fuchs, KrakatoaKatie, Newyorkbrad, SoWhy, and Worm That Turned).

In February, a formal structure for case workflow (initiated by Beeblebrox) was passed 8–0 with one abstention. The motion formally instituted a workflow structure for the Committee's internal handling of accepted cases (including an evidence phase, workshop phase, and proposed decision phase). The drafting arbitrator can add, remove, or extend phases according to their discretion; they can also choose to take actions like enforce threaded discussions or institute word limits on parties to a case. These parties can petition for changes to the rules in their case.

In March, a community consultation was opened regarding the practice of discretionary sanctions. This discussion concluded in May, reaching "a consensus that Discretionary Sanctions serves a purpose and remains effective in creating conditions for high quality information to be presented to our readers". Also in March, a majority of the Arbitration Committee signed an Open Letter from Arbcoms to the Board of Trustees, drafted over several months by many Committees across a variety of Wikimedia projects. The letter was included in the previous (March 2021) Signpost arbitration report, as well as a more detailed explanation of its intent and purpose.

In April, two actions were taken in the interest of increasing transparency. First, an appeals report page was created, at which arbitrators now publish periodic reports on private ban/block appeals. Later, a motion was passed regarding the Committee's retention policy on personally identifying information: an annual "examination" of the ArbCom wiki (to take place every April) was established, in which information would be "considered no longer necessary if the user has not edited under any account for a significant number of years or if the reason for the private information to be held has passed".

In September, a motion passed to amend certain Arbitration Committee "500/30" remedies, which required that editors have 500 edits and 30 days on their account prior to editing in certain areas. The amendment changed the language of the remedies to instead say "extended confirmed restrictions" were in place (which, at the time of the motion, was identical to 500/30).

New trainee clerks appointed the year 2021 include CodeLyoko, Firefly, MJL, and GeneralNotability (the latter of whom was promoted to full clerk in October).

Motions, cases, et cetera

• AP2 cutoff moved to 1992

  January 19: Following a request for clarification and amendment filed by Interstellarity on December 23, an 8-to-1 majority (with two abstentions) passed a motion amending the AP2 cutoff from 1932 to 1992. All other provisions of the remedy remain in place. The previous sanctions had been instituted when the American politics 2 case (often referred to by the shorthand of "AP2") concluded, with one of its remedies being a modification of previously existing discretionary sanctions on American politics (AP1, or ARBAP). The AP2 remedy authorized standard discretionary sanctions on "all edits about, and all pages related to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people".

• Flyer22 and WanderingWanda case dismissed

  January 21: The Arbitration Committee dismissed the pending case between Flyer22 Frozen and WanderingWanda, saying: "The Committee has received word that Flyer22 Frozen has passed away [...] We would like to express our heartfelt condolences to the family of Flyer22."

• Encyclopedia Dramatica links permitted with consensus

  February 12: Following a request for amendment filed by Steve M regarding a dispute over link inclusion on the Encyclopædia Dramatica article, Remedy 1 of the MONGO case was amended by motion. The original remedy, from 2006, said that links to Encyclopædia Dramatica may be removed "wherever found on Wikipedia as may material imported from it". The amended version now says that such links "may be removed wherever found on Wikipedia, absent explicit consensus for their inclusion".

• Gender and sexuality remedies moved to single case

  February 22: an 11–0 motion (initiated by Barkeep49, with language drafted by L235 and Maxim) passed to move Remedy 1.1 of the 2015 GamerGate arbitration ruling to a new case specifically created for it, Gender and sexuality (or "WP:ARBGSDS" -- quite a mouthful). Furthermore, remedies originally from the Manning naming dispute case, as well as the Gender Gap Task Force case, were relocated to the new WP:ARBGSDS case. There were no new sanctions or remedies issued by the motion, which was done solely for the purpose of making enforcement simpler by unifying remedies from disparate cases with similar areas of relevance.

• Topic bans and site bans on Kurds and Kurdistan

  February 23: The Committee ruled on a wide-ranging arbitration case concerning the Kurds, Kurdistan, and Syrian Kurdistan (with drafting arbitrators BDD, Primefac and Maxim). Prior attempts at resolution were given as one thread on DRN, one on RSN, one on NPOVN, and eight on AN/I. The case was closed with a number of findings; primarily that the conduct of several participants had gone beyond the pale (in some cases as the culmination of a long history of disruptive editing). One editor, Paradise Chronicle, was warned to avoid "uncollegial conduct" in the future. Another (GPinkerton) was site-banned. Three editors (Thepharoah17, عمرو بن كلثوم, and Supreme Deliciousness) were topic-banned from "articles related to Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed". Three days later, these topic bans were amended by a 10–0 motion to strike "articles related to" (i.e. to make them apply across the entirety of the project).

• Tenebrae motion

  March 23: Due to issues regarding conflict of interest, Tenebrae was "indefinitely banned from any mainspace edits related to Frank Lovece or Maitland McDonagh, broadly construed", but permitted to continue requesting edits on talk pages. Following an AN discussion two days later, Tenebrae was community-banned, and their account indefinitely blocked.

• RexxS desysopped

  March 26: A case centering around RexxS was closed, after a month-long case filed by ProcrastinatingReader that accumulated 43 preliminary statements. Of those statements, around 17 had requested that the Committee decline the case. RexxS, a board member of Wikimedia UK until his term expired in July 2021, and an administrator since April 2019, was desysopped. RexxS, a contributor with over 43K edits since January 2008, has not edited Wikipedia since February 25, one day before the case was filed; on the 23rd he had commented that while he was open to "discuss and try to learn any lessons", he was unwilling to participate in "a forum for everybody who has ever disagreed with me to sling mud".

• Carlossuarez46 desysopped

  March 31: An arbitration case against administrator Carlossuarez46 was filed. The dispute regarded "geostubs", articles generated from public databases of geographical information. Many geostubs serve as the basis for long and beautifully sourced articles — we all owe thanks to the famous Rambot — but many others remain stubs for years or decades, and many derive their claim to notability from the mere existence of coordinates in a database. Indeed, many geostubs are nominated for deletion upon the discovery that the database entries are the result of technical glitches, or data entry errors. Carlossuarez46, who had created thousands of geostubs in decades past, was accused of violating administrator conduct standards in 2021 discussions about his geostubs. After a week of proceedings, he announced his retirement on his userpage, and the case was suspended for three months on April 8, with a temporary three-month remedy of desysopping until it was resumed. On July 8, it was automatically closed, with him remaining desysopped.

• Antisemitism in Poland remedy amended

  May 9: Following a request for amendment by Girth Summit on March 12, the Committee passed a motion amending Remedy 5 of the Antisemitism in Poland case.

• COVID-19 sanctions moved from GS to DS: In the interest of full disclosure, note that yours truly made a statement on this one

  June 16: Following a long case request spurred by vigorous months-long dispute over the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis, a motion was passed 8–1 to rescind the March 2020 AN-instituted community sanctions on COVID-19 (WP:GS/COVID19) and replace them with discretionary sanctions (WP:ARBCOVIDDS). Previously, 15 individual sanctions and 36 page sanctions had been logged under the GS regime; since the switch in June, the arbitration log has had 7 individual sanctions and 37 page sanctions for COVID-19.

• Mutual interaction ban loosened

  July 3: the interaction ban between Ritchie333 and Praxidicae was amended by motion to allow discussion of the ban itself: "Parties may discuss the existence of the ban, and examine its implications, but remain forbidden from discussing each other and interacting with each other."

• Palestine-Israel restrictions clarified

  July 12: Following a request for clarification and amendment by ProcrastinatingReader, the Committee passed a motion that "The phrase 'other internal project discussions', as used in Remedy 5 of the Palestine-Israel articles 4 case ('ARBPIA General Sanctions'), shall be construed to include requested moves."

• Iranian politics DS enacted, four topic bans, two warnings

  September 20: The Iranian politics case, filed in July by Idealigic, concerned an area of dispute already under community-instituted general sanctions — namely, the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK). Previous attempts at dispute resolution had failed, and the Arbitration Committee issued four topic bans: BarcrMac, Idealigic, and Stefka Bulgaria were topic-banned from "post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed", while Mhhossein was topic-banned from "People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), broadly construed". Furthermore, Mhhossein and Vice regent were warned against "a battleground mentality". Additional remedies included the upgrade of post-1978 Iranian politics from general sanctions to discretionary sanctions, and the authorization of uninvolved administrators to facilitate RfC consensus-building by instituting word/diff limits on RfC participants, bans on disruptive RfC editors, sectioned commenting rules, and moratoriums (of up to one year) on additional RfCs on any given dispute.

• Eostrix blocked

  October 19: As has been previously covered in the Signpost, prospective admin candidate Eostrix was blocked by the Arbitration Committee five days into a nearly unopposed home-run RfA. Eostrix was blocked indefinitely as a sockpuppet of Foundation global-banned user Icewhiz.

• Emergency desysop of compromised admin account Epbr123

  November 19: Administrator Epbr123 has made over 290,000 edits since 2006, but has been largely inactive in recent years (their last 50 edits go back to 2013). The account was desysopped, globally locked, and indefinitely blocked under Level I desysopping procedures after its login credentials were compromised and used to make a highly offensive (now revdelled) edit to the article on George Floyd.

Unblocks

• January 27: Donald1972, indefinitely blocked in August 2019, made a successful appeal to the Arbitration Committee, and was unblocked on the condition that they be forbidden from editing the article Matthias Laurenz Gräff.
• March 4: SethRuebens, previously indefinitely blocked in August 2020, was unblocked following a successful appeal to the Committee. This editor would again be indefinitely blocked following an AN/I discussion in July.
• March 17: J-Man11, indefinitely blocked since September 2020.
• March 24: Jessiemay1984, indefinitely blocked since January 2021.
• June 14: Uhooep, indefinitely blocked since May 2021.

Enforcement actions

So far, a total of 809 enforcement actions have been logged in 2021. These include a few in rarely-seen areas like Falun Gong, Scientology and Macedonia; the bulk of enforcement, however, occurred in traditionally contentious areas like Israel-Palestine and American politics 2. The most active category, however, was Biographies of Living Persons, at 143 logged actions.

Corrections: After publication, it was noted that RexxS's last edit was on February 25, not February 26, and that of the statements in his case, around 17 had been requests to decline. His final comment on the issue, from February 23, was also provided.

Major changes to Requests for adminship (RfA) appear imminent after community members discussed proposals to modify the current process. Editors have been working on the 2021 Requests for adminship review process since August 29. During previous phases editors identified issues with the existing process and brainstormed solutions. The fruits of their labor are almost ready to harvest as the feedback period on formal proposals to modify RfA processes closes on November 30. Among the potential changes: changes to a default RfA question, changes to the admin toolkit, additional boards for scrutinizing the use of administrator tools, and formal administrator elections using SecurePoll.

Big changes proposed

Several large changes to adminship have been proposed and subjected to significant community discussion. These changes affect both the process by which editors can become an administrator and the tools entrusted to administrators by default.

Potential direct changes to administrator-making process

Significant discussion took part on the potential for administrators to be selected by an election process as an alternate route to adminship. The full proposal, written largely by Worm That Turned, describes the process as follows:

Candidates would sign up by a certain date, then would have a shorter period of 3 days for discussion and questions. There should be discussion only in this period, no bolded !votes. At the end of the period, candidates can progress to the next period, secret ballot (through SecurePoll) for a full week. Voter suffrage would initially match Arbcom elections. Candidates who achieve 70% Support would pass and become administrators.

— Admin Elections Proposal

The proposal foresees elections will take place every six months.

Many editors supported the proposal, arguing that it would reduce the amount of scrutiny that editors would expect to individually see and would thereby encourage additional competent editors to pursue adminship. Dreamy Jazz argued that "[b]y bundling everyone together it reduces the amount of spotlight that an editor will feel going through an RfA. ...Also by providing a system where editors can only simply vote for or against anonymously this means that there is likely to be less permanent to see negative scrutiny for a candidate who ends up failing."

Other editors opposed the proposal, arguing that this would fail to achieve the desired goals of allowing competent prospective administrators to succeed in their attempts to become an administrator. Cryptic, whose comments were frequently referenced throughout the discussion, wrote:

There was a large drop in average support when arbcom elections moved from open to closed voting. (I want to say it was something around 15 or 20 points, but I'm too lazy to go look.) I'll grant that there's people who refuse to run an RFA because of the atmosphere who'd likely pass in the 90% range. I can think of two offhand. But I'd lay odds that there are far more that would pass a traditional RFA, get universal support in the public discussion period where people are accountable for what they say, and not even break 50% in the safely-anonymous voting. Being able to name and shame people who oppose for poor reasons is a feature, not a bug.

— Cryptic, 20:49, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Some editors in support of the proposal indicated that they partly agreed with Cryptic's comments. "To an extent I agree with Cryptic below," S Marshall wrote, "but I think our current system is collapsing so badly that we need to do something that really changes it, and this is, in my view, the only sufficiently radical proposal on the table."

Just over sixty percent of around ninety participants indicated support for the proposal as of 23:59 GMT on November 25, leaving it unclear what the final outcome of this proposal will be.

Not all proposals have been nearly as contentious, however. A suggestion to change standard question 1 to "Why are you interested in becoming an administrator?" has gained sweeping support, with over fifty-five editors in support of the change and no editors indicating opposition as of the 23:59 GMT on November 25. This would replace the existing standard question 1, which currently reads "What administrative work do you intend to take part in?".

Proposed page for reviewing inappropriate administrator actions draws support

A proposal made by Joe Roe seeks to create a new noticeboard in order to review administrative actions. The proposed noticeboard, titled "Administrative action review" by Joe Roe, would have the scope to review "action, or set of related actions, requiring an advanced permission and not already covered by an existing process". Discussions on the noticeboard would be able to either endorse an administrative action or fail to endorse it; in the latter case, the proposal states that actions taken could be reversed by any editor or administrator. While participation in discussions would be open to all users, only administrators would be allowed to close discussions on the page, according to the written proposal.

Joe Roe, quoting current arbitration committee candidate Worm That Turned, states that the intent of the noticeboard is "to create a middle ground between AN/I and arbitration, 'where any admin decision can be reviewed, keeping it low drama and away from ANI, but equally reducing the high stakes atmosphere'". Other editors, such as MER-C, wrote that this would be helpful in reviewing actions by non-admin new page patrollers, stating that "this may be a way to catch infiltrating spammers."

Not all editors, however, have supported the proposal. Guerillero, another arbitration committee candidate, compared the proposal to the defunct Wikiquette assistance and Requests for comment/User conduct processes, which Guerillero says "died for a good reason". Dennis Brown argued that this proposal would exacerbate existing problems, writing that the noticeboard would be a "[d]rama fest full of everyone who feels they've been wrong[ed]... this is what Arb is for, and filing an Arb case is trivial if there is any misuse."

Autopatrolled no more?

The status of administrators as being autopatrolled by default is up in the air after Taking Out The Trash proposed removing the status from the default administrative toolkit. The editor explained that doing so would reduce the necessity for administrators to demonstrate exceptional competence in the area of content creation, thereby allowing users with sufficient back-end experience to be more likely to survive RfA. "If admins did not become autopatrolled by default," the editor wrote, "it would open the door to having admin candidates that are exclusively or almost exclusively technical or countervandalism or some other non-content focus." Administrators would still be able to assign themselves the autopatrolled right under the proposal.

Editors in support argued that the autopatrolled right is different from many other rights in the administrator toolkit. Editors can become sufficiently experienced to be an administrator, supporters say, without being fit to be granted the autopatrolled criteria. Jackattack1597 wrote that "many admins would not otherwise meet the autopatrolled criteria, and there have been issues with admins having autopatrolled in the past".

Editors in opposition to this change disagreed that this solution was proper. Some, such as Hut 8.5, argued that editors who could not be trusted with the autopatrolled tools were not competent enough to become administrators. "The autopatrolled right means that your creations don't need to be reviewed by NP patrollers, who are largely interested in filtering out articles which obviously need to be deleted and applying obvious maintenance tags (unreferenced, uncategorised etc). A candidate who genuinely can't manage that shouldn't be an admin," the editor wrote.

Not all proposed changes embraced with open arms

Not all proposals were welcomed by editors with open arms. Several, such as a proposal for a unique role that would allow vetted editors to apply semi-protection to pages, were closed as failed under the snowball clause. Other proposals that drew substantial community opposition have been allowed to continue discussion.

Opt-in binding recall proposal for RfA candidates draws low support

The perennial proposal for administrators to be subject to a binding recall drew low levels of community support, with around 60% of those who submitted a !vote as of the time of writing indicating opposition to the proposal. The details of the proposal are as follows:

Those in opposition to the proposal noted that bureaucrats have already publicly stated that they will not take on the role of enforcing the results of recall discussions and that the process could become a bludgeoning tool against potential RfA candidates. "Pressure to commit to recall criteria would be very unhealthy for RFA," GeneralizationsAreBad wrote. Rschen7754 expressed similar concerns, writing that "[t]his could result in de facto bullying: 'Oppose unless you agree to XYZ'."

Those in support of the proposal argue that it would bring about significant change. Bilorv, the proposer, wrote that "the right path forward is a mandate for binding recall criteria, which would be groundbreaking. The fundamental issue we have that needs a formal RfC is that no recall criteria are enforced by crats, so candidates who want to set them can only pledge to follow them, and voters who want to support them are forced to either trust the candidate to act sensibly in a situation where they are unfit for adminship, or oppose because the criteria are not enforceable."

Opt-out RfA conscription proposal draws scrutiny

A proposal to draft experienced editors who do not opt-out into running for RfA drew significant pushback. Supporters argued that the proposal, which would have opened a subset of editors with over ten thousand edits and no blocks over the past five years to the potential of being randomly selected to go through an RfA, would result in more candidates going through an RfA.

Some supporters argued that this was necessary to combat wiki-cultural barriers to gaining good admins. "I see a culture that states that potential admins should not want to be admins," wrote Ifnord, "if volitional adminship is deemed so negative, what alternative is there than conscription?"

Opponents, however, thought that conscription was not the proper way to address issues with RfA. "Users have the right not to be admins, as absurd as this comment would be in any other context," Trainsandotherthings wrote, while Espresso Addict stated that "[i]t's important that admins are true volunteers, not draftees who didn't manage to say no firmly enough."

Discussion on proposals ending soon

Community discussion regarding proposals to reform RfA began on October 31 and lasts until November 30, according to the 2021 RfA review hub page. Following the end of this discussion period, proposals will be evaluated for consensus, with proposals that achieve consensus slated for implementation. "[H]opefully," the 2021 RfA review hub page says, implementation will "be fast and not require any further phases."

For those who have not yet commented on the proposals, time is quickly running out to have their voices heard. The period to formally discuss the proposals ends on November 30, with the outcome of many proposals looking unclear at the moment. In the meantime, participants in these discussions lie in wait to see what proposed changes will take effect and lie in hope that whatever changes are made will be enough to help fix what many participants have described as a broken RfA process.

Legoktm is a site reliability engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation. He wrote this in his volunteer capacity.

There is some irony in a piece of software being named MediaWiki while it struggles with media files, but it's not that surprising given that much of Wikipedia's focus and efforts go towards developing text. On the Main Page, you'll most likely have to scroll past multiple sections celebrating written text until you hit the day's featured photo.

Given the recent issues with uploading files, let's take a look into what it actually takes to upload a file to Wikimedia servers.

A brief history

In the very beginning, you needed to email a Bomis employee to place your photo on the server. The initial version of Magnus Manske's PHP-based wiki would accept any file from editors and administrators. Users had to select a checkbox which said, "I hereby affirm that this file is not copyrighted, or that I own the copyright for this file and donate it to Wikipedia." On the server, the only thing it checked was that the hard drive was not more than 96% full, and if so, it would disable all uploads. And it had a polite request for users, "You can upload as many files you like. Please don't try to crash our server, ha ha."

It was not until 2004 that tagging images with copyright statements became a convention. The Creative Commons licenses and templates were introduced, and Wikimedia Commons was first proposed by Eloquence in March of that same year.

In 2009, the Usability Initiative (see past Signpost coverage) brought grant funding for improving the multimedia experience, leading to UploadWizard on Commons and better metadata extraction, among other things. The English Wikipedia's own File Upload Wizard was developed in 2012, offering users a guided method to upload non-free files.

More recently there has been an increased focus on tools to facilitate mass GLAM contributions, such as bulk uploaders like GWToolset and Pattypan.

How it works today

Today all media files are stored in an OpenStack Swift cluster, a cloud storage system similar to Amazon S3, so it's unlikely the disks will actually fill up. These files are made available in both of Wikimedia's two primary data centers in Virginia and Texas for redundancy. Users will end up downloading these files from either the data centers, or one of Wikimedia's CDN servers in Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Singapore that is geographically closer to them.

Most users will never see the original file that was uploaded. Instead, a piece of software named Thumbor generates smaller versions of each image, so users viewing an article would only download the size of images they see (also stored in Swift). Videos are scaled in the same way, generating lower-quality versions of high quality uploads (just like on YouTube and other video-sharing sites).

There are three main ways MediaWiki accepts uploads in the backend, each with its pros and cons. First is a direct upload through Special:Upload, which is the original upload interface. This is the simplest form; the entire file is transferred in one go, and available for processing on the server immediately. However, because it is so direct, there's no opportunity for any nice user-facing progress bars, and any failure means the entire upload must be retried. It also only accepts files up to 100MB.

Then there's chunked uploading, in which a file is split into much smaller pieces, uploaded chunk-by-chunk, and then finally reassembled into one file (via the job queue) and processed. Tools like UploadWizard and bigChunkedUpload are able to provide progress bars for users, and individual chunks can be retried if there's a brief network interruption. It is more complex to implement, but more reliable and flexible, so most upload tools and bots use it. In theory, users can use chunked uploads to upload files up to the maximum file size of 4GB, but there may be some practical issues like server-side timeouts.

Finally, some editors and administrators can upload files by specifying its URL. MediaWiki will download the file from the remote website, and then process it as if the user uploaded it. This is convenient for users, as they don't need to download the file individually before re-uploading it. However, this comes with limitations, as the server needs to be able to download and finish the entire upload in 180 seconds, and downloading from some sources (especially the Internet Archive) might be too slow for that.

Once the file is actually on the server, MediaWiki does some security checks on each file. It's easy to hide arbitrary files (think malware or copyrighted stuff) inside JPEG images, which we want to reject. This was exploited by some users on Wikipedia Zero networks to share pirated films without having it count against their data plans. SVG files can be written in a way that allows triggering cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks—MediaWiki rejects those too. There are also some validity checks, like making sure a file named "Foo.png" is actually a PNG file.

At this point, MediaWiki will extract some metadata from the file, like its size, geolocation, and other exif fields. This data is stored separately from the file itself for quicker retrieval. PDF and DjVu files that contain text will have that extracted and indexed for search.

Finally, the original file is uploaded to Swift in both of the primary data centers (Virginia and Texas). Even though this step takes place between Wikimedia servers, it is encrypted using HTTPS in case an attacker is able to tap into cross-data center communications. MediaWiki will also instruct Thumbor to pre-generate thumbnails for common sizes, so users see no delay when trying to use them in an article. If a new version of an existing file was uploaded, MediaWiki would also rename the previous version in Swift, and delete all the old thumbnails.

Once a file has been uploaded, there's no way to modify it in MediaWiki itself. Performing basic functions like rotating or cropping needs to be done by external tools like CropTool.

A complex process

The process for uploading files has grown more and more complex as requirements and scale have increased. The current system is rather optimized for delivering users small images quickly, and less so for handling the upload and processing of very large files. For an encyclopedia that is still mostly focused on text and images, that may be fine. But as people ask for and expect more interactive and engaging elements, that may need to change.

There has been no dedicated Wikimedia Foundation development team focusing on backend media development in the past few years (it's debatable whether it ever had one), with critical components like Thumbor being entirely unmaintained at Wikimedia and outdated. For now, many of the gaps are being filled with various tools and gadgets by those who are interested.

And if you desire some nostalgia, you can still send an email file a Phabricator task and sysadmins will upload the files for you.

Hello again! Movies and films form an important component of our modern media culture. As actors and filmmakers try to capture and reflect ideas, emotions or events, here we interview WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers, a group of Wikipedia editors trying to capture and reflect (in an appropriately Wikipedian manner!) actors and filmmakers.

1. What motivated you to become involved with WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers?
   • Teblick:...I became involved with the project indirectly. When I began editing on Wikipedia in 2014, my interest was in articles about old-time radio programs and people. As I worked on those, I discovered a lot of overlap with older films because many actors and actresses worked in both media. I gradually expanded my interests to include film actors from the past and (to a lesser extent) the present.
   • KyleJoan: ...Personal interest. I mainly edit in the area of biographies of living persons, which includes figures in entertainment.
   • HandsomeBoy: ...So I come from a country where the film industry and entertainment in general is quite huge, I believe Nollywood is considered the third biggest after Hollywood and Bollywood, so it was just logical that I would want to contribute in this area. But I saw that there was a gap in quality of articles, so my main motivation was for knowledge sharing. I wanted to tap into the existing knowledge base of the WikiProject. And since this is a collaborative project, it has been seamless and helpful.
2. In what ways do editors on your WikiProject collaborate? Are there any goals that your WikiProject is working towards?
   • Teblick: ...I don't have an answer for those questions. I tend to work on my own without seeking collaboration.
   • HandsomeBoy: ...I will say talkpage discussions. I have asked a number of questions there, and I have always gotten a reply
3. Why have a WikiProject on Actors and Filmmakers? How does this project relate to other WikiProjects (such as WikiProject Film) - is there much crossover?
   • Teblick: ...Films and people who appeared in them and made them compose a significant part of our historic culture. As we preserve more information about them, we enable people in the present and future to learn more about that aspect of the past.
   • HandsomeBoy: ...Honestly, I didn't know there was a WikiProject Film, until now. I will sign-up right away. But I think there should be crossover since filmmakers and actors are mainly notable for the films they appeared in.
4. From passionate fans, undisclosed or conflict of interest editing, the influx of editing associated with new films and even I suppose geopolitical tensions, how does your WikiProject deal with these issues (and others) that affect articles within its scope?
   • Teblick: ... I have not been involved with that aspect of the project, so I cannot answer that question.
   • HandsomeBoy: ...I think I am very passionate about indigenous films/actors so I am probably in a good position to give an opinion on how it is treated. I will say we try to make such editors keep an open mind. Once you have been made to see things clearly with logical arguments and friendly explanations it gets easier to implement policies and guidelines.
5. Has editing in this area changed your personal opinion or preference for films, or given you greater insight into acting or filmmaking or the societies that consume their films?
   • Teblick: ...I don't think it has changed my opinions or preferences. It has, however, given me a better understanding of actors, actresses, and the environment in which they worked and lived.
   • KyleJoan: ...It has not changed my opinions or preferences. That said, I'm now more aware of how sources highlight the profitability and critical reception surrounding actors and filmmakers.
   • HandsomeBoy: ...Sure. Before now, I only watched Nollywood, Ghollywood, Hollywood and Bollywood films. But right now, I am also interested in other African films. I have seen a number of South African, Kenyan, etc. films, and it was because of the broader conversations that was initiated on Wikipedia.
6. What do you see as the greatest area of need for your WikiProject and its articles, and how can a new editor contribute?
   • Teblick: ...We need additional reliable documentation in many articles. Too many articles have too few citations, especially where actors of the past are concerned. That problem is not necessarily a reflection on editors. I sometimes grow frustrated doing research on actors because so little is available in the way of reliable, published sources. A related topic is use of unreliable sources such as IMDb, FilmReference, and Find a Grave, which make an article appear to a casual reader to be more reliably sourced than it actually is.
   • KyleJoan: ...Removing violations of the biographies of living persons policy. Since actors and filmmakers are often covered in sources of various reliability levels, many of their articles contain unencyclopedic material, such as gossip, based on subpar sourcing. It would benefit the project if new users could help articles abide by the policy by discarding inappropriate content and inspecting the reliability of sources in articles.
   • HandsomeBoy: ...I think there is a need for more reliable sources to cover historical filmakers, especially in the African region. I also think that we have many low quality articles that should be expanded. More coverage is also needed for non-English speaking films/actors/filmakers.
7. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
   • Teblick: ...I can't think of anything else at the moment.
   • HandsomeBoy: ...More initiatives from the WikiProject. More synergy with other related WikiProjects will also help. Lastly, let me use this medium to encourage everyone to volunteer as a participant or a jury in the AfroCine Months of African Cinema.

That's it for this month; please feel free to suggest a WikiProject for an interview (or interview a WikiProject yourself!) here

Did you know?

There were only a few hundred women pilots in World War II. Yet Wikipedia recently mixed up the images of two women pilots from that period. The image of Veronica Volkersz (née Innes) was featured prominently on the English Wikipedia main page on 19 November 2021, to illustrate the DYK ("Did you know?") item about Dutch pilot Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten.

This was the complete text of the DYK hook: "Did you know … that about 700 airmen – and Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten (pictured) – received the Dutch Airman's Cross?" Pictured was a woman pilot. So far, so good. It was a pity though that the woman in the photo was not Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten, but Veronica Volkersz.

First woman flying a fighter yet

Love was to blame, of course. The photo was taken from the Dutch National Archives, which had a rather complicated text accompanying the photo, speaking more about Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten than about the actual pilot in the photo, Veronica Volkersz. Veronica, born Veronica May Innes in Chesterton, April 17, 1917, was a former beauty queen who joined the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) as a Second Officer in March 1941. We know this because of the book that Veronica Volkersz wrote about that period (The Sky and I, 1956) and because of her RAF logbooks 1939–1965 (currently for sale online at £9,000).^[1]

Veronica married Dutch pilot Gerard Volkersz in Chelsea in 1942, and thus acquired Dutch nationality – hence the mix-up in the Dutch archives. ATA pilots like Veronica were tasked with ferrying aircraft between airfields, but she did far more. Her first solo flight in a Spitfire was in 1941, and she flew in a few dozen types of aircrafts. She was in fact the first woman ever to pilot a Gloster Meteor EE386, a jet fighter. Volkersz flew until 1965. She died in Cambridge, Dec. 13, 2000. According to AbeBooks: "The entry on her Death Certificate describes her occupation thus: 'Aviator (retired)'." Indeed, this woman needs a Wiki article a.s.a.p.

Mistakes and metadata

Back to Ida Veldhuyzen van Zanten – who rightly received the Dutch Airman's Cross in 1947, and still is the only woman to have received this distinction. Pictures of her are quite rare, but I recently found some images to illustrate her Wikipedia article, helped by a family member and the Dutch National Archives. About 400,000 photographs from this archive, Nationaal Archief, were transferred to Wikimedia Commons in the last decade.^[2]

All metadata contain mistakes. That's only natural, and Wikipedia editors were not the first to be tripped up here. They were in good company: the Dutch Ministry of Defence used the same wrong photo of Ida in its magazine De Vliegende Hollander (Flying Dutchman) in 2015.^[3]

Wikipedia can learn from the mistake made with this photo in DYK. Never take information for granted, not even metadata from National Archives. In this case the (admittedly unclear) source, in which two names were mentioned, should have been a clear warning sign. Moreover: the original of the cropped photo of Veronica Volkersz was already in Commons – with correct attribution.

This article was originally published on Diff on November 16, 2021.

The origin of the tool/initial adoption

The Content Translation tool, which was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation Language team in 2014 to simplify translating Wikipedia articles, recently reached a massive milestone of supporting the creation of one million articles.

The tool plays a key role in closing knowledge gaps on Wikipedia by making it easier to translate Wikipedia’s knowledge into new languages. The tool’s journey has been steady and evolving over the past seven years. It is available by default in 90 Wikipedias, and it exists as a beta feature in the rest. It is used to translate an article every three minutes, and the articles created with the tool are deleted less often than those created from scratch.

We are excited to celebrate this remarkable milestone with over 70,000 Wikimedia contributors who helped get here! As we celebrate, we also want to reflect on the tool’s journey so far and take a look back to its beginnings and other major moments…

In 2014, the tool was tested in Wikimedia Labs, with a focus on translation from Spanish to Catalan. The tool was deployed after receiving positive feedback. This was just the beginning of our success story. The decision to test the tool with the languages mentioned above was influenced by the availability of the robust open-source machine translation support service through Apertium for them, and by the passionate Catalan community of contributors that were eager to participate in the testing and feedback process. These communities were the backbone of the tool and its chronicle is incomplete without Spanish and Catalan communities.

Getting established: a more solid tool

Following the successful deployment in Spanish and Catalan Wikipedia, in January 2015, the tool was enabled in six other Wikipedias (Danish, Esperanto, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmal) and Portuguese) as a beta feature. The deployment was further extended at the request of most communities to 22 Wikipedias. After three months, 260 users had translated with the tool, and 1,000 users manually enabled it on their Wikipedia from beta. The success so far motivated the team to deploy the tool in beta for all Wikipedias. The above decision was influenced by the positive acceptance and usage of the tool in less than six months of its enablement in eight languages. It is interesting to know that the outcome received mid-year 2015 proved our assumptions of accepting the tool by recording 1,300 new translators and 3,000 new translations. That year was undoubtedly a busy one for the development team and our ardent translators, who also reported dozens of bugs.

Another remarkable, eventful period for the Wikimedia Foundation Language team was when the tool started in 2018. This period was the revision phase of the Content Translation tool. Based on the feedback from translators across different languages about the tool, its impact and use over the years, the translation tool was ready for a revamp. The change focused on incorporating the more solid VisualEditor editing surface and other milestone improvements to evolve the Content Translation Version 2. By the end of 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation Language team had significantly updated the Content Translation tool, and it could boast of the following:

• Better guidance for newcomers
• Improved artificial intelligence to enhance automated steps
• Quality control mechanisms for machine translation
• Extended machine translation support service from Yandex, Google Translate, Youdao, Matxin (currently replaced by Elia), and Lingocloud
• Independent customised systems to improve the quality of content in different Wikipedia communities.
• The achievement of a five hundred thousand (500,000) articles milestone

Notwithstanding the above achievements, Content translation's developers had more work to do, with a big theme being to help more communities utilise the translation tool and attract newcomers in emerging communities. Being energised by what they have achieved with this tool and craving to support the volunteer communities that are ready to make the sum of all knowledge available for all, the team initiated the Content Translation Boost project.

New ways to translate: sections and mobile

We started research to explore more ways to translate and make the tool more pronounced, resulting in the launch of the Section Translation tool initiative and a process to enable Content Translation by default (out of beta) in Wikipedias that had fewer than 100,000 articles with the potential to grow with translation. With the above plans, the Wikimedia Foundation Language team were about to take translation to another dimension.

Section Translation became the primary project of the Boost project. Section Translation is an expansion of the capabilities of Content Translation to solve key limitations of the tool:

• prioritising a mobile-friendly tool for phone and tablet users
• allowing the collaboration of many users to translate articles section by section
• attracting new contributors by lowering the entry barrier from translating an entire article to just a section
• the capability to improve existing articles and not only create new ones.

To a layman, Section Translation is still a translation tool that will help mobile device users translate articles in bits easily. Now that you know, let’s walk you through this phase.

In early 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the project supported a design exploration to gather interview data about the assumptions of Section Translation. The prototype development started, and in the middle of the pandemic, the development of the tool was in full swing. In January 2021, an initial version was ready to be tested in a testing instance by Bengali Wikipedia editors. Bengali emerged as the chosen community because of their interest in the initiative and participation during the design exploration. The community tested the tool and provided feedback, and some of the feedback was adopted immediately.

In February, the Wikimedia Foundation Language team was ready to deploy Section Translation. This marked the beginning of another tool that will further bridge the content gap in small-sized Wikipedias.

Since the first enablement in Bengali Wikipedia, improvements have been made on the tool based on community feedback and takeaways from user research conducted after the deployment in Bengali Wikipedia. Some of the improvements are: introducing other entry points to increase discoverability and the ability to search for an article of interest.

As for the Section Translation tool, we are still evolving the tool and learning from the outcomes. Currently, after a feedback and validation process, it is enabled in five more Wikipedias: Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Thai, and Kurdish. We are excited about its future and impact. While we evaluate the tool's impact and users' experiences, and also continue to improve it, we welcome other members of the different Wikipedias to test the Section Translation, provide feedback and indicate interest in having it.

Congratulations and thank you to everyone who has been part of the journey to this one million article milestone!

Here is the soul of a man, here in this place for the taking (October 24 to 30)

Eternals blackness, beyond the stars (October 31 to November 6)

Waiting in line for a new Report each week, if Eternals should fail (November 7 to 13)

It calls our name, recalls our number, how bad we come (November 14 to 20)

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

Vandalizing Wikipedia as rational behavior

A paper^[1] presented last year at the International Conference on Social Media and Society studies possible rational motivations for Wikipedia vandalism:

"Competing theories in criminology seek to explain the motivations for and causes of crime, ascribing criminal behavior to such factors as lack of impulse control, lack of morals, or to societal failure. Alternatively, rational choice theory proposes that behaviors are the product of rational choices. In order to apply rational choice theory to vandalism, this project seeks to understand vandal decision-making in terms of preferences and constraint"

The author observes that "vandalism-related research has tended to focus on the detection and removal of vandalism, with relatively little attention paid to understanding vandals themselves" (which can be readily confirmed by searching the archives of this newsletter for "vandalism"; one exception being a 2018 study that asked students their guesses about why their classmates vandalize Wikipedia: "Only 4% of students vandalize Wikipedia – motivated by boredom, amusement or ideology (according to their peers)"). She notes that

"Although the harm is clear, the benefit to the vandal is less clear. In many cases, the thing being damaged may itself be something the vandal uses or enjoys. Vandalism holds communicative value: perhaps to the vandal themselves, to some audience at whom the vandalism is aimed, and to the general public."

The theoretical framework used to study such rational motivations is "rational choice theory (RCT) as applied in value expectancy theory (VET)". It conceptualizes the expected utility of a choice (such as that engaging in an act of vandalizing) as the sum over possible outcomes over the product of "the probability of some outcome O [...] and the utility valuation U of that same outcome".

Based on a sample of 141 vandalism edits (from the English Wikipedia), the author proposes an ontology of Wikipedia vandalism, extending classifications used in previous vandalism detection studies (e.g. blanking, misinformation, "image attack", "link spam") with a few new ones: "Attack graffiti" (i.e. "attack an individual or group") and "Community-related Graffiti" (expressing "opposition to community, norms, or policies").

The quantitative part of this mixed methods paper "examine[s] vandalism from four groups: users of a privacy tool Tor Browser, those contributing without an account, those contributing with an account for the first time, and those contributing with an account but having some prior edit history". Tor Browser edits are generally blocked automatically on Wikipedia and those in the dataset consists of edits that slipped through this mechanism, raising the question whether some or many of these edits might have involved the editor having to try several times to get around that block, setting them apart from less dedicated vandals in the other groups.

The observation that contributing under an account requires more effort (i.e. creating that account, and logging into it) than contributing as IP editor motivates the author's first hypothesis: "(H1) users who have created accounts will vandalize less frequently". She finds it confirmed by the examined edit data.

Secondly, the author hypothesizes that "the least identifiable individuals are more likely to produce vandalism that has high-risk repercussions" (H2) because value expectancy theory "suggests that identifiability acts as a constraint on deviant behavior." The author finds this hypothesis partially supported. Among other findings, "Tor-based users are substantially more likely than other groups to engage in large-scale vandalism and least likely to engage in the lowest risk type of vandalism, that which communicates friendly and sociable intent."

In motivating her third hypothesis, the author observes that "the groups under study differ by how they are treated by community policies. Newcomers are targeted for social interventions to welcome, train, and retain them. Wikipedia invites IP-based editors to create accounts as well as welcoming them. However, Tor-based editors generally experience rejection." The resulting hypothesis is "(H3) Members of excluded groups are more likely to strike against the community targeting them," operationalized as a higher rate of vandalism in the "community-related" category (e.g. directly attacking Wikipedia norms or policies).

The paper contains various other interesting observations that might make it worth reading for Wikipedia editors spending time dealing with vandalism and related community policies. To pick just one example, the author highlights that vandalism can also have positive effects, referring to a 2014 paper.^[2] That earlier study involved conducting interviews with editors and a quantitative analysis of a dataset that included edit numbers by editor experience level, page watcher numbers, pageview numbers and other data from the English Wikipedia, finding that "novice contributors’ participation has a direct negative effect on the quality of goods produced [i.e. newbie edit decreased article quality on average], but a positive indirect effect because it acts as a cue for expert contributors to improve the quality of those goods that consumers [i.e. Wikipedia readers] are most interested in." It found "that the positive direct effect of article consumption [i.e. pageviews] on expert editing patterns is fully mediated by novice contributions. Results [...] support the theory that experts are unaware of demand [i.e. experienced editors do not usually check traffic levels of the articles they edit] but they are stimulated to respond to article consumption if consumers signal demand for that particular good through their contributions as novice producers."

Briefly

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
• This month's "WikiIndaba" community conference included a panel about "growing and supporting the Wikimedia research communities in Africa" (video recording, tweets).
• The Wikimedia Foundation announced a "Wikimedia Research Fund" grants program, inviting "submissions from across research disciplines including but not limited to humanities, social sciences, computer science, education, and law" (deadline: January 3, 2022).

Other recent publications

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

Language biases in Wikipedia's "information landscapes"

From the abstract and conclusions:^[3]

"We test the hypothesis that the extent to which one obtains information on a given topic through Wikipedia depends on the language in which it is consulted. Controlling the size factor, we investigate this hypothesis for a number of 25 subject areas. [...] at least in the context of the subject areas examined here [Wikipedia's] different language versions differ so much in their treatment of the same subject area that it is necessary to know which area in which language someone is consulting if one wants to know how much the part of the IL [information landscape] he or she is traversing is biased."

"Universal structure" of collective reactions to invididual actions found in Twitter, Wikipedia and scientific citations

From the abstract:^[4]

"In a social system individual actions have the potential to trigger spontaneous collective reactions. [...] We measure the relationship between activity and response with the distribution of efficiency [...]. Generalizing previous results, we show that the efficiency distribution presents a universal structure in three systems of different nature: Twitter, Wikipedia and the scientific citations network."

"Novel Version of PageRank, CheiRank and 2DRank for Wikipedia in Multilingual Network Using Social Impact"

From the abstract:^[5]

"... we propose a new model for the PageRank, CheiRank and 2DRank algorithm based on the use of clickstream and pageviews data in the google matrix construction. We used data from Wikipedia and analysed links between over 20 million articles from 11 language editions. We extracted over 1.4 billion source-destination pairs of articles from SQL dumps and more than 700 million pairs from XML dumps. [...] Based on real data, we discussed the difference between standard PageRank, Cheirank, 2DRank and measures obtained based on our approach in separate languages and multilingual network of Wikipedia."

(see also earlier coverage of related research that applied such ranking metrics to graphs of Wikipedia articles)

"Modeling Popularity and Reliability of Sources in Multilingual Wikipedia"

From the accompanying blog post:^[6]

"In this paper authors analyzed over 40 million articles from the 55 most developed language versions of Wikipedia to extract information about over 200 million references and find the most popular and reliable sources. In the research authors presented 10 models for the assessment of the popularity and reliability of the sources based on analysis of meta information about the references in Wikipedia articles, page views and authors of the articles. [....] For example, among the most popular scientific journals in references of English Wikipedia are: Nature, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Science, The Astrophysical Journal, Lloyd’s List, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, The Astronomical Journal and others."

References