Board of Trustees elections

Fourteen candidates have thrown their hats into the ring for the four vacant seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The winning candidates will serve three-year terms. As of press time, you have one more day to submit your candidacy.

You may also submit questions for the candidates, or endorse or comment on others' questions through June 29. So far 40 questions have been submitted.

The diverse group of candidates includes four women, one current board member, and three Africans. About a dozen nationalities are represented.

The elections were cancelled last year while plans to redesign the Board were in progress. Voting will be held August 4–17 with eligible voters casting single transferable votes.

Virtual Wikimania August 13–17

Wikimania, the annual conference hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, will be a virtual event this year for the first time in its 15-year history.

Submissions for presentations are now closed, with almost 300 submissions received. Registration will open soon.

Masking IPs proposal

The WMF is starting to make its proposal to mask IP addresses more concrete. WMF Legal has stated that this type of proposal must be implemented for legal reasons, though the WMF is still gathering evidence and opinions on how best to implement it. Be sure to see the talk page for the most recent community feedback.

Another very long, and somewhat disorganized, discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 3#IP Masking Update seems to have significant support for simply banning IP editing if the IP masking is put into effect.

Board chair steps down, becomes WMF consultant

María Sefidari, Raystorm, has stepped down as chair of the WMF Board of Trustees. It was then announced on a Wikimedia mailing list that she would become a paid consultant. The reaction on the mailing list, starting with Chris Keating, was "flabbergasted". Michael Maggs, Philip Kopetzky and others joined in saying that it looked like a conflict of interest and a general governance mistake that the WMF would never allow WMF affiliates to get away with.

There is now also a discussion at The Village Pump (WMF), under the heading Self-Dealing on the WMF Board.

Brief notes

• Former Wikimedia Foundation CEO and ED Katherine Maher is now a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Trialpears, Less Unless. and Ashleyyoursmile.
• Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones since May 1:
  • The Persian Wikipedia has reached 800,000 articles.
  • The Aragonese Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
  • The Hausa Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
  • The Crimean Tatar Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
  • The Franco-Provençal/Arpitan Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles
  • The Altai Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.

Boris gives Joe an outstanding present

A diplomatic exchange of gifts involving a photo on Commons (right) was thoroughly dissected by The Washington Post, The Independent, The Times and many other newspapers.

US President Joe Biden gave UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson a $6,000 bicycle. Boris gave Joe a photograph of a mural in Edinburgh of Frederick Douglass taken from Commons. An earlier version of the story in The Times suggested that Boris' present was not really adequate. Sorry, I didn't archive the earlier story in time, but in any case The Signpost disagrees. It's wonderful that Johnson recognized the importance of US–UK shared history—including Douglass's life and general race relations in both countries. It's even better that Johnson gave a freely licensed photo available on Commons. Why waste the taxpayers' money when such a thoughtful gift is libre as well as gratis.

The photographer Melissa Highton gives due credit to the muralist Ross Blair (AKA TrenchOne). Highton is a dual US–UK national with roots in Maryland and Scotland. She says that the "incident gained a wee bit of media coverage" and that it "just goes to show that serendipitous things happen when you share openly."

More prime ministers and presidents should give such gifts. We welcome readers' suggestions in the Comments section below on what Commons photos their political leaders should give to other countries' leaders. Be sure to include the filename, e.g. for Biden to France's Emmanuel Macron, include [[:File:New Colossus manuscript Lazarus.jpg]], with a colon in front of "File".

The most reliable source on the internet?

PC Magazine interviews Amy Bruckman, Professor at Georgia Tech, and a keynote speaker at the upcoming IntelliSys 2021 Conference, who also edits Wikipedia occasionally. She states:

The content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created. Think about it—a peer-reviewed journal article is reviewed by three experts ... and then is set in stone.... A popular Wikipedia page might be reviewed by thousands of people. If something changes, it is updated.... On the other hand, a less popular Wikipedia page might not be reliable at all.

Her book Should You Believe Wikipedia? will be published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press.

Canada's Global News offers a slightly different perspective but concludes with similar advice.

Arabic Wikipedia grows in size and scope

Reuters reports that Arabic Wikipedia now has more than 1 million articles. The story, written by Mahmoud Mourad, notes that in 2020 the number of registered users to the site expanded by 44%, and is now at 136,000. A brief interview with a Wikipedian, Anass Sedrati, contains this quote which gets to the heart of Wikipedia: "We can consider this as an attempt to provide knowledge to those who have not had the same opportunities as us." In another example of the Wikipedia ethos (and some commentary on our notability policies!), a second Wikipedian shares: "...We must have an article on everything that exists and on everything related to our life." Happy editing to all those over at Arabic Wikipedia!

Wikipedia, love, and marriage

They met about 2010 in a "chat room" on Wikipedia, according to The New York Times among a community of "passionate moderators, writers, and editors". In 2013 they met in person at a Wiki-wedding in New Jersey. Wikimania 2014 in London was next. The relationship heated up a bit in 2016 and again in 2019. This Pi day, March 14, the two were married celebrating with lemon meringue and apple pies. In their spare time they've managed a total of over 30,000 edits. The Signpost sends our warmest congratulations to IShadowed and Shirik.

Apparent plagiarism leads Elsevier to retract periodic table book

Chemistry World reports that academic publisher Elsevier has retracted the book The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses based on accusations that the book plagiarized Wikipedia. An occasional Wikipedia editor Thomas Rauchfuss, an inorganic chemistry professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was notified by another Wikipedian of the apparent plagiarism, and checked it out in some detail. After contacting the book's three co-authors without receiving a satisfactory reply, Rauchfuss notified Elsevier who pulled the book.

Canadian students write articles about Indigenous people and social justice

Canadian editorial outlet Troy Media publishes the story "Students bring Indigenous perspectives to Wikipedia", which was originally published in the University of Alberta's magazine Folio. The story reports on Dr. Nykkie Lugosi-Schimpf and one of her students, Kris Cromwell, and how they used Wikipedia in Lugosi-Schimpf's course Colonialism and the Criminal Justice System.

In the course, students created Wikipedia articles about Indigenous people and the Canadian justice system. Lugosi-Schimpf was inspired to create the course after reading a story about Erin O'Neil, the Wikipedian in Residence for University of Alberta, and O'Neil's discussion about how Wikipedia can be used for social justice projects. Lugosi-Schimpf then contacted Wiki Education to set up the course. Previously the course had students work directly with organizations and communities to fulfill the service learning portion of the course. With the COVID-19 pandemic, such in-person work was not possible and Wikipedia presented an alternative. According to Lugosi-Schimpf, it also presented a great opportunity for students as well. "Indigenous peoples have been spoken for and talked about, and I think that for students to be able to speak for themselves, about themselves, rather than have someone else tell their stories is really important." Students peer-reviewed each other's work before the final articles were posted to Wikipedia, which gave them scholarly editing skills as well as a connection to each other during a difficult time socially due to the pandemic.

Kris Cromwell relates that she was excited by the opportunity presented by the course to impact how Wikipedia depicts racialized groups. "I'm a Black woman in the Faculty of Native Studies, and I thought it was important to have something from the perspective of a racialized person with education and training in critical Indigenous studies." She created Indigenous peoples and the Canadian criminal justice system and has continued to edit. She says "while not everyone can be a journalist, everyone can be a Wikipedia editor."

An Edit-a-thon for Eternity

The Australian Christian newspaper Eternity, working with the WikiProject 1000 Women in Religion, held an edit-a-thon to increase the coverage of Australian religious women.

Two more Indigenous Taiwanese language Wikipedias

On April 15, 2021, the Atayal and Seediq language Wikipedias were launched, as reported in The News Lens and Language Magazine. Both languages are indigenous to Taiwan, and are the second and third indigenous Taiwanese language Wikipedias to be created. The launch of these Wikipedias, along with the Sakizaya Wikipedia back in 2019 (see prior Signpost coverage), are part of a language revitalization project by the Taiwanese government. Atayal is spoken by only 90,000 people, and Seediq by only 10,000, and fluent speakers of both respective languages are far fewer. In 2018, UNESCO categorized Atayal as "vulnerable" to extinction and Seediq as "severely endangered". These languages belong to the Formosan family of Austronesian languages. Most speakers are elderly.

The lab leak hypothesis on Wikipedia

Once again CNET reports on the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic on Wikipedia. This time, the focus is on the origins of the virus: " Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory." The article, written by Jackson Ryan, is clear in its descriptions of Wikipedia processes, and features quotes from involved Wikipedians. The piece was well-received on a relevant talk page, with one Wikipedian writing: "it is rare to read an article about Wikipedia that gets things broadly right".

In brief

• Wikipedia is swimming in money—why is it begging people to donate?: While the Wikimedia Foundation raises a record amount of funds this year, Andreas Kolbe, a former editor-in-chief of The Signpost, raises the question of whether the WMF needs the funds. Conversely, James Lileks in his featured column for the Star Tribune recommends that readers of Wikipedia donate to the project.
• The Power and Pitfalls of Gamification in Wired explores how adding games in a work process encourages the workers. Based on a 2010 experiment which awarded random barnstars to new editors, the author concludes that the positive results on editor retention were due to the editors' motivation as volunteers being aligned with the goal of building an encyclopedia. However she posits that if the workers' motivations are not aligned with the goals of the organization, if they feel manipulated or forced into the game, then gamification may not work. See Random Rewards Rejected in The Signpost for a different view of Wikipedians' reactions to this type of game.
• Wikipedia turns 20: El País reported on Wikipedia turning 20 this year, and mentions a 2016 study by Open University of Catalonia which endorsed the quality, reliability, and timeliness of scientific content on the Spanish Wikipedia. The Italian version of Wikipedia also turned 20 on 11 May, as reported by il Fatto Quotidiano.
• New digital catalog links to Wikidata: The German Literature Archive Marbach launched a new digital catalog on 26 April, according to a press release from Informationsdienst Wissenschaft. The catalog connects to Wikidata.
• Wikipedia as a flagship of public interest internet: The Electronic Frontier Foundation includes Wikipedia as an example of public interest internet in its article about the enclosure of such internet.
• Wiki Loves Muixerangues: 20 minutos and ElPeriodic.com on Wiki Loves Muixerangues, a GLAM Wiki project organized by L'ETNO, Valencian Museum of Ethnology. [1], [2]
• Advergames: The A.V. Club wrote about the Wikipedia article Advergames — games that are also advertisements.

Videos and podcasts

• Jimbo on section 230: (11 minutes) Jimmy Wales is interviewed on Yahoo! about possible changes to the U.S. law that shields the WMF and other platforms from liability caused by their contributors. "We can't make Facebook legally liable for everything that somebody’s crazy uncle types on the internet.” Jimmy then moves on to "your sweet grandmother" and "angry boys".
• "Just the facts, ma'am": (8 minutes) Katherine Maher on April 13, her last day as CEO and Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was interviewed by Trevor Noah. Over nearly eight minutes, they discussed the growth of Wikipedia, neutrality and verifiability, and fund raising. The main surprise was that she repeated a quote associated with the TV show Dragnet.
• Katherine Maher also spoke to the Atlantic Council on June 22, 2021.
• The Nature of Wikipedia: (29 minutes) on podcaster The World According to Wikipedia starts with a discussion on cabals, and moves on to Wiki Loves Earth the international photo competition. Anastasiia Petrova, the international coordinator is featured.

A decade-old case of " project capture" of the Croatian Wikipedia (Hr.WP) by nationalist administrators may have been resolved with the help of a report published this month on Meta by the Wikimedia Foundation titled " The Case of the Croatian Wikipedia". The report was authored anonymously, presumably to avoid harassment, and is an independent view of an expert on the subject matter.

The admins, led by Kubura, inserted disinformation and used sockpuppeting and other abusive tactics, according to a separate RfC which globally banned him last November. Blablubbs, who participated in the RfC, said that Kubura had an "army of socks". Blablubbs decided to help at the RfC "partially because of the whitewashing ... and partially because of draconian crackdowns on dissent inside the project".

The admins were linked by the report to Croatian nationalist positions by their downplaying the UN war crime convictions of Croatians who fought in the 1991–1999 Yugoslav Wars, their use of biased unreliable sources and by their support of the World War II era Nazi-puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), as well as the military group, the Ustaše which the report calls "terrorist".

The report echos earlier accounts of administrator abuse including a 2019 article in The Signpost, "The curious case of the Croatian Wikipedia", Croatian and international news stories going back to 2010, and complaints by Wikipedia editors starting about 2007. The report concludes that "Hr.WP had been dominated by ideologically driven users who are misaligned with Wikipedia’s five pillars, confirming concerns about the project’s integrity from the global community."

Articles are being re-written and disaffected editors are rejoining the project. The report notes this progress but warns that the transformation is not complete and that the banned admins may use new accounts to try to recapture the project.

The report also observes that this case highlights a "significant weakness in the global Wikimedia community and – by extension – Wikimedia Foundation platform governance."

The report

The WMF began its planning for the report in November 2020 as the RfC on banning Kubura was in progress, but the author's investigation started in February 2021. He is an external expert on the subject matter and provides three recommendations to the WMF. Jan Eissfeldt, Global Head of Trust and Safety at the WMF told The Signpost that the author is a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian with "decades of relevant international experience analysing ... patterns of organised disinformation." The report states "opinions expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Wikimedia Foundation."

The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian Wikipedias are unusual in that they all separated starting in 2003 from the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, which continued to exist. All these languages are mutually intelligible variants of Serbo-Croatian, which is termed " pluricentric".

The report states that

this structure enabled local language communities to sort by points of view on each project, often falling along political party lines in the respective regions. The report asserts, furthermore, it deprived the newly-created communities of editorial diversity that normally guides and underpins the traditionally successful process of editorial consensus in other pluricentric language projects.
— Report, p.2

The limited number and diversity of editors on the new Croatian Wikipedia allowed it to become politicized, and allowed Kubura, his sockpuppets, and followers to capture the administrative structure of the project.

Evidence of this capture is shown in the report's section on "Key findings and case studies" (pp. 15–35) which makes up one-third of the report. It includes subsections on

• "Measuring disinformation," which uses a sample of articles on 32 people convicted of war crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars and compares how these crimes were covered in 8 Wikipedia language versions. Though the sample size is low, Hr.WP clearly covered Croatian war criminals differently than the other language versions.
• "Illustrative examples," or case studies from the above subsection
• "Propaganda," examining a dozen specific articles
• "Questionable sources," which examines eleven sources used in the project and the frequency of their use, classifying them as self-published sites, those without any declared editorial standards, openly extremist sites, etc.

This section is the core of the analysis and may set the standard if any future reports of this type are needed.

Based on these findings the report makes three recommendations to the WMF and the Serbo-Croatian communities:

1. that the Croatian community seek to "continue re-establishing a robust local governance system, requesting oversight and support from the rest of the Wikimedia movement as needed;"
2. that they seek to unify the selection of admins and functionaries with other Serbo-Croatian communities; and
3. that they explore a full reunification into the original Serbo-Croatian language project.

Adding some urgency to these recommendations, the report warns that, as currently constituted, Hr.WP is at risk of being recaptured by nationalist editors and admins.

An additional observation – strengthen global governance

Following the recommendations, the report's author makes a statement that goes beyond the Serbo-Croatian community and the Hr.WP disinformation problem.

The evident failure of the Meta RfC system to resolve the structural misalignment of Croatian language Wikipedia and the lack of an adequate alternative pathway to resolution, points at the significant weakness in the global Wikimedia community and – by extension – Wikimedia Foundation platform governance. This is a problem for public and regulatory confidence in the self-governance model provided for within the framework of the Foundation’s policies ... While devising possible pathways to address this identified bigger challenge is beyond the scope of this disinformation assessment, it strikes the author of this evaluation as increasingly important to resolve in the light of heightened regulatory scrutiny of user-generated platform models, including Wikipedia ...
— Report, p.14

The Signpost asked Jan Eissfeldt of the WMF for his reaction to the report's observation. He recognizes that disinformation is a growing problem, and emphasized that the WMF would work with the communities as openly as possible. For cases where safety is a potential problem, they might need to work through stewards or other trusted users. "We are investing in our movement's capacity to identify and respond to all kinds of influence operations, including those led by government actors, to ensure the accuracy of the information shared on Wikimedia projects. An example of this was the taskforce we put together ahead of the U.S. presidential election."

While not promising to start any new program to systematically evaluate disinformation problems, he said "the Foundation aims to conduct project evaluations, in collaboration with volunteers in the Wikimedia movement, to explore potential issues in projects openly and transparently."

How well did the WMF respond in the case of the Croatian Wikipedia? He says that the WMF "did not adequately understand some of the unique risks now identified in the report," in particular the risks of having separate Wikipedias for parts of pluricentric language communities.

"WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, and Other Stories Wikipedia Tells Us: A Feminist Critique of Wikipedia’s Epistemology"

Reviewed by Markworthen

This paper ^[1] by Menking and Rosenberg, published in the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values, is a recondite article. Its depth is both a strength (diligent study of the article will likely enhance Wikipedians' understanding of potential problems, such as our assumptions about what constitutes a reliable source or our epistemological presumptions), and a weakness (most Wikipedians will not read it because it is so dense).

I tried (several times) but cannot improve on the authors' summary. Here, then, is an excerpt from the article abstract:

A repository for established facts, Wikipedia is also a social space in which the facts themselves are decided. As a community, Wikipedia is guided by the five pillars—principles that inform and undergird the prevailing epistemic and social norms and practices for Wikipedia participation and contributions. We contend these pillars lend structural support to and help entrench Wikipedia’s gender gap as well as its lack of diversity in both participation and content. In upholding these pillars, Wikipedians may unknowingly undermine otherwise reasonable calls for inclusivity, subsequently reproducing systemic biases. We propose an alternative set of pillars developed through the lens of feminist epistemology ... Our aim is not only to reduce bias, but also to make Wikipedia a more robust, reliable, and transparent site for knowledge production.

Context

Background reading that will enhance understanding of this Menking & Rosenberg (2021) article:

• Benjakob, Omer and Stephen Harrison. From Anarchy to Wikiality, Glaring Bias to Good Cop: Press Coverage of Wikipedia's First Two Decades. The Signpost 17, no. 1 (31 January 2021).
• Epistemology
• Feminist epistemology
• Feminist method
• Lorraine Code and Helen Longino – Feminist philosophers whose ideas helped guide Menking & Rosenberg's analysis.

Talk page discussions about the article

The article has generated some engaging discussions on Wikipedia talk pages, for example:

• " Helping new editors: Learn Wikipedia's unique culture" – Discussion of the article begins after I posted the citation on 28 December 2020 @ 17:45 UTC (in that thread).
• " WP:5P sidetrack (part II) on Iridescent's Talk page.
• User talk:Markworthen/sandbox/Feminist critique of Wikipedia's epistemology

African Americans are vastly underrepresented among US Wikimedians, but contribute motivated by "black altruism"

Reviewed by Tilman Bayer

Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation published the results of its annual "Community Insights", a global survey of 2,500 Wikimedians ( including active editors and program leaders) conducted in September/October 2020. ^[2]

For the first time, the survey asked about race and ethnicity, confined to two countries where such categories are widely used and accepted: the US ( 195 responses) and the UK (67). Among US contributors, the findings shows striking gaps among Black/African American editors (0.5% compared to 13% among the general population) and American Indian/Alaska Native editors (0.1% vs 0.9%). Hispanic/Latino/a/x editors show a lesser but still large gap (5.2% vs. 18%). White/Caucasian (89% vs. 72%) and especially Asian Americans (8.8% vs. 5.7% among the general population) are over-represented among contributors in the US.

In the UK, the survey similarly found "significant underrepresentation" of Black or Black British editors (0.0% vs. 3.0% in the general population), whereas the percentage of white editors was close to the general population.

A racial or ethnic gap among Wikipedians in the US has long been anecdotally observed or conjectured (see e.g. this 2010 thread which also contained some informed speculation about possible reasons), but this marks the first time that it is backed by empirical survey data, related to the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation's annual surveys are global in nature and there are no internationally accepted definitions of race and ethnicity (or worse, survey questions of this nature would be considered offensive in many countries) [3] [4].

Correspondingly, there has been few research about possible reasons for such gaps. An exception is the 2018 paper "The Pipeline of Online Participation Inequalities: The Case of Wikipedia Editing" ^{[supp 1]}, which we previously reviewed here with a more general focus, but it also contains some insights about reasons why African Americans contribute at a lower rate.

While this study did not find a significant racial disparity among the earlier parts of the pipeline (measuring whether survey respondents had heard of Wikipedia or had visited Wikipedia), when it comes to "know[ing] that Wikipedia can be edited [...] age, gender, and several racial/ethnic identity categories (Black, Hispanic, Other) emerge as salient explanatory factors where they did not before. Income no longer explains the outcome. Education level associates strongly with knowing Wikipedia can be edited." However, racial and ethnic background factors "do not associate with who contributes content" (i.e. the last part of the pipeline). This points to raising awareness of Wikipedia's editability as a potential strategy for reducing these gaps, although this would not address "the importance of education and Internet skills" gaps for closing knowledge gaps that the authors highlight in their overall conclusions.

Conversely, a 2020 paper answered the question "What drives Black contributions to Wikipedia?" ^{[3] [4]} with the following conclusions, based on a survey of 318 Black Wikipedia editors in the US:

First, black altruism [measured via the survey question "Writing/editing Wikipedia is a way for me to help the Black community," "Sharing my knowledge through Wikipedia improves content on the Black community," and "It is important that Blacks write/edit Wikipedia"] indirectly influences Wikipedians’ content contribution through their perception of information quality regarding Black content in the Wikipedia universe. In other words, the higher their altruistic tendencies, the stronger their perceptions of information quality. [...] We argue that black altruism mediated through perceptions of information quality [...] helps extend black digital culture in the online encyclopedia. Therefore, we suggest one of the gratifications of Black Wikipedia contribution is likely the production and dissemination of Black cultural information content. [...]

Secondly, our findings suggest that Black Wikipedians’ perceived social presence, is also a significant driver of content contribution. That is to say, Wikipedia contribution uplifts self-esteem and feelings of self-enhancement among Black authors and editors. [...]

Lastly our findings, demonstrated that entertainment is not a factor that significantly motivates Black Wikipedians’ content contribution in the current study. We suggest this may be because Wikipedia content contribution, like long-form blogging, requires “more sustained time, editing, maintenance” (Steele, 2018 p. 116), intellectual endeavor, and a higher degree of technological proficiency than other types of social media activities. Nevertheless, our results are a sharp contrast to previous studies which suggest that amusement is an influential factor in Wikipedia contributions [...]"

Survey respondents were recruited in 2017 via Qualtrics "based on predefined characteristics such as individuals who identified as Black/African American, resided in the United States, and had made at least one edit/contribution to Wikipedia's English edition over the last three years". Interestingly, the resulting sample of 318 Black Wikipedia contributors was much larger than that of the WMF Community Insights survey, which (barring some extreme downward adjustments during the weighting process) appears to have consisted of a single Black respondent in the sample, considering the stated percentage of 0.5% among 195 US-based respondents.

Wikiworkshop 2021

Report by Tilman Bayer

The annual WikiWorkshop, part of The Web Conference, took place as an online event on April 14, 2021, featuring the papers listed below. The organizers reported that 78% of attendees were non-native English speakers, 66% first-time attended Wiki Workshop for the first time, 53% were academic researchers and 34% students.

"References in Wikipedia: The Editors' Perspective"

From the abstract: ^[5]

"we explore the creation and collection of references for new Wikipedia articles from an editor’s perspective. We map out the workflow of editors when creating a new article, emphasising on how they select references."

"Do I Trust this Stranger? Generalized Trust and the Governance of Online Communities"

From the abstract: ^[6]

" we hypothesize that administrators’ community governance policy might be influenced by general trust attitudes acquired mostly out of the Wikipedia context. We use a decontextualized online experiment to elicit levels of trust in strangers in a sample of 58 English Wikipedia administrators. We show that low-trusting admins exercise their policing rights significantly more (e.g., block about 81% more users than high trusting types on average). We conclude that efficiency gains might be reaped from the further development of tools aimed at inferring users’ intentions from digital trace data."

"Negative Knowledge for Open-world Wikidata"

From the abstract: ^[7]

"Like most major KBs [knowledge bases, Wikidata is] incomplete and therefore operates under the open-world assumption (OWA) – statements not contained in Wikidata should be assumed to have an unknown truth. The OWA ignores however, that a significant part of interesting knowledge is negative, which cannot be readily expressed in this data model. In this paper, we review the challenges arising from the OWA, as well as some specific attempts Wikidata has made to overcome them. We review a statistical inference method for negative statements, called peer-based inference, and present Wikinegata, a platform that implements this inference over Wikidata. ... Wikinegata is available at https://d5demos.mpi-inf.mpg.de/negation ."

"A Brief Analysis of Bengali Wikipedia's Journey to 100,000 Articles"

From the abstract: ^[8]

"This paper analyzes the various associating factors throughout this journey including the number of active editors, number of content pages, pageview, etc., along with the connection to outreach activities with these parameters."

"WikiShark: An Online Tool for Analyzing Wikipedia Traffic and Trends"

From the abstract: ^[9]

"This paper introduces WikiShark (www.wikishark.com) – an online tool that allows researchers to analyze Wikipedia traffic and trends quickly and effectively, by (1) instantly querying pageview traffic data; (2) comparing traffic across articles; (3) surfacing and analyzing trending topics; and (4) easily leveraging findings for use in their own research."

"Tracing the Factoids: the Anatomy of Information Re-organization in Wikipedia Articles"

From the abstract: ^[10]

"... we investigate the impact of gradual edits on the re-positioning and organization of the factual information in Wikipedia articles [...] we show that in a Wikipedia article, the crowd is capable of placing the factual information to its correct position, eventually reducing the knowledge gaps. We also show that the majority of information re-arrangement occurs in the initial stages of the article development and gradually decreases in the later stages."

"Wikidata Logical Rules and Where to Find Them"

From the paper ^[11] (an extended abstract):

"We are interested in soft (approximate) constraints expressed as dependencies (or logical rules), such as the constraint that “a person cannot be born after one of her children”. Such rules have proven to be useful for error detection [4], adding missing facts [3], executing queries faster, and reasoning [1]. Not only these rules are not stated in Wikidata, but, to the best of our understanding, a way to express them as constraints is still to be defined in the repository ... there are very few rules that are exact, i.e., true for each and every case. As an example, consider a rule stating that “a country has always one capital”. This is true for most countries, but there are 15 countries that have two or more capitals. Therefore, the rule has a very high confidence, but it is not exact ... The goal of our work is to create a large collection of rules for Wikidata with their confidence measure. In this abstract, we report on two directions we have been exploring to obtain such rules, our results, and how we believe the Wikimedia community could benefit from this effort."

"Simple Wikidata Analysis for Tracking and Improving Biographies in Catalan Wikipedia"

From the abstract: ^[12]

"we highlight the possibilities of taking advantage of structured data from Wikidata for evaluating new biographical articles, so facilitating users to get engaged into diversity challenges or track potential vandalism and errors"

Related code: https://github.com/toniher/wikidata-pylisting

"Structural Analysis of Wikigraph to Investigate Quality Grades of Wikipedia Articles"

From the abstract: ^[13]

"we present a novel approach based on the structural analysis of Wikigraph to automate the estimation of the quality of Wikipedia articles. We examine the network built using the complete set of English Wikipedia articles and identify the variation of network signatures of the articles with respect to their quality. Our study shows that these signatures are useful for estimating the quality grades of un-assessed articles with an accuracy surpassing the existing approaches in this direction."

"Towards Open-domain Vision and Language Understanding with Wikimedia"

From the abstract: ^[14]

"This work [i.e. research proposal] describes a project towards achieving the next generation of models, that can deal with open-domain media, and learn visio-linguistic representations that reflect data’s context, by jointly reasoning over media, a domain knowledge-graph and temporal context. This ambition will be leveraged by a Wikimedia data framework, comprised by comprehensive and high-quality data, covering a wide range of social, cultural, political and other type of events"

"Language-agnostic Topic Classification for Wikipedia"

From the abstract: ^[15]

"we propose a language-agnostic approach based on the links in an article for classifying articles into a taxonomy of topics that can be easily applied to (almost) any language and article on Wikipedia. We show that it matches the performance of a language-dependent approach while being simpler and having much greater coverage."

See also: online demo, data dumps, model details

"Fast Linking of Mathematical Wikidata Entities in Wikipedia Articles Using Annotation Recommendation"

From the abstract: ^[16]

"We evaluate the quality and time-savings of AI-generated formula and identifier annotation recommendations on a test selection of Wikipedia articles from the physics domain. Moreover, we evaluate the community acceptance of Wikipedia formula entity links and Wikidata item creation and population to ground the formula semantics. Our evaluation shows that the AI guidance was able to significantly speed up the annotation process by a factor of 1.4 for formulae and 2.4 for identifiers. Our contributions were accepted in 88% of the edited Wikipedia articles and 67% of the Wikidata items. The >>AnnoMathTeX<< annotation recommender system is hosted by Wikimedia at annomathtex.wmflabs.org. In the future, our data refinement pipeline will be integrated seamlessly into the Wikimedia user interfaces."

"ShExStatements: Simplifying Shape Expressions for Wikidata"

From the abstract: ^[17]

"Wikidata recently supported entity schemas based on shape expressions (ShEx). They play an important role in the validation of items belonging to a multitude of domains on Wikidata. [...] In this article, ShExStatements is presented with the goal of simplifying writing the shape expressions for Wikidata."

"Inferring Sociodemographic Attributes of Wikipedia Editors: State-of-the-art and Implications for Editor Privacy"

From the abstract: ^[18]

"we investigate the state-of-the-art of machine learning models to infer sociodemographic attributes of Wikipedia editors based on their public profile pages and corresponding implications for editor privacy. [...] In comparative evaluations of different machine learning models, we show that the highest prediction accuracy can be obtained for the attribute gender, with precision values of 82% to 91% for women and men respectively, as well as an averaged F1-score of 0.78. For other attributes like age group, education, and religion, the utilized classifiers exhibit F1-scores in the range of 0.32 to 0.74, depending on the model class."

"The Language of Liberty: A preliminary study"

From the paper: ^[19]

"We managed to align more than 37,000 articles across Wikipedia and Conservapedia; of these, about 28,000 pages share an identical title, while the remaining ones are aligned based on redirect pages. In total, the whole corpus contains 106 million tokens and 558,000 unique words. [...] We can notice marked differences in word usage in the two resources: Wikipedia authors tend to use more objective/neutral words (affordable care, american politician), in addition to many non-political terms. In Conservapedia [there] prevail derogatory terms such as rino, which stands for “Republican In Name Only", and Democrat Party, but also topics of high concern to the conservative community such as the homosexual agenda, communist manifesto, and fetal tissue."

"Information flow on COVID-19 over Wikipedia: A case study of 11 languages"

From the abstract: ^[20]

"we study the content editor and viewer patterns on the COVID-19 related documents on Wikipedia using a near-complete dataset gathered of 11 languages over 238 days in 2020. Based on the analysis of the daily access and edit logs on the identified Wikipedia pages, we discuss how the regional and cultural closeness factors affect information demand and supply."

"Towards Ongoing Detection of Linguistic Bias on Wikipedia"

From the abstract: ^[21]

"As part of our research vision to develop resilient bias detection models that can self-adapt over time, we present in this paper our initial investigation of the potential of a cross-domain transfer learning approach to improve Wikipedia bias detection. The ultimate goal is to future-proof Wikipedia in the face of dynamic, evolving kinds of linguistic bias and adversarial manipulations intended to evade NPOV issues."

Analysis of two million AfD (Article for Deletions) discussions

From the abstract: ^[22]

"[Wikipedia article deletion] decisions (which are known as “Article for Deletion”, or AfD) are taken by groups of editors in a deliberative fashion, and are known for displaying a number of common biases associated to group decision making. Here, we present an analysis of 1,967,768 AfD discussions between 2005 and 2018. We perform a signed network analysis to capture the dynamics of agreement and disagreement among editors. We measure the preference of each editor for voting toward either inclusion or deletion. We further describe the evolution of individual editors and their voting preferences over time, finding four major opinion groups. Finally, we develop a predictive model of discussion outcomes based on latent factors."

Among the findings are that "Editors who joined before 2007 tend to overwhelmingly belong to the more central parts of the network" and that "user preferences [for keep or delete] are relatively stable over time for ... more central editors. However, despite the overall stability of trajectories, we also observe a substantial narrowing of opinions in the early period of an AfD reviewer tenure. ... Strong deletionists exhibit the least amount of change, suggesting the possibility of lower susceptibility, or higher resistance, to opinion change in this group." Overall though, the authors conclude that "differences between inclusionists and deletionists are more nuanced than previously thought."

"Assessing the quality of health-related Wikipedia articles with generic and specific metrics"

From the abstract: ^[23]

" we use general and health-specific features from Wikipedia articles to propose health-specific metrics. We evaluate these metrics using a set of Wikipedia articles previously assessed by WikiProject Medicine. We conclude that it is possible to combine generic and specific metrics to determine health-related content’s information quality. These metrics are computed automatically and can be used by curators to identify quality issues."

"Wikipedia Editor Drop-Off: A Framework to Characterize Editors' Inactivity"

From the abstract: ^[24]

"... we present an approach to characterize Wikipedia’s editor drop-off as the transitional states from activity to inactivity. Our approach is based on the data that can be collected or inferred about editors’ activity within the project, namely their contributions to encyclopedic articles, discussions with other editors, and overall participation. Along with the characterization, we want to advance three main hypotheses, derived from the state of the art in the literature and the documentation produced by the community, to understand which interaction patterns may anticipate editors leaving Wikipedia: 1) abrupt interactions or conflict with other editors, 2) excess in the number and spread of interactions, and 3) a lack of interactions with editors with similar characteristics."

The paper is part of an ongoing research project funded by a €83,400 project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. Some related code can be found at https://github.com/WikiCommunityHealth/ .

Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year

Besides presentations about the papers listed above, the Wiki Workshop event also saw the announcement of the first " Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year" ("WMF-RAY", cf. call for nominations), with the following two awardees:

"Content Growth and Attention Contagion in Information Networks: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia" ^[25] ( also presented at last year's Wikiworkshop), a paper which according to the laudators

"demonstrates causal evidence of the relationship between increases in content quality in English Wikipedia articles and subsequent increases in attention. The researchers conduct a natural experiment using edits done on English Wikipedia via the Wiki Education Foundation program. The paper shows that English Wikipedia articles that were improved by students in the program gained more viewers than a group of otherwise similar articles. It also found that this effect spills over into a range of articles linked to from the improved articles."

"Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages" ^[26] and Masakhane (which describes itself as "A grassroots NLP community for Africa, by Africans"). The paper

describes a novel approach for participatory research around machine translation for African languages. The authors show how this approach can overcome the challenges these languages face to join the Web and some of the technologies other languages benefit from today."

While the research does not seem to have concerned Wikipedia directly, the laudators find it an "inspiring example of work towards Knowledge Equity, one of the two main pillars of the 2030 Wikimedia Movement Strategy" and expect the project's success

"will directly support a range of Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Movement goals including the newly-announced Abstract Wikipedia which will rely heavily on machine translation too."

Consistent with its title, the paper features an impressive list of no less than 48 authors (with the cited eprint having been submitted to arXiv by Julia Kreutzer of Google Research).

Briefly

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

References

Supplementary references and notes:

And the Oscar goes to... (April 25 – May 1)

Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes final today (May 2–8)

Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain (May 9–15)

Sing, sing a song, sing out loud (May 16–22)

I'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for me too (May 23–29)

No one could ever know me, no one could ever see me (May 30 – June 5)

Someone to face the day with, make it through all the rest with (June 6–12)

Even at my worst I'm best with you, yeah! (June 13–19)

This article was originally published in the Wikimedia Techblog on June 7, 2021 CC BY-SA 4.0

How people use Search to access Wikipedia is a common question by researchers. Until now, however, there has been little data available about this relationship. To help address these questions, the Wikimedia Foundation is releasing a new, faceted dataset on search engine traffic to Wikipedia so you can ask questions like "What is the most common search engine in my country?" or "Which search engine is most-used by Android users?"

It's no secret that search engines ferry a great deal of traffic to Wikipedia. With every major change in how a search engine presents its results, ^[a] questions arise about how the change might affect Wikipedia traffic. Historically, there has been scant data about how search engine traffic varied by platform and region.

We are taking a small step towards shedding greater light on the relationship between Search and Wikipedia by releasing a new, daily dataset of Wikipedia pageviews referred directly from search engines split by Wikipedia language, search engine, operating system, and web browser.

A day in the life of search

What might you find combing through the data? Well, first, you'll discover there's a lot of data! In any given month, about eight billion pageviews to Wikipedia come directly from clicks on search engines. On any given day, this dataset showcases pageviews that come from about 220 different countries, 100 different languages of Wikipedia, ^[b] 50 browser families, 14 operating systems, and 20 search engines. ^[c]

The vast majority of those clicks—over 90%—come from Google Search ( table; see Figure 1). The next closest competitor is Yahoo Search at 2% of views followed by Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex Search. While Google's search traffic is globally quite dominant, many of the smaller search engines see their share of search coming primarily from a single country—e.g., 70% of Yahoo!'s search comes from Japan; 90% of Yandex's search comes from Russia; almost 100% of Naver's search comes from South Korea ( nested table).

The increasing dominance of mobile devices can be seen in this dataset as well but with slightly more variation between countries than between search engines. Android and iOS typically trade between the top two spots with Windows generally in a strong third place (heatmap). Browsers have similar dynamics but replace Android with Chrome Mobile, iOS with Safari, and add a few more desktop versions into the mix ( heatmap).

Visualizing the data

The multi-faceted nature of this new dataset also presented some new display challenges. Most datasets we release consist of a target metric—e.g., pageviews—and are composed of a single facet—e.g., language edition—or sometimes hierarchical facets—e.g., you can split by project family like Wikipedia or individual languages of Wikipedia. This dataset has five, non-hierarchical facets, all with many categories, as highlighted in the previous section.

Maybe you're interested in which search engine is dominant in a particular market? Or how Android users compare to iOS users? Or the distribution of language editions in a given country? Or, or, or…? This makes our standard public dashboards — Wikistats, Dashiki, Discovery — a poor fit for someone who might want to slice or aggregate the data as they primarily support a single dominant facet.

Luckily, Wikimedia has some experience with an open-source dashboarding platform called Turnilo that is a perfect fit. Turnilo allows for us to create quick, dynamic filters and aggregations, supports a variety of displays—e.g., tables, line graphs, or heatmaps—and makes it easy to share specific views of the data via URLs. We currently use Turnilo to showcase a number of private datasets, so we had some experience working with it but had never provided a publicly-viewable version. In just a few hours, we built a public Turnilo instance on our Cloud VPS infrastructure ( code). We worked with the Turnilo team to improve support for flat files (as opposed to their more popular, but more complex Druid back-end). And now we have a strong use-case for expanding our public dataset dashboarding options ( Phab)!

Go check it out at: https://wiki-search-referrals.wmcloud.org/ And if all the options are a bit overwhelming, here's a good place to start: search referrals from the previous month split by country and search engine ( link).

See also

• Technical details: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Lake/Traffic/referrer_daily
• See data stretching back to October 2015 on the proportion of pageviews that come directly from search vs. internal clicks or other routes: https://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/#traffic_by_engine

Footnotes

Wikipedia is a haven for specialized knowledge, unevenly applied. While articles on topics as important as " The Sun in culture" sit little-noticed and little-loved, we have poured time and attention into producing extremely high-quality articles on some more obscure subjects. Here are a few of Wikipedia's featured articles on the bizarre, outlandish, or simply fascinating things the world produces from time to time.

The Brown Dog affair

With a title that seems lifted from a Tintin book, the Brown Dog affair actually involves a public hue and cry in Edwardian Britain. At about 5,600 words, the full story is well worth your time to read, but in short, to quote from the lead: "it involved the infiltration by Swedish feminists of University of London medical lectures; pitched battles between medical students and the police; police protection for the statue of a dog; a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice; and the establishment of a Royal Commission." Nominated for FA status by the great and much missed SarahSV, this article is a reminder that the past is a massive place.

Why don't animals have wheels?

Rotating locomotion in living systems answers a question that occurs to every five-year-old shortly after they learn about cars. Why haven't animals given up their ungainly legs, paws, and wings in exchange for the ability to roll? The article, nominated for FA status by swpb, is a perfect example of how to turn inquiry into knowledge.

Cats, the coronation cut

Continuing on our mammalian theme, we come to the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. This article describes a cat with a lordly salary of £100 a year, whose role is to keep 10 Downing Street, a notoriously drafty and unwelcoming home, free of vermin. It's hard to say which part of the article better exemplifies Wikipedia's appreciation of the catholic nature of knowledge – the section on partisanship with relation to the cat, or the navigation box at the bottom containing article links to all the Chief Mousers of years past. Nominated for Featured List status by Matthew.

And now for something completely different...

Anyone who has suffered through a YouTube video beset with ads will understand the frustration of American football fans who tuned in to watch the Heidi Game. Played in 1968, when TV channels were few and football was just beginning its rise to dominant popularity in the United States, the regular-season game filled up its entire 3-hour timeslot. A few minutes before the Oakland Raiders began an epic comeback, NBC decided to switch to regular programming – specifically, Heidi, a made-for-TV movie not much remembered today. Interestingly, the film's score was composed by John Williams, one year after his first Academy Award nomination. Nominated for Featured Article status by The Writer 2.0.

Honorary mention

Finally, mention must be made of Extremely Online, recently brought to Good Article status by JPxG. An enjoyable read, the article does fail to answer one key question – how much time do you have to spend on Wikipedia before you become Extremely Online? Maybe it's best if we leave that one to the philosophers.

Hello to all! The best way to get something done at The Signpost is the same as everywhere else on Wikipedia: just do it. So, I'll take my chances with some interviews this year and see how it goes.

I enjoy Wikiproject interviews because they show the atmosphere that keeps me on this website. Editors interested in a broad or niche area contribute together, with a WikiProject often forming the nexus of this collaboration. These editors aren't always the most vocal, and they aren't always the ones running RfCs or in Arbcom, and might not be running for administratorship. Instead they are often part of the thousands of us editing content in the background. These interviews can give fascinating insights into different topic areas and the editors' motivations in those areas.

The atypical title first drew me to WikiProject on open proxies. My interest only grew when I saw its unique structure as a noticeboard. So – what is an open proxy? And why have a WikiProject about one? These and many more questions are hopefully answered below:

What is Wikipedia:WikiProject on open proxies?

• MarioGom: A project to enforce Wikipedia:Open proxies. That is, blocking open proxies on Wikipedia.
• zzuuzz: I'd describe it as part of a loose collaboration of users who aim to identify or confirm open proxies, and usually block them from editing. Requests are made by a wide range of editors, admins, and checkusers who deal with vandalism, spam, and sockpuppetry problems. At the core of the project is the task of confirming whether an IP address is an open proxy or not, so it also seeks to help unblock IP addresses which have been blocked as open proxies but are no longer open proxies. It can additionally provide other technical and diagnostic information, for example opinions about IP block lengths or collateral damage. Also, being an open proxy is not always a straightforward issue – a response might sometimes identify a public wifi, or a private server, or a commercial filtering service, which can be complicated areas in terms of both policy and potential abuse. Sometimes this information may be simply relayed to the person making the request so they or anyone else can make up their own mind.
• GN: Depends who you ask. Mario and zzuuzz hit most of what I'd say – we're a loose group of people who work together to help enforce our policy on open proxies and to provide technical knowledge about open proxies to other editors.
• SQL: The replies above cover it very well.
• Blablubbs: I concur with the above.

It's interesting that you are a combined noticeboard and WikiProject. What do you see as the benefits (or downsides) or formatting yourselves as a a WikiProject?

• MarioGom: I am relatively new to the WikiProject, and I am unaware of the original rationale. I think working as a noticeboard is well aligned with the work we do (similar to WikiProject Spam). A WikiProject, which is somewhat informal, allows for some flexibility that is probably needed in an area where a small number of users is involved.
• zzuuzz: WP:OP was initially part of a now defunct cross-wiki project. While other 'chapters' have gradually become deprecated, the enwiki chapter has carried on in roughly the same format over the years. A rename has occasionally been mooted, but usually lacking any great alternatives or enthusiasm. I think the project label is not really a bad fit, as there is a membership of sorts – the list of users who can verify open proxies. Apart from this list, membership is highly informal. The noticeboard format is suitable for the task in hand, which is to process reports. On the downside, I would say a singular focus on reports may not be best suited for strategic or in-depth discussions.
• GN: It's been like this since before I joined, and for the primary task (handling reports) it works well enough that I haven't really seen a need to reconsider the setup. On the rare occasion that I've been around and we've needed to have bigger discussions, the talk page has worked well enough.
• SQL: It's been that way for as long as I can remember. At one point I was looking at rolling it into IPCheck, and using the resulting data to help train a Machine Learning algorithm.
• Blablubbs: Our primary function arguably is as a noticeboard, but I don't think the name really matters. The current format gets the job done well.

What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject on open proxies?

• MarioGom: I am involved in tracking and reporting undisclosed paid editing and other types of abuse. Through this work, especially on sockpuppet investigations, I learnt that a very high proportion of abusive users (spammers, harassers, vandals) routinely use VPN [ Virtual private network] or proxy services. This facilitates block evasion and obstructs the work of CheckUsers. I noticed that VPN services often got their servers blocked individually. I thought this was somewhat pointless because if a single VPN server is blocked, the user can jump in a couple of clicks to any other servers offered by that same VPN service. I started participating on WPOP to report full VPN and proxy services at once. If I see abuse from an IP that belongs to a VPN service, instead of reporting that single IP, I report every IP for that service, effectively blocking the full service.
• zzuuzz: Open proxies have always been responsible for a disproportionate amount of spam, vandalism, and other disruption, so I generally support blocking a lot of them. At the time I joined in 2007 there was a very messy approach to blocking open proxies, with large numbers of suspected proxies usually being blocked indefinitely and remaining blocked, sometimes on the weakest of evidence. I joined the project as I figured I could use my technical skills and experience to help bring some sense to the proxy-blocking process.
• GN: I joined because WPOP looked fairly understaffed and I already had a good amount of the requisite technical knowledge. I also have come across several open proxies during my work as an SPI clerk.
• SQL: I joined to help cut down on UPE [ undisclosed paid editing].
• Blablubbs: I don't recall what exactly triggered my interest in proxies – I had my fair share of encounters with them, both through UPE-related tasks and other anti-abuse work, and at some point I became interested in verifying them myself, started asking around and learning by doing, and it all sort of went from there.

What do you see as some of the biggest achievements of WikiProject on open proxies, and are there any contributions you are particularly proud of?

• MarioGom: Making abuse a little bit harder. I am particularly fond of some tools I created to automatically list all unblocked IPs from VPN services, which are now my primary tool to create WPOP reports. This has led to some VPN services that were often used for abuse being fully blocked. That being said, WPOP and its participants are not the only ones tackling this problem. There are several bots for automated blocking, such as User:ST47ProxyBot on English Wikipedia. There is also a bot used to list IP ranges of certain big hosting providers that are often used by VPNs and proxies (see User:AntiCompositeBot/ASNBlock), as well as very dedicated stewards who do their part on meta (User:Jon Kolbert).
• zzuuzz: It's difficult to separate the achievements of the WikiProject from other achievements made by the blocking policy, the open proxies policy, and the community in general. However, in line with the advances made elsewhere I would say the projects greatest success has been supporting the transition to dealing with open proxies fairly, proportionately, and accurately.
• GN: In my opinion, our biggest achievement is just cutting down on abuse – there are several long-term abuse cases who are known to use proxies, and blocking those makes their lives harder.
• Blablubbs: It's hard to quantify the impact we have in exact terms – I don't know how many logged-in users are on any given VPN range or proxy IP we find, and what they're actually doing on those proxies. What I do know is that while we'll never be able to block every proxy in the world, our work here at the very least forces people to spend a lot more time looking for unblocked ones, and that makes it worthwhile. In recent months, we've been able to knock out a very large number of VPN providers and webhost ranges (mostly thanks to MarioGom's ceaseless efforts) and discovered and integrated new tools and discovery methods (shoutout to the fine folks at spur!). I'm proud of that progress.

What does an average day at WikiProject on open proxies look like? What roles and tasks do you associate with your WikiProject, and how do you go about fulfilling them?

• MarioGom: Overall, a report of comes in, a verified user confirms the report and adds additional information and an admin blocks IPs or ranges if appropriate. I am primarily involved in reports. I spend about half of my time in the project coding tools to find blockable IPs, and the other half on manual review of these results and preparing reports in a way that (hopefully) saves some time from verified users and admins.
• zzuuzz: On a typical day, reports will come in to the noticeboard listing IP addresses used by vandals, spammers, block-evaders, and other undesirables. There may be observations from various people about the evidence and other connected data. Usually a verified user will then confirm whether the IPs are open proxies or not, along with any appropriate blocks, and a passing admin will take any appropriate action.
• GN: My main role has just been working off the backlog. Someone reports an IP, I use various tools to determine whether that IP is an open proxy (or something else blockable, like a VPS), and then figure out what kind of action to take (hardblocks vs softblock, for example, or whether I need to block an IP range). Even if a proxy checker has signed off on the block, I always do spot checks before hitting the block button, just to be certain.
• SQL: Reports come in, a verified user looks it over, and makes a recommendation, and an admin acts on it. Often times, I'll add the appropriate filters to ASNBlock.
• Blablubbs: I'm usually alerted to new reports by a bot ping on IRC and tackle them once I find time – in the majority of actionable cases, the reports will be for single VPN IPs, since ST47ProxyBot does an excellent job at finding and blocking open proxies. After confirming any given individual IP, I'll go for deep dives into ranges and providers using SQL's excellent isprangefinder tool, branch out from there, and then recommend administrative action. Aside from this, I do behind the scenes work, running checks on IPs that people send to me privately and often bouncing thoughts back and forth with MarioGom; together, we also maintain a list of common VPN fingerprints that enables us to attribute IPs to specific proxy providers.

What are WikiProject on open proxies's most pressing needs, and how can a new contributor help?

• MarioGom: We could use more help from: (1) Users with advanced networking skills willing to help in VPN and proxy discovery and verification. Discovery is about finding the IPs in the first place, and verification is about technical methods to make sure that a reported IP is a proxy. (2) Admins that can help processing reports. Or stewards who can bridge these efforts to meta. (3) The WMF could help with further automation and data. We could also use better coordination with Meta and other Wikimedia projects.
• zzuuzz: The project can always use people with the technical skills and experience to identify and confirm open proxies.
• GN: More folks with technical expertise, more people with new ideas (we have a status quo, and it works, but it's entirely possible that we're stuck doing things a particular inefficient way and we don't see a simpler way to do things), and I wouldn't mind if the WMF actually tried to help instead of making our job harder.
• SQL: More technically inclined people. Maybe a better format than the current noticeboard format.
• Blablubbs: I concur with what others have said – more technical expertise, admin help and WMF assistance would definitely be an asset. I'll also add that this project depends on people making reports; while spotting potential proxy use can be hard for people who aren't technically inclined, there are some telltale signs (an IP editor hopping from country to country, weird WHOIS outputs that point to something not being a normal residential ISP etc.), and people reporting such IPs are a huge asset to the project. I'd rather decline more checks than miss more proxies. It's easier than it looks, and I'm happy to provide advice to anyone who is interested in contributing in one way or another.

Anything else you'd like to add?

• MarioGom: Thanks to all editors, admins and stewards who contribute to this area.
• zzuuzz: In the intro you asked what an open proxy is, and it's a good question. Put simply, an open proxy is an IP address that anyone can use to edit Wikipedia. They can be used for many things in fact, but the key purpose of using an open proxy is to obscure the real origins of an action. This might be in order to improve privacy for the end user, or to evade sanctions. I suppose many users these days might better recognise the term virtual private network (VPN service), some of which operate on the same principles and fall under the same Wikipedia policy. These networks can be used to evade geolocation restrictions or other censorship, sometimes legally and/or ethically, and sometimes not. Wikipedia has a long standing policy of blocking lots of open proxies from editing. There is no explicit prohibition against open proxies, and flags such as block exemption can enable editing from blocked addresses, however we do block an enormous number of them because they are responsible for an enormous amount of abuse.
• GN: My thanks to everyone who contributes to WPOP, but I specifically want to call out User:MarioGom and User:Blablubbs – the two of them have discovered/written several tools over the past year or so that make proxy-checking a whole lot easier.
• SQL: Seconding what GN said above. In specific, Blablubbs and MarioGom have been a huge help lately.
• Blablubbs: Thanks for all the shoutouts, and thanks to anyone who helps out with reports, checks, and food for thought. I'll specifically call out Malcolmxl5, who has been a huge help in knocking out the administrative backlog lately.

Why are we asking volunteers for technical expertise to a strongly identified problem, when there is a foundation dedicated to spending 100 million dollars on this sort of thing? – question from Bri.

• MarioGom: I'm not sure this should be material for the Signpost article about WP:WPOP (maybe it will be appropriate for the comments once published?), but the upcoming IP masking will render WP:WPOP obsolete. That is ok, but that also means that the WMF will need to assume tasks and responsibilities that are currently done by the community. My opinion is that independently of IP masking, the WMF should have a dedicated anti-abuse team.
• zzuuzz: I think it's fair to say there's still some confusion about both the proposed extent of IP masking, and the nature and quality of proposed proxy checks. It's also important to note that most proxy blocking is already done outside of this WikiProject. No automated check claims, or should claim, to be 100% effective. One proxy checking tool which is used regularly provides about 15 different pieces of information, at least some of which are usually contradictory, to help the checker make up their own mind. Even the Torblock extension, which has been used in production for over a decade and uses a list of IP addresses supplied directly from the Tor project, can't pick up all Tor proxies. Where this project has most value is in these edge cases. I've said many times that human skills and judgment are essential to proper proxy identification. Would the community want someone in employ of the WMF to decide whether an IP should be blocked or not? I'm not sure that would go down well.
• MarioGom: I think the WMF can help us significantly from a technical perspective. For example, a small amount of ASNs account for high number of VPN servers. These are mostly blocked in enwiki, but global blocks are not so comprehensive. There is also the problem of residential proxies, where long blocks are useless (and even harmful), but it is theoretically possible to build an autoblock system that minimizes collateral damage, and that system would require access to a good deal of backend data. The WMF can also provide better and more accurate data and tools to admins and CheckUsers.
• zzuuzz: No doubt there's more that could be done, though I don't think the vision of a comprehensive ban across all projects is realistic. In the meantime, and in any case, this project could still use volunteers with technical skills and experience.

Thanks to everyone who answered (or asked) these questions, and also to you, the reader. Please contribute some ideas for WikiProjects to review or any feedback in the comments below, or on my talk page.

Over the past few months, the use of documents hosted on WikiLeaks as a source for facts has been a topic of discussion across several different noticeboards.

Editors discuss reliability of WikiLeaks

Several discussions began surrounding the reliability of WikiLeaks ( see entry in perennial sources list), following a dispute regarding the use of the source in a stub-class biography article of Laotian politician Sisay Leudetmounsone. The biography article's creator, Ruling party, had inserted a WikiLeaks document purporting to be a diplomatic cable of the United States into the article while building the page. After JzG objected to the use of the source, a discussion began at the article's talk page regarding whether the use of the source was consistent with Wikipedia policy.

Discussions on the article's talk page soon spilled over to the biography of living persons (BLP) noticeboard, where editors debated in a now-archived discussion whether or not a specific leaked U.S. diplomatic cable available on WikiLeaks, which lists the biography's subject as a part of the 8th Central Committee of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, is a reliable source. Editors discussed whether or not the source being available on WikiLeaks satisfies the policy requirement that reliable sources be published, whether WikiLeaks has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, and if the extent to which previous discussions that had taken place at the reliable sources noticeboard should play a role in evaluating the particular use of the source. Editors also discussed if other sources whose reliability is not contested existed for the information.

Further discussion occurred in a now-archived thread and a request for comments (RfC) on the reliable sources noticeboard regarding the general reliability of WikiLeaks in providing authentic primary source documents. Initial comments surrounded the use of WikiLeaks as a source for the biography, and the discussion initially focused on whether the cable in question had been reported on by reliable sources or subject to external verification. Many editors noted some skepticism of WikiLeaks' fact-checking and document verification process, though a clear consensus was not immediately reached.

The RfC proposed by Szmenderowiecki raised the question of WikiLeaks' reliability in general, asking editors to consider the extent to which editors believe that WikiLeaks is " per se reliable for the publication of genuine government documents" and whether or not there would be special considerations for cases in which "a reasonable editor may conclude that the coverage from RS [reliable sources] is likely to be minimal or absent on the subject". At the time of writing, the RfC has been archived without a closing summary statement.

This article was written by twenty-four Wikipedians.

The Wikipedia community was deeply saddened in early May to hear of the death of SlimVirgin, also known as SarahSV or Sarah, who began editing in November 2004 and became an integral, respected, and influential member of the community. She was foundational in developing many of Wikipedia's core policies, including biographies of living persons, no original research, and verifiability, and drew on her wide range of interests to write some of Wikipedia's finest content.

A prolific contributor, her edits, numbering more than 177,000, give insight into the project's often difficult evolution since its early days. In March 2005 she was nominated for adminship and passed with a majority of 77 to 1. SarahSV's intelligence, direct manner, broad range of policy knowledge, and lucid writing were highly regarded, and for many years her talkpage was the second-most-watchlisted, after Jimbo Wales'. Several editors, on learning of her passing, described her on her talk page memorial as "irreplaceable" to Wikipedia. Her final edit was on April 18, 2021.

Policy development

SarahSV was instrumental in establishing verifiability, not truth. ^[1] She helped to develop a number of policies that are at the core of the project. After the 2005 Seigenthaler biography incident she played a key role in formulating an early draft of the biographies of living persons policy and in negotiating community acceptance. She continued to watch over and hone the policy, and made nearly half of all edits to the page.

In 2006, SarahSV proposed that the verifiability and no original research policies be consolidated as an attribution policy. ^[2] Although that merger did not gain consensus after a vote of 424 supports to 354 opposes, her leadership led to significant improvement of both policies, which have served as templates to similar policies on more than 70 Wikipedias. In recent years she was active in simplifying, clarifying, and structurally improving the conflict of interest guideline and related pages.

SarahSV embraced controversial subjects. In her first week on Wikipedia she created the article Death of Jeremiah Duggan, related to the LaRouche movement, which led to her first arbitration case. Both on- and off-wiki she was subjected to extensive harassment, stalking, and misogyny, particularly in the early years. Her experiences helped to inform the community's policies on personal attacks, harassment, and the use of external attack sites. Over time, many of these principles have been incorporated into both Wikimedia Foundation and broader Wikimedia community policies; the current draft of the Wikimedia community universal code of conduct reflects many principles she championed.

Creation of the Gender Gap Task Force

Since her first years at Wikipedia, SarahSV actively sought to highlight and counter systemic bias and to reduce the gender gap. In May 2013 she formed the Gender Gap Task Force ^[3] to gather information on the gender gap among both editors and content, and to reduce these by encouraging new editors and content development. The Task Force has grown to more than 170 editors who work closely with other WikiProjects in promoting content drives.

SarahSV participated on the Gender Gap Mailing List, promoted editing salons focused on relevant subjects, wrote and improved articles about women, and authored the essay Writing about women. Of particular note, she brought Female genital mutilation to featured article status in 2014. The article was described by the late Brianboulton as covering "a difficult and challenging topic", and "an important contribution to Wikipedia". J Milburn agreed, congratulating her "fortitude in tackling such a difficult and yet important subject". On February 6, 2015, on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, it appeared on Wikipedia's homepage as Today's featured article. The article was later recognized by the community with a Million Award.

Featured and other article work

SarahSV was a meticulous researcher, an expert at evaluating sources, and a clear and concise writer. She had eclectic interests and worked on a broad range of topics—including justice, race relations, philosophy, literature, human and animal rights, the Holocaust, religion and faith, current events, and conspiracy theories. She was greatly respected in the FAC community, where she made important contributions to setting and improving standards for featured articles, not least through the quality of her nominations. She was an eloquent, facts-based, and demanding FAC reviewer, and many nominators found her insistence on the correct use of sources intimidating. A consensus is that her guidance was always constructive: on reviewing one biography, she advised editors to "bring out some of the colour, things that make him three-dimensional for the reader ... [to] bring him to life".

She brought Bernard Williams to featured-article status in December 2004, followed in 2006 by three further featured articles: Joel Brand, Rudolph Vrba, and Elie Wiesel's book Night. She nominated Brown Dog Affair in 2007 as a collaboration with other editors. In 2009 she successfully nominated Abu Nidal, Stanley Green, and Marshalsea, followed a year later by the Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah and Death of Ian Tomlinson. In 2014 she was part of a collaboration that brought the notoriously difficult and complex poet Ezra Pound to FA status.

SarahSV's editing reveals a focus of great breadth and depth. She uploaded almost 3000 files, created 4174 pages, and edited more than 22,000 articles; twelve of which she edited more than 1000 times. When working to achieve good article or featured status, she often expanded related articles, such as the Holocaust, Rudolf Vrba, and Christian Science. Other articles on typically difficult subjects that can in large part be credited to her include veganism, Bad Pharma, the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and Chelsea Manning. She was continuing her work on the Holocaust and the Auschwitz concentration camp until her last edits in late April 2021.

An honest woman here lies at rest,
As e’er God with Her image blest:
The friend of all, the friend of truth;
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like hers, with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so inform’d:
If there’s another world, she lives in bliss;
If there is none, she made the best of this.
— adapted from Robert Burns, Epitaph on My Own Friend