Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-02-04

Just two short weeks ago, you were promised the world by a heady editor with a gleam in his eye. Well okay, you were promised "something". I'm pleased to announce a couple of somethings (this issue going out late is not one of them). The chief developments we've gotten out of the last couple weeks have been a usable article search function, individual byline pages and tag series pages, made possible by Module:Signpost and Wegweiser (with some bug fixes on the last made possible by the heroism of Mr. Stradivarius).

Everyone else has these, and now so do we. For example, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Author/Michael Snow will bring you an automatically generated index of every article from our first editor-in-chief, Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Author/Smallbones will bring you a weal of hard investigative reporting, and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Author/JPxG will bring you a bunch of articles written by JPxG. An index of all individual byline pages is here, and a sortable table of all authors in the history of the Signpost can be found here.

While there are far too many individual authors to reasonably make byline pages for everyone (which would be nearly a thousand pages), limiting it to authors with at least ten article credits brought it to a more manageable hundred-and-some. There was intense effort involved in getting WegweiserBot to parse all of the author data, and then going through it to eliminate the weird errors from the initial run. Since we've gone 18 years without a systematic effort to clean up the metadata, there were plenty of author fields with weird stuff in them like "3 July 2006", "03 July 2006", or "{{{2}}}". Also, we had stuff like "brassratgirl" versus "Brassratgirl", or "Andreas Kolbe" versus "Andreas Kolbe (leads" versus "Andreas Kolbe 1 April 2016 19:58 (UTC)" versus "Andreas Kolbe 19 March 2016 21:12 (UTC)".

After spelunking into the depths and cleaning up all that garbage, my conclusion is that there have been 926 distinct authors in the Signpost's history. Of these, all 926 (duh) have written at least one article, but only 415 have written two or more, and only 122 have written ten or more. The distribution looks something like this:

Man, wouldn't that be a neat graph? Too bad I don't feel like making one.

In a post at the Village Pump on 25 January 2023, WMF CEO Maryana Iskander provided an update on a number of topics covered in recent issues of the Signpost:

• the December fundraising campaign and the related Request for Comment (RfC) survey (see Signpost coverage last November),
• software updates in Commons (see Signpost coverage last October),
• PageTriage updates for New pages patrol (see Signpost coverage last August),
• the Foundation's relationship with the Tides Network, and specifically the Knowledge Equity Fund, which will now be moved back into the Foundation (see Signpost coverage last October).

Iskander said:

I am back to post a brief follow up message to my November note. Following the close of the RfC, the Wikimedia Foundation set up a co-creation page to seek input from community members on proposed messaging for banners. We posted regular updates on the campaign's performance to this page. In brief, over 450+ banners were tested during this year's campaign, and $24.7M of revenue was raised against an original $30M goal (a shortfall of $5.3 million). During the first few days the new banners resulted in about 70% less revenue than on the corresponding days in the prior year. Additional information on the campaign results are posted here. Next year, the fundraising team will continue to engage with the community on banner messaging. We look forward to building on the process we created this year.

I wanted to provide further updates on a few other issues that were raised:

• Given the reduced revenue from the English campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation has reduced its budget projections for the current year. At this point, we don’t expect to see the same year-on-year growth in the Foundation’s budget next year. We will have more information by April on future financial projections.

• The Foundation’s annual planning this year is being led by the needs of our Product & Technology departments. This will be the first time since about 2015 that these two departments will undertake joint planning. @SDeckelmann-WMF has asked me to pass along this update: "We've made progress on PageTriage issues raised by New Page Patrollers in an open letter. In the last 120 days, 141 patches have been reviewed through collaboration between the Foundation and the community. There have also been several meetings between community members and staff to talk about the future of PageTriage and the newcomer experience, and there is now work planned in Q4 to update the extension. We continue to engage with Commons as we are making critically needed software upgrades to community prioritized tools. The Foundation's Wishathon (leading up to the community wishlist kickoff for 2023) involved about 40 staff contributing time over a week in December to deliver 71 patches and 4 wishes granted. We are working with the community to make Vector 2022 the default skin, after 3 years of development work, feedback and iteration with wiki communities. More to come in March!"

• Some comments were made in the RfC about the unclear role of the Tides Foundation in managing the Knowledge Equity Fund. Over the next few months, we will be moving the remainder of the Equity Fund from Tides back into the Foundation. The Wikimedia Endowment has received its 501(c)(3) status from the US Internal Revenue Service, so we are in the process of setting up its financial systems and transitioning out of Tides.

The message was warmly received by volunteers.

On 31 January 2023 Maryana also posted a longer "One Year Update" on the Wikimedia-l mailing list, marking her first full year in office. This covered some of the same ground as the above update but added further detail, especially as regards the months ahead:

On strategy, the Board of Trustees will meet this March in New York to consider a few topics that require taking a multi-year view:

1. Wikimedia's financial model and future projections for revenue streams in online fundraising (which we anticipate will not continue to grow at the same rate), the next phase of the Wikimedia Endowment, and the lessons we have learned so far from Wikimedia Enterprise's first year of operation.
2. Re-centering the Foundation's responsibility in supporting the technology needs of the Wikimedia movement by understanding the needs of our contributor communities, as well as emerging topics like machine learning/artificial intelligence and innovations for new audiences.
3. Beginning more focused conversations to establish frameworks and principles for understanding the Foundation's core roles and responsibilities. This is intended to help to provide inputs into the movement charter deliberations and broader movement strategy conversations.

Members of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee and Wikimedia Endowment Trustees will join in the March sessions, and we will share a report with you after the meeting.

The update marking Maryana's first year in office is also available as a wiki page on Meta-Wiki. – AK

UPDATE: Pakistan's Prime Minister has stepped in and ordered the PTA on 6 February 2023 to restore access to Wikipedia in Pakistan. – AK

On 1 February 2023 the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) published an announcement indicating that access to Wikipedia in the Muslim country had been restricted^{[Note 1]} for 48 hours after failing to remove and/or block what the government agency described as "sacrilegious content". The Pakistani government agency stated that it had provided notice to "Wikipedia" for failure to abide by "applicable law and court order(s)" and had previously issued a takedown request on the offending content that was not complied with.

Dawn, Pakistan's flagship English-language newspaper, reports that the PTA had previously issued takedown notices related to Wikipedia's content in 2020. A contemporaneous report from Dawn describes these notices having objected to Wikipedia's characterization of Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the current leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, as being a Muslim.

Ahmadiyya teachings differ significantly from most Sunni and Shia Muslim groups; its teaching that 19th-century Punjabi author and religious leader Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was both the Messiah and the Mahdi is rejected by most other Muslims who consider Muhammad to be God's final prophet. Pakistan's constitution defines the nation's state religion as Islam and a constitutional amendment passed in 1974 declared that people who practice Ahmadiyya are to be considered non-Muslims. Subsequent legislation, such as the 1984 Ordinance XX, have banned Ahmadis from publicly describing themselves as Muslim and have generally restricted the public practice of Ahmadiyya. In Pakistan, it remains illegal for Ahmadis to recite the Islamic call to prayer, to proselytize, and to use various Islamic Honorifics to refer to people within the Ahmadiyya community.

In 2020, the PTA had also objected to Wikimedia content containing what was described as "blasphemous caricatures" of Muhammad. Disputes involving images of Muhammad have long been a contentious topic on Wikipedia, though the Arbitration Committee recently rescinded its authorization for the use of discretionary sanctions on pages relating to the topic; the authorization thereof was terminated effective November 2022.

The PTA stated on 1 February that it would permanently block Wikipedia if the free encyclopedia would not comply with its censorship demands, though neither the Pakistani government nor the Wikimedia Foundation made public the exact scope of the demands.

On 3 February Bloomberg reported that Pakistan had blocked Wikipedia services in Pakistan, citing a statement by PTA spokesman Malahat Obaid. Later that day, the Wikimedia Foundation released a statement confirming that it had been blocked in Pakistan, saying that the foundation's internal traffic reports showed that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects had been blocked in Pakistan and urging the Pakistani government to unblock Wikipedia in the country. The full statement reads as follows:

On Friday, February 3, 2023 Pakistan’s Telecommunications Authority blocked Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia Foundation calls on Pakistan to restore access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the country immediately.

The Wikimedia Foundation received a notification from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority on February 1, 2023, stating “the services of Wikipedia have been degraded for 48 hours” for failure to remove content from the site deemed “unlawful” by the government. The notification further mentioned that a block of Wikipedia could follow, if the Foundation failed to comply with the takedown orders. As of Friday, February 3, our internal traffic reports indicate that Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are no longer accessible to users in Pakistan.

The Foundation believes that access to knowledge is a human right. Wikipedia is the world’s largest online encyclopedia, and the main source of trusted information for millions. It’s an ever-growing record of history, and gives people from all backgrounds the opportunity to contribute to everyone’s understanding of their religion, heritage, and culture.

In Pakistan, English Wikipedia receives more than 50 million pageviews per month, followed by Urdu and Russian Wikipedias. There is also a sizable and engaged community of editors in Pakistan that contribute historical and educational content. A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository. If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s knowledge, history, and culture.

Wikipedia is written by nearly 300,000 volunteer editors. Together, this global community of volunteers has designed robust editorial guidelines that require strict citations and references to verified sources of information. Content on Wikipedia is mined from secondary sources; it does not allow original research. The community is guided by values of neutrality, reliability, and equitable access to information.

The Foundation does not make decisions around what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained. This is by design to ensure that articles are the result of many people coming together to determine what information should be presented on the site, resulting in richer, more neutral articles. We respect and support the editorial decisions made by the community of editors around the world. There are dedicated response channels available to individuals, organizations, or governments that would like to raise concerns about the site’s content directly with volunteer editors for their consideration and review. This contributes to Wikipedia’s transparency and upholds its collaborative model.

We hope that the Pakistan government joins with the Foundation in a commitment to knowledge as a human right and restores access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects promptly, so that the people of Pakistan can continue to receive and share knowledge with the world.

Stephen LaPorte, a lawyer for the Wikimedia Foundation, said in an email to public mailing list Wikimedia-l that the foundation "is already examining various avenues and investigating how we can help restore access, while staying true to our values of verifiability, neutrality, and freedom of information."

"For over twenty years, our movement has supported knowledge as a fundamental human right," LaPorte said in his email, "In defense of this right, we have opposed a growing number of threats that would interfere with the ability of people to access and contribute to free knowledge. We know that many of you will want to take action or speak out against the block. For now, please continue to do what is needed to remain safe. We will keep you updated on any new developments, actions we are taking, and ways which you can help return access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in Pakistan."

– R, AK

Wikimedia Foundation Board member Esra'a Al Shafei has announced that she joined the Board of the Tor project on 15 December 2022.

In a post on the Wikimedia-l mailing list dated 24 January 2023 she says:

Tor's privacy technologies have been critical resources for my human rights advocacy work. It felt fitting to have this opportunity to support an organization and community that made my work and the work of many other activists possible, especially those who live in countries where censorship and surveillance are the norm.

In the rare event that any Board decision from Tor or Wikimedia Foundation may impact either organization, I will be fully recusing myself from them. Like the Foundation Board, this position is voluntary and unpaid.

Tor's own announcement is here. – AK

As announced in a Diff blog post, the Wikimedia Endowment has added two new "At-Large Directors" to its Board: Alex Farman-Farmaian and Lisa Lewin.

Alex Farman-Farmaian has been a Wikimedia donor for more than a decade and is passionate about Wikimedia’s vision of bringing free knowledge to all the world’s people. Since 2006, Alex has been Vice Chairman, Partner, and Portfolio Manager at Edgewood Management. Prior to Edgewood, he was a senior member of the Portfolio Management team at W.P. Stewart & Co., chairing the Investment Oversight Committee. Alex will bring his finance and investment expertise to the Wikimedia Endowment as a member of the Finance Committee. [...]

Lisa Lewin served on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation from January 2019 through to September 2021. She is CEO of General Assembly, which has built transparent career pathways for over one million people and diverse talent pipelines for hundreds of the world’s leading employers. She brings to the Endowment Board a deep knowledge of the Wikimedia movement as well as 25 years of experience leading and advising private, public, and nonprofit sector organizations. Lisa will serve on the Governance Committee, helping to ensure the Board is governed efficiently and effectively.

The full Endowment Board roster can be found on the Wikimedia Endowment website.

The Diff blog post also quotes Jimmy Wales referring to the "fact that we met – and even surpassed – our expected timeline for the Endowment’s maturation into a 501(c)(3)." Readers of The Signpost will recall that WMF promises to transfer the Endowment to its own 501(c)(3) organization, which would then file public financial statements, date back as far as 2017 (see previous coverage).

Under the present arrangement with the Tides Foundation, the money held in the Endowment is not included in the net assets of the Wikimedia Foundation, as those funds are held by the Tides Foundation. Donations to the Endowment that are received by the Wikimedia Foundation as a pass-through are redirected and sent to the Tides Foundation. Therefore, they are not reflected on the Wikimedia Foundation's financials as revenue or net assets. When the Wikimedia Foundation makes special grants to the Endowment Fund, those are reflected as "Awards and Grants" expenses on the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Independent Auditors' Report.

As stated in the above updates from Maryana Iskander, the Wikimedia Foundation is currently still in the process of "transitioning out of Tides", having restarted this process in 2021 and gained approval for its new 501(c)(3) organization last year (see previous coverage). – AK

Will the first AI-generated Wikipedia article please stand up?

The staff of The Signpost have identified what we believe to be the first AI-generated article in English Wikipedia, created on 6 December 2022. We challenge our readers to find this article, or any earlier AI-generated mainspace article. In the Comments section below, please let us know how you did it and what methods you used.

While the Village Pump section about content generated by large language models draws toward a close, and Wikipedia:Large language models a draft proposal for their use on Wikipedia is beginning to take shape, new tools to assist in identifying this output are not far behind.

A number of websites currently offer access to models that attempt to detect LLM-generated text, some of them seedier than others: https://detector.dng.ai/, https://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/, https://corrector.app/ai-content-detector/, and https://writer.com/ai-content-detector/ all offer quick free analysis, with at least one of them using the opportunity for a sidebar upsell on their own "undetectable" generative models. Most of these seem to be implementing some form of roberta-base-openai-detector, a model based on RoBERTa (Robustly-optimized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers-approach) and freely available on Hugging Face. However, RoBERTa-BOAID was optimized for detection on OAI's 2019 GPT-2-1.5B model.

OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, have released a test version of a classifier model (account required) designed to detect if text was generated by current GPT-series models: GPT-3, InstructGPT, and GPT-3.5 (ChatGPT). There is currently no whitepaper associated with the classifier model, and OpenAI says in the model card that they "do not plan to release the model weights", continuing a trend that began after their release of GPT-2 and subsequent partnership with Microsoft.

The Signpost tested the current text of the article mentioned above, which has been edited by 18 editors a total of 67 times since its creation. The detector reported that "The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated."

Another detector, GPTzero, was created by Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton University, and was also used to test the same text. It reported that "Your text may include parts written by AI" and identified 12 sentences that were "more likely to be written by AI".

OpenAI and GPTzero's creator were both contacted for comments on this article at short notice, but neither have, as yet, replied. – J, S, B,

WikiLearn, the free online learning platform created by the Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation, has come out of its beta testing period. It has a major new feature: course content translation.

For more info see Meta-Wiki. There is also a catalog listing courses people can enroll in right now, using their Wikimedia account (via OAuth, no password necessary). – AK

• Wikimedia Enterprise: WMF Legal has said that a passage in the Wikimedia, LLC Operating Agreement that ostensibly allows the WMF to admit additional members to the limited liability company that handles Wikimedia Enterprise's for-profit work, and allows it to transfer all or any part of the WMF's interest in the company to another individual or entity, is standard wording that was included by outside counsel drafting the document. WMF Legal's Shaun Spalding stated there was no intent on the part of the WMF for this language ever to be triggered, and said it would be removed in the ordinary course of business if or when the Operating Agreement is ever updated. He also stressed that no such change as the section nominally allows could be made without the approval of the WMF Board of Trustees. – AK

• New/delisted user-groups: On 16 January, five user groups were delisted as lapsed: the Wikimedistas de Ecuador, the Dehalvi Wikimedia Community User Group, the Para-Wikimedians Community User Group, the Wikimedians of Chicago User Group and the Wikimedians of Colorado User Group.
• Wikimedians of Peru User Group: The Wikimedistas de Perú have posted their 2022 annual report on Meta-Wiki, detailing the photo campaigns, meetings and other projects conducted last year.
• Wikimedians of Republic of Srpska: This user group, too, has posted its 2022 annual report on Meta-Wiki, describing collaborations with a number of Serbian universities and GLAM organisations as well as a wide range of community activites.
• Wikipedia & Education User Group: And another annual report. Highlights include a book chapter accepted for publication, and planning for the 2023 EduWiki conference in Belgrade.
• Wikimedia UK: "Knowledge has a beginning but no end." This is the title of the beautifully designed Wikimedia UK Strategic Report for the financial year 2021/22, the organisation's first such report in fully digital format. Prepare to be dazzled. – AK
• Global bans:
  • On 18 January the WMF globally banned NMasiha. NMasiha had made 2,064 edits in the English Wikipedia, and 12,362 edits in the Farsi Wikipedia. In the English Wikipedia, they created the biographies of a number of political prisoners in Iran, such as Alireza Shir Mohammad Ali, Mohammad Ali Haj Aghaei, Majid Assadi, Jafar Kazemi, Execution of Ali Saremi, Saeed Shirzad and Ali Nejati, as well as biographies of Iranian cultural figures such as painter Ali Akbar Tajvidi and musician Mir-Ismael Sedghiasa Hosseini. The user had clean block logs on the English and Farsi Wikipedias.
  • On 30 January the WMF globally banned Kolega2357, who according to his global account information has made over 20 million edits on the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, over 450,000 on Serbo-Croatian Wiktionary, and tens of thousands of edits on other Wikimedia projects, including 1,412 on the English-language Wikipedia. Kolega2357 was subject to a community ban on Meta-Wiki last year.
  • On 2 February Avoided was globally banned by the WMF following a request for comment on Meta-Wiki. – AK

• Changes to CheckUsers: An announcement at WP:AC/N informs the community that "At his request by email to the committee, the CheckUser permissions of MusikAnimal are removed." MusikAnimal, who is also a WMF Community Tech employee, remains an English Wikipedia admin. He is also still a steward (though possibly not for much longer).
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is The Sims (video game). Please be bold in helping improve this article! The week after will be Waffle iron.
• WikiProject Organized Labour Edit-a-thon throughout February. Participate online if you are interested in improving coverage of worker organizations, strike actions and more! Learn more about the WikiProject at the latest WikiProject Report on Organized Labour!

JPxG is a welder, forklift driver, software engineer, message board administrator, and Wikipedia editor who has written a number of articles for the Signpost, and a number for Wikipedia, including "Extremely Online", which he has been since some time around 1999.

In two major English-speaking countries, two separate legal mechanisms are working their way through two separate processes. The first is a United States Supreme Court case regarding §230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the second is a proposed Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom "intended to improve internet safety". Both have wide-ranging implications for posters, lurkers, and everyone in between, and both have been the subject of fierce debate. Both are also the subject of special reports in this issue of the Signpost – the other is at Special report.

In two major English-speaking countries, two separate legal mechanisms are working their way through two separate processes. The first is a United States Supreme Court case regarding §230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the second is a proposed Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom "intended to improve internet safety". Both have wide-ranging implications for posters, lurkers, and everyone in between, and both have been the subject of fierce debate.

According to Wikipedia, the Online Safety Bill is "intended to improve internet safety" in the United Kingdom. The WMF, and many others, have a dim view of it. For more, see this issue's special report.

See prior Signpost coverage, and this issue's Section 230 report.

Media articles on the topic of the US Communication Decency Act's famous Section 230 include reactions to an anti-terrorism lawsuit, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, where plaintiffs blame YouTube for the Islamic State's 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

The Verge tells us: "A number of internet services – including ... the Wikimedia Foundation – filed briefs last week ... encouraging the [United States Supreme Court] not to narrow its definition of Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act]." But – as pointed out by The Verge – it also comes at a time where the Supreme Court might curtail the Section 230 in the separate NetChoice lawsuits against new state laws in Texas and Florida to restrict online moderation that is defined by these states as viewpoint discrimination. An argument against these state laws is that they essentially compel speech by online hosts such as Wikimedia – what Eugene Volokh writing in Texas Law Review calls "compelled hosting" – which is likely a First Amendment violation. We don't know yet whether it is a violation, and this is what the Supreme Court case will sort out, maybe.

Additional media coverage includes Gizmodo sorting out the views of several participants in Gonzalez, and a number of legal scholars providing opinions and analysis around Section 230 in both cases:

• The United States Supreme Court's linked list of relevant documents about Gonzalez v. Google
• The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by a Cato Institute research fellow concerning Section 230 and compelled speech.
• The Cornell Law Review has an analysis that states "requiring tech companies to maintain politically neutral content moderation algorithms is a form of compelled speech and is therefore presumptively unconstitutional under the First Amendment."
• The MIT Technology Review reported on the potential impact the Supreme Court decision could have on Reddit and Wikipedia.
• WMF's own amicus brief in Gonzalez references several Wikipedia articles, like Tiger Woods, and asks whether "the arrangement of content in a way that could (and sometimes does) highlight important controversies [is] now open season for litigation".

– B

The story of the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of sixteen administrators and editors in the Middle-East/North Africa region and the two Saudi Wikimedians, Osama Khalid and Ziyad Alsufyani, who have been jailed in a Saudi Arabian maximum-security prison since 2020 (see previous Signpost coverage) has been attracting further press attention over the past two weeks.

Democracy Now! featured an interview with DAWN executive director Sarah Leah Whitson on 17 January.

On 18 January, a number of human rights organisations (Access Now, ALQST, Article 19, Global Voices, GCHR and IFEX) published a report that called for Osama's and Ziyad's release and also included a short WMF statement:

"We are saddened and deeply concerned about these arrests and the harm they have caused to the freedom and safety of Osama Khalid and Ziad Al-Sufyani. The Foundation shares a common belief with Wikimedia volunteer communities around the world that access to knowledge is a human right."

On 26/27 January, a Reuters story titled "Wikipedia Middle East editors ban shows risks for creators" was carried by outlets including the Bangkok Post, Jakarta Post, Deccan Herald, Jerusalem Post and CNBC Africa.

The report included quotes from the recent Signpost coverage as well as a statement from Raed Jarrar, DAWN's Advocacy Director, who questioned Wikimedia's "business model" which he said had created "two classes of humans" – those paid to manage Wikimedia, and the volunteers who produce and edit Wikipedia's content for free:

"The biggest question here is about Wikimedia's model of relying on volunteers who are operating in authoritarian countries, and putting them in danger, and not advocating for their release when they are in trouble."

Pat de Brún, head of artificial intelligence and big data at rights group Amnesty International, commented on the political dimension driving government interest in Wikipedia:

"A huge amount is at stake. Knowledge is power, and the power to rewrite history and do propaganda is valuable for governments who have a lot to hide and have a shameful human rights record."

– AK

A few articles have been written around the web about the allegedly uncontroversial implementation of Vector 2022. Meanwhile, an RfC regarding the update, created on January 21, has a whopping million bytes of discussion on it. The main question – whether the WMF should roll back the new skin as the default – currently stands at 289 in support, 207 in opposition, and 17 neutral. Further down the page, a side RfC on unlimited text width has 79 in support and 57 in opposition.

• "Wikipedia has spent years on a barely noticeable redesign": by Annie Rauwerda for Slate.
• "Wikipedia's first desktop design update in a decade doesn't rock the boat", Engadget
• "Wikipedia gets its first makeover in over a decade…and it’s fairly subtle", TechCrunch
• "It's not just you — Wikipedia looks different", Business Insider

– J

• Mystery billionaire didn't have a Wikipedia page: Alex Gerko, a non-oligarch Russian-born algorithmic trader, paid more taxes (£487.4 million) than anybody else in the UK this year. The lack of a Wikipedia article surprised the Mirror, but the article was created within 10 hours. An article on Gerko's firm, XTX Markets, had been created in 2018.
• The good, the bad, and the ugly: Poynter together with a PBS Newshour Student Reporting Project video teaches about the good – the solid foundations of Wikipedia's work; the bad – vandalism, the special markup language, and the difficulty of editing on a mobile device; and the ugly – hoaxes. It also gives some tips on using Wikipedia such as "explore the footnotes", and look for locks or tags at the top of the page. It gives a rating as well – "Mostly Legit". View the video here. The real good, bad and ugly are here.
• Italian TV report: An episode of Italian TV series Report, which airs on the Rai 3 channel of Italy's national broadcaster, took an hour-long critical look at Wikimedia finances as well as paid editing and POV pushing on Wikipedia. Among the interviewees featured in the programme were Ethan Zuckerman, Wil540 art, Bluerasberry, Pete Forsyth and representatives of Wikimedia Italy. Rai also posted links to WMF responses to the programme makers' questions: 1, 2. These documents are bilingual, showing the original English questions and answers followed by an Italian translation.
• Wikipedia "not completely dependable", says Supreme Court: "The Supreme Court [of India] cautioned the courts and adjudicating authorities against use of 'wikipedia' for legal dispute resolution". Fair enough.
• Quiet progress: Noam Cohen in The Atlantic writes that "The Culture Wars Look Different on Wikipedia" (paywalled).
• Is everybody skeptical?: Paranormal Daily News is skeptical about how the paranormal is covered in this encyclopedia. They believe that a secret conspiracy is working to suppress the scientific presentation of the paranormal here.
• Igbo Wikimedians: Digital safety challenges for activists preserving their language through open knowledge (Global Voices' RisingVoices blog).
• Software turns Wiki pages into videos for education: Article by EdSurge, a journalism project of the International Society for Technology in Education.
• Annie Rauwerda, again!: For the second time this month, Rauwerda's work on her Instagram account @depthsofwikipedia has been recognized by the press, this time on Bustle. For the second time this month, the article has featured a photo of my dog! – Sb
• Freely licensed oral knowledge: Peoples Gazette reports that Wikimedia User Group Nigeria and the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group donated 100 Nigerian oral histories and 20 audiovisual recordings of Yoruba Indigenous work to the Department of Linguistics and African Languages at the University of Ibadan. – AK
• Pakistan state telecom "degrades", then blocks Wikipedia access due to sacrilegious content: Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the state telecom regulator, threatened to block Wikipedia on 1 February, as reported by TechCrunch and Daily Times. Neither these two media sources nor the PTA English language press release mentioned what was the offending material, nor how the PTA notified "Wikipedia" of its order. Bloomberg then reported on 3 February that the PTA had indeed gone ahead and blocked Wikipedia. For a more comprehensive report and a WMF statement on this development, see News and notes in this issue of The Signpost.
• Congressman edits: Controversial U.S. congressman George Santos may have edited English Wikipedia a decade before his election this past November. Reported by The New Republic in the United States, The Independent in the UK and Politico published in the U.S. with German ownership. See also the Disinformation report in this issue of The Signpost.
• Indigenous history in Wikipedia: Slate has published an article titled "How Wikipedia Erases Indigenous History. Native editors are fighting back." as part of its "future tense" partnership with New America and Arizona State University. The article focuses on editing disputes around Wikipedia's coverage of early U.S. presidents, in particular Andrew Jackson, and indigenous history topics like the 1830 Indian Removal Act. – AK

The authors are a veteran Wikipedian working as a Wikimedian In Residence (Poulter) and an interdisciplinary scholar, author, and curator (Ahmed). Our research into how the Wikimedia projects cover visual art has recently been published in the peer-reviewed journal Digital Studies. The paper shows how far Wikimedia falls short of a global perspective on visual arts but also sets out actions the community and the global cultural heritage sector can take to improve the situation.

Gender gaps and geographical imbalances on Wikimedia are already well-researched. Our focus is a cultural gap which does not correspond exactly to geography. For example, on the English Wikipedia, List of sculptors is 99% Western, despite sculpture being common to many different cultures, Lists of painters by nationality is around 75% European, and List of contemporary artists is 80% European. Many countries with especially rich artistic traditions, such as Libya and Mali, do not even have dedicated articles about their art (in the same way as there exist exhaustive articles such as French art or Greek art). The English Wikipedia's Level-4 Vital Article list for visual artists currently includes six from non-Western cultures, out of 124 articles.

On Commons, the Gallery of Non-Photographic Media – Religious Art showcases ninety pieces of art relating to Christianity, alongside eight images for Buddhism, five for Judaism, five for Hinduism, and three for Paganism. Islam, with around two billion followers worldwide, has three examples of religious art (two of which we've uploaded).

It's unequivocally a good thing that Wikimedia projects make so much knowledge about art freely available. Our concern is that its overwhelming focus on the Western canon gives readers a misleadingly narrow picture of visual art and its role in human cultures. It's great that there are extensive articles about John Constable or the Bayeux Tapestry in English; we just want similar recognition for the artists or works from different cultures that are at least as important to those cultures as Constable is to British culture: Shibata Zeshin in Japan, or Raden Saleh in Indonesia, for example.

The Wikidata project Sum of All Paintings is extremely impressive in how it has drawn together details of more than 600,000 paintings from thousands of catalogues. While praising it, we have to be aware that a focus on paintings, usually by named artists, is itself a kind of bias towards European culture. The most celebrated art within another culture might be textile art, architectural features, or calligraphy; we should document these as well.

For our quantitative research, we consulted books and art experts to build lists of artists and works from cultures outside the Western canon. These were compared against lists of Western artists and works drawn from the Vital Articles lists on the English Wikipedia. Most of the non-Western masterpieces had no dedicated representation at all on the Wikimedia projects (though they might be mentioned in artists' biographies). So the main part of our research calculated the ratio of coverage of the two sets of artists (in terms of bytes of text, Commons files, or Wikidata statements). This measure is independent of the size of the Wikipedia, and allows us to place each Wikimedia project on a spectrum from "Western" to "global" for the visual arts.

Taking all languages in aggregate, Wikipedia gives seven times as many bytes of coverage to the Western artists as the artists from other cultures. Wikidata's coverage is more even, with four times as many statements for Western artists. Commons has 21 times as many files relating to Western artists. The individual language versions of Wikipedia formed a spectrum with Indonesian, Punjabi, and Bengali among the more "global" while Italian, Polish and Serbian were amongst the most "Western". The big surprises: English Wikipedia is one of the most "global" (a ratio of 4) and Thai Wikipedia the most focused on Western art (a ratio of 40).

Like other biases on Wikipedia, this cultural imbalance results from a combination of factors outside and inside the project: the availability of sources and images as well as the interests of volunteers. So improving the situation involves both external outreach and on-wiki activity.

The external factors include the availability of reliable sources in the appropriate language, and of digital images of the appropriate content. We had seen that Commons in particular has a heavy bias toward the Western canon. So we are taking this message to cultural institutions that haven't worked with Wikimedia before. The Khalili Foundation is now reaching out to art museums to encourage them to share images and catalogue data with the Wikimedia projects. We have already uploaded more than 1,100 images of Islamic art and Japanese art as part of the Khalili Collections/Wikimedia UK cultural partnership. As part of the World Festival of Cultural Diversity, the Khalili Foundation is running a series of editathons with partner organisations in the UK.

We have put our lists of artists and masterpieces into a project page where you can see which links are red and which articles have the lowest quality assessments. This is also somewhere to share suggested references. We use Wikidata identifiers, which we hope will make it easy to implement the project page in other languages. The page is situated within WikiProject Visual Arts, but you do not have to be a member of that WikiProject to take part. Improving a linked article, creating a Wikidata item, or even finding a reference that could be used to create an article, are all welcome. We are not just looking to improve the coverage of topics mentioned in our research, but to diversify Wikipedia’s representation of art, so feel free to add artists or topics that you think are lacking.

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

A preprint titled "Polarization and reliability of news sources in Wikipedia"^[1] finds

[...] a moderate yet systematic liberal polarization in the [English Wikipedia's] selection of news media sources. We also show that this effect is not mitigated by controlling for news media factual reliability."

The study is based on a dataset of 30 million citations extracted in 2020, which the second author and others have already examined from different angles in other research publications (cf. our previous coverage: "6.7% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one academic journal article with DOI", "How Wikipedia keeps up with COVID-19 research", "A Map of Science in Wikipedia").

As with research examining other kinds of bias (like gender, language or geography), studying political bias involves the non-trivial problem of defining a "neutral" baseline against which to compare Wikipedia's content. For example, in a series of earlier papers that (among other results) found Wikipedia to be "more slanted towards Democratic views" than Britannica, although its "bias was moving from left to right", Greenstein and Zhu used the United States Congressional Record as a kind of gold standard of unbiased language. (Of course, this opened them up to the question whether the spectrum of opinions present among US federal lawmakers is an appropriate baseline for an international encyclopedia, even if their analysis was focused on articles related to US politics.) A 2017 paper studied both political and gender bias by comparing Wikipedia's coverage of topics to that of "political periodicals geared toward either liberal or conservative ideologies" (e.g. Mother Jones vs. National Review), and women's vs. men's magazines, respectively (see our earlier coverage: "English Wikipedia biased against conservative and female topics, at least when compared to US magazines").

The present study relies on a different source that has since become available:

To estimate the political polarization of Wikipedia citations, we use the Media Bias Monitor.^{[supp 1]} This system collects demographic data about the Facebook followers of 20,448 distinct news media outlets [...]. These data include political leanings, gender, age, income, ethnicity and national identity. For political leanings, the Facebook Audience API^{[supp 2]} provides five levels: Very Conservative, Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Very Liberal. To measure the political leaning of an outlet, MBM firstly finds the fraction of readers having different political leanings, and then multiply the fraction for each category with the following values: very liberal (–2), liberal (–1), moderate (0), conservative (1), and very conservative (2). The sum of such scores provides a single polarization score for the outlet, ranging between –2 and 2, where a negative score indicates that a media outlet is read more by a liberal leaning audience, while a positive score indicates a conservative leaning audience. In the original paper, MBM is compared to alternative approaches used to infer the political leanings of news media outlets, finding that this method highly correlates with most alternatives."

Matching domain names between MBM and the "Wikipedia Citations" dataset, the study finds that

"The average Wikipedia citation polarization score (red line) is -0.51 (median -0.52) [on the aforementioned MBM scale from -2 (very liberal) to 2 (very conservative)], therefore leaning towards liberal. The bulk of citations also falls between the range -1 and 0."

Breaking down polarization ratings by ORES article topic areas, "we cannot see differences among macro topics". This "general trend" was also found for the top 10 (sub-)topic areas and the top 10 Wikiprojects, although with "minor shifts [...]. For example, the topic sports has a higher conservative-leaning fraction of citations, all the while maintaining a liberal-leaning skew. The WikiProjects Politics and India are more liberal-leaning than the average, instead. Taken together, these results confirm that the overall trend towards liberal political polarization is not specific to some areas of Wikipedia, but seems to be widespread across topics and WikiProjects."

Motivating their second research question, the authors "speculate that editors may introduce political polarization in their sources in order to prioritise reliable ones" (which might remind one of Stephen Colbert's dictum "Reality has a well-known liberal bias"). To test this hypothesis, they use the reliability ratings of Media Bias/Fact Check (but not that site's bias ratings). They note in passing that "that, while there are only 1467 citations rated as 'VERY LOW' [reliability], there remains a sizable fraction of citations to low or mixed reliability outlets" on English Wikipedia, as of 2020. (It might have been interesting to conduct the same analysis with the English Wikipedia's own reliability ratings that the community has compiled for numerous news sources at WP:RSP – where, ironically, "Media Bias/Fact Check" is itself currently rated as "generally unreliable, as it is self published", somewhat in contrast to the present paper and the peer-reviewed publication that it cites in justification of using MBFC.)

However, in a linear regression analysis (which also takes article topic and WikiProjects into account), the authors "cannot see a clear pattern emerge. While high reliability shows a liberal skew, very high reliability shows a conservative skew in turn. Mixed sources tend to be more liberal, while low and very low reliability ones tend to be more conservative." Overall, they conclude that "the case for a possible association between low reliability and conservative news outlets disappear[s]" in the end.

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
• The Wikimedia Foundation's Research team is soliciting nominations for the "Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year" 2022, to be submitted until February 6.

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.

From the abstract:^[2]

"Diversity Searcher is a tool originally developed to help analyse diversity in news media texts [...] We compare two data sources that Diversity Searcher has worked with – [the Wikipedia-based] DBpedia and Wikidata – with respect to their ontological coverage and diversity, and describe implications for the resulting analyses of text corpora. We describe a case study of the relative over- or underrepresentation of Belgian political parties between 1990 and 2020 in the English-language DBpedia, the Dutch-language DBpedia, and Wikidata [...]. In particular, we came across a staggering overrepresentation of the political right in the English-language DBpedia."

From the "Method" section:

"As a null hypothesis, a knowledge source represents a political constellation in an unbiased way if the relative number of politicians from a given party who are represented as an entity in a knowledge source [...] equals the relative number of this party in a relevant real-life context. [... We] consider “having a Wikipedia page” (etc.) as an important contributor to public visibility of a person and their party. [...] The baseline is then – relatively – easy to define: the shares of the vote or the number of seats of parties Y at times T in a given political body. We started by concentrating on the national parliament, the Chamber of People’s Representatives (Kamer van volksvertegenwoordigers, henceforth KVV) and used the number of seats at the beginning of a legislature. We also looked at the regional (Flemish) parliaments (Vlaams parlement, VP) [...]"

From the "Results and interpretation" section:

"These results not only confirm our first informal observation of over-representation of rightwing parties (especially the N-VA) in the English-language DBpedia, with a trend growing over time. (During these years, the N-VA’s share of the popular vote increased, but the DBpedia growth clearly exceeds the baseline growth.) Different biases seem to occur in the Dutch-language DBpedia: although on the whole comparatively similar to the baseline, this ontology seems to over-represent the main centrist party (CD&V). Wikidata, in contrast, gives a rather accurate picture of party shares in the national parliament. The French-language Walloon parties are (understandably, given the language focus) under-represented in the Dutch-language DBpedia. Both the overrepresentation of rightist and centrist parties in media coverage have been identified in earlier international research [...]"

In this legal essay,^[3] US legal scholar Eric Goldman (whom some Wikipedians might recall for his – later retracted – 2005 prediction of Wikipedia's demise due to volunteer burnout) contrasts Wikipedia's "Assume Good Faith" principle with current attempts by Internet regulators to rein in on user-generated content websites and Section 230 (see also this issue's "In the media").

From the abstract:^[4]

"[...] we focus on how the editors' attitudes, namely being broad-minded or stubborn, affect the consensus-building process in a model of Wikipedia. We further investigate how banning editors affects the speed with which conflicts or debates can be resolved. For the analysis, we use an agent-based opinion model developed to simulate different aspects of Wikipedia. We show that, in most cases, banning agents from editing an article slows down the consensus-building process, and increases the system’s relaxation time. We show further, and counterintuitively, that with large groups of 'extremists' who hold other than the central opinion, consensus can be reached faster and the article will be less biased."

From the "Conclusion" section:

"[..] for the consensus [to be achieved] it is more important not to have intolerant editors than to have very tolerant ones.

Our results indicate that consensus is reached extremely slowly if the bias of the article can be changed only by a small amount. To resolve the conflict faster, one must either increase the change of bias in one edit or the ratio of extremists. In general, the latter cannot be controlled deliberately, but the former can be influenced.

In Wikipedia, there is already a method aimed at resolving disputes of that sort. The solution is to move the disputed questions into a new section (or page) where they can be discussed freely. The new trend to move disputed parts of the article into the Criticism or Controversy sections [which is actually discouraged in a widely cited community essay] is a good way to handle this problem. Assigning [sensitive] arguments and opinions to a small section of the article that is much easier to modify makes the full article less disputed. Thus, tolerance towards the main article increases [...]"

See also our review of a related earlier paper involving one of the authors: "More newbies mean more conflict, but extreme tolerance can still achieve eternal peace".

From the abstract:^[5]

"About a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to representing 'local content', i.e. the corresponding cultural context —geographical places, historical events, political figures, among others—. To investigate the relevance of such content for users and communities, we present an analysis of reader and editor engagement in terms of pageviews and edits. The results, consistent across fifteen diverse language editions, show that these articles are more engaging for readers and especially for editors. The highest proportion of edits on cultural context content is generated by anonymous users, and also administrators engage proportionally more than plain registered editors [...]"

(cf. by some of the same authors: "The Wikipedia Diversity Observatory: A Project to Identify and Bridge Content Gaps in Wikipedia")

This paper is part of a 2021 monograph published on occasion of Wikipedia's 20th anniversary ("Wikipedia, veinte años de conocimiento libre"), which comprises various other research papers, most of which are in Spanish with an English abstract.

From the abstract:^[6]

"This study explores how historical knowledge is produced on Wikipedia. The project is based on multiple methodologies ranging from qualitative analysis of Wikipedia pages related to history, survey with Wikipedia editors, to quantitative analysis of participatory practices within the Wikipedia community. The main argument is that Wikipedia allows people to discuss the past, express their opinions and emotions about history and its significance in the present and the future through the portal of “talk” [pages] that Wikipedia provides [...].

This dissertation includes detailed examinations of the history of discussions at Talk:Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Talk:Vietnam War and Talk:September 11 attacks.

This is an earlier paper by the dissertation's author. From the "Conclusion" section:^[7]

"Wikipedia’s capability of producing historical narratives, its self-critical character through the talk pages, and its open character are significant tools that should not be underestimated. The popularity of Wikipedia and, particularly, the popularity of the historical pages that are visited daily by a lot of people have to be studied and not be neglected as a kind of not “real history.” Wikipedia cannot change radically the historical scholarship but can bring the historian closer to the society."

From the abstract:^[8]

"Broken external references on Wikipedia which lack archived copies are marked as 'permanently dead'. But, we find this term to be a misnomer, as many previously dysfunctional links work fine today. For links which do not work, it is rarely the case that no archived copies exist. Instead, we find that the current policy for determining which archived copies for an URL are not erroneous is too conservative, and many URLs are archived for the first time only after they no longer work."

Supplementary references and notes:

WikiProject Organized Labour was created by Canadian editor Bookandcoffee on 10 January 2006 with the title of WikiProject on Organized Labo(u)r. Already then, there was an appetite to focus on the global labour movement, not just in the Western hemisphere. Within one year, 48 members joined, including currently-active members Goldsztajn and Warofdreams.

For the December 30-January 30 period, per this this database report; shout out to ElijahPepe for some of the write-ups below.

• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.