Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-11-06
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/From the editors
Cricket jumpscare
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, Ollieisanerd, Death Editor 2, CAWylie, Rajan51, GeorgeBailey and Ltbdl.
War for territory (October 15 to 21)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2023 Cricket World Cup | 
|
3,937,866 | _during_the_2015_Cricket_World_Cup.jpg)
|
It may have taken three weeks, but the latest edition of the premier cricket tournament finally made it to the top of this list. Last week witnessed some big upsets, with Afghanistan beating the reigning champions England, and South Africa losing to the Netherlands. On the other hand, India and New Zealand have remain unbeaten after four games each, but one of them will lose that streak when the two teams face each other on Sunday. |
| 2 | Suzanne Somers |
|
2,539,567 | 
|
'Had Somers died in 1993, her achievements would have been immortal. Had she died in 2003 she would still have been a great actress but flawed. But she died in 2023. Alas, what can one say?' Paraphrases about Chairman Mao aside, actress and health and wellness businesswoman Suzanne Somers died at 76 of cancer. |
| 3 | Leo (2023 Indian film) |
|
2,458,805 | .jpg)
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Kollywood returns with another action film. This one stars Vijay, and is directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj, whose previous film topped this list last year, and this one would have probably done the same if not for sports and deaths. A sequel is already in the works. |
| 4 | Cricket World Cup |
|
2,358,550 | .jpg)
|
Brought to this list by #1. |
| 5 | 2023 Israel–Hamas war |
|
1,759,278 | 
|
The latest Middle Eastern conflict continues, with rockets flying, thousands of civilians dying, both sides accused of committing war crimes by the other side and being called out for their misdeeds (the extremist group who rules the Gaza Strip and struck first for terrorism, Israel for continuous occupation of territories recognized as Palestinian that tends to turn violent). |
| 6 | Gaza Strip | 
|
1,539,801 | 
| |
| 7 | Israel |
|
1,522,213 | 
| |
| 8 | State of Palestine |
|
1,495,597 | ||
| 9 | The Fall of the House of Usher (miniseries) | 
|
1,457,045 | 
|
A Netflix miniseries based on The Fall of the House of Usher and other works by the Gothic fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe was released on October 12. |
| 10 | David Beckham |
|
1,453,522 | 
|
One more week for the footballer chronicled in Netflix's Beckham. And it's nice that the miniseries features a clip from the hilarious interview Posh and Becks gave to Ali G. |
And the violence caused such silence (October 22 to 28)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2023 Cricket World Cup |
|
4,201,290 | 
|
One more week of India receiving the world championship of its national pastime. The hosts have won all their games so far, and surprisingly defending champions England have only one win in six matches! |
| 2 | Cricket World Cup |
|
2,927,565 | ||
| 3 | Leo (2023 Indian film) |
|
2,595,951 | 
|
Still in India, a Kollywood action thriller based on A History of Violence starring Vijay, that is also a sequel to last year's Vikram and part of a franchise known as the "Lokiverse" (a name which Hollywood's Loki would probably want for himself and his show). Leo is the fifth highest-grossing Indian film of the year so far, and who knows if it can take fourth from another movie that spent a while in this list, Jailer. |
| 4 | Mike Johnson (politician) |
|
1,753,392 | 
|
The new Speaker of the U.S. House, and the first from the state of Louisiana, was elected on the fourth ballot. He is the most junior representative to be elected speaker since 1883. |
| 5 | Killers of the Flower Moon (film) |
|
1,716,626 | 
|
Martin Scorsese made his third 3-hour movie in a decade, an adaptation of a novel that itself was inspired by the true story of the Osage Indian murders that happened in 1920s Oklahoma after oil was found on the Osage Nation's land. While big chunks of Killers of the Flower Moon could be cut with no loss, it's a worthwile watch, helped by an exceptional cast led by Marty's two favorite actors: Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. The studio arm of the biggest company in the world could easily spend $200 million in the picture, and while it might not make as much in theaters between its length and competition with among others #9, the praise received by Killers of the Flower Moon makes it a certain awards contender. |
| 6 | Five Nights at Freddy's (film) |
|
1,225,895 | .jpg)
|
Coming in at number 6 is a heartwarming (if you ignore all of the murder and jumpscares) movie about an older brother (played by Josh Hutcherson) reconnecting with his younger sister (played by Piper Rubio) while fighting ghost robots and Shaggy Afton. MatPat appears in a cameo role, having made numerous videos about the FNAF franchise at the height of its popularity. Markiplier was also supposed to have a cameo as a security guard, but he had to decline due to scheduling conflicts. |
| 7 | 2023 Israel–Hamas war |
|
968,300 | 
|
The latest Middle Eastern war sadly continues, with thousands of civilians dying in bombings and many more being displaced, and now Israel has sent ground troops and tanks into Gaza to rescue its hostages. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2023 | 
|
938,672 | .jpg)
|
And it's true that you've reached the better place Still, I'd give the world to see your face And be right here next to you But it's like you've gone too soon and the hardest thing to do is say bye |
| 9 | Taylor Swift | 
|
859,140 | .jpg)
|
Along with wrecking the box office with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (which has led in North America for two straight weeks and also surpassed $186 million worldwide), the singer released her fifth re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor's Version) (even if there's nothing less necessary than extra versions of "Shake It Off" and "Bad Blood"), which soon broke streaming records, while her viral 2019 track "Cruel Summer" currently occupies the top spot on the Billboard charts. |
| 10 | David Beckham |
|
856,673 | 
|
Netflix's documentary miniseries Beckham keeps its subject one more week. The footballer was a fan of someone who'll rank highly next week. |
Exclusions
- 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.
Most edited articles
For the September 30 – October 30 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 Israel–Hamas war | 7495[1] | As if it could've been anything else but the latest flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, that needs constant updates regarding military developments and international reactions. |
| Deaths in 2023 | 2319 | Among the deceased of October were the aforementioned Suzanne Somers, and also Bobby Charlton, Dick Butkus, Tim Wakefield and Richard Roundtree. |
| October 2023 Speaker of the United States House of Representatives election | 2261 | After Kevin McCarthy was removed from his post, an emergency election was held, eventually promoting Mike Johnson of Louisiana. |
| India at the 2022 Asian Games | 2259 | India had its performance at the continental games, with over 100 medals and ranking fourth overall. |
| Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion | 1528 | One of the worst moments of the current war in the Holy Land, as a hospital already damaged by a Israeli rocket was hit head-on by a missile of undetermined origin (Hamas blamed Israel, who in turn said it was a Gaza rocket that malfunctioned and fell), causing hundreds of deaths. |
| Legalism (Chinese philosophy) | 1381 | FourLights continues to expand and clean up this page. |
| United States at the 2023 Pan American Games | 1283 | Santiago, Chile is taking in sports from all the Americas in the 2023 Pan American Games. The sports potencies of North (even if the USA mostly brought B-list athletes) and South (in fact, the hosts are one of the only two nations in the continent that Brazil doesn't border) America lead the medal count. |
| Brazil at the 2023 Pan American Games | 1242 | |
| Bigg Boss (Tamil season 7) | 1179 | The latest edition of India's version of Big Brother, airing on Star Vijay. |
| 2023 Lewiston shootings | 1107 | 40-year-old Robert Card was the lone gunman that killed 18 and injured 13 in a bowling alley and a restaurant on October 25. A intensive manhunt soon followed, and Card was found dead in an apparent suicide in Lisbon, Maine two days later. |
| Mike Johnson (politician) | 1085 | The latest Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and a fairly minor politician before, with Senator Susan Collins downright telling a CNN reporter that she doesn't know Johnson and was going to Google him. |
| List of Cricket World Cup records | 965 | The 2023 Cricket World Cup inspires updates on these lists. |
| 2023 Cricket World Cup statistics | 953 | |
| Leo (2023 Indian film) | 925 | Kollywood fans update as the latest in the Lokesh Cinematic Universe picks up the crore. |
| List of NBA regular season records | 811 | As the 2023-24 NBA season starts, BeFriendlyGoodSir decided to expand this list of basketball achievements. |
- ^ 2359 under the original name October 2023 Gaza−Israel conflict.
UK shad cab bigwig accused of ripping off WP articles for book, Wikipedians accused of being dicks by a rich man
U.K. Shadow Chancellor accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in her new book
The Financial Times, in "New book from UK shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves lifts from Wikipedia", accuses Rachel Reeves of wholesale plagiarizing from Wikipedia in The Women Who Made Modern Economics. There were lesser amounts of unattributed copying from The Guardian and several other sources. The Guardian reported that
Basic Books, the publisher, said some sentences should have been "rewritten and properly referenced" and pledged to review all sources in the book, but added that "at no point did Rachel seek to present these facts as original research".
Reeves told the BBC that some sentences "were not properly referenced", but would be corrected in future reprints. She also told the BBC:
I'm the author of that book, I hold my hands up and say, I should have done better .... Obviously, I had research assistants on the book, but I take responsibility for everything that is in that book.
But for me, what I wanted to do is to bring together the stories of these women. And if I'm guilty of copying and pasting some facts about some amazing women and turning it into a book that gets read, then I'm really proud of that
Both The Guardian and the Financial Times highlighted the irony "that one of the themes of the book was the failure to properly acknowledge the work of female economists."
Other media covering the story include The Telegraph, The Independent, The Times, and i. – S, H
Rich guy and Wikipedia: Who is offended by what?
- See also: this issue's Opinion.
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A tweet, from the world's richest man and leading tweeter, said that Wikipedia should change its name to "Dickipedia," offering Wikipedia a billion dollars to do so, "in the interests of accuracy". The tweet mockingly referred to a screenshot of a Wikipedia fundraising banner ("Wikipedia is not for sale. A personal appeal from Jimmy Wales"). Perhaps this check was slated to be cut right after his cage match with Zuckerberg.
An explosion of press articles followed:
- The Guardian opines that Wikipedia's very existence offends him and compares the "good internet" (Wikipedia) to the "bad internet" (Facebook and X, née Twitter).
- Rolling Stone writes that the rich man "Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia", referring to how he paid $44 billion for Twitter a year ago and renamed it X, which is now valued at about $19 billion. Wikipedian Annie Rauwerda is quoted at length, saying for example "Frankly, I have been sick of thinking about [the rich man] for years and I do not think his tweets about Wikipedia are all that novel. I mean, 'Dickipedia' isn't even the first disparaging nickname for Wikipedia he's touted this year." Rolling Stone also mentions Stephen Harrison's May 2022 article in Slate, about how the article about the rich man had become controversial and difficult to edit.
- In a new article for Slate, Wikipedia Is Covering the War in Israel and Gaza Better Than X, Harrison focuses on how people are spreading misinformation about the war on X (née Twitter) and how his changes have made matters worse. The rich man has been focusing more on criticism from Wales and "trolling" him rather than addressing his specific points.
- Noam Cohen is the dean of the small group of journalists who specialize in covering Wikipedia. His opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Elon Musk's hate for Wikipedia reveals his true views on free speech focuses on the weaknesses of the rich man's arguments against Wikipedia's accuracy. His main tool is ridicule. Wikipedia's main tool is good-faith collaboration. Wikipedia is now on his "roster of A-list enemies".
- The Hill added context by describing a back-and-forth Tweet-fest between the rich man, Jimmy Wales and others. It highlights how a tweet where the rich man questioned Wikipedia's fundraising propriety ("Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn't needed to operate Wikipedia [...]") was augmented by X's own "Community Notes", initially undercutting his arguments by providing facts about Wikipedia's large usage numbers.
Wikipedians can be grateful for the support of all these journalists when we are getting roasted by the world's richest man (who, less than three years ago, had expressed a very different opinion on occasion of Wikipedia's 20th anniversary: "Happy birthday Wikipedia! So glad you exist"). They all, in their own way, attest to the quality of our website and the power of collaborative editing. The number and strength of their responses also reflect on him.
In fact, the "Wikipedia is not for sale" fundraising banner that the rich man mocked in his tweet had itself already been inspired by an earlier richest-man-related Twitter controversy and the observation that it had generated a lot of public support for Wikipedia. As detailed by Jimmy Wales when he proposed using the "not for sale" wording in fundraising appeals back in December 2022:
I saw a tweet from a New York Post journalist saying to [the rich man] (who had complained to his fans creating a silly "scandal" about a routine deletion debate) "I wonder how much Wikipedia would cost?" I responded in a quote tweet with a dry "Not for sale". [see also Signpost coverage] This got an extremely positive response (at this moment over 220,000 likes!) from people including many who said that they hadn't donated before but would donate now. I paid close attention to the negative responses but they were mostly from the sorts of people who claim that that community is basically full of CIA agents, etc.
This gave me an idea – people do love it about us that we are not like other websites. Wikimedia is a nonprofit, a charity, and therefore isn't subject to the kinds of risks and pressures that other major websites have. [...] So I propose this banner message, and welcome open testing of variants. [...] --Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:17, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
In the aftermath of the posts, outlets such as Vice have (contrariwise vis-a-vis the rich man) claimed that the Wikimedia Foundation is "obviously spending money on servers to keep things stable". In this case, it should be noted that the Wikimedia Foundation's spending, and its funding priorities, have been criticized sharply by Wikipedians themselves for many years, and indeed criticized in the pages of this very publication. Indeed, we would be remiss to let our readers go away thinking that some rich guy from online invented criticizing the Wikimedia Foundation in 2022 — Wikimedians invented that the same day they invented the WMF!
Other news outlets that have covered this story include NDTV, PC Magazine, Livemint, Bloomberg, euro.news and Yahoo!.
Reports have tentatively identified the rich man as a South African businessman and investor named "Elon Musk". – S, H, J
Websites are music
The New Yorker cartoonist Triana Muñoz draws websites (here) as if they were musical styles and gives the styles names in the captions. Not to ruin your viewing pleasure, we list the websites and give music to fit the captions.
- Google [1]
- Rotten Tomatoes [2]
- Yahoo [3]
- Buzzfeed [4]
- Weather Channel [5]
- Wikipedia [6]
- Miscellaneous sites [7]
- Neither X nor Twitter made the cut – No cartoon, no caption – bonus track – S
Does Wikipedia's Gaza coverage show an anti-Israel bias?
The Spectator Australia, a conservative magazine, criticizes the English Wikipedia's coverage of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war as biased. The (paywalled) article examines two existing articles that recently were thrust into the news limelight by the conflict, focusing in particular on the neutrality of their lead sections ("when read time is primarily the first two to three paragraphs on any page, those paragraphs need to include a variety of sources"):
[In the article Gaza Strip,] the initial two paragraphs would lead the reader to think that Israel occupies Gaza since 1967, that Hamas are not a terrorist organisation, and that Israel blocks Gazan land, sea, and air space for no reason at all. To find any mention of the word terrorist (of which there are only two mentions) the reader needs to navigate through over 11,000 words down to near bottom of the page. The word terrorism is not mentioned once despite reference to Hamas control of Gaza since 2007, and sources are predominately from the United Nations which is known for its anti-Israel bias or from the post-Zionist writings of the 'New Israeli Historians' [see New Historians].
(It may seem reasonable to ask whether this Wikipedia article – as it looked like around the Spectator article's publication time – creates a misleading impression for readers without any background knowledge about Hamas. However, the author does not seem to be aware of Wikipedia's general guidelines discouraging the use of terms like "terrorist", and also doesn't mention that the article about Hamas itself contains ample mention of it being described as a terrorist organization by various entities.)
The author's second "timely example of Wikipedia distortion" is the article about Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi (which has had Good Article status since 2019):
The introductory section gives three references about Ahed portraying her as a Palestinian activist, two sources from Haaretz, and one from The Guardian. Haaretz is an Israeli news source known for its left-wing and liberal stances as is The Guardian – even a search on Wikipedia itself tells you this. There is no counter stance provided about Ahed's alleged family connection to terror. In the section "Early life" there is no mention about her parents encouraging Palestinians to throw stones at Israeli soldiers and berate them. There is no mention of her unrepentant aunt, Ahlam Tamimi, one of the convicted masterminds behind the 2001 Sbarro Pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed and wounded hundreds of Israeli civilians.
[... T]he page is seriously lacking in context and sourcing and is a detriment to the reader. The recent vanishing of Ahed Tamimi's Instagram account following her alleged post stating Israeli settlers should be slaughtered and referencing the Holocaust and Hitler, is nowhere to be mentioned (to date). It is not known if she deleted the Instagram account or if it was suspended. In fact, since I have recently become a Wikipedia editor, here is the discussion on why it is not included [excerpting this talk page section]. [...] The battle between editors over arguments of sources on Ahed's page is illustrative of the dominance some editors have over others.
The author, who identifies as "an advocate for the 'Deleting their Lies' campaign – a group dedicated to tracking and reporting hate speech on social media", concludes: "With growing anti-Semitism worldwide, Wikipedia has become an increasingly risky source on these topics as readers cannot exercise critical thinking with the limited information presented. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one such area highlighting this. Currently, it is unwise to blindly trust the Wiki crowd and it should be paramount for Wikipedia editors, new and old, to note all sides of the debate [...]."
The article also contains some general remarks about Wikipedia's importance and alleged ideological bias. As evidence for the latter, it cites two somewhat dated studies by Greenstein and Zhu (see our previous coverage in Recent research: 2015, 2012), Wikipedia's own article Ideological bias on Wikipedia, and criticism by Larry Sanger that had attained media attention in 2021 ("Sanger highlighted the Covid vaccine and the Hunter Biden scandal as examples of topics with left-leaning bias and little debate", see also our own coverage at the time: "Larry Sanger on bias in Wikipedia – with opinion orthodoxy, truth becomes more elusive"). – H
In brief
- Who is Mike Johnson?: Johnson (R-LA) is the newly elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Not just another candidate for the post, but the actually elected Speaker, second in the line of succession for the presidency. Politico asked European and Canadian politicos, who they diplomatically granted anonymity, who he is. They were at an embarrassing loss for words until an Irish government advisor was found. He had looked up Johnson on Wikipedia.
- Maher steps up: Al Jazeera reports that former WMF CEO Katherine Maher replaced Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave, who had spoken too much about the Israeli-Gaza conflict, according to some of the conference's corporate sponsors. "In recent weeks Web Summit has been at the centre of the conversation, rather than the host. Its purpose was overshadowed by the personal comments of the event's founder and former CEO, Paddy Cosgrave," according to Maher.
- Alleged antisemitism on Wikipedia: In February, Dr. Shira Klein will present a lecture on this subject at the USC Shoah Foundation (Shoah is Hebrew for The Holocaust). Earlier this year, Klein, together with Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski, published an academic paper titled "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", causing a significant amount of media coverage and on-wiki controversy, and prompting a re-opening of the long running arbitration case on "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland". See previous Signpost coverage in In the media (February 20, March 9, April 26, May 22), Recent research (March 9) and Arbitration report (May 22).
- Wikipedia pages can be used to deliver malware via Slack: Security Week describes a new "Wiki-Slack attack" that exploits a formatting glitch in Slack as "essentially a numbers game, meaning that the attacker needs to modify as many Wikipedia pages as they can and register domains for them, to ensure they can eventually infect a target of interest." TechRadar said that "sharing a Wikipedia link on Slack could be a serious security no-no".
The reports are based on findings by security firm eSentire, who published a blog post with further details, including a "sample of organic occurrences of Slack's mishandling of Wikipedia links." For example, in the article South African insolvency law, the end of the first paragraph and the beginning of the second paragraph read:
Insolvency is also of benefit to the insolvent, in that it grants him relief in certain respects.1
In broad and everyday terms, a person is insolvent [...]
- When previewing the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_insolvency_law, Slack will mangle this text so that it contains a link to the website respects.in.
- Sport records are "only interesting for Wikipedia" ... says race team CEO: Mercedes' Formula One team boss Toto Wolff said team records are "only interesting for Wikipedia, which nobody reads anyway". Three-time Formula One world champion driver Max Verstappen (not driving for Mercedes) had other opinions. (ESPN)
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/Technology report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/Essay
An open letter to Elon Musk
- The following open letter to Elon Musk contains the opinions of its author Smallbones. These opinions do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost, its editors or staff, or those of other Wikipedia editors or of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Dear Elon,
Try as I might to assume good faith, it's impossible to do so for your tweets of October 22: "I will give them a billion dollars if they (Wikipedia) change their name to Dickipedia" which was followed up by two tweets "(Please add that to the 🐄💩 on my wiki page)" and "In the interests of accuracy".
The only way to interpret those tweets is that they are intentional insults to all Wikipedians. You are effectively calling me and all Wikipedia editors "dicks" on a platform that you control where millions of people can view the insult within hours. Ten days later the tweets had been viewed 18.5 million times.
And you start with a reminder of your wealth "I will give them a billion dollars", letting us know that you are a big shot. In fact, you are now the richest man in the world, according to both Forbes and Bloomberg. Most people don't like it when some rich person insults them and uses their money to justify the insult.
Some basic Wikipedia rules
A fundamental tenet of Wikipedia, known as "assume good faith" or AGF, instructs us to assume good faith on your part, but that's just not possible in this case. As the saying goes "AGF is not a suicide pact". But there are other fundamental policies that you should know about. First you need to know what you have done wrong, what rules you've broken. That's pretty simple here — the flip side of AGF, "don't be a jerk" is the basis of all of our behavioral rules. Originally this rule was known as "don't be a dick", which might seem more appropriate in this case. But the rule's name was changed after a few years, because naming this policy in a discussion was considered calling someone a dick: a "dickish move" as the argument for changing the title went. You can see the quandary this can cause. It's difficult to even talk about the problem with your tweets. So let's just use the new name: "don't be a jerk". The idea behind that policy is easy to explain. Just view the video shown at the top of this page, that's been included in the policy since March 2018.
Another standard rule that you have violated regards inappropriate canvassing. It simply says that if you have a disagreement about Wikipedia, don't call out to everybody you know who agrees with you to change the disputed article. And don't even think about telling them to put 🐄💩 into an article. You are not the first person to try canvassing like this. Soon after Wikipedia was founded, radio talk show hosts would run out of anything interesting to say, so they would talk about something they disagreed with on Wikipedia. Then they would call on their listeners to vandalize one of our articles. So we were forced to create the "inappropriate canvassing" rule.
I shouldn't pile on by naming all the rules that you may have broken, but your phrase "my wiki page" particularly irks me. The policy you have broken prohibits article ownership. We edit collaboratively. It is not your wiki page — you don't own it. It is Wikipedia's article about you.
There is also a rule about autobiography that you should know about, which contains a literary quote as a perfect explanation about why we need it.
It is said that Zaphod Beeblebrox's birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighbouring stars, and, shortly afterwards, by the issuing of over six and three quarter million writs for damages from all of the major landowners in his Galactic sector. However, the only person by whom this is said is Beeblebrox himself, and there are several possible theories to explain this.
— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Fit the Ninth
First, the good news
Wikipedians are accustomed to dealing with people who act like jerks and don't follow our rules. The first time you break the rules, you'll usually be let off with a warning. Consider this letter to be a warning.
In fact, there is an interpretation of the rules — and people who will argue this interpretation — that you haven't broken any rules at all. It is implicit in every rule that you have to edit Wikipedia to break the rules. But Wikipedians interpret the rules on a case-by-case basis, and ultimately look to the spirit of any rule, rather than any technicalities. Nothing "implicit" need apply.
There is only one case that I know of where a person who hadn't been proved to have edited Wikipedia has been blocked. This is the case of the paid editing company Wiki-PR, which used hundreds of undeclared paid sockpuppets to insert bias and advertising into articles.
While we blocked all the paid socks, as is normal, we also blocked the company as a whole, including the owners who might not have done any actual editing, and most people associated with the company.
Employees, contractors, owners, and anyone who derives financial benefit from editing the English Wikipedia on behalf of Wiki-PR.com or its founders are banned from editing the English Wikipedia. This ban has been enacted because Wiki-PR.com has, as an organization, proven themselves repeatedly unable or unwilling to adhere to our basic community standards.
— WP:ANI on October 13, 2013 and The Wall Street Journal
In addition, when the company changed its name to Status Labs the ban still applied to the "new company".
What can you do now?
The most irksome part of your behavior is that you didn't need to do any of it. If you want to influence how an article is presented in our encyclopedia, all you have to do is start editing, while following a few of the basic rules as stated above. Anybody in the world can try to influence how an article is edited if they follow the rules. But please remember that your preferences are not any more important than anybody else's, per "no ownership" and "don't be a jerk".
It's best to create an account first so that people can't track your IP address and so that you can get messages on your own talk page. If you want the username User:ElonMusk, there are some minor procedures to go through so that people won't impersonate you. It's a bit like that blue checkmark as it used to apply on Twitter.
At this point you should read our policies on conflict of interest and paid-editing. If you want to edit the article about yourself, or about the companies you own, you will need to comply with the conflict-of-interest guideline and likely the paid-editing policy, which is also part of the site's terms-of-use.
In short, you should not edit the affected pages. Rather you can just edit the talk page, identify yourself as an editor with a conflict of interest, and make a polite and detailed request of how you want to have the article changed.
You'll likely not want to do this yourself. After all, your time is worth a lot of money. So you are allowed to hire a paid editor to do the same thing for you. There's really only one strict requirement — the paid editor must declare that you are paying them, or that you are the client (or both). There's no anonymity for the employer or the client. Also, it's best that you only hire one paid editor at a time. If they work together, or make another editing mistake, or engage in any type of deception, they'll both likely be blocked as sockpuppets. And please make sure that they realize that they have no special privileges on Wikipedia. They must follow all Wikipedia rules in addition to the paid editing rule.
Review
There's a lot of material covered here, so let's do a quick review. You need to respect the following rules if you want to influence article editing on Wikipedia:
- Assume good faith
- Don't be a jerk
- Neutral point of view
- inappropriate canvassing
- no ownership
- autobiography
- sockpuppets
- no advertising
- conflict of interest and
- paid-editing
It's really not that hard to understand. I hope you'll join us in improving Wikipedia, while following the rules that apply to everybody.
Sincerely,
- P.S. – I forgot to thank you for your contribution to the endowment a few years ago. I know how important encyclopedias are to you. Of course your monetary contribution doesn't buy you any special influence in editing.
Board candidacy process posted, editors protest WMF privacy measure, sweet meetups
Candidacy process for 2024 board elections posted on Meta-Wiki
The Wikimedia Foundation's RamzyM (WMF) last month posted the proposed candidacy process for the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation board election on Meta-Wiki.
Shortlisting candidates (if necessary)
The benchmark is a shortlist of 12 candidates (since there are 4 open seats). After the confirmation of the candidates’ eligibility, the following process would take place.
- If there are more than 15 candidates, trigger an affiliate process that will help to shortlist the candidates using the qualification criteria. This would be how affiliates are involved in a process for “community-and-affiliate seats.” Elections Committee and Affiliates to design the process, and the support team will be responsible for managing and implementing the process.
- PROPOSAL: Iterate the process we used in 2022 for the affiliate process: request 1 representative for each affiliate to provide endorsements (or alternatively, the default contact point from each affiliate can provide endorsements); they could endorse a maximum of 12 candidates and at the end. The top 12 candidates with the most endorsements from affiliates would make up the shortlisted candidates.
- Note: the reason the proposal uses the threshold of 15 candidates to trigger this shortlisting process even though the ideal number is 12 candidates is because the 1-3 candidates that are removed might feel ostracized and it would be a lot of work for affiliates to carry out to only eliminate 1-3 candidates from the candidate list.
- Community questions for candidates
- The Elections Committee can select from the community questions for the candidates to answer (suggested number of questions should be 5-7 total to ensure equity).
- Note: in 2022, there were two separate sets of questions: one from the affiliates, one from the community. In this proposal, there would only be one call for questions (to be shared alongside the call for candidates) whereby anyone – from communities, projects, affiliates, etc. – can suggest questions to ask the candidates.
- The Elections Committee will finalize the list of questions, which will be shared with the shortlisted candidates.
Candidates will provide written responses in English within a specific timeframe. Support staff will coordinate the translation of these responses and upload the English and translated responses to Meta at a designated time.
- “Meet the Candidates” Panel
- Host a panel interview with all shortlisted candidates. This panel will be available virtually with interpretation; and recorded for those who can’t attend live.
- To ensure equity, the questions will be shared with candidates ahead of time so they can prepare. Support staff will facilitate to make sure there is equal airtime for every candidate.
This shortlist method is similar to the procedure used in 2022 to fill two seats that were historically "affiliate seats" (the difference is that the shortlist will now be longer than in 2022). The four seats up for grabs in 2024, however, were historically "community seats" before the Wikimedia Foundation board abolished the distinction between the two types of seats. If the proposed shortlist method is implemented, this will mark the first time that "community seats" will not be subject to a free vote by the volunteer community. – AK
The key to a successful adminship is a lowercase "x", or perhaps ...
- Disclosure: JPxG is the editor-in-chief of this publication. He did not participate in this writeup.
Not quite 3,735,928,559 votes were cast for two recent admin candidates, JPxG and 0xDeadbeef but attendance at the requests was sufficient for both to be listed now at Wikipedia:Times that 200 Wikipedians supported an RFX.
Both nominations had a certain amount of attention on their technical qualifications: both do advanced technical Wiki-stuff such as operating bots, creating edit filters, or script wrangling. And, of course, they both have "x" in their user names.
But Ganesha811 passed his RfA on November 3, breaking the "x" trend and only getting 153 supports (that's a 99% support ratio). They may have also created a new trend. Along with JPxG he is a Signposter, having contributed over a dozen articles to this newspaper before this year. Don't worry, we don't expect this trend to continue – but who knows?
The Signpost congratulates and welcomes the English Wikipedia's three newest administrators.
Editors of Russian Wikipedia protest Foundation's privacy measure intended to protect them
WikiStats is hiding the number of Russian, Belorussian, and Kazakh contributors by policy because WMF does not release aggregations of sensitive data in countries identified by independent organizations as potentially dangerous for journalists or internet freedom.
In an RfC on Meta, many editors from the affected region objected to this "protection" by a count of 30 to 2:
We, ruwiki contributors, believe that this policy does a lot of harm and no good: Russian Internet users tend to believe that ruwiki is an alien resource, and Russia/Belarus/Kazakhstan has so many ruwiki contributors that it's impossible to get any information about certain user from that generalized statistics.
Remarkably, the first !vote in favor of rescinding the policy reads "Support. Statistics were not needed to put me in prison," by Pessimist2006 (for context, see this Wikipedia article and our own previous coverage). The issue had already been raised back back in May by another editor who related how they frequently "had to explain to my opponents, who showed me this, that no, the Russian Wikipedia is not written only by foreign authors" - apparently without a reaction by the Foundation.
On October 21, WMF Trustee Victoria Doronina (herself a longtime member of the Russian Wikipedia community) stated that "The WMF staff is aware of the RfC and is working on a reply. I know that it doesn't solve the problem, but in the meantime here's some data for Russia in 2022 - 23."
Until around 2013 or 2014, the Foundation regularly published data on the number of edits (rather than editors) by country for each language Wikipedia, but these statistics are no longer being updated.
Brief notes
- Longest editing streak: Johnny Au sets the record for most consecutive days of editing. The streak of over 5,700 days started way back on November 11, 2007. He is passionate about Wikipedia, telling Diff "Never give up. Fight the good fight. We must fight against misinformation and disinformation".
- New WMF Trustee: Kathy Collins has been appointed to the WMF Board of Trustees. Collins was Vice President of Finance at Rice University for 20 years before her recent retirement. She will replace Tanya Capuan, both as trustee and Audit Committee chair effective in December, but will attend the WikiConference North America which starts this Thursday, November 9, in Toronto.
- CEE gathering: Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe gathered in Tbilisi on September 15 for a sweet meeting. Out of 140 participants, over 100 showed up for the group photo. The sweetest part was that Wikipedians from most of the countries in the region could meet and discuss peacefully in a region where war rages. Among other great presentations a WMF Board member from Belarus, Victoria Doronina, presented Russia: Editing Wikipedia projects in the time of cholera (slides).
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Severe weather, followed by Play (theatre) (beginning 6 November 2023). Please be bold in helping improve this article!
- Some highlights from the WMF's weekly Tech News from the past month:
- The Growth team is upgrading its Impact module, which is designed to help editors "know their impact on wiki", by showing metrics such as pageviews for recently edited articles. While primarily intended for newcomers, it is available to any logged-in user at Special:Impact.
- A new "safe mode" user preference "will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets."
- The Wikimedia Foundation's Language team has launched a new "Language and internationalization newsletter".
- The Foundation invites input on a proposed plan for re-enabling the Graph Extension (which had been removed earlier this year from all wikis due to security issues, thus leaving lots of pages bereft of graphs - cf. our previous coverage: Graph extension disabled).
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/In focus
Admin bewilderingly unmasks self as sockpuppet of other admin who was extremely banned in 2015
| “ | What?????? What the hell??? | ” |
| — arbitrator Moneytrees, arbitration request for Lourdes | ||
A 2015 arbitration report in this very periodical said "it was a matter of deep concern" that an abusive editor who had obtained administrator privileges "was able to fool the community for so long". At that time, they were banned by the Arbitration Committee following a long case. We are sad to report that, not only did the abuse not stop in 2015, but the same person managed to obtain a second administrator account, and was just discovered a few days ago.
November 1 case request and startling admission
Beeblebrox opened a request for arbitration against administrator Lourdes on 1 November, claiming misdeeds including administrative blackmail
— bullying other less-privileged editors over their votes during a recent request for adminship. With the case request around one day old, on 2 November, the respondent suddenly stated that they are the site-banned former admin Wifione. The case request was closed as moot following Lourdes' admission.
One of the contributors to the case, Kurtis, asked "Is this an ArbCom case request or an M. Night Shyamalan movie?" Others, like arbitrator Moneytrees in the quote above, were more to-the-point.
Wifione background
If you have read our prior coverage of how the Wifione siteban came to be, amidst allegations of paid editing while holding the admin bit, you can probably skip over this section.
According to the 2015 Arbcom case, the oldest known account used by the individual also known as Wifione was created in 2006. They created dozens of sock accounts, which were revealed by a 2008 checkuser request.
That prior account was later linked to another account called Wifione, which was created in 2009 and that had become a Wikipedia admin in 2010. The Arbitration committee case found that Wifione was engaging in search engine optimization related to an Indian educational firm. Wifione was sitebanned as part of the case resolution.
An admin called "Lourdes"
This long-term abuser created the Lourdes account in late 2015, initially under a different name. In 2016 they renamed the account. They were most active in 2016–17, and ran an unsuccessful, self-nominated request for adminship in early 2017; a second attempt in 2018 was successful with 207 in favor and 3 opposed. The account went mostly unused for 2020 through 2022, with many months of total editorial inactivity, although it continued to perform admin actions. In 2023, they returned to regularly editing the English Wikipedia.
Throughout their tenure, they made 2,282 admin actions, according to User:JamesR/AdminStats.
The arbitration case request filed this month alleged that Lourdes engaged in egregious abuse of their administrator status during a recent request for adminship, including the following:
Because I remember having acted on your complaints at ANI a few times, and on the basis of that connect and support that I gave you, I am requesting you to reconsider your stand
— Lourdes, at the case request
This kind of pressuring (there were other examples) was described by one of the contributors to the case request as "the kind of thinly veiled threat you'd expect to hear in The Godfather". In response, Lourdes gave an admission nobody expected:
I am User:Wifione, the admin who got blocked years ago.
My RL identity has nothing to do with any celebrity or anyone like that. I am not writing this to have any final laugh. It's just that I feel it appropriate to place it here specially for Beeblebrox, who I almost emotionally traumatised over the years with the aforementioned double sleight -- aka, pulling him around for revealing my so-called identity. It also required double-doxxing myself on at least one external project, namely Wikipediocracy, which even placed mentions of my name in the private section to protect my identity.
— Lourdes, at the case request
And blocked themselves indefinitely:
2023-11-01T22:47:55 User:Lourdes (talk | contribs) blocked User:Lourdes (talk | contribs) with an expiration time of indefinite (account creation blocked, email disabled) (Abusing multiple accounts)
All of the details of the request and the statements made there — which arbitrators voted to decline as pointless soon after the revelations and the self-block — can be seen at its last revision link.
Aftermath
Nobody is quite sure what to make of this. How did they get away with this for so long? How did they conceal it this well? How did nobody notice? What was the point of spending years as a productive administrator, making tens of thousands of edits and logging thousands of actions, to implode the whole thing over a pointless argument on an RfA talk page?
The Signpost's sources have confirmed that the particular BADSITE mentioned in Lourdes' final message has indeed discussed this issue, and that both Beeblebrox and the disgraced LTA have posted more about the events, but the thread over there doesn't make a whole lot of sense either.
In short: what?
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/Humour