Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 72

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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (miscellaneous). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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30,000 articles gone missing?

I noticed that Wikipedia’s article count has dropped by around 30,000 in the last few days. Have a large amount been deleted or has Wikipedia changed the way they count articles? DonkeyW (talk) 16:45, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

@DonkeyW: Many apologies - I meant to post about this here on Monday evening but it looks like I didn't get around to it. There was a bug in the page counting script that feeds Special:Statistics etc - see phab:T315693 for the details. The script was patched and then the counter re-generated. It will have affected anything displaying the total article count (or total page/edit/user count) but not anything which directly counted pages such as the various maintenance report bots, etc. No pages were deleted. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:06, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Request for feedback on research project for fixing dead links

As part of a research project at the University of Michigan, we have been developing a new system for fixing broken links on the web. Given a broken link to a web page, our system, FABLE (which stands for Finding Aliases for Broken Links Efficiently), attempts to find the new URL at which that same page now exists on the web; please see the web page for the FABLE project (https://webresearch.eecs.umich.edu/fable/) for more details.

About 3 weeks ago, I posted at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Request for comments on research study describing our plans to have User:FABLEBot make posts on the Talk pages of the articles in which FABLE had found the new URL for a permanently dead link. The purpose of these posts would be to seek feedback on the URL replacements discovered by the FABLE system.

Based on the feedback we received, we have now instead created the page User:FABLEBot/New URLs for permanently dead external links, which lists a random sample of the URL replacements discovered by FABLE for links which have been marked permanently dead.

We would greatly appreciate the community's input on that page to help us gauge the accuracy of FABLE's output. Your feedback will help us ascertain if the URL replacements discovered by FABLE are sufficiently accurate that we can request permissions for our bot to directly edit articles and patch dead links.

Please let me know if I should advertise this elsewhere too. Thank you! HarshaMadhyastha (talk) 13:52, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

More than just some "mistakes"

If you think there is more than some "mistakes" and if you belive in "persecution of users by access-holders", lets talk about it. I see even Wikimedia Foundation do same, I mean blocklog-related value judgment. Ruwaym (talk) 17:29, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

@Ruwaym have you notified the editor you’re complaining about? Doug Weller talk 18:13, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
@Doug Weller It's not just about me. It's global, all projects suffering from that, more or less. Ruwaym (talk) 18:46, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
Just right now, I saw i am not eligibilitable to vote in Wikimedia Foundation Board Elections 2022 because "Sorry, you cannot vote in this election as you are blocked on at least 2 wikis." Ruwaym (talk) 18:50, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
That sounds like an issue you should take up on Metawiki, we're not going to be able to do much about WMF voting policies or blocks on other projects here. signed, Rosguill talk 19:17, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
@Rosguill That is just an example how they treat people. I roported them about a child abuse last month, they showed not enough attention. @4nn1l2 can talk to us about the chaos of FaWiki, I also have an unpleasant experience in ArWiki. Btw, I came here, EnWiki, as a refugee. I see nice faces here, cool people, they respect me and themselves. But i don't think that such an issue has anything to do with the independence of projects as we want just talk about it. I hope there aren't too many "mistakes" here on EnWiki, to make me listing users affected by abuse of access. Matawiki doesn't care, we have to do it ourselves. Ruwaym (talk) 23:25, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

The 2022 Board of Trustees election Community Voting is about to close

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Hello,

The Community Voting period of the 2022 Board of Trustees election started on August 23, 2022, and will close on September 6, 2022 23:59 UTC. There’s still a chance to participate in this election. If you did not vote, please visit the SecurePoll voting page to vote now. To see about your voter eligibility, please visit the voter eligibility page. If you need help in making your decision, here are some helpful links:

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MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Input on List of unidentified murder victims in the United States

For comparison sake, please see this version of the article from August 2021 just prior to my first edit and the current version of the article.

I am bringing this here for the sake of visibility and wanting wider community input. Over the past year I have been working to solve the problems inherent in List of unidentified murder victims in the United States. The article was largely sourced to primary references like law enforcement and government documents (such as National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, police documents, county government reports, etc.) Many of the entries had no secondary sources, or were original synthesis of primary materials and secondary sources. Many of the entries also used self published references, unreliable self published crime websites, etc. The Doe Network website (which largely is a mirror of NAMUS; they copy paste NAMUS entries) was also widely used. There were also large amounts of text without any supporting sources, and there was text offering speculative claims by investigators in the middle of ongoing investigations. As such, most of the entries failed our policies as written at WP:Verifiability and WP:OR.

It has taken me a very long time to read through all of the sources, and remove original research/synthesis and material that isn't verifiable. I also found several factual errors as new information in ongoing investigations changed (including several bodies that had been identified), and discovered that even the naming of many of the entries were problematic as NAMUS and county departments would often have multiple John and Jane Does in a given geographic location during a given year. As such the identifying names of the entries in the list in many cases were original research (NAMUS/ law enforcement databases use ID codes). In the end I decided to remove any entry that lacked a minimum of two secondary sources, given the prolific use or original synthesis and research within the article.

All of this to say, I have strong concerns about whether this list is actually encyclopedic and whether we can have a list on this topic in line with our policies. Here are some of my concerns:

1. The list is unstable. These are all crimes with ongoing investigations. Bodies do get identified, and then no longer qualify for the list. This has happened multiple times in the last year.

2. The topic of this list is inevitably going to rely heavily on primary sources like NAMUS, police and government reports, etc. As such, original research and synthesis are likely to remain ongoing problems as content changes (which is likely in an unstable content area like this).

3. Much of the content previously added (before I trimmed) was a mirror of the entries in the NAMUS datatbase or The Doe Network website. WP:NOTMIRROR is an on-going issue with active editors on this page uploading NAMUS and Doe Network created images and copy pasting material from their entries.

4. The scope of the topic is overly broad. According to NAMUS, 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year, with approximately 1,000 of those bodies remaining unidentified after one year. There are currently over 40,000 unidentified murder victims in the United States (according to NAMUS). So why these few entries? What is the scope of criteria for having a list like this with a small sample of individuals from the whole? Does the list fail WP:NOTDIRECTORY?

5. The naming of entries in the list is problematic. Many of the bodies are identified by state, year and county such as in the former version of the list linked above "Atlantic County Jane Doe" under the state of New Jersey. The problem with that is that Atlantic County has more than a dozen Jane Does in its cold case files, and the primary sources supporting that entry actually use a Case ID number for the naming of the body. This is an example of how original research/synthesis of law enforcement primary sources can cause problems.

So my questions are these. Is this an encyclopedic topic? Does the list meet our policies? Should it be deleted? If not, how do we determine what entries should and should not be included? Is there a way to prevent future original synthesis/research and misinformation in a content area with changing information involving primary source material?

All opinions are welcome. Thanks.4meter4 (talk) 20:33, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

@4meter4, have you considered a "blue links only" approach to that article? It's one of the narrower variants of the Wikipedia:Common selection criteria. If you did that, the "List of" page could be reduced to a table with some basic information (e.g., name of the article, male/female, state, city, year of death, year of discovery). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:50, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
@4meter4 Certainly WP can't be dictionary. One approach is only allow Blue link as suggested by WhatamIdoing, one can filter even a blue link list on basis of significance of the incidence.
Since you have already worked on details in the list, alternate approach would be convert list into a encyclopedic article by adding some relevant academic research info and retain only significance of the incidences with community consensus @ The article talk page.
I have not read the list article personally while sharing my opinion.
Bookku, 'Encyclopedias = expanding information & knowledge' (talk) 08:52, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

KiwiFarms URL discussion

Non neutral canvassing. 0xDeadbeef 14:02, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

At Talk:Kiwi Farms#URL, a local consensus to remove the website URL appears to be forming. This would break with the long standing Wikipedia policy to retain website URLs for controversial websites such as Sci-Hub, VDARE, and goatse.cx. Considering the wide-ranging implications, this policy discussion (and likely decision) should be evaluated at a higher level, presumably at this Village Pump. TryKid [dubious – discuss] 01:11, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

You are invited to the discussion at Talk:Kiwi Farms#URL regarding whether the website URL should be linked in the article. 0xDeadbeef 14:02, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

This isn't about a specific discussion, not sure how it would be canvassing when I'm asking for more elaborate discussion here. I've previously edited Library Genesis page to add links to the site, and people have raised concerns about that in the KiwiFarms discussion (and also apparently on the LibGen page years ago, but I didn't ago that). The community should probably get together and decide on the status of WP:ELOFFICIAL and WP:ELNEVER. Case by case discussions and ambiguity are not helpful and only seem to be creating partisan friction on the KiwiFarms page. regards, TryKid [dubious – discuss] 11:53, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
Agree that a wider discussion is needed, but elements of your statement above (namely "This would break with the long standing Wikipedia policy to retain website URLs for controversial websites", emphasis own) frame the discussion as a negative — this is probably what 0xDeadbeef meant by "Non neutral canvassing". For what it's worth, there is no policy to retain website URLs for controversial websites — perhaps you meant that the status quo is to normally do this? Regardless, the neutrally worded canvass above by 0xDeadbeef serves the purpose of informing without leading expectations — TheresNoTime (talk • she/her) 12:04, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Talk to the Community Tech Team, 14 September 2022 + mini-survey

(Hello. This is a crosspost. Please help translate to other languages. Please feel free to move to a better venue if you prefer. Thank you!)

I'm happy to announce that the excellent Community Tech team (the folks behind the Community Wishlist, as you know) invite you to meet them on 2022-09-14 for a chat on Zoom.

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Bonus! They have a mini-survey for you (also on Meta). Please consider taking a few minutes to let them know what you would like to see covered in future meetings. You can leave your thoughts on the Meta talk page.

For everything related to this announcement and the event, please contact Karolin Siebert - not me!

Kind regards, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 18:44, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education is hiring

Wiki Education is currently hiring for the role of Wikipedia Expert. Visit the job posting here to find out more.Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:06, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Revised Enforcement Draft Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct

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Hello everyone,

The Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines Revisions committee is requesting comments regarding the Revised Enforcement Draft Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). This review period will be open from 8 September 2022 until 8 October 2022.

The Committee collaborated to revise these draft guidelines based on input gathered from the community discussion period from May through July, as well as the community vote that concluded in March 2022. The revisions are focused on the following four areas:

  1. To identify the type, purpose, and applicability of the UCoC training;
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  3. To explore the concept of affirmation, including its pros and cons;
  4. To review the balancing of the privacy of the accuser and the accused

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Building a system to privately and easily report incidents

The Wikimedia Foundation wants to improve how Wikimedia communities report harmful incidents.

The Trust and Safety Tools team has been tasked with building the Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) to make it easy for users to report harmful incidents easily, safely and privately.

You can read more about PIRS on the project's page. You can leave comments on the talk page, but we would appreciate it if you could focus on answering the questions provided.

Additionally, we would like to interview some community members to understand how people currently report harassment in their communities. If you have ever faced a harmful situation that you wanted to report/reported, we would like to speak with you.

To sign up for the interview, please email Madalina Ana.

Best regards,

Trust & Safety Tools Team ––– STei (WMF) (talk) 13:51, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Is there any evidence the community wants this, and won't engage in an uproar analogous to WP:FRAM as soon as the first meritful report gets handled? * Pppery * it has begun... 14:06, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
There seems to be consensus that the community is willing and able to deal with most incidents itself. For matters too serious to handle internally, most jurisdictions already have a police force. Does anyone want the WMF to invent and appoint itself to this new function? Certes (talk) 14:32, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
"The community"? Which community? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:02, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): The Wikipedia Community. The Wikimedia Foundation should be getting less involved here, not more, in my honest opinion. This tool seems to be a solution in search of a problem. -- RockstoneSend me a message! 05:45, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
The "problem" seems to be communities dealing with incidents themselves, and the "solution" another opportunity for the WMF to extend its control. Certes (talk) 13:40, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
There is no single "Wikipedia community". There are more than 300 Wikipedias and dozens of separate communities, most of which are not willing and able to deal with all incidents on their own.
For example: does anyone here feel like they're part of the Croatian Wikipedia community? Was anyone here able to solve their problems? Does anyone here think that that community was willing and able to solve its problems on its own? Speaking for myself, my own answers to those three questions are: no, no, and no.
99% of WMF-hosted wikis do not have an active ArbCom, but this one does. 95% of WMF-hosted wikis do not have any CheckUsers, but this one does. What's true for the core community at the English Wikipedia is not true for most communities. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
So, if that's the case, would WMF be OK with this Wiki simply not taking part of the system? I accept that Wikis with few users probably do need something like this, but the English Wikipedia is mature and doesn't need this tool.-- RockstoneSend me a message! 21:47, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
This isn't my project, so I don't know the answer to your question. But consider these two points:
  • A while ago, a US politician proposed a law that would have required large websites to provide a toll-free phone number, answered within a certain number of minutes, for abuse reports. I believe that one was aimed at Facebook, but if something like that were actually required, then there wouldn't be any ability for a community to opt out. So: maybe it's possible, maybe it's not.
  • If you read a standard US corporate harassment policy, it almost always includes the names and contact information for at least two people. They do that partly for diversity reasons (e.g., some victims of sexual harassment would prefer to talk to a person of the same gender), but they also do that because of the possibility that the perpetrator is also the person named in the policy. If you think "Alice" is treating you unfairly, you can present your complaint to "Bob". This community deals with hundreds of incidents per day. A low error rate of just 1% means hundreds of unfairly treated people per year. Most of these are minor incidents, but if you were the victim of a major injustice, wouldn't you want to be able to report your problem to someone else?
Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:02, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for the clarification. The WMF and the English Wikipedia community clearly have very different ideas of what the WMF's role should be. I suppose the acid test will be how many of us walk away at the next Framgate. Certes (talk) 23:19, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
I don't think that the 122,676 currently active editors of the English Wikipedia all hold a single view. To continue the Croatian example, if they had asked me in the job interviews what actions the WMF should absolutely never take, I would have told them that none of the communities want the WMF to touch content, and especially not to intervene in any NPOV debates, which are exclusively the territory of volunteer editors. But during the RFCs at Meta-Wiki, the comments said things like "WMF board must discuss this" and "that is not my problem but a problem of WMF". You and I might want the organizational side of the movement to stay out of content, but enough of "the community" disagreed with us that the WMF was involved in the m:Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment-2021. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Well, that law will never pass, and is certainly unconstitutional. I'm not worried about that. As for the second point though, the English Wikipedia does have multiple avenues to appeal. -- RockstoneSend me a message! 01:59, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
I doubt seriously such a law would be unconstitutional (a term thrown around a lot by people who have little idea what they're talking about) but it certainly would be stupid. In fact, the only thing more stupid than a toll-free number for registering complaints about a website would be a little postcard you can fill out and mail in with your complaint about a website. What we really need, of course, is some kind of world-wide information network -- computers, let us say, connected by telegraph lines -- with keyboards by which people could enter data, and a display device -- possibly something like a television -- on which responses could be displayed. If such a thing existed then people could use it to register complaints about websites, but in the meantime I guess a toll-free number is better than nothing. EEng 16:34, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
What a foolish idea, that would never work. If we actually tried to build these "computers" and join them together by wires into an interconnected network--an "internet", if you will--it would surely cease to function simply by virtue of the number of typographical errors made by people trying to use these "keyboards". And those television monitors would be filled with either the most lurid filth, or the most mundane pablum, like pictures of people's pets, or what they had for lunch. The whole thing would distract people from their work and their families, creating an entirely new cause of addiction and strife. It would consume immense natural resources while pushing the progress of civilization back by generations. For God's sakes, let's just use the telephone. Levivich 20:04, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
I think we currently do perfectly fine with emailing Admins/ArbCom/CU/Stewards privately, when we don't want to leave an on-wiki note. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 14:39, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
This is unserious. This internet site makes it extremely easy to report anything safely and privately, as it is based on anonymous contributions. Its users have been doing so, consistently. Outside entities that have the ability to peel the anonymity in any meaningful way are very likely beyond the reach of WMF in any case. 65.88.88.68 (talk) 15:12, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Why does the team need to build this from scratch? Surely there is an off-the-shelf open-source system that can do this much more cheaply? Phil Bridger (talk) 16:57, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
It looks like they're still in the "gather requirements" phase. There might be existing options that will work, but until people know what it needs to do, it'd be premature to say "Sure, we'll just use this existing thing". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:38, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Curious to learn more on this. The reporting frameworks here are complicated; whilst the processes work well, it's my opinion that less experienced users would find this confusing and cumbersome. There are some cases where it's difficult to know what to do with threats of self harm (red warn works well, but again, it's a power user tool). Mr.weedle (talk) 04:11, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
I don't hold with this whole ideology of reporting threats of self harm, with the aim of coercive intervention into someone's personal choices.
And I especially deplore such responses to threats posted to online communities, where identities are often hard to detect. These threats of self harm are highly manipulative acts which impose a high burden on those who try to connect the on-line ID with a human identity, and when I was involved in running online-support forums for some vulnerable groups, a series of incidents led us to develop a firm rule (with input from mental health professionals) that posting a threat of self harm led to an instant ban. Our rule was that if you want help or crisis support, please please do ask for it ... but do not manipulate us into trying to track you down and call emergency services.
@Whatamidoing (WMF): is the WMF going down this path because of some legal obligation? In what jurisdiction(s)? Or is this a free choice by WMF? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:29, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
I haven't followed this project, so I don't know if there are other considerations, but I understand that the main answer is m:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations/Provide for Safety and Inclusion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:09, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, @Whatamidoing (WMF).
But what a very odd document. It provides no obvious path to find out who wrote it or what status it has. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:19, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
  • Meanwhile, mobile users STILL don't receive notification of messages posted on their talk pages, which is a big reason that little problems grow into big problems around here. We've only been waiting ten years for that. And what's a "harmful incident", anyway? I followed the link but nothing there explains that. EEng 09:35, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
    Which particular mobile users btw ? Because most now do actually receive some notifications...See Wikipedia:THEYCANTHEARYOU —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:49, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
    Sorry, I clicked on that link and my epilepsy was triggered. I think maybe I meant mobile IPs or something. EEng 01:32, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
  • To whom are these incidents privately reported? To T&S, or to the affected Wiki's admin corps, or to their ArbCom? Stewards? The Moon?--🌈WaltCip-(talk) 14:24, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
    @WaltCip, I believe that they would like your advice on that point. The dev team is building software. They are not proposing to handle the reports themselves. Do you want something that enters the report in an incident ticket system like Wikipedia:Volunteer Response Team uses? Something that sends the report to the local ArbCom's private mailing list (for the 10 Wikipedias that have an active ArbCom, assuming that each of them has a mailing list)? Something else? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
    @Whatamidoing (WMF) for feedback on what to include in software, it would be very useful to know who the userbase of the software is. So far it seems there are at least a few classes of users: (a) reporters - which could be most anyone, need a simple and easy UI. (b) ticket handlers - who these are can very well change the software requirements. Does this need to be very flexible for primary use by disperse volunteers - or is it going to be by employees who can be told exactly how they have to work? (c) some sort of application administrators - will likely be small and have their own requirements. So really at this point software engineers shouldn't be asking for advice on what to include, if they don't know who their end users are. — xaosflux Talk 18:06, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
    And software developers should certainly not be the decision makers as to "Who will handle reports?" — xaosflux Talk 18:06, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
    Speaking of enwp, at least, there are plenty of ways in which the processes for handling conflicts leaves much to be desired. But getting the reports in the first place is, I think I can say without fear of contradiction, the least problematic step in these processes. Were told that The need to have a private space where users can file a report without feeling exposed or unsafe came up in our research [1] -- what research, please? EEng 23:02, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
    This part I actually do believe. Nearly no one can file a report against an established user or administrator through any venue on enwp without being threatened with calls for a boomerang. Whether the retaliation is validated or not in this case doesn't change the fact that it creates a culture that discourages publicly reporting people who have some tenure. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 14:40, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
    I see. So what's wanted is a way to make anonymous one-way accusations without having one's own behavior scrutinized. Uh huh. There's a reason that reports by novices against experienced editors so often result in boomerangs: experienced editors usually know what they're doing, and novices often have the wrong end of the stick.
    Anyway, as described so far this is to be a path for registering complaints privately. Are they then going to be somehow investigated and adjudicated privately, or will there be discussion among the community as usual? If the former, then that's highly problematic; and if the latter, how does the filer participate? Or does the community just get random anonymous complaints dumped on it ("Editor X is being mean to people") and have to figure out what's going on for itself? EEng 16:12, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
    A secret reporting tool to help disappear problematic editors sounds great! How do I get access to it. I've been making a list and checking it twice.... Springee (talk) 19:36, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
    You've hit the nail on the head. Anyone can report me to the WMF or the police or the local newspaper or my mum; the problem is what is done with that report. The WMF has already "disappeared" one editor, resulting in an unprecedented mass walk-out and reinstatement. Such interference is unwelcome. I thought that message had got through, but clearly not. Let's not go down that route again. Certes (talk) 20:28, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
  • In case the lot of you missed it, this is required by the UCOC Enforcement Guidelines - you know, the thing you all actually got to vote on (no, not the UCOC itself). Which, BTW, $ProjectTeam should go and look through the discussion/comments from there first and/or discuss with the amendment group about whether that system as specified there will change; I know that I personally left comments on this particular part of it. --Izno (talk) 06:41, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
  • Very randomly stumbled upon this. I must agree to what user Whatamidoing has typed above some days ago. Put in a very crude way, EnWiki serves as the capital of WikipediaWorld but the situation is very different on the suburbs. Intervention is usually not highly appreciated around here, to say the least, but in small wikis, such as in my homewiki, we are desperate for such intervention and more. Sometimes it is because it gives extra reassurance when you are told that the whole community is not actually dependent on only 1-2 people if things go extra bad (that's how many admins usually are active in small wikis) and sometimes it helps those only 1-2 people solve some problems by knowing "where to send" some requests when they're lacking the needed experience to solve them (which happens quite often in small wikis). Although, truth be told, I believe the only way for any body of work, be that the WMF or any other foreign group, to be able to correctly solve global problems is to overcome the language barriers and I believe we are far from being there currently. We need either better global participation, better automatic & dynamic translation tools for the talk/technical space or ideally both. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:26, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

Thesis research question for Wikipedians: What is, for you, the most important actor in editing Wikipedia?

Hello,

I am a university student and for my thesis, I am researching how knowledge is produced on Wikipedia. In your personal opinion as Wikipedian, what button, shortcut, combination of keys,... is the most important in editing Wikipedia? This can range from the delete-button to your mouse cursor, no answer is too crazy (maybe it is but I won't judge ;) )

This question is just for me, to get an idea of the workings of Wikipedia and experienced Wikipedians. If this is not the appropriate place to ask, please direct me to te designated space.

Thank you in advance :) CharlesWritesOnTheInternet (talk) 16:49, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

"Actor" seems a slightly odd term here, especially for asking the general public. Could you clarify? I mean, the obvious answer is the "edit" button, that starts everything. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 19:41, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
An actor (actant) is something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. ( Actor–network theory#Actor/Actant ) So I research Wikipedia from this perspective.
So what is something on WIkipedia that makes you (or other actors) do something? (if that clarifies anything ;) ) CharlesWritesOnTheInternet (talk) 20:41, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
In reality, probably Tom Hanks, but this is Wikipedia, so Kevin Bacon. BD2412 T 21:03, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
Of course, if you are asking who the most important Wikipedian is, that would be me. BD2412 T 14:11, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
Knowledge is not "produced" in Wikipedia. In rare cases, properly referenced established facts providing a rounded general description of a notable subject are disseminated through an anonymously edited internet platform. In most cases, the reality is very different. 68.173.78.83 (talk) 23:27, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
I'm a pretty heavy user of Search, it is one of the tools I use to hunt for typos. But across the community I expect it is the Cite tool. Other important ones are the Block and delete buttons that admins have, and twinkle and hotcat. ϢereSpielChequers 09:09, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
  • The edit function is obviously the most important for editing. In this case, I accessed it using an "edit source" link by the section heading. But that seems so fundamental that it's unavoidable. The optional feature that I'd highlight is the watch list. It's my impression that novice and irregular editors don't use their watchlist and so this function is a significant tool of the experienced editor. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:03, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
  • The OP's question is a bit vague. There are many kinds of editors here with many different motivations for doing what they do. It also depends on how versatile they are and whethere their focus is actually on providing new content or doing essential maintenance work. I've used most tools that are available, and for a while the admin toolset, but by and large I think Andrew sums up what I also use most. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:25, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
  • Yes, the watchlist, but also search is important (and WP's search is very good - far better than eg JSTOR's). I never use the Cite tool. The edit history is important, and I often choose what to edit by checking pageviews. Johnbod (talk) 13:46, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
  • From an ANT perspective, if you haven't already, you should take a look at our policies and guielines. Not because you should understand them all, but to appreciate the extent to which they function as actors within the network, shaping behavior and framing what it makes sense to do/say within and about our articles. Those policies are likewise written by the volunteers who follow them by the way. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 13:57, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
    • I would further qualify that the policies are proposed by individual volunteers, but made policy pursuant to discussion and consensus of the community. BD2412 T 18:47, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation English fundraising campaign - October pre-tests

Hi everyone,

As previously mentioned here, I will continuously inform you of pre-tests on English Wikipedia as the Wikimedia Foundation prepares for the English fundraising campaign later this year. As part of the English campaign we test our infrastructure on a regular basis throughout the next few months and you might see banners every now and then on Wikipedia if you are not logged in.

The scheduled dates for October are (you can find the September ones in this post):

  • 3rd-10th of October - a low level week long test (During the test, a banner will only be shown to users 5% of the time until the maximum of 10 impressions (1 big and 9 small banners) is reached.)
  • 13th of October - a 100% traffic three hour test
  • 17th - 24th of October - a low level week long test
  • 27th of October - a 100% traffic three hour test

Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks you and regards,


JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 11:08, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Wikimedia Sound Logo: What is the Sound of all Human Knowledge?

On September 13, 2022, the Wikimedia Sound Logo Contest was launched. In the tradition of the movement's visual logo contests, the Wikimedia Foundation has organized a contest to select, this time around, a sound logo to represent all Wikimedia projects. To learn more about the initiative, visit soundlogo.wikimedia.org.

  • The first phase, for submission of proposals, will be open until October 10, 2022.
  • Voting, open to all, will take place in December of this year.

(!) If you want to learn more about sound logos, need help with your submission, or if you have a good idea but don't know how to capture it, join our workshop on September 29 at 15:00-16:00 UTC. Sign up directly on Zoom or check the contest meta page.

CalliandraDysantha-WMF (talk) 22:24, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Allowing Wikitext editors to preview changes in realtime

Hello, Community Tech has introduced a new beta feature. It allows editors to preview their changes or edits side by side when writing in wikitext.

The goal is to make it easier to review changes while editing. This was the wish number four of the Community Wishlist Survey 2021.


What does this feature change?

In the 2010 wikitext editor toolbar, a new button appears with the label “Preview”. The button enables a side by side comparison showing what the published content would look like. You can see an illustrative example on the screenshot.


We would like to check if the editing experience improves. If it does, we will make this change available for everyone by default.


What do I need to do?

If you want to try out the feature, make sure the New Wikitext mode beta feature is DISABLED in the 'Beta features' section of your 'Preferences'. Feel free to provide feedback about the impact this new feature has on your editing experience.

See the original wish and the project page.


Thank you! ––– STei (WMF) (talk) 14:38, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

I wrote my first essay

Hello!

I wrote my first essay: it is Wikipedia:Unsourced information is not valuable.

Could you provide your feedback on it? Technical advice is also welcome. Any comment or thought in general is welcome! Veverve (talk) 17:37, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

mot du règne

main: wikt:Project:Tea room/2022/September#mot du règne, also: User talk:Drmies#Writers' tip

There is a word that has been around for about 2 centuries (1808 in an issue of The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor is the earliest occurrence in running prose that I have found, with a cursory search) that (a) Wiktionary might end up being the first to recognize, (b) seems somewhat useful for writers to know the 19th to 21st century common spelling of at this time. Uncle G (talk) 12:06, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

The neologism in question seems to be Carolian. That is not recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary which just has Carolean, following Jacobean. As the prime minister is using "Carolean" then that seems well-established. Note that there is no simple pattern for this as the previous age was usually "Elizabethan" though the OED has some archaic examples of "Elizabethean" and "Elizabethian". Andrew🐉(talk) 14:08, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

No more citations to bible verses linking to particular translations (especially if it's KJV or NKJV)

This is new and absurd. Needs to be fixed ASAP. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iluvlawyering (talk • contribs) 03:09, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't know what specific example(s) you're thinking of. Personally I like using [2] (Masoretic Text) for some reason, per King James Only movement there are people who like those translations.
In general, I think a more modern bible translation is more helpful for the general reader, but I don't think KJV is glaringly awful by default. Do we have an essay or something on this somewhere? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:46, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
All citations may link to the source the editor used. Is there any reason why particular translations should be summarily disallowed? 64.18.11.67 (talk) 13:06, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
I think the problem may be, that you sometimes see in the pedia inline links (eg {{url}} or [ www.bibleKVJ ], etc) instead of a proper reference. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:18, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
As citation any bible-text is generally unfit per WP:RSPSCRIPTURE. I was more thinking of customary intext WP:EL, my mistake perhaps. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:56, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
Intext EL? Is not the rule "External links normally should not be placed in the body of an article." Or are you referring to something else? I sometimes see, things like, "Genesis 4:14" in article running prose but it is also sometimes externally linked in blue, and that seems like a bad practice. On the other hand, if it is important to mention "Genesis 4:14" in an article, it may also be important to know what it says, and some reference(s) to what it says may be needed (not to mention a quote, which per V, always need a reference). -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:18, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
@Alanscottwalker Yeah, that's what I meant, like at Jesus#Naming_convention,_various_names. These are also sometimes made with interwiki links to wikisource like John 21:25 which doesn't look like EL:s but are. Similar links to the Quran also exists.
Yep, that's the guideline, but these still exists here and there. The argument, I guess, would be that this isn't "normally". Or "that's just a guideline." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:22, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
Do you have a specific issue in mind or are you just looking for controversy? —Kusma (talk) 14:55, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
@Kusma: you’re an admin and yet don’t follow AGF? Doug Weller talk 20:22, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
@Doug Weller, AGF is why I haven't blocked the OP, who has made a few similar posts... —Kusma (talk) 20:28, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
I think I misunderstood who you were responding to. Doug Weller talk 20:30, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Australian mysteries that aren't real mysteries

Etc. The point I'm suggesting is that Wikipedia articles in Australia have a tendency to create the air of mystery where none exists, or there is very little evidence to say it exists.

Is there anyway to combat this, or am I on my own? Jack Upland (talk) 04:09, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

@Jack Upland: feel free to remove this information if the information that "X is only speculation" or "X remains a mystery" is not sourced, or if the information is unsourced in the summary and not present and reliable sourced in the article. I myself have removed it from Donald Mackay (anti-drugs campaigner). Veverve (talk) 17:43, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
Harold Holt is still missing (see Disappearance of Harold Holt), as are Juanita Nielsen and Donald Mackay. They're likely dead, but no body has yet turned up. I don't see anything about Sydney and Voyager that seems mysterious.--Auric talk 20:11, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Announcing the preliminary results of the 2022 Board of Trustees election Community Voting period

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.
More languages • Please help translate to other languages.

Hi everyone,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2022 Board of Trustees election process. Your participation helps seat the trustees the community seeks on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

These are the preliminary results of the 2022 Board of Trustees election:

You may see more information about the Results and Statistics of this Board election.

The Board will complete their review of the most voted candidates, including conducting background checks. The Board plans to appoint new trustees at their meeting in December.

Best,

Movement Strategy and Governance

This message was sent on behalf of the Board Selection Task Force and the Elections Committee

MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (talk) 06:23, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons Files becoming Public Domain

This may be a strange question to ask but what is the protocol for Wikimedia Commons files that are currently under a CC License becoming Public Domain? In the US, copyrighted material enters Public Domain 70 years after the creators death or past a certain date. Hopefully this won't need to be addressed for a long time and Wikimedia will still be around then but will the licenses be changed on those files when that happens? Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this question but thanks anyways. Have a good day! DiscoA340 (talk) 23:36, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Technically, all that would need to be, once validated that the creator's death + 70 has passed, is to change the template to PD, though I would suspect that would include adding additional info that confirms the passing of copyright. This is how material that has fallen into the PD is typically handled when uploaded to Commons after becoming PD. Masem (t) 23:48, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Researching Wikipedia

If you've got a burning question about how the Wikimedia movement works, and a researcher handy to do the work, then you might want to look into m:Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Research & Technology Fund/Wikimedia Research Fund. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:45, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

About misusing rights

There are still unanswered essential (and irritating?) questions – after three years!

- Praxidicae claimed that Risto hot sir is a disruptive editor. What are those ”disruptive edits? It should be easy to pick ’em out of nearly 100,000 ones. They haven’t been mass-reverted. Every jury in the free world wants to see evidences. And what might be the motive to damage the project? - Based on that lie Wim b blocked Risto globally in less than one hour and not asking opinions of the local admins. Why just steward Wim b with their level two in English language? - Before Risto was blocked in 5 wikis. One was the Dutch wikipedia after a couple of well-meaning edits. Vermont blocked them on Simple English wikipedia obviously for personal reasons. That can be seen if you read the conversations. The third block was set by Whaledad on Dutch wikiquote. This wiki’s editing history consists mostly of ”preventive blocks”. I haven’t seen those in other wikis. Why does the SWMT tolerate this? - Afterwards Risto has used many accounts, but only to make articles better. Their edits haven’t been reverted. You actually ”punish” by shooting own knee – neglecting readers. The amount of visitors on the English wikiquote, for example, is lower than ever. - And the most important question: why don’t the Meta-people trust in the local admins and their ability to decide what their wiki needs? Isn’t it time to unblock? Helekutin häslääjä (talk) 01:55, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

User:Risto hot sir is globally locked. To appeal a global lock, you may follow the instructions at meta:Steward requests/Global#Requests for global (un)lock and (un)hiding. For technical reasons, an unlock would need to be granted before we could consider an unblock request. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 06:38, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

2nd Community Safety survey results now on meta

A few months ago, the 2nd Community Safety survey was conducted on your wiki. The results are now available on meta. We hope you will use this data to continue discussions about safety in your community.

The quarterly survey will be conducted again this month.

Your feedback and questions are welcome on our talk page.

Thank you!

- TAndic (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Wwwyzzerdd: Edit Wikidata From Wikipedia

I'm announcing general availability of a browser extension that I've been working on called Wwwyzzerdd. Here's the short demo video.

It lets you see the linked information on Wikidata for a given Wikipedia article and edit it without leaving the page. I'm seeking feedback on how it could be improved.

You can install it for Chrome or Firefox:

or from source on GitHub.

Thanks. BrokenSegue 04:03, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Dark theme

Hello. Is there css code for dark theme for enwiki? ✍A.WagnerC (talk) 14:57, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

@A.WagnerC if you are using the Desktop version of Wikipedia, you can enable dark mode toggle in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. — xaosflux Talk 15:21, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
Xaosflux Thanks! ✍A.WagnerC (talk) 18:15, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

logged-in editing is suddenly messed up

All of a sudden about 2 hours ago, editing started getting messed up. It happens when I'm logged in, not when I'm logged out, and it happens on both Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. Regular alphanumeric characters are OK. Characters on the keyboard without shift are OK. But when I try to enter, for example, asterisk, exclamation point, or left and right curly brace, I get garbage. I can enter these characters by pasting from another application. My preferences includeː

  • Skin = Monobook
  • What else would you want to know?

— Anomalocaris (talk) 08:26, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Moreː It may be that Skin makes a difference. I switched to Vector for this edit. Here are some characters (asterisks pasted because asterisk key doesn't work):

  • colon looks like a colon but is lighter ː
  • exclamation point ǃ
  • asterisk comes out like an umlaut but doesn't move to the right if you type characters to its left ̈
  • left and right parentheses ()
  • left and right curly braces ̪ˈ
  • less than and greater than <>
  • question mark ?
  • at dollar ̩̊
  • number #
  • percent ̥

— Anomalocaris (talk) 08:43, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Editing is working fine for me in the normal "2010" wikitext editor. It looks like you're somehow getting various phonetic symbols for various key combinations. Anomie⚔ 11:56, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
Have you tried restarting your system? What is the operating system? 0xDeadbeef 11:58, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
@Anomalocaris: Just in case it was somehow a culprit, I turned off your script in User:Anomalocaris/common.js. Feel free to revert that edit of course. — xaosflux Talk 12:30, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
@Anomalocaris You probably enabled the International Phonetic Alphabet input method, probably by pressing Ctrl+M. You can toggle it with this keyboard shortcut, or disable it more persistently by going to Preferences → More language settings → Input → Disable input tools. More info about this feature: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector/Input_methods. Matma Rex talk 17:16, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
Xaosflux Thank you, that wasn't it. Matma Rex: Thank you, it was Ctrl+M, I didn't know about this feature. Problem solved. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:04, 28 September 2022 (UTC)
@Matma Rex: Wow, I'd had a similar problem in Wiktionary for ages, but just assumed it was some configuration setting over there (like some other places, such as the Esperanto Wikipedia). Control+m fixed it on Wiktionary as well! Graham87 11:18, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Criticism of Wikipedia by YouTuber J. J. McCullough

Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!) --  Denelson83  04:06, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

  • Haven't seen the video, but the comments are quite interesting. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:24, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
  • And we should care about what this sardonic ignoramus says why? Random example: McCullough says [3] that a "CBS story estimated that a third of everything written on Wikipedia was written by just one guy" (specifically User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao). But that's not what the CBS story [4] says; what it says is that SAdN has edited about a third of our articles. Good thing McCullough doesn't do any WP editing, since he apparently cannot read a source and put what it says into his own words without getting the facts mixed up (in this case possibly intentionally, since he throws a misleading pull-quote onto the screen to back up the misinformation he spouts verbally). Any more of your smarmy mustachioed dumbfuckery we can clear up for you, Mr. Smartass? EEng 09:31, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
That mustache almost looks fake.~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 15:01, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
The quiff certainly does. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:30, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
  • Well, per [5] he may very well have done some WP-editing. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:39, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
    @EEng: Ooooh, were my ears burning this morning. Hell of a thing to wake up to, I tell you what. This is right up there with that individual that called me fascist online due to my work history that one time. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 12:32, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
    You may very well have edited a third of the articles I started. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 16:36, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
    That individual was retweeted by J. J. btw. X-Editor (talk) 01:11, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
    More than 10000 edits, actually, and created File:Villainc.svg (see also Draft:J.J. McCullough). —Kusma (talk) 15:17, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
    Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! So the actual reason McCullough hates Wikipedia is that he's a nonnotable Youtuber whose autobio was deleted three times? EEng 00:58, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
    @EEng: he is actually a former admin. —Kusma (talk) 15:20, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
    Well we can see why former. EEng 00:58, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
    Wait a minute I thought this was a joke, he's actually a former admin [6]. That somehow makes this even worse haha, as how could a former admin with 11,000 edits be so ignorant to WP. Curbon7 (talk) 18:31, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
    Oh jeez, RfA used to look like THIS. Curbon7 (talk) 18:34, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
    It never looked like that. Its actual state at the time was, if anything, even more worthy of caps and italics. —Cryptic 14:46, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
    God damn. To think I could have become an admin back then under those circumstances. I must admit I'm kicking myself more than a little now. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 16:12, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
I think I actually agree with J.J. that the Internet was in many ways a better place in 2003 than it is now. I'd just blame Google and Facebook for the transformation instead of Wikipedia. —Kusma (talk) 19:54, 20 September 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the un-subscription. I knew this dude was a complete ignoramus, the fact that he really doesn't know what he's talking about shows me that anyone can pull up any plucky puckery they want, talk about it in front of a camera with some wacky vfx to keep the audience's attention, and get a ton of views from it just shows me the absolute state of modern society. Also per the opinion of everyone else in the thread. Explodicator7331 (talk) 17:29, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
Of course he knows what he's talking about. Otherwise they wouldn't let him be on YouTube. Jeesh. EEng 02:02, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
He admits having avoided the site for years, so no surprise that there are some errors in what he says. Are we a bunch of middle aged white male Americans? My view from London is that we have a white male skew, not sure about the middle aged bit. As for the idea that the guy who has contributed 0.5% of all the edits on this site has contributed a third of the content.... People with a basic knowledge of the site know that the people with high edit counts have disproportionately large proportions of minor edits. As for talking about a dwindling editor community, it is now 2022, the apparent decline of editing between 2007 and 2014 is very stale news, and much of it was really the move of a lot of vandalfighting to the edit filters. ϢereSpielChequers 14:31, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
There are all sorts of valid complaints about Wikipedia in its current state. For example, articles on current events tend to be highly unencyclopedic in their writing, essentially consisting of glorified timelines and flag salads. We don't do a good job of adhering to WP:NOTNEWS very well. Or the fact that in 2022, we still cannot produce a competent mobile editing platform. Those are all legitimate concerns, for example. But to me, this dude's approach just looks like shock jockery. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 16:54, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
If memory serves, the last time I saw demographics information, most editors (>50%) at the English Wikipedia were younger adults (age 18 to 40), with the rest divided between teenagers, middle-aged adults, and older adults. I also remember seeing once that, in the space of 10 years, the typical age of an experienced editor went up something like 6 or 8 years. So we are older than we used to be, but I don't think that middle aged adults are the most common group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:20, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
21 minutes of utter BS. It indeed looks like a joke from a wannabe stand-up comedian who has chosen 'theme Wikipedia' for this week's performance. I got as far as the first 4 minutes and switched off. The guy obviously has a problem. Is that video made in his office or in the bedroom of one of his very young children? If he was once an admin one can really wonder who is behind some of our admin user names. Let's be fair, though in 2003 Wikiopedia was still in it's infancy - but some of those users still are. That said, who really cares about the demographic, WhatamIdoing? For one thing there's no accurate way of establishing it. What matters is that serious articles, serious edits, and serious site governance are done by serious people. Of course there are a quite a few users who joined as middle-aged adults and are now 'older adults' who are still active and have a lot to offer from their professional and/or academic knowledge and experience and even some septuagenarians who sill have their marbles. At least Wikipedia as an encyclopedia has a specific goal rather than being just another chat room, social media site, or MMORPG, or some other weird form of entertainment. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:35, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Demographics affect what gets written. Age itself might not matter quite as obviously, but consider this: Erectile dysfunction was created in May 2001. Infant and Childbirth were created about 15 months later. Back labor (a complication affecting about a third of vaginal births) was created 13 years later. Would this have been different if we had more women editors? I think so.
Our articles about regional subjects depends upon people from that region helping out. For example, how much of Category:Vietnamese cuisine is just stubs, and how much of it could be so much more, but probably won't be, unless someone with a connection to Vietnamese culture decides to work on them?
I'm not sure that middle-aged folks have special things to contribute, but young people probably do (e.g., newer forms of pop culture, an interest in schools), and older people probably do. Our end-of-life articles are not showpieces. Scholars write excellent books on things like retirement, nursing homes and hospice, but who's going to work on those articles? It's probably not going to be the editors who are still young enough to believe they're invincible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:40, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
You obviously have a personal slant in your interpretation of Wikipedia demographgics. I do hope that it was not aimed at us septuagenarian professional and academics who create articles often based on our subject matter. We are not paid for our work either. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:58, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
I don't dispute that demographic skews matter. I've even credited him with being correct in the white male parts of his critique. But he gets an awful lot wrong, enough wrong on the bits I know that don't feel it worth my time to take him seriously or try to learn from him. ϢereSpielChequers 05:58, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
EEng's first comment convinced me that it wasn't even worth clicking on, and since I have no direct knowledge of what he said, I have not commented on anything that the YouTuber said. I have only provided information, in response to what was said by editors on this page, about the demographics information we have (check out WP:Wikipedians if it's a subject that interests you), and my opinion of their implications. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:17, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
Thanks WhatamI, I remember those surveys and may have taken part in one. I think the WMF one was in part a response to a suggestion of mine in the 2009 strategy wiki. It is a shame that it wasn't made an annual or at least biannual event. Much of the alarm of the death spiral era would have been avoided if we had a better understanding of community demographics. Some of the tension between the WMF and the volunteer community would have been averted if more staffers had a mental image of a typical wikipedian as a retiree rather than a 14 year old. If I'm correct, our recruits in the last decade have included a significant proportion of silver surfers. It is now normal for retirees in the developed world to have online access, so as our founding generation of young editors find themselves busy with careers and young families we have replaced a proportion of them with retirees, and I suspect a new survey would not just show a much higher average age, but if the greying of the pedia is correct, an average age that has risen by more than 11 years in the last 11 years. But the Youtuber who described us as having a middle aged skew despite our last survey showing an average age of 26? I suspect if the average age now turned out to be 40 he might think that indicated a middle aged skew even if the true curve showed peaks in the 20s and 60s and an underrepresentation of middle aged people. ϢereSpielChequers 10:40, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
I think they are meant to be more or less annual, with the occasional break (e.g., for re-designs, to align with various planning processes, etc.). It's currently called m:Community Insights, and the results from this year's survey are expected next month. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:49, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
  • The guy makes some good points but I am continually distracted by his pronunciation of "aboot". Is that a Vancouver thing?
But note that Wikipedia's own assessment of itself is not so different. It's a standard tenet here that "Wikipedia is not a reliable source" and every page carries a disclaimer that "Wikipedia makes no guarantee of validity".
Numerically, less than 1% of our pages are rated as good or better and so over 99% are officially not good. And a recent scandal indicates that it's possible to get hundreds of flawed articles rated as good just by being persistent and so that rating of the few good articles lacks validity too.
But the thing is that there's no easy alternative. Sturgeon's Law that "ninety-percent of everything is crud" applies and so there's a torrent of bad stuff out there – news media, streaming services, mass market publishing, you-name-it.
Wikipedia's big advantage is not its high quality but its accessibility and openness. If you want to know something then it's usually easy to find. If it doesn't seem right then you can seek confirmation or tag it or fix it yourself. Other sources are just take-it-or-leave-it with little option to engage with the topic.
But YouTube is an exception as it's easy to post comments and there's a community of content-creators who now engage with each other. J.J.McCullough has 841K subscribers and so is doing quite well. But Mr. Beat is up-and-coming with 606K and he has posted a riposte – "A Teacher Defends Wikipedia"...
Andrew🐉(talk) 22:48, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
I don't agree that GA ratings lack validity. I would say that you need to understand what GA means: it is an article that, in the opinion of exactly one (1) editor, met a short list of criteria. In practice, some editors fail articles that do meet the listed criteria, and other editors list articles that fail to meet the listed criteria, but if you understand it as "one individual's view", as contrasted with "a consensus among experienced editors", then you are unlikely to misunderstand the rating too badly. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:50, 22 September 2022 (UTC)
Andy, I'm surprised you don't know aboot 'aboot'. It's totally characteristic of Canadian English and even parts of New England. As a European, and if you speak French, good luck if you're ever in Quebec... Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:11, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
It was easy to find our article on the subject – Canadian raising. But that is graded C class and starts "Canadian raising is an allophonic rule of phonology in many varieties of North American English that changes the pronunciation of diphthongs with open-vowel starting points." This badly fails MOS:JARGON and there's a lively talk page which complains that the article is "incomprehensible" or "utterly incomprehensible". Such articles badly need an actual editor who takes the raw text and makes it readable but there don't seem to be many users who operate at that level.
J.J. covers the issue himself in All aboot Canadian accents. This doesn't baffle with incomprehensible jargon but illustrates its points quite well with video clips. It therefore seems better for a general audience and it has 1.7 million views which is more than the Wikipedia equivalent which has had 1.5 million.
Andrew🐉(talk) 10:23, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
Highly suspicious about the feedback a guy complaining about the research on Wikipedia gives when a sentence before he says he listens to podcasts as research for his videos. Haven't listened past 2-3 minutes in but doubts about his research methods and his multiple failed attempts at getting an auto-BLP article accepted leaves me thinking he won't point out issues we aren't aware of already. — Ixtal ( T / C ) ⁂ Non nobis solum. 11:14, 23 September 2022 (UTC)

Oh, yeah, he's the guy who drew a "stereotypical villain" and everyone - including the blurb writers for two of its three appearances on the main page said it looked just like Snidely Whiplash. I mean, it's probably just about legally distinct, but not when... well:

He also did File:Mad scientist.svg which had three more POTD appearances. He was doing GREAT at using Wikipedia to promote himself in its early days. Should've hurried up. And if you want proof it's him, all those POTD blurbs literally identify him by full name. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.1% of all FPs 03:08, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

  • I think he could have and should have gone further. There is plenty to criticize about Wikipedia, from the often overly-detailed, disjunct, slapdash composition, to the over-emphasis of trivia (and CONTROVERSY!!!), and the lack of executive power (i.e. an editor-in-chief who can say "this sucks, we're not printing it") and the mediocre (sometimes barely literate) style of writing fond in many articles. I mean, has anyone here actually read a Wikipedia article on, let's say any current US politician, from top to bottom, and left thinking it's a well-written, high quality article that serves the reader more than the writers? And if you have, I'd ask have you ever read real encyclopedias and concise biographies? Also, while there is certainly space to criticize the criticism, if you're outraged, and you're here reading this thread, your view of the situation is probably different than 99% of the audience (of both YouTube and Wikipedia). Take a deep breath, take a step back, realize Wikipedia has flaws as well as strengths, and ask how you can make it better. I personally think there should be much more critical analysis of Wikipedia (both from within and without) and the effects it has had and may have on group learning, writing, reading, knowledge sharing, and monopolizing the attention and information economy. For instance, are people on average less inclined to seek out new information on a subject or write their own analysis once it already has an article? Does the Wikipedian itch to create spinoff articles impede comprehensive understanding? What will online information look like in 50 years, when almost no one remembers a time before Wikipedia existed? --Animalparty! (talk) 05:27, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
  • Adding a different view than J. J. McCullough's video: Evidence suggests Wikipedia is accurate and reliable. When are we going to start taking it seriously? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:59, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
    All true, and yet, I have to be more or less suspiscious of almost every fact I see in Wikipedia. I have often realized that something I added to Wikipedia myself has turned out to be wrong. The encyclopedia will never be completely accurate. Anyway, that should keep us busy for a while, yet. Donald Albury 18:43, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
    @Donald Albury, are you familiar with QI? They've had segments like "3 years ago, you, panel member X, gave this reply, which we gave you points for since per knowledge at the time you were right, but new knowledge has proven that you were in fact wrong, so today you lose 10 points. And you, Alan, get 60 points for similar reasons." They've even had statistics on what % of their stated facts turned out to be incorrect per years passed. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:16, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
    I haven't always had that excuse. In at least one case, I named a wrong city in a statement, an error I did not discover for eight six years. In other cases I did not adequately understand a source, or used a poor or old source that did not agree with better or newer sources. I have gotten more picky over the years about the quality, quantity, and age of sources I use. And, of course, my personal biases may affect my choice of what sources to use, and what I use from them. Donald Albury 19:40, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
    When I started Shakespeare and Star Trek, another editor had to correct my spelling of Roddenberry. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:01, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
    I understand, I have not completely grown out of my childhood dyslexia. Donald Albury 21:21, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Question regarding filmography

If an actress has appeared in two/three episodes of an series, how am I supposed to list the episodes? I am aware that after a high amount of episodes, the normal practice is to write the number of episodes, for example "38 episodes". However, let's say an actress appeared in several episodes of an series, but a small amount. Should I write it as:

  1. Episode: "Example", "Another example", "Last example"
  2. Episode: "Example"; "Another example"; "Last example"
  3. 3 episodes

Also, what is the limit of episodes before I should just write the number instead of the actual names of the episodes? Thanks. 12u (talk) 20:03, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

@12u: can't help but pinging @Masem:, @Sennecaster:, @Bbb23: for you — Python Drink (talk) 19:23, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
I think you pinged the wrong person. I'm sorry, I can't help very well here. Sennecaster (Chat) 21:18, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
If it is a series where we routinely have individual episode articles (eg The Simpsons)I would include all. Otherwise I would consider just saying X episodes, adding names of any with notable episode articles. Masem (t) 21:27, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Arbitration committee 2022 election

The 2022 arbitration committee election will be taking place in just under two months. Given the significant commitment required to be an arbitrator, it's a good time to start thinking about candidates. If there is someone you'd like to see run, or if you want to know someone else's plans before making your own decision, I encourage you to get in touch with them now! For more information about the work involved with serving on the committee, see the arbitrator experiences page. isaacl (talk) 21:50, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

I'll just add to this that while successful candidates have always traditionally been admins, without checking right now, I'm sure that some non-admin candidates even reached the pass mark. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:58, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

The data for non-admin candidates since 2014 is available at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2022 § Non-admin candidates since 2014. isaacl (talk) 23:04, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Most cited claim

As per WP:Verify, all material on Wikipedia must be verifiable. What single claim in an article has the most references? I weren't able to find anything on WP:Records. 31.44.228.51 (talk) 21:31, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

There was some discussion of this a while back on Twitter [7] although I don't think we ever found a definitive answer. Wikipedia:Citation overkill#Examples has a list, although those have mostly been fixed to be less excessive. the wub "?!" 21:43, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Geonotice size

A discussion about changing the size of Wikipedia:Geonotices is open at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-geonotice-core.css. Any feedback about this is welcome there. — xaosflux Talk 13:29, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

2023 OC and CRC appointments process

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Hi everyone! The Ombuds commission (OC) and the Case Review Committee (CRC) are looking for members. People are encouraged to nominate themselves or encourage others they feel would contribute to these groups to do so. There is more information below about the opportunity and the skills that are needed.

About the Ombuds commission

The Ombuds commission (OC) works on all Wikimedia projects to investigate complaints about violations of the privacy policy, especially in use of CheckUser and Oversight (also known as Suppression) tools. The Commission mediates between the parties of the investigation and, when violations of the policies are identified, advises the Wikimedia Foundation on best handling. They may also assist the General Counsel, the Chief Executive Officer, or the Board of Trustees of the Foundation in these investigations when legally necessary. For more on the OC's duties and roles, see Ombuds commission on Meta-Wiki.

Volunteers serving in this role should be experienced Wikimedians, active on any project, who have previously used the CheckUser/Oversight tools OR who have the technical ability to understand these tools and the willingness to learn them. They must be able to communicate in English, the common language of the commission. They are expected to be able to engage neutrally in investigating these concerns and to know when to recuse when other roles and relationships may cause conflict. Commissioners will serve two-year terms (note that this is different from past years, when the terms have been for one year).

About the Case Review Committee

The Case Review Committee (CRC) reviews appeals of eligible Trust & Safety office actions. The CRC is a critical layer of oversight to ensure that Wikimedia Foundation office actions are fair and unbiased. They also make sure the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t overstep established practices or boundaries. For more about the role, see Case Review Committee on Meta-Wiki.

We are looking for current or former functionaries and experienced volunteers with an interest in joining this group. Applicants must be fluent in English (additional languages are a strong plus) and willing to abide by the terms of the Committee charter. If the work resonates and you qualify, please apply. Committee members will serve two-year terms (note that this is different from past years, when the terms have been for one year).

Applying to join either of these groups

Members are required to sign the Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information and must be willing to comply with the appropriate Wikimedia Foundation board policies (such as the access to non-public information policy and the Foundation privacy policy). These positions requires a high degree of discretion and trust. Members must also be over 18 years of age.

If you are interested in serving in either capacity listed above, please write in English to the Trust and Safety team at ca(_AT_)wikimedia.org (to apply to the OC) or to the Legal Team at legal(_AT_)wikimedia.org (to apply to the CRC) with information about:

  • Your primary projects
  • Languages you speak/write
  • Any experience you have serving on committees, whether movement or non-movement
  • Your thoughts on what you could bring to the OC or CRC if appointed
  • Any experience you have with the Checkuser or Oversight tools (OC only)
  • Any other information you think is relevant

There will be two conversation hours to answer any questions that potential applicants may have:

The deadline for applications is 31 December 2022 in any timezone.

Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any users who you think may be qualified and interested. Thank you!

On behalf of the Committee Support team,
BChoo (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Adminship

Hello everyone, I am looking to become an admin in the future, but i wish to know some things from current or former admins. First; What is a good minimum edit count for RFAs', I have seen as little as ~10000 so i assume that is pretty much where start having a chance at being an admin. Second; is there anything i can do now to make my chances better in the future? Toast (talk) 11:06, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Raw editcount is one of the least important things to consider at RFA. I believe the lowest editcount for a successful candidate in recent years was 2,370 - though I doubt if that candidate's edits included many that were minor or automated. Several editors have written up their RFA criteria, mine are at User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_criteria you might find them interesting. ϢereSpielChequers 13:23, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
I agree that fixating on edit count is not the important thing. What I would suggest is finding some area that interests you, roll up your sleeves, and get to work. For example, you qualify as either a AfC reviewer or a new page patroller, and both of those areas always need more help. You could help out reviewing submissions at WP:DKY. You could help at WP:AfD. I'm sure there's lots of other places, but those are the ones I'm most familiar with. Any of them will require that you invest the time to learn the policies that apply to that area and be willing to accept constructive feedback from your peers as you learn the ropes. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:44, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
{disclaimer: not an admin} Unfortunately, in this day and age, wanting to become an admin is something you don't necessarily want to advertise in order to get adminship. We are a long ways removed from the culture of adminship not being a big deal. The process has become more stringent, the scrutiny more intense. The main thing that people always cite as being the most important factor for adminship is having a WP:CLUE. It's obviously not something that you achieve overnight, and it only comes with experience, not just knowing the policies and guidelines but knowing how they are applied. As RoySmith said, the best thing to do is to get involved, but also be very mindful of your own inexperience, and be willing to learn and be informed. --🌈WaltCip-(talk) 15:13, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
Oh, one other thing. You are never going to please everybody. Just look back through the most recent successful RfAs. There are some that passed with unanimous support, but even the ones that had majority support have had their fair share of people not only opposing but also vigorously and viscerally opposing. You could have 100,000 edits and you will very likely still run into these. --🌈WaltCip-(talk) 15:16, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Meeting with WMF web team today (Vector 2022)

This announcement went up this morning about a meeting this afternoon, so noting it here to get greater visibility. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:30, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

WP:ACE Election Commission - Call for candidates

Thank you to all the volunteers who have put in your names for this, nominations are now closed. — xaosflux Talk 01:37, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hello all, qualified editors are invited to self-nominate for the 2022 Arbitration Committee Elections Electoral Commission. Those interested should list themselves on this page. Commissioners are empowered to make binding decisions on unexpected or exception issues related to the election, and some other duties specified in Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections/ACERFC decisions to date. This is a single-term position lasting until the end of the December election. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 15:21, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

2022 Arbitration Committee Elections - Electoral Commission feedback requested

The community evaluation period for the Electoral Commission is open until 23:59, 15 October 2022 (UTC); feedback on volunteers for this commission is appreciated. — xaosflux Talk 01:41, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Citaion needed for a person's middle names...

The other day I wrote an English version of the Swedish original about a Swedish cyclist, - Gustav Johansson - suddenly I see that an English editor demands that there should be "citation needed" on this person's middle name, I've been active on W for 10 years and made over 20k edits, but I've never seen a citation needed for a peson's middle name , is this something new, or is it just this editor's requirement… Jonnmann (talk) 17:46, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

well that depends, do we have any source that includes a middle name? Because every piece of info has to be sourced. If there's no source for a name then indeed we cannot include it. We don't necessarily need a source link directly on the middle name, unless of course there's no other place to include the link. --Golbez (talk) 18:48, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
There was no source with the middle names in the article. If there was one then yes I would not have tagged the name. Apologies for the drama caused but I just wanted the addition sourced. Paulpat99 (talk) 04:29, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
"With identity theft, a serious ongoing concern, many people regard their full names and dates of birth as private. Wikipedia includes full names and dates of birth that have been widely published by reliable sources, or by sources linked to the subject such that it may reasonably be inferred that the subject does not object to the details being made public." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 05:59, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
  • @Jonnmann: Yes, everything added to an article should be sourced. None of the sources seems to include his full name. How do you know his other names? Either from a reliable published source, in which case please add it to the article, or because you "just know" them, in which case you might have a WP:COI to consider before editing his article (friend, family member, etc?). PamD 07:39, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
    No, everything added to an article should not be cited. Everything in an article must be verifiable, with an emphasis on the -able. It must be possible to verify absolutely everything, but we don't necessarily want editors to add inline citations to absolutely everything. It is possible to verify content if you can find a source (e.g., by searching books.google.com) – not only if a source is handed to you on a silver platter/in a little blue clicky number. See WP:REPCITE for one example of what an article could look like if we tried to cite everything.
    What we do want is everything on the WP:MINREF list to be in the already-cited category. Whether you interpret that list as "practically everything" or "only about half" probably depends on the kind of subject you're writing about, but it's not actually everything.
    It is helpful if editors differentiate "verifiable" from "cited" and "sourced". See Wikipedia:Glossary#verifiable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:35, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
    In this case, however, the claim has been challenged, so WP:MINREF does require a source. (And as an aside, the example at REPCITE does not demonstrating that citing every claim is a bad thing, just that having individual footnotes after each discrete fact makes it difficult to read. There's a lot of cleaning up that could be done of that example paragraph while keeping exactly the same information). Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
    (If there aren't individual footnotes after each discrete fact, then someone may think that certain discrete facts, e.g., someone's middle name, aren't cited. The standard for FAs says that each discrete MINREF-type fact requires one citation per entire article. IMO we should avoid re-citing facts that are repeated in close proximity. I'm happy when citations are repeated if the facts are further apart (ditto for internal links). Very few readers read all of an article; most never read past the first paragraph or so, and people who look further in an article usually read a single section that sounds relevant to what they want to know. If it's cited or linked in a previous section, they won't see it.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:21, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
    The standard for FAs says that each discrete MINREF-type fact requires one citation per entire article.
    In this case the claim is made only once in the entire article, and not cited there. Nor is it supported by any of the citations attached to any other claim in the article, or by either of the external links. The plain text of both WP:WTC and WP:MINREF supports that a citation is required here. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 15:58, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
    I was talking about the REPCITE example. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:20, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
  • The above quote ("With identity theft ...") from the policy at WP:BLPPRIVACY makes it clear that we should not include full names unless they have been widely published in reliable sources or sources linked to the subject. If no such source can be found, the extra forenames should not be included (even if they are present, apparently unsourced, in Swedish Wikipedia: we don't consider Wikipedia to be a WP:RS.) PamD 09:26, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Arbitration committee 2022 election: nominations to start in a month

The nomination period for the 2022 arbitration committee election will start in just under a month. If there is someone you'd like to see run, or if you want to know someone else's plans before making your own decision, I encourage you to talk to them now, well in advance of the election. For more information about the work involved with serving on the committee, see the arbitrator experiences page. isaacl (talk) 00:57, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Bullitt Fate of the Dodge Chargers

The article mentions the fate of the two Ford Mustangs, but fails to give equal service to the two Dodge Chargers used in the film. Anyone out there that can help? Cheers! Mr442396 (talk) 02:44, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Request for CIS-A2K Internet access

Hello, as you're aware that CIS-A2K is providing internet support assistance to contributors. According to CIS-A2K's new policies-guidelines, applicant must discuss the request with community members before placing a request. The applicant request needs to be endorsed by three active community members, or one sysop/Wikimedia administrator. I made a request for internet support on 1st October 2022, I am seeking community members support for my request in meta. Thanks for your consideration. C1K98V (💬 ✒️ 📂) 17:00, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia's poor coverage of pre-school television.

I've recently noticed while looking up TV shows broadcast on the television channel Cbeebies (the most popular preschool channel in the UK) that many articles are missing, redirected somewhere else or stuck in draft space. Some of the more older shows have decent articles, but there seems to be a significant gap in coverage here. Is there any systemic bias issues at hand for this issue? Obviously the target audience is too young to edit Wikipedia themselves, and many parents are too busy to edit Wikipedia as well. Also a reflection on the gender gap too. Plus I find that reliable sources don't cover preschool shows as much as shows for older children and adult shows. I think this is an area that Wikipedia needs to discuss more in detail. DonkeyW (talk) 09:23, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

I think the answer is pretty obvious. As you say, pre-schoolers are not editing Wikipedia, unless they are very precocious, and their parents are usually too busy to spend time on it. That just leaves grandparents like me with the time and potential interest to edit such articles. At least having grandchildren gives me an excuse to watch one of my favourite TV programmes. No relevant task force seems to be listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Television/Descendant WikiProjects and task forces. Maybe it would be worth setting one up. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:32, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
I stopped watching pre-school TV at Bill and Ben, Andy Pandy, and Muffin the Mule in the early 50s. Funny how I can remember it like yesterday. I expect my great grandchildren will be the next to be watching kid's TV, Phil. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:25, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
I haven't found much in WP about the radio programs I listened to on weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings before we had a TV. Donald Albury 16:49, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
The (now blocked) user correctly notes the lack of reliable sources (which prevented me from doing much to improve the The Stinky & Dirty Show article). –xenotalk 17:23, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
@Xeno, did you try searching in https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/ ? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:05, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing: I did not; just tried now and it did turn up a few sources. Thanks for the reminder! –xenotalk 19:19, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
For popular older shows, I think scholar.google.com or https://eric.ed.gov/ might be worth a search. Sesame Street has whole books about it, but it's not the only one to get some attention from child development researchers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:02, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
Don't google edukay fun 2.0 PlatypusesAreBirds (talk) 15:39, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
If it is an area that RSes do not routinely cover (and as I watch sources like Deadline Hollywood and Variety, the only news about these types of programs are thin) we can't cover them either. While primary sources could be used, we want secondary sources as key to supporting such articles. Sadly, unless its something like Sesame Street or the Cocomelon / Pink Frog stuff, it gets overlooked in the RSes. Masem (t) 15:43, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
With the odd exception, like Teletubbies, it is also less international than most media areas. Even Sesame Street was only aired in the UK years after the US. Johnbod (talk) 16:07, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Template for getting string suffixes

Is there any template to get the suffix of the string? BlackShadowG (talk) 01:01, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

@BlackShadowG: {{Str right}}. If you just want help with something then post to Wikipedia:Help desk. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:27, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
Thank a lot！Sorry for posting my question in the wrong place. BlackShadowG (talk) 01:36, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

File:Carlos III Coin.jpg

Can one of you figure out what this is and what's going on with it? Its history and all the commentary puzzles me. Talk page too. Drmies (talk) 03:32, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Something exciting happened there, for sure.
I am not a coin person, but I can do research and I love rabbit holes. Coins like that have sold for wildly varying prices on ebay: from $6 to the low ~$100 range. You can also get one from Amazon that freely admits to being a fake for $8. This page says $100 is a reasonable minimum. It also conveniently has a fake identification guide for this exact coin near the bottom of the page, and I must admit the uploaded image does look a lot like their example fake coin.
The comparison image doesn't point out the noses, but they are different if you're looking for it. (I wasn't looking for it and missed it at first, because I saw the arrows and focused on those.)
Unrelatedly, caricatures of stereotypical facial features are a thing racists do sometimes.
So I think what happened is: some unscrupulous ebay sellers were selling fakes that look like this one, and linking to this page to prove the authenticity of theirs, because Wikipedia is Trustworthy™. Someone got scammed, realized it, and came here (with good intentions, if a lack of awareness of Wikipedia norms) to warn others about it. Some other people assumed this was solely because of the nose thing, and so misinterpreted this as racism and got understandably upset about it. A several-years-long edit war ensues. 3mi1y (talk) 06:46, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Looking for good examples to explain terminology confusion

The article on Cortical minicolumn is fairly good at explaining the concept of Cortical column but the coiner of the term Mountcastle used the term minicolumn to be part of the cortical column and that concept is used in quite a lot of literature. I'm looking for examples of how that might be handled. There is a possible example that I am not fond of in Predictive coding where the very first line says:

The term predictive coding is used in several disciplines (including signal-processing technologies and law) in loosely-related or unrelated senses.

Thanks for any ideas. Bodysurfinyon (talk) 17:46, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

Web page references

Hello, I am new to the rules of the wiki, but I am trying to make a page that was combined into a larger category (in sandbox). I was wondering if I am allowed to refer to a website that is providing information for my page (ex: "...the next step- referencing (website name)..." . I currently have the page up right now if you click on the link on my user page, so if anyone could look over it I would appreciate it. Is this the right place to put this question? Thanks! User:Robins birdtalk 12:20, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

@Robins bird, the page for new users to ask questions is at Wikipedia:Teahouse. Read the reference sections at the Wikipedia tutorial, Help:Introduction for an explanation of how to write references for websites, books, etc. You might find it easiest to use the Visual Editor. Also this is an encyclopedia, now a how-to manual. This is not the place to tell the world about a treatment you discovered. Instead only use material from reliable published sources, which can include websites. StarryGrandma (talk) 22:35, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
Many people have experienced this disease with poultry, and the Wikipedia main-space article gives very little information. I am not going to edit an article that covers a broader topic than the category that I am working in. You can also see there is a redirect that goes to the main article. Creating this smaller portion of a big disease will help give more detail and profound understanding than telling the reader what it is and nothing more. I have found multiple reliable resources (and cited accordingly), and I have a section that I am using for treatment. If you looked you might have seen it. Sorry for the confusion, thank you for your time.
User:Robins bird talk 18:15, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Is there a list of WP pages with no photo(s)?

Is there a list of WP pages with no photo(s) that I can use to help add photos from Commons? If a list is available or can be created, does it or can the list WP show these pages by language? Thanks, -- Ooligan (talk) 04:35, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

There is Category:Wikipedia requested images. CMD (talk) 05:36, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
There are some other ways to find them, see meta:Wikipedia_Pages_Wanting_Photos/Lists_of_articles_with_missing_photos#Wikipedia_articles_needing_images. — xaosflux Talk 15:27, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Getting treated like vandalism for perfectly good-faithed edits

I'm angry at Favonian for reverting and warning me as though I was engaging in disruptive/unconstructive editing at Patrik Štefan. I was only adding facts (Ferraro's statement can be found on YouTube videos about his blunder, and his name can be found on multiple lists of the biggest draft busts in NHL history). Adding content without sourcing does not mean it's vandalism.

If my edits are to be interpreted as vandalism, then I won't edit Wikipedia ever again. 94.191.152.89 (talk) 21:49, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

94.191.152.89, this isn't the right place to complain.To answer your complaint, the content of your addition to Patrik Štefan wasn't quite constructive and was unsourced, although I think a level 1 warning might have been a better start. Diffs: 1 2. — Nythar (💬-🎃) 21:59, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation English fundraising campaign - November pre-tests

Hi everyone,

As previously mentioned here, I will continuously inform you of pre-tests on English Wikipedia as the Wikimedia Foundation prepares for the English fundraising campaign starting later in November. As part of the English campaign we test our infrastructure on a regular basis. In the final month before the campaign, you might see banners every now and then on Wikipedia if you are not logged in.

The scheduled dates for November are (you can find the September ones in this post and the October ones here):

  • 26th of October - a 100% traffic three hour test JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:39, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
  • 1st of November - a 100% traffic three hour test
  • 7th - 14th of November - a low level week long test (During the test, a banner will only be shown to users 5% of the time until the maximum of 10 impressions (1 big and 9 small banners) is reached.)
  • 15th of November - a 100% traffic three hour test
  • 18th - 20th of November - a low level weekend test
  • 29th of November - banner campaign launch

Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks you and regards, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:43, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

What's the point of informing us if, like last time, you can't or won't tell us which banners will be used, and it turns out that the feedback you receive about the banners and the many problems with them aren't taking into account anyway (yes, some minor issues are perfunctorily changed, but the main complaints about agressive tone, lack of truthfullness, ethical problems... are just ignored again and again). Fram (talk) 11:13, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
These "tests" are so extensive that they sum up to about 1 full day of fundraising in each of the three months. You have effectively added three days to your end-of-year fundraising campaign, haven't you? Andreas JN466 11:34, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
Actually, make that four days. I'd forgotten you started "testing" in August (Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive_71#Wikimedia_Foundation_English_fundraising_campaign_-_further_pre-test_dates). Though it wouldn't surprise me if there were some "tests" in July, June, May ... as well. --Andreas JN466 17:16, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

WP:NOCONFED

Those interested in the subject of the American Civil War, Neo-Confederates and the Southern United States (or at some other related subject) might be interested in WP:NOCONFED, a closely related essay that was created rather recently. —Sundostund (talk) 12:00, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Warning for editors at Talk:Christian Bale?

There have been literally dozens of requests at Talk:Christian Bale to change his stated nationality to Welsh, all of them denied for good reasons. To repeat an inquiry I left a few days ago at that talk page with no reply so far explaining how to proceed:

How does one go about getting a warning to be displayed when that talk page is opened for editing, similar to the one currently in use at Talk:Turkey, reading "STOP: Are you about to ask for a change in Christian Bale's nationality from English to Welsh?" followed by an explanation that this has been asked a zillion times before and that it's been denied because he considers himself English and because one isn't Welsh just because one's non-Welsh mother happened to have been in Wales on the day she gave birth? Or something a little more sober than the language that I just used. Largoplazo (talk) 19:29, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Editnotice is likely most applicable. - Floydian τ ¢ 19:47, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
@Largoplazo: That editnotice comes from Template:Editnotices/Page/Talk:Turkey. Similar editnotice can be created at Template:Editnotices/Page/Talk:Christian Bale to achieve the desired goal. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 19:54, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
Thank you both! Largoplazo (talk) 20:00, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
@Largoplazo, if you can find a clear, strong source, then adding a sentence to the article like "Although he was born in Wales, that does not make him Welsh" would probably help even more. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:32, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Request for comment on samurai terminology

Comments needed concerning the historical figure Yasuke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yasuke#Request_for_comment_on_samurai_terminology natemup (talk) 03:39, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Arbitration committee 2022 election: have you considered who you would like to see as a candidate?

The nomination period for the 2022 arbitration committee election will start in just under two weeks. Have you thought about who you would like to see run as a candidate, whether it is an existing arbitrator, a past arbitrator, a newcomer, or you? I encourage you to consult with anyone you feel is necessary, whether it is to bolster their plans, or for you to make your own decision on running. Don't be caught by the nomination deadline! For more information about the work involved with serving on the committee, see the arbitrator experiences page. isaacl (talk) 04:03, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Open Knowledge Association (OKA)

I have recently created the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a tax-exempt non-profit that provides funding for translators to translate Wikipedia articles into English. I wanted to post here to make sure that the Wikipedia community is aware of the work we are doing.

We currently have 5 full-time translators: 2 in Spanish, 3 in Portuguese, and we will soon expand with French. The articles that we have published are listed here (bottom of the document, 85 articles so far) and the detailed workflow and instructions that our translators follow can be found here. More information is also available on our website. Our translators are listed here, and they all include a mention of their affiliation to OKA in their profile. At the moment, all of the funding comes exclusively from me, but in the future we will be looking for donors.

We are open to any suggestions on what we could do to improve our processes, or if some other editors would like to be directly involved in the process of selecting the articles we translate. While I have been light Wikipedia editing for a long time, I am myself not aware of all the best practices, so I am very open to any proposals for improvements to our ways of working. Feel free to reach out to [email protected]

7804j (talk) 20:24, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

  • This project has actually been going on for over 6 months, and many of the results are very problematic, with a large number of WP:CFORKs, editors who clearly have very poor English, don't read through their work (or are incapable of seeing problems) and don't add links and so on. As the OKA instructions linked above make clear, these are machine translations, with all the problems that brings. For a long time they did not "all include a mention of their affiliation to OKA in their profile", or add the appropriate templates at the translated articles, but this has been improved in the last week or so. The most successful translations are generally those that deal with Spanish or Portuguese subjects, where we certainly have gaps. But there have been a number of unwise attempts to translate long articles on large topics covering Western/classical history or art history in general, which all have major problems, some fatal. I think we neeed a special page somewhere to discuss what can be done about these articles. It's a great pity 7804j didn't announce the project and ask for advice until 6+ months in. Johnbod (talk) 13:01, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
    For transparency, Johnbod has already raised his concerns in this thread, which contains more details and detailed replies to his concerns. Several of his accusations are unfounded or exaggerated (at the moment, only 1 of the articles that we created has been removed, and that was due to lack of notability of the source page, not due to the English translation). Our translators manually review all translations, so they are not pure Machine Translations. Johnbod seems to be fundamentally against the idea of using Machine Translation as initial input, which of course puts us at odds against his vision for Wikipedia (even Wikipedia's own translation tool leverages Google Translate). See this thread for the related debate taking place on this topic.
    The reason why I waited for bringing it up in the Village pump is that I first wanted to set up everything and run a MVP to see if the model works. I wasn't sure that I would be able to recruit translators and get the non-profit recognition from the government, nor that it would be possible to train them on editing Wikipedia with reasonable effort, so I didn't want to bother the community with hypotheticals. Now that the concept has been tested and that I have had time to improve the processes, I am inviting the community to share its inputs. We never tried to hide our work.
    So far, we have only translated articles that were considered "Featured" or "Good articles" in the source language.
    We are continuously improving our processes -- some things may have been done incorrectly in the past, or could still be improved today, and we are open for any constructive suggestions for how to change it.
    7804j (talk) 13:19, 26 October 2022 (UTC)
    "...at the moment, only 1 of the articles that we created has been removed, and that was due to lack of notability of the source page, not due to the English translation" is certainly not true - only last night I found out that Livestock in Brazil had very properly been redirected as a WP:CFORK to the existing and better Animal husbandry in Brazil. This was by User:Yngvadottir, who became aware from a thread on Wikipediocracy. Possibly there are some bits that might be moved over to the existing article. The same has happened to other articles, and there will be others, I imagine. My main objection has been, as I said at the top, to inferior content forks, of which there are unfortunately several. Mixtec Culture seems decent, and to fill a gap, so I'm fine with that. I haven't looked at that many of the articles on the project's spreadsheet but I expect that many of the ones on Spanish/Portuguese subjects will be acceptable in terms of gap-filling and quality, but there are several very long articles on all-West art history that are both poor-to-terrible quality, and clear content forks. Johnbod (talk) 16:01, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps you will attract a higher number of serious responses by changing the name of your project from "Open Knowledge Association" (just another slogan) to something more descriptive and reality-based like for example "Funding service for select Wikipedia article translations". Yes, do away with the jazzy acronyms and meme-ready names. Once all the sophomoric promotional nonsense is off, maybe a legitimate discussion can take place. 67.247.99.116 (talk) 12:03, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
7804j, as Johnbod notes, the translations include duplicates of topics we already have (I have suggested on Thiago pigtv's talk that they check where the Commons images are in use rather than relying on Wikidata's interwiki links; Wikidata is also volunteer-operated, and it's all too common for a duplicate topic to be created there under a variant English name); this is a waste of money, effort, and time, including the time and effort of volunteers in the en.wikipedia community who must check and fix up the articles, as well as the time and effort of the translator. Also, the project is vitiated by bad translations. This was the state of Livestock in Brazil, 19 hours after its creation and 12 hours after the last edit, by a new page patroller. It contains obvious errors in English including in the opening sentences, and one of the headings is still in Portuguese (plus two in Latin). This would be of little use to English Wikipedia readers even if it was not a duplicate of an existing topic, and indicates the translator did a very sloppy job or does not have the competency in the language they are translating into. Whoever foots the bill for your project, whether you or donors, has a right to be embarrassed and angry at this waste. It also illustrates why English Wikipedia—which unlike most of the other Wikipedias, attracts many well-meaning contributors whose mastery of writing in the target language is not as high-level as they think—has a whole project for improving bad translations (with a backlog back to 2016) and why English Wikipedia has a policy that machine translations are worse than nothing, and requires extended confirmed status for use of the WMF's own translation tool to create articles. Quite apart from the issue of paid editing, which many Wikipedians regard with great distaste—it's a slap in the face to all of us who volunteer here for no recompense—the OKA project is not ready to be publicized, it needs urgent managerial attention to both the selection of the articles and the qualifications of the translators. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:15, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
At the moment of my posting, it was correct that only 1 article was affected. Animal husbandry is now another one, which we have taken note of; the feedback has been passed to the translator, and he has been given a warning. This was a new translator, so he is also less experienced in Wikipedia editing. Additionally, every time an article gets removed, we do a post-mortem analysis to understand what happened and to update our processes. For example, we have taken note of the feedback regarding WP:CPFORK, so we will in the future deprioritize any article that poses a high risk of being considered as such for topics where substantial other articles exist.
Nonetheless, these cases are only a small minority of the articles that our translators have published. Of course, the first version of published articles are rarely perfect, even when translated by a native English speaker, so some form of cleanup and peer review is always value-adding.
When it comes to assessing the return on investment, I think it is better to let us and the donors decide, as we have a better visibility on the costs and may have different priorities. Of course, we could get better article quality if we hired US-based PhDs to translate articles in their field, but for the cost of one such writer, we can fund more than 10 university-educated translators in other countries. Both have benefits and drawbacks, and I think a balance of the two is required.
Similarly, I agree that there would be a lot of value in translating articles from English to Spanish in critical topics such as Mathematics, and we will certainly do so in the future, but at the moment we preferred starting with English because it is the version of Wikipedia that attracts the most readership. This is a philosophical debate, and I understand the opposite perspective as well.
Overall, I really encourage everyone to take a more holistic perspective on this discussion -- it is ok to flag specific articles that may have issues, but I think the focus should be on assessing the overall work of the 85 articles that were translated. I would also suggest not focusing on whether this is a good use of the funds or not, because it is not possible to make such an assessment without looking at the actual spend and comparing it to other projects with similar goals.
As mentioned above, I am open to all suggestions regarding how to best put in place additional controls or instructions for our translators, or even to directly include other Wikipedians or administrators within our process to be part of the selection of articles.
7804j (talk) 06:59, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
@7804j: You (OKA) have chosen to create articles on the English Wikipedia because it attracts the most readership. With that large readership (including Google exposure) comes responsibility: you cannot expect the English Wikipedia community to smile indulgently while you add confusing duplicate articles, or to happily devote time to fixing still more bad translations. Since your project seeks wide readership—and advertises itself and even seeks donations—you should be ensuring you are giving the English Wikipedia a genuine benefit, and taxing the community as little as possible: at least less than the many, many editors we get who try their hand at writing here rather than in their native tongue because they don't realize their written English isn't up to the task, or they want to advertise their village, their school, or their business on the largest Wikipedia, or they simply don't realize Wikipedia is not auto-translated. In addition, you write elsewhere that so far the money has come out of your own pocket, but here you write of let[ting] us and the donors decide. How you spend your own money is of course your own business, except that by your inadequate oversight of the program, you and your associates have so far added appreciably to the workload of a small group of already overworked volunteers (many of us, as it happens, with PhDs, and neither asking nor receiving payment for looking for and trying to fix your messes); but since you are asking for donations, your inadequate management becomes quite a bit more reprehensible. I believe you realize that we could get better article quality if we hired US-based PhDs to translate articles in their field, but for the cost of one such writer, we can fund more than 10 university-educated translators in other countries is a false dichotomy. Translators don't have to be PhDs or even have bachelor's degrees, don't have to be American / in the US, but should be native speakers of the language they are translating into, with good writing skills, because they are writing for publication in English. That's not even touching on what you refer to as a philosophical debate, whether your project should seek to fill gaps in the English Wikipedia or, as is the main thrust of the WMF's article translation efforts, in other-language Wikipedias; but if you believe you can't afford good translators by a factor of 10, then you may be under-paying the translators you are hiring. And if you are not exerting even minimal oversight over the topics to ensure lack of duplication, you're wasting someone's money as well as this community's goodwill.Yngvadottir (talk) 10:41, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
  • The irony here is that there is a much greater need to translate articles from English Wikipedia into a massive number of other languages. No, I'm not talking about Britney Spears or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or even Wuthering Heights; I'm talking about mathematics, science, geography, chemistry, pharmacology, and similar articles. Maybe switching your translators to work the other way around might be more useful. It would, however, be even more useful if translations were going from any of the larger Wikipedias to any of the small or mid-size ones with significant basic encyclopedic knowledge gaps. Risker (talk) 02:52, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
    Agree 100% this process should be reversed..... and has been mentioned before ....other wikis simply aren't of the quality to simply copy over in many cases. That said if the topic is notable it is a good starting point. Moxy- 02:57, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
    Have you looked at Wikipedia:Featured articles in other languages/Spanish and Wikipedia:Featured articles in other languages/Portuguese and similar pages? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:55, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
    English is the largest Wikipedia. Most missing topics will also be absent from non-English wikis. Many which are present will be of low interest to readers of English, e.g. a Brazilian village covered only in Portuguese. OKA translators seem to be fluent in another language(s) and have basic competence in English. That's an ideal combination for translating from English, where there are far more source articles. Perhaps OKA could work with the other language wikis to identify English articles for which they would like equivalents, then set about translating those from English. Certes (talk) 10:33, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
I came across one of the OKA articles at New Page Patrol: Kassite dynasty. There were a couple of oversights but these were easy to resolve by discussion and appropriate action. The resulting article now seems a good addition to our language edition.
The OKA has chosen to recruit Portuguese and Spanish natives so far. My understanding is that professional translation usually requires natives of the target language for the best result and so the OKA might be going against the natural flow. Apart from command of the language, there are also social factors to consider. The English language Wikipedia is rife with conflict and even native English speakers are often discouraged or driven off. Perhaps things are easier in other language Wikipedias and so it might be good to try different directions of translation and see what works best.
But, overall, I support this initiative and wish it well.

"By way of conclusion: facility is not enough. Blood and sweat—yes, and tears as well—are the secret of the thing."

— Samuel Putnam, Translating Isn't All Beer and Skittles, Books Abroad
Andrew🐉(talk) 20:20, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

What happens when you play with Twinkle

I have seen user acceidently XFD or CSD thier User page,

and get blocked for "not building a encylopedia"

These users have two options.

1. Wait for thier IP adress to change.

2. Try to get the admin to unblock you

I want to finaliy bring awareness to this cause of getting blocked.

So that these "to become" editers don't fall in to the trap.

I hope that this message will stop pepole from getting blocked because of it. Whatthedggdgdgd (talk) 14:04, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Could you link to some cases where this has happened? Donald Albury 17:11, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
I have never seen this happen, although I don't often review MfD discussions and the evidence may disapper with CSDs. I would hope that our admins don't block without having good reason. Are you sure that this has happened, Whatthedggdgdgd? If so the obvious answer seems to be not to play with Twinkle. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:14, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
Two times i have seen this happened Whatthedggdgdgd (talk) 11:57, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
Saw one at October Whatthedggdgdgd (talk) 11:59, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
There is no way we can evaluate your claims if you do not provide links. I would be interested in seeing any evidence that an admin had blocked a user as 'nothere' solely over one incident of clicking the wrong button. - Donald Albury 13:07, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I was told when you play with Twinkle you get hairy palms. Levivich (talk) 17:48, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates

There's been a bit of a lack-of-participation crisis of late at featured pictures. If anyone wants to join in, it would be helpful. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.2% of all FPs 22:13, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Easy enough, and enjoyable to boot. Are you looking for more nominations, or just more votes on the already nominated images? I see that several recent nominations have failed for lack of a quorum. (P.S. The fly scene from Orpheus in the Underworld is one of my favorite images.) Choliamb (talk) 02:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
@Choliamb: Honestly, we could use both. Activity breeds activity, and Commons FPC shows there's plenty we're ignoring. Only warning for nomination is to make sure the image is A. Stable in articles (generally, a week or two is good, with exceptions for it there wasn't an image before), B. High resolution (at least 1500px on the shortest side is a good rule of thumb), C. Used in such a way it adds value (If the article's stuffed with samey images, or the thing shown isn't talked about, that's a problem), and, D., High quality for its time. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.2% of all FPs 04:15, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

WikiProject Time in country years talk pages

I've been editing country years talk pages (e.g. Talk:1920 in France) and I'd like to know if WikiProject Time is an appropriate WikiProject for such articles. I've seen it randomly on a few talk pages, but are such articles actually well-suited for this project? (note: we already use WikiProject Years) — Nythar (💬-🎃) 05:42, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

Seems like a question better asked at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Time. WikiProjects generally decide their own scope. Anomie⚔ 12:35, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
Just did that -- thanks. — Nythar (💬-🎃) 18:46, 6 November 2022 (UTC)

PSA: How to bypass the NY Times paywall in a citation

We get a lot of citations to articles in the New York Times. That's generally a good thing, but many of the citations I see are to the paywalled version of the URL. If you've got a subscription, it's better if you use the non-paywalled URL. You can generate one of these by clicking the "Give this article" button. Our readers will thank you. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:03, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

that is truly a great idea. can you add that to a permanent essay or help section article? this sounds like very useful data. --Sm8900 (talk) 14:20, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Do the "give this article" codes function indefinitely? Similar mechanisms for sharing other publications expire after a few days. Certes (talk) 15:12, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Here's a "give this article" link: "Want to See the Weirdest of Wikipedia? Look No Further." Let's see if it lasts. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 15:16, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
I've stored that URL in archive.org. I'm not sure whether adopting a similar approach more widely would be legal and ethical or might have consequences for the NYT account which generated the link (but didn't archive it). Certes (talk) 16:32, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
still works for me o7 Malachi Amadeus (talk) 09:49, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
Huh. I had *thought* it was permanent, but now that I'm reading the instructions, it appears it's only good for 30 days. Well, don't I feel stupid. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:52, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Hmmm, they mention 2 weeks in once sentence and 30 days in the next. I think they're talking about two different expiration scenarios, but I can't quite figure out when it's one vs the other. In any case, certainly not forever like I originally thought. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:44, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
In a rolling 30-day period, you can share up to ten articles, each of which can be read by the recipient for two weeks. isaacl (talk) 17:01, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
@RoySmith it appears those expire in 2 weeks. — xaosflux Talk 15:24, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
The ultimate solution is to use Bypass Paywalls Clean, but this isn't something we can advertise to our readers. 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 15:34, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
Since they expire in 2 weeks, it could create link rot problems. 15 articles have it. I can put a feature request in with Citaiton bot to strip ?unlocked_article_code from URLs which is a good idea regardless for archiving purposes, and we don't know how NYT will respond to these URLs in the future. -- GreenC 15:55, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
What do you mean link rot? It still has the original link and wouldn't NYT just fallback to original free/paywall rules if it expires? 0xDeadbeef→∞ (talk to me) 16:30, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
NY Times paywall can be bypassed just by disabling JavaScript in you browser. – SD0001 (talk) 03:33, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Slogans

I was wondering if the Project name in the "Project" column is ok in lower case or they should be written in small caps as reported in Wikipedia logo. Is there a bot that can help me or I should done manually? 2001:B07:6442:8903:88F7:2018:286E:CEBC (talk) 14:18, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

We don't normally stylise brand names, so the column is probably best left as it is. If we really want to change it, {{Smallcaps}} would work, like This, though we might need to uppercase the final letter manually. Certes (talk) 14:54, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Difference between Rollback (user right) and Rollback (thirdparty)

Hello. As someone who focuses on stopping vandalism I've come to notice that there are multiple versions of the "Rollback" tool. There's the "Rollback" user right, and also some thirdparty versions found in Twinkle and RW/UV. So, I'm wondering what the difference is between them? Would gaining the "Rollback" user right result in more efficient reversion? Or would it make no difference if I already had a thirdparty extension/gadget? Thanks. - 𝘾𝙤𝙤𝙡𝙢𝙖𝙣2917 (talkpage) 15:21, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Rollback (by userright) is much faster and consumers very little traffic. It actually just sends a command to the server to substitute the last revision with the previous one. Ruslik_Zero 18:50, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
You can see all about the different software-managed reverts here: mw:Manual:Reverts. What you are calling "thirdparty" is client software/scripts that approximate the 'result' - generally they just fetch a prior version and republish it. — xaosflux Talk 19:26, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
Alright, thanks for the info 𝘾𝙤𝙤𝙡𝙢𝙖𝙣2917 (talkpage) 22:43, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
Please Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance. If these scripts were a problem, the devs would have told us about that a long time ago. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:24, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

RfA

NAC: To make a long story short, the OP has been blocked. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:54, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hi everyone ! I have posted a recent RfA and was told to advertise it here. The WP:RFA is locate at WP:Requests for adminship/Craffael.09. If bureaucrats and admins could give it a look, that would be awesome thanks ! Craffael.09 (talk) 16:41, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

It's good that you're fluent in "Englisg". We need more "Englisg" admins. But seriously, this isn't going anywhere unless you disclose what your previous account was and explain how it being hacked required you to abandon it. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:14, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
Who told you to advertise the RFA here? Phil Bridger (talk) 17:24, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
An RfA that doesn't appear at WP:RFA will, for sure, never get anywhere...
—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:41, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
You did not follow the instructions for how to transclude the nomination to WP:RFA. Also, I am very curious as to who (if anyone) told you to post this here, as notices of RfAs are never posted here. Thirdly, account impersonation (in this case, claiming an old inactive account as being yours) is not looked on kindly and will almost always earn a block if you don't fess up asap. Please state your original account, or be honest now if this was a lie. Curbon7 (talk) 17:52, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
Why I am convicned the prior account thing is a lie by the way: someone who has been editing since 2017 (longer than me) should have at least enough of a clue to know that "The administrator toolset will help me through my edits and it is a great opportunity for me to become a real Wikipedian" is a very poor argument at RfA. Curbon7 (talk) 17:57, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
  • Why thank you so much for placing such an immense trust in me ! First of all,the "Englisg" is beautiful language full of subtilities that makes its charm

Secondly, my previous account was GandalftheGreyDumbledore but it got deleted and, like , almost all the edits were reverted because the hacker used it for pedo***** if you know what I mean... :(. I can't find anywhere, wich, I understand, does not make it very credible, but I am asking of you to take my word for it or forget this hacking matter as I want no conflicts. Thirdly, some time before seeing your comment on my reason for wanting to be an admin, Curbon7, I realized that my RFA was waaaay too short so I kinda derailed it a bit more.

Sincerely yours, Craffael.09 (talk) 23:45, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Edits might be suppressed, but accounts don't get deleted entirely, and no account by that name exists. - MrOllie (talk) 01:11, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
@Craffael.09: Maybe you can use Special:PrefixIndex to find the right name? RAN1 (talk) 03:26, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
  • I looked around and found the hacked account ! Except it is registered in the French wiki so it does not really apply to my RFA. I wassure it was in the Englisg wiki, but iy seems I was wrong. Itwas just to prove I was around since 2017, but let's forget it cuz I don't want any conflict or anything.

Oh and Happy Hallowe'en  !!!!

Craffael.09 (talk) 09:44, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Craffael.09, can you link the "hacked" account please? Curbon7 (talk) 18:35, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Questions about the "Peer review" tab

If the "Peer review" tab that appears in edit mode has always been there, I, somehow, managed to miss seeing it. Having noticed it now, I have to say its functionality is not self-apparent. And I question the wisdom of directing questions, through use of the feature, to a user that hasn't edited since 2020. Do others have any insight regarding this feature? Thank you. --John Cline (talk) 11:05, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

I agree, i've never seen it; on the other hand, i still can't ~ where exactly are does this tab appear, John Cline? I've just opened a tab in edit mode for Venetian glass and the words "Peer review" don't appear on the page anywhere...? Happy days ~ LindsayHello 11:51, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
When I hit the edit button, there is a "Peer review" tab on the right side next to where it says log out. --John Cline (talk) 14:38, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
@John Cline It's User:AndyZ/peerreviewer which you've installed by adding it to User:John Cline/vector.js. the wub "?!" 15:22, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
Ok, thank you. I see where it's been added to that page. Thanks again. --John Cline (talk) 17:16, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

What is the diffrences between full protection and cascade protection?

I mean only admins and interface admins can edit both cascade and full protected pages so wouldn't that make it cascade protection and full protection the same thing? I edit pages32 (talk) 05:31, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Not really. 'Full protection' means you can't edit a single page. 'Cascade protection' means that you can't edit a single page plus anything transcluded onto that page. (Transclusion is a way of sticking one page inside another.) So if you put an infobox inside an article, with full protection on the article, you can't edit the article; with cascade protection, you can't edit the article plus you can't edit the infobox template. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:29, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing could you provide some examples where cascade would be appropriate please? Doug Weller talk 21:16, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
The classic example is the main page. Otherwise, a spammer could identify some obscure template transcluded by an article featured there and replace it by one of the most prominent ads in the history of the internet. Certes (talk) 22:18, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Cascade-protected items. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:12, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
Thanks both, that helps me a lot. Doug Weller talk 08:43, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

My user page says it's nominated for deletion?

Hi, I haven't used Wikipedia in a few months, and now there's a notice on my userpage (among my userboxes) saying it's being considered for deletion? I can't see anything in my user page's history or source that would indicate why that's the case, but any advice I'd be grateful. Xx78900 (talk) 20:55, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Xx78900 it is because the userbox User:Yilangren/Userboxes/radfem is being considered for deletion. Paulpat99 (talk) 20:59, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
In other words… the user page is not up for deletion… just one of the userboxes placed on the page?
I have to admit, that notice is very confusing, and I can see why Xx7890 was concerned. Such notices should probably be placed on the user’s talk page, and should read “A userbox appearing on your user page has been nominated for deletion” or something like that. Blueboar (talk) 21:29, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
Hi @Xx78900 and Blueboar: You put that in there yourself, Xx78900, with this diff. It was in User:Yilangren/Userboxes/radfem that you used . Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:09, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
My concern is that we are using the wrong notice template when userboxes are up for deletion. What the reader sees is a note on his user page saying “This page has been nominated”… it is natural to assume that the notice is referring to his user page. What we need is something that says “A Userbox on your page has been nominated”… or something like that. Blueboar (talk) 23:55, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
We already have that. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion#How to list pages for deletion says to use {{subst:mfd-inline}} for userboxes but the nominator failed to do it. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:19, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

Issues with naming

I have found three rivers called Bee Branch in Iowa, however, two do not have articles. Should Bee Branch Creek (Iowa) be moved to Bee Branch Creek (Dubuque)? Mitch199811 (talk) 00:09, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Why do you need to create articles about all of the rivers? Do you have enough source text about each of them to write a reasonably comprehensive article about each? --Jayron32 13:46, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
Actually, the SIA / DAB article Bee Branch lists five streams in Missouri named Bee Branch:
So, based on the pattern followed by the others, the article you've come across ought to be retitled Bee Branch (whatever it's a tributary of). Drdpw (talk) 14:01, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
I am not, but I was wondering if I should rename the one current one. Mitch199811 (talk) 16:40, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

The nomination of the article

Where to contact before publishing an article? GermanVL62 (talk) 17:19, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

I've added a template to it that allows you to submit it when ready. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 20:34, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Opportunities open for the Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee

Hi everyone! The Ombuds commission (OC) and the Case Review Committee (CRC) are looking for members. People are encouraged to nominate themselves or encourage others they feel would contribute to these groups to do so. There is more information below about the opportunity and the skills that are needed.

About the Ombuds commission

The Ombuds commission (OC) works on all Wikimedia projects to investigate complaints about violations of the privacy policy, especially in use of CheckUser and Oversight (also known as Suppression) tools. The Commission mediates between the parties of the investigation and, when violations of the policies are identified, advises the Wikimedia Foundation on best handling. They may also assist the General Counsel, the Chief Executive Officer, or the Board of Trustees of the Foundation in these investigations when legally necessary. For more on the OC's duties and roles, see Ombuds commission on Meta-Wiki.

Volunteers serving in this role should be experienced Wikimedians, active on any project, who have previously used the CheckUser/Oversight tools OR who have the technical ability to understand these tools and the willingness to learn them. They must be able to communicate in English, the common language of the commission. They are expected to be able to engage neutrally in investigating these concerns and to know when to recuse when other roles and relationships may cause conflict. Commissioners will serve two-year terms (note that this is different from past years, when the terms have been for one year).

About the Case Review Committee

The Case Review Committee (CRC) reviews appeals of eligible Trust & Safety office actions. The CRC is a critical layer of oversight to ensure that Wikimedia Foundation office actions are fair and unbiased. They also make sure the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t overstep established practices or boundaries. For more about the role, see Case Review Committee on Meta-Wiki.

We are looking for current or former functionaries and experienced volunteers with an interest in joining this group. Applicants must be fluent in English (additional languages are a strong plus) and willing to abide by the terms of the Committee charter. If the work resonates and you qualify, please apply. Committee members will serve two-year terms (note that this is different from past years, when the terms have been for one year).

Applying to join either of these groups

Members are required to sign the Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information and must be willing to comply with the appropriate Wikimedia Foundation board policies (such as the access to non-public information policy and the Foundation privacy policy). These positions requires a high degree of discretion and trust. Members must also be over 18 years of age.

If you are interested in serving in either capacity listed above, please write in English to the Trust and Safety team at ca(_AT_)wikimedia.org (to apply to the OC) or to the Legal Team at legal(_AT_)wikimedia.org (to apply to the CRC) with information about:

  • Your primary projects
  • Languages you speak/write
  • Any experience you have serving on committees, whether movement or non-movement
  • Your thoughts on what you could bring to the OC or CRC if appointed
  • Any experience you have with the Checkuser or Oversight tools (OC only)
  • Any other information you think is relevant

There will be two conversation hours to answer any questions that potential applicants may have:

The deadline for applications is 31 December 2022 in any timezone.

Please feel free to pass this invitation along to any users who you think may be qualified and interested. Thank you!

On behalf of the Committee Support team,

MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (talk) 11:10, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

WMF English fundraising campaign update and example banners

Dear all,

As promised previously, I am happy to share our control banners for this years’ English banner fundraising campaign with you. I have also uploaded them to our meta page. Banners will be shown to non-logged in readers as of the 29th of November throughout the month of December. As our campaigns are built on continuous iteration and improvement, the team will continue to incorporate your feedback and ideas into our testing in the next few weeks, as well as daily iteration throughout the campaign.

Changes already made in response to feedback in the past year

In the past year, the fundraising team has made the following changes to campaigns in direct response to volunteer feedback. We are grateful for the input and partnership with volunteers in improving campaigns for readers.

  • The banner message no longer includes the number of reminder banner messages shown to readers. For example, "For the 2nd/3rd/4th time recently, we interrupt your reading to humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia’s independence." The message only references the first time we ask for a donation.
  • The message more prominently highlights Wikipedia as a place of learning and knowledge.
  • The line “98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way”  has been removed
  • The word “reliable” has been removed from the message.
  • The mobile message more prominently highlights our vision: “We are passionate about our model because at its core, Wikipedia belongs to you. We want to make sure everyone on the planet has equal access to knowledge.”
  • “Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising.” has been changed to “We don't run ads, and we never have.”
  • More information about what donations support has been added to the small reminder banners on mobile:
    • “Here’s what your donation enables:
      • Improvements on Wikipedia and our other online free knowledge projects
      • Support for the volunteers who share their knowledge with you everyday
      • Resources to help the Wikimedia Foundation advance the cause of free knowledge in the world.”
  • An ‘I already donated’ feature has been added in all our fundraising banners and the thank you confirmation page to help donors dismiss banners across all their devices.
  • The Foundation discontinued the direct acceptance of cryptocurrency as a means of donating. We began our direct acceptance of cryptocurrency in 2014 based on requests from our volunteers and donor communities. We made the decision to discontinue this practice based on feedback from those same communities.

In the creative process, the team uses feedback from readers, donors, and volunteers to generate new messages that will resonate with our audiences. We are always looking for new language suggestions to reach our readers to help them learn more about Wikipedia while we ask for their support. For example, the Dutch community recently wrote a fully original banner that the team tested during the Dutch campaign in September. We ran the banners for 4 days towards the end of the campaign, and the overall result of the new banner was a 65% decrease in donations. While this exact message won’t reach the revenue target for the year, there are interesting concepts to further develop. We followed up on this test with a productive conversation with the community after the campaign, and we are planning to  work together on incorporating more of the ideas from that session into future banners for the Netherlands.

Providing feedback

As the team is actively preparing the upcoming End of Year campaign and developing new messaging, we would greatly appreciate feedback and ideas for ways we can reach our donors while raising the revenue target this year. If you have messaging ideas you would like to see tested, please share them with me or on our meta talk page. The work of the global community of editors make Wikipedia a useful resource for readers. We thank you for your work and welcome your input on the fundraising campaign.    

Thank you, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 11:34, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

These messages are an improvement over previous ones I've seen (thank you), but I still don't like the line we run on a fraction of what other top sites spend. Technically, that's true, but it's misleading. WMF's annual budget is $150 million, which is indeed a "fraction" of "other top sites" like Facebook, Twitter, and Google (who probably spend well over a billion a year). But those sites pay their workers, and Wikipedia is created by unpaid volunteers. Wikipedia is special, indeed, but the line suggests that Wikipedia is more frugal than other websites, and I don't believe that's true. The salaries WMF pays are comparable to the salaries paid by other top sites, as is the (per-person) money spent on rent, equipment, travel, etc. Is the WMF really more frugal than Facebook, once you factor in the unpaid labor? I don't think so, but that's what the fundraising messages are stating. Levivich (talk) 18:32, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
Note that the fundraising goal for this year has been raised to $175 million.
I agree with Levivich that these banners are an improvement. I still don't like –
  • "to humbly ask you to support Wikipedia's independence" (if anything, it is the WMF's independence that is at issue here);
  • "humbly ask you to protect Wikipedia" (Wikipedia is not under threat; the only thing conceivably under threat is the WMF's ability to follow through on its plans for further expansion of its budget and headcount);
  • "If Wikipedia provided you $2.75 worth of knowledge this year, please take a minute to secure its future by making a donation" (see above);
  • "This Monday we ask you to help us sustain Wikipedia" (see above).
What I like is the inclusion of the phrase "help the Wikimedia Foundation advance the cause of free knowledge in the world". This should be more prominent still, in my view. Andreas JN466 21:42, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Why so many California politician, Georgia politician...?

Kevin McCarthy (California politician) puzzles me. why is the noun not modified by an adjective? other countries' are Thomas Mann (German politician), John Griffiths (Welsh politician), Kim Song-il (North Korean politician)... instead of "Germany politician", "Wales politician"... RZuo (talk) 18:20, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

That's an interesting question. Per the sample of people at Category:21st-century American politicians noun is how "we" do it for American states here. I see no Floridian, Washington, D.Cian or Wisconsinian. Perhaps it's easier as a rule of thumb? I don't know if there's written guidance on this particular qualifier somewhere. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:54, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
I think it is that we don't adjectivize sub-national entities. Short descriptions operate the same way. Curbon7 (talk) 18:56, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
I'm not sure "adjective" is the right term. Looking at my own usage, I say "I am a native Floridian", or "I am a Florida native." I.e., "Floridian" is used as a noun, and "Florida" as an adjective". Donald Albury 20:59, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
"Demonym"? Certes (talk) 21:46, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
For some states in the US the demonym can also work as an adjective ("Hawaiian", "Alaskan" - the non-contiguous-48 states, as it happens), but for most states such use feels, at best, as awkward to me. Some demonyms feel terribly awkward to me in any use (Utahn/Utahan, Arkansan/Arkansawyer). Now, I have no problem with Britain/Briton/British, or using French, Canadian, Brazilian, or Congolese as adjectives as well as demonyms. It is just with US states and places within them that my idiosyncratic grammar rejects using demonyms as adjectives. Donald Albury 22:19, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
there're Luis Díaz (Colombian footballer) Aisha (Latvian singer) Charles Taylor (Liberian politician) The Lemons (Mongolian band)... being a native speaker of an analytic language but having reinforced inflecting the language while learning english, i find it so odd to read "California politician". RZuo (talk) 16:54, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
then there's another strange thing. why are Tobias Müller (footballer, born 1993) and Tobias Müller (footballer, born 1994) disambiguated by year of birth but not Saxon footballer vs Baden-Württemberger footballer? why are US politicians not American politician, born 1955 vs American politician, born 1966? RZuo (talk) 17:06, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
This is just how we do it in American English. See Florida Man. BD2412 T 17:09, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Picture of the Year voting open

Voting is now open in the sixteenth annual Picture of the Year contest - please vote! There is one week left for voting in the first round.

Any user with more than 75 edits before Jan. 1, 2022 is eligible to vote; if you're not sure the voting tool will automatically check for you. If you have any questions, please see the help page.

Thanks! Legoktm (talk) 15:58, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Talk:Main_Page#Nanook_of_the_North

Just a heads up that an upcoming POTD deals with a controversial film. Levivich asked me to try and provide a bit more warning in future for potentially controversial Picture of the Days, and I really have no objection to that. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.2% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600th FP! 20:07, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Forking resources (current information)

I want to create a fork of Wikipedia.

The FAQ on forking cites information from 2008 for only part of what would need to be downloaded...the "Size of Wikipedia" article has information that doesn't exactly match apples and oranges... how much storage space would I actually need to download and extract and display what is available to be downloaded? (I wish there were files to download (for restoration) articles whose deletion I disagree with,but apparently that is not an option...obviously I do NOT want to download user pages or community stuff like this one or anything else related to this site in particular,but I want as much of the knowledge-base as is available). Are what-links-here and related tools automatic options with Wikimedia software or must they be created from scratch?

If a download of the big file is interrupted would it need to be restarted from scratch?...I figure that it would take a long time at all but the fastest bandwidths. Are the extracted files reachable when stored on multiple disks/partitions without any modification to URLs to accommodate this? I intend to be the only person with the authority to take revisions live but am open to letting visitors make pending revisions I could approve/reject (no account signup mechanism though). 71.105.190.154 (talk) 20:33, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

If you want to self-host, I think you'll want to start with mw:Manual:Installation requirements. Once you have the MediaWiki software up and running, you can import the content later. MediaWiki and its various extensions is what provides all of the Special: pages. Some other tools, including everything you see in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets, are user scripts and have to be copied over after you install MediaWiki. If you don't want to self-host, then you might look at the list of known wiki farms.
In terms of disk space, I think the two biggest questions are whether you want all revisions (vs just the current version of an article) and whether you want images as well as the text. In addition, you will presumably also want a lot of the templates and the modules that support them.
The long list of copies in Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks proves that it can be done. However, I wonder if you've fully thought through what you're thinking about? If you spend every waking minute on a complete copy of the English Wikipedia, then going through articles at a rate of one article per minute means it will take you about 20 years to look at each one. I would not recommend this as a viable project for any lone human. If you want to work on a subset of articles, then you might look into the smaller batches of higher quality and higher-interest articles that the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team have created. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
I certainly intend to "self-host",I note that the installation requirements for Mediawiki don't address how much storage is needed for a fork of Wikipedia.As I said,I want as much history as possible in order to do my own editorial review of past deletions.
I am well aware that I won't be able to keep everything up to date as fast as thousands of collaborators can,and I expect things I care about most will see the most work and those I care about least will see the least (I am sure things that have no interest at all for me I may well wind up deleting but I want to have it in front of me to do that).As for reorienting things to my preferences I think even getting rid of pinyin wherever it conflicts with the orthographic traditions of the English language for the Latin alphabet may be beyond my ability to complete,but I do want to try (the same with getting rid of non-ordinal dmy dates).But editing without edit wars is priceless. 71.105.190.154 (talk) 08:44, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
I'm not sure that the dumps contain deleted articles.
MediaWiki itself seems to be quite small. mw:Manual:Installation requirements#Hardware requirements suggests that you will not need to worry about it. The content, on the other hand, can fill disks quickly. There is file size information for the database dumps at Meta-Wiki. The answer appears to be that the size depends on which type of dump you are interested in. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:56, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

One Love solidarity

@WanderingWanda:

Those who have access to the social media could publicise the following:
User:Steue/Solidarity

Ping welcome, Steue (talk) 17:19, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Featured content

Is there a list of featured articles across all the Wikipedia versions? From the list we could see which article has is the most featured on multiple versions of Wikipedia or which articles are featured no on ENWP. Eurohunter (talk) 17:04, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

@Eurohunter, are you looking for the Wikipedia:Featured articles in other languages? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: It's interesting but I'm looking for a list with exact articles listed. Eurohunter (talk) 17:55, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Click through to the specific pages from the "language" column, to reach pages like Wikipedia:Featured articles in other languages/German. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:58, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps you could get them recursively from wikidata:Q4387444? — xaosflux Talk 19:37, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: @Xaosflux: Yes but I would like to see ranking - a summarised list with positions like Finland and number of Wikipedia versions where article is featured. Eurohunter (talk) 20:09, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
@Eurohunter Looking on Wikidata:
There is a complication here in that these figures include FAs from non-WP projects as well - Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wiktionary and Wikisource all have FA-equivalent page statuses, and while they're not nearly as common, there's enough to make the numbers a little noisy. I haven't quite worked out how to filter those out yet (though am investigating!) but figured might as well post it - all the counts below are adjusted to be purely WP where needed.
The most frequently featured ones tend strongly towards planets, which I found very interesting - I guess they are a nice combination of a clearly very significant topic, with a lot of easily available literature, but without much in the way of controversial issues to work around. The top person on the list is Augustus (17x) then Julius Caesar (14x) and a handful more around 12-13x. We don't get a living person until Roger Federer & Michael Jordan (8x), though I guess you could make a case for counting The Beatles (12x), and if you go down that route there are a couple of football teams in the same range.
The top one with no enwiki article at all is possibly Lviv during the Middle Ages (Q18401624), found in five WPs and featured on az/ru/uk - though it's difficult to make a definitive statement at this end of things because things can get a bit fuzzy around how we define the boundaries of topics, what gets covered in a main article (History of Lviv) vs split out, etc. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:08, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
and thanks to @Tagishsimon over on WD, here is the corrected versions:
So we can say there are 23,306 article clusters with at least one WP FA (wow!), ~78% of which are only FA on one wiki. About 60% of enwiki's FAs are only FAs on this project. There may be a little plus-or-minus on this - my query reports 6,182 FAs on enwiki and WP:FA reports 6,171, so I'll do a little tidying to get those numbers back in sync, and it's possible some of the other projects are similarly off a little. But it's probably good enough to be going on with. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:55, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
  • Thanks, Andrew, but what is the point of all this? The standards of FAs vary wildly across the European languages I can understand, with most non-English wikis having the sort of standards we had in about 2008. The ill-fated OKA initiative thought it was a good idea to machine-translate Spanish and Portuguese FAs into English. It wasn't, & I'd advise anyone else thinking of similar efforts to be very cautious. Equally FAs on en:wp in the last decade have increasing been on obscure micro-topics, often only of interest to the Anglosphere, so I'm not at surprised if other wikis don't have them as FAs - I bet many aren't even covered at all. Look at WP:FAC now, or anytime. Johnbod (talk) 19:07, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
    @Johnbod sorry, missed this comment - yes, I would definitely agree with these points. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:59, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

Which tag for a citation to the google search page for a topic?

Do we have a tag for a citation such as this: "Artificial intelligence - Google Search". www.google.com. Retrieved 2022-11-05..

Thanks in advance. ---- CharlesTGillingham (talk) 06:10, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

I guess Template:Better source needed if you don't want to just remove it. Or Template:Nonspecific. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:28, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Just replace it with {{cn}} or, better yet, remove the statement. Nardog (talk) 07:11, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
  • A google search result is too vague to be a valid source. It’s like citing “the library” instead of citing a specific book in the library. Remove it and put a “cn” tag if you can not cite a more specific source yourself. Blueboar (talk) 13:08, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Global preferences

I remember there was a way to set global preferences across all WP versions. What was that? Eurohunter (talk) 21:13, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

@Eurohunter: are you looking for Special:GlobalPreferences? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 21:16, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Special:Preferences has a link to Special:GlobalPreferences. It's for all Wikimedia wikis where your account works. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:17, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
@Firefangledfeathers: @PrimeHunter: Can I set there expections for certain Wikipedias? Eurohunter (talk) 21:19, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
I use that page to set my preferences across all Wikimedia projects. If I then want to have something special happen on a particular sister project, I set the local preferences to be slightly different. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 21:22, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
Firefangledfeathers, is it better to set global preferences here or on meta:Special:GlobalPreferences? — Nythar (💬-🎃) 21:26, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
Nythar, as far as I can tell, it does not make a difference where you change your global preferences. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 21:32, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
@Firefangledfeathers, location matters for a few things. Compare m:Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures vs w:en:Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:03, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Whatever it is, you're doing it well. Thanks, WAID. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 00:40, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
@Eurohunter: Not at Special:GlobalPreferences but you can set local exceptions at Special:Preferences in the individual wikis. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:23, 16 November 2022 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: How to do exceptions at Preferences? Eurohunter (talk) 15:20, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
@Eurohunter: Set a global preference first. Then you get an option "Set a local exception for this global preference" at that preference when you view Special:Preferences. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:11, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Global preference settings are greyed out for me. Why? Eurohunter (talk) 19:22, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
If the first checkbox is off in global prefs, you can't change it (as you have it not-applied globally). — xaosflux Talk 19:28, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
@Eurohunter: There should be a working checkbox to the left where you can say you want to set a global preference. Then you can choose how to set it. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:29, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: What about gadgets section? I need "Enable the legacy (2006) editing toolbar. This will be overridden by the "Enable the editing toolbar" option in the Editing tab." and eventually "Add extra buttons to the legacy (2006) editing toolbar". Eurohunter (talk) 19:49, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
@Eurohunter: Gadgets are coded locally at each wiki so there is no concept of global preferences for gadgets. Special:Gadgets shows that the gadgets you mention use code in MediaWiki:Gadget-legacyToolbar.js and MediaWiki:Gadget-extra-toolbar-buttons.js. If you load them in your global JavaScript at meta:Special:MyPage/global.js then their code will be loaded at all wikis:
mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-legacyToolbar.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );
mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-extra-toolbar-buttons.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );
I don't promise the code of those gadgets will actually work at other wikis. It was written for the English Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:05, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Thanks. It looks like atleast basic toolbar works. Do you know how to make HotCat tool globally? Eurohunter (talk) 14:37, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
@Eurohunter: Special:Gadgets shows it uses MediaWiki:Gadget-HotCat.js. It doesn't work for me to load that page with:
mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:HotCat.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );
But it appears to work to copy the load command in the page:
mw.loader.load( '//commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-HotCat.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );
PrimeHunter (talk) 23:34, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Second version works. I didn't tried the first. Thanks @PrimeHunter: Eurohunter (talk) 09:52, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: There is tool that bolds and moves to the top of the list of user-defined interwiki but I can't make it to work. Do you know how to import it?

Original local version:

importScript('Wikipedysta:Lampak/MyLanguages.js');
var mylangsArray = ["en"];

Doesn't works globally (?):

mw.loader.load('https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Lampak/MyLanguages.js');
var mylangsArray = ["en"]; — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eurohunter (talk • contribs)

@Eurohunter: Use a load command like the others above to load pl:Wikipedysta:Lampak/MyLanguages.js from another wiki:
mw.loader.load( '//pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedysta:Lampak/MyLanguages.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );
var mylangsArray = ["en"];
PrimeHunter (talk) 21:58, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: I have tried it now but it doesn't works. Is that possible it's limited only to PLWP? Eurohunter (talk) 17:16, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
@Eurohunter: I don't know why it fails in meta:Special:MyPage/global.js but it also fails for me. It works in Special:MyPage/common.js at the local wiki, for example de:Special:MyPage/common.js for pages viewed at de:. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:04, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Online Safety Bill (United Kingdom)

The WMF policy team posted this article regarding the UK's Online Safety Bill.

The short version is that it threatens to expose and erode the privacy of contributors to Wikipedia because of mandatory age verification requiring the collection of data on those who make contributions. Our article details a variety of other critiques Seddon talk 03:30, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

Protesting this would be a significantly better use of banner space than asking for donations. If the Online Safety Bill passes and Wikipedia is affected, we'd be in trouble immediately. If the WMF gets no donations in the next three years, we should still be fine. —Kusma (talk) 11:34, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
This could have a similar effect in the UK to the US SOPA proposals, and may require a similar response. If passed, Wikipedia would lose most of its UK editors, resulting in a reduction in manpower and loss of coverage of a significant part of the English-speaking world. This is an area where the WMF has expertise and should be concentrating its resources urgently. Certes (talk) 11:53, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
“If passed, Wikipedia would lose most of its UK editors…” How so? Blueboar (talk) 13:39, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Because (if I've understand the legislation correctly, and it may well get watered down) it would become illegal for editors who have not gone through an age (i.e. identity) verification process to contribute to Wikipedia from the UK. I haven't been through such a process, I don't intend to do so, and I'm guessing that many of my compatriots hold a similar position. Certes (talk) 13:51, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
British law has nothing to do with ENWP. ENWP is as British as German or French Wikipedias are so it would be frivolous if Britsh law could affect ENWP only. Actually it's not "English Wikipedia", it's American Wikipedia available in English or any other language. Eurohunter (talk) 14:44, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Of course, the bill is not specific to English-language Wikipedia, but it might be expected to affect enwp much more than Wikipedias in languages not widely used in the UK, most of which have low levels of contribution from UK-based editors. Proportionately, cywp and gdwp might suffer even more. Certes (talk) 15:11, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Meh… I suspect that the majority of UK editors won’t have an issue with proving their age. And for those that aren’t… that’s what VPNs are for. Blueboar (talk) 16:06, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
We would also lose the contributions from junior editors, and deny their potential to become future adult editors. We haven't even mentioned non-editing readers, whom we'd be obliged to protect by CENSORing content and possibly even hiding it behind a age-check wall. Using a VPN to circumvent these checks would presumably become illegal too. Do we really want an encyclopedia anyone can edit only after sending in proof of identity, and can read only by committing a criminal offence? I hope this is a flag run up the proverbial pole with the aim of forcing a compromise on something less draconian, but even that might be very bad for both the British public and Wikipedia. Certes (talk) 19:53, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
As Wikipedia doesn't let you edit from behind a VPN, suggesting that as a solution isn't helpful. These sorts of laws are what the community should expect when it goes out of the way to oppose online safety - for example see [8] and related discussions where our articles are accused by Suicide prevention charities of promoting suicides, even if you ignore the toxic nature of much of Wikipedia's talk page , and the rejection by the community (or at least the loud parts of it that dominate notice boards) of all and any attempts to make things better.Nigel Ish (talk) 20:07, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
@Nigel Ish: Wikipedia is a reference work, all of those articles are heavily cited to academia articles working to understand and prevent it. If the articles don't reflect that, we should try to fix the problem. RAN1 (talk) 21:56, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
For suicide-related issues, much of the issues are to do with how information is presented. We have articles like Suicide bag which can easily be interpreted as a how to kill yourself using this method, even if it well cited, and there is a general refusal to consider adding suicide helplines and the like to relevant pages, unlike virtually all mainstream media. Then, of course, there is as I said before, the general toleration of toxic behaviour.Nigel Ish (talk) 22:49, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Then our opinions differ, and you may wish to support the Online Safety Bill as a way of making that content unavailable in the UK. Certes (talk) 22:57, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
The problem is that these sort of issues, if not handled properly, will make it harder for Wikipedia to make the case that the potentially more draconian interpretations of the bill shouldn't apply to entities like Wikipedia. We should aim to avoid making enemies and appearing to act like edgelords when we are trying to argue that regulation should have a soft touch.Nigel Ish (talk) 23:30, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
The community has no say in UK policy. RAN1 (talk) 01:05, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
It can express its opinion though. Seddon talk 13:10, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Wikipedia should certainly not contain material which promotes suicide. I hope we don't have any and, if we do, I support its removal. Unfortunately, any discussion of methods or equipment will contain information useful to those contemplating their use, but articles such as Suicide bag is clearly a definition and description rather than a how-to. The UK's attempts to block one page of Wikipedia in 2008 was a fiasco: see Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia. (Warning: top of linked page contains a small image which may be illegal in some jurisdictions.) Certes (talk) 17:00, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
"The majority of UK editors won't have an issue with proving their age..." That assumes that Wikipedia provides some method of doing that. It also assumes that it is relevant - the act doesn't appear to explictly state that age verification is required, and while there seem to be extra requirements to protect children if the website is likely to be used by children (which probably applies to Wikipedia - both due to editors and readers, some of the requirements apply to everybody. The draft act appears vague enough that we don't know what the effects will be - we will only know when secondary legislation and regulations get implemented under the terms of the bill.Nigel Ish (talk) 23:10, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
Next to how (un)desirable it is for communities, there is the question of sheer cost. There is no international system for proving one's age. It basically requires verifying, in a non-leaky way, your government id. You need expensive custom integrations with every single country around the world, or buy one from someone that has done that work for you. Even if we ignore that most countries in the world don't even have this option, even then the process requires lots of ppl running manual checks and corrections. So take the donations-infrastructure work (currently several percents of WMF budget, due to all different payment systems used throughout the world) as a starting point to get somewhat of an estimation of the cost of something like that (on the very low end of cost I might add).
Having said that, it is my personal opinion that long term, this is where the internet (unfortunately) is heading, because too many ppl can't help themselves but abuse the freedom they have been given. Like plots of land are regulated, so will be your access to the internet at some point, because some a**holes just can't respect boundaries. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:09, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

...The thing I am most concerned about with this act is how Wikipedia may be required (depending on its categorization) to keep certain WP:POLEMIC content just because it relates to UK politics. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 02:11, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

More on the bill here - "Encouraging self-harm to be criminalised" - while in general our articles don't encourage suicide (which apparently is already illegal in the UK) or self harm, this may require a tighter watch to be kept on articles and on talk pages to stop edits that encourage suicide/self harm from remaining in place for significant periods of time.Nigel Ish (talk) 12:43, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

The obligation to remove harmful but legal content has been removed, but other parts of the bill still give concern. Certes (talk) 15:35, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Paywalled 1970s biochemical articles used widely as references

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T198456

When looking at a recent AfD on an article about a company, I saw an unusual use of a 1975 biochemistry journal article as a reference. Looking further, I could see it also used as a reference for articles on a document destruction firm, on athletic records, to support a summary of later writings by Cornell West, etc. and could also see similar use of other journal articles.

I wrote a program to generate tables summarising their uses across articles (at User:AllyD/BiochemReferences). I was hoping to identify a pattern, but, while this does show them being used to reference all manner of topics (from entertainer's biographies, to town patron saints, to geo-political disputes), and shows they are being added to more articles recently, I am not really seeing why these references are appearing. (I had expected to find them to be "Potemkin village" references to bolster new articles, but that doesn't seem to be the pattern.)

I am not sure if this is an appropriate forum, and what can and should be done about this, but felt it could be useful to bring this to others' attention. I have removed some of the more infeasible uses but while the likelihood of some others being relevant is vanishingly-small, have left them in place becauss of being unable to confirm or deny the relevance of the paywalled articles. AllyD (talk) 10:23, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

I notice they both have unusually low PMIDs of 1 and 3. Maybe that has something to do with it? PMID 3 has the same metadata as appears in the references, but a totally unrelated abstract. the wub "?!" 10:34, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps someone has used the reference generator and put a 1 or 3 in the pmid box by accident. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:46, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Yes I think that must be it. PMID 2 shows up in a bunch of unexpected places too [9]. the wub "?!" 10:51, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing that out. I had been bogged down in the typical human pattern search thing of looking for intent rather than accident. It could be worth a bit of validation in reference generation tools, for example insisting that a single-digit PMID be input as "01" etc.? AllyD (talk) 11:56, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
I can offer a similar example of irrelevant/inappropriate IDs. While editing an article, I researched several databases to collect references on the subject and then proceeded to drill down to the individual references. One of the database aggregators was EBSCOhost, which supplies its own identifier known as an "accession number" to quickly retrieve the particular document. However, the identifier is not present in all EBSCOhost records. It seems that when an established identifier (such as PMID) is already assigned to a document, it is used by EBSCOhost as a defacto accession number. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any routine to avoid an EBSCOhost-assigned accession number being the same as a PMID-assigned number. If one adds the (duplicate) identifier to a reference (as an EBSCOhost id), the wrong document may pop up. One example from EBSCOhost is below. When querying the identifier 14297630 the result is 2 entries:
  • "The Kenotic Convict: A Divertissement on Contemporary Contemplative Spirituality in its Social Context." Merton Annual. Nov2003, Vol. 16, p152-171. 20p. EBSCOhost accession number 14297630
  • "SENSITIVITY OF VIRUSES TO BILE SALTS AS TESTED IN TISSUE CULTURE SYSTEMS." The Indian journal of medical research [Indian J Med Res] 1965 Apr; Vol. 53, pp. 304-8. PMID 14297630 (defacto EBSCOhost accession number)
Emphasis added for clarity. 50.75.226.250 (talk) 19:00, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Yep, this is mostly coming from VisualEditor users. I suspect people either are trying to reuse existing reference, or think they need to manually assign a number to each reference. In any case, all you need to do is open in a page in VisualEditor, click "Cite", then type in "1" and out comes a citation to "Formate assay in body fluids: application in methanol poisoning". Edit filter 979 (hist · log) tracks these. Perhaps it should tag or warn, also. It's very easy to mistakenly assume bad faith when someone is doing this; if you don't know about this VisualEditor "feature", it looks like https://xkcd.com/906/. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:48, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
  • Question… does this mean the visual editor is generating inaccurate citations? Blueboar (talk) 22:27, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
    Yes and no. It's not spitting out random citations when used correctly, AFAIK. But it's a very easy mistake to make. Suppose you are new to Wikipedia and want to reuse citation number 2. The natural thing is click "cite" and type in the number "2". The correct process is to click "cite", then click "re-use", then type in "2" but some people miss the middle step. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:39, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Agree with comment above. I never use VE, but I doubt the tool is solely to blame. The editor is supposed to check the generated citation before it is committed. If it looks foreign to the article's subject matter, why should one agree to insert it? Unless the source has been examined manually, in detail (as it should happen for every citation) and passes requirements for context and relevance, despite the strange title. 172.254.222.178 (talk) 22:51, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Or, never ever ever use numbers as ref names. Use words. Use phrases. Fix VE so that it doesn't offer people the option to use numbers as ref names. DS (talk) 03:20, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

  • Thanks to all for the above. It is interesting that the problematic edits are being captured already in an Edit Filter; it has long been the case in IT that Audit Lists are useful but a poor cousin to prevention at point-of-entry: in this case, while the faulty Biochem refs could be erased, we can't retrieve the original editor's intended ref.
  • I am not familiar with VE so tried it on a dummy article today. This confirmed all that is said above about the vulnerability of the single input field in VE's Add a citation / Automatic tab to defaulting to these Biochem articles, and also that it does present the retrieval to the editor for approval - but clearly that isn't enough in practice. (I have placed some screenshots here.)
  • In terms of the overall remit of the Visual Editor, these show a further issue: Someone using VE and opting to reuse ":1" might have reasonable expectations that the existing reference appearing as [1] will be reused, but it won't: it will be the one which has been allocated :1 as a ref name (as per my screenshot where the BBC ref [1] is not used but the Journal article is).
  • In my opinion, we need to request an enhancement to safeguard against these situations: I am not sure where is the best place to workshop this and raise a consensus request for change? Based on everything above, I am inclined to favour DragonflySixtyseven's suggestion that pure numeric ref names should be replaced by alphanumeric. AllyD (talk) 08:33, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
There seem to be some good user behaviour observations here, that someone should capture in phabricator, if you want them to at least be remembered beyond the date range of this page and have any hope of them ever being fixed. It also sounds like a perfect little small achievable project for the community tech wishlist, so note it down, so you can propose it during the wishlist as well. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:37, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
I've been holding off writing a phabricator task until there's a better idea of what we actually want. Blocking the automatic reference generator from working on PMIDs below a certain threshold? A design change to make the "Re-use" tab more obvious?
While VE's lack of properly named references (phab:T92432 / phab:T245199) is certainly a real problem that should be fixed, I doubt it's relevant to the situation here. Without looking at the wikitext users won't even see the autogenerated :0 :1 style names. What seems more likely is naive users are just taking the number they see in the [1] and plugging that into the automatic reference generator. the wub "?!" 10:46, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Well one idea might be to pop up a 'did you mean?' whenever a number is entered matching a reference number/name in the current version. It could give you a button to 'autocorrect' to re-using an existing reference. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:12, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
@The wub, I'd love to have you file a Phab ticket (tag it with citoid, which should add the visualeditor tag automatically when you submit the ticket), but I suggest that you file the ticket about the problem, and leave the solution out of it. It might be the kind of thing that needs to be addressed from several different perspectives, and having a clear problem statement without suggesting solutions could help the team evaluate the problem without any preconceived notions. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:50, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
@Whatamidoing (WMF): Isn't this just phab:T198456? Which was tagged as "low" priority over four years ago. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 01:58, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for identifying that "Users entering small numbers into automatic citations, expecting it to re-use an existing citation" change which was proposed in 2018 to alleviate this problem. I have added a comment there to support the change. To my mind, preventing use of a single-digit number at VE's Add a citation | Automatic input box would not materially detriment users (any who really do want to reference one of these 1975 Biochemical articles can enter it manually) and would prevent further inadvertent corruption of article references. AllyD (talk) 12:33, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
I've attached a naïve first take on this as a patch (864858) on that phab ticket. It just makes it so that pressing “generate” after you’ve entered any number less than 1000 in the auto input will switch to the reuse panel and fill in its search field with that number. The editor would then be responsible for clicking the item in the search results that corresponds to the one they meant. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 23:06, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
See WP:Edit filter noticeboard#Set filter 979 to warn? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:49, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
  • Following from the above both I and EdJohnston have each been editing some of the erroneous biochem references. When I started doing this with the hope that by looking at the revision prior to the biochem reference being introduced - in particular looking at its references [1] and [:1] - I might discern and be able to replace with the editor's actual intentions. In practice I didn't succeed, and ended up just excising the biochem refs. The current situation is one of Inattentional blindness (the gorilla experiment): after keying 1 the biochemical article info does preview at the bottom of the screen, but it is so far outside expectation (e.g. if the editor is working on an article about an entertainer) as to not be noticed. Both Pcoombe and I have recently added comments to phab T198456, which I do feel should be progressed to staunch this flow of dodgy refs. AllyD (talk) 10:56, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
    The match would be to whatever was [1] in the revision when the person added the wrong ref. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Join the Movement Charter Regional Conversation Hours

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.
More languages • Please help translate to other languages.

Hi all,

As most of you are aware, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) is currently collecting community feedback about three draft sections of the Movement Charter: Preamble, Values & Principles, and Roles & Responsibilities (intentions statement).

How can you participate and share your feedback?

The MCDC is looking forward to receiving all types of feedback in different languages from the community members across the Movement and Affiliates. You can participate in the following ways:

  • Attend the community conversation hours with MCDC members. Details about the regional community conversation hours are published here
  • Fill out a survey (optional and anonymous)
  • Share your thoughts and feedback on the Meta talk page
  • Share your thoughts and feedback on the MS Forum:
  • Send an email to: movementcharter@wikimedia.org if you have other feedback to the MCDC.

Community consultation hour for the United States and Canada will take place on Monday, 5 December 2022 on Zoom. You can check out more times here. The conversations will not be recorded, except for the section where participants are invited to share what they discussed in the breakout rooms. We will take notes and produce a summary report afterwards.

If you want to learn more about the Movement Charter, its goals, why it matters and how it impacts your community, please watch the recording of the “Ask Me Anything about Movement Charter” sessions which took place earlier in November 2022.

Thank you for your participation.

On behalf of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee,

MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

  • Hey all, just wanted to follow up about this conversation which begins in just under 9 hours (at 9 PM EST/6 PM PST). Although it's regionally schedule/titled "USA & Canada", all English Wikipedians (and English speakers, for that matter) are welcome regardless of location. Here is the Zoom link: https://wikimedia.zoom.us/j/88407930105?pwd=VVpBaFpKRThtd29mVzk5RCtOa1FaUT09 . Hope to see some of you there! Xeno (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
    I don't have time to join the zoom but I posted my thoughts on meta. Levivich (talk) 19:12, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
    I appreciate you providing your thoughts in that format! There's also a survey available. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 19:20, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
    Thanks -- as it turns out, that page is how I found the place on meta to post a public comment. So, to say something positive: it was easy to find a place to complain voice my opinion on the subject, and I appreciate that, as well as the reminder about the zoom call, which reminded me to complain voice my opinion on the subject. :-) Levivich (talk) 19:24, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
    Ha =) Just under an hour to go for this conversation. Of course anyone else who isn't able to join should feel free to leave comments on Meta-Wiki also! Xeno (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Banners and changes at the Wikimedia Foundation

I've been the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation for nearly 11 months now. I am posting here as a follow up to the Request for Comment to change fundraising banners.

I agree that it is time to make changes at the Wikimedia Foundation, including more direct community input into fundraising messaging. We have taken the guidance provided by the close of the RfC to change banners on the English Wikipedia campaign as early as Tuesday. The fundraising team welcomes your help and ideas on the specifics.

The task at hand in responding to the guidance provided by the RfC is that Wikipedia's existence is dependent on donations. Donated funds are used primarily to support Wikipedia. I think what we heard is that while this may be true, how we say it matters. We need banners that better recognize the real stake our communities have in how we communicate to our donors.

In the next few months, the fundraising team will work more closely with local communities to guide future campaigns. The Foundation will measure the financial results of using new banners in this year's English campaign, and we will share this information when the campaign is completed.

I will briefly address a few other areas of concern that were raised about the future direction of the Wikimedia Foundation, and commit to writing again in January after we finish this campaign. I believe some things at the Foundation can in fact be different, because they already are:

  • I agree that the Foundation has grown very rapidly over the past years and that the budget should be stabilized. In my first six months, I did two things to act on this: first, I informed the Board that we would dramatically reduce hiring until we were sure that we were getting the maximum benefit from the resources we already had. Second, I started reversing the trend of prior growth by setting this year's budget to account mainly for year-on-year costs like inflation.
  • I brought in a Chief Product & Technology Officer, @SDeckelmann-WMF:, who has experience supporting online communities and collaborating with technical contributors. She has been on the job for 17 weeks and has already directly responded to community concerns on New Pages Patrol and Wikimedia Commons. In March 2023, Selena will be ready to host forums on- and off-wiki with what she thinks are needed improvements to the Foundation's processes, including technical support and collaborative product development. We collectively have to respond to decades of growing technical debt, poor processes for maintaining software, and staying relevant in a world where technology keeps going faster.
  • I have already started frank conversations with the Board and Foundation staff about what roles the Foundation should grow (like support for technology), and what activities we should hand over to others or stop altogether. Looking ahead, the size of our budget should be driven by what the Foundation should be doing, and can actually do well. I think the 2030 movement strategy provided guidance (and motivated much of our historic growth), but was short on the specifics. I await the Movement Charter for further clarity, but believe we'll need to make some decisions sooner.

None of these things may happen as quickly as those of you who have been very frustrated for many years would like. I think we are heading more in the right direction, and I am sure you will tell me if we aren't.

I will write again in January with more information. In the meantime, you can reach me on my talk page or by email. MIskander-WMF (talk) 23:28, 25 November 2022 (UTC) (I am getting on a long flight shortly but will check this thread afterwards.)

@MIskander-WMF: Can you clarify Second, I started reversing the trend of prior growth by setting this year's budget to account mainly for year-on-year costs like inflation? The year or year budget increase is over 20% (after an even larger 29% increase the year before), which is more than twice inflation; can you provide a breakdown of where this extra money is flowing to?
Regarding the movement, the current format deters most editors from participating; most editors don't leave their home wiki to participate on meta, and of those that do even less will register and regularly check an unrelated forum. Would you consider acting to encourage a broader range of participation, such as shuttering the forum and returning the conversation to meta, as well as looking at technical changes to allow editors to participate in discussions on meta without leaving their home wiki? BilledMammal (talk) 23:48, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Sure, @BilledMammal: thanks for the question. Yes, the budget did grow 20%, which is down from 31% year-on-year growth in the previous year - this was my main point about stabilising the budget following a period of more rapid growth. As I will detail in a moment, this takes into account some increased costs carried over from the prior year, as well as a return to travel and community convenings which were reduced during the pandemic. The Foundation's actual expenses for FY2022 were just under $146M, and our current budget was projected to be $175M in FY2023 (although this remains uncertain pending fundraising outcomes). The $29M difference is broken down into 4 broad categories: about half of that is personnel costs that includes full-year salaries for people hired in the prior year and cost-of-living and other adjustments across 40+ countries; the other half is from increases in grants, travel and events, and depreciation which includes developed software and our newest data centre in Marseilles. This was offset by some in-kind expenses and reductions in donor processing costs. I am curious to hear more about what you think are the highest priorities for the budget (besides infrastructure like servers which I don't dispute). I noted above that for me, this has to start with what roles the Foundation is expected to do, and can do well. MIskander-WMF (talk) 13:48, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
I agree that the movement strategy forum may be better placed on-wiki, since that is the software that Wikipedians are used to. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:15, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Hi @BilledMammal: and @Novem Linguae: - I will be honest that I am still learning about all the different channels folks use to communicate and for what purposes. I understand that some forums are there to support multilingual participation, but I am happy to keep learning more. MIskander-WMF (talk) 13:48, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
@MIskander-WMF: I don't know why the forum is in use, but I know that it decreases participation. If the goal is to encourage multilingual participation I would encourage users to contribute to discussions in their own language, and use Google Translate to understand comments made in languages they can't read. BilledMammal (talk) 00:25, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I am curious to hear more about what you think are the highest priorities for the budget (besides infrastructure like servers which I don't dispute). I believe the highest priorities are technical support. For example, the WMF should be able to respond to 400+ editors asking for NPP to be upgraded with "Yes, we can" and "When can we have a meeting to discuss the exact requirements of the NPP team?" rather than struggling to find the resources. BilledMammal (talk) 00:25, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I second that question by BilledMammal. For reference, the relevant board meeting minutes state: FY22-23 is not anticipated to be a year of rapid growth. The Foundation anticipates 17% growth to a budget of $175 million with moderate growth in terms of staffing. Next year, the fundraising team will be increasing targets in each of their major streams, with a particular focus in Major Gifts. (Expenses in 2021–2022 were just under $146 million, so $175 million does in fact represent a 20% increase).
I have an additional question. Last year, an INSEAD fellow published an article containing the following passage: The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget ($33.75 million) to maintain according to Lisa Seitz Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia. Would you please provide a comment on this that my colleagues could quote in the WP:Signpost? Thanks, Andreas JN466 08:41, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
@MIskander-WMF: Thank you so much for posting here Maryana, it really is a refreshing change. While it is obvious you cannot be expected to micromanage the WMF, this comes as a welcome respite from a lack of direct engagement by people at the top with the volunteers since around 2014. This new trend in dialogue is also evidenced by the video meetings I and the NPP team have had very recently with Selena. While the role of the CEO is extremely important as an ambassador for the movement, most of us feel reassured when its leaders know about what needs to be done on the factory floor to keep the volunteers happy and retain their enthusiasm. I am aware that my comments do not always come across as particularly friendly towards the Foundation, but over the years I and others have had to strive very hard on occasions to impress upon some its engineering departments that they can sometimes help by rethinking their practice and policies - and it worked. Thank you again. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:09, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
+1 to what @Kudpung said for both you and Selena. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:36, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
Thank you @Kudpung and @Barkeep49. Most of the real work happens on the proverbial "factory floor," so it's where I also need to spend a lot of my time. As I said in my note above, we have some really tough stuff to figure out on the product/tech side. No matter how hard SDeckelmann-WMF works, she isn't a magician (at least I don't think she is!), so I hope we can keep rebuilding these channels of communication to get more collective brainpower solving problems together. MIskander-WMF (talk) 13:52, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
  • Thanks for your statement. While I have your attention, can a staff member please summarize how us volunteers can best participate in 1) movement strategy and 2) annual plan? It seems that these two processes direct what WMF staff work on and where our donation dollars go so they are very important. But I have no idea how to participate. One question I left on a meta talk page has gone unanswered. If we are given real, effective channels to discuss and vote on these issues, I think that would go a long way towards reducing tensions. If the existing channels are poor or non-existent then the processes should be overhauled. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:14, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
    "If we are given real, effective channels to discuss and vote on these issues" History has proven again and again btw that this isn't true. There are plenty of channels both past and present and almost no one ever shows up. Ppl only show up to complain when things go wrong (cause they want to write articles, not built communities). Due to low participation, none of the channels ever become effective. The most effective are the affiliates, but those seem to be hated even more so by the subset of wiki editors complaining this time round. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:11, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
    Hi @Novem Linguae - As someone with relatively new eyes, I can see that the Foundation has grown its communication channels for how to engage in these processes but we clearly aren't winning with everyone, which I am not sure will ever be possible. Though I know invites like this can easily be missed, I did experiment with a few new things in the Annual Plan last year on-wiki and saw higher levels of volunteer response – we had about 17,000 pageviews of the plan and more discussion on Meta-wiki (4x increase from last year). I also agree with @TheDJ that affiliates can serve as a more helpful channel for some communities. I am trying to figure out what changes for the coming year would be productive, and achieve the intended goal. What would you find most helpful? (Can't promise I will be able to do it, but would appreciate knowing.) MIskander-WMF (talk) 13:57, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
    Hey @MIskander-WMF. Thanks for replying. For better communication with enwiki specifically, I'd recommend 1) that WMF continues to post invites to annual plan and movement strategy stuff at WP:VPWMF, 2) that WMF tries to make all its posts at WP:VPWMF (instead of at this board and others), and 3) for the most important stuff, you can request a watchlist notice by making a post at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-messages. Maybe do this once or twice a year for the most important items. I have WP:VPWMF watchlisted now, so that would get people like me involved in these conversations. Another issue is that it sounds like movement strategy uses a third party forum, and annual plan uses video meetings. This is not software that Wikipedians may be most fluent in. Wikipedians are most comfortable using wiki talk pages to communicate, so that leads to 4) provide wiki talk pages and invest some time in onwiki discussion of both these issues (movement strategy, annual plan). The idea here is to reduce the # of steps it takes for a community member to participate in these processes, which reduces bureaucracy and reduces how much of an "insider" you have to be in order to know the steps to participate. Hope this helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 04:54, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for this very welcome statement. I understand that an organisation as large as the WMF has become can't turn instantly, but it gives hope for movement in the right direction. I had planned to stop editing Wikipedia on 29 November when the banners appear, possibly returning in January, but I'll carry on while we see whether your good words fall on the right ears. Certes (talk) 20:08, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
@MIskander-WMF: am I correct in my reading of extrapolation from this report that your 2020—2021 current salary is at least US$400,000? If so, how would you explain to our small donors why your salary is worth 200,000 recommended donations ($2, in the banners going out this year)? And how would you explain to the volunteers who work for free what value you bring to the Wikimedia community that is worth $400,000? — Bilorv (talk) 10:36, 27 November 2022 (UTC).
(Factual correction per Jayen466—my comment was based on both misremembering and then misreading The Signpost. Original comment here.) — Bilorv (talk) 17:54, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
That's an easy one to answer: she's the CEO of one of the world's largest nonprofits, in charge of hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions of donated dollars. Good luck finding anyone on earth competent and willing to do that job for less than $400k/yr. That's a lower-than-average CEO salary for an organization of that size. Levivich (talk) 16:45, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
The WMF is smaller than a typical UK university, and VC salaries in the £300k+ range are widely seen as excessive. —Kusma (talk) 17:36, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
Why would you compare a US nonprofit to a UK university? Compare it to other US nonprofits, or better yet, the WMF is a tech company, so compare it to other tech companies. Levivich (talk) 17:37, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
Honestly, I think anyone who is complaining about executive salaries for non-profit companies should possibly take a look at themselves and their own jobs and ask if anyone could do their own job for significantly less than they're making, not just within their own home country but also around the world. It's never a pleasant conversation whenever someone's livelihood (paying for their bills, supporting their families, putting their kids through college, etc..) is scrutinized, and I feel a bit more compassion is needed here. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:34, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
A rant about WMF salaries, for my volunteer colleagues:
  • What kind of software engineers do we want the WMF to hire to work on MediaWiki? Below average, average, above average? Well, according to Indeed.com, the average base salary for a software engineer in the US is $122k [10]. At Apple, $174k. At Meta, $165k. With benefits, that'd be over $200k in total compensation.
  • Software engineering managers, of course, get more: $141k base salary is average; at Apple, $219k, at Meta $245k [11], and with benefits, you're now approaching $300k.
  • It's a no-brainer that the Chief Technology Officer at a tech company, who supervises all the managers (and probably some vice presidents as well), would be at or above $300k [12]. Base salary for Apple's CTO is $378k according to Salary.com [13]. WMF's CTO made $319k in 2020 per its Form 990, page 7, and that's total compensation, not just base salary; their base salary is surely below $300k.
  • The other officer-level executives (Chief Financial Officer, General Counsel) would of course be on par at $300k total compensation.
  • So how much should the Chief Executive Officer, who oversees the other officers, make? $400k total compensation is totally reasonable; in fact, it's low.
  • All the executives are taking "pay cuts" to work at the WMF -- they'd all make more doing the same jobs elsewhere.
There are lots of problems with WMF spending but executive salaries aren't one of them. Lowering them would only be shooting ourselves in the foot because we wouldn't be able to attract top personnel, who would go work elsewhere for more money. Levivich (talk) 17:36, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
The WMF very much pretends not to be a San Francisco tech company, but a movement empowering people all over the world. If it needs the money to pay outrageous San Francisco tech salaries, it should say so on the banners it shows to people on far lower salaries all over the world. —Kusma (talk) 17:45, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
Kusma, these aren't "outrageous San Francisco tech salaries". These are average base pay in the United States--the whole country. San Francisco tech salaries are much higher. Levivich (talk) 17:50, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
It is news to me that the WMF is a tech company. (Usually, tech companies have more functional mobile apps). —Kusma (talk) 17:56, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
That's a cute rhetorical line but in all seriousness, you do agree that the WMF's primary function is maintenance and development of technology, right? That's what makes it a "tech company". I don't think it's news to you. Levivich (talk) 18:01, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
The WMF has important tech roles such developing MediaWiki. Personally, I'd like it to become more of a tech company, simply by terminating some peripheral non-tech activities. However, what proportion of its income is spent on tech? For $200+ million a year, you could pay 1000+ tech salaries and buy some very impressive server hardware. I don't think that happens. Certes (talk) 18:15, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
Believe it or not but I happen to know a large group of people willing to donate their labour for 100% less than market rate—some world-leading experts, many with PhDs, professional educators among them—because they believe in the mission of making human knowledge accessible to all. Many of those people actually pay in order to volunteer (buying books, newspaper subscriptions etc.), and are unemployed or employed in jobs with salaries less than they could potentially get.
It is one thing for employees to receive living wages and fair working conditions: I've never expected a WMF employee to work outside Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., although some seem to. It is another to pay $400,000 of small donors' money to a single person. I don't care what other companies do. The inequalities of capitalism are not news to me. Though I don't disclose my job/entire education status for safety reasons, let me assure you that with my qualifications if I wanted to work at Meta, I could be working at Meta as a software engineer; instead I chose a course far less well-compensated because of my values. — Bilorv (talk) 17:49, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
I flat out don't believe you that you know anyone who is qualified to be the WMF CEO and who would do that job for free. It's a more-than-full-time job, nobody would do that for free, and if they did, I wouldn't trust them. A CEO who isn't afraid to be fired is dangerous. Levivich (talk) 17:52, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
It's strange to disbelieve me over something I didn't say and don't believe, with which I'll let this be my last reply. You are better than this comment Levivich and I don't mind disagreeing with you but I'm sorry that you are not interested in hearing my perspective. — Bilorv (talk) 18:00, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
"100% less than market rate" == free, no? "I happen to know a large group of people willing to donate their labour for 100% less than market rate" == you know people who would work for free. Do you know anyone who would serve as WMF CEO for free? I understood that is what you were saying? Levivich (talk) 18:02, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
As you're asking a clarifying question, I will respond to this to say: read it again. The people I'm referring to in the first paragraph are you, me, and the Wikimedia volunteer community, and I am not talking about WMF employees in that paragraph. — Bilorv (talk) 18:08, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
My apologies for misunderstanding, then. Since your post about knowing people who would work for free was in reply to my post about WMF salaries, which in turn was in reply to your post about the WMF CEO's salary, I thought we were talking about WMF salaries, specifically the CEO's. Otherwise, what's the relevance that there are people who would do some work for free? Of course we all know people willing to work for free -- you and I are among them -- but that's not relevant to the question of WMF CEO and executive salaries. Nobody is going to do those jobs for free, and the people doing them are already taking a discount on their compensation. Levivich (talk) 18:11, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
Like you Bilorv I choose to take some of my compensation in belief for the organization I work for rather than maximizing my compensation based on my skills at a different organization. Like both of us so do many Wikimedia employees. Software engineers do take a discount to work at the Wikimedia Foundation. Most employees, and all senior employees, take a discount over their for profit rate to work at the Wikimedia Foundation. We want those people to be professional and to act accordingly so of course we need to pay them a market rate for their non-profit work. We want them to be professional so that they respond in a professional manner when they're told - as many people in mission based organizations or roles (i.e. teachers) - that they should not value their labor appropriately and that they should do their work for less or, in this case, for free. We want those people to be in the range of what they could get at other organizations so we get skilled employees doing skilled work rather than people whose skills are comenserate with low compensation or people who can afford to gift their labor for less than a fair rate because they have outside support. The former would lead to a poorly run org, the latter would lead to a workforce that represented the Wikimedia movement even less than what we have today. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:02, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
The WMF should minimise its US-based staff. Even rates in Europe are considerably lower; rates in Asia even more so. Andreas JN466 18:58, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
The WMF has been becoming less US-centric in its staff composition for much of the last decade. Seddon talk 07:33, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I'd love it if this very general statement could be made more meaningful by backing it up with specifics. Andreas JN466 13:48, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
I do think Bilorv's question is highly relevant in the context of WMF fundraising in India or South Africa or even Latin America, especially fundraising that implies Wikipedia might go offline or start charging a subscription.
For reference, about one billion people in India have less than $2 a day to live on. Almost half a billion people have less than $1.25. [14] So if you are asking for 150 Rupees, what you are asking for is the mathematical equivalent of asking a programmer on a $200,000 salary for $550 on a fundraising banner – more actually, because that programmer spends most of their money on luxury items (one day without such spending makes hardly a difference), whereas a poor person in the developing world spends most of their money on bare necessities for survival.
And you need about 250,000 people in India donating that 150 Rupees just to pay the salary of the WMF CEO.
Fundraising messages in such countries should be toned right down so that only the people who truly can afford it (yes, there are billionaires and rich professionals in India) feel called upon to donate. And even then you are actually pulling money out of India and into the US that could be more profitably spent on more urgent charitable causes in India itself. Andreas JN466 18:35, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
Yes, "a poor person in the developing world spends most of their money on bare necessities for survival", and so is pretty unlikely to be reached by wp appeals at all, most especially on en:wp. Johnbod (talk) 19:41, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
@Johnbod: According to the Business Standard, "India had 1.2 billion mobile subscribers in 2021, of which about 750 million are smartphone users." I recall that the WMF made special efforts to support the lower-spec operating system used by many mobile phone users in India. Andreas JN466 21:16, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
It seems a suspiciously high figure given the whole population is supposed to be only 1.375 Bn... Anyway hard to reconcile with your first statement: "about one billion people in India have less than $2 a day to live on. Almost half a billion people have less than $1.25". Lots of Indian statistics have to be treated with caution. Johnbod (talk) 23:44, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
That's not really the issue though, is it? Mobile phone use is pretty ubiquitous in India and Africa; it's one item even people very poor by Western standards try really hard to afford.
Our article claims over 600 million smartphones in India in 2021, up from 440 million in 2020, based on a source also cited by Reuters.
The WMF constantly speaks of its efforts to reach the most disadvantaged in Asia and Africa. I would assume these efforts are having some degree of success. Andreas JN466 00:06, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Chesterton's fence, how does it work? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 05:29, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
Mobile phone usage is. Smart phone usage, not so much. Seddon talk 07:34, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
750 million smartphones is a lot. Even if you mistrust the article linked above: the number of smartphones in India went up from 440 million in 2020 to over 600 million in 2021 according to Newzoo, a source deemed reliable by Reuters and the New York Times. It's a fairly reasonable assumption that the number has risen to about 750 million today and will continue to rise. Andreas JN466 14:00, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
You're saying a 25% increase in mobile smartphones in a year is a reasonable assumption? I don't. I'm not saying 750 million is wrong only that if you have 600 million as your 2021 basis it's not reasonable to suggest 25% more people have them today. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:36, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Against the background of a 36% increase in mobile smartphones in the year before, and a 28% increase in the year before that, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable to assume there might have been a 25% increase this year.
The rate of increase has actually been rising.
For reference, smartphone penetration in India rose from 25% in 2019 to 32% in 2020 (that is the 28% increase) and then to 43.5% in 2021 (the 36% increase). See List of countries by smartphone penetration.
Look, the WMF is specifically targeting this demographic: "I think in the US, we’re primarily familiar with Apple and with Android, Google, those types of products. But in India and in other kinds of emerging markets in the world, there’s different operating systems, more simple operating systems that we’ve built an app for. So, we formed a partnership with KaiOS, and we built a KaiOS app to get that out to users in these places. So, these are much, much less expensive phones and devices that they’re using. And so, we have to build an app for that market. And those are the markets we’re trying to reach." (Interview with Lisa Seitz-Gruwell on Wikimedia fundraising.)
The fundraising messages shown to these users should bear the economic disparities between the prospective donors and the donation recipients in mind. Regards, Andreas JN466 17:13, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Hi Andreas,
We do not run fundraising banners in the KaiOS app.
Best, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:11, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
@JBrungs (WMF): Thanks, that is very good to know. Does that mean the only mobile users in India who see fundraising banners are those that have an Android or Apple phone, or are there apps for any other operating systems that show them?
And are the fundraising banners limited to English Wikipedia, or are they also shown in other Indian language versions (Hindi, Marathi, etc.)? Regards, Andreas JN466 13:49, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
@JBrungs (WMF): Also, I understand KaiOS includes a browser (note screenshot showing Wikipedia). So, what is the situation of KaiOS users who don't download the app, but visit the mobile online version of Wikipedia? Would they see the banners? Regards, --Andreas JN466 19:02, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
During the last campaign we ran a test on the Android app in India. This was the first time we did any in app banners in India. We only run banners on English Wikipedia in English not on any local language versions. I am finding out about the KaiOS browser but this might take me a few days. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 12:43, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, Julia, I very much appreciate your efforts. What may also be relevant here is the proportion of KaiOS users taking the trouble to download the WMF app versus those simply using their built-in browser to visit Wikipedia. I would imagine most casual users will do the latter.
Restricting banners to English Wikipedia means that most people confronted with a banner will probably be above India's 90th percentile in terms of education and income, simply based on the number of English speakers in India. This is good.
However, it doesn't mean these users are wealthy by US standards. According to Lant Pritchett, The “statistical” rich in India are very poor by rich country standards. This 90th percentile household [he shows a picture] has a measured consumption per person per day of $8.47 (in purchasing power adjusted dollars), which is higher than the highest poverty line the World Bank reports of P$5.50. But the US “guideline” poverty line for a family of 4 in 2019 was $17.63 [per person] per day. The “rich” Indian household would have to have income twice as high to not be poor in the USA. Sources: [15][16] Andreas JN466 14:40, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for this message and clear communication, Maryana, it's good to see! A question: how do you think the WMF should balance the needs of readers vs the needs of editors? Both groups are crucially important to Wikipedia's long-term mission, but while we editors are generally skilled at making noise and alerting the WMF to our wishes, readers (who vastly outnumber us) are almost entirely silent. The recent discussion over the adoption of Vector 2022 was a fine case in point. We editors are a select group of hobbyists whose hobby is Wikipedia; readers might include almost everyone in the world with an internet connection. In the end, though, all editors started as readers and without a healthy reader base and a solid pathway from reading to editing, the editing base will eventually become endangered. How does the WMF plan to determine the needs of readers? How does the WMF view this issue? —Ganesha811 (talk) 02:11, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
@Ganesha811 Thank you for helping us all remember that readers also have a stake in these discussions. The Foundation's product team has had this as a focus area, and in particular how to help them deepen their engagement with the wikis, wherever they are on their journey - whether it’s reading more frequently, or if they are ready, to try to start editing. The newcomer experience built by the Growth team is one example of a project that engages readers when they are farther along in their journey, encouraging them to try out editing with guidance and suggestions along the way (this seems to have increased the engagement of new editors). I could use more perspectives from you and others about how the Foundation should be balancing the needs of existing contributors with the needs of readers. It’s an important question. MIskander-WMF (talk) 17:47, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the answer. In general, I would say that it would help editors if the WMF was as transparent as possible about how they assess what readers need, and ask for input on surveys and questionnaires. The more information shared, the easier it will be for editors to trust that the WMF is not just using readers as an excuse to make changes the WMF would have wanted anyway. That's not something I believe, but I've seen that sentiment expressed here. I would also say that the newcomer experience is helpful. There has been some talk on the fundraising banners page about possibly launching an "editing banners" campaign to encourage readers to edit - that's another idea worth exploring. —Ganesha811 (talk) 01:09, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
I thought the WMF was going to abide by the outcome of the RfC. The latest banner once again asks people to donate money to "preserve" Wikipedia. :(
(The wording goes: "Wikipedia is a place to learn, free from bias or agenda. Together, let's preserve this special space. If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, please support the technology that makes our projects possible ...") Andreas JN466 00:09, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
I think you may be over-interpreting here, Andreas. The WMF *does* play a key role in preserving Wikipedia; if it disappeared tomorrow, so would Wikipedia. I generally agree with your views on the fundraising campaigns, but you might not have a lot of success with this argument. The word is not a form of crisis language or implying that Wikipedia is in danger. —Ganesha811 (talk) 00:14, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
@Ganesha811, see Wikipedia:Fundraising/2022_banners#"Together, let's preserve this special space" (current banner wording). The WMF say thay have removed the sentence. Andreas JN466 14:42, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Fair enough! I still think the word is innocuous, but I'm glad they are being responsive to editor opinion in any case. —Ganesha811 (talk) 16:43, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
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