Some wishes do come true

News and notes

Some wishes do come true

Community wish list furnished stocking stuffers for 2018

Arbitration Committee election 2018

A total of 2,209 users voted for the 13 candidates in the running. Of these, 91 were discarded because the voter had voted twice, and 13 were struck. The full list of voters was published at List votes: 2018 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election. The results were announced on 14 December, with Mkdw, GorillaWarfare, AGK, SilkTork, Joe Roe, and Courcelles being elected for a 2-year term. At this year's election the number of committee positions is reduced from 15 to 13 members. Full details of the election results are here.

Remaining in office for the second year of their term are BU Rob13, Opabinia regalis, KrakatoaKatie, Premeditated Chaos, Callanecc, RickinBaltimore, and Worm That Turned.

Community wish list results

Blinded by the light? "Wikipedia skins are very bright, and at night they can be hard on the eyes."

As reported in last month's issue of The Signpost in Special Report, the WMF's wish list poll for software development closed on 30 November. The results were announced on 4 December with a total 7,282 support votes recorded for the 212 proposals. Leading the poll in the top position with 157 votes was the request by the New Page Reviewers with a proposal by Insertcleverphrasehere for 19 urgently needed open Phabricator tickets to be addressed. A fairly close second with 130 votes was the request for work on five open Phabricator tickets was the proposal by Premeditated Chaos for 'Some kind of toggleable dark or night-mode like YouTube or TV Tropes', because: "Wikipedia skins are very bright, and at night they can be hard on the eyes."

The rationale for the improvement to the suite of New Page Curation tools was: "New Page Review is a key process on Wikipedia, and the only firewall that prevents inappropriate new pages being added to the Encyclopedia. However, there are many longstanding issues with the Page Curation tools and the New Pages feed which inhibit efficiency and cause problems to be overlooked. Aside from a few additions made when the Growth Team added Articles for Creation (AfC) drafts to the New Page Feed last year, the tools haven't been supported for many years and the list of proposed developments is long. These include bugs, features never implemented, and suggested improvements which have been left unaddressed. While a few requests for improvement of the tools used by New Page Reviewers can be addressed by on-wiki customisation by volunteers, most others are part of the Mediawiki software and require the intervention of the WMF developers."

The full list of results is at m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Results.

Brief notes

The ten successful RFAs this year

New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Galobtter, who obtained the suite of admin tools at their RfA with 208/46/12 (82%) in yet another contentious RfA that incited much discussion in the comments section – reinforcing the new trend. With three admins nominating, over 70 of the 208 supporters were admins. Among the 46 voters opposing were 6 admins. The oppose rationales included claims that the candidate's edit count was 'only' 25,000 with 'only' 8,000 to mainspace, and relatively short tenure. One support and one oppose both from the same sock farm, were struck. This makes a total of 10 new admins for 2018 – less than half the number for the previous year, demonstrating again RfA's inverse Moore's law.
Emergency desysopping: The level 1 desysopping procedures for compromised accounts were effected on the accounts of Orangemike, Killiondude, Garzo, and Esanchez7587 precipitating a discussion that is taking place at the Village Pump on a proposal to tighten up the admin inactivity procedure with suggestions for mandatory two factor authentication (2FA) for admins. Following satisfactory explanations, the tools were restored to the accounts Orangemike and Killiondude while Garzo and Esanchez7587 are users whose accounts have been dormant for many years.
Retired admins: Six admins were desysopped on 1 December under the inactivity policy. One further admin voluntarily retired their tools for personal reasons and inactivity.

Maggie Dennis

WMF staff reshuffle: Maggie Dennis is "...excited that we have located a new chief [of Community Engagement (CE)], who will join us in January 2019, whereupon I will transition to the role of Vice President of Support and Services. CE is a Wikimedia Foundation staff department of over 40 people focused on the goal of increasing the quantity, quality, diversity, and reach of free knowledge by supporting people and organizations aligned with the Wikimedia Foundation mission. We support contributors by representing them in the development of new technical tools."

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If I'm reading this right, and 2018 saw 10 total successful RfAs, 6 inactivity desysops, 1 resignation, and 2 (permanent) emergency desysops… By my count the net change in the number of brooms being pushed on the project for 2018 is 1. --Xover (talk) 15:11, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite, you are getting monthly and annual numbers mixed up. For instance there were three more inactivity desysops and one resignation listed in the December 1 News and notes. The totals are strongly negative for 2018. "Down 50 in the last twelve months" said Kudpung in his May Op-ed. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:23, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Bri: - I was wondering if we had any idea of number of properly active admins (say, at least 5 actions in the last month etc)? Nosebagbear (talk) 16:29, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the roster is kept at Wikipedia:List of administrators/Active. It stands at 514 admins currently, vice 539 on January 1. I'd also invite readers to go back to my February 20 News and notes item, "Wandering in the RfA desert of 2018" and the reader comments, especially Widefox's excellent graphs illustrating the problem. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:12, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"Active" isn't an ideal measure as it looks at logged editing activity, so you could have an active admin who hasn't used the tools in years. But it is the measure we have available to us, and it has the virtue of having been collected consistently over time. It is showing a drop of about 24 year on year - that's almost a 5% annual contraction. Ϣere SpielChequers 17:15, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You might be right. I did a spot check of the "active" admins starting with 'A' and there are plenty who aren't really very active. Some are just doing routine stuff that could be automated, like deleting empty categories. At least one did just two logged actions of any type in 2018 (they were both page creations). Many are just doing page moves (which is unbundled [I have that right myself]). I'm sure there's some gaming the system to keep the bit. A better picture would be "who did more than N of [block|page protection|revdel]" where N is a significant number like 20 or more. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:30, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

At the risk of tooting my own horn, this is sort of what I created User:Amorymeltzer/s-index to look at. There are plenty of failings with it, but it tries to get some measure of logged sysop activity over time by calculating S, the number of sysops who made S logged actions in a given time period. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 02:02, 25 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The biggest question, though, is whether there are insufficient admins to actually keep the place afloat. Or anything close to that. As far as I can tell most backlogs that require admin intervention are not hopelessly long, but I may be mistaken. On another note it's worth bearing in mind that some admins concentrate on tasks that don't show up in the "administrative action" count, such as closing discussions or editing the main page. — Amakuru (talk) 22:43, 24 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Factcheck (again): Could you be more specific about the sockfarm you mention during Galobtter's RfA? As I understood it there was one support vote (which was counted) from the Sagecandor/Yetishawl/Cirt sockfarm, and one yes-voter and one no-voter (neither of which was counted) from an unrelated sockfarm. ~ 🐝 ~ SashiRolls ^{t · c} 18:16, 25 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

SashiRolls, See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Korruski/Archive. (something you could have checked yourself). The purpose of mentioning the socking is not specifically to discuss SPI, but to draw attention once more to how corrupt RfA can be and that it is essential to be vigilant. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:36, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Kudpung, I saw this. What I found strange was that you mentioned the sock whose vote was struck/stricken, but didn't mention the sock whose vote *was* counted in the election. Who knows, maybe being the main author of the Wikipedia page on the Signpost brings some special perks with it, like not having your sock drawer reported in the paper of the same name. ^^ SashiRolls ^{t · c} 00:49, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

'Special perks', SashiRolls? I doubt it, maybe this thread will explain what your own research missed. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:52, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It's notable that one admin has made about 1,000,000 deletions. I'm not sure that if we lose that one we have enough resource to fill the breach. In fact, I have often thought that (and a small sample quite a few years ago seemed to confirm) we are not sufficiently careful about speedy deletions, even when we had far more active admins. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:21, 31 December 2018 (UTC).[reply]

I don't agree that we've a shortage of admins now. I remember huge administrative backlogs being dealt with during the first few years after I got the mop in 2007, and those backlogs are gone. There was more work for a larger corps then, not so much now. – Athaenara ✉ 04:30, 29 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad to see a dark mode added to Wikipedia (I was hoping for something like this before, and installed a plugin into my browser to do pretty much that!) That said - and correct me if I'm wrong - but unless the account's been hacked or is otherwise being abused, desysopping an inactive admin seems like a solution in search of a problem. PrussianOwl (talk) 19:18, 7 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@PrussianOwl: Please forgive me for whatever my problem is, but what is "dark mode" in this context? Is it reverse light/dark in text display so letters are light on a dark background, or something more nuanced or subtle or political? – Athaenara ✉ 08:42, 12 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind, scratch that, I see now "toggleable dark or night-mode" up there. – Athaenara ✉ 08:44, 12 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost is looking for new talent.

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