2018 Wikipedian of the year blocked

News and notes

2018 Wikipedian of the year blocked

Farkhad Fatkullin banned, unbanned, rebanned, re-unbanned on Tatar Wikipedia

2018 Wikipedian of the year Farkhad Fatkullin was banned on the Tatar Wikipedia for a post on Phabricator on August 21, 2019. As of March 29, discussions continue in Tatar, Russian, and English on this page. The Signpost has not been able to contact all parties involved, so this report should be considered preliminary.

In 2018, Jimmy Wales said, "Farkhad is energetically community organizing among Russia's minority languages communities, going far and wide beyond his native Tatar. He is also fluent in English, a fact that has established a bridge between those communities and the wider movement after years of isolation."

Fatkullin's views in September are expressed on his Tatar user page in both Russian and English. He recently told The Signpost that he is "quite busy around Wikimedia Language Diversity (Meta), Wiki-Smart Tatarstan (Wikimedia RU) & wider Wiki-Smart Region (Meta), so I don't at all have time to feel wiki-exclusion."

According to this log Fatkulin appears to have been rebanned and re-unbanned on March 29.

Ssr contributed to this article. —S

Brief notes

A pilot social media traffic report gives statistics on traffic referred to Wikipedia articles from the social media sites Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube. The pilot is expected to last 1–3 months, and may help to design a permanent database of such referrals. One hope is that having such a database may aid in patrolling damaging edits coming from disinformation campaigns on the social media sites. See meta:Research:Social media traffic report pilot for further information and Social media traffic report for the data from March 27.
Guy is back: The community was notified on March 8 by a family member of requests for adminship (RfA) candidate Guy Macon that the candidate had experienced a health incident on March 3, while the RfA was in progress. The RfA was marked "unsuccessful" on March 5. Guy returned from an editing hiatus on March 12 to say that he was recovering and "As a general response to the oppose !votes, I will be studying them and seeing what I can learn ... don't expect any 2nd RfA any time soon."
WikiCred, a project started at the WikiConference North America 2019, bills itself as Wikimedians Strengthening Knowledge and News Credibility on the Internet. The Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, and Microsoft fund the project. WikiCred offers microgrants (from $250 to $10,000) for pilot projects to help support internet credibility using Wikimedia. The microgrants can be awarded to individuals or teams. The first deadline to apply is April 6, 2020.
New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this week's newest Wikimedia movement affiliates:
- Wikigrannies User Group (Вики-бабушки "wiki-babushkas")^[1] – official language Bashkir
- Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group^[2] – official languages Turkish and Turkic
- Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group^[3]
- Wikimedia Community User Group CEE [Central and Eastern Europe] Spring^[4]
- Wikimedians for Sustainable Development^[5]
- Myanmar Wikimedia Community User Group^[6] – official language Burmese
New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Cabayi and Lee Vilenski.
Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this month:
- Ukrainian Wikipedia: 1 million articles on March 22 (details in Ukrainian, details in Russian)
- Dutch Wikipedia: 2 million on March 8

References

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29 March 2020 (all comments)

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Wow, the Farkhad Fatkullin story is a bit understated. The dude was indef blocked by the same user he was criticizing, Derslek, who is now wheel-warring with multiple Stewards who are trying to overturn the block as obviously inappropriate. That would be an absolute shitshow over here, though a smaller wiki like that may not have any system of checks and balances to prevent this kind of abuse. Hopefully there is some higher authority that can step in and deop this dude. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 03:47, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
He has been desysopped by the stewards as of a few minutes ago. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 04:57, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
What I find really troubling is the role of AffCom. This is really not the AffCom's business to decide who can be blocked on the projects and who can be desysopped.--Ymblanter (talk) 05:41, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's unclear to me what the role of AffCom was. I can see that Steward Mehman97 mentioned his position as a member of AffCom, but also stated that he was not speaking or presumably acting on behalf of AffCom. He was clearly invoking some sort of perceived additional authority as being a member of AffCom, which is strange, because, as you say, AffCom, as I understand it, basically has the authority to recognize Wikipedia "clubs" as official affiliates, and nothing more. Being a Steward, he already had the full authority to take action in a rogue admin situation, and his AffCom membership would have been irrelevant. There was no reason to invoke his AffCom membership, and I'm not sure why he did. It does seem that he was not acting as a representative of AffCom itself, merely implying that part of his authority stemmed from being an AffCom member. Strange indeed. I suppose the notion comes from the fact that AffCom is an extension of the WMF Board. Still, I'm happy he took action. ~Swarm~ ^{sting} 06:17, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Swarm: For the record, Mehman97 is not a Steward. I think you're confusing him with Mardetanha, who performed the unblock. — 🦊 06:32, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hello folks. First of all, to say that the role of the Affiliation committee is 0, I didn't act on behalf of AffCom and in general AffCom is not involved in this case. I mentioned AffCom for the reason that it is more recognizable (than for example Wikimedia UG Georgia, where I'm Chairman) for everyone, and with this I wanted to explain my interest in the matter. I think that we, the committee members have a social responsibility to help communities and people in problem situations, what I do. As a mediator, I wanted to peacefully solve the problem of blocking Farhad, but unfortunately the administrator didn't listen to my calls and ended as it is now. So, there’s nothing to do with AffCom and it’s not necessary to connect it with my actions as some kind of interested party. Kindly, --Mehman 97 13:31, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Current Meta link on Farhad/Derslek case --ssr (talk) 06:29, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Oh look, yet another ethnonationalist fight on one of the non-Western-European-language projects. For anyone who doesn't know the context, which is most people reading this, Tatars are viewed as a "troublesome minority" by Russian nationalists. I presume that's what's underlying this. Of course the WMF has no people who speak any languages needed to know what's going on here. Sooner or later one of these things will blow up into a big PR scandal. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 21:58, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- No, it won't. --ssr (talk) 08:54, 3 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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