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Enough time left to vote! IP ban

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By Bri, Ganesha811, Isaacl, and Smallbones

Trustees election delayed

You've got two more days – until 23:59 UTC August 31 – to cast your vote for the new community-elected Board of Trustee members. The start of the election period was delayed due to technical reasons for 14 days to August 18.

To vote, follow the link on meta:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2021/Voting. In the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system you need to rank the candidates. Rank your favorite candidate 1, your 2nd favorite 2, and so forth, up to your 19th favourite (as there are 20 candidates). You only have to rank as many candidates as you want; the rest are treated as being equally unpreferred by you. You can't rank a candidate more than once, and you can't skip a ranking – for instance, you can't specify a 2nd-preferred candidate and a 4th-preferred candidate, leaving your third preference blank.

You'll likely want to rank at least four candidates, since that's the number of open seats on the board. The STV method being used for this election is designed to consider your preferences in order from most-preferred to least. If your favourite candidate isn't seated, your vote is transferred to your next favourite. In addition, once a candidate you voted for has enough votes to guarantee finishing in the top four (that is, has reached quota), a percentage of your vote is transferred to your next preferred choice. (See Meek STV Explained for more details.) -S, I

Portuguese IP ban on track

Last October Portuguese-language Wikipedians voted to require that editors register before editing. "IP editing" was effectively banned with the goal of reducing vandalism and improving the editing experience. The Wikimedia Foundation has been following the impact of the ban closely and issued its report last month. They "found no significant negative impact" on the health of the community and several positive impacts.[1] [2]

New user account registrations and the number of active editors on ptWiki have increased. Vandalism is down as indicated by a decline in the number of reverts. Also administrator actions for page protections and blocks are down over 70%. User retention shows no trend.

The impact on the number of edits is unclear. The total number of edits has decreased but the decline is at least partially explained by decreases in reverts and bot edits. Without these edits being included in the data, year-on-year edits declined during the first six months of the study period, but increased during the final three months.

Editor comments were requested and indicated that 14 editors supported the ban, four opposed it, and one was neutral. The report recommends that ptWiki be allowed to continue the IP editing ban for now, along with continued data collection and study. Two more Wikipedia projects might be allowed to conduct "similar experiments" but "the experience of a single wiki should not be used as decisive evidence." -S

Committee members needed for movement charter!

Editors are invited to nominate themselves until September 14th for a spot on a drafting committee. As noted on the meta page, "the Movement Charter defines the roles and responsibilities for all in the Wikimedia Movement. It will be a shared framework for working together toward the Strategic Direction." In other words, if you want to shape Wikipedia's Future by using lots of Nouns that are capitalized in the Middle of Sentences, this is your chance! Polish up your word choice skills in a way that really matters, rather than wasting your inner bureaucrat on your actual job. Only a few more days to get your name in there, in all seriousness, so take a look and see if you can volunteer your time to help out the movement. G

"The Wikimedia Foundation broke Russian Wikinews again"

A discussion was held at User talk:Jimbo Wales concerning the resolution to a back-end performance issue and its impact on Russian Wikinews (which is also available in the English language). According to WMF staff, dynamic page lists (DPL) had to be disabled to preserve several S3-hosted wikis. The related Phabricator ticket shows a list of hosts that does not include English Wikipedia but does include a number of related projects including English Wikinews, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks.

More technical details are available at wikitech:Incident documentation/2021-07-26 ruwikinews DynamicPageList. B

Policy, or dead cat?

Is the English Wikipedia's paid-editing disclosure policy fully signed off by the community? One commenter at the talkpage (linked from WP:Village Pump (policy)) doesn't think so: I don't think the way forward is a Schrödinger's cat-like state where the page is a policy in minds of some, not in the minds of others, and enforced as a "Wikipedia policy with legal considerations" regardless due to the banner at the top. It's either a policy or it isn't. The Signpost notes that an RfC on new disclosure requirements for freelance paid editors was closed on November 19 as having resulted in consensus to add language about mandatory disclosure of paid editing accounts in advertising and in communications directly to clients. B

A successful AfC backlog cleanup drive

The backlog at WP:Articles for creation went down from 4,156 to 0 during the July drive. S

Graph from WP:AfC

Brief notes

Number of active administrators through 2019 – subtract 50 more for current count
S
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The nomination period for the Movement Charter Drafting Committee has been extended until the 14th. MER-C 19:52, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - changed it now. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:57, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
In any case, the number of mini threaded discussions being moved to the RfA's talk page is becoming very much more frequent. This is not due to more consistent clerking, but is a result of the steady degradation of the environment of the process, the doubling of participation since the December 2015 reforms, and the classical propensity at Internet forums for everyone to add their two pence.
Anyone who does not read this and follow all its links before running for adminship only has themself to blame if their RfA turned out to be a bad trip whether it passed or not.
The data is only held for 5 years but at nearly 20,000 views in that period alone would appear to demonstrate that most candidates have been reading it. Interestingly, a logarithmic graph would probably reveal that the page views are concomittant with a growing lack of interest in becoming an admin. Hardly surprising in today's climate. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:49, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]



       

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