Wikimedia Foundation shares ANI lawsuit updates; first admin elections appoint eleven sysops; first admin recalls opened; temporary accounts coming soon?: Defamation, privacy, censorship, and elections.
In what The Hindu called "the first instance of an English Wikipedia article being taken down by the foundation in the encyclopedia's history", the Wikimedia Foundation has deleted the Wikipedia article Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation pursuant to an order from the Delhi High Court. This article deletion is the third major conflict of concern to Wikipedia editors in this story; the first is Asian News International (ANI) suing the Wikimedia Foundation over defamation in the Wikipedia article about themselves, and the second is ANI's demand that the Wikimedia Foundation reveal the identity of certain editors to that article. The Signpost previously reported this story's development in October, September, and July.
Editors' discussions about the events, and their response, can be found at a wide variety of locations, including mailing lists and community-managed offsites like Discord and Telegram.
On October 21, Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees member and Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales wrote:
Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. Although I've been around Internet legal issues for a long time, it's important to note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. As you might expect, it's pretty limited as to what people are able to say at this point, and unwise to give too many details. However, I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Nothing has changed about our principles. The difference in this case is that the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step. My understanding is that the WMF has consulted with fellow traveler human rights and freedom of expression groups who have supported that we should do everything we can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today. I hope these words are reassuring to those who may have had some concerns!
— Jimbo Wales at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) § The Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation situation (09:13, 21 October 2024 (UTC))
On October 31, the Foundation legal team gave an update that "We have not shared any user data".
This issue of The Signpost includes multiple columns of coverage. Here, we report Wikimedia community news updates. This issue's "Technology report" describes how Wikipedia editors and technology interact in the context of this case. "In focus" is a different telling of this story, formatted as the common questions and answers which commentators are exchanging. "From the editor" clarifies that The Signpost is a newspaper, and that newspapers in countries where many Signpost editors live, usually cover important court cases as a public service.
As always, The Signpost invites all Wikipedia editors to post in the comments section for any article, and to submit journalism and new perspectives to future issues. – BR, Sb
32 candidates stood through the entire administrator elections trial that began this month. Voting concluded as of 23:59 31 October (UTC), and after scrutineering to remove invalid, sockpuppet, or duplicate votes, we have the results posted at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Results. The 11 new administrators are as follows, alphabetically:
With the 11 elected admins, this brings the total number of new admins in 2024 to 20, significantly more than recent years. The last year with more admins by end of year was 2019, with 22. This is a significant step forward in terms of reducing administrator attrition, though it's unclear if the long term trend will be reversed – the number of active administrators increased from 419 on 3 November to 429 the following day, when the new cadre was given the sysop bit, putting the count back to about what it was at the end of August. This topic was last covered by The Signpost in the 19 October issue, and broad discussion about reforming the process for granting administrator rights has been ongoing since 2007 as documented in Wikipedia:RFA reform.
As the community approved Administrator Elections as a one-time trial, it would need approval through an additional RFC to become permanent. There is ongoing discussion on a dedicated 'debrief' page about the next steps from here.
Community members who were officially part of the trial election process included monitors Theleekycauldron and Pickersgill-Cunliffe; and scrutineers Johannnes89, EPIC, and Yahya. This author (B) additionally notes the unofficial yet crucial involvement of Novem Linguae in moving the SecurePoll process forward, and other work that made the election possible. Some of these folks have already received barnstars, but The Signpost encourages readers to thank and acknowledge the organizers for their labor, ethical guidance, and dedication to this crucial aspect of Wikipedia volunteer community governance. – B, S
You may now submit your self-nomination for the Arbitration Committee election until 23:59, 12 November 2024 (UTC). Eight vacant ArbCom seats may be filled. Questions for candidates from the community can be submitted at any time during the election. Voting will be held over 14 days, from 00:00 UTC, 19 November 2024 to 23:59 UTC, 02 December 2024.
For complete information see WP:ACE2024. – Sb
The ability of the community to remove or "recall" administrator's privileges has been discussed for almost two decades. Some important way stations in the recent discussions are:
A new administrator recall policy, part of the 2024 RfA Reform, was adopted by separate RfC on October 26. The new policy follows unsuccessful attempts to formulate a recall procedure in 2006 and 2019. Until this point, only the Arbitration Committee could remove admin privileges without the cooperation of the administrator;[adminrecall 1] now a community consensus can also result in removal of privileges (see prior Signpost coverage).
The first recall was initiated under the new policy soon after the RfC was marked as adopted (Special:Permalink/1253547916 / Special:Permalink/1253758891). As of our writing deadline, there is almost 100 kilobytes of text in the ongoing discussion (about the equivalent of 50 typewritten pages), which may reflect the participants hashing out process and procedure for this new venue. – B
In June 2024 the Wikimedia Foundation established the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin as a channel for staff of the Wikimedia Foundation to share project updates with the volunteer Wikimedia community of editors. The bulletin is a flood of information of interest to Wikipedia enthusiasts. The late October issue describes Temporary Accounts, which is a project intended to give new privacy options to Wikipedia editors, and which may be of interest to anyone exploring how privacy works in the Wikimedia platform. Temporary Accounts seems to be the new name for IP Masking, discussed previously in The Signpost here and here.
Other relevant posts include the removal of Flow on all projects (It'll be replaced with DiscussionTools), an ongoing research project on admin recruitment and attrition, and a publicity campaign to highlight Wikipedia in the United States. – B, BR, S
Discuss this story
Please check out Wikipedia:2024 open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. Cullen328 (talk) 20:02, 7 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"The WMF has consulted with fellow traveler human rights and freedom of expression groups"—"fellow traveler" doesn't mean what Wales thinks it means. -- llywrch (talk) 08:12, 9 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Jimbo Wales comment seems rational and is an important piece of information to understand this fiasco. Jason Quinn (talk) 13:51, 11 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]