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In wholesome news, User:Junnn11, a prolific contributor of illustrations of anthropods, made the main page of Hacker News [1] and a Japanese blog [2]. Nardog (talk) 21:14, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about...for "In the media" (or something more): Authority of knowledge: historians on Wikipedia in higher education #LILAC23 blogpost by Sheila Webber about a talk by Delphine Doucet given at the #LILAC23 Conference (information literacy). Maybe Doucet is an editor? - kosboot (talk) 15:51, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write an article comparing the several user scripts that show the reliability of sources:
User:Headbomb/unreliable, User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/CiteHighlighter, and User:SuperHamster/CiteUnseen
some of the things about each script
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Headbomb's script:
Novem Linguae's script
SuperHamster's script
All three scripts can apparently be used together without bugs (here is someone else's screenshot) ![]() |
137a (talk • edits) 18:02, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
{{done}}
The Signpost should write about editing with a WP:COI taking place in Durham County, North Carolina if it hasn't already.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:47, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
{{done}}
Would The Signpost welcome a piece by me, combining and updating User:Hansmuller/The_sum_of_all_knowledge (including international interpretations) and User:Hansmuller/Five_Pillars_plus_one (also Wikology/Wikisophy :-) in a more appropriate style? The sum of all knowledge might also be viewed as an extra Pillar, so then we would end up with a total of Seven Pillars of Wikipedia? Thank for considering this proposal, Hansmuller (talk) 08:41, 15 April 2023 (UTC), Wikipedian in Residence African Studies Centre Leiden
The Signpost should write about...
A really interesting research article about how Wikipedia's institutions have changed over time that essentially claims that Wikipedia's processes have become less friendly to fringe views over time was just published open access in APSR, an elite political science journal.
The title is "Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet"
I suggest that someone (perhaps myself) review it for the next recent research section.
Groceryheist (talk) 03:15, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about paltry funding for Wikimania scholarships.
{{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:59, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about...
Hi--I'm the executive editor over at the Forward and we just published this piece that I thought you all might be interested in. It's about a Wikimedia-funded project to save a half-dozen lost Jewish languages and there's been a major Wikipedia edit-a-thon associated with the project as well. Anyway, here's the link to the story: https://forward.com/culture/554932/jewish-languages-iran-neo-aramaic-endangered-preservation-wikimedia/
All Best,
Adam Langer 2603:7000:9600:172:869:57E:CCBC:7BD3 (talk) 19:33, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about...
Slightly amusing tail wags dog story. There is a new RM (7th, but who's counting (we are)) going on at Talk:Czech Republic. The arguments for moving include more weighty orgs like IOC now use Czechia. In the Talk:Czech_Republic#Moratorium sub-thread I pointed out that the Czech OC still used "the Czech Republic" on their about-page[3], and that someone should perhaps talk to them about that. Apparently someone did, the page was updated[4] and currently reads the Czechia. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 15:22, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost should write about the oldest hoax/false statement found thus far. As part of a peer review/expansion of Clipperton Island attempts to source the claim of a 1725 French expedition to the island found nothing predating 2003, which is when the claim was first added to Wikipedia. It seems the claim lasted on the page for 19 years, 3 months, and 15 days, propagating to a number of other sites, including print sources.
The previous longest-lasting known false statement was 15 years, 5 months; the longest-lasting known hoax article was 17 years, 5 months. —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 22:08, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
→History: date wrong, check founding date, I don't believe it too!" It remained that way until CMD started in on the article in June and July 2021.) —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 12:38, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
This coming October will mark 21 years I've been a contributor here at Wikipedia. I've been musing writing a memoir about how Wikipedia has changed over the years. Some good changes (e.g., as a reference it is definitely far more useful today than it was in 2002), some not good (e.g., as a result it is definitely harder to contribute to Wikipedia than 20-odd years ago, let alone start a new article -- although much remains to be covered). -- llywrch (talk) 21:26, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps Smallbones is already on this, but just in case:
The New Yorker has a lengthy investigative article titled "The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign", describing how "Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, paid a Swiss private intelligence firm millions of dollars to taint perceived enemies". Most of the article isn't about Wikipedia, but there are several paragraphs about how the firm ("Alp Services", founded by an investigator named Mario Brero) used it for their purposes alongside many other interesting tools (such illegitimately obtaining phone call records or tax records of their targets, and planting stories in various news outlets). I'm excerpting them below for convenience.
The first part is about an American oil trader named Hazim Nada, founder of a company called Lord Energy:
On January 5, 2018, Sylvain Besson, a journalist who had written a book purporting to tie [Hazim Nada's father] Youssef Nada to a supposed Islamist conspiracy, published an article, in the Geneva newspaper Le Temps, claiming that Lord Energy was a cover for a Muslim Brotherhood cell. “The children of the historical leaders of the organization have recycled themselves in oil and gas,” Besson wrote. A new item in Africa Intelligence hinted darkly that Lord Energy employees had “been active in the political-religious sphere.” Headlines sprang up on Web sites, such as Medium, that had little editorial oversight: “Lord Energy: The Mysterious Company Linking Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood”; “Compliance: Muslim Brotherhood Trading Company Lord Energy Linked to Crédit Suisse.” A Wikipedia entry for Lord Energy [probably fr:Lord Energy] suddenly included descriptions of alleged ties to terrorism.
This outside view from the victim's perspective is later matched to what the reporter learned from leaked/hacked internal emails of "Alp Services":
In February, 2018, [Brero] asked for more money to expand his operation against Nada, and proposed “to alert compliance databases and watchdogs, which are used by banks and multinationals, for example about Lord Energy’s real activities and links to terrorism.” His “objective,” he explained, was to block the company’s “bank accounts and business.” [...]
Alp quickly put the Emiratis’ money to work. An Alp employee named Raihane Hassaine e-mailed drafts of damning Wikipedia entries. On an invoice dated May 31, 2018, the company paid Nina May, a freelance writer in London, six hundred and twenty-five pounds for five online articles, published under pseudonyms and based on notes supplied by Alp, that attacked Lord Energy for links to terrorism and extremism. (Hassaine did not respond to requests for comment. May told me that she had worked for Alp in the past but had signed a nondisclosure agreement.)
And:
Alp operatives bragged to the Emiratis that they had successfully thwarted Nada’s efforts to correct the disparaging Lord Energy entry on Wikipedia. “We requested the assistance of friendly moderators who countered the repeated attacks,” Brero wrote in an “urgent update” to the Emiratis in June, 2018. “The objective remains to paralyze the company.” To pressure others to shun Lord Energy, Alp added dubious allegations about the company to the Wikipedia entries for Credit Suisse and for an Algerian oil monopoly [possibly Sonatrach, referring to these edits].
And regarding another target:
Brero’s campaign sometimes involved secret retaliation. In a 2018 report, a U.N. panel of human-rights experts concluded that the U.A.E. may have committed war crimes in its military intervention in Yemen. The Emiratis commissioned Brero to investigate the panel’s members, especially its chairman, Kamel Jendoubi, a widely admired French Tunisian human-rights advocate. [...] “Today, in both Google French and Google English, the reputation of Kamel Jendoubi is excellent,” Brero noted in a November, 2018, pitch to the Emiratis. “On both first pages, there is not a single critical article.” Within six months, Brero promised, Jendoubi’s image could be “reshaped” with “negative elements.” The cost: a hundred and fifty thousand euros.
Rumors spread through Arab news outlets and European Web publications that Jendoubi was a tool of Qatar, a failed businessman, and tied to extremists. A French-language article posted on Medium suggested that he might be “an opportunist disguised as a human-rights hero.” An article in English asked, “Is UN-expert Kamel Jendoubi too close to Qatar?” Alp created or altered Wikipedia entries about Jendoubi, in various languages, by citing claims from unreliable, reactionary, or pro-government news outlets in Egypt and Tunisia.
Jendoubi told me that he’d been perplexed by the flurry of slander that followed the war-crimes report. “Wikipedia is a monster!” he told me. He had managed to clean up the French entry, but the English-language page still stymied him. He said, “You speak English—can you help?”
I likely won't have time to look more into this, but it surely seems worthwhile to examine edit histories, look at whether frwiki has been discussing these issues, etc.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 16:37, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Seems to me it should be mentioned that Kamel Jendoubi is a BLP article, and the content added to it was clearly slanderous, poorly cited, and in ungrammatical English, but when an IP tried to remove it, one of our WP:RCP users reverted the IP, claiming "censorship". This speaks to me of the difficulties of checking thousands of edits every day NotBartEhrman (talk) 19:27, 7 April 2023 (UTC)