The Wikimedia Foundation's biennial Board of Trustees election is open for voting. Of the ten seats on the board, three are elected representatives of the global Wikimedia community—you.
The relationship between the WMF and the community has been strained in recent times, perhaps most notably after the introduction of superprotect on the German Wikipedia and the VisualEditor on the English. As such, Wikipedia editors love to gripe about the WMF. Often, this complaining is justified, but voting in this election is one of the primary outlets by which Wikipedians can shape the strategic direction of the WMF. The board hires the executive director, approves the annual budget, and generally oversees the organization. We need to seize the opportunity to help shape the WMF's responses to the challenges it faces and will face in the coming years.
You can get to know the candidates through several methods. Last week's Signpost special asked them to rank their answers on a numerical scale, making it a quick and easy way to see the candidate's positions on various issues. For those looking to make a more in-depth assessment, the main questions page on Meta has 35 questions (as of publishing time) to read through.
How should you vote? We are not in a place to tell you who to vote for, but as the system used is a modified form of an approval vote, you can maximize your impact by liberally voting no. As Dirk Franke explains (minor changes for readability):
| “ | To give you some examples with small numbers:
In this case person A would be the winner although in total numbers he has only half the support of person B. In this scenario the candidate needs 9 support votes to make up for one oppose vote. This of course works for bigger numbers as well:
A wins
A wins The higher the approval rate for the top candidates is in general, the higher is the impact of a negative vote. With an approval rate of 90% for the top candidates voting nay has 9 times more impact than voting yes. Around 80% approval rate the impact of a nay is 4 times as big, around 70% approval rate the factor is below 3 and around 50% the factor is just one. Below 50%, the support votes become more influential than nays. Given normal circumstances in such an election the approval rates for the top three candidates should be over 70 or 80%; so a negative given has three to four times than impact than a positive vote given. For you as tactical voter this means: don't waste nay-votes. Don't vote neutral. |
” |
Vote now and make a difference. The people selected in this election will quite possibly help make significant decisions for the future of our movement.
The article counts of many Wikimedia wikis suddenly changed on 29 March 2015: as the Signpost reported at the time, sixty-five wikis fell below milestones tracked at the Wikimedia News Meta page, and three increased to new milestones. Among these wikis, the largest absolute changes were a decrease of 281,624 articles in the English Wikisource (a 27% drop) and an increase of 4421 entries in the Persian Wiktionary (an 8% rise). The most extreme relative changes were a 98% decrease in Sindhi Wikinews articles (from 749 to 13), and a 23% increase in Bengali Wiktionary entries (from 920 to 1134).
The proximate cause of the large changes was the running of a maintenance script that recounts articles from scratch. For several reasons the article counts reported by most Wikimedia wikis have long been inaccurate—many negligibly so, but some by ridiculously large amounts. The maintenance script corrected these inaccuracies on almost all of Wikimedia's content wikis (except Wikibooks), but because not all of the root causes of the incorrect counts have been fixed, the script will be run once per month to ensure that the article counts can no longer get too far off of their correct values for too long.
The three main reasons the article counts needed to be fixed are:
What follows is a brief explanation of why the article counts became wrong over time, a description of what changes in article counts were actually observed when the counts were fixed, and some suggestions of what issues related to article counting the wider Wikimedia community may wish to discuss further. Further technical details are available at meta:Article counts revisited.
Because articles are the main "public face" of a wiki—the mechanism by which content is presented to readers—Wikimedia wiki communities and the Wikimedia Foundation alike like to advertise article counts. The raw data is visible on each wiki's Special:Statistics page, available off-wiki through the MediaWiki API, and presented at pages such as meta:List of Wikipedias/Table; article-count milestones (such as reaching 10,000 or 100,000 articles) are routinely announced on the Wikimedia News page, and major milestones are often reported by the Signpost.
The first definition of what constituted an article in the early years of Wikipedia was that it was a page in the main namespace that was not a redirect and contained at least one comma. This worked fine for articles in English, since it ruled out exceptionally short pages that were not to be considered useful articles, but proved a poor solution for projects in other languages—especially those that represent or use commas differently, or lack them entirely. A short discussion and vote was held on the Meta-Wiki in March 2003, where it was decided that the definition would be changed: a page would now be counted as an article if it were a non-redirect in the main namespace, as before, and contained at least one internal wikilink instead of a comma. While it is not clear whether the voters intended for category links or interwiki links to count, the actual implementation of the decision in the MediaWiki software simply checked for the string "[[" anywhere in the source text of the page, thereby counting several different types of legitimate links (1–5 below), as well as two types of "fake" links (6 and 7), and one type of non-link (8):
[[Babel]], [[Talk:Babel]], etc.[[Category:Software]][[File:Yes.png]][[de:Wikipedia:Hauptseite]] or [[:de:Wikipedia:Hauptseite]][[species:]]<!-- [[don't look at me]] --><nowiki>[[look at me]]</nowiki>wikilinks start with "[["(Note that links like [[:Category:Software]] and [[:File:Yes.png]], which start with an initial colon, are regular page links of type 1.)
Discovering this, some editors started gaming the system by routinely placing <!--[[--> (an HTML comment) on all of their pages, just to get them counted as articles!
At the same time, the comma-based definition of an article was not entirely abandoned. Instead, a configuration variable was added to allow wikis to optionally retain that counting criterion. Additional variables were added over the next few years to allow more flexibility in article counting. In June 2006 a variable was added to allow articles to be in namespaces other than the main one; this change was taken advantage of mainly by Wikisources, which routinely count "Author", "Page", and "Index" namespaces along with the main one as their "content namespaces". In May 2011 a variable switch was added that enabled any one of three different article-counting criteria. Two were essentially reimplementations of the link- and comma-based counting criteria already in use, while the third introduced the option of counting any content namespace page as an article. Currently the English Wikibooks and Portuguese Wikibooks use the "comma" criterion; the Czech Wikinews, Chinese Wikinews, and Gujarati Wikisource use the "any" criterion; and all other Wikimedia wikis use the "link" based criterion.
The article count of a MediaWiki-based wiki is set to an initial value by a script when the wiki is first created. Afterwards, it can be recounted from scratch using either of two maintenance scripts, but otherwise all operations on the article count are relative changes in response to different actions on the wiki itself. The article count may (or may not) increase if a new page is created or imported into the wiki, or if a previously deleted page is "undeleted"; decrease if a page is deleted or if its edit history is merged with that of another page; and change in either direction if a page is edited or moved between namespaces.
It had been known at least since 2007 that different elements of MediaWiki code used different criteria for determining whether a page counted as an article. For example, every time a page in the main namespace was saved, it was checked for the string "[["; if articles were recounted using the maintenance script, a certain database table was checked to see if each page really linked to another page on the same wiki (thus counting only links of the first type listed above, but including links provided by templates); if the wiki's site statistics were completely recalculated, each potential article was simply checked to see if it contained any text at all (i.e. a page length greater than zero). The May 2011 changes to the code were supposed to fix such inconsistencies, but it is not clear whether this was fully accomplished.
Bugs affecting article counting have continued to be a problem. One particularly tenacious bug that caused newly imported articles to increase the count by the total number of revisions (page edits) rather than the number of articles was not resolved until February 2015. It seems likely that unknown but significant lingering issues still remain, calling into question whether article counts can ever truly be accurate.
For high-traffic wikis like the English Wikipedia, it may never be possible to get a completely accurate article count. Over all of 2014, the English Wikipedia averaged about 3 million page edits per month, working out to just over 1 edit per second. At peak periods of editing, the number of edits per second can be far higher. Any of these edits can potentially change the article count (though most do not); even a single edit to a template can change the "article status" of several pages at the same time. Add to this the fact that many servers are simultaneously rendering, caching, and changing page content, and the very existence of a "true" article count becomes debatable. Even if one assumes that at any instant in time there is a true count, it may not be possible for a script to successfully determine it, since the counting process itself is far from instantaneous—edits made in the intervening time may impact the results.
For much of Wikimedia's history Erik Zachte's Wikistats website has been collecting monthly article counts (and many other statistics) for most Wikimedia wikis, counted offline from periodic database dumps using custom Perl scripts written for that purpose. Unfortunately these statistics cannot be seen as "more accurate" versions of the MediaWiki article counts, because Wikistats counts articles in a completely different way.
Wikistats presents two different types of article counts, a so-called "official" count and an "alternate" count. The "official" count uses a link-based criterion that parallels MediaWiki's link-based one, but treats category links (links that place pages into categories) as being equivalent to regular page links, whereas MediaWiki completely ignores category links when counting articles. The "alternate" count is similar, but adds an additional requirement that the page length be at least 200 characters (or 50 characters for certain non-Latin scripts). Neither matches any of the article-counting criteria used in the MediaWiki software. In addition, the Wikistats counts are recalculated every month on the basis of the then-current edit histories of each wiki, meaning that deleted articles "disappear" from all previous monthly counts going back to when those articles were created. To be more specific, if Wikistats reports that a given wiki contains 1000 articles in February 2015, the next month's report might list that wiki as having had only 990 articles in February 2015, if 10 articles that existed in that month were deleted before the next month's report was compiled.
Erik Zachte explains his approach in this way:
| “ | For many years articles which were deleted were widely seen as just bad content, which shouldn't have been there in the first place. My own assessment of what Wikistats page counts meant evolved... into 'the total of number of articles which survived scrutiny/cleaning up', [and therefore] 'the number that should have been presented earlier'. In short, Wikistats is not about total historical articles, but rather about total historical vetted articles. This wasn't by design, it just happened, but I came to see this (and still do) as one valid way of presenting article counts in a meaningful way. | ” |
On 10 May 2012, following a bug report, articles were recounted on all of the language editions of Wiktionary and Wikisource (the articles of which are often called "entries" and "text units", respectively). As reported at Wikimedia News at the time, this caused 8 Wiktionaries to rise to higher milestone levels, and 24 to fall to lower levels; also, 15 Wikisources rose to higher levels and 13 fell to lower levels. 14 Wiktionaries lost all of their entries (a 100% decrease), but all of them had 5 or fewer entries before the change. The total article count of Wiktionary, summed across all language editions, decreased by 220,590 entries (a 1.6% decrease). As for Wikisource, the most extreme changes were seen in the French Wikisource, which increased by 819,297 text units (a 291% increase), and the Thai Wikisource, which decreased by 8,548 text units (a 63% decrease). Including French, 10 Wikisources more than doubled their text units: in fact, the total article count for Wikisource, summed across all language editions, almost exactly doubled, increasing by 1,599,639 text units.
Since it was clear at the time that the articles of Wikimedia's other content projects would also eventually have to be recounted, additional tables were created by a user in May 2012 that showed the changes that would occur if these wikis had their articles recounted. Not surprisingly, it was found that changes of a similar magnitude to those already observed would be seen in the rest of the projects. In particular, 3 Wikipedias, 2 Wikibooks, and 1 Wikiversity would have risen to new milestone levels, whereas 26 Wikipedias, 29 Wikibooks, 30 Wikiquotes, 11 Wikinews, and 2 Wikiversities would have fallen to lower levels (Wikivoyage was not a Wikimedia project at this time). The full information is available for review.
On 29 March 2015, the articles were recounted on all of the languages of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Wikivoyage. Wikibooks was left out because, as previously mentioned, the English and Portuguese Wikibooks use the "comma" criterion to determine articles, and the maintenance script does not correctly implement that counting method. As the Signpost reported last month, 3 wikis rose to higher milestones and 65 wikis fell to lower milestones. The previous report summarizes the major changes seen in those 68 wikis, but more details are available. In addition, among all 679 recounted wikis the most extreme changes were seen in the English Wikisource, which decreased by 281,199 (a 27% drop), and the English Wikipedia, which increased by 97,285 (a 2% rise). The largest relative increase was seen in the Norwegian (Nynorsk) Wikiquote, which rose by 40% (479 pages). One Wikipedia and 14 Wikiquotes lost all of their articles, all of which had 7 or fewer before the change. The mean absolute change was 1340 articles (up or down); the median absolute change was 39 articles. The total article count for all recounted wikis decreased by 551,440, a 0.9% decrease. A full accounting of the observed changes (including changes to total pages and page edits, for comparison) is available.
 | Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. |
As things currently stand, the article-counting script is set to run on the 21st of each month. This should keep the on-wiki article counts reasonably correct from now on. However, there are some remaining issues that should probably be considered by the wider Wikimedia community. In each case, this will require working with the MediaWiki developers to determine which possible decisions could realistically be implemented.
The issues raised above as well as many more technical details on the article-counting problem are presented at Article counts revisited on the Meta-Wiki.
Reader comments
The list is topped this week by Danish scientist Inge Lehmann, thanks to a Google Doodle celebrating her 127th birthday. Lehmann discovered in 1936 that the Earth has a solid inner core. It is sometimes surprising to realize how recently such basic scientific knowledge of the Earth, which we now take for granted, was discovered.
In a generally slow week for news and entertainment, it only took 464,540 views to crack the Top 10 this week, the lowest total of the year by a wide margin – for example, last week it took over 720,000 views to make that mark. This lull led articles with fairly consistent weekly views to rise high, including Deaths in 2015 at #9, and the ever-popular Facebook at #10. The main page had over 208 million views, however, which is higher than we've recently seen. Reader interests were simply more varied this week.
For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.
For the week of May 10 to 16, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inge Lehmann | 
|
1,922,118 | Lehmann (1888–1993) was a Danish seismologist and geophysicist who discovered in 1936 that the Earth has a solid inner core inside a molten outer core. On the 127th anniversary of her birth on May 13, Google honored her with a worldwide Google Doodle. | |
| 2 | Mad Max: Fury Road |
|
1,123,916 |  |
This action film starring Tom Hardy (pictured) in the title role debuted on Australia on May 14 and in the United States the next day. Despite very good reviews it was defeated at the box office in North America by Pitch Perfect 2 (#14), though it was the top release in many other countries. As of May 17, its worldwide box office reached $109.4 million on a budget of $150 million. |
| 3 | Avengers: Age of Ultron | 
|
1,105,364 |  |
The latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe premièred in Hollywood on April 13, and went on wide release on May 1. |
| 4 | Mother's Day |
|
945,291 |  |
The second Sunday in May (that's May 10 to all you ingrates who forgot) is far and away the most popular time of year to celebrate Mother's Day, and, even as the day fell, panicked college students in all participating countries rushed to their computers to learn they'd blown it. And then sent e-cards, perhaps. |
| 5 | B.B. King | 
|
875,051 |  |
This legendary American blues singer and guitarist put down his Lucille for the last time, dying in Las Vegas on May 14 at the age of 89. |
| 6 | Mad Max |
|
661,735 |  |
The 1979 film starring Mel Gibson (pictured) that started the Mad Max franchise, albeit one that had not released a film since 1985 until now. |
| 7 | Game of Thrones (season 5) |
|
649,169 |  |
Episode 5 for this season ("Kill the Boy") debuted on May 10. |
| 8 | The Flash (2014 TV series) |
|
569,089 |  |
This spinoff from the hit series Arrow marks DC Comics' second attempt to create a TV universe, after the late and much lamented DC Animated Universe. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2015 | 
|
516,509 |  |
A slow traffic week means that the 516,509 views this article had this week, within the remarkably constant total between 450 and 550,000 seen every week, places it in the top 10. Deaths this week included Indian historian Ninad Bedekar, pictured at left (May 10), Belgian author Jef Geeraerts (May 11), Australian serial killer William McDonald (May 12), Russian middle-distance runner Nina Otkalenko (May 13), American Astrophysicist Stanton J. Peale (May 14), Uruguayan writer Carlos Maggi (May 15), and American BASE jumper Dean Potter (May 16), who died during a wingsuit jump. If you want to make it into the deaths list on Wikipedia, I hate to say it, but BASE jumping will raise your chances immeasurably. |
| 10 |
|
464,540 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article, also in the Top 10 in a slow traffic week. |
Wikipedia editors logging in on May 19 found themselves walking into an unexpected amount of anti-vandal work to keep the site in line with its extensive biographies of living persons policy. A plethora of Wikipedia articles related to the United States House Committee on Appropriations, and the five representatives serving on it, have been hit by a raft of anonymous editors making often vulgar edits referencing "chicken fucker," or more creative combinations: "sexual conduct", "sexual congress", "fornicator", "intimate relations", or "trysts with chickens."
This unusual burst of interest in a congressional committee can be traced back to a talk show on HBO.
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight is a popular late-night satirical news show on HBO, a premium cable network. Oliver, a British comedian, was a correspondent on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but his big break came when he was given the opportunity to guest-host the show for eight weeks in summer 2013. His success there directly led to Last Week Tonight, where he has crafted his own niche with lengthy and in-depth looks into serious topics with a comedic and satirical voice.
The show's signature voice emerged "almost as a dare," the Associated Press reported in February, when Oliver and the show's writers decided to do an extended twelve-minute segment on the very serious topic of the death penalty. As he said before launching in head first, "I know what you’re thinking. ... Wait, you’re not really going to do a comic take on the death penalty, right? It’s your second episode—I haven't even decided if I like this show yet!" When uploaded to YouTube, the piece was quickly viewed millions of times, and the show has replicated this success; his subsequent rant on net neutrality has been credited by the press with drawing attention to and helping turn the tide against the plans of Comcast and other US Internet providers.
While Oliver has thus far largely avoided Wikipedia until this week, the encyclopedia has been a frequent target of other late-night shows. Stephen Colbert of the now-former Colbert Report, another satirical news show inspired by the Daily Show, made the encyclopedia the subject of a number of segments. For example, in a 2006 segment, Colbert claimed to have vandalized the articles Oregon and elephant, inspiring vandalism aping the edits mentioned on the show (see previous Signpost coverage). Just last week on the Daily Show, Stewart himself called for vandalizing the article on US President Warren G. Harding in a May 12 segment.
Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight followed a similar format: after taking aim at the US Patriot Act (on the USA Freedom Act passing the House of Representatives: "A meaningful bill passing with broad, bipartisan support. It's like discovering yourself sexually for the first time. I don't know what this sensation is, but I think I like it, and I want it to happen again."), Sepp Blatter's FIFA, and the Australian agriculture minister, they moved into a more than 18-minute-long segment on the plight of chicken farmers in the US.
As Oliver tells it, independent chicken farmers are contracted by the four major chicken producers in the United States—Perdue Farms, Pilgrim's Pride, Sanderson Farms, and Tyson Foods—to raise the chickens. These companies control the money-making parts of the operations, dropping off chicks and picking up fully-grown chickens a month later, while off-loading the significant costs of property, construction, upkeep, and equipment to the farmers. This upkeep is not inexpensive; the companies continually add to their required equipment, such as when they told their farmers to convert their chicken-holding buildings into tunnel houses to limit chickens' movement (thus fattening them). Those who refused to do so would immediately lose their contracts. These individuals can be easily penalized; they are graded on the quality of chickens they produce, and those not performing up to par can and do see their promised payments cut by up to half.
Complicating matters further, Oliver writes, is that there is little to no whistleblower protection for these farmers. If they speak up, farmers believe that they are given more of the "8, 9, 10" chickens—that is, the unhealthiest chicks on a 1–10 scale—and have their payments cut. There is a law on the books to prevent this from happening, but Steve Womack, the representative from Arkansas's 3rd congressional district—the home of Tyson's global headquarters and recipient of almost $70,000 from Tyson alone since 2011—has championed an annual rider that prevents the US government from enforcing its provisions.
Meanwhile, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur crafted an amendment that would have prevented chicken producers from retaliating against farmers who speak up, but it was voted down. This set the stage for the closing minutes of Oliver's show:
"There is actually a glimmer of hope [for chicken farmers]. That same committee is set to meet again next month, and Marcy Kaptur might again try to pass a provision protecting farmers from retaliation. And if she does, let me use the chicken companies' weapon against them. I'm talking, of course, of using jangly guitar music to convince you that everything I'm about to say is true."
Standing in front a screen with the faces, names, and states of congressmen and women, he continued. "There are fifty-one voting members on the committee. These are their names and their states. If your representative's name is up there, and they vote against Marcy Kaptur's amendment, it is because they—and I cannot stress this enough—are chicken fuckers. They fuck chickens. That's what they do. Every day, every which way."
He concluded with an explicit threat, using Wikipedia as the stick and the vote as a carrot: "unless they want that chicken fucker label to follow them for the rest of their lives, they might want to think extra carefully about which way they are going to vote, because "chicken fucker" accusations do not come off a Wikipedia page easily. Or if they do, they tend to go right back up. Because chicken producers may be able to retaliate against chicken farmers for speaking out, but they cannot prevent us, as one, from screaming "chicken fucker" at the top of our lungs if any of these people votes against the farmers in this tiny, tiny amendment. All potential chicken fuckers here [pointing at the screen]. Don't be one of them, that's all we're saying. That's our show."
Inevitably, vandals descended on the articles of Committee members, regardless of how they voted on the amendment. Even Kaptur's article was vandalized by an IP editor complaining about her supposedly being against the amendment she herself offered. Many administrators participated in reverting the vandalism and protecting articles, and one created an edit filter to flag edits adding variations on the phrase "chicken fucker." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Steve Womack's page was heavily hit, leading to nearly one hundred edits in the last few days. At least 36 other articles were also vandalized during the spree.
In an administrator's noticeboard discussion, editors discussed what EEng called Oliver's "Crimes most foul." Some suggested writing to Oliver and Jon Stewart, Oliver's former boss. Kevin Rutherford wrote that they should be asked to "abstain from encouraging mass-vandalism, because it causes a lot of trouble on our end". Others responded that such an effort would be futile. MarnetteD noted noted that "they are entertainers ... they and their staff could care less about what happens with Wikipedia articles."
On the other side, editors like Chillum commented on the biographies of living persons noticeboard in support of the editing freedom: "to a lot of people shaming politicians is far more important than an online encyclopedia. Without this sort of political mockery we would probably not have the freedom we need to run this project." MastCell found it hard to be angry with Oliver "when he has the smartest and funniest show on television."
Berean Hunter, however, came out as one of the strongest voices against Oliver's actions. On-wiki, he said that "we need to send Mr. Oliver this special delivery from all of his friends at Wikipedia." When contacted by the Signpost, he went farther:
| “ | It is irresponsible and unethical behavior whether there is humor in it or not. The exploitation of non-profit organizations and their volunteers doesn't usually bode well when perpetrated by any public figure at any time and there is nothing different in this circumstance. It is seriously time consuming for the volunteers that do not find the vandalism amusing since they have to clean up the mess. ...
Pulling such stunts reflect negatively on him and public view could turn on him with a boomerang effect. It isn't too terribly clever or impressive to provoke destructive actions en masse for the sake of humor. If you want to be clever, try steering the same crowd towards doing something far more productive and meaningful for the sake of humor instead of wasting the potential. Try inspiring others into helping people rather than hurting them. He ought to make a hefty donation as an atonement to help support Wikipedia as well as spend some time in the trenches with our fellow editors to gain more insight into the effects of his actions. |
” |
Oliver's segment was featured in numerous brief media stories, including ones in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Time, and Deadline, but none appear to have looked into how Oliver's suggestion affected Wikipedia.
The Signpost emailed Quentin Schaffer and Jeff Cusson, the press contacts for HBO, with a copy deadline of 21:00 UTC Wednesday. They did not reply.
Three featured articles were promoted this week.
7 featured lists were promoted this week.
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Seven featured pictures were promoted this week.
Jimmy Wales and five others accepted the 2015 Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University on May 17. The laureates had been announced earlier this year (See previous Signpost coverage). First awarded in 2002, the prize "recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. It aims to foster universal values of excellence, creativity, justice, democracy and progress and to promote the scientific, technological and humanistic achievements that advance and improve our world." The prize comes with US$1 million, ten percent of which goes to doctoral and postdoctoral scholarships.
In an interview (May 20) with the Jerusalem Post, the Post noted that "Wales wants Wikipedia to be an agent of change, and he believes it has the tools to help set oppressed societies free and bridge conflicts." Wales spoke of the progress and obstacles Wikipedia has faced in providing access to citizens of restrictive governments like Russia and China. Wales mentioned that a group of Russian and Ukrainian editors had peacefully met together despite the conflict between their two governments. He said "The overwhelming bulk of people in the world are perfectly nice people who wouldn’t do horrible things. So the possibility exists to create spaces where that overwhelming majority of perfectly sensible people dominate, and that’s the big lesson from Wikipedia – that people can collaborate, people can behave themselves."
Wales discussed some of the same themes in a May 18 op-ed in Haaretz written with Orit Kopel, CEO of the Jimmy Wales Foundation. They write about how "oppressive regimes" attempt to fight against the access to information brought to their citizens by the Internet and Wikipedia. The conclude:
| “ | The free flow of information is one of the key elements of a functioning democracy. The information revolution has granted us the opportunity to join forces and increase our collective power by sharing our knowledge. While many of us around the world enjoy the fruits of the information revolution, we must not leave behind the people who are still subject to oppressive regimes and are restricted from freely enjoying it. Ultimately, these are the people who need it the most. | ” |
The piece singles out Kazakhstan for specific criticism, noting that the government has the ability to "block websites and shut off communication networks without a court order" and restricted journalists from "publishing information about the corruption of public officials", and that bloggers and activists fear "government reprisal". In previous years, Wales has been criticized for alleged links to the Kazakh government after naming a government official the 2011 Wikipedian of the Year (see previous Signpost coverage). The Jimmy Wales Foundation, which has little Internet presence besides a LinkedIn page and a Twitter account, is dedicated to the "fight against human rights violations in the field of freedom of expression". It was formed following criticism of Wales' acceptance of the 2014 Knowledge Award from the United Arab Emirates, a government which, according to Human Rights Watch, "has continued to crack down on freedom of expression and association" (see previous Signpost coverage).
Similar issues came up in an article (May 18) from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about Wales' views and the encyclopedia's coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Wales declared "I’m a strong supporter of Israel" for "all of the standard reasons — the support for freedom of speech is very important to me, the rights of women, proper democracy. You can support all those things while still having criticism of actions and policies that aren't good." Of course, Wales also supported presenting the issue neutrally on Wikipedia: "You present what all sides have said and leave it to the reader to come to the answer." G, AK
This week, we had the pleasure of interviewing WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, which has come a long way since our last interview in 2008. Like most projects, it has a long member list, but only a small subset of that group regularly contributes. With 28 featured articles and 58 top-importance start class ones, the project has clearly had some success, but has a ways to go. We talked to three regular project contributors.
The Arbitration Committee has an unusually large case load at present. Although perhaps not on a par with the high-profile, multi-party cases seen towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year, with five open cases the arbitrators are likely to be kept busy for the next several weeks.
Collect and others and American politics 2 were opened simultaneously after a single case request. This request focused on the conduct of Collect—a prominent and sometimes controversial editor on articles related to American politics—both in that topic area and elsewhere on Wikipedia. The filing party, MrX, alleged that Collect's editing demonstrated a "battleground mentality", which manifested itself in edit-warring and other combative behaviour. Collect rebutted that the case request was vexatious and grounded in a minor content dispute. During the evidence phase, several editors accused Collect of attempting to game the system in content disputes, disingenuously invoking the biographies of living persons policy ("BLP") to justify his position in disputes, misrepresenting source material, edit-warring, and other misconduct. A handful of editors submitted evidence in Collect's defence, praising his use of the BLP policy and suggesting that the case was politically motivated. The committee's final decision was posted on 10 May, with the result that Collect was topic-banned from American politics and subject to a one-revert restriction. Although almost two weeks elapsed between the posting of the proposed decision and the closure of the case, no drastically different remedies were discussed.
As mentioned above, this case was opened concurrently with the Collect and others case; this one has a wider scope, and is intended to evaluate the conduct of multiple editors—at the time of writing, the list of parties contains 22 names (including Collect), making it the largest the committee has handled for some time (for comparison, the long and acrimonious GamerGate case had 27 named parties, see the Signpost's coverage). Despite the apparently broad scope, participation in the case has been relatively sparse—six editors presented evidence and only one made proposals in the workshop. The proposed decision is two weeks overdue, but such delays are not unusual for large cases, especially when the committee has a large caseload.
This unusual case was opened on 23 April to examine a block, and related accusations, made by checkuser, admin, and former arbitrator Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry (talk · contribs). Chase me ladies blocked an account he believed was being used by (or on behalf of) Grant Shapps, a senior UK politician (see previous coverage in ITM). It emerged that Chase me ladies' actions were prompted by the receipt of evidence from a journalist at The Guardian (a left-leaning newspaper which had previously criticised Shapps), and several editors raised concerns about his handling of the case. Due to the potential sensitivity of the matter, the committee is hearing the case entirely in camera. The period for evidence submission has passed (after having briefly been re-opened until 18 May), and a proposed decision is now due by 26 May.
The main party to this case, OccultZone requested this case himself after being involved in a series of disputes and noticeboard threads which resulted in his being briefly blocked four times and three of those blocks being reversed by other administrators. OccultZone alleges that several administrators have behaved improperly towards him and that the blocks were unjust; other editors allege that—since the incident which led to the first block (on 23 March this year)—OccultZone has embarked on a pattern of disruptive editing, including accusing opponents in disputes of sock-puppetry, and has failed to heed advice to modify his behaviour. OccultZone observes that some of his accusations of sock-puppetry have been proven at least partially accurate. Evidence closed on 14 May, and several proposals are under discussion in the workshop. The target date for the committee's proposed decision is 28 May.
Opened on 3 May, this case was requested to examine the conduct of Lightbreather (talk · contribs), whose involvement in topics relating to gun control and to Wikipedia's gender gap (both sensitive topics on Wikipedia, prone to heated disagreement between editors) has been a source of controversy for around the last year. The case focuses on accusations that Lightbreather, who is a party to four interaction bans, has perennially behaved disruptively and that community-based attempts to address the problem have failed. Lightbreather, meanwhile, alleges that she has been harassed by other editors, and has requested that another eight editors be added as parties in order for their conduct to be examined as far as it affects Lightbreather. Due to the unusual number of interaction bans among editors mentioned in the case, the committee has waived interaction bans for the purposes of presenting evidence, and for the other phases of the case has decided to treat all one-way interaction bans as though they were two-way. The case has generated controversy elsewhere on Wikipedia, as requests have been made to two arbitrators to recuse themselves from the case (GorillaWarfare, who some felt was biased in favour of Lightbreather, and Salvio giuliano, who some felt was biased against Lightbreather); neither request was granted, resulting in a request to the remainder of the committee to forcibly recuse Salvio giuliano—a request which was debated internally by the committee and denied. A proposed decision is anticipated by the twice-revised date of 16 June.
At the time of writing, there are three open clarification and amendment requests, relating to Infoboxes. Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and Scientology respectively. At the time of publication, none had gained significant traction.
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