In November 2019, the nonprofit Internet Society announced that it had reached a $1.1 billion deal with a fledgling private equity investment firm, Ethos Capital, to sell the Public Interest Registry and thus its control of the .org web domain. Dot-org has been under the stewardship of the Internet Society since it was founded in 1985 for use by nonprofit organizations, and managed through the PIR since 2003. The domain has been available to for-profit enterprises in recent years. The sale blindsided many web leaders, while the Internet Society explained that it was focusing on other goals and was not keen on spending its time managing domains. Hundreds of nonprofits voiced their objection, raising fears that Ethos would raise prices or attempt to censor information or sell data gleaned from hosting their websites.

In 2013, wiki and open source websites made up the largest share of users of .org, holding 22% of the registered domains.^[1] According to Alexa Internet, as of the time of writing Wikipedia has the highest volume of traffic of any global website that uses the .org domain, ranking as the 13th most used website.^[2]

Reuters broke the news early this month that a group of concerned internet nonprofit leaders were appealing to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to block the sale, and had moved to create a nonprofit cooperative, the Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants, as an alternative buyer of the .org domain. Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Katherine Maher has offered herself to be one of seven directors of the new cooperative. She told Reuters, "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit." Maher also said that the organization was not offering a competing bid for .org, but wishes to obtain it to safeguard its integrity and ensure that the sites it hosts are not subject to censorship. The NonProfit Times added that a few members of the United States Congress have declared their opposition to the sale.

Last month's Constitutional Court decision in Turkey did not have immediate effect, as pointed out by Wikipedian John Lubbock in the Ahval News story "Wikipedia is good for the Turkish economy and education sector - but it's still being blocked". Five days after Lubbock's article and three weeks after the Constitutional Court ruled against the ban "Turkey Lifts More Than 2-Year Block of Wikipedia" according to the Associated Press.

Other sites reporting on the ban being lifted include WMF News "Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years".

Snøhetta Selected to Design the New Visual Identity for the Open-Source Platform Wikipedia: Snøhetta is a successful Norwegian architecture/design firm. Eight companies competed for the contract, according to Aftenposten (in Norwegian). A joint WMF-Snøhetta webpage has been set up. Community consultations will be held.

• Techcrunch is the first to notice that the English Wikipedia has six million articles, with their story soon translated into Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish. Other English-language media including The Economic Times of India covered the story.
• We're number 2 (we used to be number 1) YouTube's Organic Visibility Tops Wikipedia in Google SERPs. That's Search Engine Results Pages, meaning that YouTube now appears more often than Wikipedia on the first page of Google search results.
• Beware of malware: Gadget and some other outlets have reported on recent, unsettling findings by Kaspersky Lab researchers into Shlayer, a group of Trojan horse malware programs that target macOS. One method by which the malware was spread was through links which, when clicked by unsuspecting victims, downloaded the program. The researchers found that even Wikipedia had been affected, as "such links were hidden in the articles' references. Users that clicked on these links would also get redirected to the Shlayer download landing pages." The full report on the findings can be found here.
• The Sum of What? On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia: Author Kirsten Menger-Anderson reviews the number of women academics cited in Wikipedia articles on literature and mathematics on Undark. She finds that women are generally cited much less often than their male peers in both categories, and noted that Wikimedia's list of 31 writers essential for every language Wikipedia includes no women. Ultimately, she suggests that Wikipedia's gender bias is a product of both its own features and pre-existing disparities in the academic community.
• Fighting fake news: Omer Benjakob of Haaretz writes about Wikipedia cracking down on misinformation and blocking sources deemed untrustworthy, and thinks we do a whole lot better job of it than social media giant Facebook.
• Wikipedia caught up in Indian liability changes: Tech Crunch reports on proposed changes to Indian liability regulations that require web "intermediaries" to better identify content creators and filter what they produce to avoid legal liability. The move has generated an outcry from the tech community, including WMF general counsel Amanda Keton, who warned that such action could interfere with the functioning of Wikipedia.
• An Introduction to Python for SEO Pros Using Spreadsheets: An article on how Python can be used to manipulate data extracted from Wikipedia, another example of Wikipedia being used to teach programming. Cf. Recent Research: "Wikipedia as a learning resource (for programmers)".

• External audio
  The Story Behind Wikipedia, 23:37, Innovation Hub (WGBH and PRX)[3]

  Wikipedia's Volunteer Army: Media expert Andrew Lih is interviewed by WGBH (FM) (Boston) on how Wikipedia works.
• Meet the 9 Wikipedia bots that make the world's largest encyclopedia possible (see also our earlier review of the underlying research paper: "First census of Wikipedia bots")
• Katherine Maher interviewed: The WMF Director shares her thoughts (in Spanish) on Wikipedia's usefulness and its future with artificial intelligence to The Clinic.

There were four main instances real-world politics and allegations coming up on Wikipedia this month in the form of vandalism or sharp content alterations, accompanied by an unusual enthusiasm for criminal investigations. The Signpost would like to advise political actors that Wikipedia is not a court of public opinion.

• Policing vandalism or ownership by the police? In a strange display of both vandalism and apparent government assertion of ownership of content, an IP editor "cyber criminal" inserted disparaging language into the Uttar Pradesh Police article, which the real-world department discovered and reverted, as reported by The Times of India. The apparent police editor account, User:Patroitwarrior, also took the chance to insert that the department is "one of the finest and technologically advanced police forces in the world". Director General of Police for technical services Asim Arun confirmed to the Times that the department was responsible for the reversions, saying "Within hours [of being notified], the department removed the objectionable content." Arun continued, "We value the Wiki principles of sharing of information, but will take steps to prevent such vandalism. We are trying to identify the culprit and will lodge an FIR." An admin stepped in to admonish Patroitwarrior to disclose any COIs and protected the Uttar Pradesh Police page to prevent further vandalism.
• "Sunda imperialism" or trolling overblown? CNN Indonesia and Tempo have reported on what appears to be an overblown incident of vandalism. An IP editor altered the article for the United Nations to say that the first session of the UN General Assembly was held in Indonesia instead of the United Kingdom. Though the vandalism was quickly reverted, politician and self-proclaimed internet "expert" Roy Suryo decided to bring it to the attention of the Jakarta Police, accusing a mysterious social media group known as the "Sunda Empire" of being responsible. Spreading fake news across electronic media is illegal in Indonesia, and police have opened an investigation.
• Aspersions against a Dutch politician lead to Maltese parliamentary inquiry: The Shift News reported that an IP address added information to the article for Pieter Omtzigt in October 2019, accusing him of paying bribes while investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to secure fake evidence that the plane's crash was Ukraine's fault and absolve Russia of suspicion. The IP address is used by a government ministry in Malta. Omtzigt suggested that this was related to his investigation into the death of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, which was not warmly received by the Maltese government. The accusation has since been removed from the Wikipedia article. Later, the Times of Malta wrote that the incident led to questions being raised in Parliament, following which the Ministry of Education declared that it had, after conducting a "technical investigation", located the responsible editor, a contract employee, and dismissed them. Maltese MP Jason Azzopardi took to Twitter to demand that the culprit's name be made public and that they be brought up on criminal charges. Minister for Home Affairs Byron Camilleri assured Parliament that police had concluded that no crime was committed. The Signpost surmises that Azzopardi might have to contact authorities in Uttar Pradesh or Indonesia to get his wish.
• British politician apparently COI edits out mentions of his financial conflicts of interest: According to an article in The Independent, British Member of Parliament Stuart Anderson "appears to have edited his own Wikipedia page". An account named "Stuart Anderson MP" removed "references to funding that one of his companies received from the EU and information about illegal dividends that he was paid". The account was warned about conflict of interest guidelines and then blocked pending a change of username or confirmation of identity. A Signpost request for information from Anderson's new parliamentary e-mail account received an automated response saying that since Anderson was newly elected, a response would be delayed.

• The tax man says Strass: What do Australians and New Zealanders call a Boloney-like substance that before WWI was called "German sausage". According to the Wikipedia article it's "polony," "luncheon sausage," "Belgium," "devon," "Windsor sausage" and "fritz". "Bung Fritz" is incorrect because that delicacy includes sheep appendices. According to Gizmodo Australia on January 16 someone at the Australian Tax Office added another name variant that same day, "Strass". The ATO issued a gentle reminder that their employees should confine their use of office computers to official business. The article raises three important questions. Don't ATO employees have anything better to do than put "Strass" into Wikipedia articles? Don't Gizmodo journalists have anything better to write about than this? And what do Ozzies call salami?
• The tax man knows where all the skeletons are buried: In the latest incarnation of the meme "He doesn't have an article on Wikipedia, so he must not be very important," CNN announced Mikhail Mishustin didn't have an English Wikipedia page on Wednesday morning. A day later, he's Russia's prime minister. The Russian-language Wikipedia has had an article on Mishustin, the former head of the Russian Federal Tax Service, since 2010.
• Captain America thinks Wikipedia articles are too long: Chris Evans, who has played superhero Captain America in ten films, is founding a new website dedicated to showing one-minute videos of politicians explaining basic topics in the news such as DACA and NAFTA. According to Slate, Evans's motivations include the belief that people would rather get the information from politicians in a short video than in Wikipedia articles, which are too long to read. The Signpost suggests that he freely license the videos so that Wikipedia can put them in our articles if his website is taken down.
• Obsessed with Wikipedia 'personal life' entries? You're not alone. by Emily Yahr in The Washington Post. Did you know that Joe Pesci broke the same rib, 15 years apart, both times while filming a Martin Scorsese directed movie? And that Pesci's second wife was convicted of attempted murder-for-hire aimed at another of her ex-husbands. Wikipedia's personal life sections have got to be better than soap operas.
• We don't usually cite the crypto press here, but Decrypt's Do "no-coiners" gate-keep Crypto Wikipedia? send up of admin and crypto-skeptic David Gerard is almost as good as Gerard's Signpost contribution this month.

The article count on en-Wiki surpassed 6,000,000 at about 18:59 UTC on January 23. Due to the limitations of the software and the volume of article creations at about that time, it is impossible to determine exactly when the milestone was reached. The symbolic 6,000,000th article was decided by consensus to be Maria Elise Turner Lauder written by User:Rosiestep. She told The Signpost

I woke up at about 3:30 AM the morning of January 23rd. Unable to go right back to sleep, I went into the living room. I opened up my laptop to Wikipedia and noticed we were a few hundred articles shy of the 6 millionth article. I decided to create an article about a woman writer, my preferred focus, on the chance that when I would be ready to click Save, it would miraculously be the right moment.

Why do I focus on women writers? Well, my grandmother and my mom were writers, and I've become one too – an encyclopedist. I founded WP:WikiProject Women writers. I'm a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University's Women Writers Project.

Without a particular article in mind, I reviewed this list for inspiration, and considered the redlinks. When I checked out Maria Elise Turner Lauder, I noticed that there was a substantial article about her on Wikisource, plus a photo. I googled her and found enough to create a decent article, what would become the first edit; but, I didn't Save it yet. If I had saved the article, I would have felt compelled to improve it before going back to sleep, but I was too tired. The article counter was moving up slowly, still a few hundred articles shy of 6,000,000.

I went back to sleep. When I got up, I checked the counter, and saw that we hadn't reached 6,000,000 yet. When it reached 5,999,996, I clicked Save on the Lauder article, but it didn't save, forcing me to click a second time. That was it. Then I went about my regular business of improving the article. Eventually, I knew, there would be an announcement on article #6,000,000. The Lauder article would be the lucky one, or it wouldn't. Of course, I was very happy with the news that it was the milestone article. Congratulations to you, Wikipedia, and to all the editors who contributed articles on January 23, 2020. Six million is a "drop in the bucket," there are many more articles still to write. I look forward to working with editors from everywhere as we write more, edit more, and collaborate more. Look out, article #7,000,000; we're headed in your direction.

Congratulations to Rosiestep and to all editors who contributed to the last million new articles.

Coffeeandcrumbs told The Signpost in detail how the symbolic article was chosen, saying it is impossible to exactly identify the 6,000,000th article. "We don't know if a redirect (with an old creation date) that was converted to an article or disambiguation page was what brought us over the threshold, or which of the new articles created that same minute was the one. Like in all things on Wikipedia, consensus should reign supreme and consensus determined that Rosiestep's article deserved recognition."

Fifteen articles which were created at 18:59 UTC on January were screened for quality. The entire decision process may be viewed at Wikipedia talk:Six million articles.

What can be said about six million articles? As usual, Wikipedia's editors provide the answer. A chance view of a user talk page told us:

"6 million is starting to get to be a serious figure, but only a tiny fraction of what is possible of course. A truly resourceful comprehensive encyclopedia in which every article is the highest possible quality is going to take hundreds of years without a doubt. I am certain that Wikipedia will still be around in 2100, even if this evolves into something like a 3D encyclopedia ... You never know!" –Dr. Blofeld

To which another editor responded:

"I keep marveling at how poor our coverage even of American topics is, and of course that's light-years better than our coverage of many other countries. If our American coverage is so spotty, imagine what that means for the rest of the world. We have a long way to go yet..." –Ser Amantio di Nicolao

Your answers and comments are requested in the comments section below.

Fourteen heritage sites, known collectively as Paris Musées, announced that 100,000 digitized files in its collections are now licensed CC-0.

Paris Musées, which holds many masterpieces, is the first Parisian institution to so license its public domain files. They can be downloaded in High Definition via a dedicated API. Wikimedia France (in French) has a formal partnership with Paris Musées and will help import images and data to Wikimedia commons and Wikidata.

The Creative Commons annual summit will be held from May 14–16 in Lisbon, Portugal. Proposals for presentations are due February 12. The overlap of Wikipedia's goal with those of CC, which provides Wikipedia with our free content licenses, is shown by the tracks for the presentations: "Creators of the Commons; Powering the Commons" (about tools, technology and communities); "Open Education and Open Scholarship"; "Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums"; and "Policy and Advocacy promoting the Commons".

Citizendium, one of Larry Sanger's failed encyclopedia projects, may be officially closing. Two of its four active editors have agreed that Citizendium "is simply not going to be a viable project as an encyclopedia." They wish to "deliberately wrap up this project by exporting any useful content to Wikipedia, closing the wiki to editing, posting an archived copy to the Internet Archive and directing possible readers there, and use remaining funds to secure the domain name for a long time with some small hosting overhead for a single landing page."

The Signpost recommends care in importing Citizendium articles into Wikipedia. WikiProject Citizendium Porting may be useful in these imports, but the WikiProject has been mostly inactive since 2010.

Angus Merker McLellan was a Wikipedia administrator and long-term contributor to the project, known for his work on articles about related to Scotland, and about the Middle Ages. He passed away on November 15, 2019 after a brief battle with lymphoma.
— Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians

Brianboulton's obituary may be viewed here.

The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's four newest administrators who passed RfA this month:

• Wugapodes
• QEDK
• Nick Moyes and
• Ergo Sum

As well as editing on Wikipedia since 2004, David Gerard wrote a book on why cryptocurrencies and blockchains are terrible — all of them — which he's too modest to link here. David apologises for the usage of the short form "crypto" in this article, which, sadly, is accepted finance jargon now. You can treat it as short for "cryptosporidium".

Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of magical Internet money: cryptocurrency. The idea is a form of currency that has no central controller — you can just trade it as digital cash, directly. And no-one can stop you.

Of course, it's all a lot more complicated than that: the crypto world has attracted an unholy melange of idiosyncratic economics, ultra-libertarian politics, bright-eyed naïve hopefuls ... and scammers, to prey upon them. So, so many scammers.

Whenever there's a whole new paradigm of money, and the old rules of finance just don't apply any more — the promoters show up on Wikipedia as well! And we delete their spam, and block the worst offenders. But there are always more.

Blockchain, as a buzzword, is the enterprise-friendly version of the Bitcoin idea — that a decentralised database something like this, with or without a central controller, could make business work better.

Enterprise "blockchain" has serious problems. The hype was literally copied from Bitcoin hype with the buzzword changed, the press releases don't distinguish "actually does" from "could hypothetically", there's still no real-world production systems where the blockchain bit actually does anything ... and its promoters are just as enthusiastic about getting their vapourware into Wikipedia.

I write about this stuff, go on TV as a public expert, and have strong opinions on the topic — but here, I'm just another Wikipedia editor who knows the area, would like it properly covered by Wikipedia, and has to cite his claims like anyone else.

I don't have any special powers to declare how a topic area should be edited — even one with floods of financially-conflicted drive-by editing. Many others on WikiProject Cryptocurrency will disagree with my opinions here! But we all want the area to be good, and not spammy.

This is a good worked example of a perennial Wikipedia issue: how can we properly cover an area with notable topics, but that has a massive spam problem?

The answer that worked for the cryptocurrency area: strong reliable sources.

Scams with real victims

Despite the past hype, cryptocurrency doesn't affect the real economy that much — and media interest is through the floor since the 2017 cryptocurrency bubble popped. (At least until Facebook foolishly thinks starting a crypto is a good idea.)

But covering it properly is actually important — because people look stuff up in Wikipedia, and they trust us, and assume we've done our best.

The usual way to do financial fraud is to make your target feel like they're more of a big shot than they are. They put their money into your ill-regulated financial scheme, where they could win big!! ... and they get burned, and lose everything.

The cryptocurrency world plays at doing finance — but it's pretty much unregulated, with none of the safety nets that most people assume any reasonable financial product would have. You can get rich from cryptocurrency! And you can also lose your shirt.

Some crypto disasters, like the collapse of Mt. Gox, seem to be from well-meaning individuals being seriously out of their depth. Quadriga seems to have been a money laundering chop shop run by a serial scammer who may have faked his own death. (It's sadly unsurprising how often crypto scammers turn out to be serial scammers.) Others, like OneCoin or Bitconnect, were straight-up Ponzi schemes. ICOs are unregulated, and frequently fraudulent, unregistered penny stocks that only work as long as the whole market is on the upslope of a bubble.

One of the reasons we have financial regulation for retail investors is that, without it, the mum-and-dad investors get skinned — every time.

User:MER-C notes that in a world with financial predators, "this is a topic that is almost as sensitive as medicine."

But you gotta hear about this one!!

The crypto bubble of 2017 brought such a stupendous flood of promotional rubbish that the administrators' noticeboard was flat-out dealing with the proponents. Even after the 2018 crash, the ongoing firehose of spam and spammers was such that the call for general sanctions on cryptocurrency and blockchain articles got unanimous support.

And so we have: General sanctions/Blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Look through these restrictions — where promotional or tendentious editing risks a general topic ban or even a year's ban from Wikipedia, and pages may be protected or semi-protected, or "any other reasonable measure that the enforcing administrator believes is necessary and proportionate".

Contemplate, for a moment, just how bad an area must have become to need that level of sanction.

Our entire crypto problem — and the reason the general sanctions for crypto articles exist — is a stupendous conflict of interest: how desperately these guys want to spam Wikipedia.

They'll even hire PR firms, expecting them to generate an article that sticks. (That agency was wise enough to demur — though they tried to blame a cabal of "no-coiners.")

There's good reason that "holding a cryptocurrency" is listed as a financial conflict of interest for Wikipedia editing about that currency.

Reliable sources are your best friend

But plenty of crypto and blockchain stuff is genuinely notable, and we should cover it properly. How do we hold off the flood of financially-interested spammers, while we try to write an encyclopedia?

Regular editors in the crypto area have come to a rough working consensus on sourcing — we stick to strong reliable sources (commonly abbreviated WP:RS) only. Mainstream press or peer-reviewed academic sources. Since the 2017 bubble, there's plenty of mainstream press coverage — the financial press is increasingly well-informed on the topic — and academics have always found the area interesting.

No crypto blogs, no crypto news sites — because these look like specialist trade press, but they're really about advocacy: promoting their hodlings. Many are blatantly pay for play, and very few ever saw a press release with "blockchain" in it that they wouldn't reprint.

This isn't a written sourcing rule — but the editors following crypto tend to enforce it in practice, and anything other than solid third-party RSes in an article is a death sentence at articles for deletion. But, solid sourcing means it'll live!

Off-wiki crypto advocates complain regularly, but the rule has stuck — because the Reliable Sources principle is solid, and what we're applying here is basic Wikipedia rules.

(I'm arguably speaking against my own personal interest there — I make some money as a crypto journalist, often publishing in these very sites. I know my stuff is good, and my editors are good, and my friends are good journalists! But I also know that if some subject or fact isn't noteworthy enough to make it into mainstream or peer-reviewed sources, it's probably not noteworthy enough for Wikipedia.)

Wikipedia also has many editors who are fans of cryptocurrency and blockchains, who have realised that WP:RS is an excellent and effective way to make our articles better! Because they're tired of the crypto spammers too.

If you love cryptos and I hate them, WP:RS lets us work together.

If your own favourite topic area has a spam problem, get strict on sourcing.

Scammers and spammers are eternal — but we don't have to let them ply their trade on Wikipedia. Neutral Point of View, informed by Reliable Sources, is — as always — our best protection against promotional nonsense.

There are three open cases, all involving administrators, now in different phases at the Arbitration Committee.

A case against RHaworth, who has been an administrator for over 14 years, was proposed by Tony Ballioni for improperly unblocking an editor who had been blocked by a checkuser. The workshop phase has now closed, with the proposed decision set to open today.

The Proposed decision is progressing quickly. All 15 arbitrators are active on the case, including the newly elected arbs. The two participants are BrownHairedGirl, who argues strongly against portals, and Northamerica1000 who has been editing them. Votes for proposed remedies suggest that BrownHairedGirl could be desysopped and admonished for incivility. There are currently no proposed remedies targeting Northamerica1000.

A case against Kudpung has opened and is in the evidence phase. The original case was brought by Guerillero for alleged incivility by Kudpung. That matter appeared to have been solved by an apology, but as sometimes happens other editors made other complaints, including incivility and conduct unbecoming of an admin. Kudpung is a former editor-in-chief of The Signpost. Chris.sherlock cited the alleged incivility in the evidence phase. Recused arb GorillaWarfare contributed the longest section on the page. Four other arbs have recused themselves, Beeblebrox, Newyorkbrad, Worm That Turned, and DGG. The evidence phase is scheduled to close on January 28, 2020. The workshop is scheduled for a February 4 close, with the proposed decision to be posted by February 11.

Money emoji has been appointed as trainee clerk for ArbCom.

Correction: Guerillero proposed the case against Kudpung, rather than Chris.sherlock, as earlier reported.

Sooner or later every Wikipedian will enjoy their 15 minutes of Wiki-fame. Mercurywoodrose is now getting his, having won the 6,000,000 pool by most closely predicting when Wikipedia would record its 6,000,000th article. He predicted that the milestone would be reached on December 1, 2019. Second place goes to ϢereSpielChequers who predicted September 12, 2019. The Signpost proposed a serious interview with Mercurywoodrose. He did not cooperate. -S

• Signpost: What are you going to do with the $6,000,000 prize? (just kidding!)
• Mercurywoodrose: I don't know, but if i get in a catastrophic test plane accident and have my legs, one arm, and one eye destroyed, I know what I am doing with $6,000,000. Gentlepersons, they can rebuild me. They have the technology. They have the capability to build the world's first bionic Wikipedian. Mercurywoodrose will be that editor. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster, with more reliable sources.
• SP: Do you remember why you made the December 2019 prediction 6 years ago?
• MW: I figured I knew just enough about mathematics to make a somewhat accurate back of the napkin estimate for the date, factoring in a bit of the slowdown in new article creation, and believing that this downward trend in new articles would continue. I'm sure I must have done an actual calculation, but the methods I used would probably give an actual statistician apoplexy. It was a miseducated guess.
• SP: What's the biggest change you've seen in Wikipedia in that time (other than a couple of million articles)?
• MW: A team of editors with way too much time on their hands created an automation system for creating new Portals. What's a Portal, you ask? Exactly... On a side note, the biggest change that did NOT occur is that the Deletionists and the Inclusionists are still engaged in a Manichean struggle, with neither side winning. The proof of this is that the number of articles has not gone to zero, decreased by a factor of Thanos, or expanded to infinity and beyond.
• SP: How many articles have you created?
• MW: 310 using created by me, and adding up the total articles by HAND. Computers! Ha! Who needs them! I did get into the top 400 editors by edit count, which of course is a meaningless measure, but it was fun while it lasted.
• SP: What's your prediction for the 8,000,000th article? (the 7,000,000 pool is closed)
• MW: I cannot predict that, it's beyond my processing capacity as a quasi-quantum computer, but I know what i would LIKE it to be. An article about ME, of course. Hopefully for something worthwhile, not notorious. First Wikipedian to be shot into the Sun for being too sarcastic? Well, that's sort of both...
• SP: What's your favorite article out of the last million created (since November 1, 2015)?
• MW: Aside from my own articles created during this time, of which my favorite subject is Jen Bartel (she rocks), I don't know. How about new articles on things I like? My first thought, I really loved Joker. That article was created, oh, wow, on my birthday! I didn't expect that!.
• SP: Anything else you want to add? Feel free to be serious, philosophical, sentimental, humorous, thank your mother, etc.
• MW: I'm a little sad that new editors will be facing an ever more complete work, with fewer areas to expand without being an expert. Perhaps we should consider erasing Wikipedia every few decades, and recreating it from scratch, to give new editors that initial experience of joy and wonder that they can be part of this, not just an observer, by clicking that innocent little "edit" tab. But maybe there is hope, maybe that sense of wonder will persist into the future. I know I fell in love with Wikipedia, and while I'm no longer obsessed with editing, I may fall in love all over again.