• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

This month we learned a great deal about the near term future of Wikipedia. It's not all scary! Two of the stories here appear in News and notes, Opinion, or Op-Ed with the extensive news coverage links parked here for your convenience.

Wikimedia Foundation's selection of a new CEO was noted by several major media, after it was announced mid September:

• Wikipedia’s next leader on preventing misinformation: ‘Neutrality requires understanding.’ The New York Times: An interview with just 5 questions, some of which are longer than the answers, this may still be the best article overall.
• Wikimedia taps leader of South African nonprofit as its next CEO in the Washington Post was one of the earliest reports and gets the facts right - an amazing array of facts. It borrows heavily from the WaPo interview published the next day. It looks like WaPo had a pretty good lead on all the other news outlets.
• Wikipedia still has a moderator diversity problem. Its new chief wants to fix it., the followup interview in The Washington Post is another 5 question interview, this one with short questions and short answers. Iskander obviously did her homework, especially with her answer on Section 230.

• Ex-Planned Parenthood Executive to Lead Wikipedia’s Foundation from Bloomberg News, short and factual.
• Wikimedia Foundation appoints Maryana Iskander as new CEO, in Reuters.
• 'The Hill' just summarizes the WaPo interview.
• South Africa’s top youth jobs guru lands CEO role at Wikimedia Foundation from the The Daily Maverick in South Africa gives additional material on her work in South Africa.

You can find out more about the CEO's background and plans for the Foundation at this issue's News and notes. – B

Wired focuses the spotlight on the efforts of Wikipedian-in-good-standing K.e.coffman. The article, called "One Woman's Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia", notes her longstanding efforts as part of Wikiproject Military history, one of the largest and most active projects. Describing her journey down the rabbit hole, we come across a paragraph many editors might relate to: "At first, Coffman stuck to tentative, sporadic suggestions. But then she was making edits nearly every day; there was so much to fix. She liked the site’s intricate bureaucracy—the guidelines on etiquette and reliable sourcing, the policies on dispute resolution and article deletion, the learned essays and discussion pages that editors cite like case law. “Wikipedia is very regimented,” she says. “I am good with instructions.” Coffman is also responsible for an important essay on WikiProject Military History – which we reprinted in a 2018 Signpost Op-ed – about rooting out the Myth of the clean Wehrmacht, one edit at a time.

Also: Boing Boing, "How one woman took on Wikipedia's Nazi fancruft" – G

Dive Into A Murder Mystery On This Creepy, Cyberpunk Wikipedia with video here. There are lots of other reviews of this game that seems to be designed to freak out Wikipedians. But Kotaku says "The writers do a great job of simulating a megacorp-sponsored, brand-safe Wikipedia." How frightening can that be? – S

International coverage of the WMF's decision to ban seven users on the Chinese Wikipedia and to desysop a dozen others was extensive.

• Selina Cheng (14 September 2021). "Wikipedia bans 7 mainland Chinese power users over 'infiltration and exploitation' in unprecedented clampdown". Hong Kong Free Press. The HKFP took the lead in reporting the conflict between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese editors back in July and were the first and most complete in covering the banning. Details on the WMF statement and on the response of the Wikipedians of Mainland China (WMC) were included.
• Simon Sharwood (15 September 2021). "Wikipedia bans seven Chinese users amid concerns of 'infiltration, physical harm': Removes sysop privileges for another dozen, warns more about doxing, frets about preserving freedom to edit in the face of hostile regimes". The Register. The Reg focused on the WMF statement by Maggie Dennis, as well as statements by users in Taiwan. They did not have reaction from mainlanders.
• Chris Vallance (16 September 2021). "Wikipedia blames pro-China infiltration for bans". BBC. The BBC was quite aggressive reporting "infiltration" of the site and the WMF's "rapid response" to it. They also quoted Maggie Dennis saying "I am not in position to point fingers at the Chinese state."
• Lam, Oiwan (22 September 2021). "Behind Chinese Wikipedia user ban: threats, verbal attacks and election canvassing". Global Voices. Not to be confused with the Chinese Communist Party organ Global Times, Global Voices is a publication of the Berkman Center at Harvard. They interview an anonymous veteran editor from mainland China who gives one of the most neutral analyses of the situation.

Other coverage included:

• Sam Tobin (17 September 2021). "Wikipedia infiltrators banned for pushing China propaganda". The Times of London. (paywalled and not worth it)
• Aurore Gayte (18 September 2021). "Des éditeurs chinois de Wikipedia ont été bannis après une tentative « d'infiltration »". Numerama (in French).
• Jonathan Chin (19 September 2021). "Wikipedia fights 'infiltration' by Chinese group – INFORMANTS? Seven editors were banned, as they might have reported users to the authorities after convincing them to share their identities". Taipei Times.
• Taylor, Emily (21 September 2021). "Wikipedia's Feel-Good Story Has a Darker Side". World Politics Review.

See related coverage at this issue's News and notes. – S

The complete Jimbo? #528: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, on Homeschooling, Atheism, Understanding Financial Markets, Ayn Rand, Favorite Books, and More, with transcript. Tim Ferriss interviews Wales for almost one hour and 49 minutes – skip the first 4:45 minutes of adverts – covering almost every question you'd want to hear him answer. Some news coverage of the interview stressed that Jimmy spent a month incognito in Buenos Aires – except that he had to take a trip to Korea during that time. Perhaps the most interesting section is how Bomis, his internet startup, suddenly started working under contract with the NBC television network, then just as suddenly stopped, leading into the founding of Wikipedia, 9/11, and the financial crash of the internet. – S

• Why we need more biographies of women journalists on Wikipedia at Journalism.co.uk covers a speech by Jareen Imam at a Hacks/Hackers event in London. She stresses the need to increase the visibility of women journalists. "Visibility is necessary to help gender parity in journalism leadership, and it also affects women journalists’ safety, credibility, recognition, inclusion and income." Imam works with the group Women Do News. Though it was not reported in the story, Women Do News has received a $2,000 rapid grant to fund editathons to help write more articles about women journalists.

• Last month Global Citizen posted a list of seven African women that they thought deserved Wikipedia articles. Before we even published the list the red links turned to blue thanks to Abishe, Victuallers and Indy beetle. We then challenged other publications to send us similar lists and let us know on our suggestion page. Quartz did not mention Wikipedia or leave a message on the suggestion page, but sent a list of 24 notable African women innovators to my inbox. Six of them were already blue links. The full list is:

Jihan Abass, Miishe Addy, Diarra Boussou, Héla Cheikhrouhou, Amira Cheniour, Farah Emara, Maya Horgan Famodu, Regina Honu, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Neema Iyer, Fara Ashiru Jituboh, Xaviera Kowo, Berita Khumalo, Tomilola Majekodunmi, Moky Makura, Cathye Moukoko, Catherine Nakalembe, Nanjala Nyabola, Marie-Alix De Putter, Mmamontsheng Dulcy Rakumakoe, Jasmine Samantar, Kalista Sy, Mariam Bintou Traoré, Seynabou Dieng Traore, Indira Tsengiwe, Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wacuka. - S

• The women who appear in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ are finally getting their due, 700 years later in The Conversation. Scholarship sets the stage for Wikipedia to cover Dante's characters.
• Wikipedia editing is thankless and addictive in The Business Standard; Who knew?
• Stop Source-Shaming, Acknowledge Wikipedia in the research process from the American Libraries Magazine.
• Wikimedia awards grants to tackle racial inequality, barriers to free information (Reuters): See related coverage in News from Diff.
• Superhuman: Slate published an article about Wikifunctions, which it described in a headline as a step towards "Transcending the limits of human language".
• Victory?: Wikipedia 'War in Afghanistan' Article Describes It As a 'Taliban Victory' (Newsweek). The article, largely hypothetical, theorizes that some may be upset by this statement of fact. Newsweek, a publication in decline if there ever was one, states that it "has reached out to Wikipedia for confirmation," raising many questions, starting with - do you really need to "confirm" the contents of a publicly available webpage?

• I've got your nose: Boing Boing noticed an unusual Wikipedia article about a game played with babies. Both Boing Boing and Wikipedia missed the quick homage John Prine paid to this game on his song "Please don't bury me" at about 1:08 in the video.
• It's turtles all the way down: Boing Boing again: see WP:Getting to Philosophy for what they discovered. It's one of our favorite stories, but maybe it's getting a bit old. Media or academic coverage of the effect has been covered in The Signpost in May 2011, August 2011, August 2016, January 2017 and now September 2021.
• Bisexuality and Pansexuality: PinkNews notes backlash from Twitter users accusing Wikipedia of saying that Bisexuality and Pansexuality are the same.
• 20 years and counting: Slate author Stephen Harrison notes that Wikipedia's inception almost exactly matches that of the Global War on Terrorism and "how those shocking events of the early 2000s–including the coverage of 9/11 and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the media treatment of so-called wikiality–helped make Wikipedia into the so-called last bastion of shared reality that it is today".

Not to be outdone, Alex Pasternack in Fast Company wrote How 9/11 turned a new site called Wikipedia into history’s crowdsourced front page.

• Firefox more integrated with Wikipedia: Fast Company outlines a new Firefox browser feature, "Suggest", that offers in-Wikipedia results from the address bar without first going through a search engine.
• Content for South Asian languages to expand: Centre ropes in experts from IITs to develop Indian version of Wikipedia, The New Indian Express describes a new machine translation effort leveraging the Indian Institutes of Technology brain pool to translate from English into Hindi and other regional languages.
• Be more like us: Jimmy Wales tells UK Parliament social media giants should use a Wikipedia-style peer-to-peer governance model for content moderation, in his testimony on the Online Safety Bill (The Guardian)

This month the Wikimedia Foundation took swift action in banning multiple editors to protect other editors on the Chinese Wikipedia, zh.wiki.^[1] The 2-step move was unprecedented. First the WMF protected editors' privacy by removing all data access which required non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in both Farsi and Chinese Wikipedias. This move affected a steward, some Volunteer Response Team (formerly OTRS) personnel, and oversighters on both language versions. Some editors criticized the foundation's action, but within two weeks of the WMF's removal of such "NDA only access", a more drastic step was taken. Seven users were globally locked, 12 users had their administrator rights removed, and another 12 were warned.^[2] The scale of the bans and the unprecedented nature of the 2-step action makes it impossible to call this another Fram Case. When such action against the Wikipedians of Mainland China (WMC), an unrecognized user group, was executed, some members of the zh.wiki community supported the ban and even proposed more drastic measures, though at least one of them has already been denied through a community process.

After the foundation's actions, the WMC claimed the actions were a blatant attack by the foundation colluding with outside authorities. The WMC published a letter to encourage fellow Wikimedians to leave Wikipedia. They even addressed the public through a Chinese tabloid (Global Times), controlled by the communist party, against the "atrocious" act by the foundation.

Some WMC concerns will still need to be addressed. But, when the authors read the WMC's joint statement ("Open letter" posted on their website), it shows that they are still attempting to spread disinformation, still spreading false information against members of the zh.wiki community.

WMC protests mostly concern two aspects of the action – the "no notice" nature of their ban and the bitter fact that they were banned even though they were considered to be in good standing at the time of the ban. Thus, we address the questions: Were they warned, and were they in good standing?

The WMC knew of the possibility of quick bans during the Framgate incident. One of the now-banned users, Techyan, made a lengthy comment at the time.^[3] It involved two foundation-bans against two individuals (守望者愛孟 and Galaxyharrylion), with a third person receiving a warning. Techyan omitted mentioning one more foundation action (that seemed to be directed at the WMC), an outright removal of CheckUser permissions from the Chinese Wikipedia in 2018.^[4]

The two bans and the conduct warning were directed against individuals who were connected to WMC.

Techyan said that one of the users was in good standing, and received no warnings nor bans in the Chinese Wikipedia. But why? Because individuals connected to the Chinese User Group had been blocking any process to address their own issues from outsiders. In fact, previous deadlocks stemming from the removal of the CheckUser permission was done at a time when Techyan, a now-banned user, tried running for CheckUser position. However, within a month of his run, another desysop poll took place to address Techyan's own controversial acts that he had never explained until the vote. Even with voting, canvassing seems to have completely derailed any attempts of making Techyan accountable, as shown from this voter statistics table.^[5]

User:1233, the main author of this article, tried to initiate discussions to bring administrators in check through a motion saying that Techyan had abused his administrator powers in blocking/unblocking users.^[6] 1233 also tried placing a meta Request for Comment for the ongoing issues within the Chinese Wikipedia. What happened after that? WMC users started labeling 1233 as both “pro-Hong Kong independence” – making him an easy target for mainland editors – and saying that he “has malign intentions to hamper the development of the WIkimedia community in mainland China". Techyan never properly addressed the concerns in the two desysop attempts, evading all attempts to make him accountable for over 180 days.^[7]

Even with a warning the foundation placed against the individual and the subsequent calls by local users to conform to civility, at least two users got banned in this round of foundation actions who had very uncivil user pages.

Walter Grassroot, who was introduced to readers of The Signpost through the 2019 protests and recent threats against Hong Kong users, had written, on their user page that people having different opinions from him were shabi (傻逼) – roughly, "backbiting idiots". Other similar terms on his page (白癡／弱智) refer to supposed mental deficiencies in an editor in good standing who did not agree with Walter Grassroot.^[8]

Another user, 尤里的1994, had openly called himself a "fascist, nazi, and Nazbol Wikipedian" in zh.wiki. The user page was nominated for deletion, but a snowball keep made the deletion attempt impossible. Have they been warned? Definitely, serious attempts were made on-wiki. Those who were merely desysopped or warned in the latest round of bans, had given them at least tacit support by disregarding these attempts to warn those who violate our rules on civility.^[9]

Perhaps the foundation never warned them directly – we don't really know – but it was the banned, desysopped, and newly warned editors who disregarded local attempts to remind them of their civility violations. Their harsh rebuttals and name-calling made attempts to enforce civility rules impossible. After the foundation ban, we suspect that they have publicly doxxed and shamed a specific user through external media, calling them anti-Chinese and a supporter of Taiwan Independence who betrays China and the Chinese people as a whole (漢奸). Bitter replies against their ongoing calls for civility, are added to ultra-nationalist rhetoric, where outsiders call their efforts "Chi-nazi-fication".^[10]

Attempts had been made both on-wiki and off-wiki to correct the problems of some mainland editors.^[11] Other parties hope to take note of concerns from Hong Kong and Taiwanese communities. Did that work? No. It did not.^[12] These malign actors had effectively paralyzed any attempts to resolve civility problems and place the whole community into gridlock.

After the office actions there was an overwhelming majority of users on zh.wiki voting to remove any links to websites controlled by the WMC user group. This is proof that the WMC user group hijacked the community at large, and demonstrates the idea of "community capture", used in the foundation's open letter explaining the office actions.

So, the question is: were they really in good standing according to Wikipedia standards? The answer is no. Were they warned, or at least, reminded of their actions? The answer is yes.

This explains why the foundation calls this a "community capture". It is not the community being controlled by someone or captured by a party purely based on political means, but it is the outright disregard of civility by a small group of users that placed the Chinese Wikipedia in a deadlock, which rendered local attempts to resolve disputes impossible.

Are they really that innocent? Even after the WMF bans, WMC public statements sought not to address the harassment that led to WMF action, but rather had the audacity to critique that the WMF "never considered whether the appellants had conflicts of interest and whether they held radical pro-Hong Kong independence, pro-Taiwan independence, or anti-communist views",^[13] and that WMF "acted like a propaganda organ of Washington".^[13] It is clear those in charge of WMC are not here to build a global knowledge movement but to impose the Chinese Communist Party's ideology of information warfare onto Wikimedia. This runs counter to WMF's Terms of Use, the Friendly Space Policy, the Universal Code of Conduct, and just about every policy that the Wikimedia movement has to regulate participant's behaviour and the WMF is absolutely right to ban any editor propagating such intolerance.

For too long, Wikimedians have turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of ultra-nationalist editors in the hope for widened participation from behind the Great Firewall of China. This has unfortunately been turned into complicity with authoritarian abuse. Wikimedia Foundation's recent actions are a step in the right direction: a red line must be drawn, open knowledge must be a two-way conversation, and we will need continued vigilance from the global Wikimedia community to ensure all editors can participate safely regardless of creed, ethnicity, or nationality.

On September 14th, the Board of Trustees announced that they have picked Maryana Iskander as the new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, replacing Katherine Maher. She will begin work on January 5th, 2022. Since 2013 she has been the CEO of the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator in South Africa. Before that, she was COO for Planned Parenthood in the United States.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Iskander said she planned to be mostly "on a screen and on airplanes", with presence in the United States "a lot". Mentioning an issue which has been on the mind of many Wikipedians, another article states that "while Wikimedia has ballooned in size over the past decade, Iskander said she’s wary of any expansion that could endanger the culture the organization has built." It goes on to quote her as saying “Scaling people and departments and tasks and activities, lots of people do that. I think how you scale culture alongside that is much harder."

The Signpost hopes to interview Iskander for our next issue. If you have a question you'd like to ask her, please note it in the Comments section below. Please keep the questions short enough to answer in two paragraphs. We may combine or simplify them, and hope to ask her at least four reader questions.

See related American, South African and other international media coverage at this issue's In the media. – G, B ‎

The Wikimedia Foundation banned seven users and desysopped a further 12 on September 13 after a year long investigation centering on the unrecognized Wikimedians of Mainland China (WMC) user group. The foundation called the case "unprecedented in scope and nature". Their concerns included "community capture" by WMC via infiltration of the corps of administrators enabled by off-wiki canvassing during admin elections on the Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wiki) and possible extortion of editors holding advanced permissions. Without releasing any details, Maggie Dennis, the foundation’s Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability stated that "we know that some users have been physically harmed" and that they "have no choice but to act swiftly and appropriately in response."

Some users affected by the ban had checkuser rights before 2018 when these rights were removed on zh.wiki. Checkusers can see IP addresses and other technical information related to logged-in editors. Six of the banned users and 7 of the desysopped users are members of WMC, which describes itself as a politically diverse group representing "most currently active mainland Chinese Wikimedians". It was previously the center of controversies involving possible Chinese government editing which was covered by the BBC, as well as threatening to name pro-democracy editors in Hong Kong to the National Security Police. Two editors involved in the National Security Police controversy, users Walter Grassroots and Techyan, were among the banned editors and were interviewed at length in our July Special report. Techyan denies that he was involved in the controversy.

The WMF also expressed concerns on election irregularities. In response, the zh.wiki community has suspended all requests for adminship elections for three weeks while an improved election process is devised. While the concerns about community capture seem to have pointed some journalists and outside observers to questioning the role of the government of the People’s Republic of China in this affair, Dennis states, "I am not in position to point fingers at the Chinese State nor in possession of information that would lead me to do so."

The WMC responded at length (4,800 words) on their website in Cast Away Illusions, Prepare For Struggle — WMC's First Open Letter on the Recent Office Action. A second open letter is expected to be published soon. They say that the bans were made hastily, instigated by a small group of Chinese Wikipedians, without proper investigation or community input. They believe that the foundation has done nothing for mainlanders, providing no money, legal advice, or encouragement.

The authors of the open letter say they do not understand how they, as a small part of the about one-third of the Chinese editing community that is from the mainland, could accomplish "community capture". They believe the process of making the bans was done without warning and without input from those banned, with no real appeals allowed and was thus grossly unfair. The letter does not address the WMF accusation of "physical harm" caused to other Wikipedians.

The mainland group say that, if it is subordinate to the foundation, the Wikipedia movement is dead in mainland China. But they plan to make a hard-fork of zh.wiki located in the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China, perhaps supported by a university or donations. It should be clear that a wiki hosted in the PRC would have to be exempted from the government's block of all Wikipedia sites, and thus would be subject to censorship.

User:Super Wang was not banned or desysopped on September 13. He is still an editor in good standing, who was recently warned for canvassing on zh.wiki and has now chosen to retire as an editor. He is a member of WMC. He has attended a few meetups sponsored by WMC – paying for his own lodging and transportation. There was no rule against canvassing on zh.wiki until a guideline – not a policy – was passed in 2020. He looks forward to editing Wikipedia again – on the hard-fork. For the views of another WMC member, see this month’s Op-ed.

The views of Hongkongers and other non-mainland Chinese so far seems fairly muted or even shocked. The Hong Kong Free Press earlier this summer had extensive contacts with Wikipedians in Hong Kong, but in their most recent story only had one comment from a Hong Kong Wikipedian. He was surprised that the blocks were so far reaching, but still wished to remain anonymous for his own safety. Two Hongkongers report at Opinion on their reactions, which focus on how the mainlanders should have known that their actions were wrong, and how they received many warnings. – A, B, S

Four candidates have been selected by a record turnout of 6,873 voters to three year terms in the Wikimedia Board of Trustees election. In the order they were selected in an 18 step single transferable vote procedure, they are Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Victoria Doronina, Dariusz Jemielniak, and Lorenzo Losa. Two of the seats are newly created. Dariusz was re-elected having served since 2015. Doc James, who did not run for re-election, will be leaving the BoT as soon as the new board members are confirmed by the old board, which he hopes will occur by early October. He then plans to spend more time with the projects MDWiki and NC Commons, an invitation-only effort to collect Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC) medical imagery. – S

The legitimacy of the voting in the latest Russian Arbitration Committee election (AK-32) has been challenged. Because of allegedly irregular or "coordinated" voting, bureaucrats overseeing the election "refused to certify a candidate that passed an electoral threshold only with help of the votes of the alleged 'plotters', but at the same time we have declined to reinstate a candidate that failed due to the voting of the 'plotters'". according to one of the three deciding bureaucrats, Levg.

An unofficial report authored in part by the losing candidates has been released at ru:ВП:ДАТАПУЛЬТ. While the report is unofficial, its authors are widely respected and the report appears to have some weight. According to Levg "there is a probability that AK–32 will be asked to investigate it, or more likely – to establish a kind of 'Investigation commission'."

The report alleges that:

• Sergei Nesterovich, who had run a paid-editing service to insert articles into ru.wiki helped coordinate the voting. He has been blocked for many years
• `Videos and screenshots of the datapult.ru site controlled by Nestorovich show groups of accounts with the names C01, W01, W02, W03, W101, G01, F01, etc. which appear to be paid-editing, sock puppet or meat puppet accounts on ru.wiki controlled by Nesterovich
• In the video of the publication "Project", lists of members of groups C01 and W01 appear. "Project" video (in Russian)
• Members of the C01 group of accounts were accused of coordination in the election.

One editor has since been blocked after apparently outing one of the six remaining arbs to two other arbs, who then resigned due to a conflict of interest. With only four arbs left on the panel, activity in the case seems to have subsided. – S

Another look at requests for adminship (RfA) has begun at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review. Titled a "review", it is in phase 1 to identify issues, scheduled for August 29 to September 28. As of publication, the discussion encompasses issues A through W and runs about 50 pages long if printed. A future phase 2 will address solutions.

The discussion was initiated by Barkeep49, one of the 22 administrators selected in 2019. He gave the following reasons, when asked by The Signpost:

We're on pace to end the year with the fewest number of new admin ever – less than 10. And it didn't seem to be from a lack of trying on the part of people who were ready to be nominators. For at least the last 15 months or so, and arguably much longer than that, there have been regular discussions at WT:RFA and elsewhere about problems with RfA and possible solutions. It had also been six years since the last time the community comprehensively thought about RfA. It felt like we had made as much progress as we could with pre-discussion and also from those discussions it wasn't clear exactly what problem needed to be addressed with many people offering different (and sometimes contradictory) ideas. So it was time to see if the community agreed that changes were needed at RfA and if so what problems we should attempt to solve. And quite honestly I will admit that I decided that this had the chance to produce more new administrators than investing time looking through the editing records of one of the half dozen or so editors currently on my "maybe RfA" list only to be turned down by the ones who I think would make good admins and have a good chance of passing RfA.

As far as results of the discussion, Barkeep had this to say:

So far I've been very pleased with the discussion which has been thoughtful and robust in the best spirit of Wikipedia. Assuming that some of the suggest problems are deemed to have consensus by the closers, we'll then move to a second phase where possible solutions are discussed and considered. I expect that some changes will be made, though I also think it likely that some problems will not have any solutions which have community consensus behind them. I modeled much of the format of this RfA review on the great work Biblioworm did in 2015 in a similar process.

The last round of serious rejiggering of the process by which the community selects administrators was the 2015 administrator election reform, referenced by Barkeep49 just above. The resulting RfC closed in December of that year with procedural changes including more RfA notices, a limit on the number of questions for a candidate, and an expanded discretionary range.

See prior Signpost coverage at 2015 op-ed, "Wikipedia needs more administrators".

Further comprehensive coverage of this important discussion can be found at this month's "Discussion report". – B

• WikiConference North America will be held online from October 8-10. Registration is gratis and now open.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Blablubbs. The Request for Adminship (RfA) vote followed several others that were near unanimous. All but one of the eight RfAs put forward this year (not including one NOTNOW with single-digit votes) had 95% or greater community approval.
• And the community says... maybe: The discussion to determine whether Wikimedia movement is notable resulted in "no consensus". Yeasayers pointed to the open-source-software movement, free-culture movement and free software movement; naysayers pointed to navels and the Wikimedia Foundation's PR department.