Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Traffic report
Canary Media, an affiliate of the activist non-profit RMI, reports that Wikipedia has a climatetech problem. They urge "climatetech professionals" to edit articles because "The problem is that Wikipedia is often out of date, particularly when it comes to emerging or fast-changing subjects such as clean energy and decarbonization."
WMF staffer Alex Stinson is quoted giving some good advice in a 2020 article, as well as on a Wikiproject page, including finding malicious edits, flagging bad information, and marking a missing citation. – S
The Hong Kong International Airport sponsored free airline tickets to let tourists know that the the city was open for business after a long COVID slowdown. The plan was to give away 500,000 tickets via multiple lotteries, including 80,000 to be distributed by Cathay Pacific. According to Mothership, Cathay Pacific was to give out 12,500 of those tickets for the Singapore-Hong Kong route, to people who applied between March 2 and March 8. All you had to do to enter the contest was fill out an online form and answer some trivia questions about the history of Cathay Pacific. To find the answers (according to pageview data) about 6,000 more people than usual visited the English Wikipedia's article about Cathay Pacific on March 2. And about 5 people, using IP addresses traceable to Singapore, made about a dozen edits "to prevent others from winning". For example the founding date in the article was changed from 1946 to 1947 and then to 1949. In the first 43 minutes that registration was open 100,000 people entered the contest and the contest was closed early. A Wikipedia admin locked the article at about the same time.
Cathay Pacific named the winners on-time on March 20, as Mothership reported the outcome. It turns out the "free tickets" weren't really free because a fuel surcharge, taxes and other fees needed to be paid to get the tickets. The net you needed to pay: S$194.50 (about US$145) to get the S$474.50 tickets. – S
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Technology report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Opinion
Wikipedia's new sound logo has been rolled out, as announced on Wikimedia News.
The Verge says the winner of the contest to create the sound was Thaddeus Osborne, "a nuclear engineer and part-time music producer from Virginia". Osborne describes the sound design as a combination of whirring pages and clicking keys.
Gizmodo says the sound is "cute". – B
The WMF has announced that the WMF board ratified the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines on 9 March 2023. This means the Enforcement Guidelines are now in force and—
may not be circumvented, eroded, or ignored by Wikimedia Foundation officers or staff nor local policies of any Wikimedia project.
A Voter Comments Report summarising community comments made as part of the recent community vote on the Enforcement Guidelines (see previous Signpost coverage) has been published as well.
The Enforcement Guidelines now in force state:
Enforcement of the UCoC by local governance structures will be supported in multiple ways. Communities will be able to choose from different mechanisms or approaches based on several factors such as: the capacity of their enforcement structures, approach to governance, and community preferences. Some of these approaches can include:
- An Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) for a specific Wikimedia project
- An ArbCom shared amongst multiple Wikimedia projects
- Advanced rights holders enforcing local policies consistent with the UCoC in a decentralized manner
- Panels of local administrators enforcing policies
- Local contributors enforcing local policies through community discussion and agreement
As for systemic failure to follow or enforce the Code, the Guidelines state:
Systemic failure to follow the UCoC
- Handled by U4C
- Some examples of systemic failure include:
- Lack of local capacity to enforce the UCoC
- Consistent local decisions that conflict with the UCoC
- Refusal to enforce the UCoC
- Lack of resources or lack of will to address issues
The "U4C" here refers to the UCoC Coordinating Committee that the WMF will form. The adoption of the Enforcement Guidelines attracted press coverage (see this issue's In the media section); the underlying Wikimedia Foundation press release is here. – AK
An attempt to create a policy about AI-generated articles is happening at Wikipedia:Large language models.
The draft policy as of this writing includes reiterations of existing content policies, including no original research and verifiability. The draft adds in-text attribution is necessary
for AI generated content.
In related news, the Wikimedia Foundation has published a "Copyright Analysis of ChatGPT" (which, despite the title, also touches on the subject of AI-generated images), and on March 23 held a community call on the topic of "Artificial Intelligence in Wikimedia" (meeting notes). – B & T
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/In focus
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland was accepted 13 March. New parties were added to the case as recently as 24 March.
Timeline relevant to the case will be (target dates according to clerks):
Scope: Conduct of named parties in the topic areas of World War II history of Poland and the history of the Jews in Poland, broadly construed
In accepting the case, arbitrator CaptainEek said we've received scholarly rebuke for our actions, and it is apparent that the entire Holocaust in Poland topic area is broken
, referring to an academic paper about the management of English Wikipedia's editing process on the topic (see prior Signpost coverage in In the media, issue 4, and Recent research, issue 6).
An editor has requested that Arbcom de-sysop an admin, Dbachmann, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests#Dbachmann.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-03/Humour
