The city attorney of Durham, North Carolina, attempted to coax the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to reveal the identities of three editors and to prohibit the placement of certain verifiable and truthful content on Wikipedia pages of city officials, Indy Week and The News and Observer report.
A letter, dated June 29, outlined three complaints about content on Wikipedia. Two of the complaints pertained to coverage of a council member's alleged attempted extortion of a developer, while the third related to an image depicting the signature of the mayor of Durham. The letter requested that the Wikimedia foundation remove the image and bar users from uploading it on Wikimedia projects, and requested the names and identities of the various editors who added the text and/or image content to Wikipedia.
Recent months have been a tumultuous time for Durham's seven-member city council. In March, Elaine M. O'Neal, the mayor of Durham, publicly read an allegation that a Durham city council member (subsequently identified as Monique Holsey-Hyman) had extorted a developer for campaign contributions. The aftermath of the meeting was testy, with the public able to hear shouting between officials, despite them being out of public view. An eyewitness interviewed by Indy Week alleged that Durham council member DeDreana Freeman had attempted to strike Durham Mayor-pro tempore and council member Mark-Anthony Middleton during the shouting session, but instead struck O'Neal once and punched the head of fellow Durham council member Leonardo Williams twice before Williams subdued her. In the aftermath of these incidents, O'Neal announced that she would not seek re-election as Mayor, and a state investigation was opened into the extortion allegation (Holsey-Hyman denies the alleged extortion attempt and a separate allegation that she ordered city employees to perform campaign work on her behalf).
For making edits to the Wikipedia entries about certain figures implicated in this scandal, the letter requested the identities of Mako001 and Willthacheerleader18. The entries contained unflattering information about the public officials at the time of the letter's sending, but the entries were well-sourced; Indy Week reports that the entries' descriptions of the scandal were written "without any apparent factual error and with links to news articles as references".
Several figures have publicly expressed concerns about the sending of the letter. Barry Saunders, a member of the editorial board of The News and Observer, wrote that, "[u]nless the Wikipedia posts were egregiously wrong—and there's no evidence that they were—the three Durham officials should have taken a page, when it came to criticism, from the title of the 1970s hit by the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive: let it ride .... Few voters, though, will forgive attempts to silence critics".
Duke University law professor Stuart Benjamin was taken aback by the letter. He told The News and Observer, "I understand why public officials do not want unflattering information published about them, but it is deeply troubling that any public official tried to unmask someone who posted this accurate information."
David Larson, opinion editor of The Carolina Journal, concurred. "[T]his attempt to intimidate anonymous people online for daring to discuss real but unflattering details of your political service is the stuff of dysfunctional regimes", he wrote.
The WMF, for its part, told Indy Week that it is "strongly committed to protecting the privacy of editors and users on Wikimedia projects".
The letter, signed by city attorney Kimberly Rehberg, also states that she had removed the image of the signature from the Wikipedia article about Elaine M. O'Neal on June 28. This checks out; that article was edited on that day by a user named Kimlynn69, and Kimlynn69 wrote a message to Johnson524 that identified herself as "Kimberly M. Rehberg" and as the city attorney of Durham. As it had for the editors who touched content relating to the scandal of the March 23 meeting, the letter had also requested Johnson524's name and identity as well.
In response to Rehberg's message, Johnson524 explained that he had obtained the signature from Durham Performing Arts Center playbills. Indy Week reports that, following Johnson's reply to the message, Rehberg said in an email "there is little legal basis to demand that Wiki reveal the identity of the User or prohibit the upload of a photo of the signature to the Mayor's Wiki page".
The mayor, per an email obtained by Indy Week, was unsatisfied with Rehberg's reply. O'Neal told Rehberg that her request to send the letter to the WMF "still stands"; Rehberg said in an email sent later that day that the letter had been sent. Despite this, the letter may have never actually arrived at its intended destination. The WMF told Indy Week that they had not received the letter and that the letter that had been made public contained an incorrect postal address for the WMF's headquarters. Rehberg, meanwhile, told Indy Week that the letter had only been sent by physical mail.
The Signpost reached out to Johnson524 following the publication of Rehberg's letter. "I was so happy to see an outpouring of support from the Wikipedia community from editors who have been around longer than I have," he wrote: "I have always valued that Wikimedia has also never succumbed to external powers—and has continued to fight for a world of free information: whether that be not to take down/severely censor their project in Russia, to campaign for those jailed editors in Saudi Arabia, or even just go against unjust decisions by local governments here in the U.S."
He remained, however, displeased with the mayor's handling of the situation. "I would have even put it past the mayor Elaine O'Neal if she went back on her statement after I explained how I got the signature publicly, but since she doubled down on her attempt to try to 'unmask' me and two other editors after without really any prior contact, I am glad she will not be running for mayor again, because I don't think how this situation was handled was right at all", he wrote. – R
(For further coverage of this story see this issue's In the media.)
_01.jpg)
Vladimir Medeyko (User:Drbug), the former head of Wikimedia Russia and founder of the Russian government-approved Ruwiki fork, has been "banned indefinitely by the Wikimedia Foundation from editing all Wikimedia sites". Medeyko had previously been blocked indefinitely on the Russian Wikipedia, following a discussion at the Russian Wikipedia's Administrators' Noticeboard, as well as on Commons, where the reason given was –
Long-term abuse: creating a Wikipedia fork which includes stolen content from Commons as well
See also previous Signpost coverage here and here. – AK
Wikimedia Europe has published its European Policy Monitoring Report for July 2023. Among other current legal developments, it highlights that –
France is working on a tech bill to regulate the entire online environment [...,] the projet de loi visant à sécuriser et réguler l'espace numérique (SREN). There are several problematic articles and aspects in the proposal that would change how content moderation on [Wikimedia] projects works. Such examples are provisions aiming to keep links to 'banned' media off websites (think Russia Today) or an obligation to not allow banned users from re-registering (which would require some sort of background check on all new registrations).
The report also calls attention to "Italy['s] Crusade Against the Public Domain", referring the country's efforts "to restrict and get paid for re-use of public domain material" such as Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. – H
The Wikimedia Foundation has launched an instance on the federated social network Mastodon, at https://wikimedia.social/ (for technical reasons, it was not possible to use a wikimedia.org domain). According to a July 17 announcement on Wikimedia-l,
At the moment, sign-up is open for Wikimedia Foundation staff as we examine moderation and other areas. Product and technology staff will use it primarily for developer engagement. The goal is to create a space for people to connect and talk tech.
At the time of writing (July 30), the server lists 72 active users, although its directory of recently active local users shows only five who have posted. The Foundation's own @wikimediafoundation account leads, with 14 posts, and has already gained over 5,000 followers – undoubtedly helped by a Hacker News post that made it (close) to the top of that site's front page.
The announcement comes amid continuing concerns about Twitter (where the corresponding @wikimedia account remains active, although viewing a list of its recent tweets currently requires registration, due to recent changes by X née Twitter). In late 2022, suggestions that the Foundation should mirror the official Wikipedia Twitter account (run by its Communications department) on Mastodon had fallen flat. This later motivated the creation of a community-run Wikipedia account on the Wikis World Mastodon server in April 2023 (see our coverage: "Wikipedia gains an official presence on Mastodon ... without the Wikimedia Foundation's involvement" and "Who speaks for Wikipedia? Mastodon accreditation reverted"). At the time of writing, it continues to be active, with 16K followers and a verified checkmark, while requests by WMF staff "to change the name of the account [from @wikipedia] to 'Wikipedia movement', 'Wikipedia volunteers', 'Wikipedia worldwide', or something similar" remain unheeded. – H
The New York Times says this is "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth" and asks: Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right – without destroying itself in the process? Starting with the 2021 essay, Death of Wikipedia by Barkeep49, the Times examines how Wikipedia and artificial intelligence will interact. Barkeep considers death-by-AI to be the most likely cause of Wikipedia's demise, followed by a fragmentation of the internet, and forks caused by WMF shenanigans. All these scenarios might seem wildly optimistic, but Barkeep does outline the strengths of Wikipedia: only a better encyclopedia will be able to replace us. But reaching that milestone will be very difficult for a new 'pedia, with a likely lack of agreement among Wiki editors on which 'pedia to move to, and the lack of the WMF's stash of cash. He elaborates why our encyclopedia won't likely succumb to any of these threats anytime soon. But he did admit that "AI's day of writing a high quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later." He told the Times reporter that "It wouldn’t surprise me if things are fine for the next three years, and then, all of a sudden, in year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff."
Academic researcher Nicholas Vincent worries, according to the Times that AI will cannibalize Wikipedia, mostly spouting information taken from the 'pedia. A chatbot need not be better than Wikipedia, but simply faster, or somewhat more up-to-date. Once a chatbot's Wiki-based output becomes more popular than the 'pedia itself, the quality of the 'pedia might fall, leaving the chatbot to cannibalize itself. This has lead one group of Wikipedians on a conference call to agree that "we want a world in which knowledge is created by humans".
The article continues at length and in depth. Other topics include the Wikimedia Foundations's recently announced Wikipedia plug-in for ChatGPT (see our previous coverage) and a reflection on Joseph Reagle's 2020 essay "The many (reported) deaths of Wikipedia". There's even a few paragraphs on the final death spiral. In sum, the Times article is encyclopedic: something that this author doubts a large language model could replicate. –S
Three news outlets covered a tempest in a teapot that resulted after Durham, North Carolina's City Attorney Kimberly Rehberg sent a request to the Wikimedia Foundation to identify editors who have been editing articles on Durham city politics (see our related coverage in this issue's News and notes column). Mayor Elaine O'Neal and City Council members DeDreana Freeman and Monique Holsey-Hyman also requested that some material in "their articles" be removed. O'Neal will not be seeking re-election this year, while Freeman will be running for mayor, and Holsey-Hyman who was appointed in 2022 is seeking election to the council.
Holsey-Hyman has been accused of attempting to solicit a bribe to vote for a rezoning proposal. There's no news on whether an investigation by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is going anywhere. She was also accused of improperly using city employees for her election campaign. Freeman reportedly engaged in an aggressive shouting match with a political opponent. These facts seem to have been properly reported and documented in Wikipedia's articles about the two politicians.
Some people may be surprised when they see a Wikipedia article about themselves. The Signpost recommends that if you don't consider yourself notable or you have a strong desire for privacy that you identify yourself and request that the article be deleted, either on the article talk page or at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard. If you believe the article is inaccurate, rather than just unpleasant, you should also post on these pages. However, please do not attempt to doxx our editors, edit the article yourself or through paid editors, or make even vague legal threats. Everybody will be much happier if you follow these recommendations. –S
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), aka Michaelvlawler, was doxxed by the Daily Beast as none other than himself, after making 26 edits to the Mike Lawler article. It wasn't really a case of jumping to a conclusion − since User:Michaelvlawler had been warned about his apparent conflict of interest, ignored the warning and kept on editing about himself, and was ultimately blocked. His only other edit had been to include Mike Lawler as a well-known alumni at Manhattan College. He'd also added his middle name, Vincent, to his own article. Only after the Daily Beast article appeared did he contest the block, saying that he had been blocked because he did not confirm that he was the subject of the article, and that he would promise not to edit that article again. A kind-hearted admin — our own Tamzin — undid the block after the proper documentation was received at WP:VRT, but did emphasize the promise not to edit the Wikipedia article and recommended that he review WP:Conflict of interest. While we are not complaining about the forgiving spirit demonstrated here, we note that there are sometimes downsides to forgiveness. Lawler then disputed the Daily Beast article, extracting a correction saying that he was not banned by Wikipedia for editing the Wikipedia article about himself, but rather that he had been banned for not confirming that he was the subject of the article. Lawler is not a lawyer, but an accountant. Nevertheless, we are sure he would have made a very good Wikilawyer had he not already given himself away.
The Signpost strongly recommends, again, that politicians never edit articles about themselves, whether they do it personally or through staffers or other paid editors. Too many reporters now know the trick of checking a politician's articles for biased or conflict-of-interest edits. Those politicians who do such editing are almost certain to get into a spot of bother. We also recommend that publications not doxx these editors. Simply note the edits that seem most promotional, any whitewashing and warnings to the editor on the article or user talk pages. The Signpost will then be able to mention the problem in this column – provided we have the space. We have lots of space. –S
.jpg)
UnHerd criticizes Wikipedia for a communications project intended to update a number of articles related to climate change, run as part of the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 13; they call it "just the latest front in the UN’s ongoing online climate change narrative control war" and draw parallels to similar projects undertaken during the time of COVID-19.
The communications project in question is –
formally entitled "Phase 2 Communicating current SDG 13 knowledge through Wikipedia – a collaboration between Wikipedia editors and content experts at SEI, IPCC, UNFCCC and other organisations" and runs from mid 2022 to mid 2024.
The project selects relevant Wikipedia articles dealing with climate change topics that have significant daily pageviews and at the same time require updating and improvement in content and quality. The project team scores the quality of these Wikipedia articles at the start and at the end of the project using ten quality parameters. We also interact with published experts who advise us on necessary content edits. The core project team is made up of academics who have scientific and climate change expertise and also know how to edit Wikipedia.
On much the same topic, though from a different perspective, CNN reports that the United Arab Emirates, the country hosting this year's COP28 climate conference, has –
embarked on a major PR campaign to boost its green credentials ahead of the COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai later this year, prompting heavy criticism from climate groups and some politicians.
At the same time, researchers are raising red flags over allegations of more covert influence campaigns, as members of the COP28 team were found by the Centre for Climate Reporting and the Guardian to have been editing Wikipedia pages about the conference’s chief, and an army of fake social media accounts has appeared, promoting the country’s climate record.
The COP28 president's "greenwashing" of Wikipedia had previously been reported by the Centre for Climate Reporting in late May of this year. – S, AK, J
For further coverage see this issue's Disinformation report.
Yes, it's hot out there. Be careful – even the news is hot this month.
Two weeks ago, CNN took a new look at a two-month-old controversy involving Sultan Al Jaber – the presiding officer of this year's United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP28 – and COP28-related paid editing on Wikipedia. In fact, this coverage was just a warmed-over retelling of an outstanding article, Cop28 president's team accused of Wikipedia "greenwashing", jointly published by The Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting on May 30. The Signpost reported in brief on the joint article, though we really didn't have much to add to it. But as the weather keeps getting hotter, the story just seems to get hotter with it. This story, just like climate change itself, is unlikely to go away soon.
Sultan Al Jaber has several obvious conflicts of interest. As the presiding officer of the UN sponsored conference, Al Jaber sets the agenda for a possible agreement among governments on how to deal with climate change and he – like the representative of any government – can veto any agreement. He is also the CEO of a major oil producer, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and the chairman of ADNOC's alternative-energy company Masdar. Adding even more to his many responsibilities, he is the United Arab Emirates' minister of industry and advanced technology and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), which claims to be the world's first university specializing in artificial intelligence.
Green activists worry that Al Jaber, the oil executive, is not willing to set a cutoff date for burning fossil fuels – a step they think Al Jaber, the COP28 organizer, must take.
Like many people with a conflict of interest, Al Jaber seems to be addressing the problem more as communication difficulty than as a problem of split loyalties. The May 30 joint article identified three paid editors working for Al Jaber.
The Signpost can add that GreenDrake28 declared that they were paid by Masdar on their first edit in April 2023 and made only five more edits, all to the Masdar article or talk pages.
In short, it looks like COP28 is at least making an attempt to appear that they are trying to comply with Wikipedia rules. But do they actually understand and agree with our rules? We will see going forward.
There is one worrying report, that followed the jointly-published article by just a few days. The Climate Disinfo Project published a summary of a Twitter campaign that appeared to be coordinated in the UAE, and encouraged climate change policies in line with Al Jaber's priorities. Many of the accounts were "seemingly artificial or astroturfed". Check out the section on "The 'Five American Blondes'". Somebody is certainly pushing something there.
Jason Aldean has a hot hit song about small towns, but some folks might not think the joys of small town life necessarily involve brandishing guns or stomping on people who desecrate the American flag. There are many good songs about small towns that don't mention these things, for example John Mellencamp's Small Town [2] and John Prine's environmentalist view of Paradise [3]. Even Merle Haggard's conservative anthem Okie From Muskogee [4], famous for taking a dim view of hippies, doesn't suggest kicking their asses.
But the Try That in a Small Town video has gotten Aldean in hot water. It's not so much the guns in the video, but the focus on how cities are cesspits full of crime and protests; when the video does get back to a small town, it has the guy singing in front of a courthouse, which is the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. A hundred years ago, an 18-year-old Black man, Henry Choate, was lynched there, hanged to death out of one of its windows. Six years later, the lynching of Cordie Cheek occurred just outside of town. Cheek was castrated just before he was hanged to death. The town is also remembered for the Columbia race riot of 1946. Well, maybe he didn't know. Maybe he didn't care. Go figure.
Has Aldean been spreading his propaganda on Wikipedia? Unless somebody is trying to embarrass Aldean with a Joe job, it appears likely. Perhaps he hasn't been paying for his extensive exposure on Wikipedia, but simply has many fans who go to extremes in coordinated editing of the article about Aldean.
All told, there are at least 23 banned socks (including some given checkuser blocks) who have edited the Jason Aldean article. They almost all appear to promote Aldean's career. Most of the socks seem to edit this article solo, except for the Cherry Benji sockfarm. Cherry Benji, CHYTT, COUNTRYNOW and XxxMr.Cherryxxx were all blocked as part of this sockfarm, and all of them edited the Jason Aldean article. The reason this group of accounts was blocked is because they all concentrated on articles related to Aldean and created new, non-notable, low-quality articles related to him. Cherry Benji alone made 35 edits to the Jason Aldean article.
Considering the recent creation of the Try That in a Small Town article, you might not expect to already see blocked socks in its history. You'd be wrong: Red Slapper edited the page three days after the new article replaced a redirect. Their last edit (not including their talk page) was about requesting page protection for the article. The sockfarm that the account worked for was NoCal100, which started its long-term abuse way back in 2008, and was best known for spreading anti-Muslim hate.
Joe Lewis, age 86, is a businessman and owner of the London-based soccer team Tottenham Hotspur F.C.. His net worth is about $6.1 billion, according to Forbes. He made this money running pubs, speculating in currencies, and in private equity; at least until recently, he has served on many corporate boards of directors, both in the UK and the US. The SEC accused him this week of engaging in insider trading, a very lucrative form of fraud, based on information he learned about (and misappropriated) while serving as a corporate director. According to a statement by Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York:
My Office, the Southern District of New York, has indicted Joe Lewis, the British billionaire, for orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme and his co-conspirators and personal pilots, Patrick O'Connor and Bryan ‘Marty' Waugh. We allege that, for years, Joe Lewis abused his access to corporate boardrooms and repeatedly provided inside information to his romantic partners, his personal assistants, his friends, and his pilots. Those folks then traded on that inside information – and made millions of dollars in the stock market – because, thanks to Lewis, those bets were a sure thing... [A]s we allege, he used inside information as a way to compensate his employees or to shower gifts on his friends and lovers. That's classic corporate corruption. It's cheating. And it's against the law – laws that apply to everyone, no matter who you are.
According to the indictment, Lewis gave his two private aircraft pilots inside information on an unannounced drug trial – and two loans of $500,000 each. The pilots then traded on the stock, each profiting by more than $500,000. They also texted detailed information on the potential trade to their friends, citing Lewis as its source. Yowza!
The indictment does not specifically name the "romantic partners" or "lovers", but refers 20 times to at least one "girlfriend" or "ex-girlfriend" who made trades similar to those of the pilots. As the SEC has said, indictments are not convictions, and Lewis (and others mentioned in the indictments) should be considered innocent unless and until they are convicted in a court of law.
The Hotspurs motto in Latin is audere est facere ('to dare is to do'). Would Lewis dare to try to pull off such a series of crimes? And would he dare to violate Wikipedia's rules on paid editing?
With the usual caveat about possible Joe jobs, it appears that Lewis (or someone trying very hard to look like Lewis) has hired a series of sophisticated paid editors. At least 13 blocked socks (including checkuser blocks, and one editor blocked for undeclared paid editing) edited the Joe Lewis (British businessman) article. Several of these editors were part of farms that also edited articles on Russian oligarchs. These include users Alfaweiss and DeltaGr, from the Mikenew1953 sockfarm; users CoffeeStation95, Equity2019, Platanias25 and Softmusic16, from the Antony1821 sockfarm; as well as users Pharaoh's jaws bites, Poor billionaire, Shalom Shabat Woggly and Mohel's knife cuts, from the Pionier sockfarm.
ScepticalChymist, who did not edit articles on oligarchs, was blocked for UPE, for running a reputation management firm and editing the articles about his clients.
999bottles also edited the article, and was a member of a fairly new sockfarm, LucyAyoubFan, which includes at least 210 confirmed socks. The first blocks of this sockfarm occurred in 2022, and it was also very active on the Hebrew Wikipedia. Among its specialties was a focus on editing soccer club-related articles.
This week William S. Tidwell, a correctional counselor at the Federal Medical Center, Devens prison hospital, was charged with taking bribes and lying to a bank about a loan he received from a prisoner. Allegedly the bribes total up to $90,000, and the loan was for $50,000, coming from a "high-net-worth inmate" identified only as "Individual 1" in the charging document. Reuters reported that "a person familiar with the matter" identified Individual 1 as Raj Rajaratnam; his lawyer said that he was unfamiliar with the matter, but that his client "would cooperate appropriately" with prosecutors if asked.
Rajaratnam was a hedge fund manager born in Sri Lanka, who founded the now-defunct Galleon Group, and was convicted in 2011 having profited up to $63.8 million from insider trading. His combined fines from civil and criminal cases was $150 million. He served less than eight years of his eleven year sentence, having been released from FMC Devens to his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment.
Editors of the Raj Rajaratnam article included at least 9 later-blocked sockpuppets (including checkuser blocks and an undeclared paid editor). I did not examine the multiple other articles about Rajaratnam's trading, legal cases, or books.
One especially disturbing sock was Belomorkanal. This user name is Russian for "White Sea Canal" — which was Stalin's first major show project, dug by hand by prisoners from the Gulag. Belomorkanal was part of the Bobmack89x sock farm, which specialized in editing articles on crime, gangs, gangsters (especially Russian gangsters) and U.S. federal agencies. The total effect of his three edits at the article was to link then-President Barack Obama to Rajaratnam.
Two socks, Hillcountries and HudsonBreeze, were both from the Sudar123 sock farm which specialized in editing about Sri Lankans.
OnceaMetro was an undeclared paid editor who was blocked following a 2015 Signpost story detailing their edits for Sony, hedge fund managers and other financiers.
What do all of these dastardly schemes have in common? Not much — apart from that they were all foiled by diligent volunteers with nothing but computers and brains. And if you have both of those things (frankly, you can get by with just one) your help is appreciated in the fight against socks.
Doncram (Donald Peter Cram) was an American Wikipedian who created over 13,500 main-space articles, and many more pages in total. Many of these focused on U.S. National Register of Historic Places entries and U.S. National Historic Landmarks. He also worked on articles about NRHP-affiliated artists, architects, builders, and engineers. He participated in several WikiProjects over the years, was active at AfD, and created many excellent list articles. During his lifetime he worked as a cabbie in New York City, where he also worked as a budget analyst. He held faculty positions at MIT, Cal State Fullerton in California and at SUNY Oswego. Later, after moving to Montrose, Colorado, he was employed in airport operations. He died on July 9, 2023 in Montrose of natural causes. His obituary in the Montrose Press can be found here.
_(cropped).jpg)
Dr. Peter McCawley, an economist from the Australian National University, spent a little over ten years on Wikipedia contributing in his area of expertise, writing articles about the economy and politics of Indonesia. Outside of Wikipedia, his career history included being the executive director of Asian Development Bank, dean of the Asian Development Bank Institute, and the deputy director general of AusAID; his work was indeed cited on Wikipedia. He died on July 18.
Eagleash, from South Croydon, London, began editing Wikipedia on 15 October 2012 and amassed nearly 109,000 edits on many subjects including his beloved Crystal Palace F.C. and Formula One. He often helped out new users at the help desk and in articles for creation. He edited every day for over eight years from 9 April 2015 until his last edit on 29 May 2023, achieving the fourth-longest such editing streak in all namespaces along with the same ranking (among non-bot editors) in the article namespace list. He died on 8 June 2023, aged 70, after a heart attack.
In the last edition of The Signpost, I covered three bots highly useful to WikiProjects. In this edition of Tips and Tricks, I'm going to focus on smaller, more personal tools, that let you focus on more specialized tasks – some user scripts, some gadgets, and some external tools. In particular, I'm going to try to do a brief summary of the main scripts/gadgets/tools related to citations.
Some of the text was taken from these tools' description pages, which I highly encourage you to read if any of them interest you.
A quick note on how to install user scripts, using my own WP:UPSD (which is hosted at User:Headbomb/unreliable.js) as an example. The other scripts can be installed in exactly the same way, replacing User:Headbomb/unreliable.js with User:Example/source.js accordingly. Some scripts may have additional customization options, detailed on their documentation page.
importScript( 'User:Headbomb/unreliable.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Headbomb/unreliable.js]] to the page (you may need to create it), like this.As a general caveat, for cybersecurity reasons, you should only install user scripts if you trust their author to not be secretly nefarious. Likewise for external sites from third parties. Gadgets can be directly enabled in your preferences, and their code has been community vetted, thus they represent a lesser security risk.
The Citation Expander is a gadget that lets you invoke Citation bot. I have already written an in-depth guide a year ago, so I'll summarize the main points and you can read that article if you want to know more. If you're new to tool-assisted editing, if you only install one tool today, this is very likely the one you want.
The key idea is that you can have citations like
{{cite journal |jstor=20107388 }}{{cite journal |doi=10.1038/351624a0 }}{{cite book |isbn=978-0-9920012-2-3 }}and have the bot automatically expand them to
This can save you a huge amount of time and headaches, not having to format things yourself, not having to manually enter authors, etc. All you need is an identifier (URLs will often work too), and let the bot take over. Then all you have to do is review what the bot did (e.g. it missed the publisher of the book, which you could add yourself with |publisher=Institut d'Études Acadiennes).
You can also unleash the bot on existing citations so it can perform some cleanup and find other relevant bibliographic information.
OAbot is a tool designed to find and add links to open access publications and find suitable links to free versions of paywalled articles by searching several databases, author websites, and so on. In the case of open-access DOIs, it will append |doi-access=free to the citation to flag that the publication is indeed open access.
The bot will make edits on its own, but you can ask the bot to make edits on your behalf via ToolForge. Keep in mind that some database or website, like CiteSeerX or ResearchGate, might host papers in violation of copyright, even if most are not, so you ought to review that the uploader has the permission to upload the paper in the first place. If they aren't one of the authors of the paper, they likely do not have such permission.
Note: You'll need to use the manual install method (method 2) with the following code to use its custom options.
importScript('User:BrandonXLF/CitationStyleMarker.js'); // Backlink: [[User:BrandonXLF/CitationStyleMarker.js]] window.CSMarkerMode = 'both';
BrandonXLF's Citation Style Markers is a very simple script that lets you know if there are clashes between Citation Style 1 (e.g. {{cite book}}), Citation Style 2 (i.e. {{citation}}), and others like {{vcite book}} or {{cite LSA}} in an article.
If you have two different citation styles, it will append a small CS1, CS2, CSVAN, or CSLSA at the end of the citation.
{{cite book |title=Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists |publisher=Fake Publisher}}{{citation |title=Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists |publisher=Fake Publisher}}I personally choose to enable those warnings only when there's a clash. I can then search for 'CS1' and 'CS2' to see which is the dominant style and which citations are compromising consistency. It's often only a matter of changing one or two citations from a {{citation}} to a {{cite book}} or vice versa. Sometimes it's a matter of appending |mode=cs1 or |mode=cs2 to premade citations (like {{McCorduck 2004|mode=cs1}}) or specialized templates (like {{cite arXiv|...|mode=cs2}}), which will change the template style from CS1 to CS2 or vice versa.
Note that plain text citations, like <ref>Smith, J. (2010) "Random Book". Random Publisher. pp. 32–38 {{ISBN|978-0-123-45678-9}}</ref> will be completely ignored by the script, so you still have to keep an eye out for those.
You can choose if you want the markers always present, present by default, off by default, or only present when there is a clash by changing OPTION in window.CSMarkerMode = 'OPTION'; above. See the documentation for details.
Trappist the monk's HarvErrors is an evolution of the now-outdated Ucucha's HarvErrors. This script deals specifically with all sorts of issues unique to Harvard citation templates like {{harv}}, {{harvnb}}, {{sfn}}, etc. These Harvard templates are prone to problems with their automatically generated links (see this old version of the industrial espionage article for an example).
HarvErrors checks these links for validity and displays an error message for incorrect links. In addition, it checks for citations that are likely set up to receive links, but do not have any pointing to them.
If you don't want to deal with warnings, and only with confirmed errors, use Svick's original HarvErrors instead.
Reference Tooltips is a small gadget that simply shows you the citation upon hovering the reference link. You no longer need to click and go down to the reference section to see what the reference is. This is particularly helpful with articles that make use of {{rp}}.
Sadly, it will not work if the Navigation Popups gadget is enabled.
My own (i.e. Headbomb's) Unreliable/Predatory Source Detector, or UPSD for short, is a relatively famous script. The core idea is that the script looks for URLs and DOIs, and colour codes them according to reliability, summarized in the table below.
| Severity | Appearance | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Blacklisted | example.com | The source is blacklisted on Wikipedia and can only be used with explicit permission. |
| Deprecated/predatory | example.com | There is community consensus to deprecate the source. The source is considered generally unreliable, and use of the source is generally prohibited. |
| Generally unreliable | example.com | The source has a poor reputation for fact-checking, fails to correct errors, is self-published, is sponsored content, presents user-generated content, violates copyrights, or is otherwise of low-quality. |
| Marginally reliable | example.com | Sources which may or may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. For instance Forbes.com is generally reliable, but its contributors generally are not. |
In general, the script is kept in sync with WP:CITEWATCH, WP:DEPRECATE, WP:NPPSG, WP:RSN discussions, WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:SPSLIST (not fully synced), WP:VSAFE/PSOURCES, {{Predatory open access source list}}, and common sense "duh" cases I come across (like a parody website) with some minor differences. Obvious issues should be reported on the script's talk page, but since I do not want my opinion to be king, I maintain a general policy that everything is appealable at WP:RSN.
The documentation contains several warnings and caveats, and I would highly recommend that you at the very least read the big warning box at the top of the documentation and the full summary table before making use of this script so you understand its limitations.
The script can be customized to an extent, and can even support supplemental lists for specialized tasks, like User:GeneralNotability/unreliable-rules.js which helps find many black hat SEO efforts.
_2.png)
SuperHamster's CiteUnseen analyses citations much like UPSD above, but focuses more on the origin and nature of sources. For example, it will mark citations as coming from advocacy groups, government-controlled outlets, opinion pieces, tabloids, etc. It will also add icons to reflect reliability based on WP:RSP, but you can configure which are displayed.
Like with any scripts dealing in citation analysis, it comes with heavy caveats, so you should read the documentation in detail to understand what it does.
Both CiteUnseen and UPSD will work together without issue, to provide fairly comprehensive analysis of both the reliability and nature of sources – and if one script misses a source, maybe the other will pick it up.
Novem Linguae's CiteHighlighter is another citation analyzer script. CiteHighlighter colour-codes things in the same way they are found on WP:RSP#Legend. Sources of data include WP:RSP, WP:NPPSG (which is based on WP:RSN discussions), and the source reliability pages of various WikiProjects. It recognizes around 1,800 sources.
Like with any scripts dealing in citation analysis, you should read the documentation in detail to understand what it does. In particular, it makes certain assumptions like The New York Times = reliable, without consideration to the type of article being published, or a reference with a PMID = reliable, despite the PubMed database including sources of various reliability.
CiteHighlighter works with either or both of UPSD and CiteUnseen, so feel free to mix and match as your heart desires.
The Earwig's Copyvios invokes Earwig's Copyvio Detector. Which, as you might suspect, searches the web for potential copyright violations. Like reFill below, it runs on ToolForge.
This tool is normally more useful to reviewers than to regular editors; if you don't know that copy-pasting/closely paraphrasing things from sources is bad, the intervention you need is education on the topic, not more tools. New Page Patrollers and AFC Reviewers in particular might want to install this, but anyone that is interested in copyright cleanup will be well served by this tool.
Dispenser's Checklinks is typically used to make sure external links are working (i.e. not dead). If they are not, you can use it to search for archived versions of these links. It runs on Dispenser's personal site.
reFill is a tool that specializes in dealing with bare URLs. Like Copyvios above, it runs on ToolForge, but you can use Zhaofeng Li's Reflinks script to invoke it directly from Wikipedia, or CiteGen to run it from your web browser. You can also run it directly from a Linux or Windows PC (see reFill's FAQ for details).
It adds information (page title, work/website, author and publication date, if metadata is included) to bare URL references, and does additional fixes as well (e.g. combining duplicated references). The tool is an open-source replacement of Dispenser's Reflinks.
It is not perfect, and you will often need to cleanup its output, like |last=Welle |first=Deustche for Deutsche Welle links. But it gets you at least 90% of the way there!
.png)
Kaniivel's Reference Organizer displays all an article's references in graphical user interface, where you can choose whether the references should be defined in the body of article or in the reference list template (see WP:LDRHOW). You can also use it to sort the references in various ways, and rename the references.
Nardog's RefRenamer is similar to Reference Organizer, but focuses specifically on renaming Visual Editor reference names, like <ref name=":0"/> or <ref name=":1"/>, to something more editor-friendly, like <ref name="Smith-2006"/>. It will automatically make suggestions, but you can always choose a different name in case it picks something silly like <ref name="Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz"/>.
Ohconfucius's Sources is a script that deals with common newspapers, magazines, and websites to ensure that their names are accurate per the frontpage of these publications, from including/omitting the leading The, to making use of and or &, to making sure they are properly italicized per MOS:ITALICTITLE, to making sure that magazines aren't in the |publisher= field of citation templates, etc.
Phew! That was a lot wasn't it? That's ok, you don't have to install all these scripts, or memorize all those details. Just pick the ones that seem useful to you.
That said, there are important caveats to using UPSD, CiteUnseen and CiteHighlighter. I know I've mentioned those before, but it bears repeating that these are not scripts to use mindlessly. They are, at least in part, based on the interpretation of discussions, many with limited participation. It's perfectly possible, and even likely, that some of these discussions did not reflect the entirety of the source, and that a closer look would change its classification from generally unreliable to marginally unreliable (or vice versa), or a source would be deemed unreliable in context X, but reliable in context Y.
Also remember that just because a source is considered generally unreliable, it doesn't mean that it cannot or shouldn't be used. Scripts cannot appreciate the full context in which a source is used. But you can. So don't be a meat popsicle, and use your brain.
Feel free to post your experiences (new or old) with any of these scripts in the comment section! Also feel free suggest other scripts that you feel might benefit your fellow Wikipedian!
Note: This article was updated on 5 August 2023 to mentioned Nardog's RefRenamer. The omission was due to a bug in WP:TOPSCRIPTS listings. The author apologizes for the oversight. Thanks to PamD for bringing this script to light in the comment section.
Tips and Tricks is a general editing advice column written by experienced editors. If you have suggestions for a topic, or want to submit your own advice, follow these links and let us know (or comment below)!
Does Wikipedia lean left? We often hear complaints. Maybe it leans right and we just never hear about the leftists complaining about it? Either way, we have a mandate to cover things from a neutral perspective, or a neutral point of view.
I decided to investigate by picking random topics that I already knew, and see if that was true. Since pictures are a thousand words, I decided to be super efficient and head over to the Wikimedia Commons to dig a selection of images from these topics, and see if they were presented from a right-leaning or left-leaning perspective.
_-_n._3875_-_Pisa_-_Il_Duomo.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Clearly, there is a bias. Out of a random sample of nine images, only two gave a left-leaning perspective, and just one presented the vaunted neutral point of view. But that could just be a one-off. Let's continue to investigate.
While WikiProject Military History aims to cover things neutrally, that doesn't mean they get it right all the time. So how is this famous event covered? Let's investigate.
Perhaps surprisingly, this topic seems to be nearly 100% left-leaning. We have six clearly biased takes on the event... and only one NPOV source. I would not have expected this, given the strongest support for the US military usually comes from people that lean right.
It's important to check how well our processes respect NPOV. I decided to check the DYK archives for the month of June 2023. Let's see how they fare.
.jpg)
.jpg)
_in_flight_060905-F-1234S-049.jpg)
_(cropped).jpg)
_1a.jpg)
Twenty-five NPOV images, three left-leaning ones, two right-leaning ones. I note however – the pupils, while neutral in pose, are given left-leaning educational material. Overall, however, DYK seems to be doing a pretty good job of having a neutral perspective.
After investigating 46 images – equivalent to 46,000 words worth of in-depth reading – did I manage to uncover a secret cabal? What does this mean? What other areas should we investigate?
Tell me in the comments below, because I don't have a friggin' clue about what I'm supposed to conclude from this.
In 2009, I had an idea I thought was pretty neat. What if we looked at all the |journal= parameters of citation templates? Nearly 14 years later, it's more than time to share what that idea became. Here, then, is a historical tour of one of Wikipedia's interesting little secrets.
The idea was born out of a desire to understand which journals were highly cited on Wikipedia, so WikiProject Academic Journals could prioritize work and focus on the in-demand journals and redirects. I figured we had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of |journal= parameters – we might as well compile them and see what comes out of it. This was the basic idea behind Journals cited by Wikipedia, or WP:JCW for short.
After a bot request, ThaddeusB tackled the task with WikiStatsBOT (BRFA), and the idea began to take shape (albeit in a crude form). The bot would download a dump of all Wikipedia articles and process it into three searchable sub-compilations: an alphabetical one, comprehensively listing all the |journal= parameters, a most popular journal listing, and a most popular missing journal listing.
Sample outputs of the first decently-accurate run (30 June 2009):
The initial output was crude and inaccurate (especially before the above date), but it was good enough to get us started. WikiStatsBOT was quickly improved to clean up some entries, have better accuracy, and present things in a more appealing and useful way. After the early kinks were sorted out, about 355,000 citations were covered. The most popular journal entry was J. Biol. Chem. (with 17,543 citations), and the most popular 'missing' journal entry was Genome Res. (with 10,190) – Genome Research actually existed, but the redirect from Genome Res. hadn't been created yet.
ThaddeusB continued to run the bot every now and then. Its first run was in June 2009, followed by others in July and August of that year. Things were looking good: by the end of 2009, the top 300 most cited entries all had articles (or redirects), and only about 40 entries in the top ~500 remained missing. The topmost missing entry went from 10,190 citations to below 120 citations. That's a reduction of two orders of magnitude in the span of half a year! During that time, we also developed a writing guide for journal articles (which has since been greatly refined).
The next and last run didn't occur until May 2010. ThaddeusB then abruptly became inactive (a reminder that bus factors of 1 are bad), leaving us without both bot and coder. We still worked with what we had, clearing the first 500 journals by the end of December of that year.
A new bot request was made, looking for a bot to take over WikiStatsBOT's old task. I used the opportunity to bring in new ideas, and redesign some of its functionality and visual appearance. After a few days, a coder was found in JLaTondre. A BRFA was filed, and in July 2011, the JL-Bot unleashed its 0s and 1s in service of WikiProject Academic Journals.
Sample output of the first decently-accurate run (10 July 2011):
Again, the bot was quickly improved to clean up some entries, have better accuracy, and present things in a more appealing and useful way.
JL-Bot's takeover marked the beginning of what I call the "modern era" of JCW. The compilation became reliably updated, which let us focus on adding functionality and having a more polished presentation. The current update schedule is for major updates twice a month (after data dumps become available) and daily minor updates as needed. The major updates reflect the evolution of Wikipedia since the last dump (i.e. new citations, deleted citations, cleaned up citations, etc.), while the minor updates reflect smaller changes in how things have been organized since the last daily run (i.e. categorization and redirect updates, as well as bot configuration tweaks).
Over time, new sub-compilations were designed to browse the data according to different criteria.
Those can all be easily accessed through the current JCW mainpage. Browsing the archives of User talk:JL-Bot and WT:JCW will give some insights as to how each feature got implemented over time, but I must warn you that the discussions can get pretty technical. But, perhaps more importantly, the source code is available on GitHub under the MIT License, greatly mitigating the bus factor issue.
As of writing, the compilation covers about 3.4 million citations, with 1.5 million distinct DOIs, with 7,290 distinct DOI prefixes. This is nearly ten times the initial coverage we had in 2009, which reflects the expansion Wikipedia had since (both in the number of articles and in the number of citations per article). For posterity,
| Summary of the current compilation, based on the 20 July 2023 dump | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Most cited publishers | Citations[n 1] | Most cited journals | Citations[n 2] | Most cited missing journals | Citations[n 3] |
| Elsevier | 360,000
|
Nature | 51,000
|
The NamesforLife Abstracts | 1974
|
| Springer Science+Business Media | 286,000
|
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | 40,000
|
Cesa News | 824
|
| Wiley | 255,000
|
Science | 37,000
|
New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics | 534
|
| Nature Research | 118,000
|
Journal of Biological Chemistry | 33,000
|
The Real Estate Record: Real Estate Record and Builders' Guide | 509
|
| Informa | 112,000
|
The Astrophysical Journal | 23,000
|
Memoirs of the American Entomological Institute | 505
|
You might say, "but wait, those redlinks contains things that aren't journals!" Well, read on to find out more. I will however, take a small pause here to thank various people that helped with the development of the compilation in one way or another over the years.
First JLaTondre whose speed and skill at implementing my vision is simply unparalleled and unfathomable, as well as ThaddeusB for giving it a shot ages ago. Then, in no particular order of importance, AManWithNoPlan, the late DGG (obituary), Fgnievinski, Galobtter, IntoThinAir, John Vandenberg, Johnuniq, Mark viking, Markworthen, Randykitty, Rjwilmsi, the late Ronhjones (obituary), Smith609, Steve Quinn, TheSandDoctor, Tokenzero, and Trappist the monk. I'm sure I'm forgetting some people, and I apologize for doing so. But believe me, I have appreciated every bit of help I have even gotten.
Understanding what exactly the compilation is is important. As mentioned above, it's a searchable compilation of all |journal= parameters from citation templates on the English Wikipedia, taken from the latest database dump. The |doi= parameters are also used by the compilation to group things by DOI prefixes (the 10.xxxx/... part of DOIs). It is based on citations like:
<ref name=Bloom1969>{{cite journal |last1=Bloom |first1=E. D. |display-authors=etal |year=1969 |title=High-Energy Inelastic e–p Scattering at 6° and 10° |journal=Physical Review Letters |volume=23 |issue=16 |pages=930–934 |doi=10.1103/PhysRevLett.23.930}}</ref>It will, however, ignore named-reference repeats like <ref name=Bloom1969/>, as well as "manual" citations like
<ref>Bloom, E. D. et al. "High-Energy Inelastic e–p Scattering at 6° and 10°". Physical Review Letters, 23 (16): 930–934. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.23.930</ref>There is also limited support for semi-manual citations involving {{doi}} and {{doi-inline}}, like:
<ref>Bloom, E. D. et al. "High-Energy Inelastic e–p Scattering at 6° and 10°". Physical Review Letters, 23 (16): 930–934. {{doi|10.1103/PhysRevLett.23.930}}</ref>Then some cleanup and processing is done:
|journal=[[Foo|Bar]] is treated as |journal=BarMatching is not perfect, so you'll often find mismatched entries like:
| 2842 | Nature Sustainability |
|
When these are found, they can be bypassed in WP:JCW/EXCLUDE, and won't show up in the next daily run. A great deal of energy is spent dealing with bad matches, particular after new data dumps. But there will always be mismatches.
The |journal= parameter will often be misused for books, magazines, newsletters, websites, or contains wrong/extraneous data like authors/publisher/volume/page. We try to identify what type of publication we're dealing with in the most popular journals, and alphabetical sub-compilations based on categories and keywords, but no filtering is done because we want to be able to clean that stuff up when we come across it! And if we have a highly-cited non-journal, like Cesa News, well that's still good to know. If it's not notable on its own, maybe we can create an article on its publisher, Centre for Entomological Studies Ankara, and redirect Cesa News there.
Additional information on how to read the compilation can be found at the bottom of each page in the compilation, as well as on the compilation's main page.
The main historical use of the compilation was to find highly cited missing journals. That is still the case today. But so much more can now be done, particularly on cleanup:
Citation bot and JCW-CleanerBot will often be seen doing cleanup based on these compilation.
Well, the first natural extension would be WP:MCW – Magazines cited by Wikipedia. But that already exists! It was developed alongside JCW, but given much less attention; historically, {{cite magazine}} redirected to {{cite journal}}, so its adoption was much less widespread. We could also have WP:PCW (Publishers cited by Wikipedia) or WP:BCW (Books cited by Wikipedia). But those would require a great deal of curating, given those would represent entirely new datasets, with their own peculiarities. It doesn't mean they won't ever get done – just that those would represent a big design challenge. The bot code would probably be relatively straightforward to adapt once the design was clear, but I'm sure that would still have its challenges.
But for now, I hope that you'll have fun exploring the compilation, and perhaps decide you want to tackle the many invalid titles, or clean up the many proceedings cited as journals. Feel free to share your experiences with JCW or suggest improvements to the compilations in the comment section!
This article attempts to explore what can happen after global bans, what new situations arise, what dilemma does the community face, and how to deal with off-wiki harassment.
PlanespotterA320, a former trusted sysop from Uzbek Wikipedia, through persistent sock-puppetry introduced unreliable contents into articles, harassed other Wikipedians off-wiki, trolled and so on. She was first banned by global community on 24 February 2023, then by the Wikimedia Foundation on 17 March. After being banned, she continued to recruit meatpuppets on Reddit to defame and harass others on and off wiki.
Coincidentally Projects, also known as the "George Reeves Person", has been banned since 18 October 2018. Using a variety of IPs, he still continues to intimidate other Wikipedians on English Wikiquote, Wikipedia, and various off-wiki sites.
When such problems arise, are global bans truly the last step?
Wikipedia's policy recommends that legal threats should not be resorted to when faced with legally relevant issues, and the highest resolution the Wikimedia Foundation can achieve is a global ban. After global bans, some communities smoothed over the disaster caused by those disruptors (see a related case about the Croatian Wikipedia). But other disruptors continued to mess around in and out of communities after being banned, causing more and more troubles.
Filters, blocks, article deletions, rev deletions, check users and page protections. These are the ways that some of us, Wikipedians, can deal with these unruly, global banned bad guys. Outing, defamation, intimidation, threats, and even physical attacks, those are what those bad guys can use against us. There is a huge gap between the impact of these two. While the disruptors may be blocked or banned locally (or even globally), it might not be enough to stop them. Regular editors can have very unpleasant experiences, especially if their public identity is known.
After some research, I found that someone had tried to contact the authorities to deal with issues concerning long-term abuser Nipponese Dog Calvero, also known as KAGE. After being repeatedly harassed by KAGE, someone tried to contact the police and the courts for help. The outcome is unknown, but at least for now KAGE is no longer trying to threaten or intimidate other Wikipedians. After being repeatedly harassed by Project, there were also some sysops who contacted the police. This, at least, allowed these disruptors to stop their activities for a period of time and made them realize that their actions may have some adverse effects on themselves.
Of course, this is not to encourage Wikipedians to resort to legal threats when faced with all kinds of matters. When faced with most content disputes, there is no problem with the cycle shown in BOLD, revert, discuss. There are many of noticeboards being set up, such as Dispute Resolution, Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents or Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring and even Arbitration Committee to help solve your disputes. Even if all of these processes fail, like in the Croatian Wikipedia when it was dominated by "ideologically driven users who are misaligned with Wikipedia's five pillars", you can still go to Metawiki and make a request for comments.
In addition, seeking legal help should not be an act of intimidation to others, but a kind of protection of one's own reputation and safety. It's not about telling other editors, or even disruptors that "Agree with me or face the police and government." Doing so will only lead to common editors offended, trolls fed, and situation downgraded. Instead, when you face intimidation, outing, threats of harm and so on, first contact the Wikimedia Foundation, then, when necessary, call the police with the an accurate description of the problem.
Under normal circumstances, these vandals will use various methods to protect their identities from legal claims, including using varieties of open proxies, fake user agents or fraudulent identities. Second, transnational lawsuits are often quite complex. In some countries, disputes and even threats on the Internet are far from enough for the authorities to take action.
So, does that means we shouldn't ask for offline help? Obviously not. The first sentence in WP:EMERGENCY is If you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency services. Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia community can try a block, or even a global ban, which might stop the disruptors immediately. But online issues are ultimately online, anyone can shut down their laptop or leave Wikipedia without any side effects. But offline personal safety may affect you, the editor in reality, a lot.
I also hope that there will be fewer and fewer situations that require public power to intervene in the future, which marks that the Wikimedia project is developing in an increasingly calm and civil way. But unfortunately, Wikimedia projects must be open as they can be edited by the public. Anyone with a computer and Internet connection can edit them. So, there is still a long and hard way to go for a calm and brighter future.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. So, this issue, we're publishing what I had done when what happened happened. It's hard to be silly after that.[1]
Fourteen featured articles were promoted this period.
Eighteen featured pictures were promoted this period, including the one at the top of this article which I never got to show my father, and the one at the bottom.
.jpg)
_LCCN2014708419_Crop_2.jpg)
_male.jpg)
-20230419-RM-125228.jpg)
_2.jpg)
_male_Crockford_Stream.jpg)
_Danube_delta.jpg)
_-_Keila.jpg)
_in_flight.JPG)
_swimming.jpg)
.jpg)
,_mar_Rojo,_Egipto,_2023-04-15,_DD_49.jpg)
Eight featured lists were promoted this period.
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Huw Edwards | 
|
2,240,811 | .jpg)
|
This Welsh news reader for the BBC was revealed to be the man behind The Sun's allegations that a well-known BBC presenter had paid a 17-year old tens of thousands of British pounds for sexually explicit images, which they then allegedly used to fund their cocaine addiction. The police said that they found no evidence of criminal conduct. Edwards was suspended and was reported to be in hospital with depression. |
| 2 | Oppenheimer (film) |
|
1,629,598 | .jpg)
|
Christopher Nolan's latest film, bound to get critics raving because of its production values and get their ears bleeding because of Nolan's obsession with terrible sound mixing. I'm likely going to watch it as a double feature. |
| 3 | J. Robert Oppenheimer | 
|
1,580,213 | You guessed it, the subject of #2. I don't have anything of note to say about him, so I'll let Harry S. Truman do the talking. | |
| 4 | Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One |
|
1,491,335 | 
|
Secret agent Ethan Hunt returns for his seventh go in trying to save the world - with the threat this time being a rogue AI (a fairly relevant topic!) - while driving dangerously, jumping off incredibly high things, and wearing masks that downright turn him into other people. Only this time, as the "Part One" in the title makes clear, it's not a complete story so moviegoers will have to wait until next June to see the conclusion - though in the movie's favor, it at least cuts at a reasonable point instead of doing like Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse and closing in the middle of a scene. Delivering the same spy intrigue and unbelievable stunts of the previous movies, Dead Reckoning was acclaimed by critics and had a strong opening week earning over $200 million worldwide, and it's bound to keep making money if last year's Top Gun: Maverick shows how much of a draw Tom Cruise remains. |
| 5 | Sound of Freedom (film) |
|
1,439,425 | .jpg)
|
An action movie based (very, very loosely) on Timothy Ballard's (pictured) Operation Underground Railroad. It's gotten decent reviews and exceeded expectations at the box office, though it's attracted controversy over whether it promotes QAnon conspiracy theories (not helped by Ballard and star Jim Caviezel having publicly endorsed some of QAnon's more extreme beliefs). |
| 6 | Mission: Impossible (film series) |
|
1,013,011 | .jpg)
|
In 1996, Tom Cruise co-produced an adaptation of an old TV series about spies. It's still running strong nearly three decades later while providing many ways for Cruise to defy death, be it scaling a mountain with his bare hands, being thrown around cars in a freeway, climbing the tallest building in the world, hanging from a plane door as the thing takes off, a HALO jump in the middle of a storm and in the latest one (#4) using a motorcycle to jump off a huge cliff. |
| 7 | Chandrayaan-3 | 
|
1,012,436 | 
|
India launched one more lunar mission, expected to land in the Moon next month. |
| 8 | 
|
987,743 | 
|
Websites among Wikipedia's most viewed articles didn't seem like something that could still reappear. But Elon Musk just had to mishandle Twitter enough[1] for Meta Platforms to retaliate with their equivalent Threads and bring plentiful views for the company's better known social networks. | |
| 9 |
|
979,774 | |||
| 10 | Carlos Alcaraz |
|
941,375 | .jpg)
|
Tennis grand slams have a tendency to bring in articles here, so in comes the current #1 in the ATP rankings as he reached the Wimbledon final. Considering the Spaniard won the match, expect even more views next week. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | J. Robert Oppenheimer |
|
4,921,587 | 
|
Christopher Nolan tackled a biopic for the first time, and the result has the expected epic results with impeccable production values and an outstanding cast. Unfortunately, Oppenheimer also focuses less on the Manhattan Project, where physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer helped develop the atomic bomb, than on the Oppenheimer security hearing where the Congress tried to determine if he was a communist, making much of the three hour runtime (particularly once Trinity explodes by the two hour mark) be boring politics that can certainly drive viewers to wash it off by immediately following things with the diametrically opposed other big release of the week (#4). Still, it had an overall approval of audiences and reviewers and is expected to make much money, specially from IMAX screens. |
| 2 | Oppenheimer (film) |
|
4,779,203 | ||
| 3 | Carlos Alcaraz |
|
2,781,884 | 
|
At Wimbledon, this Spanish tennis player reminded us why he's the current leader of the ATP rankings by beating the living legend at #5 at just 20, his second Grand Slam while breaking a sequence since 2003 where only the same four guys won on the English lawn. |
| 4 | Barbie (film) |
|
2,609,472 | 
|
If you're seeing an unusual amount of people wearing pink, blame this movie that takes Mattel's famed doll and adds a satirical approach reminiscent of The Lego Movie, albeit in a way that is certainly not aimed at children (be it discussing the patriarchy or mentioning Barbie's below waist anatomy...). Much praise was given to how Greta Gerwig made Barbie such a funny and subversive flick, and given being more recognizable while having lower content ratings compared to #2 it will certainly beat it at the box office, with the opening weekend alone nearly doubling the already impressive $80 million of Oppenheimer. |
| 5 | Novak Djokovic |
|
1,697,593 | .jpg)
|
After winning the first two Grand Slams of the year, 'Djoko' was stopped by #3 in the Wimbledon final, preventing him from both matching the 8 titles of Roger Federer and taking back the top of the ATP rankings. |
| 6 | Jane Birkin |
|
1,506,323 | 
|
Died this week aged 76. Birkin was a British actress and singer who was known for her romantic relationship with French musician and actor Serge Gainsbourg. She later acquired French citizenship and achieved a successful career in French cinema. |
| 7 | Tony Bennett | 
|
1,466,736 | .jpg)
|
One of the last-surviving jazz crooners of the 1950s and 60s, Bennett passed away from Alzheimer's disease this week at age 96. Bennett worked in the music industry for over 80 years, during which time he earned 20 Grammys and sold more than 50 million records worldwide, his songs becoming part of the Great American Songbook. His family said that he kept singing till the end, the last song he ever sung being "Because of You". |
| 8 | Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One |
|
1,407,946 | 
|
Tom Cruise complained that #1 would be taking IMAX screens away from his movie, the seventh in a series that has been running strong since 1996, but nonetheless was already shown holding tickets to both it and #4, wanting to support the film industry he so loves and like Ethan Hunt in the movie, is not dealing well with the threat of artificial intelligence. Dead Reckoning Part One was hailed as one of the best in the franchise and is nearing $400 million worldwide, a great indicator that many can't wait for Part Two next June. |
| 9 | Christopher Nolan |
|
1,129,085 | 
|
The writer-director of #2, who has a pechant for creating incredible imagery without computer graphics - which in the case of Oppenheimer included the climactic detonation! |
| 10 | Sound of Freedom (film) |
|
1,099,731 |
|
Compared to #1, #4, and #8 this thriller is a much more modest deal, priced at only $15 million when all the others have budgets in the nine digits. Yet it has kept itself steady at the box office, never falling below third while already breaking the $100 million mark. Maybe now its makers can find international distribution deals so overseas moviegoers can find out if Sound of Freedom earned all this success. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sinéad O'Connor |
|
8,096,961 | .jpg)
|
An Irish singer known primarily for making a Prince song her own, a distinctive shaved look, and tearing a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. Last year was taxing for her once her son committed suicide at just 17, leading to an hospitalization due to depression, and now O'Connor herself has died at 56, leaving behind ten studio albums, three other children and a grandson. |
| 2 | J. Robert Oppenheimer |
|
6,073,436 | .jpg)
|
Out of the universe A strange love is born Unholy union Trinity reborn... |
| 3 | Oppenheimer (film) |
|
5,767,988 | ||
| 4 | Barbie (film) |
|
3,898,258 | 
|
Pink, it's my new obsession Pink, it's not even a question... |
| 5 | Cillian Murphy |
|
1,384,434 | 
|
#2's portrayer, working with Christopher Nolan again, a collaboration dating back to the Scarecrow in Batman Begins and its sequels. Jokes were raised on how the marketing to #4 was all those highly visible pink things while #3 simply revealed new pictures of Murphy looking very disheveled. |
| 6 | Lewis Strauss |
|
1,224,066 | 
|
The commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission who would then lead the security hearing against #2, played in #3 by Robert Downey Jr. wearing heavy make-up. |
| 7 | Margot Robbie |
|
1,303,351 | 
|
The star of #4 who, fun fact, is reportedly going to be co-starring alongside her Ken Ryan Gosling in another movie. |
| 8 | Greta Gerwig |
|
1,144,227 | .jpg)
|
Once this actress turned into writing-directing, the result were two Best Picture nominees, the semi-autobiographical Lady Bird and an adaptation of Little Women. Now movie fans wonder if she'll again be an awards competitor for #4, given Gerwig and partner Noah Baumbach pulled a surprisingly smart movie out of Barbie dolls. |
| 9 | Katherine Oppenheimer |
|
1,050,908 | 
|
#2's wife, played in #3 by Emily Blunt (meaning that the German-American couple were portrayed by two actors from the British Isles, an Irishman and an Englishwoman). |
| 10 | Deaths in 2023 | 
|
1,002,566 | 
|
For #1: All the flowers that you planted mama In the back yard All died when you went away... |
For the June 24 – July 24 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Legalism (Chinese philosophy) | 1909 | FourLights is really devoted in improving this article. |
| Wagner Group rebellion | 1844 | The fallout of a paramilitary group that used to support Putin deciding to mutiny against him for a day is yet to be concluded, with the Wagner Group leaving for Belarus, announcing they wouldn't fight again in Ukraine, and delivering heavy military equipment back to Russia, but are still training Belarusians and taking part in African conflicts. |
| Deaths in 2023 | 1783 | Our version of the obituary. Along with Tony Bennett and Jane Birkin, mentioned above, the period also had the departures of Alan Arkin and Coco Lee, who entered the last Traffic Report, plus among others writer Milan Kundera and hacker-turned-security consultant Kevin Mitnick. |
| Leonardo Torres Quevedo | 1449 | Still here a month later, a Spanish engineer with one dedicated editor trying to clean up his article. |
| Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny | 1410 | Indiana Jones came back to fight Nazis in 1969 accompanied by his goddaughter (whose portrayer will always earn this here writer's contempt for creating Fleabag), and the fifth movie has not been the same runaway success of its predecessors, splitting fans while only barely surpassing its enormous budget and the earnings of the lowest-grossing one. Still, here's to him. |
| 2023 Wimbledon Championships – Men's singles | 1149 | Novak Djokovic could have matched two records, Margaret Court's Grand Slam titles (24) and Roger Federer's Wimbledon ones (8), while taking back the top of the ATP rankings. But Carlos Alcaraz stood in the way and defeated him in the final. |
| Barbie (film) | 980 | For everyone who is having "Barbie Girl" stuck in their heads (even if the movie itself doesn't feature the song aside from a rap sampling it - like me, Mattel disapproves the song!), mind I remind that Aqua made this infinitely better track? |
| Bigg Boss OTT (Hindi season 2) | 862 | India started a new season of their version of Big Brother with celebrities. |
| 2023 Wimbledon Championships – Women's singles | 858 | Markéta Vondroušová, just two years after winning the Olympic silver, got her first Grand Slam title, defeating in the final Ons Jabeur, who also lost last year's Wimbledon final. |
| Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance | 788 | An alliance of 24 Indian parties hoping to take down the current government in next year's elections. |
| Oppenheimer (film) | 762 | The Wolf of Wall Street peaked two hours in and still had one more hour to go. Another biopic went the same way, only this time the remaining running time is mostly talking. And did you know some editors were trying to delete Barbenheimer? (once the dust settles, they might try again!) |
| 2023 Championship League (ranking) | 742 | A snooker event held in Leicester and won by Shaun Murphy. |
| Killing of Nahel Merzouk | 705 | A 17 year old French of North African descent was shot at point blank in a suburb of Paris, the latest in a series of occurrences (this year alone there were three) of fatal shootings during a traffic stop in France, mostly happening to people of color. As an entry below shows, the death was a turning point for those against police brutality with implied racial profiling, not helped by the responsible policemen lying in their testimony. |
| Great Britain at the 2023 European Games | 695 | The third edition of the European Games were held in Poland, and Great Britain finished seventh with 49 medals. |
| Nahel Merzouk protests | 681 | The article is actually now Nahel Merzouk riots, showing that in comparison to Black Lives Matter across the ocean, the French escalated their protests in the 19 days after Merzouk's death in a violent way, leading to over €650 million in damages. |
