We have had eight successful candidacies for adminship so far in 2023, which is just one more than the worst-ever year for RfA, which was 2021. The number of active administrators started the year 2023 at 500, then took a big dive in mid February for no reason that The Signpost has been able to determine, touched 452 a couple of times in April, and until October was steady around 460.
On October 18, we hit a new record low, going back over a decade, of 448 active admins. To find the last time English Wikipedia had fewer than 449 active admins, we have to go back to 2005.[a]
The reasons for this are cloudy and have been covered before by The Signpost, for instance at "Administrator cadre continues to contract – more" in January 2022.
In a recent Administrators' noticeboard discussion titled "Twelve fewer administrators", BeanieFan11 noted not a single month this year have we had a net gain of administrators, and so far all but one have had a net decrease, some large - per the admin's newsletter: January: +3, -11, net -8; February: +1, -5, net -4; March: +1, -2, net -1; April: +1, -1, net 0 (only month without negative net); May: +1, -4, net -3; June: +1, -3, net -2; July: +1, -8, net -7; August: +1, -4, net -3; September: +2, -4, net -2; October: +1, -12, net -11; Overall: +13, -53, net -40
At least one disappeared admin was fallout from the WP:ROADS controversy ending in a content fork and some departures, including Rschen7754 who resigned as an administrator and editor. – B
The Wikimedia Foundation has published comprehensive notes from the recent community call about the Knowledge Equity Fund on Meta. The notes include a Q&A. The WMF also highlights that the Fund has helped it to make new connections:
We contacted user groups and connected the grantees with them geographically or thematically, explaining the objects of the fund. We are also trying to create new synergies between Wikimedia user groups and external groups to increase our impact.
A few examples of connections we made are:
- Project Multatuli, which we connected with Wikimedia Indonesia
- Create Caribbean were connected with Noircir, Wiki Cari UG, Whose Knowledge, Projet:Université de Guyane and WikiMujeres
- Black Cultural Archives were connected with Noircir, Whose Knowledge and Wikimedia UK
- Criola were connected with Whose Knowledge, WikiMujeres and Mujeres (mulheres) LatinoAmericanas in Wikimedia and
- Data for Black Lives which we connected with AfroCrowd and Black Lunch Table
Through these connections, we have seen positive synergies within the movement at large
An ongoing English Wikipedia Village Pump Request for Comment on the controversial fund stands at 35:23 in favour of adopting the following non-binding resolution:
The English Wikipedia community is concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has found itself engaged in mission creep, and that this has resulted in funds that donors provided in the belief that they would support Wikimedia Projects being allocated to unrelated external organizations, despite urgent need for those funds to address internal deficiencies.
We request that the Wikimedia Foundation reappropriates all money remaining in the Knowledge Equity Fund, and we request that prior to making non-trivial grants that a reasonable individual could consider unrelated to supporting Wikimedia Projects that the Foundation seeks approval from the community.
– AK
There is an overwhelming consensus to not promote. 1 editor would promote to policy, 7 editors prefer guideline, and 30 editors were against promotion. 2 editors were fine with either policy or guideline. [...] The most common and strongest rationale against promotion (articulated by 12 editors, plus 3 others outside of their !votes) was that existing P&Gs [policies and guidelines], particularly the policies against vandalism and policies like WP:V and WP:RS, already cover the issues raised in the proposals. 5 editors would ban LLMs outright. 10-ish editors believed that it was either too soon to promote or that there needed to be some form of improvement. On the one hand, several editors believed that the current proposal was too lax; on the other, some editors felt that it was too harsh, with one editor suggesting that Wikipedia should begin to integrate AI or face replacement by encyclopedias that will. (2 editors made a bet that this wouldn't happen.)
Editors who supported promoting to guideline noted that Wikipedia needs to address the use of LLMs and that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. However, there was no general agreement on what the "perfect" looked like, and other editors pointed out that promoting would make it much harder to revise or deprecate if consensus still failed to develop.
Similarly, on Wikimedia Commons a page collecting guidance about AI-generated media (particularly the use of generative AI models such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion or Midjourney), likewise created in December 2022, is still marked as "a work in progress page", although it appears to have progressed a bit further already towards reflecting community consensus.
In any case, discussions about generative AI are continuing in the Wikimedia movement, also in off-wiki fora such as the "ML, AI and GenAI for Wikimedia Projects" Facebook group and the "Wikimedia AI" group on Telegram (non-public but with public invite link). At Wikimania 2023, it was the subject of various sessions including two panels titled "AI advancements and the Wikimedia projects" (video) and "ChatGPT vs. WikiGPT: Challenges and Opportunities in harnessing generative AI for Wikimedia Projects" (video). The September edition of the Wiki Education Foundation's "Speaker Series" likewise had the topic "Wikipedia in a Generative AI World", featuring three speakers including Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail, a former research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation and developer of the AI-based ORES system that is still widely used for vandalism detection and other purposes). – H
In its EU Policy Monitoring Report for September, Wikimedia Europe highlights several legislative efforts that are ongoing on the continent. Some of them raise concerns regarding their possible impact on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects:
– H
In Slate, Annie Rauwerda (of Depths of Wikipedia fame) explains why "On Wikipedia, Anyone Can Be a Model". The article focuses on LittleT889, who created the article thirst trap ("a type of social media post intended to entice viewers sexually") and illustrated with a shirtless selfie of himself that has since been "viewed almost a million times" (although it was recently replaced in the article). What's more, "He adds photos of himself to all sorts of encyclopedically relevant topics, like water bottle flipping, Nae Nae, and my favorite, the Floss (dance) article, where he wears sunglasses indoors and furiously shakes his hips in front of three guitars and a bongo drum", as well as Running man (dance), Dougie, and Naruto run.
Rauwerda also managed to get in touch with other selfie contributors, such as a "20-year-old Russian university student [who said that] once he took a picture of his eye so astonishingly beautiful that an Instagram post wasn’t enough — he needed to put it on Wikipedia," and "a retired biology teacher in Germany [who] realized that Wikipedia had no good photos of female fingers [and] uploaded a snap of her own hand to Wikimedia Commons", which now illustrates the article finger. In general, the article observes that Wikipedia's "photos have an unvarnished feel and an unmistakably human charm" and that it's "immediately obvious that Wikipedia’s models are real people, not actors." It also recalls earlier media coverage of similar examples, such as a couple who has graced the high five article since 2008, and last year - now married with kids - recreated the shots for an online magazine (see earlier coverage: "The king and queen of the high 5").
Lastly, Rauwerda calls on Slate's readers to consider contributing themselves: "And even though Wikimedia Commons hosts more than 100 million pieces of media, it has some stunning gaps. There’s a big list of requested images, and some of the items are shockingly quotidian, like 'half-up hairstyle,' 'business women shaking hands,' and 'tripping' (go ahead, fall on your face for the sake of free knowledge)."
"TechNewsWorld" reports that "Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Zillow are the fastest-loading U.S. websites on the internet, according to a study released Monday by web design company DigitalSilk." Wikipedia came second "with an average load time of 1.40 seconds (1.6 mobile, 1.2 desktop)", well ahead of sloths such as Instagram ("The site on mobile takes a whopping 6.7 seconds to load and 4.2 seconds on desktop") or Google ("While it had a respectable mobile load time of 1.1 seconds, its desktop time of 4.6 seconds bloated the search giant’s overall performance").
This success is certainly in part due to the longtime work of the Wikimedia Foundation's recently disbanded Performance team, but also, according to one of the study's authors, due to Wikipedia's simpler design: "It’s interesting to see how websites like Wikipedia and Craigslist, which have barely changed their design and have remained largely text-based, topped our list, and the popularity of these sites shows that sometimes simplicity can work."
(The TechNewsWorld article doesn't link to the actual study and doesn't provide much detail about its methodology. But in a similar study featured by ZDNet earlier this year, DigitalSilk had used an online tool called Pingdom Website Speed Test.)
Nature News notes the publication of "Improving Wikipedia verifiability with AI" in Nature Machine Intelligence. "Wikipedia lives and dies by its references" the news article states, "but sometimes, those references are flawed." The neural network-based system described in the academic study, called SIDE, looks at whether Wikipedia references support the Wiki text, and proposes replacements for the weaker refs.
The paper is open access, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, and can be downloaded at the above links.
The Washington Post reviews the book Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie, a former lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. The review, titled The most influential crowdsourcing project happened long before Wikipedia, focuses, like the book, on the roughly 3,000 OED contributors who sent in quotations showing words in use in printed texts. Only a dozen or so are actually named in the review, but 97 of these unpaid volunteers are recorded at Wikipedia's List of contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Eadweard Muybridge hasn't yet made our list but two other murderers, Sir John Richardson (naturalist) and William Chester Minor do. Margaret Murray, who later became an Egyptologist and wrote The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, contributed 3,800 quotations from the Douay–Rheims Bible while growing up in India. There are many women among the 3,000 including Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor Aveling and a lesbian couple who wrote under the name Michael Field.
The implicit comparison of OED contributors to Wikipedians in the book review's title might seem exaggerated at first glance. After all, some of the OED contributors are quite unusual. But Ogilvie does play at comparing OED contributors with Wikipedians in the book's Introduction, which I just had to read on Amazon after reading the review. I'll have to read the rest of the book before drawing any firm conclusions. –S
I've talked a bit about why I restore images before, and, in a recent issue, covered the research process I go through to find the images.
But perhaps I haven't really shown how big of a role researching images alone plays in improving Wikipedia. Even if you feel image restoration is beyond you, it's often not particularly hard to improve Wikipedia in a substantial way by research alone. So let's not just look at images before and after restoration — let's look at what was in the article before the research.
Nettie Stevens was one of the two independent discoverers of the Y-chromosome, and arguably had much deeper insight into its role. Her before-research image is fairly typical of the sort of very mediocre image that can readily be replaced. As she's American, I tried the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), at https://dp.la, which found two images of her: one a much better copy of the image in use, and the other of which obscured her face with a microscope. Then I restored what I found:
The biggest jump in quality, in my opinion, is between the old image in the article and the better copy I found through DPLA. The original looks like a photocopy. The research is more important than the restoration here, and Wikipedians are generally good at research.
The other, less insightful, independent discover of the Y-chromosome was Edmund Beecher Wilson. When I was cleaning up the Nettie Stevens images, I thought perhaps I should add his image to XY sex-determination system as well as hers, went to his article, and realised something had to be done. As he was also American, I used DPLA again, and found good enough results I didn't need to go further:
There's probably a bigger boost from the restoration here, but at the same time, the original is so appalling that one would be hard-pressed to say that the restoration is the bulk of the improvement.
Also, this image brings up issues with the specifics of restoration. Now, archives go offline all the time, so I reiterate my position that you need to upload the unaltered original. But you don't need to use it in articles. The biggest improvements at thumbnail level were probably the crop, the levels adjustment, and fixing the damage to the edges that show up as areas of white. The first anyone could do, the second requires a little care (it's very easy to go too far), and the third is much more difficult; but that does mean with a little care, anyone could have done two of the most substantial improvements.
The original lead image for Emily Davison isn't too bad at thumbnail size, but it's pretty appalling zoomed in: it looks like an upscale of a much smaller image. I used either Bing or Google to find this one; I don't remember which, as I often try both and see which one I get better results with. As often happens with researching an image, it conveniently turned an unknown photographer into a known photographer: in this case, Andrew William Dron. Who was a research project in himself to get a birth and death year for, but that's maybe beyond the scope of this article.
I think this one shows the benefits of research the best, since, at thumbnail, outside of the crop, there's little visual distinction. It's pretty obvious that there's a bunch of white spots that got removed once you zoom in a little more, but thumbnails are rather forgiving:
...And that's to your advantage. It means that a host of small flaws will be forgiven at the article level. Now, Wikipedia articles are widely used to find images of people nowadays. So there is a good reason to fix them, if you can. But even if you can't, you're still doing a very valuable job of putting substantially improved images out there that can be readily reused. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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I've said this before: If I don't write these, no-one else does. So I've... really rushed this week's article, and it probably shows. If anyone cares to help for next issue... please?
Eighteen featured articles were promoted this period.
Seventeen featured pictures were promoted this period, including the ones at the top and bottom of this article.
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One featured topic was promoted this period, nominated by Pseud 14.
Twelve featured lists were promoted this period.
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October started off not much different from usual, with sports and entertainment. Then war flared up again in the Middle East.
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | India at the 2022 Asian Games | 
|
2,382,812 | 
|
Hangzhou received the continental games that ended on October 8, and our South Asian friends that always shape this report had their best performance, surpassing 100 medals and standing fourth in the total count. Among the podiums are over 20 in both shooting and athletics, three for those who medaled in Tokyo 2020 (javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra, seen to the left, boxer Lovlina Borgohain, and the field hockey team), and both gold medals in the national sport (see below). |
| 2 | 2022 Asian Games |
|
2,120,017 | (WL)_-_33423_-_VGHS.jpg)
| |
| 3 | 2023 Cricket World Cup |
|
2,102,848 | .jpg)
|
India is a natural to host this, as they even have a cricket ground for 132,000 people. The tournament began last week, with a rematch between the finalists of the last edition which ended in the champions' defeat. The group stage of this edition alone will last over a month, so this article will take a while to leave. |
| 4 | David Beckham | 
|
1,654,841 | 
|
Netflix released Beckham, a documentary miniseries about one of the faces of England's late 90s football resurgence, who won a lot with Manchester United, Real Madrid and LA Galaxy, with the stint in the last one helping Beckham get an expansion team from Major League Soccer, Inter Miami FC, who currently employs an even bigger football star than Beckham ever was. |
| 5 | Jawan (film) |
|
1,248,683 | .jpg)
|
After becoming the biggest Indian movie of 2023 and the second-biggest Hindi film of all time, this Shah Rukh Khan-starrer continues to bring in the crore in the last lap of its run. Meanwhile, a certain Canadian believes that Hollywood could learn a thing or two from it. |
| 6 | Travis Kelce |
|
1,034,857 | .jpg)
|
The Kansas City Chiefs are going off well in their post-Super Bowl season. But most views regarding their tight end regard how he and Taylor Swift might be in a case of "You know I love the players, and you love the game". |
| 7 | Cricket World Cup |
|
1,034,149 | 
|
#3 led to readers seeking out the article on the quadrennial event whose trophy still remains the biggest honor in cricket. |
| 8 | Kevin McCarthy |
|
928,377 | .jpg)
|
He was the US Speaker of the House for 10 months, starting in January this year and ultimately ending this month after he was axed. This makes him the third shortest serving US speaker in history, and the first in history to be axed. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2023 | 
|
921,298 | 
|
For you, it's goodbye For me, it's to cry For whom the bell tolls... |
| 10 | Dick Butkus | 
|
860,882 | The American football linebacker who played for the Chicago Bears between 1965 and 1973 has died aged 80. He was considered the most feared tackler of all time. After his playing career, Butkus became active in sports commentary and philanthropy through his charity the Butkus Foundation. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gaza Strip |
|
5,344,460 | 
|
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been ongoing since 1947, and centers on the fact that both Jews and Arabs claim the Holy Land for themselves. It is one of the longest lasting conflicts that continue to this day.
Saturday, October 7, was a day of Sabbath, a day of holiness and rest observed by Jewish men and women. This was the date on which Hamas began Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, breaching the Gaza–Israel barrier, murdering over 1,200 Israelis and taking hundreds hostage. Israel began Operation Swords of Iron. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (#15) began retaliatory strikes and pledged to "turn all the places where Hamas is organized and hiding into cities of ruins". On October 8, Israel declared a state of war. The Israel–Hamas war is currently in its second week. Thousands on both sides have been killed, and more than a million have been displaced. |
| 2 | Hamas |
|
5,213,111 | .jpg)
| |
| 3 | 2023 Israel–Hamas war |
|
4,371,096 | .jpg)
| |
| 4 | Israel |
|
4,062,258 | 
| |
| 5 | 2023 Cricket World Cup |
|
3,829,668 | 
|
Only a nation of a billion can prevent a top 5 centered on the war, as India is hosting the world championship of its favorite sport. Last week saw the hosts win their first three matches, and five-time champions Australia lose their first two matches. |
| 6 | State of Palestine |
|
3,813,694 | 
|
#3 brings in the partially-recognised country in an ongoing sovereignty dispute with #4, that conflict having itself a spot on the list of longest continuing conflicts. |
| 7 | Israeli–Palestinian conflict |
|
2,921,208 | ||
| 8 | David Beckham |
|
2,553,561 | 
|
Let's liven up with sports. In the world's most popular, football, the Netflix documental miniseries Beckham chronicled the English striker who currently is a co-owner of Inter Miami FC. In another that certainly ranks high on global popularity helped by the huge populations of India and Pakistan, cricket, the former is hosting the world championship (#5). |
| 9 | Cricket World Cup |
|
2,370,824 | 
| |
| 10 | West Bank |
|
1,684,896 | 
|
There are two territories claimed by the State of Palestine in the geographical state of... Palestine. The first is the West Bank, occupied by Israeli military, and is split into Palestinian enclaves and a contiguous Israeli occupied area. The second is the Gaza Strip (#1), ruled by Hamas (#2) as an oppressive de facto one-party state. |
A new tool to bridge the gap between our physical surroundings and the digital realm came to life under the name of Sawtpedia. This tool enhances our exploration of items documented on Wikipedia by enabling users to listen to Wikipedia articles through the simple act of scanning a QR code generated by the tool itself. Sawtpedia opens up a fascinating audio dimension to the world of knowledge discovery.
In this post, we'll delve into Sawtpedia, exploring its origins, capabilities, and the potential it holds for knowledge dissemination.
Before we dive into Sawtpedia, it's essential to recognize QRpedia, the precursor of Sawtpedia. QRpedia, introduced in April 2011, is a mobile web-based system that employs QR codes to deliver Wikipedia articles to users in their mobile's language. Conceived by Roger Bamkin and coded by Terence Eden, QRpedia utilizes Wikipedia's API to determine whether a specified Wikipedia article is available in the language used by the mobile device used to scan the QR Code.
QRpedia has found its niche in various settings, including museums, GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions, historical cities, and even cemeteries.
Fascinated by this tool, I tried to introduce it to my country Tunisia. During Wikimania 2014 I initiated the idea of a new project in the medina of Tunis (UNESCO world heritage city) that I named Medinapedia. This project was executed by the Tunisian NGO Carthagina and with the collaboration of Wikimedia Tunisia and the Tunisian Association of the Preservation of the Medina – Tunis (ASM Tunis).
However, after installing the QRPedia codes on the monuments within the Medina of Tunis, I realized that it would be more practical to listen to the Wikipedia articles rather than reading them while strolling through the historic city.
And that's how the concept of Sawtpedia dawned upon me!
So, what exactly is Sawtpedia? Sawtpedia, a fusion of "Sawt" meaning "sound" in Arabic and Swahili, and "pedia" as a reference to Wikipedia, serves as a tool that produces QR codes for Wikipedia articles. These articles, spanning various topics like monuments and museum collections, offer users the convenience of listening to them in the device's language.
Upon scanning a QR code, Sawtpedia fetches the Wikidata item for the associated article. If an audio file is available on Wikimedia Commons for that Wikipedia article in the user's mobile language via the Wikidata property P989, Sawtpedia plays it. In cases where such audio recordings are not available on Commons, Sawtpedia steps up by generating an audio version using the article's lead text through the gTTS Text-to-Speech System (under MIT License).
The concept was initially introduced at the WikidataCon 2021 and later put into action during the Hack4OpenGLAM when my friend Houcemeddine Turki stepped-in and assumed responsibility for the coding part and the deployment on Toolforge.
Sawtpedia is the result of collaborative efforts between Wikimedia Tunisia, Wiki World Heritage, and the Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit from the University of Sfax.
1. Enhanced User Experience: Sawtpedia seeks to provide a better experience for visitors who scan QR codes. It bridges the gap between written content and auditory accessibility.
2. Foster GLAM partnerships between Wikimedia affiliates and museums: The tool can serve as a strong motivator for museums and local affiliates to collaborate closely. Museums can derive numerous benefits from Sawtpedia. (check this article: 7 reasons why museums should use Sawtpedia!).
3. Content Creation: The tool indirectly aims to foster content creation within the Wikimedia ecosystem. This includes the expansion of Wikipedia articles, Wikidata items, and audio files on Wikimedia Commons.
4. Promote accessibility and inclusivity: Sawtpedia can be used to promote accessibility and inclusivity by providing information to those who may have difficulty reading or accessing text-based content. For instance, the tool has the capability (work in progress) to provide the possibility to listen to content in local languages/dialects that are not configured on mobile devices (e.g. in some countries like India, most of the phones are configured in English while there are many local languages/dialects).
In conclusion, Sawtpedia is more than just a tool; it's a leap forward in making Wikipedia accessible to a broader audience. By combining the power of QR codes, Wikidata, and audio resources from Commons, it transforms the way we engage with Wikipedia articles. Whether you're exploring a museum, visiting a monument, or simply curious, Sawtpedia offers a new dimension to the world's largest open-access knowledge repository.
After a long Request for Comment at Help talk:Citation Style 1, consensus was reached for creating a new template to allow robust and standardized citations for revelations and epiphanies experienced by Wikipedia editors. The template, {{Cite altered state}}, offers a number of parameters representing a broad range of philosophical, religious, and pharmaceutical experiences.
{{Cite altered state
| thought =
| author =
| date =
| state =
| substance1 =
| dose1 =
| substance2 =
| dose2 =
| background-audio =
| audio-author =
| url =
| access-date =
| medium =
| like-whoa-man =
}}
Examples:
It's hoped that this template, and the accompanying citation guidelines, will allow us to finally put into articles the revelations, fully-baked ideas, cosmic truths, and toaster inventors that Wikipedia has always struggled to properly include.
