Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson chows down on Tucker Carlson's two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an opinion piece published by the Daily Mail. Many reviewers found the interview to be boring, e.g. Masha Gessen writing for The New Yorker (paywalled). When asked what brought about the current "special military operation", Putin elaborates on Russia's origin myth (phrased as actual history) starting with Veliky Novgorod and Kyiv in the year 862, moving onto the baptism of the Rus in 988, and barely getting to Catherine the Great (who reigned from 1762 to 1796) in the first half-hour. The next hour, which goes up to the fall of the Soviet Union, is little better.

Johnson says that he:

Perhaps Johnson was irritated by Putin's claim, made two or three times, that Johnson had stopped truce negotiations in Istanbul early in the war. Otherwise, Johnson sticks to his main point, that Carlson showed "bum-sucking servility to a tyrant."

The mystery for Wikipedians is Johnson's claim that Putin's story had anything to do with Wikipedia. My review of Kievan Rus', Christianization of Kievan Rus', Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and Dissolution of the Soviet Union gives little support to Putin's views.

Azernews reports: More than 600 articles related to ICT published on "Wikipedia" in Azerbaijani language. The Azerbaijan Information and Communication Technologies Industry Association (AICTIA), Azercell Telecom, the Azerbaijan I, and a government agency led a five-month-long project which created 600 articles on the Azerbaijani Wikipedia.

A major share of Azercell is believed to be owned by the ruling Aliyev family, according to a 2015 report from OCCRP. Ilham Aliyev, the president of the oil-rich former Soviet republic, is widely considered to be a dictator.

I don't claim that the Azerbaijani editors are effectively acting as paid editors for a dictator. What else are they supposed to do, if they want to contribute to Wikipedia in this field? But it does look like a clumsy and potentially problematic arrangement.

As recently reported by Kazakhstan-based, English-language newspaper Astana Times, over 100 academic scientists and researchers attended a seminar in Astana, hosted by the Kazakh Ministry of Science and Higher Education, on building scientific content in the Kazakh language on Wikipedia.

In the past, the neutrality of the Kazakh Wikipedia was disputed due to its suspected ties to the national government; a controversy that notably involved (albeit indirectly) none other than Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

– S, B

Members of the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group appear to be taking an active role in reforming the standardization of the Yoruba language, a language which is spoken by over 40 million people in West Africa. According to a post published on the Wikimedia Foundation's Diff blog, this effort comes as a collaboration between the user group and the International Centre for Yoruba Arts and Culture. The partnership has been ongoing for a couple of years, though the effort seems to have become increasingly organized and concrete in recent times.

Nigeria's The Nation reports that a group met at the University of Ibadan on January 12 in order to discuss this topic, describing the gathering as "a pivotal inaugural meeting". Nigeria's The Guardian reported in mid-January that a joint committee that seeks to "examine and harmonize the current orthography" of Yoruba had been formed and was partnering with Wikimedia. According to The Guardian, members of the committee contain representatives from a number of Nigerian and Yoruba civil society groups. The joint committee has scheduled a conference for the weekend of February 20, 2024, to continue the group's orthography standards reform efforts.

According to a 2013 paper published the Journal of Arts and Humanities, a standardization of Yoruba orthography was first published in 1875. The 1875 orthography remained the standard system for writing Yoruba for nearly 100 years, though reform efforts that began in the 1960s culminated in a committee of Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Education writing and approving of new standards for the language by June 1974. The 1974 orthography has remained the language's official standard through the present day. – R

• People are interested in Oxford and Cambridge: The Tab, a British publication targeted at college students, published a list of the top 10 U.K. universities by Wikipedia page views during 2023. Oxford took first place with 1,353,397 views and Cambridge second with 995,733. The top Scottish university by page views, St. Andrews University, took fifth place with 349,988 views. No universities from Wales or Northern Ireland made the cut. (See also: WikiProject Higher education's popular pages list)
• Which Wikipedia page this week: The Independent. "She obviously can't decide which Wikipedia page to copy this week." PM on shadow chancellor. (see prior coverage, "U.K. Shadow Chancellor accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in her new book" from the November 6, 2023, issue of The Signpost)
• Wikimedia CEO to speak at university: According to a release from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander will give a lecture at the university on the topic of "the future of the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia in an era of artificial intelligence". Iskander will speak at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time on Thursday, February 22, in the university's Cowell Hay Barn. The lecture is free and open to members of the public, though organizers encourage prospective attendees to register ahead of time.
• How should we use Wikipedia?: Euronews Bulgaria speaks with Sofia University professor Iglika Ivanova, who provides some guidance on how to use Wikipedia as an informed citizen.
• Boston, we have a problem...: In a recent edition of Here and Now, Boston-based public radio WBUR-FM reported that conservative Wikipedia fork Conservapedia is "laced with falsehoods"; indeed, the site's views on several social and political topics have been under scrutiny since its very foundation in 2006.
• Honey, how you grew!: Back in January, Andrea Daniele Signorelli reflected for la Repubblica on the 23rd anniversary of Wikipedia (in Italian), stating that "in a [digital] world that is usually based on the so-called surveillance capitalism, Wikipedia represents an unicum for its relevance, longevity and size". Fun fact: Signorelli also interviewed Gianluca Moro, an IT consultant for the University of Padua, who reportedly created the first article on the Italian Wikipedia, about communication.
• Wikipedia's coverage of the Arab Spring causes uproar in Ghanaian treason trial: In Ghana, several individuals were recently tried for the capital crime of high treason, with the prosecution alleging that the defendants had plotted to engage in a coup d'etat in 2021. Two of those charged were acquitted, while six individuals were convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Part of the trial had focused on references to the Arab Spring that had been made by a high-ranking police official. During the trial, the Attorney General of Ghana attempted to rely on a definition of Arab Spring that had been taken from its Wikipedia article. The defendant, who had publicly argued that Wikipedia was not credible as a reference source in this context, provided an alternative definition in his defense. The judge, in issuing the final ruling in the case, agreed with the defendant.

Wikimedia Russia Director Stanislav Kozlovsky was declared to be a foreign agent according to Meduza. In December, Kozlovsky had been forced out of his job as associate professor at Moscow State University in anticipation of the official statement and he had already started the process of closing Wikimedia Russia. See previous Signpost coverage.

Oleg Orlov, the co-founder of Memorial – which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize – was also named a foreign agent by the Russian government, along with four other individuals:

• Anton Kartavin, an independent Novosibirsk City Council deputy
• Mikhail Chimarov, photographer
• Nikita Sokolov, historian and
• Sergey Stepanov, journalist

In a subsequent interview with Worldcrunch, titled "Is Wikipedia The Last Hope For Free Speech In Putin's Russia?", Kozlovsky stated

I will remain in Russia; it's my country. I am not a "foreign agent", and I hope charges never come to that. If they do, it would impact my ability to teach at universities, write popular science articles, and engage in the popularization of science. There's uncertainty about job prospects with the status of foreign agent.

I've edited around 40,000 Wikipedia article, not all could have a label stating "material created by a foreign agent." But it's unclear whether fines will be imposed or how long such offenses will last. Fifteen years at Wikipedia, 25 years at Moscow State University, and, in one day, it could all come to an end.

Yet I am hopeful that a new stage will begin. Wikipedia is a brilliant project, crucial for global development, and Russian Wikipedia is something our country should be proud of, despite the lack of support. I hope common sense will prevail.

– AK, Smallbones, H

In its latest EU Policy Monitoring Report, published on January 30, Wikimedia Europe highlights some "really, really intensive" legislative work ongoing in the European Union (ahead of a de facto February deadline in advance of the upcoming European Parliament elections in June). Some of them raise hopes and concerns regarding their possible impact on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects:

The anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) proposal, which was published in April 2022, aims at protecting persons who engage in public participation from manifestly unfounded or abusive court proceedings that present a cross-border aspect. [...] As you may be aware, our projects and communities are facing SLAPP cases across Europe, including in Portugal and Estonia. [...] Overall, the agreement can be considered satisfactory as it introduces some common safeguards that until now the EU lacked [as opposed to various other jurisdictions, including many US states]. There are nonetheless a few aspects on which Wikimedia Europe wants to focus at national level when Member States will transpose the Directive. Indeed, Member States can decide to offer further protection, for instance, on the early dismissal mechanism, the possibility to introduce the right to ask for the compensation of damages or the possibility to take into account the ubiquitous nature of the Internet as a relevant element to determine the cross-border nature of a case. We will prepare “transposition documentation” and work with interested communities across the continent.

Secondly,

The European Media Freedom Act is intended to boost media and journalistic freedom [1] across the bloc. It is a bag of very versatile measures that are intended to help protect a pluralistic media landscape. Things like rules on government spending on public service announcements and enshrining the protection of sources at the EU level. For Wikimedia this law is relevant, because it also wants to limit how online platforms moderate content provided by media providers, which are defined as media outlets but also individual journalists. [...]

The agreed text of Article 17 would require online platforms to accept self-declarations from media service providers who identify as such and warn such users ahead of moderating their content and to allow them a fast-track channel to contest decisions. All this can be problematic, seeing that disinformation is sometimes produced by media providers.

For example, Signpost readers may recall the protestations of the (then still EU-based) British tabloid the Daily Mail against its "ban" by the English Wikipedia in 2017. Will the new law enable such news publications to interfere with their deprecation or blacklisting, or with other community decisions? The authors of the report appear to be optimistic (although not certain) that this won't be the case, thanks to a carveout:

Despite the fact that Wikimedia projects were exempted from this provision in the Commission proposal, and that Parliament introduced Recital 35a explicitly recognising the role of online encyclopaedias and excluding them from the scope of the Article [2], the final version of the text contains a less clear carveout. This means that Wikipedia is in scope, but the exact extent of the obligations likely won’t mess with the established content moderation practices.

As a third new legislative agreement of relevance to Wikimedia projects, the report names the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), "a law for internet-connected products that is meant to improve the security and software maintenance of your smart toaster and AI-powered fridge (just random examples)." Here, the European Wikimedians "were involved [...] because the newly proposed obligations could have seriously messed up the free & open software ecosystem. In the end the CRA will not harm free software and is unlikely to cause havoc on the open source environment, as long as it is outside a commercial activity," thanks to added exceptions. However, they call it "still a terrible piece of law and we have to be honest, at best it won’t do much harm." – H

• Steward elections open until 27 Febuary: You can vote at m:Stewards/Elections 2024
• New administrator: The first request for adminship that opened in 2024, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/The Night Watch, was closed as successful. The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Rigatoni. Please be bold in helping improve this article!

"He was a Nazi" — never before had that statement filled me with so much satisfaction.

Bertil Anzén [sv] was born in 1912. He studied art and was part of the Young Artists exhibition at the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts in 1938. He sold his paintings. They can be found at the Swedish Museum of Modern Art, the Stockholm City Museum, the Malmö Museum, the Uppsala University Library. Over time, he was forgotten. Three of his paintings had been offered at an auction, clumped together. By being willing to part with 75 SEK – roughly 7 USD – I had ended up with the winning bid.

In February 2021, I biked to pick up a couple of other pieces from the auction house. Two normal-sized paintings: a bit unstable on the bike, but it works. I pedaled the five kilometers to the auction house, gave them my customer number, and received my five works of art, three of which the system had not yet indicated as delivered when I left home. That's how I ended up wobbling home through Malmö with five paintings on two wheels. I wrote a short social media status update about my adventures to amuse my friends.

"Is this the same Bertil Ragnar Anzén as the Nazi?" asked my friend Eric Luth, who had found a very short news item in the archives of the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper — the Anzén who in 1945 was prosecuted for illegal intelligence activities, as an agent for Svenska socialistiska partiet [sv], one of the Swedish Nazi parties at the time?

It's a question one so rarely gets about the paintings in one's kitchen. Wikipedia didn't have much to tell — his parents, his wife, his apprenticeship. He painted portraits, cityscapes, and landscape paintings with motifs from eastern Skåne, as well as drawings done in red chalk and charcoal, the Swedish biography said. A year of death was missing, even though he was presumed to be deceased. But how many Bertil Ragnar Anzéns could there be?

I decide to try to update the Swedish Wikipedia article: year of death and possible Nazism. He was employed by a National Socialist party in the 1940s — that's enough to be relevant for a somewhat-public figure, regardless of whether they were prosecuted for those activities. And I couldn't find any signs of there having been two Bertil Ragnar Anzéns.

Among the search results I found Håkan Blomqvist's Gåtan Nils Flyg och nazismen ("The Enigma of Nils Flyg and Nazism") from 2000, now freely available as a PDF. Here, a Bertil Anzén is mentioned as an agent in the Svenska socialistiska partiet, but without any more details. I emailed Blomqvist to ask if he possibly knew more about Anzén. He didn't, he replied, but perhaps Tobias Hübinette would know. So I tried that, but Hübinette didn't know either.

I started reading through books about Swedish Nazism in the 1940s: Nazismen i Sverige 1924–1979. Pionjärerna, partierna, propagandan ("The Swedish Nazism 1924–1979. The Pioneers, the Parties, the Propaganda") and Hakkorset och Wasakärven: en studie av nationalsocialismen i Sverige 1924–1950 ("The Swastika and the Wasa Sheaf: A Study of National Socialism in Sweden 1924–1950") by Heléne Lööw, and Hitlers svenska förtrupper ("Hitler's Swedish Vanguards") by Armas Sastamoinen. Once again, Anzén was important enough to appear — but not important enough for anyone to have written anything substantial about him.

At the same time, I tried to figure out when he actually died. Vem är det, a Swedish biographical lexicon published from 1912 to 2007, stated in 1967 that Anzén was at the time residing in Málaga, Spain. After 1981, he disappeared from Vem är det, without being listed among the dead. I turned to a help page on the Spanish Wikipedia to see if they could help me. They couldn't. The Church of Sweden in the Costa del Sol didn't reply. Still, I was encouraged: a Swede moving to Francoist Spain in the 1960s didn't exactly contradict a Nazi background.

Eric Luth tried to email the Swedish Museum of Modern Art. They didn't know and couldn't do any further research. I contacted the Maglehems kulturförening ("Maglehem Cultural Association" in the village of Maglehem), which had had a painting by Anzén as part of an exhibition as recently as 2014. The owner of the painting told me that Anzén lived in Knäbäck in the the 1950s and was hit by depression when the village had to be moved. He painted only "black paintings", and it was that disappointment that would have driven him to Spain. But he couldn't say anything about a year of death, nor about any National Socialist tendencies (or lack thereof).

I went back to Blomqvist's work and read the footnotes. Suddenly, it struck me: Anzén had been prosecuted. There was a reference to the material from a trial, sure to be available at the Stockholm City Archives. With biographical details therein! I emailed the archives, but didn't have a case number, and was told that Anzén wasn't mentioned in the criminal register in court records. Through the names of others who were prosecuted at the same time as Anzén, a civil servant eventually found the documents in the auxiliary section for classified espionage cases. Did I want the archive office to scan them? It would cost four Swedish kronor — around forty US cents — per page. The material, I was told, covered roughly a thousand pages. I decided I could wait.

It took a few months. There was a pandemic going on, and I felt like getting vaccinated before I got on a train to head north. Come autumn, I had other errands in the vicinity of Stockholm, and requested the documents to be retrieved — only to be told that they had been digitized and made accessible where they could now be accessed from the Malmö City Archives. As I sat down in front of the archive's computer, ten months had passed since I started digging. It took me a little while to skim through all the photographed pages to find the right case, but there, in the margin, I found it: April 14, 1912. The birth date of the Nazi was the same as that of the artist. Sweet victory. The protocol from June 23, 1945, also mentioned that Anzén had received a scholarship to study painting.

Having, at last, found conclusive proof, I needed to do something with it: publish.

Eric Luth, who had instigated the entire thing by asking an innocent question, happened to be not only a fellow Swedish Wikipedian, but also the cultural editor of the Swedish magazine Liberal Debatt [sv]. He would be happy to publish a piece on the hunt for the truth about Anzén, he told me.

I still don't know when Anzén died. But so, about a year after I started looking, I had created a reference and could — Swedish Wikipedia allows you to refer to your own work, provided that it has been published in a reliable source — add a couple of short sentences to the Wikipedia article.

We can't write about the things we can't reference. But we can't let such insignificant details stop us.