• AARoads, take me home: A long-running conflict over Wikipedia's articles about US roads led to the forking of many roads articles back in September. Gizmodo recently interviewed a number of AARoads editors and Wikipedians (Imzadi1979, BMACS1002, and onel5969) about the split, calling it "a promised land where the editors hope, at last, that they can find peace". See also previous Signpost coverage: "A fork in the Roads WikiProject" ("News and notes", September 16, 2023)

• Getting away from it all?: AFAR magazine explains "Why Google Flights and Wikipedia (Yep!) Are a Traveler’s Best Friends", giving some tips on finding airports connecting aspiring travelers to their destination. The article calls the customary "Airlines and destinations" sections in Wikipedia articles about airports (example) "a great resource for those wanting to know options for nonstop flights and possibilities for mileage redemptions."

• Balkan edit wars: In an interview for Portuguese newspaper Público (in Portuguese, paywalled), University of Novi Sad professor and fact-checker Stefan Janjić broke down the influence of Russian disinformation in his native country of Serbia, including a recent dispute over the content and tone of the article about the Srebrenica massacre on the Serbian Wikipedia.

• Around the world in 292 ways: Wikipedian Lucy Moore has created an article for a woman from every country in the world (as well as nearly every partially-recognized state, United Kingdom subdivision, autonomous region, special administrative region, overseas territory and disputed ethnic republic!) Moore participates in Women in Red, a WikiProject dedicated to closing the gender gap on Wikipedia. An article in The Guardian and an interview with CNN cover Moore's work and highlight women from lesser-known corners of the world. In honor of International Women's Day, an editorial in The Guardian analyzes Wikipedia's coverage of women.

• Covering Pakistan's elections on Wikipedia: The Friday Times covers how Pakistan's turbulent politics and recent general election has caused problems for Wikipedians; accusations of political bias fly as editors try to figure out who to list as the leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, whether to list the party on election maps at all, and perhaps most importantly, who won the election.

• French Wikipedia discusses transgender names: Le Monde (in English, paywalled) reports that "Wikipedia's French-speaking community is torn apart over 'deadnaming' trans people": "The source of the conflict lies in a debate over the 'deadnames' – or morinoms in French – of trans people. Should these names that are no longer in use, such as birthnames, be mentioned on Wikipedia? If so, in which cases and under what conditions? On the English-language version, contributors settled the matter back in 2015, without too much controversy: They agreed to only mention the deadnames of people who became famous under that name. However, among French-speaking Wikipedians, the question has remained unanswered, and even resurfaces regularly."

A lack of technical support for interactive content on Wikimedia projects was lamented in a wide-ranging discussion on Wikimedia-l and elsewhere over the last two months. In particular, several community members expressed deep frustration about the state of the Graph MediaWiki extension, which had been disabled in April last year due to security vulnerabilities in the underlying third-party Vega framework (Signpost coverage). Back then, a Wikimedia Foundation representative had stated that "My hope is we can maybe restore some functionality in the next week or so." But eleven months later, graphs and charts remain deactivated, replaced by a prominent error message in many Wikipedia articles - despite extensive discussions about possible solutions.

Basque Wikimedian Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga (User:Theklan) opened the Wikimedia-l discussion by decrying this state of affairs:

All the solutions proposed have been dismissed, but every two months there's a proposal to make a new roadmap to solve the issue. We have plenty of roadmaps, but no vehicle to reach our destination.

He contrasted Wikimedia projects with e.g. "a place like Our World in Data [which] has been publishing data and interactive content with a compatible license for years". Several other Wikimedians likewise voiced their frustration about the lack of progress in getting graphs re-enabled.

Marshall Miller, Senior Director of Product at WMF, acknowledged these concerns on the mailing list, stating that:

to support graphs and other interactive content, we would need to take a step back and make a substantial investment in sustainable architecture to do it – so that it works well, safely, and is built to last. And because that’s a substantial investment, we need to weigh it against other important investments in order to decide whether and when to do it.

I know that it is very frustrating that the Graph extension has not been operational for many months – it means readers haven’t been seeing graphs in articles, and editors haven’t been able to use graphs to do things like monitor backlogs in WikiProjects. Over the months of trying to find a way to turn graphs back on, it has become clear that there isn’t a safe shortcut here and that the path forward will require a substantial investment – one that we have not yet started given the other priorities we’ve been working on.

How did things get to this point? Several proposals and plans had been pursued since the discovery of the XSS vulnerability in April 2023:

• One proposed solution (phab:T336595) was to re-enable the feature but treat the Vega code for graphs "like other dangerous content (Javascript, CSS) and restrict editing it to a small, trusted set of users" (similar to Interface administrators). However, this option was eventually abandoned in favor of a different approach:
• To sandbox the graphs into an iframe (a separately loaded part of a web page). This option (phab:T222807) had in fact already been proposed back in 2019 out of general security concerns, long before the discovery of the current vulnerabilities in Vega. By November 2023, some progress appears to have been made on its implementation. But serious performance problems remained due to complexities around caching. What's more, the iframe approach met principled objections by WMF engineer Timo Tijhof (User:Krinkle), who argued that it "severely limits our audience, technical choices, and assumptions going forward, and I think negatively impacts our mission and reach in a way that is in direct contradiction and violation of principles that thus far have been accepted without question" (citing the Wikimedia Foundations Guiding Principles and other WMF engineering conventions). In particular, Tijhof worried about the redistribution of content in other forms (citing examples including "Kiwix, IPFS and Apple Dictionary"). Noting that e.g. the Wayback Machine "consistently fails to archive [...] non-trivial JavaScript pipelines", he argued "there can be no JavaScript requirement for fundamental access to content". Lastly, as noted by WMF security engineer Scott Bassett, while the iframe sandbox "would reduce the risk of running potentially dangerous javascript within a user's browser, [it would] not eliminate the risk entirely." The iframe task was eventually closed as "Declined" earlier this month.
• Other options that had been proposed early on included sanitizing the input. But this approach was described as "extremely tricky to get right (after all,vega failing at it is how we landed in this situation)."
• Update the underlying library: As noted in a WMF FAQ, the Graphs extension is based on a very outdated version of the Vega library: "The last upstream release (bugfix or security) of Vega 2.x was in January 2017. Vega 5 was released in March 2019 and is still under active maintenance and development." However, by May 2023, initial hopes had been dashed that an upgrade to version 5 would suffice to resolve security concerns. The WMF's eventual plan to fix the Graphs extension (apparently now abandoned too) envisaged the version update and eventual deprecation of version 2 only in combination with the sandbox solution. What's more, as detailed in the FAQ, migrating to Vega 5 will necessitate the conversion of existing graph templates and modules, much of which needs to be done by hand (although aided by a translation tool).

Rarely, if ever, has there been a software issue that affects Wikipedia content so visibly for such a prolonged time. By January 2024, User:Sj estimated that it had "already conservatively affected 100M pageviews." According to a September 2023 analysis, over 1.3 million pages are impacted across all Wikimedia projects - the vast majority of them (1.16 million) on the Arabic Wikipedia.

Still, on English Wikipedia, only 19,160 pages were affected. (Those numbers likely already reflect the manual removal of broken graphs from many pages.) In a more detailed 2020 analysis, volunteer developer User:Bawolff had found that "the graph extension is used on 26,238 pages [on English Wikipedia]. However, most of these are in non-content namespaces, from a template that generates a graph of page views for a specific page (w:Template:PageViews graph). There are 4,140 pages on en.wikipedia.org in the main namespace that use graphs. [...] As a percentage, that's 0.07% overall, 0.2% of "Good Articles", 0.3% of Featured Articles." Another Wikipedian reported that "In ruwiki, interactive Lua-based graphs are used in more than 26000 articles about settlements and administrative units through https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Statistical (also, more than 8000 on ukwiki, etc.)."

Several users questioned whether the full interactive functionality of the Vega library was really needed, arguing e.g. that "Most graphs on wiki are simple bar/pie/line charts. These could be produced quite easily using even a language like Lua."

WMF engineer Gergő Tisza (who appears to have done much of the technical work on the aforementioned iframe solution) observed that

Interactive animations were very much part of Yuri's vision for the Graph extension, but during the decade Graph was deployed in production the number of such animations made was approximately zero. [...] Instead, both gadgets and Graph usage are mostly focused on very basic things like showing a chess board or showing bar charts, because those are the things that can be reused across a large number of articles without manually tailoring the code to each

Concretely, Bawolff had observed in his 2020 analysis of the usage of graphs on English Wikipedia that:

Most of these are simple static graphs. Some notable exceptions is interactive time scale maps, such as the one at w:Template:Interactive COVID-19 maps and the one at w:List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions, which shows how geographic data evolves over time (See also w:template:Global Heat Maps by Year). Also the graph at w:Vancouver_Whitecaps_FC. Nonetheless, I have yet to see any examples where a graph based visualization makes what would otherwise be a difficult concept clear, or where the visualization stops me in my tracks, and is core to my understanding of the article.

Volunteer developer TheDJ even argued "let's be honest... the interactivity-part has been an 8 year long nightmare. Maybe its time to put that to bed and accept defeat."

On the other hand, Galder titled his post that opened the Wikimedia-l discussion "We need more interactive content: we are doing it wrong". He took a much wider view, arguing that the WMF's failure to get graphs working again was just one example of wider stagnation and lack of progress towards the goal that "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge" (quoting from a 2017 strategy document). Besides Our World in Data, Galder named several other educational websites that have surpassed Wikimedia projects on interactive content, e.g.:

• Wolfram Alpha is like a light year ahead us on giving interactive solutions to knowledge questions [...] That's also "free knowledge".
• Brilliant (https://brilliant.org/) is brilliant if you want to learn lots of things, like geometry or programming. Way better than Wikipedia. But... you need to pay for it.

(Other parts of the mailing list discussion focused on MediaWiki's shortcomings with regard to video.)

In her op-ed in this Signpost issue, Maryana Pinchuk, the Wikimedia Foundation's Principal Product Manager, pushes back against such proposals, reporting that at an event last fall, she "heard many Wikipedians express concern about where pursuing this strategy could lead us. There was fear of making Wikipedia into something it isn’t. There was also fear about the cost and risks of building big new software features and trying to compete with massive for-profit technology companies for users. I think all of these concerns are very valid."

In the Wikimedia-l discussion, Wikipedian and former WMF engineer Ori Livneh argued that direct comparisons with sites that do not contain user-generated content may severely underestimate the additional engineering work to implement such interactive features on Wikipedia. He pointed out security engineering as a bottleneck at the Foundation holding up such work:

The critical issue is *security*. Security is the reason the graph extension is not enabled. Security is the reason why interactive SVGs are not enabled. Interactive visualizations have a programmatic element that consists of code that executes in the user's browser. Such code needs to be carefully sandboxed to ensure it cannot be used to exfiltrate user data or surreptitiously perform actions on wiki.

The bar for shipping security-critical features is high. You can ship code with crummy UX [user experience] and iterate on it. But something that touches security requires a higher amount of up-front technical design work and close scrutiny in the form of peer review. And this means that it cannot progress spontaneously, through sporadic bursts of effort here and there (which is how a lot of engineering work happens) but requires a solid commitment of focused attention from multiple people with relevant expertise.

There are engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation and in the technical contributor community with the relevant expertise but as a rule they are extremely oversubscribed. My recommendation would be to engage them in crafting a job description for this role and in reviewing candidates.

On March 26, the WMF invited feedback on "the Product & Technology draft key results for next fiscal year. They aim to explain what outcomes we are working towards" as part of the 2024/25 annual plan. In reaction, Galder noted that "there's no single mention to this [Graphs outage problem], nor to improving the multimedia experience". In a discussion on the talk page, Miller said that "we are working on a possible plan for graphs, but I'm not sure yet what its scope will be or when we would resource it if we proceed with that plan".

The Charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (holy alliteration!) has been ratified, with nearly 75% support from 1,746 voters. Some voters were excited about the potential benefits of the charter regarding administrator accountability and representation, while others were concerned about local-project autonomy, potential abuse of the policies, increasing bureaucracy, and even political bias. Still others commented on the voting process itself, including the availability of translations into other languages. Full voter comments are available on Meta-Wiki. – s, AK

The winners of the 2023 Wiki Loves Monuments contest were announced earlier this week. The announcements were staggered and spanned two days, starting with honorable mentions (places 25 to 16) on Monday 25 March, and concluding with the 15 winners on Tuesday 26 March. To see the 15 winning entries, go to the Wiki Love Monuments website. Wikimedia Commons has a complete overview of all nominees, winners and runners-up. – AK

• 
  2nd place: Marksburg Castle, Germany, in winter
• 
  3rd place: Panoramic view of Premana, Lombardy, Italy

• Wikimania 2024 CfP: A call for session proposals for Wikimania 2024 (to be held in Katowice, Poland from August 7-10) will close on April 3.
• Annual reports: Wikimedia Ukraine (in Ukrainian), Diff post (in English); West Bengal Wikimedians User Group; Dagbani Wikimedians User Group; Wikimedia Community Ireland.
• New administrators: None to report this issue.
• Record low active administrators: 442 was the low point for active admins in 2023 (see prior Signpost coverage, and followup), and 2023's low point was just undercut on 28 March 2024, when 441 were counted by the bot (see page history for the tally). Just as 442 was last year, 441 is a record for nearly the last 20 years of English Wikipedia, i.e. the period encompassing the current Requests for Adminship (RfA) procedure. Currently, reform of the RfA process is being discussed at the 2024 RfA Review.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Abdalá Bucaram, the former president of Ecuador. Please be bold in helping improve this article!

Dear fellow Wikipedian:
I have heard your concerns, and I understand that this is a contentious discussion that requires careful deliberation. Upon consideration, I have determined that more deliberation will mean better results. It must also be recognized that I am right, hence all deliberation must be for the purpose of stating my argument. Therefore, I will continue to reply to every comment that disagrees with me in this 7,000-word-long discussion, even if I am not being addressed in any way. I do not recognize that this may crowd the discussion, make it difficult for other editors to speak, or fail to accomplish anything that I could not have done with a single comment. I have added the page to my watchlist, and I have enabled notifications for this discussion. I look forward to engaging with you further. Extensively.
Kind regards,
Your persistent friend

Dear fellow Wikipedian:
Thank you for filing your report. You have accurately identified 750 instances of incivility, point of view editing, ignoring of consensus, ownership of content, and insertion of original research by this user in the last 7 days, and you are correct that they have chased away three productive editors. We have determined that this is a content dispute. None of these individual infractions rises to the level of sanctions, and you are chastised for wasting our time. Furthermore, you used a slightly brusque tone in one of your interactions with this user. You are cautioned to improve your conduct in the future. Please hesitate to file additional reports here if you encounter further disruption.
Sincerely,
The Administrator's Noticeboard

Dear fellow Wikipedian:
It has come to my attention that you have nominated my article for deletion. What you fail to understand is that you are a buffoon, because this thing was mentioned in seven different newspapers, only twelve years ago. Therefore any encyclopedia would be incomplete without a thorough repetition of every complete thought that was reported in regard to this subject. I reject any idea that more than a brief acknowledgement of its existence is necessary for this to be a notable subject. You don't need to read any notability guidelines to know that three reliable sources means automatic victory.
Thanks,
AfD arguer

Dear fellow Wikipedian:
I resent your comments about my participation in the Palestine/Israel topic area. I assure you, I take the utmost care in following policies and guidelines while editing and engaging in discussion. I carefully deliberate on every issue before developing an opinion. Yes, you are correct that my actions in this area have been beneficial to the same side and detrimental to the other every single time I have ever engaged with the topic in my ten years on Wikipedia. This is not because I am incapable of a neutral point of view. It is because my side has been correct in 100% of the disputes that have emerged. If you accuse me of editing with a POV again, I will disparage you on every noticeboard I can find. You have only proven that you and your people cannot edit on Wikipedia neutrally.
Best wishes,
An account that edits almost exclusively in the Palestine/Israel area (swap the topic as needed)

Dear fellow Wikipedian:
I fail to understand your concerns about the quality of my sources. I happen to be an avid reader of Alternative Facts Today, The Extremist Times, and The Government is Lying to You Weekly. I can attest to their accuracy in reporting. I expect that you would prefer coverage from the lying mainstream media, like Reuters or The New York Times. My friend, has it occurred to you that it is actually the reliable sources that are the biased ones, while my sources are entirely neutral and correct? Pull the wool from your eyes, and wake up to the lies that keep them in power.
Until the revolution proves me right,
A neutral Wikipedian

Dear fellow Wikipedian:
It appears you have taken an interest in our favorite subject. What you don't realize is that this subject is governed by our WikiProject. The five of us who engage at the WikiProject have total ownership over all 12,000 articles under our domain, and any edits to these articles must follow the rules we have imposed. Please see our WikiProject style guide essay for what you are and are not allowed to do when editing on this subject. You are welcome to join, but we will all vote against your ideas because they are not part of our established paradigm. If you attempt to make an edit that complies with Wikipedia best practices, we will continue to inform you that we don't do that here and that our articles operate on different rules from all of the others... because we said so.
Cordially,
Your local WikiProject

Dear fellow Wikipedian:
I have noticed that you attempted to make a change on Wikipedia. Have you asked permission first? Wikipedia is not some place where anyone can edit, you must first seek approval before doing anything beyond fixing a typo. I object to your change because you have not been given permission, and I will continue to object on account of the fact that it has been objected to (by me). I have no suggestions for an alternative or a compromise, so we'd better just leave everything exactly as it was without fixing whatever you were trying to improve.
Sending my love,
The neighborhood watch

All characters and letters on this page are fictitious. The concepts expressed herein are representative of broad trends that exist throughout Wikipedia. Any resemblance to specific editors is purely coincidental.