How does censorship work? In Russia, you can start with intentionally sowing confusion about the name of your brand new website, by calling it essentially the same name as the website you are trying to censor. In this case, "Рувики" in Cyrillic characters, or "Ruviki" in Latin characters.

So let's call a spade a spade. We'll call the legitimate Russian Wikipedia (ru.wikipedia.org) by its common on-Wiki name, Ruwiki. It is being forked with the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime by an imposter website (ru.ruwiki.ru) that we'll call Ruviki.

Novaya Gazeta reports how Ruviki has been operating since its official January 15 launch. Almost all of Ruwiki's 1.9 million pages have been copied and pasted onto the fork, and then edited to "delete everything that raises even the slightest doubt" about compliance with Russian media law – at least in the words of Vladimir Medeyko. In general, the censor mostly edits politically sensitive topics involving the Russian government’s policies on free speech, human rights and, most notably, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Medeyko was the long time director of Wikimedia RU (aka Wikimedia Russia), a Wikimedia Foundation affiliate intended to support WMF projects in Russia. He launched Ruviki's beta version back in May 2023 and was soon stripped of his position at Wikimedia RU by the organization's members, before being also banned indefinitely from editing all Wikimedia sites by the WMF.

Medeyko's post at Wikimedia RU was taken by Stas Kozlovsky, who in turn announced the dissolution of the organization in December 2023, after being forced to resign from his job as associate professor at Moscow State University, and then included in the Russian government’s foreign agent blacklist.

According to Novaya Gazeta, about 110 Wikipedia pages about the war in Ukraine have been cut entirely from Ruviki, while graphic designer Konstantin Konovalov, who tabulated the number of characters changed for every major category of Ruviki articles following their copying from Ruwiki, compared the extensive censorship process to "something out of [...] 1984". Ironically, Ruviki's version of the article about George Orwell's dystopian novel is missing the whole section about the Ministry of Truth, which the Ruwiki page describes as "continuously falsifying various pieces of information (statistics, historical facts)". Other examples of altered pages include the 2022 documentary film about the murdered dissident Alexei Navalny, both the Wagner Group's co-founders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, GRU colonel Anatoliy Chepiga – who was reportedly involved in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 – and Head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov.

Moreover, Ruviki users have attempted to minimize the influence of sources from Russian independent media, by removing most of the links to Novaya Gazeta itself – even deleting references to articles penned by the assassinated journalist Anna Politkovskaya – as well as Meduza and Dozhd. While Wikipedia is still alive in Russia, despite repeated struggles with the national government, Ruviki's effective censorship process might cast doubt on the future of Ruwiki, the truly free Russian encyclopedia, and more generally, the freedom of information within the country. – S and O

Meanwhile, a group of Russian billionaires are trying to hide their ties with the Kremlin by editing pages both on the Russian and English Wikipedia, according to the Kyiv Post, who in turn covered an article in Important Stories reported with Wikiganda. In an attempt to keep traveling, running their businesses, or accessing their money freely in the West, the billionaires are minimizing, or even eliminating, mentions of Russia and Putin in the Wikipedia articles about themselves. According to these sources, they just wikiwash the inconvenient facts away (or more poetically, they stay тише воды, ниже травы, "quieter than water, lower than grass"). Billionaires Arkady Volozh, Dmitry Pumpyansky, Alexander Mamut and Igor Altushkin, as well as Nikolai Choles – the son of Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov –, all seem to have tried this tactic. Vladimir Putin's daughters, Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, may have also tried it, but perhaps only to mask the activities of their large groups of bodyguards. – S and B

Two musical interludes

In a year full of key elections, including one in the U.S. and another one over in Europe, the city of San Francisco is no exception: in November, its citizens will line up to vote for the new Mayor, District Attorney, and members of the local Board of Supervisors. As reported by the San Francisco Examiner, though, the local political debate has become so heated that it has spilled into Wikipedia articles on several prominent candidates: "The City" is where the Wikimedia Foundation has its headquarters.

The Examiner report focuses on edit wars involving local supervisors and their views on the housing shortage affecting San Francisco – a problem the city's administration tried to tackle directly last year, by announcing a plan to build more than 80,000 new housing units by 2031. According to the data collected by the newspaper, the total number of edits made to the Board members' pages has increased significantly from 2022 to 2023, and 2024 could soon set a new record, since 164 revisions have been made in this year's first quarter alone. Four supervisors who have gained the most attention are Dean Preston and Connie Chan, who are seeking re-election, and Ahsha Safaí and Aaron Peskin, who have both switched to the mayoral race.

Preston has become the subject of the fiercest virtual battle. The Democratic Socialist supervisor's page has been edited at least 177 times over the last year, almost as much as the article for Governor of California Gavin Newsom, with its size more than doubling in the process. Most of these edits involved Preston's political career, the perceived contrast between his political views and his controversial record on housing, as well as the extent of his wealth – reportedly including a house worth $2.5 million, a detail that has now been removed from the page. Two users, Coffeeandcrumbs and Thenightaway, have been noted for their frequent contributions to the page, with the former even diving in lengthy and fiery discussions with other editors. – O

In a recent episode of the CBS comedy panel show After Midnight, aired on April Fool's Day, host Taylor Tomlinson brought back the mini-game Wikipedia Link for another edition – see previous Signpost coverage about its first instance – as her fellow comedians Jourdain Fisher, Zach Zimmerman and Arden Myrin competed in a wikirace to guess how many clicks it takes to go from Jacob Elordi to the Dutch West India Company on the English Wikipedia.

Once the three panelists submitted their final guesses to Tomlinson, who reminded the show's audience of how Wikipedia is "the most educational way to waste your time", she finally revealed the solution to the enigma: we have to click four times to go from the actor last seen in Priscilla and Saltburn, to Vin Diesel, to Greenwich Village, to Wouter van Twiller, to the infamous Dutch chartered company. Obviously, there are likely unlimited combinations of pages hiding behind wikiraces like this one, but as for Tomlinson's own disclaimer: "This is a comedy show, not an accuracy show!"

Something we can all agree on, though, is that Taylor and the After Midnight staff have seemingly fallen in love with our encyclopedia and its comedic potential, quite like that English baby who grew really fond of his brother's finger back in the day. Well, the respect is mutual! – O

• Baltimore bridge hoax: PolitiFact has recently disproved a statement on X claiming that Wikipedia's article on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse blamed Israel for the disaster. It was one of several conspiracy theories around the incident, according to CNN, including one rebuttal asking sarcastically if Jewish space lasers might have been deployed.
• Netanyahu's son asks for biography to be deleted: Avner Netanyahu has asked for his biography to be deleted from the Hebrew Wikipedia. "I am the subject of an entry, and I do not see any public importance for it. The entry is sparse in any case," Netanyahu jr. said, according to a report in Haaretz. On Tuesday the article was deleted.
• Commander of clandestine spy agency edited Wikipedia under his full name: Israeli general Yossi Sariel recently was exposed as the formerly anonymous commander of the country's military intelligence agency Unit 8200, due to what The Guardian called a "surprising lapse in security" concerning an anonymous contact email address in a book he had published pseudonymously. The paper reports that, among numerous other online activities that had already compromised his identity (considered a state secret in Israel) for years, e.g. on Facebook and LinkedIn, "Sariel even left traces of his activity on the Hebrew-language Wikipedia, where he used his real name and edited pages ranging from Louis XIV of France to an entry titled 'the problem of Palestinian refugees'." The Guardian notes that "In a post from 2006, a fellow Wikipedia user noticed the intelligence official's activity on the website was 'very public' and warned: 'It's possible that your personal details will be misused.' In a statement, the IDF said Sariel had created the Wikipedia [user] page 'as part of an academic group project' while a student", it has since been deleted. (All of the user's surviving content edits date from 2006, the year of the account's creation – presumably long before Sariel took his current position.)

• 149 New Montgomery Street default: The new owners of the former Wikimedia Foundation Headquarters building went into default, amid a crash in San Francisco office space rental rates – the building's value is down 40% since the 2010s, according to The Real Deal.
• Baidu Baike app to close: The South China Morning Post reports that Chinese company Baidu is set to shut down their standalone mobile client for their semi-regulated, Wikipedia-like website, Baidu Baike, on June 30, reportedly in order to re-invest the resources in AI initiatives such as Ernie Bot.
• Blind faith: Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) reports on a study by University of Tartu researchers showing that Estonian schoolchildren frequently use Wikipedia for school assignments and to find information quickly, although teachers often tend to consider the platform "a nuisance", fearing that their students might "place blind faith" on the encyclopedia's content. See this issue's Recent research column for more details.

• Jonathan Livingston... Seagullis?: Indy100 reports on the vandalism Jonathan Gullis's Wikipedia page has been subject to since his promotion to deputy chairman of the British Conservative Party. Acts of vandalism include changing his last name to Seagullis as a reference to a Reddit meme.

• Wikipedia music video: As reported by The Times of India, Punjabi artist Shaami dedicated his new song to none other than Wikipedia itself. If the words "Oh check kar wikipedia aaunda piche media..." aren't stuck in your head yet, give this a listen!
• One day, all this will be yours... too: In a recent interview for The Line of Best Fit, British singer-songwriter Fabiana Palladino, the daughter of experienced bassist Pino, acknowledged to be "someone with a parent whose name on Wikipedia is blue", while breaking down her own musical path and the production process of her recently released debut album.
• Will the real King of Wikipedia please stand up?: The Majorca Daily Bulletin names Rafa Nadal as the "Wiki King" based on his count of 131 articles about him in different language versions. Unfortunately, the official statistics don't confirm the coronation: fellow tennis players Novak Djokovic, who has articles in 133 languages, and Roger Federer, with 135, outpace Nadal – as do the King of Rock and Roll (177), Donald Trump (236), and Jesus Christ (264).
• Maryana Iskander joins Mellon Foundation Board of Trustees: Iskander officially joined the eleven-member board on March 20. The Mellon Foundation is old, rich, influential, and prestigious, even more so than the Wikimedia Foundation, where she currently serves as CEO.
• Roman sites... and Juliet: Verona-based newspaper L'Arena recently interviewed Italian Wikimedian and University of Padua collaborator Marco Chemello, who offered several key suggestions for anyone interested in editing Wikipedia and joining the free MOOCs offered by Wikimedia Italy. Last fall, Chemello and fellow Wikimedian Piergiovanna Grossi co-hosted a workshop that allowed volunteers to update and expand articles about the archaeological sites within Verona's city centre, as part of the GLAM-Wiki global initiative.

In the end, it seems like the Italian Ministry of Culture did get the memo (kind of). As reported by Piergiovanna Grossi for Wikimedia Italy (in Italian), on 21 March 2024 the MoC published a revised version of the controversial decree that had aimed to introduce minimum fees for the commercial use of digital reproductions of state-owned cultural heritage, including works in the public domain. This decision had received widespread backlash from the academic community and had been criticized even by the national Court of Audit – see previous Signpost coverage.

The new bill brings some encouraging updates for researchers who work with and produce open access material: academic publications of every kind, newspaper and magazine articles and art catalogues, together with brochures and other publications (printed in up to 4,000 copies) involving exhibitions and cultural events, have all been exempted from payment for using reproductions, in line with the so-called Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code (CCHL), an Italian law originally approved in 2004 to "support the role of cultural heritage institutions in sustainable economic and social development".

However, both Grossi and University of Florence professor Paolo Liverani remarked that the bill and the CCHL still present some legislative flaws and confusing passages that could be detrimental for freedom of access to and sharing of reproductions of cultural heritage in the public domain. In an analysis for JLIS.it (in Italian), Liverani noted how the MoC "didn't have the courage to [fully] abandon the previous formula [of the bill]" and host public conversations with academic and cultural experts. As a result, the original fee system has been kept in place, despite being "neither acceptable, nor practically feasible", especially outside of Italy: in fact, the trial court of Stuttgart recently rejected (source in German) the MoC's request for compensation to allow toy company Ravensburger to use a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man for a new model of their 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle series. Among other aspects, Liverani also points out at the vague definition of "open access" provided by the bill, which is generically indicated as "publications freely accessible by everyone in virtue of not having a cover price", without any clear reference to the various types of Creative Commons licenses.

Plus, the decree still delegates reviews of requests submitted by non-exempted applicants to local cultural institutions: this bureaucratic process might not only take a toll upon the boards' economic and human resources, but also put researchers at risk of unequal treatment, since the bill could be interpreted differently depending on the area. On the other hand, as argued by Grossi, this same aspect could also lead to wider freedom of access to cultural heritage, if local institutions prove virtuous enough to extend exemption rights to other categories; she also noted that such organs have the right to cut fees entirely, which might be particularly beneficial to institutions in lesser-known areas and/or with lower budgets.

Overall, Grossi and Liverani agree that, despite some notable issues, the new version of the MoC's decree is a step back on the right track, although the former reminds that "it's now the turn of cultural institutions, the scientific community, researchers and volunteers to put these concessions to the test and see how far we can go". — O

The Wikimedia Foundation staff have presented a draft for the "Wikimedia Research Best Practices Around Privacy Whitepaper", which aims to outline privacy guidance for academic researchers to avoid doxing contributors, as requested last year by the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee in one of the remedies of the case "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" — see previous Signpost coverage. The Arbitration Committee said:

Formal request to the Wikimedia Foundation for a white paper on research best practices

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T337883

1) The Arbitration Committee formally requests that the Wikimedia Foundation develop and promulgate a white paper on the best practices for researchers and authors when writing about Wikipedians. The Committee requests that the white paper convey to researchers the principles of our movement and give specific recommendation for researchers on how to study and write about Wikipedians and their personal information in a way that respects our principles. Upon completion, we request that the white paper be distributed through the Foundation's research networks including email newsletters, social media accounts, and web publications such as the Diff blog.

This request will be sent by the Arbitration Committee to Maggie Dennis, Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability with the understanding that the task may be delegated as appropriate.

Passed 11 to 0 with 1 abstention at 16:30, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Updated to include Phabricator tracking at 09:20, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Community feedback on the newly-presented draft is invited by 30 April. The WMF has also scheduled a Conversation Hour:

* Join us for a Conversation Hour on 23 April 2024 at 15:00 UTC. This conversation will be guided by some questions to encourage actionable feedback. Join via Google Meet.

• We encourage you to use the talk page/discussion feature to provide your input. If you need a private space to communicate your feedback, you can do so by sending an email to research-feedback@wikimedia.org with "privacy white paper" in the subject line.

– AK

Following extensive discussions (see last issue's Technology report) about how to handle the outage of the Graph extension (which had been deactivated in April 2023 due to security issues, leaving tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles with broken content) and multiple abandoned attempts at a more limited technical fix, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced a plan for

[...] building a new service to replace the Graph extension. This approach will enable editors to create basic visualizations, will require coordination with communities around migrating existing graphs, and will be extensible by developers who want to build and maintain additional functionality.

The Foundation asks for input on several questions (e.g. "What are the basic visualization types that are most important to support? Which ones can we do without?" and "Which use cases are you concerned about being missed?"). The announcement indicates that implementation work on this project won't ramp up fully before July, and won't include interactive features yet:

In the many conversations around graphs, volunteers have also raised longer term questions about “interactive content”, such as timelines and 3D objects. Rebuilding the capability to serve simple graphs securely will be a large amount of work for staff and volunteers. As part of this, the new extension will be readily extensible by volunteers who have the technical skill to add more sophisticated visualizations and more data sources. This may be an open door to some kinds of interactive content, but the larger topic of interactive content is worthy of separate, continued conversations moving forward.

In the meantime, Basque Wikipedia, in collaboration with the Wiki Project Med Foundation, has implemented a feature for displaying interactive graphs from Our World in Data inline in Wikipedia articles (example, documentation). For privacy reasons, it initially shows a static image from Commons and requires the reader to click a button and provide consent (to have their IP address shared with a non-WMF site) before the interactive version of the graph is loaded from OWID's servers. Another community-driven implementation of interactive content using the same "Template gadgets" system (enabled by a March 22 software change that allows the loading of gadgets for pages in a specific category) can be seen in the Spanish Wikipedia's article on the Game of Life. Both workarounds have obvious downsides in terms of the editability of the displayed interactive content. – H

Former Steward Mohsen Salek (User:Mardetanha) was globally banned by the Wikimedia Foundation on 8 April 2024.

Mohsen has been a prominent movement figure for many years, as a past co-author of Wikimedia "Diff" blog posts, as well as the recipient of an honorable mention in the Wikimedian of the Year 2016 event for creating the Persian-language version of the "Wikipedia Library".

He also served as an administrator and bureaucrat for the Persian Wikipedia, which in recent years, according to several independent reports, has been subject to interference from Iranian authorities, most notably from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. – AK, G, O

• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of the four newest Wikimedia movement affiliate throughout the first quarter of this year, including the Wikimedia User Community Group Niger, the Telugu Wikimedians User Group, the Wikimedia Community User Group Cyprus and the Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana.
• Annual reports: Wikimedia UK 2023 annual impact report.
• New administrators: None to report; the last RfA was conducted in February.
• Record low active administrators: The number of active administrators is still falling since the record reported in the last issue of The Signpost. The new record low is 435, set on 21 April, and has not been above 450 since 8 March.
• Global bans:
  • Blue Barette Bam, since 25 March 2024.
  • Mardetanha, since 8 April 2024 (see report above).
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week:
  • Persian Wikipedia reached 1,000,000 articles.
  • Simple English Wikipedia reached 250,000 articles.
  • Irish Wikipedia reached 60,000 articles.
  • Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
  • Moksha Wikipedia reached 5,000 articles.
  • Xhosa Wikipedia reached 2,000 articles.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Pool, which will be followed by Exploration. Please be bold in helping improve this article!