User talk:Iridescent/Archive 49

I disagreed with the G12 speedy nomination by User:Praxidicae of SLC6A1 epileptic encephalopathy (right now a cross-namespace redirect), because it was unclear to me that the article could not be salvaged. The version now at User:Charles Matthews/SLC6A1 epileptic encephalopathy has had a general tidy up and attention to referencing. Substantively, what I have done is a rewrite of the Seizures subsection, which indeed had some verbatim copying.

The score from the Earwig tool now reads out as "Violation Unlikely 33.8%". So I feel justified in what I was arguing at User talk:Charles Matthews#Healx: that WP:G12 might not be properly applied. It is not the case that "there is no non-infringing content on the page worth saving".

So as far as I'm concerned the amended article could be re-created. But I thought I'd ask you first, given that you deleted it. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:51, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Provided you remove the copypasting and revdelete the versions which contain them, I don't see an issue with recreating it. Fair use is allowed within reason, but it isn't a general license to cut-and-paste material freely provided one wraps it in quote marks, which is what appeared to be going on here. Diannaa is probably the best person to ask about these 'when does cut-and-pasting from multiple sources cross over the line from data aggregation into copyvio?' situations. (It's no secret that I think Praxidicae is often too trigger-happy with the deletion tags, but in cases of copyvio or libel her 'it's better to delete it and discuss whether to recreate it, rather than to keep it and discuss whether to delete it' approach is correct. In situations like these where the matter in question is an actual legal issue rather than one of style or notability is 'when in doubt default to deletion'; in cases like this it's important to delete the pages before they have a chance to be picked up by the mirrors.) ‑ Iridescent 14:29, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

OK, I don't agree with that interpretation, given that the quoted material is still there. But thanks for the reply. Charles Matthews (talk) 14:58, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

We still ignoring WP:ATT or what? If you're going to wheel-war and restore a copyvio article you should at least make sure it's properly attributed. But honestly, why bother asking anyone if you were just going to restore it anyway? PRAXIDICAE🌈 15:46, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

C'mon now. You applied G12 incorrectly. Apparently this is condoned: but I don't think that is really acceptable. If there has to be a G12a to park a suspect article while it is fixed, it shouldn't be described as for articles that are not salvageable. You threw around a lot of allegations on my User talk, and what I did instead of replying in kind was to deal with the issue, which was one edit that was a direct copy rather than paraphrase. Was that not what I should have done?

So don't play the process wonk here, when your application of speedy deletion is clearly a big stretch, supported by big talk. By the way, it isn't a good look to flail in this way, in relation to an event that has attracted a lot of positive attention over the past 24 hours. You don't get to make your own interpretation of "wheel-war", and you are still making allegations over a broad spectrum in an inflammatory tone that does nothing helpful. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:08, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Is that aimed at me or Charles Matthews? I don't see how restoring it—either with or without the problematic quotes—would constitute ignoring WP:ATT; the issue isn't that it didn't say where the material had come from, it's that even though the material was attributed, the reliance on quoted material was excessive. (It's a legitimate grey area, not a sign of malice on either side. The current guidance is vague on what's acceptable and has been for years; we did try to get Arbcom to clarify it back in the dim and distant, but they declined that particular hot potato.) ‑ Iridescent 16:11, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

It wasn't incorrect - it was originally a copyvio (I can't see the deleted revisions of any of the articles) and it was almost entirely copied from Chop.edu, so the tag wasn't incorrectly placed. My comment about the restoration without attribution (because it lacks attribution to a CC By whatever source) is because the attribution to the source is missing and has nothing to do with the original copyvio - which was copied from a source which was not licensed with a compatible license and was infact fully copyrighted. I'm not sure why this is confusing. Copying from NIH still requires attribution. This isn't about quoting and isn't a grey area. Any content that is fully copied in such a way requires attribution, ie. this. From the copied source directly: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ETA: Iridescent, my comment wasn't directed at you, no. It was to Charles, who still doesn't appear to understand that even copying from compatibly licensed sources (PD, CC By 4.0 etc...) still requires proper attribution. PRAXIDICAE🌈 16:23, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

The selective restoration has left the history very garbled (admin only link and for obvious reasons I'm not inclined to make it even temporarily visible: this is what you tagged and I deleted), but as far as I can tell all the cut-and-pastes were attributed. They weren't attributed in a Wikipedia-compliant format—they just had inline comments like Source PMID: 33241211 in the running text—but this wasn't a case of someone passing off someone else's work as their own. (A lot of new editors don't understand how to format Wikipedia citations correctly, particularly if they're used to print papers where inline citation is common; provided we can figure out what they're trying to cite, we just quietly fix the citations.) The issue was whether the cut-and-pasting was over the line of what constitutes fair use.

I know you both already know it, but for the benefit of the TPWs I'm going to paste the relevant policy—and this is one of the handful of legally mandated policies to which IAR doesn't apply—verbatim:

If you have strong reason to suspect a violation of copyright policy and some, but not all, of the content of a page appears to be a copyright infringement, then the infringing content should be removed with the source URL in the edit summary if possible. Revision deletion should then be requested by placing {{copyvio-revdel}} on the article page or directly contacting an administrator on their talk page. Administrators may at their discretion unilaterally revision delete copyrighted content. A note explaining the removal may also be made on the discussion page, along with the original source, if known. {{subst:Cclean|url=insert URL or description of source here (optional)}} has been created for this. If the copyright holder's permission is later obtained, the text may be restored.

If all of the content of a page appears to be a copyright infringement or removing the problem text is not an option because it would render the article unreadable, check the page history; if an older non-infringing version of the page exists, you should revert the page to that version. A revert that only removes infringing material does not violate the three-revert rule.

If there is no such older version, you may be able to re-write the page from scratch, but failing that, the page will normally need to be deleted. In limited circumstances, administrators may delete obvious copyright violations on sight; see the relevant section of the speedy deletion policy. Contributors may list pages that meet these conditions for deletion using the {{db-copyvio}} template.

If the criteria for speedy deletion do not apply, and you believe that there are reasons that the text should be rewritten instead of removed, you should blank the article or the appropriate section with the {{subst:copyvio|url=insert URL here}} template, and list the page at Wikipedia:Copyright problems; see instructions. This will give interested contributors a week to verify permission for the text or propose a rewrite. If, after a week, the page still appears to be a copyright infringement and no usable rewrite is proposed, it may be deleted by any administrator or reduced to a non-infringing stub.

(This all looks like purest Wikilegalese, which it is, but it boils down to "if there's something potentially problematic, we shoot first and ask questions later". While we still assume good faith, in the case of potential copyright violations we don't keep things around while we discuss them.)

Speaking of Wikilegalese, you (Praxidicae) are incorrect in describing Charles Matthews's actions as wheel warring. The rules against wheel warring don't kick in when one admin reverts another; they kick in when another admin undoes the second admin's revert. (Once an administrative action has been reverted, it should not be restored without consensus if you want chapter and verse.) That is, unless you can convince Charles Matthews to undo his own restoration, nobody else can re-delete it without a demonstrable consensus so you'd need to throw the question open to the baying mob at one of the drama boards. ‑ Iridescent 18:03, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Oh dear. I have just been involved in restoring Draft:SLC13A5 citrate transporter disorder, which had had similar treatment, but with more close paraphrasing. I'm quite prepared to talk to anyone about this material _should_ be handled. On the whole the recent developments suggest to me that copyvio is better handled in terms set out in WP:COPYVIO, rather than gaming CSD for some alleged convenience. Charles Matthews (talk) 14:46, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't appreciate being accused of gaming because you failed to stay up to date with current policy and Wikipedia norms and incorrectly restored a copyvio article due to your own ignorance, requiring cleanup by other admins and editors. PRAXIDICAE🌈 14:49, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

On that subject, Wikipedia:Attribution (as I have checked before bringing it up) is not policy, and never has been. So why try to beat me up with it? Having a page with some copyright issues speedied is what makes it hard to deal with the matter. It is obvious why a page on a rare disease should be salvaged if it can be. The rest seems to me to be deflection from the point that the salvage work is classic mop-and-bucket admin work, and not a subversive activity. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:08, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

This is where you're wrong, because ATTRIBUTION is required by policy, because it's required by licensing. Attribution — , provide a link to the license, and . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. The relevant requirement for attribution is in WP:COPYRIGHT and that's my mistake for not linking you to it, but I expected an admin of your tenure to know better.

As far as mop-and-bucket, it isn't my job to clean up after you, nor do I have the ability to. You've been here long enough to know better than to allow copyright violations, much less continually restore them and not follow the revdel policy. PRAXIDICAE🌈 15:14, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

Well, I find you deeply unclear about that, and have done since you started talking about WP:ATT on my User talk. My suggestion for moving on is that the two relevant articles/drafts be referred to (a) AfC or (b) AfD. Either way, there can be a discussion about the actual content and merits of the texts now that I have doctored them so that clearest instances of copying have been removed, and the tool is happier about them. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:08, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

I think this is getting too tangled. We're talking about two different copyright issues, the current issue is about the lack of attribution from a CC by 4.0 source which is compatible but requires attribution. This whole thing could currently be solved if CM would go back and add the correct template I linked above (for clarity, in the above linked article, the attribution needs to go to this.) PRAXIDICAE🌈 18:05, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

• I'd just like to point out that this is now the third time that Charles Matthews has restored or recreated a page against policy, just this year. We had a G4 in January and a related WP:PROXYING issue a few weeks later. In both cases, Charles took the same belligerent approach, in violation of WP:ADMINACCT. The second incident ended with Charles—a former arbitrator, as he stressed to me in the first incident—committing to undertake here to avoid "repeated or consistent poor judgment". Anyways, I'm heading out the door, but if there's to be an AN(I) thread, I thought I'd offer that background. By the way, the "Treatments for other symptoms" section in the article at issue is still 100% copyvio. Someone (perhaps the admin who restored it to mainspace) might want to have a look at that. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 19:57, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

  @Tamzin, "former arbitrator" and a tenner gets you twenty Benson. After eighteen years, we're reaching the point where pretty much anyone within the limited pool of people who satisfy (1) current admin, (2) active for long enough to appear vaguely credible and (3) deluded enough to actually think it's a good idea, have either served a stretch or would be elected should they choose to stand.

  Regarding Someone (perhaps the admin who restored it to mainspace) might want to have a look at that, see my comment about wheel-warring above. Because of Wikipedia's arcane rules, without Charles's explicit consent another admin can't re-delete without the timesink of an ANI thread (or equivalent timesink at CCI, AN, Arbcom etc) now. (You will possibly not be surprised to see who the arbs who formalized the official definition of wheel warring way back before the dawn of time were.) ‑ Iridescent 21:21, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

  I don't think it would be wheel-warring to just remove the section, since that's a content action, not an administrative one, although it would be more responsible for someone to just rewrite it given that it's only a few sentences (shorter than I would personally revdel over, although I'm sure some others would). Depending on Internet availability today I'll do one of the two, if someone else hasn't already. And yes, I usually wouldn't count "former arbitrator" for much, but given that Charles made a point of it when I suggested his G4 violation might be ArbCom-worthy, I take that as a request to be held to an arb-like standard. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe) 21:46, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

  To be fair, I occasionally wheel out "former arbitrator" as well. I see it more as shorthand for "assume I'm familiar with the back-office workings, so you don't need to use the alphabet soup" than "I am superior so you will defer to me".

  If the section is removed and revision-deleted, than that's an admin action so would technically qualify as wheel-warring. If it's removed and doesn't need to be revdeleted, then we're not talking about copyrights we're just talking about aesthetics, which on a page I doubt anyone will ever read. ‑ Iridescent 04:24, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

  The other option is to blank the section, send the article to WP:CP, and argue about it there. —Cryptic 04:30, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

  It appears that the issue here has evolved from a pure copyright question into missing CC attribution, which might be less of a reason to consider outright deletion now. But on a point of order, given that (as we read above) the copyright policy is one with legal implications, does WHEEL still strictly apply? In the same way as blatant vandalism absolves you from WP:3RR-related guilt, a blatant copyvio should be an excuse to redelete an article that someone else has undeleted? Not that I intend to put this to the test, of course...  — Amakuru (talk) 16:11, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

  At WP:3RRNO, bullet #5, it says explicitly that removal of clear copyright violations is exempt from 3RR, although it doesn't say anything about missing licensing as a reason to remove. WP:WHEEL and its subsection about exceptional circumstances say nothing one way or the other about copyright. Based on WHEEL, it sounds like an option would be to email ArbCom and request permission to delete it, with the option mentioned just above, about leaving it to CP, as an alternative. (I have no opinion about whether this is something that needs to be better codified, or whether that would be instruction creep.) --Tryptofish (talk) 19:08, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

  I assume Arbcom are aware of this—my talkpage tends to serve as a de facto neutral zone for mortals to talk to arbs and WMFers without the conversation taking place in WP: space and thus being seen as 'on the record', so it's a page on a lot of watchlists. I'd imagine that they're all consciously declining to get involved in any way, per Tamzin's comment above this is potentially going to turn into a formal WP:ADMINACCT complaint at some stage in which case it makes things awkward if Arbcom already have prior involvement, particularly if that involvement is via email and thus undocumented. ‑ Iridescent 12:43, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

I am looking for due process - which may not be available.

This tweet from the day after the editathon has received numerous likes from the rare disease community, and ongoing replies, such as this one today. It refers to "our first ever @Wikipedia rare disease editathon!" This is a huge outreach opportunity, in the medical area. Clearly the "learnings" from the event are quite a number. My concern is that a putative second editathon is at risk if the approach to flawed articles is simply "machine says bad", speedy deletion, and no chance of appeal.

That explains my approach when Praxidicae brought the matter up. It did not help me that WP:ATT was not meant: what was meant was one of the links in the hatnote to that page, which has shortcut WP:FREECOPY. Bear in mind that I'm the person who has to report back to the organisers on what has been going on.

To clarify points at issue (I have annotated the original discussion with further comments), WP:FREECOPY is indeed relevant to some of the editathon articles that were not speedied. I have no doubt now that the first posting by Praxidicae was well-intentioned, but it misfired. (IRL, I had come home after a strenuous event, needed to make a meal, pack a bag and catch a train.)

Passing over other things that have not been helpful, I want to settle the situation for the deleted articles, and patch up the "by" in CC-by in the other articles where it is needed. I want to be able to use the dashboard tool to track the edits from the event and make a report: the speedies have messed up some of that, and there is a redirection by Praxidicae that ought be unpicked (when work has been done on the article).

I hope that gives an overview of my considerations in this matter. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:57, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

You know—or certainly should know by now—that Wikipedia explictly doesn't do "due process" at even the highest levels of dispute resolution let alone a spat between two editors; all our dispute resolution processes are based on "what outcome is there consensus for?", not process-for-the-sake-of-process.

I do get your point about editathons and recruitment/retention, but Wikipedia and the WMF collectively had our fingers badly burned by the India Education Program fiasco. As such you're unlikely to find much collective enthusiasm for the idea that participants in editathons or similar events and the material they contribute be granted any kind of temporary exemption from scrutiny. (If nothing else, I imagine such an approach would annoy the overwhelming majority of new editors, who come to Wikipedia through more typical 'came here to fix an error and stayed' means, and who wouldn't be extended any special treatment. We now have around 20 years of evidence that "editors recruited via editathons and student assignments" and "new editors who stick around to become long-term editors" are groups with almost no overlap.)

On I want to settle the situation for the deleted articles, I'm going to say something I almost never say and suggest that WP:AN is the best place to go. As far as I can tell, the issue here is that the wording of the policy is slightly ambiguous with regards to this specific situation. As such, a peanut gallery of busybodies keen to explain their own personal interpretation of the policy is for once actually going to be something that would be useful. The more traditional route would be via RFC, but RFCs usual benefit—that the only people who participate tend to be those who know about the issue in question rather than a bunch of randos who like the sounds of their own voices—would IMO be a drawback here. To me, this is a situation where you want the input of people who don't know or care about the issue, to see how fresh and uninvolved eyes feel policy should be interpreted. (Since this is a question regarding a legal policy, there's also the nuclear option of going straight to either the WMF or Arbcom for a formal ruling, but I'd recommend against either. Arbcom would almost certainly say it was out of their remit and if they did take it would likely treat it as a conduct issue and end up warning or even blocking one or both of you, while List of situations which were made better by direct intervention from the Wikimedia Foundation would be a very short article indeed. ‑ Iridescent 12:35, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

I have sent an interim report to my principal contact at Healx; who says it now makes more sense. If there is some sequel event, it should be in a context where the points about copyright and attribution are well taken.

I'm happy now to restrict my comment on "due process" to a single point: which is that for the CSD G12 deletions the supposed evidence should be subject to scrutiny. It is not marvellous, in my view, if the burden of proof for contesting the deletion, or in this case undoing it, is so skewed as it has appeared. Charles Matthews (talk) 13:42, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

re the idea that we have twenty years of evidence that editathons and student assignments don't recruit longterm editors. We do have twenty years of data on recruiting editors via the edit button, and I'm assuming that most of us, myself included became Wikipedians that way. However that route has become less effective over the years, new editors are much more likely to be reverted or have their contributions deleted and generally made unwelcome than in the past. If back in 2007 when I started editing I'd had the sort of reception that is now normal for new editors, I doubt that I'd have stuck around. So we do need to look at other ways to recruit editors, and we don't have twenty years of experience of either editathons or student assignments. The first Editathon I took part in was the British Museum one in I think 2010, but that was more of a skillshare event with about ten Wikipedians along with some museum curators. It wasn't really outreach to potential new editors. We don't have twenty years of experience of editathons and student assignments, perhaps ten to twelve. Having myself learned a lot about editing at events like that I'm convinced that editathons can be a useful way to hone the editing skills of existing Wikipedians. I'm a bit jaded at the idea of using editathons to recruit new editors - as HJ Mitchell once said you are selling a new hobby. I'd agree that student assignments rather miss the point - you want everyone in the room to have volunteered to be there and to be open to starting a new hobby. I was Charles's classroom assistant at the Healx event, I happened to be free that day and it was the first editathon I've taken part in since before lockdown. I think it was the first editathon where I've supported Charles, and I'm conscious that this is a numbers game, if someone has enough people coming that they want an assistant, then if I'm available I may well help (I counted over forty people in the room at that one, which is quite big as editathons go). If I were to get involved in organising another outreach editathon as opposed to just helping at one, I'd want to make sure that the invitation was going to a large number of altruistic people and worded to hopefully attract the small proportion of them who might be interested in taking up the hobby of writing an encyclopaedia. If anyone still connected to WMUK watches this page, my offer to help man a stall at a retirement fair still stands. ϢereSpielChequers 06:52, 1 July 2022 (UTC) .

I'm taking the liberty of splitting this thread for clarity, as it seems to be veering in two very different directions. No text or ordering of replies has been changed.
@WereSpielChequers, I think we're on the same page that the value of editathons is primarily for people already engaged with Wikipedia, either as "so you've been doing basic editing for a while, now come learn about lua module design" type classes or more broadly as a tool for re-enthusing people who've been editing for a while and might be getting bored. (I do feel the latter sense is one to which we don't pay enough attention. I don't think it's any great secret that I think Wikimania is a massive timesink and waste of donor funds, but if it has a value it's not in an educational sense—I doubt a single person has ever learned something at Wikimania they couldn't have learned more easily by reading the relevant documentation—but in getting that "hey, there are actually people out there who think that what I'm doing is worthwhile" feeling. I doubt anyone has ever done the research, but I'd be willing to bet large sums that the editor retention rate among people who've attended events of some kind, even if they're just of the "meet for an hour in the bar opposite Haymarket station" type, is much higher than among the editing community as a whole.)

I think you're right in that we're harsher on new editors than we used to be. (There are good reasons for that: given how much higher our readership is, we can't afford to be as tolerant of either well-intentioned mistakes or self-appointed comedians as we used to be.) As I say, I'm not at all convinced that editathons as a recruitment tool are the way to go about rectifying it. I'm sure Johnbos is correct that there are occasional examples of people recruited via editathons and outreach who continue to edit Wikipedia afterwards, but I'm equally sure that they're few and far between. Given the time and effort it takes to run such events, I doubt treating outreach as missionary activity and trying to convert the public to the wikicult is a practical use of anyone's time—the value of such programs is more in getting the "look, just because we're potentially impacting on the book sales in your gift shop doesn't mean we're not able to work constructively with you for your benefit" message across to museums, galleries and professional bodies.

Regarding recruiting new editors, my gut feeling would be that the best approach would be for the WMF to spend some of its dragon's hoard of cash on professionally produced recruitment materials, explaining to people why contributing to Wikipedia is worthwhile, how to go about it, and what to expect. The existing "welcome to Wikipedia!" material developed ad hoc over the years gives the impressions both that Wikipedia is an insanely complicated bureaucracy, and that it's edited exclusively by people who look like they haven't bathed for a month. ‑ Iridescent 04:32, 2 July 2022 (UTC)

I looked at editor retention back in 2016 and earlier e.g. at User:WereSpielChequers/2012-2016 Editor retention test. I think I first got interested in it through looking at RFA and adminship, both at the high proportion of unsuccessful RFA candidates who leave, and the fact that admins tend to stick around long term. In 2012 I noticed that all nine of the established editors who'd taken part in the 2010 editathon at the British Museum were still around, and though one is now blocked, I've just checked and the other eight are all still active - three of us have posted in the thread above (plus a bonus if Johnbod is correct that we recruited a curator). My assumption is that for those Wikipedians who aren't in academia, having a hobby that comes with the occasional backstage pass etc to serious cultural institutions is highly motivating, though we should really get a few similar case studies from other countries to see if this is just a statistical fluke. As for welcoming new editors I agree that a "welcome here are the rules" approach is likely offputting. But I don't have confidence in getting an outsider to professionally resolve this, at least not unless their approach is to look at the various things we have already deployed and test which work better than others. My own alternative welcome is Template:Welcome training which dispenses with all the rules stuff except for copyvio. But it is written for users of the classiceditor and I haven't got a version for V/E, nor to be fair have I crunched the data to see if it works in practice as well as in theory. ϢereSpielChequers 14:41, 2 July 2022 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers, there's no right answer but I can see obvious drawbacks here. As I dream of horses alludes to below, Wikipedia (like all online communities) by its nature attracts a disproportionate number of participants who either prefer to operate in an online rather than a face-to-face setting, or through circumstances (disabilities, remote location, unusual work hours, caring commitments…) are unable to participate in in-the-flesh events. Meeting IRL can be a great retention tool—it's a lot easier to be rude to some online rando than to someone you've met and chatted with face-to-face. However the flip side of that is that every meetup, wikimania, and editathon is also actively alienating those who can't participate; going down the road of explicitly rewarding people for participating in such things runs a real risk of creating an us-and-them attitude. ‑ Iridescent 04:39, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

My perception of those who don't attend real life meetings is that they are more likely to put in requests for pictures of specific objects than to resent the people who own the nice camera and have the time and flexibility to attend events. But there is a fuzzy line around when an event becomes a reward that others might resent. I think a complementary entrance ticket to a museum, or coffee and doughnuts at an editathon is on one side of that, and international travel at another. Especially when one event is "sign up here" and another is "apply here for a place". Going back to the Hoxne Hoard editathon at the British Museum, it was open to anyone who signed up in advance and while I seem to remember coffee and doughnuts, I'm pretty sure I paid my own travel costs to attend. ϢereSpielChequers 15:10, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm thinking more in terms either of when the payoff for something is actually significant, or when the freebies are restricted to those in the organizers' good books and the mere mortals need to pay their way (waves at Wikimania). There's also the issue that once institutions start giving freebies that one would normally need to pay for (such as free entry to an exhibition that would normally need to be paid for), we get into a very murky ground regarding where 'motivation' stops and 'paid editing' starts—for instance, I doubt the BM would be wildly pleased if the participants in an editathon there were to write sourced and NPOV content regarding their relationship with BP. ‑ Iridescent 15:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Shutting this particular tangent down right now. There are some topics we don't discuss publicly for good reason, and that is most definitely one of them. ‑ Iridescent 05:26, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
Yannow, the paid editing thing reminds me of Grant Shapps, the relative ArbCom case and that he's allegedly in the running for next UK PM? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:51, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that the WMF won't be publicly measuring the longterm retention of experienced Wikipedians who either got Wikimania sponsorship or were declined, and I bet they won't be publicly revealing the retention of inexperienced Wikipedians who got grants to go to Wikimania. As for COI and GLAM in general, it is good to talk about these things, and it is now twelve years since we got advice from COIN. I think that a combination on focussing on the content not the institution, openness and keeping any rewards de minimis minimises conflict with our ethos, whilst anything involving more substantial rewards needs open scrutiny. ϢereSpielChequers 21:11, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

My personal feeling is that competitions with an ultra-wide scope ("write an article about Chicago") are fine, but as soon as you get to the level of a contest based on a particular institution it becomes problematic, since by providing free access to the building, space to work, assistance from staff, prizes, etc etc, that institution is essentially paying Wikipedia for improved promotion of that institution. (Would "We are offering five prizes of £100 (≈$140USD/€120) at our shops for new Featured Articles on topics related to McDonald's in any Wikipedia language edition. Ideally, the topics will be articles about menu items." be problematic? If so, why is it unproblematic to replace "McDonald's" with "British Museum"? Both are Wikipedia accepting payment from an external organization who hope that improved coverage will drive footfall to that organization and thus earn them some profit in the long term; one could even argue that improving Wikipedia coverage of McDonald's is a higher priority than improving Wikipedia's coverage of the British Museum given empirical evidence regarding what the readers are looking for.) ‑ Iridescent 05:59, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

If you want your very own mini arbcom leak, I later discovered that at the same time as the discussion you link above there was a discussion on Arbwiki about whether the BM project was so far over the line it wasn't just breaching Wikipedia's ethical guidelines, but was potentially exposing the WMF to legal liability. From memory, which is obviously now 12 years out of date and may be inaccurate, the discussions never reached a conclusion but just naturally fizzled out at the next arbcom election when most of the participants left. ‑ Iridescent 05:59, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the Arbcom leak. I'd agree that a prize for a featured article would be going too far. My aim in GLAM events where I'm an organiser, and my criteria when I choose when to assist, is that the content isn't about the institution or its people, but instead is leveraging their expertise. Of course that hits a grey area when the content is unique. Taking the Hoxne hoard as an example, I seem to remember that the main article was suddenly vulnerable to edit conflicts, and I created an article on a type of Roman spoon. Going back to MacDonalds v Museums, Fast food emporia are driven by the profit motive, some cultural institutions have the aim of making their content freely available to everyone. True there may only be one museum in the world with a Canal Defence Light but I'm sure there are many museums with a Sherman tank. Partnerships that were going to create content about the products of one fast food chain would give that company an advantage over others. I don't see museum collections as entirely analogous, especially when the contents aren't unique. That's why I think we should be opportunistic in working with GLAM institutions that want to work with us, rather than targeting the ones we want to work with and seeking to persuade them to work with us. In that sense the big successes of the GLAM program have come with institutions such as the Wellcome Trust that have made large releases of digital content. ϢereSpielChequers 15:43, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers: As an introvert, I wouldn't show up to editathons unless it was like the small group editathon that you first attended. I think that's the crux of the issue of recruiting through editathons; the sort of person who'd edit Wikipedia on the regular (either someone who repetitiously cleans up articles or spends a good deal of time researching things...both, possibly) might not be inclined to show up to one. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 09:44, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I dream of horses. Does it make a difference to you whether it is cafe style seating or long table style? This particular event was cafe style with maybe ten tables and each table working on a different article/topic. I prefer that layout and way of organising, partly because it reduces edit conflicts. But maybe it is also more introvert friendly, and I don't dispute that our community skews towards introversion. That said, even the most optimistic people involved in outreach aren't looking to ditch the edit button as a way to recruit new editors from among our readers. As for size, Charles called out for an assistant because the event was going to be large. I've been involved in plenty of smaller events than that, and I suspect he has as well. Matter of fact, I'd rather help at an event where five people have chosen to come than one where fifty have been sent. ϢereSpielChequers 15:11, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

And now they've turned it into a movie! Despite recruitment not really being the aim, at least one of the BM curators has done quite a bit of editing since. Johnbod (talk) 15:27, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers: What would matter more is whether or not I'm allowed to choose how and where I edit. I'm not a content editor. I'm a WikiGnome, and a rather self-directed one at that. It doesn't make sense to "assign" an article for me to edit. Perhaps that would exclude me from edit-a-thons entirely. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 18:52, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Not entirely, but it depends on the format. My ideal skillshare type event is where newish editors bring problems along to see if other editors can fix them, gnomes like you and I should be fine with that. With cafe style seating it is great if you can have an experienced Wikipedian at every table, either to explain formatting or referencing etc, my experience is that lots of people can do that even if they'd baulk at explaining the same things to a table to a dozen people. Some of the most productive moments I've had at such events have involved showing other Wikipedians how to use hotcat or fix an edit conflict. ϢereSpielChequers 19:41, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers: My ideal skillshare type event is where newish editors bring problems along to see if other editors can fix them, gnomes like you and I should be fine with that. True. I might be okay with doing that in a small group setting. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:04, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

@Charles Matthews The fact that admins can view deleted articles already sets up a way to scrutinize; furthermore, Iri has suggested an avenue for scrutiny to begin, that is, WP:AN. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 17:56, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Actually, when the operational decision on whether an article is deletable is delegated to a mechanical computation, as here, and when that computation cannot simply be repeated once the page is deleted, then there is a problem, as here. And when the proposer of the speedy argues blind that there would be essentially nothing left to salvage if copyvio was removed, and the deletion criterion actually reads that deletion should only take place if that is "unequivocally" true, and de facto what you need to do to undermine the proposer's case is to produce an substantial version where the computation admits the copying found is tolerable; then simply being able to read the text does not suffice. You have to be able to reproduce it here.

That is what the meaning of "subject to scrutiny" amounts to here. The simplest way would be to do a substantial rewrite of the article and create it again, losing the history. This is hardly the way to encourage people to become editors, though.

I have said that I think speedy deletion used in this way is potentially being misused. Charles Matthews (talk) 19:29, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

@Charles Matthews I'd argue that this particular deletion was subject to a lot of scrutiny. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:37, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Have you been keeping abreast of the use of AI in 'expanding' existing art/paintings? Some examples here but most of the better (as in, more amusing) stuff is on various social media. I have wondered what DALL-E would make of the curated rotation at the top of your page... Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:33, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

(I really need to change the selection, I've been not getting around to it for about three years…)

I think the idea's interesting, but the trouble (as with those AI scripts that purport to write in other people's writing styles) is that computers are generally terrible at understanding context. Take the Mona Lisa one for instance: given Leonardo's scientific interests, I'm fairly confident not only that the fact the subject is completely framed by the hydrographic cycle (river → cloud → rain) was just as important to him as e.g. the details of her clothing, but that this is equally important to curators and historians as the fact that her face is centered within the hydrographic cycle proves that the painting hasn't been cut down over the years. The same goes for most of these things—computers miss the symbolism of why particular things are placed where they are, or why specific background elements or incidental details are there (up until relatively recently European artists loved their symbolism; there's usually a specific meaning to every bird and flower).

Boring and literal answer, I know… What would be a genuinely interesting exercise (which I'm sure has already been done) is feeding fragments of artworks into it and seeing how closely what it comes up with matches the reality. For some works I assume it would be fairly accurate, but if you (for instance) cropped Gyges out of Candaules a computer couldn't possibly guess he was there unless it was both very familiar with Herodotus and knew which incident was being depicted. (I'd be fascinated to see what it output if fed the first few panels of the Bayeux Tapestry or a comic book.) ‑ Iridescent 15:14, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

I know lots of people have used Dall-E to put things *into* the Bayeux, I dont think someone has tried to extend it yet in the same way as Creation of Adam. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:32, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

• Well, I am still on the DALL-E waitlist, so I guess we will have to wait on the illustrations, but in the meantime I've got GPT-3] (on which DALL-E is based) writing some pieces for next month's Signpost. It is pretty damn good (it's summarized a lot of discussions in a way that passes all of my fact checks, and even made note of things I failed to pick up on my first read-through). I don't think people take large models seriously enough -- but I guess in the next few iterations they're probably going to have to. jp×g 18:48, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

This is to let you know that the above article has been scheduled as today's featured article for 4 August 2022. Please check that the article needs no amendments. Feel free to amend the draft blurb, which can be found at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 4, 2022, or to make comments on other matters concerning the scheduling of this article at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/August 2022. I suggest that you watchlist Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors from the day before this appears on Main Page. Thanks and congratulations on your work. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:11, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

I'll check it over to make sure, but this is such a niche topic that I doubt it will have any issues. You might want to run it three days earlier so we're running a Yorkshire-related article on Yorkshire Day, although realistically absolutely nobody outside Yorkshire and 99% of those within it even know Yorkhire Day is a thing. ‑ Iridescent 04:48, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Cheers. 1 August is Yorkshire Day? I'll see what I can do. At least thee and me'll know. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:13, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

August songs

Thank you for the article, even if not on Yorkshire Day, introduced (in 2016): "It's fair to say that The World Before the Flood divides opinion. Dismissed by John Constable as "a revel rout of Satyrs and lady bums as usual" and condemned in the press for obscenity, it also drew great praise in some quarters, and was the subject of a ludicrously effusive poem by John Taylor. Having spent the last century on display in Southampton, which is something of an artistic backwater, it's not particularly well known, but it's an interesting aside in the story of English religious art."! - Nice to recognize an author when just looking at the image :) - have one of mine --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:37, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for uploading File:BBC News screenshot 17 Oct 2022.png. However, it is currently missing information on its copyright and licensing status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can verify that it has an acceptable license status and a verifiable source. Please add this information by editing the image description page. You may refer to the image use policy to learn what files you can or cannot upload on Wikipedia. The page on copyright tags may help you to find the correct tag to use for your file. If the file is already gone, you can still make a request for undeletion and ask for a chance to fix the problem.

Please also check any other files you may have uploaded to make sure they are correctly tagged. Here is a list of your uploads.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. Vladlen Manilov ✉ / 05:06, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

For the curious, the image the bot is concerned about is the one currently illustrating the Paper sizes and display widths section a couple of threads up. While it's nominally a copyright violation, I've intentionally blurred it into illegibility (it's only there to illustrate that even massive government-run entities are capable of atrocious web design, not to illustrate the particular text or image on the page) and as such am fairly confident that the BBC's lawyers aren't going to be knocking on my door. By the time the bot deletes it on the 24th, I presume all the participants in the thread will have seen it. ‑ Iridescent 05:27, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

(I don't think Владлен Манилов is a bot.) Elli (talk | contribs) 05:32, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

And not to be that guy, but the photo in its center is still clear enough to be copyrightable, by a pretty long ways. —Cryptic 11:11, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

No wonder nothing ever gets done around here. EEng 11:31, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

I very much enjoyed checking my watchlist today, and seeing Iri say See the screenshot to the right—assuming an overzealous NFCC patroller doesn't delete it, and then, this! Who says that there's no such thing as WP:CRYSTAL? --Tryptofish (talk) 20:19, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Also hate to be "that person," but I can understand why commons have a "We care about copyright even if the copyright holder doesn't" policy. People do change their minds, particularly if they suddenly find themselves with too much time on their hands. Also a courtesy ping to Владлен Манилов. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:45, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

FYI, Iri, just wanted to clarify that I also am fairly confident that the BBC's lawyers aren't going to be knocking on [your] door. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 22:48, 17 October 2022 (UTC) (fixed copy and paste error at 22:49, 17 October 2022 (UTC))

For obvious reasons I'm busier than expected this week, but "the photo in its center" in question is a generic photo of Kamikwasi and Disastruss. Something tells me that even in the unlikely event of it not being a Parliamentary image and thus covered by OPL, they both have more to worry about at the moment. (Theoretically OPL is incompatible with Wikipedia as the images aren't permitted to be 'used for marketing purposes', but I'll take the hit if anyone chooses to do so. ‑ Iridescent 16:06, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Fair enough. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:53, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I just wanted to let you now that I am really sorry for all the problems that I have caused and am doing my very best to follow the Wiki rules and feel really bad if I have frustrated you in the past. Whenever someone tells me now that I have done something wrong like added a copyright link ect. I will not question it and will remove it. I also have not been editing other people comments anymore like I have been told not to. I want to be on good terms with my fellow editors and administrators and will do my best to make sure that I do so. Davidgoodheart (talk) 17:17, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

No need to apologise. Just remember (a) that Wikipedia has fought very hard to fight off its reputation for inaccuracy so we take reliable sourcing and fact-checking very seriously, and (b) that when you're writing anything that mentions anything biographic you're writing about real people with real lives and real families so you have both a legal and an ethical duty to do everything you can to be both accurate and balanced in anything you write. ‑ Iridescent 10:18, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello hello. I hope this message finds you well.

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Board of Trustees election ends soon, please vote. Some of the candidates are worthy of support. --MZMcBride (talk) 14:25, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@MZMcBride I've already voted for the one person I know. What can I say? Politics is personal. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 18:19, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

It's hard not to read "Some of the candidates are worthy of support" as "The candidates aren't uniformly awful this year!" It's a nice change, in any case. —Cryptic 18:27, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I've voted only for the two candidates who have made a commitment to address the volunteers' needs for better technical support. The current board has recently told Wikipedia that technical support is none of the board's business and if the volunteers are not satisfied, they should do the software engineering themselves for free. Hence NPP's massive appeal to the WMF for some proper engagement. If you haven't seen it yet, you're all invited to support it - only if you want to of course. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:28, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps I am being quite dense, but does m:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2022/Candidates actually link to the candidate statements anywhere? CMD (talk) 23:53, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

They're on the individual candidates' pages linked from #Candidates list. —Cryptic 00:01, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. I assumed those were userpage links and that the statements would be after the text saying "candidates will respond". CMD (talk) 00:08, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I missed taking part in this, but I somehow doubt anything I did would have made the slightest difference. As far as I can tell we could elect a pigeon to the WMF board and it wouldn't make the slightest difference. ‑ Iridescent 10:18, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Dank suggested to me you might remember when we have done the above. This regards the impending TFA rerun of Elizabeth II Monday next as a way of satisfying both those who prefer a formal image and those who want an informal one. Many thanks. Wehwalt (talk) 13:55, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

{{Random item}} works fine for logged-in users. I don't know offhand how often it will change for the cached views non-logged-in users get. —Cryptic 15:29, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Actually, hm, it doesn't seem to update very often - or at all - even for logged-in unless the page is purged. (Maybe someone clicked the purge link on the template documentation page between my first two views?) —Cryptic 15:39, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

I played with it and it looks like you are right. Other possibilities?--Wehwalt (talk) 16:00, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

One possibility would be to create a video file that looks like a slideshow. In other words, select the still images that you want to include, then create a new image file in a format that supports video, in which the first image is shown for however many seconds you want, and then the second image is shown, and so forth, and then it loops back to start over again. Help:Creation and usage of media files and the pages it links to has some information on what kinds of file formats to use; my impression is that WebM might be a good choice. I realize that this might take some effort, and I'm afraid that I'm not at all skillful in this area, although I'm pretty sure that Village Pump Technical could help. (It's also possible that a limitation might be that the reader will have to click on the image to start the video running.) --Tryptofish (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

I looked at Commons:Commons:Video, and particularly Commons:Commons:Video#Looped animation, and perhaps a GIF video would be a better file type. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:26, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

@Wehwalt, super-quick driveby reply but the script from the TFA of Middle Ages should be what you're looking for. All these 'ramdomise' scripts only update when the page is purged, but on the main page that's not an issue since it gets so many readers it's purged hundreds of times a minute. A video clip or animated gif on the main page is a really, really bad idea for technical reasons. ‑ Iridescent 2 03:45, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

I have a talent for really, really bad technical ideas. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:58, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Is doing it that way materially different in user experience than using {{random item}} for the images to be displayed?--Wehwalt (talk) 18:03, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

A bit too late obviously, but I don't think there's any material difference; they both rely on using internal Wikipedia statistics that change rapidly and unpredictably to generate a pseudorandom number.

To answer Tryptofish, the reasons we don't use animated gifs on the Main Page are fairly boring.

The first is an artefact of how browser software handles image scaling. For still images the MediaWiki software scales it to the display size and then delivers it to the reader's browser, meaning only a tiny data packet needs to be sent; for animated images, the whole thing is sent full-size to the reader's browser with instructions to scale it to the correct size, meaning a much larger data packet needs to be sent. This not only means that readers with slow connections will just see a blank space while the image is downloaded and processed, it puts a load of unnecessary strain on the servers when an animated gif is included on a page that gets tens of millions of views.

The second is psychological. One of the main reasons we don't change the design of the Main Page even though everyone agrees it wasn;t fit for purpose in 2004 let alone now, is that readers are used to it behaving in particular ways. One of those ways is "if I'm interested in one of the images, I can click on it to expand it and to find out where it came from". If we use an animated slideshow, clicking the link will take the reader to the video loop rather than to the photo in question, which will just unnecessarily confuse and annoy readers. ‑ Iridescent 10:17, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Is everyone a bit more irritable than usual this week? Or is it just the pages I'm reading? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:38, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I haven't edited enough to tell the mood on-wiki; however, off-wiki, IRC and discord seem normal. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:50, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

WAID, I'm not sure that it's just this week, but I'd say for the past couple of weeks, yes. I'd also say that this has been a steady and mounting trend for a few years. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:06, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I think it's probably more to do with the community's exponentially increasing distrust of the WMF and its employees - fund raising based on deliberately misleading claims, dubious use of funds, a BoT election that is underway, and a community appeal to the Foundation that is likely to be one of the most heavily subscribed campaigns in Wikipedia history. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:06, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish, early in the pandemic, it felt like people were really stressed, but we had an explanation, so we expected some of it. Right now, the only explanation that I can find is more like it's hot outside, so we're all irritable. (This isn't completely unreasonable; violent crimes go up during heat waves. Maybe the prevalence of snippy comments increases, too.) Also, there's a change in [my perception of] the tone: we used to be struggling; now we seem irritated. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:44, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, @Kudpung, @Tryptofish: I know that I've noticed an uptick in people IRL staring at me. I'm not sure if it's related to the pandemic or not. It probably changes my perspective on tone on Wikipedia. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:00, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

I could certainly go ballistic over WMF, but I wasn't even thinking of that. More like the trend towards editors just not respecting one another. I think there's an accumulation of real-world irritations – economic, political, meteorological, viral, and so on – that put people on edge, and it accompanies a growing willingness of editors to feel like they don't want to give one another the benefit of the doubt. (A few weeks ago, I gave the finger to a motorist who cut me off while I was crossing the street. At 66, I don't think I've ever done that to anyone before, and I was quite surprised at myself.) --Tryptofish (talk) 22:34, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

We've just had one of the best months at RFA in recent years, overall editing levels are holding up and at least where I am it is no longer "far too hot". Yes the board elections are going on, we have an incident where a WMF staffer has been blocked, and the NPP petition has topped 400. But compared to Framgate or various other incidents I can think of, there isn't a storm in this teacup - more like irritating drizzle. ϢereSpielChequers 14:04, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm looking forward to it no longer being far too hot. We've reached 40 °C (104 °F) a couple of days recently. Today's down a smidge, and tomorrow is expected to be down even further, and we might reach normal end-of-summer weather by the end of the week.

Tryptofish, I had to drive somewhere today, and I wasn't irritated at any of the pedestrians or the other drivers. However, I point out that the car has air conditioning and I had it turned up high, so it was a welcome break from the heat. (Hopefully, I didn't irritate any of them, either.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:47, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

So that was you whom I flipped off! (joke) --Tryptofish (talk) 19:06, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

That's the problem, right? Because the driver who cut you off probably didn't see you, and therefore probably also doesn't know that it's only your vigilance that kept "a normal trip" from becoming "a couple of hours of repeating 'But, honest, officer, I didn't see him...'." So it could have been me, or someone like me, and I'd never know it. And that means that I don't know how many other vigilant drivers prevented me from causing a car wreck. I only know how many times I prevented them from hitting me. It's a system that makes you think you're an above-average driver and that everyone else is intentionally discourteous, even when both of these are statistically unlikely. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:36, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

She definitely saw me, because she gave me an exasperated look and pointed at the green turn light. Unfortunately, it lit at the same time as the pedestrian walk light, and she ignored the sign that says "yield to pedestrians". I was at the back of a group of pedestrians, and the driver was trying to make the turn before the light turned red. And it was a very hot day. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:38, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

I think I'm losing patience with comments that declare that some unspecified group of editors should do work that the commenter could do, but is obviously not doing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:40, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi WhatAmI, I'm in England where we have an interesting relationship with the weather gods. Traditionally the heavens open as soon as a hosepipe ban is declared. So we've had a few cloudbursts in the last week or so. ϢereSpielChequers 15:59, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

Since you're from that area: Why's a dedicated section of a street called a "bus gate"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:37, 7 September 2022 (UTC)

The one that used to be near me was a scheme to relocate a traffic jam from a stretch of narrow single lane road to the preceding wider road that had a bus lane next to it. The buses could flow freely along the bus lane beside a long queue of traffic, then flow freely through the single lane stretch up to a major bottleneck junction. There were lights on the general traffic lane besides the end of the bus lane, they held the traffic back there and released it in batches to maintain a short queue at the junction. As a bus user I thought it was brilliant, but the car lobby got it taken out. Sitting in a queue of cars whilst buses whiz past you seems to have annoyed lots of car drivers. I don't know if every scheme called a bus gate follows that same design. ϢereSpielChequers 09:10, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't know the specifics of this incident, but while I know there are some "petrol heads" who oppose any restrictions on car usage, some of the more reasonable complaints come from Amazon, Deliveroo, Curries etc delivery vans that simply want to do their job and know that time is money. I was recently debating this with someone on Canterbury City Council who wants to reduce all main roads in the city centre to 20mph, including through routes like the A28 and A257, and I think I was the only one who gave a polite and considered objection (both mentioning delivery vehicles and pointing out that reduced speed limits also make buses slower) that wasn't just a pro-car rant. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:49, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

gate is also an old synonym for "road" (many old roads at least from Scotland down to the Midlands are called -gate), but I'm not sure whether that is relevant here. —Kusma (talk) 09:32, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Is that actually true (that "gate" is a synonym for "road")? If you trace the routes of roads with the 'gate' suffix, they tend to be roads that led to the old city gates when cities were walled. I suspect that in most cases they were originally called something like "Trongate Street" and lost the 'street' at some point. You can see it particularly well with the roads leading into the old City of London, where the introduction of road signs has frozen street names in aspic at a moment where some of them had lost the 'street' suffix but some hadn't yet—thus "Bishopsgate" and "Aldersgate Street" running parallel. Most of the other cases probably derive from the era when toll roads still existed, and thus there was a literal physical gate to enter the road.

The difference between a bus lane and a bus gate is length. A bus lane is a lane that's either permanently bus-only or bus-only at particular times; a bus gate is a line across the road through which only buses are allowed to pass, so it serves the function of a gate (i.e., a barrier) keeping other traffic out.

On the OP about general mood, my 2c would be that the 'eternal September' meme may be a cliche but is based on experience. Online communities, particularly those with strong connections to academia, do historically go to pieces each September; in most of the Western world that's when new students traditionally start college and when recent graduates start new jobs, so each year there's a sudden influx of people who either think they know everything or who don't understand the rules and social norms, and get on everybody else's nerves. Plus of course the US and UK—the two biggest contributing groups here—have had a summer of constant economic bad news and in the case of the UK a near-complete political breakdown, and what people experience in real life inevitably filters through to their other activities. ‑ Iridescent 10:18, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Morning Iri and page watchers

I'm being asked to cast a vote on the Universal Code of Conduct, but I have to say I'm not entirely sure what it entails. I'm very late to this party and haven't been following the drafting or earlier phases of this at all, and to be honest in general I don't pay that much attention to what's going on at the WMF - my focus is on what I can do to make the encyclopedia better for readers. But since I've been asked to vote, I suppose I should give it some consideration. Is there any sort of big en-wiki meta thread or forum where people are debating the pros and cons? Outside of a slight sense of exasperation that the WMF are focusing so heavily on this and not on improving resources for editors or expanding the Wikipedia Library (as some have suggested), the high-level language at m:Universal Code of Conduct looks superficially harmless, but I fear the devil might be in the detail and that this could have a practical negative effect on the way we conduct ourselves. Any thoughts? Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 10:56, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, the vote is about the enforcement guidelines of UCoC and not the UCoC itself. The enforcement guidelines are being discussed at meta:Talk:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement guidelines and meta:Universal Code of Conduct/2021 consultations/Roundtable discussions/Questions and meta:Talk:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement draft guidelines review, their actual text is at meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement guidelines. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:14, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Oh right, yes. Enforcement. Thanks... still looks a bit too much to read, so I might just move on for now!  — Amakuru (talk) 16:10, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

My rather rambling thoughts on UCoC are at User talk:Iridescent/Archive 45#UCoC—it was a few months ago, but my opinion hasn't particularly shifted. The TL;DR summary would be "I understand why they're doing it, to allow the WMF to impose control on smaller wikis in the event that they get hijacked by cranks. However I don't think they appreciate how much blowback they're going to get when they inevitably try to use it to impose their own extremely US-centric value system on any of the big wikis, nor do I think the proposed mechanisms contain adequate safeguards against people using it as a score-settling mechanism. (Compare how often "civility" is used as a pretext to silence opponents in arguments as opposed to genuine behavioral issues.) I also have extreme issues with some of the wording; in particular I think forcing Wikipedia participants to endorse The Wikimedia movement does not endorse "race" and "ethnicity" as meaningful distinctions among people is offensive, in some jurisdictions probably illegal, and would have unintended consequences such as making participation in something like Wikipedia:Black WikiHistory Month a blockable offense. As such I'd encourage everyone to oppose it as things stands, even though this vote is largely meaningless since the eligibility criteria allows the WMF payroll to block-vote so it's almost certain to pass even if there's overwhelming opposition from the actual editor communities." ‑ Iridescent 16:12, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

@Amakuru I'm doing the same. To be fair to us, I think most people aren't voting. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 16:13, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

I voted no, and if it passes, will be resigning my admin bit. I tend to agree with Iri on this, and find the meddling into encyclopedia affairs by the WMF to be them yet again forgetting what they are supposed to be about. Talk about scope creep! Ealdgyth (talk) 16:27, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

@Ealdgyth, the cynic in me says that's part of the thinking behind it; they know this paragraph is going to force mass resignation of admins and functionaries across the entire ecosystem, thus giving the opportunity on the bigger wikis to force a 'temporary' lowering of requirements and the packing of RFA, Arbcom etc with True Believers, and on the smaller wikis to declare an emergency and impose direct rule by the stewards. I'm not conspiracy-minded enough to think this was the reason this is being forced through—the WMF has a long track record of coming up with stupid ideas through the best of intentions—but if the thought has occurred to me, I'm sure it's occurred to them. ‑ Iridescent 18:11, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

The problem for them, of course, is that if they mass-force an admin resignation on en-wiki, I'm not sure they could get any new ones elected. You'd think they'd have figured out from the Fram-mess that much of en-wiki is very ... jaundiced .. towards WMF "initiatives". They may think that because Fram didn't succeed at a second RFA that the majority of people on en-wiki were on the "WMF side" in the dispute, which is the wrong message to have taken from that mess. Heh. It'll be "interesting times" that's for sure. Ealdgyth (talk) 02:01, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

They don't even need to force a mass resignation; if you read the wording of the paragraph I linked, it gives them authority to conduct a purge of heretics a year after ratification (i.e. March 2023).

Remember that, aside from a handful of people like WAID who are still active on the wikis, WMF-ers are either outsiders who never had an idea what goes on, or former editors whose experiences are out of date. Their knowledge of how we actually operate is going to be second-hand (and to be clear, this isn't necessarily a criticism; for at least some positions at the WMF it's completely reasonable that the person doing the job doesn't have any strong on-wiki relationships). Since the people passing on that knowledge are going to be either (a) the type of people who attend WMF events, (b) the type of people who submit reports to Trust & Safety, (c) the type of people who hang around on Meta or (d) those editors they know in real life, I don't see how they couldn't get a skewed view of what we actually do, particularly when you multiply it by the fact that they're having to perform the same "what impact is this going to have?" assessment across around 600+ different projects.

The regular people who just get on with things aren't by-and-large the people who ever come to their attention. The people who come into extended contact with the WMF are a mix of diehard true believers telling them what a great job they're doing; people trying to get WMF funds and/or technical support for a pet project (or latest scam); and problem users so problematic that their cases have been escalated to the highest level. It would be more of a surprise if the WMF didn't have the collective impression both that the wikis were full of argumentative obsessives who need to be kept in line, and that there exists a substantial caucus of people who think the WMF is doing a fantastic job. ‑ Iridescent 05:19, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

re. the WMF skewed perspective part: weren't the UCoC, and its enforcement guidelines, written by volunteer editors though? I know the enforcement guidelines drafting committee included Barkeep49, Vermont and MJL, for example, and I think all three are folks with a good understanding of how Wikipedia, or at least English-language Wikipedias, work. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 16:12, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

These are the people who wrote UCoC. By my count there were five paid WMF apparatchiks (one of whom was using their personal rather than their WMF account so is listed under 'volunteers' rather than 'staff'), three hyper-insiders from the WMF's byzantine world of makework committees, and one actual non-greasy-pole-climbing Wikipedia editor. Trying to pass it off as "written by volunteer editors" is stretching the truth at best. ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Fair enough. I remember the makeup being more representative, but I guess I was misremembering. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:56, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

The enforcement guidelines were written by a broader selection of editors. isaacl (talk) 03:28, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

This myth that WMF staff don't edit just won't die.  A couple of months ago, I tested some polling software, and I picked volunteer edit counts as a handy subject.  Here were the results:

• 9 – no edits as a volunteer
• 11 – one to nine edits as a volunteer
• 19 – enough to get auto-confirmed
• 6 – more than 100 edits
• 20 – more than 1,000 edits

Out of the 65 respondents before we reached the polling software's limit, 86% of staff had made at least one edit as a volunteer, and 20 WMF staff members have made thousands of edits.  That's 30% of respondents in that top tier.

After that, 17 more staff posted that they had made 1,000+ edits; including several who have made more than 100,000 edits.  Two more posted  in the 1–9 category and two more in the 100–999 category.  I don't think the proportions are reliable (this was not an anonymous pool, and it's easier to brag that you've made thousands of edits than to admit that you've only made a few or none), but I do think that it's reliable to say that at least 37 WMF staff members have made more than 1,000 edits.  If you remember your numbers from Template:Registered editors by edit count, you'll remember that this means that there are dozens of WMF staff who have more editing experience than 99.9% of all registered editors. In other words, it's not just me.

Also, if anyone seeing this happens to be looking at the job openings, then I recommend putting your username in your application. The old rule about hiring 50% of staff from the communities is no longer in force, but it is still a significant factor for all jobs, and a near-requirement for some (e.g., my team). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:11, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

It may well be the case that the perception that WMF staff don't edit just won't die, but then neither will the perception that WMF staff keep coming up with stuff that is at odds with en-wiki community norms. I don't think that the answer is that en-wiki is full of editors who are cranks, or that it's only the cranks who criticize WMF. It seems to me that, even when WMF staff are engaged with content editing, they become constrained by (1) a corporate sense of wanting the editing community to appear like an inclusive HRM paradise, and (2) a corporate sense that it's all-important that the numbers of editors and edits must always be increasing. As much as inclusiveness is indeed a good thing, this mindset leads to blindspots about the things that experienced editors have come to learn from experience. @WhatamIdoing: do you disagree with what I said here? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:44, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

So many thoughts, but let me start with one: I wonder what causes you to think that the WMF thinks the number of editors and edits needs to always increase. What communications from the WMF are you seeing that gives you that impression? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:07, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Highlights include increasing monthly active editors by more than 18 percent since 2016, which continues to grow", "Grow Wikimedia's communities", "a growing Wikimedia movement", "growth has been fueled by a global volunteer force and donors who explore and visit the site regularly"… ‑ Iridescent 04:54, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

^That. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:21, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, as Jayen466 has just indirectly pointed out a few threads up, the WMF has literally just rolled out a massive spam campaign with the strapline "If you donate as little as [insert local currency] today, Wikipedia will continue to grow for years to come". ‑ Iridescent 20:58, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

"Wikipedia" can grow without the number of edits or editors growing. The other sources talk about different kinds of growth, but aren't talking about the WMF having a goal of increasing the number of editors. I didn't note any of them talking about an increase in the number of edits, but maybe I missed that. Some of them (e.g., train-the-trainers programs) seem to be talking primarily about growing the non-editing parts of the movement.

Also: Spot the enwiki admin among those blog posts' authors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:58, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Firstly, the WMF is exponentially growing its own staff numbers. Salary costs are now ten times what they were a decade ago (partly also because C-level salaries are now twice what they were ten years ago). This whole effort is financed by telling the public, year after year, that money is needed to "keep Wikipedia online", which is risible.

Secondly, it is surely without question that the WMF is trying to grow volunteer communities in the Global South, and is investing heavily in this. See, e.g., the budget increases related to "thriving movement" here. Like Abstract Wikipedia (which is teetering on the edge of a CC0 licence to keep Big Tech happy, contributor rights be damned) the ultimate aim of this effort is in part to ensure that the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have free ("free" as in they don't have to pay for it) content in Asian and African languages to feed their infobox panels and voice assistants with to conquer markets (representing tens of millions of speakers in some cases) that are currently still closed to them because of language barriers – all on the basis of unpaid volunteer labour. (An added kicker is that those companies are by and large tax dodgers – they don't like paying tax in the countries they operate in – so helping them gain control of markets in the Global South actually deprives those countries of tax income needed to fund education and health systems.)

Thirdly, official WMF strategy is that "By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us." Growing both edits and editors is implicit in that. Andreas JN466 11:47, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Did you know that the WMF claims in fundraising emails that 32% of the money people give "will be used to support the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day"?

For reference, total revenue last year (excluding gifts to the Endowment) was $163 million, and after the first two quarters of the present 2021/2022 financial year, the Foundation was already $10 million up on last year. This means the WMF is on course for at least $175 million this year.

32% of this would be $56 million. The total "thriving movement" budget this year, which includes chapter funding (for hundreds of paid staff), is $36.7M, up from $14.3M in FY20-21, so I can't make sense of that 32% figure. I've asked on Meta what they mean.

The second email people get now offers them badges. The third email acknowledges at least that the money is crucial "for our organsiation and movement to grow" – which is honest – but by then people will already have read in these emails that they donate "to keep Wikipedia online for yourself and millions of people around the world", that the WMF "choose not to charge a subscription fee" (duh, their mission statement commits them to not charging one), and that the Foundation needs money "to ensure that Wikipedia remains independent, ad-free, and growing for years to come", and "to keep Wikipedia free and independent." These are all wordings that were deprecated and discontinued on the banners years ago, following vociferous community criticism. Andreas JN466 10:08, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I assume it depends on what they mean by "support the volunteers". I'd wait until they reply before giving my opinion, as there may be a perfectly innocent explanation such as the money raised in India being spent in India owing to currency transfer fees and the WMF spending disproportionately on chapters and education programs in India. ‑ Iridescent 13:04, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I was wondering the same. But then I checked the Swedish version of the email linked on the Meta Fundraising page and found it says the same. In both cases, that phrase is illustrated with a picture that seems to have been taken in an African primary school. Andreas JN466 13:26, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

It's been nearly two weeks, and no reply has been forthcoming. Meanwhile, an interview with Raju Narisetti appeared in the Indian Express over the weekend: "We enabled people to edit Wikipedia on the phone, which is a big breakthrough in a country like India, and so that has contributed to the significant growth in languages,” he said, adding this is also the answer to why Wikipedia raises money."

He continued: “More than 75% of the money we raise globally goes to two things. One is to give money back to the volunteer community so they can launch a new language. Two is about half of it goes to the infrastructure. You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users.”

Is there a fact checker in the house? Andreas JN466 08:09, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm willing to believe that "back to the volunteer community" does not mean en-wiki, but rather the languages that need help with more basic necessities. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:36, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

@Tryptofish: First off, have a look at [1]. This shows how much money actually flows into the various regions (outside the US). Is it true that "most of it is actually flowing into the global south"? Andreas JN466 23:17, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't know enough (or anything) about accounting terminology, and the answer is dependent on what they mean by "Total expenditures for and investments in the region". If it includes more general costs rather than purely grant expenditure then it's unsurprising to see such high spending in Europe; the esams server is in the Netherlands, plus presumably a significant proportion of the tech companies with which something like the WMF would do business will be based in Europe. Presumably also this form only accounts for funds disseminated directly by the WMF, so wouldn't show the figures for those countries where donated funds go direct to the local chapter rather than being laundered through SF first.

I don't doubt that the WMF is lying here—when it comes to where the money comes from, where it goes, and who is taking a cut along the way, it would be more unusual to find them being honest—but they're probably not lying quite as much as this makes it appear. ‑ Iridescent 02:18, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Okay. Even if you limit yourself to the Grantmaking amounts (pages 30 and 31), you end up with a total of a little over $2M going to the Global South, or less than 60% of the $3.5M grant total. $2M is 1.25% of the $163M revenue.

Most striking of all, given that he is talking to an Indian audience: the amount going to South Asia as a whole was less than $80,000 ($3,339 + $75,198). That is 0.05% of the money raised. Andreas JN466 09:06, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I've expanded on this on the mailing list: [2] Comments and corrections welcome. Andreas JN466 16:31, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

I'd say wait until they reply. I have minimal AGF when it comes to the WMF, but I can think of potential explanations here, such as funds being raised in India going direct to local chapters rather than through WMF central funds (there used to be a similar arrangement for WMUK, so it's not without precedent). ‑ Iridescent 19:25, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

(adding) Ping to User:Whatamidoing (WMF)—WAID I know this particular topic isn't in your remit, but can you nudge whoever's responsible to reply. If there's a legitimate answer, the longer they go without providing it the more the conspiracy theories will grow; if there's not a legitimate answer, the longer they go without retracting the claim the more chance it causes some nasty reputational damage. (For the record, I have absolutely no problem if the majority of expenditure is in the US and Europe—it's exactly what I'd expect since most of the staff and facilities are in the US and Europe—but Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south is the kind of claim that really pisses off donors if it's not true.) ‑ Iridescent 19:40, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Memories are short, Whatamidoing (WMF). At around the time of the ill fated IEP a few years ago (another mega WMF cockup) seven figures of funds were squandered in India and our en.Wiki community volunteered to clean the huge content mess left in its wake. What the goody-two-shoes rudderless WMF in their laid back Californian comfort and ideology tend to forget is that corruption is part of the every-day culture here in south and southeast Asia - to the extent that the national economies even depend on it! Comments today: Right now, the W?F keeps spending more and more every year to do essentially the same job they were doing ten years ago with far less spending and ...the WMF is run by incompetents incapable of keeping expenditures in line with income and capital, rather than professionals in nonprofit administration with extensive experience in just that balancing act, are a perfectly apt descriptions. I have been working as an unpaid volunteer consultant for 'do good' NGOs on and off here in Asia, especially in India, Laos, and Cambodia, for longer than Wikipedia exists and their management/executive cohorts nearly all have the same things in common: enjoying high salaries and perks, little effective output during office hours, grossly disproportionate expenditure on their own infrastructure and convenience, paying external agencies for the work they are too lazy to do themselves, squandering the rest of their easy-come;easy-go donations, and a palpable disregard for the expendable community of the hundreds (or thousands) of volunteers who do the actual work for no compensation of any kind whatsoever (well,maybe a $1 T-shirt with a WMF logo if they are lucky). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:25, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Your comment reminds me of the fact that while Raju mentions 65,000 Indian volunteers in his interview, the WMF Form 990 says the 2020 South Asia "Grants and Other Assistance to Individuals" total of $75,198 went to 22 recipients (an average of $3,418 per head). Andreas JN466 15:55, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

I don't know where it went, but is that not likely to be assorted costs for the (covid-abandoned) Wikimania 2020? Or are they using some archaic definition of "South Asia" as "former British colonies in Asia"? ‑ Iridescent 17:59, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

They include Burma and Cambodia in "East Asia and the Pacific"; given that Thailand is between Burma and Cambodia, Thailand must be included in East Asia as well. Andreas JN466 20:20, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

The Indian Express article has now been updated, and a Disclaimer added. [3]

The topic of Indian funds always having to go to the WMF first came up on the mailing list recently. So there is no arrangement in India like there is in Germany (and like there used to be in the UK). Best, Andreas JN466 15:19, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

For the benefit of TPWs who are following this thread but don't get involved in the cesspit of Meta, the WMF did reply to this one. As per my previous comments, on this specific topic I think the WMF's position is perfectly reasonable; because of the physical fact of the hardware being in Virginia, Texas, Singapore and the Netherlands and the WMF's offices being in California, then by definition a disproportionate percentage of funds allocated to any program is going to be spent in those five areas, even if the area of benefit is somewhere completely different. (I personally think that a lot of these programs are mistargeted, and Africa, India etc would be better served by our concentrating on getting the existing projects up to as good a standard as possible and concentrating on ensuring people everywhere can access them easily and cheaply, rather than the current WMF obsession with missionary activity and trying to recruit as many people as possible to the cause. However, that's a separate issue.) ‑ Iridescent 08:30, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

"then by definition a disproportionate percentage of funds allocated to any program is going to be spent in those five areas, even if the area of benefit is somewhere completely different." This concept is remarkably difficult to get across to some people, even those who should know better. Where it intersects with the concept of 'social value' and commissioned services has been giving me a headache at work recently. (eg, a funder from a specific municipal area queries our spending a portion of said funds on infrastructure physically located elsewhere which supports services in their local area - we have to provide a social value breakdown of all our spending. No you numpty, our network support does not provide social value, but you still have to pay towards it because the people it supports in your area require it!) Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:43, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

Try explaining any government or government-funded job to the public. A ridiculously high number of people—including a depressing number of people important enough to be making actual decisions—seem to genuinely not grasp either that "frontline staff" and "essential staff" aren't synonyms and that admin, tech support, cleaning, quality checking, logistics, marketing, maintenance etc aren't optional extras, nor that it's usually more efficient to have a single central location for the back office functions rather than having a separate phone switchboard, warehouse, garage et al in every single location. (I imagine every local councillor in the world is sick of hearing the question "but why doesn't our small town operate its own [buses/specialist hospital/garbage collections/police force/plastic recycling plant]?".)  ‑ Iridescent 10:46, 17 June 2022 (UTC)

But... but... I thought the goal of all funding was jobs for the boys? And since I'm a local funder, it had better be local people getting my funds.

Only, perhaps you need to ask people to estimate the "economic, social and environmental well-being" they receive from that contract when the network's down, instead of when they don't notice its existence because everything's working. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:04, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

You don't need me to tell you this as you already know it, but Jayen466 is completely correct in one sense. The WMF may be careful not to technically lie, but they don't exactly go out of their way to dispel the perception of "if I give them money, it will be spent locally and thus not only benefit my community through improved access to Wikipedia, but more directly in terms of creating jobs and improving infrastructure locally". It may be the case that Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, a lot of it is actually flowing into the global south is nominally correct—$2 million, is indeed a lot of money—but it's actively misleading since it gives the impression that it constitutes a significant proportion of total spend. (What's particularly irritating is that there's no need for the WMF to equivocate here and they're just doing it out of habit. "Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, much of it is spent on improving services for the global south" wouldn't put off any potential donors and would actually be accurate.) ‑ Iridescent 17:23, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I've expanded on this theme in the Signpost: "Wikipedia's independence" or "Wikimedia's pile of dosh"?. I'd be particularly grateful for people's views and responses on the Signpost article's talk page, where I've just posted this, concerning the claim in the Annual Report that 31% of WMF spending is for "Direct support to communities":

Here are the audited financial statements for 2020/2021: [4]. They show the following data:

Revenue: $162,886,686

Expenses: $111,839,819, of which:

• Salaries and wages: $67,857,676 (this is for US and non-US employees only; it doesn't include the pay of WMF staff who work as contractors)
• Awards and grants: $9,810,844 (of which $5 million were a grant to the Wikimedia Endowment, see page 14)
• Internet hosting: $2,384,439
• In-kind service expenses: $473,709
• Donation processing expenses: $6,386,483
• Professional service expenses: $12,084,019
• Other operating expenses: $10,383,125
• Travel and conferences: $29,214
• Depreciations and amortization: $2,430,310

According to the Annual Report, 31% of spending is for "Direct support to communities", which is defined as follows: Wikimedia projects have global reach. This is enabled by the diverse contributions of volunteers from local communities around the world. We provide grants and other resources to support local contributors, community outreach events, and advocacy for growing free knowledge.

31% of expenditure is $34,670,344.

There clearly isn't any such item in the above list of expenses. Just the salaries, the $5 million gift to the Endowment and donation processing together account for $79,244,159.

That leaves just $32,595,660 for everything else.

So that means that some of the WMF salaries must be counted as "direct support to communities" – over $2 million, even if you classify all other expenses as "Direct support to communities".

Just tell me – ideally over there – do you think the Annual Report leaves its readers with an accurate impression of WMF spending?

I mean, if we look at the statement "We provide grants and other resources to support local contributors, community outreach events, and advocacy for growing free knowledge", what percentage of this $35 million do we think is "grants", "other resources", "community outreach events" and "advocacy", and what would the average reader think? Andreas JN466 08:13, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Placeholder note that I've seen this—I'll reply either here or on the Signpost page as appropriate once I've had time to read it fully. ‑ Iridescent 04:33, 2 July 2022 (UTC)

Belatedly replied there, although I've not really much to add. For the benefit of anyone reading this thread ibn a future archive, my comment was:

It was suggested I comment here, but I haven't really anything to add other than my comments in this long talk thread. The TL;DR summary of my view is that I think Jayen466 is slightly missing the point in this case; the problem isn't so much the WMF's fundraising per se, but that they've developed such a culture of instinctive evasiveness that they're misleading and obfuscating even when there's no need to. (No donor, supporter or sponsor would reasonably take issue with "owing to where our employees are located your donations won't necessarily be spent in a particular region, but it will still be for the benefit of that region"; the WMF are only lying because it's become their default communications mode.)

I do think that's the real point here. The exact proportion of funds received from various areas vs funds disseminated in various areas isn't particularly important given that it's natural that funds will disproportionately be spent in areas where WMF hardware and employees are located; the issue is that lying and dishonesty has become so ingrained in WMF culture, that they're lying even when there's nothing to gain from lying. ‑ Iridescent 04:02, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

They're not lying as such. Quoting what Simon McDonald said the other day, "I think that the language is ambiguous, it's sort of telling the truth and crossing your fingers at the same time and hoping that people are not too forensic in their subsequent questioning ..." – except that in their case, it is working.

I agree that spending patterns and the fundraising messages are two different issues.

There is a compelling argument to be made that more money should be spent in the developing world. Many things could be done more cheaply there and in the process provide life-changing opportunities. To be fair, the WMF itself has said it wants to increase such spending, and this is one thing I'd like to see included in the Election Compass.

The other issue is when the WMF makes it sound as if a major part of its spending were already flowing to the developing world. That's not okay, irrespective of what one may feel about geographical spending priorities.

I also agree that the WMF could fundraise pretty well without scaring people with the spectre of a subscription fee, or the prospect of Wikipedia blinking out of existence. But given their commitment to A/B testing I'm quite sure that every word is weighed. I believe they would take significantly less money if they used "honest" banners – they've trialled some and then not used them.

You say the WMF has an ingrained culture of lying and dishonesty – do you think that affects communications with volunteers as much as external communications with the public? What if anything could or should the community do about this culture, in your opinion? Andreas JN466 08:14, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

As I understand it, the main constraint against spending more money in the developing world is one I think they're actually correct on. The WMF for good reason is reluctant to have operations in any country where there's any possibility that editorial independence will be compromised, which severely restricts where the core operations can take place. My issue here is that nobody would have a problem if they just said "most of our operations need to be in the US"—even the proudest patriot in India, Nigeria etc would concede that the US is the only place currently with the right combination of technological infrastructure and free-speech laws for Wikipedia to operate—but with the deliberately misleading messaging.

Regarding do you think that affects communications with volunteers as much as external communications with the public?, I'm obviously jaded in this given my experience during Framageddon. My best guess is that for the most part, it's not so much a culture of dishonesty per se, but that WMF staff and the typical editor are starting to have radically differing views of the roles both of Wikipedia and of the WMF. When I talk to WMF people lately, I start to get the feel that they see it almost as a religious movement in which any activity that advances the goals is by definition doing good no matter how bad it appears to outside observers; when viewed from that "if it can be said to advance the goals then it can't be wrong" perspective, a lot of the weirder WMF statements and decisions make perfect sense. This isn't a particularly new observation—some of my earliest experiences of Wikipedia infighting are of Kelly Martin complaining that Wikipedia was becoming cult-like—but it's definitely a tendency that seems to be accelerating recently. (It also, to me, explains some of the more apparently eccentric overreactions. If you're doing God's work, then those who disagree with you aren't just in disagreement but are actively evil; as such going out of they way not just to disagree with but to actively humiliate those not of the body, be it Fram, Eric Corbett, or the monkey selfie guy isn't being obnoxious, it's a testament of faith.)

As to what we could do about it, I honestly don't know. Over the long term, I assume the missionary zeal will burn itself out and the WMF will just become another part of Big Tech that happens to have the quirk of being owned by a charitable foundation rather than shareholders. My worry is that when that happens, the existing model will be unsustainable; while too much faith is a bad thing, we rely on it to some degree to keep people volunteering. A more professional WMF would likely have less issues recruiting admins as people love the chance to tell others what to do, but I suspect would flare out and fall apart fairly quickly. (If you have a spare half hour, it's worth reading this very long thread in full for my thoughts on this.) If frorced to make a long term prediction, it would be that eventually we'll end up with a content fork—it bears repeating that Google could send Wikipedia the way of Myspace tomorrow with the addition of one line of code to PageRank—but for that to happen we'd need the backing of someone with both technical infrastructure and deep pockets, and none of those seem very appealing. For all the WMF's faults, I imagine I speak for every editor in saying I'd take Jimmy Wales over Elon Musk. ‑ Iridescent 09:00, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

Over half of all WMF expenses are US salaries – even though a large proportion of the US staff work remotely, doing work that could really be done anywhere in the world.

On the page you linked, User:力 mentioned (in 2018) that "fake references ... will not be detectable by AI anytime soon". This reminded me that some smart people at Meta (Zuckerberg's) earlier this week announced an AI tool that does precisely that – see [5] and [6].

One thing volunteers could do about the culture in my opinion is point it out (off Wikipedia) when the WMF uses the Boris style of truth in its public communications. Getting away with it does them no good.

I smirked about doing "God's work" ... there is definitely an element of that. :) Cheers, Andreas JN466 18:45, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

The WMF has posted mock-ups of the Jimbo mails it plans to use in the upcoming English email campaign (Email 1, Email 2, Email 3). You can now get badges if you donate a few more dollars to add to the WMF's giant stash of cash, to "keep Wikipedia online". Andreas JN466 11:52, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

(ec) I am currently looking at the vote log and it says 903 votes cast. That's a small portion of all Wikimedia users, I think, but I am not sure how many of the "active" participants. Looks like I am #160 and there are a lot of regulars on enwiki there. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:30, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

We have until March 21 to vote, right? The WMF has so lost their way (if they had ever found it); the level of group think and impenetrable writing is still mind-boggling (and for as long as their writing has been pure gibberish, one would think they would have done something about it by now). Easy to see why a sensible admin like Ealdgyth would turn in the bits of this sort of thing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:13, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

This type of bug on a secure voting site really inspires confidence: phabricator:T303735. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:24, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

In case anyone wants to validate Iridescent's theory that the WMF payroll [will] block-vote so it's almost certain to pass even if there's overwhelming opposition from the actual editor communities, there have been a total of 28 votes by (WMF) accounts so far, including several by people I've never heard of before even though I'm very into obscure WMF geekery. And only two of them (SOyeyele (WMF)/Jamie Tubers, Zuz (WMF)/Celestinesucess) meet the first set of voting requirements considering only their volunteer account. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:28, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

The Universal Code of Conduct is a bit of a Curate's egg. It certainly does have some good parts, and some of the sillier features were fixed during its long gestation. But at heart it reads like a blurb from a company HR department for how you treat colleagues after the recruitment process has filtered some people out. Take two examples where I have tried and failed to influence the process, age and linguistic ability. In the past I have supported RFAs of teenagers who I thought were ready for adminship, my tests for such candidate's include questions such as "Do your parents or guardians trust you with an internet account that you can't tell them the password of". But I'm aware that there are others who don't think that anyone should be an admin until they are legally adult. I suspect that the WMF and all the chapters will quickly exempt themselves from this one, leaving us with the practical issues that come up when children of surprisingly young ages start editing. No age discrimination is a very different thing when your HR department is only recruiting university graduates. Language fluency is another area, these days I spend as much time on commons as here, and of course Commons is one of our multilingual projects. Wikipedia however has 300 or so seperate wikis based on different languages, it makes absolute sense that we require some fluency in English for most roles here and in Scots for people who write the Scots Wikipedia. As a monolingual Brit who has worked for a chapter and might apply for some WMF jobs, it would be in my interest if the WMF weren't able to prefer multilingual candidates when recruiting. But as a Wikipedian I absolutely see that it would be an advantage for those WMF staff who interact with the community to have at least a working proficiency in more than one language. A rule against discrimination on language fluency in our multilingual projects would make sense, as would a ban on age discrimination among community members who are legally adult. But the code still contains "This applies to all contributors and participants in their interaction with all contributors and participants, without expectations based on age, mental or physical disabilities, physical appearance, national, religious, ethnic and cultural background, caste, social class, language fluency, sexual orientation, gender identity, sex or career field." As usual with the WMF one comes away from any interactions thinking that for a twenty year old organisation with only a few hundred employees, it has somehow acquired the inflexibility and ossification of an organisation several orders of magnitude larger and older. ϢereSpielChequers 11:05, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

• I learn something every day. I had never heard the phrase "curate's egg." I have no interest in Wikipolitics but I would like to do my bit for the survival of Wikipedia. So, O Wise Curator of Eggs and Others of Esteemed Opinion, should I vote yes or no on the enforcement guidelines of the UCoC? I will likely take your advice.Smallchief (talk)
  • I have voted No, but then used the comments box to give two or three examples of where I disagree with the current proposal. My hope is that this leads to the proposal being further improved. I would suggest that you only vote if you have the time to read the code, if you then vote "No" please give some pointers as to where you think the code needs improvement. Feel free to echo mine if having read the code you agree that each language version of Wikipedia would benefit by continuing to be allowed to require some fluency in that wikipedia's language for at least some roles in the pedia. ϢereSpielChequers 15:37, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
    • I'd encourage anyone who isn't sure both that they want this and that both UCoC and the enforcement guidelines in this form are what they want, to oppose. This is a vote on a change that's effectively going to be irrevocable, since any change to it will itself require a consultation exercise across the whole of the WMF ecosystem. (Ever tried to get the wording to WP:ARBPOL amended? Multiply that by the 325 languages in which we currently operate.)
      If you're not certain that both that UCoC is something we need and that this particular wording is the wording we need, the only rational choice is to tell them to reconsider it, preferably with an explanation of exactly which aspects you consider potentially problematic but if not, a simple "no" is fine. Wikipedia isn't going to fall apart if we go a few more months without something we've got along without for 21 years, but Wikipedia potentially is going to fall apart, or at least become unrecognizable, if we're plunged into a permanent civil war of wikilawyering over whether any given comment potentially violates something or other. ‑ Iridescent 18:40, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
      • Somehow I doubt my oppose of 'this policy is both structurally and procedurely racist in its wording and intended implementation' is going to make much difference to the WMF staff there. Anyone who can with a straight face support the 'do not recognise' section (which isnt even the most problematic of the document as a whole) despite it being blatantly discriminatory and outright illegal in various countries is already way past the point of rational argument being a useful approach. The only options left realistically are to amend WP:ADMIN to explicitly forbid enforcement of UCoC provisions (where they are not supported by ENWP's existing policies) with removal of tools if not followed, and to forbid advanced tools (admin/crat) from WMF staff members/contractors due to the conflict of interest. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:53, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
        • The WMF have already anticipated that one. All admins and arbitrators (and their equivalents on other projects) are going to be required to affirm (through signed declaration or other format to be decided) they will acknowledge and adhere to the Universal Code of Conduct. This is why the talk of mass resignations isn't just hyperbole; if this passes, we're putting people in a position where it's literally the case that the only honorable course is resignation. (I suppose I—or anyone else—could point-blank say that I'm not going to adhere to UCoC and challenge Arbcom to come and take it, but I doubt Arbcom would thank us for dumping an existential crisis onto their collective doorstep.) ‑ Iridescent 19:24, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
          • I've considered that option (not doing it and seeing what happens) also. We'll see. It would get interesting if a group of admins with a lot of social capital on en-wiki all took the "we aren't going to affirm, so come and take it from us, ArbCom" attitude. @Dennis Brown, Cullen328, and Hog Farm:... Ealdgyth (talk) 19:33, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
            • Well, you've definitely nailed the camp I'm in although I think you overestimate my ability to persuade others. I've discovered that after 57 years, two divorces, and 16 years of this place, I'm not as soft spoken as I once was. I absolutely will resign before "affirming" my allegiance to the WMF (cue USSR style music). Or it may be better to let them take it from me, although 100 admin piled up in Arb might be one hell of a backlog. I joined a movement, a project, I didn't sign on to be slave labor for a corporation. And of course, I will vote in every RFA, and if there is any concern about the candidate that is legitimately troublesome, I would politely oppose with a reasonable rationale, because it would be wrong to stuff the ranks with unqualified candidates. Don't underestimate that portion of our combined strength. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 20:11, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
              • It will come as no surprise that I'm not going to take a loyalty oath. Nor an indoctrination program. Unfortunately I think I used up my social capital during Framgate. Or, maybe that gave me more?! I don't really know how these things work. Surely threatening to resign loses it's power the 3rd or 4th time I try to use it. If nothing else, I'd be the only person to have ever been desysopped twice by WMF (I hold out some hope that the en.wiki arbcom would never desysop for this themselves).--Floquenbeam (talk) 20:17, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
                • We need box better than the lame box I'm using on my talk and user page. And maybe matching shirts. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 21:34, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
                  • I refused to sign the confidentiality agreement required to become an Arbitration electoral commission person, although I think it was more that I wanted to thoroughly understand and appreciate what I was expected to adhere to, and just couldn't do it. And I can pinpoint several fuck-ups in my life that I can trace back to signing things thinking they would be a good idea but turned out not to be. So you can imagine what my response will be to sign anything - procrastinate and hope it goes away. I'm mindful to oppose, but like WSC, I would like to put some constructive reasons why first. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:54, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
              • Ealdgyth, I think you're probably overestimating the amount of social capital I have here, or even the percentage of editors who would recognize my username. But yes, I will NOT be swearing fealty to the WMF, nor undergoing the "training" program. Like Dennis, I'm not sure if it's best to just resign and not fight it or to make the WMF and/or ARBCOM take it. Would likely depend on how much energy I have at the time, which is something that I've been in short supply of the last several weeks ... I would hope that conditions would still be good enough for me to stick around even after the mess, but if the WMF screws stuff up too much, I guess there's always Missouri Historical Review. Hog Farm _Talk 23:43, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
          • Ah you misunderstand me Iri, changing WP:ADMIN is specifically to counter that. Its largely irrelevant if an admin affirms their allegiance or not if an ENWP community policy explicitly denies admins the authority to take an action. At that point the WMF will have to overtly take control of ENWP. Essentially its putting policy in place to prevent anyone other than WMF Staff accounts from enforcing UCoC (specific) violations. The end result of such a policy is this: Admins take their oath of bullshittedness and sit through the re-education camps and then either: never actually enforce the UCoC and so the WMF de-tools them, or they enforce it and ENWP de-tools them, or they dont enforce it and nothing happens because the WMF are not actually interested in hiring the staff and paying them to do all the jobs advanced tool using volunteers do because it would upset their gravy train. The alternative is actually a lot worse, in that all the admins of character (eg, everyone who refuses to kowtow) leave, and we are left with a bunch of WMF yes men. What happened to Fram will seem like a happy memory once the ideological purges start with checks in place. Dont get me wrong, I dont think in the long run it will stop the WMF from doing whatever it wants to do, it will just force it out into the open a lot sooner. RE Dennis and any other admins thinking of resigning. Dont do it, force the WMF to de-tool you. Why make it easier for them? You gain nothing and they get an easy ride. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:37, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
            • You misunderstand: I'm not pledging loyalty to anyone, least of all the Foundation. Even if they offer free puppies. The place is full of power hungry asshats with too much of other people's money and no understanding of the community. I won't sign as a matter of principle. I will walk away. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 21:58, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
              • I voted “no” on the basis that the text is so longwinded that I was exhausted by it before finding anything of substance. I also haven’t been able to find a page to offer feedback. SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:07, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
                • I'm pondering how they will define holders of advanced permissions. I think I might be OK with requiring checkusers and oversighters to sign the affirmation. We're assuming that administrators will also be included, but would it necessarily stop there? Template editors? Autopatrolled? Rollback? There's an awful lot of room for a lack of common sense in determining who would have to swear fealty. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:43, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
                  • Since the oath is to uphold and enforce the UCoC, one would think they mean admin bit. But I've learned to never underestimate the silliness that comes from the Foundation, so who knows. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 10:27, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
                    • I agree entirely. I've been thinking about this some more, and I'm toying with proposing something in the event this thing passes. We could have an RfC at Village Pump Proposals, in which the community could choose to define the meaning of "advanced permissions" at this project for these purposes. And the criterion could be, rather reasonably, permissions that require identification to the WMF. That would mean checkusers, oversighters, and arbitrators (the last because they typically get the other two permissions). It would thus exclude administrators, which I think would be entirely a good thing. I find the reasons that admins would resign to be honorable and appropriate, but I'd much prefer that they wouldn't have to do it. Of course the WMF might object to the community deciding this, as it wasn't what they would have wanted us to do, but I like the idea of putting them in the position of saying no to a community consensus. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:20, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

                      As far as I'm aware, there are no longer any permissions that require identification to the WMF other than (for obvious practical reasons) those that create an actual contractual relationship. It was always a stupid requirement—I could knock up an ID document in about ten minutes in any name I like that would be adequate to fool the WMF (who obviously don't have access to the biometric data etc that genuine ID documents contain). ‑ Iridescent 20:08, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

                      Doggone it. We'll just have to say CHU, OS, and ARB. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

                    • I'm reading the proposal now, in preparation to vote, and I see that it says: "Designating functionaries will be done, whenever possible, by local communities, following the principle of subsidiarity that online and offline communities across the world should make decisions for themselves whenever possible." That would actually make it very practical for us to make such a consensus stick. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:32, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

So far this discussion seems to have come with no reasons at all to support the enforcement guidelines. The UCoC itself seems mostly harmless, and certainly includes things I support, but given that our informal standards of conduct here aren't that far away from the UCoC, what arguments are being made in support of having enforcement for it? What bad things happen if we don't have agreed enforcement guidelines; if we continue to expect each wiki to manage these issues themselves? The only argument I can recall is that small wikis need some such mechanism. I can see that -- there have certainly been some horror stories about small wikis -- but the larger wikis are quite different kettles of fish. Are there legal pressures on the WMF to have enforcement? I could see voting for something that applied to small wikis (maybe less than 100 active editors/month) but not for en-wiki. I have little interest or involvement in WMF politics, and I usually find myself silently disagreeing with the vocal majority on WMF issues (e.g. Framgate) but this seems misguided and I plan to oppose it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:08, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

I can't really argue that the UCoC enforcement guidelines are the correct solution, but a review/adjustment of conduct enforcement seems valuable in theory. Surely at least some people here agree that conduct dispute resolution on enwiki can be dysfunctional? For example: I don't think requiring people facing actual harassment, especially non-experienced editors who might even be using real names (as in some past cases), to show up at ANI for widely-attended public discussion is an effective way to deal with those problems. I can't imagine any company having a 'reporting harassment in the workplace' policy that functions analogously to enwiki's ANI route - it would be widely denounced. So I like the ideas in meta:Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Enforcement_guidelines#Recommendations_for_the_reporting_and_processing_tool and the technical tools suggested there.

While there aren't any reasons to support expressed here, I don't see any real disadvantages either. The main point of contention above seems to be that the UCoC requires admins to affirm their 'acknowledgement' of, and 'adherance' to, the UCoC. I don't know why that clause was inserted, but I don't see why it's a big deal either. As a practical matter, AFAIK almost everything–if not everything–disallowed by the UCoC is already disallowed by local enwiki policy and practices, either as-written or as-applied, and the enforcement guidelines leave most enforcement to local admins. So personally I'm curious what exactly people feel is bad about it? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:52, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

I want to question your characterization of ANI as the place we want reporting of harassment to be conducted. (Although ANI is certainly an easy target for criticism.) We have ways of privately contacting ArbCom, for example. I don't dispute that inexperienced users can be unaware of the best options available to them, but there is no reason to assume that they would be any more aware of the WMF. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:03, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

I will also take a stab at answering the question that you asked. Not too long ago, there was a widely noticed example of a problem where the UCoC might have been substituted for community practice, if enforcement were in effect: [7]. On the one hand, there was a class assignment, bringing in new student editors. And there was an instructor who was very interested in a topic that can reasonably be described as related to inclusiveness. And there was even a vivid case of a young editor facing considerable off-site harassment. But on the other hand, there were some minor concerns about canvassing, and major concerns about our content rules about notability. The community did not do a perfect job of dealing with it, but I think anyone who felt compelled to be guided exclusively by the UCoC would have been inclined to violate our own policies and guidelines. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:15, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Highly visible and public reporting of harassment is not necessarily comfortable for victims.but there is no reason to assume that they would be any more aware of the WMF True but the WMF isn't doing enforcement. I understood the plan being a prominent/easy-to-use reporting tool that forwards reports to the appropriate place, though I don't think the details are ironed out yet.

but I think anyone who felt compelled to be guided exclusively by the UCoC would have been inclined to violate our own policies and guidelines how so? Specifically, how do you think the issue would've been dealt assuming the UCoC enforcement guidelines had been ratified at the time? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 23:24, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Maybe we edit-conflicted, but I answer that just below. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:43, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

We did EC, however, why do you think the UCoC mandates the deletion (or non-deletion) of an article? ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 00:08, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

I'm about to logout, and the indenting here is getting strange, but what I mean is that the content was related to inclusiveness, and deletion could be construed as insensitive to inclusion. If we're going to be generally accepting of women and minorities (which of course we should), but as a matter of overriding policy, policy that overrides our current norms on notability and neutral point of view, then deleting content that reflects cutting-edge theory about that would be excluding stuff the UCoC wants us to welcome. It's like treating WP:RGW oppositely to the way that we currently do. This is what can happen when a simplistic corporate formula tries to replace what editors have developed through years of experience. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:19, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Putting that another way, that class project resulted in content that was AfD-worthy, but it might well have been contrary to the UCoC to delete that content. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:22, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

I've now read the enforcement proposal in its entirety. (Gee, what a novel idea! Read something before giving an opinion about it, rather than after!) Now, I have to say that I'm less bothered by it than I expected to be. It does a better job than I expected at deferring to local wikis and at staying out of purely content issues. There are still issues for me, and the reasons that I will vote no, in that I think that it goes too far in requiring oaths of loyalty rather than just awareness, and it opens up (at larger projects) too much risk of disconnects between the centralized U4C and local consensus about how policies should be applied. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:44, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Per my comment above, my reason for opposition and for advocating that others oppose isn't that I consider most of it particularly problematic. Rather, it's that once it's passed it will be effectively set in stone given that we can't subsequently amend it without consultation once it's been translated into 325 languages and I assume nobody wants to give the WMF carte blanche to amend it unilaterally. Thus, the usual wiki model of constantly tinkering until we find something that will stick doesn't apply—if we're not confident that this is genuinely the best we can do, we shouldn't be approving it. ‑ Iridescent 20:11, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Funny that you put it that way. In my comment along with the vote, I also said something approximately like "Wikimedia has always relied on the local communities to develop content policies through experience, and Wikimedia should likewise trust the communities with conduct policies", or something like that. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for articulating those thoughts. There's something there I agree with and am going to amend my vote accordingly, but making clear I would vote yes if the amendment process was adequete. (I don't think U4C Committee-proposed changes or WMF-facilitated reviews are adequate.) I do note as an example that WP:ARBPOL is hard (though possible) to change directly by the community, and as such it's never had a community-proposed modification made to it, so a high bar to change is not a disadvantage IMO, but there needs to be the possibility for direct community change. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:59, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

The process last time we made a significant change to ARBPOL was formal ratification by every member of the then-committee followed by a full vote of anyone who cared to comment, and ARBPOL is an extremely inside-baseball process affecting a single project and about which 99% of editors don't care, whereas this affects every participant on every project. If we end up approving something—either UCoC itself or the enforcement guidelines—and end up accidentally creating something that fundamentally changes Wikipedia's internal dynamics, or even makes one of the projects potentially illegal somewhere, it will be virtually impossible to get it right. (The idea that the WMF could unintentionally introduce an initiative that makes a project illegal isn't hyperbole. Check out the unhappy history of the entirely well-intentioned Wikipedia Zero scheme, for instance.) ‑ Iridescent 20:07, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

The UCoC looks like plain and simple common sense. However, many policies and guidelines started out as what people thought was common sense, and turned out to be distorted and browbeaten into something else over time. So I don't trust that people will enforce the guidelines properly and in a sensible manner. For example, consider everybody who didn't !vote "keep" at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Marina Ovsyannikova - I don't think there's any regular editor who didn't think they were all commenting in good faith, and a lot of replies from inexperienced editors were not the sort of comments the AfD process typically uses, but would a random WMF staffer with no experience of this read comments like "Fully agreed and people speaking out against war and for peace should never be censored! Why is this page even considered for deletion? While not every country sees free speech as a key value, and that should be respected, the internet is a place of free speech, in these times please keep this! She is a voice for peace!" and see it the same way? Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:01, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Ritchie, further above you ask for reasons to oppose; your first three sentences here sum up why I am opposing. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:05, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Mike; I have now opposed giving a variation on that. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:09, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

It isn't just the delete !votes in that one, several keep votes accuse the delete !voters of being pro Putin. In normal times we wouldn't sanction a bunch of newbies and IP editors for making such aspersions, but with the UCOC, we'd be obliged to hold them to the same standards as we hold the regulars. Where is John Cleese when we need him? ϢereSpielChequers 13:37, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

They took his mic away. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 18:44, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Okay, I'm voting no, because I don't think the English Wikipedia is broken and, thus, why mess with it? I have no idea what's going on with wikipedia in other languages, so maybe the enforcement mechanism is needed there. But I'm not persuaded.Smallchief (talk) 15:40, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

My take would be slightly different. I do think that English Wikipedia is if not broken certainly strained, because we have policies on civility and neutrality but no definition of what 'civility' and 'neutrality' actually mean. I don't think UCoC in its current form answers either question, though; all the current wording of both UCoC itself and the proposed enforcement mechanism will do is transpose the endless "where I come from this isn't considered an offensive term", "is it racist to point out that non-speakers can't rely on machine translation?" and "what do we actually mean by 'maturity'?" arguments into a different venue. ‑ Iridescent 08:55, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Good discussion and needed for voter clarification (although I voted "no" awhile back due to not wanting the foundation to force "our-way-or-the-highway" admin signings). A question: As presently written are administrators who sign on (signed in visible ink, blood, or invisible ink) required or encouraged to report an editor who voices an opinion off-Wikipedia which, if said in print, would be a code violation (i.e. daring to act as if free speech were still a thing)? 'hanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:13, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

As a general reminder to those who may not have read Meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement guidelines/Voter information in full and thus missed the part the WMF has tried to slip through, a "no" vote here doesn't mean what it does everywhere else. If a simple majority votes "yes", it moves on to ratification; if the "yes" vote fails to meet the 50% mark then the enforcement guidelines (not UCoC itself which is inviolable) are reworded and the vote is held again; the vote is repeated until it passes. (Personally, I could make a case that even if I thought the wording were perfect, the sheer arrogance of the WMF holding an 'election' in which the only choices are "Yes" or "Yes but not yet" would be grounds enough to come back and oppose it every time until they give up, just to discourage them from trying to pull this fake-legitimacy stunt in future.) ‑ Iridescent 14:52, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

@Randy Kryn: As written, the UCoC forbids you quite categorically from "sharing information concerning [another contributor's] Wikimedia activity outside the projects" without their prior consent. Whether this is in print or not doesn't come into it. It includes sharing such information verbally in the privacy of your home, in the pub, on Twitter, Facebook, Discord, by email to ArbCom, on the phone or in correspondence with a reporter or academic researcher ... sharing information concerning another contributor's Wikimedia activity anywhere, by any means, violates the code as written. This would even include quoting what someone has said on Wikipedia. See related discussions here and here. Andreas JN466 18:04, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

@Jayen466 As I read it, Randy Kryn is asking the opposite question; that is, whether the civility provisions apply to someone's activity elsewhere—e.g. if I make a comment in real life that constitutes "name calling based on perceived political affiliation" or "implicitly suggesting the possibility of unfair embarrassment", and it's possible for someone to join the dots between my Wikipedia account and my real-life identity, can I be sanctioned for it on Wikipedia. The wording of UCoC on the matter is vague; it's not clear whether The following behaviours are considered unacceptable within the Wikimedia movement translates as "these are things you can't do on Wikipedia" or "people who do these things aren't permitted on Wikipedia".

I'm fairly certain the drafters meant the narrower "these are things you can't do on Wikipedia" definition. If they genuinely meant "nobody can say anything in any context which any other person might find objectionable" it would essentially be a carte blance to block every single editor whose real-life identity could be connected to their Wikipedia account; as worded, it would mean a parent could be sitebanned if it could be demonstrated that they'd threatened to punish their child for being naughty. ‑ Iridescent 14:27, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I meant if I ever become friends with an admin, God forbid, and text them "I believe that ______ has the home-grown manners of a _________ ___ and if only the sheep could talk she'd say '______ ___ _____, buddy!'" does the admin have a contractual duty to block me on Wikipedia or just on their phone. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:59, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Me, I'd ask why they say "Wikimedia movement" rather than "on Wikimedia websites and physical spaces" but that's like knitpicky. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:08, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

That line at least I think is reasonable—there's more to Wikimedia than just Wikimedia websites and physical spaces, even though the websites account for 99.9% of it. This particular wording reduces (albeit doesn't remove) the gray areas over whether (for instance) comments made over Zoom, or at local meetings which aren't held on WMF property, still get covered. Think of it as finally clarifying the 20-year-old question over whether the IRC (and now Discord) channels are exempt from the rules. ‑ Iridescent 03:05, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Right. I did get hung up on the "if said in print" bit, given that the UCoC doesn't differentiate between "print" and "non-print" and just sticks with "sharing". Thank you for the correction, Iridescent; and I see what you meant now, Randy Kryn. You were talking about the UCoC's considered opinion that anyone who calls another person, say, a "murderous dictator", or a "pure thug", or a "war criminal", based on the other person's politics, thereby marks himself out as the kind of low-life we wouldn't want to have in the Wikimedia movement. Got it. Andreas JN466 18:58, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Well, not in so many words. I was talking about a sheep or Wikimedia pulling the wool over its eyes or something. Randy Kryn (talk) 19:20, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Andreas JN466 20:21, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Here's a vote count so far, courtesy of Xeno (WMF):

Seems like it's the big wikis dominating so far, although I wonder how much off-home wiki voting (i.e editors mainly active in project A voting through project B) there is going on, I saw a few such votes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:18, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

If I recall correctly, SecurePoll determines your home wiki based on what is identified as your home wiki on Special:CentralAuth. Everyone has to vote from Meta. Risker (talk) 13:26, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

IIRC CentralAuth tends to over-represent en-wiki as it's based on the wiki where the account first edited, and a lot of people start off on en-wiki even if it's not their native tongue just because it's so much bigger and thus more likely to have the article they were looking for and (importantly) more likely to be accurate and up-to-date. A lot of the wikis outside the big global languages are essentially just collections of pages on the interests of the half-a-dozen people who've declared themselves that site's owners. ‑ Iridescent 14:25, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

For anyone who's not aware, "yes" has scraped a decidingly unconvincing win. For the record, I'll refuse to participate in their 'mandatory training' reeducation scheme and (depending on the exact wording on what's proposed) would probably go so far as to say that if anyone does voluntarily participate in it, I'd consider that grounds in itself for a loss of confidence in that person's judgement to the extent that I'd consider them unfit to hold advanced permissions. ‑ Iridescent 19:03, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

I made a single comment on mediawiki.org that "Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is corrupt and bad. The Web team is a particularly egregious demonstration." which is demonstrably true and probably some of the mildest criticism you can offer. I got a 1-month block from the TechConductCommittee account. Lawwwwwwl, this place is hopeless. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:31, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Behold the future. To give a tiny bit of benefit of the doubt mediawiki.org and Meta have always had a slightly puritanical streak despite (or perhaps because of) being the haunt of some industrial-grade wackoes. I'd like to think they wouldn't pull that kind of crap on any of the large wikis, although if the WMF ever did decide to set up a similar squad of civility-enforcement Death Eaters on en-wiki, I could probably already predict the names of everyone who'd volunteer. ‑ Iridescent 17:42, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

It remains to be seen what happens when somebody criticizes another user, but we now know for sure that criticizing the WMF will result in a trip to the gulag. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:59, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

It looks like my Phabricator account has been disabled as well: <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/MZMcBride/>. For calling the organization corrupt and bad. Huh. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:57, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

I wonder what they were thinking they would accomplish by blocking you for a month when you on average edit that wiki far less than once a month. For what it's worth, blocking an account on MediaWiki.org or Wikitech automatically blocks the corresponding account on Phabricator, so it's probably not a deliberate decision to disable your phabricator account. And, as another admin on MediaWiki.org (albeit one who isn't very active and uses the block button rarely) I agree the block wasn't warranted. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:40, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Regarding I wonder what they were thinking they would accomplish by blocking you for a month when you on average edit that wiki far less than once a month, I assume it's a conscious attempt to send a "nobody is safe" message. This is the first block they've placed for four years, and there was no attempt made to warn or discuss beforehand; it's impossible to believe this wasn't both calculated and deliberate. ‑ Iridescent 19:01, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

I think the other interpretation is that in the context (on a page where Tuvalkin was warned about the Tech CoC for this edit), MZMcBride chose to attack the Web Team in a similar not-very-personal way and the TCC then blocked him because they thought that way he would Respect Their Authority. —Kusma (talk) 19:59, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

That group doesn't always bother to use the official account. Many of the members have been admins for years. See, e.g., this block from a year and a half ago. I've only rarely seen them block people, but it is generally true that they enforce the level of civility that you'd expect in an actual office, when speaking face to face with a co-worker. If a comment would get you fired or escorted out of the building at a real-world job, it'll get you blocked in the technical spaces (if you persist after being warned). It's different from enwiki's approach. Some people even think it's better. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:30, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

By the level of civility that you'd expect in an actual office I assume you mean "the level of civility that would be expected in the WMF's office" and not actually "in an actual office". I've been around the block a few times, and have never (and I mean never) worked anywhere where MZM's comment would get you fired or escorted out of the building. ‑ Iridescent 23:24, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Really? Corruption is a serious crime. Just how often did your colleagues accuse each other of committing serious crimes, with nobody minding? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:33, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing. Who said or even suggested legally (in the U.S.?) corrupt? I think it's perfectly possible that Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is ethically and morally corrupt without meeting a strict legal definition.

I'm not a lawyer so you'd have to ask one if collecting millions of donor dollars under false or highly misleading pretexts and wasting them is legal. Regardless of the legality, I'm within my rights to call it out. I might write an essay at some point. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:39, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

An advantage of living in a free society is that you can share your belief that your government is corrupt without having to fear repercussions just for saying so – and plenty of people do so. The governments that put you in jail when you say anything they feel discredits them are generally the authoritarian ones.

One trick used by the latter is to have laws that practically everyone has broken, but use them only to punish the "right" people. The UCoC seems not unlike that. Take this mailing list post from Wikimedia Taiwan, urgently asking for the UCoC enforcement guidelines to be implemented now, rather than waiting for another vote. The post "shares information concerning other contributors' Wikimedia activity outside the projects", in breach of the UCoC as written, and clearly hopes that enforcing the UCoC per the draft enforcement guidelines will somehow thwart or sanction the contributors they're talking about. The reply by a WMF board member is entirely sympathetic, the UCoC breach passed over without mention.

This idea – to have rules that most anyone will have broken, and then apply them selectively to sanction only the "right" people – has some very obvious short-term benefits and equally obvious long-term drawbacks, as any track record of using rules in this way will expose the actor to credible and effective charges of hypocrisy and abuse of power from outside their immediate sphere of control – exactly the same consequences that are experienced by authoritarian governments.

Unfortunately, it looks more and more like the WMF is hell-bent on adopting that authoritarian government pattern. The new board (s)election method, for example, arguably follows the Iranian model by requiring candidate vetting and approval by another body than the electorate. Andreas JN466 15:45, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

@WAID, I'm quite sure you (wearing either your editor or your WMF hat) understand the concept of 'figure of speech' and don't really believe Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is corrupt and bad. The Web team is a particularly egregious demonstration. actually constitutes "accus[ing] each other of committing serious crimes". (If I wrote "a crowd of 70,000 watched the Rams beat the Bengals last February", would you wonder why none of those 70,000 people had reported the assault?)

Even if one takes it literally, it's perfectly possible to say that elements of an organization have questionable integrity without it rising to the level of a criminal allegation. (We are talking about an organization which employed someone who had a side hustle running a website for people to trade and rate crime-scene photos of murdered children; which employed someone who shared their fantasies about murdering women in internal discussions; which employed someone who was caught whitewashing articles for pay; which employed someone who was caught using a sockpuppet to harass other Wikipedia editors; which oversaw the entire Knowledge Engine fiasco; which has at least arms-length responsibility for the chapters and affiliates some of which are outright moral vacuums; and which going further back had a Chief Operating Officer with a lengthy string of serious criminal convictions.)

Yes, anything that gets to this kind of size is going to have a few bad apples, but there's a fairly consistent pattern over the years of the WMF trying to cover misconduct up and style it out (every one of those examples I've just given only came to light as a result either of leaks, whistleblowers, or external detective work by someone else); it's not unreasonable for people to raise concerns. (It's now been three years; is the WMF able to say yet what the total amount of 'grants' given to Laura Hale over the years added up to?) ‑ Iridescent 19:07, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that it was a figure of speech. I think it is far more likely that it was a non-figurative claim of moral and ethical corruption.

Imagine that you are dealing with a pattern of behavior. One day at work, someone walks over to your team – he has nothing to do with your team, he's not a manager, etc. – and offers his unsolicited but apparently heartfelt opinion: "You know, if it were up to me, you'd all be fired". Another day, he goes to your team and calmly says "Your project should never have been started, and it ought to be cancelled." The next time, he announces "You produce garbage". Another day, he tells you "You all are morally and ethically corrupt".

Is this normal and expected workplace behavior, in your experience? Is it behavior you would recommend to a colleague? Do you think your team should be expected to accept this treatment as "just part of the job", indefinitely, without complaint? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

I notice that you frame your example as one of repeated, continuous expression, which I can appreciate would lead to a cumulative effect. But, unless there is more that I'm unaware of, the comment by MZMcBride was a single one. So I don't think it could be characterized as an ongoing problem over time. You also describe something where the person keeps approaching coworkers face-to-face and frames the criticisms as "you". That's more confrontational and personalized than what happened here. In addition, there are differences between a paid workplace and volunteer editing at a website, in terms of contractual obligation to abide by the management's expectations (although the UCoC seeks to significantly reduce those differences). If the example were of the leader of the team telling the team members "I've discovered that you are all corrupt and I'm going to take action", that might be a jolting statement, but it would also be accepted at many workplaces as at-will employment. Here, I think it might be closer to compare it to someone who is not part of the team offering an unsolicited but heartfelt opinion that "I think you guys have been doing a bad job, and it would help the rest of us if you get it together", one time, and then being docked pay. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:43, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

I believe that MZMcBride has earned his reputation as a very persistent and consistent critic of the team that supports mw:MobileFrontend, including face-to-face communications. This is the team he called "a particularly egregious demonstration" of the WMF being "corrupt and bad". If you are looking at this incident without taking the whole history into consideration, then of course you might think it was an overreaction. (I would hope for a first-time incident, management would work out an apology and a promise not to re-offend; for people who are already living paycheck to paycheck, docking their pay can mean food insecurity or losing their housing. But I think that around the third or fourth time, you could expect to be fired.)

It's also worth noting here that this action was taken by a group of volunteers who were implementing their local community-approved policy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:47, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

You compare these interactions to interactions among colleagues – peers – all working for the same employer. But staff and volunteers are not peers. Staff are paid, volunteers are not. To me these interactions feel more like the sort of interactions that happen between labour and management. I think you'll readily admit these frequently tend to be quite adversarial, with management accused (often justifiedly so) of all sorts of malfeasance, employees taking strike action and so forth. (Hell, I remember WMF staff being quite vocal about Lila back when.)

And as the WMF has recently voiced its commitment to human rights, it's worth mentioning that these labour rights – right to unionise, right to take strike action, i.e. to be adversarial – are also recognised as fundamental human rights.

Now you can say that MZMcBride is not a union representative and has no democratically earned mandate. That is true. But a lot of people think that he usually has a point, just as was the case with Fram. Andreas JN466 14:02, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

MobileFrontend is bad and should not exist. The team that's working on it is actively harmful. Saying so isn't the issue here, squandering millions of dollars and community goodwill on a bunch of bad and failed projects is the issue. But of course you already know all of this. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:06, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't know enough of the back story here so will take you (WAID's) word for it on has earned his reputation as a very persistent and consistent critic of the team that supports mw:MobileFrontend. What I would say is whether that's a bad thing or not depends purely on who's in the right. "A very persistent and consistent critic" could describe

1. Someone who camps outside a politician's house screaming abuse through a megaphone because they're not telling the truth about the lizard people;
2. A heroic Galileo figure martyred for refusing to bow to orthodoxy in the face of evidence, and who will subsequently be lauded as a hero;
3. Literally anything in between.

I don't know what he's like in his interactions with the WMF, but in my experience MZM has consistently over the last 15 years been someone with whom I may not agree, but whose opinions are pretty much invariably worth listening to. If he's saying he thinks there's a problem and is giving a coherent explanation as to why he thinks it's a problem, it's almost certainly worth listening to.

Statement of the obvious perhaps but if mw:MobileFrontend refers to the m.wikipedia.org site and the iOS/Android apps, then MZM is hardly alone in thinking MobileFrontend is bad and should not exist. It's not exactly one of Wikipedia's state secrets that readers complain about the design and usability of the mobile site. ‑ Iridescent 12:47, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jayen466, regarding One trick used by the latter is to have laws that practically everyone has broken, but use them only to punish the "right" people while I agree that the UCOC is a good example of this, the WMF certainly can't be blamed for introducing the "create a rule which technically every person in the world has broken, but only enforce it against those considered undesirable" approach. Fortuitously, Internet Archive captured a full snapshot of Wikipedia the week before the WMF was founded which means it's possible to recreate what Wikipedia looked like in the Last Days of Bomis without having to go through hundreds of logs to confirm which page was created on which date and what was linked from where. As such one can confirm that even back when the entirety of Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines was 566 words long the intentional ambiguities like "treat others with respect" and "represent differing views fairly" were already starting to creep in. ‑ Iridescent 02:46, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, this idea to tailor the application of rules to the one at the receiving end of them has a long history in the volunteer community as well. As for "represent differing views fairly", I remember being really impressed when I first arrived here by the concept of "Writing for the enemy" – or, as the current version puts it (much less pithily, and much more politically correct), Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/FAQ#Writing_for_the_opponent. The current version of the FAQ says,

• "I'm not convinced by what you say about "writing for the opponent". I don't want to write for the opponents. Most of them rely on stating as fact many statements that are demonstrably false. Are you saying that, to be neutral in writing an article, I must lie, in order to represent the view I disagree with?
• The great thing about NPOV is that you aren't claiming anything, except to say, "So-and-so argues that ____________, and therefore, ___________." This can be done with a straight face, with no moral compunctions, because you are attributing the claim to someone else. Even in the most contentious debates, when scholars are trying to prove a point, they include counter-arguments, at the least so that they can explain why the counter-arguments fail."

We live in a world today where what you're told about the world depends to a very great degree on where you live. The problem assumes such proportions that we don't even know any more (or perhaps we never did) what people elsewhere are told and genuinely believe. Occasionally one may find articles that try to bridge the gap – the New York Times for example had an article recently on Russian reporting of the Ukraine war, and the Guardian has published similar efforts, describing how press reporting of the conflict differs in places like Brazil or South Africa, or what Chinese social media users are saying (apparently, Putin is portrayed as a hero standing up to the West in most posts).

If Wikipedia were true to its original idea, it would be a place where you would see competing narratives, neutrally presented, each attributed to its origin. I'm pretty sure this is not what the present WMF management would want and I suspect it is not, by and large, what is really happening in Wikipedia ... but would it even be a "good thing"? Or was neutrality too amibitious a goal, given that we've entered the age of fake news? I have no idea.

I do think though that it would be good to have a place that would simply report, without judgment, what the politicial propaganda machines are spewing out in the various corners of the earth (ours not excepted). Maybe it wouldn't be an encyclopedia, but it would be instructive – and perhaps bring people to a common baseline. Andreas JN466 19:09, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

All the above is only true for the infinitesimal proportion of the content that deals with contentious topics. Even with the big topics, for something like Horse or Locomotive, there are no alternative points of view that need to be mentioned (unless we're going to pander to obvious looney-tunes ideas like Baraminology). For the first five pages I got clicking Special:Random (Sandalinas, 1962 Icelandic Cup, Autonomy Liberty Democracy, Eric of Brunswick-Grubenhagen, Coast station (PAAC)) there's nothing—other than arguably the definition of "centre left" in the article about the Italian political party—that would be any different were the article written by anyone else, from anywhere else, of any other political persuasion. I've no reason to believe that I couldn't repeat the experiment virtually indefinitely with the same result. NPOV gives the impression of being a major existential crisis for Wikipedia because the handful of articles where potential bias is an issue get a disproportionate amount of attention from critics, but in reality Wikipedia's main problem is bad or nonexistent sourcing, not cultural bias.

(If I were in charge, Wikipedia wouldn't cover current events at all, and we'd have some kind of "nothing gets an article until it's been mentioned in a book" rule. The solution to Wikinews being a useless joke of a website should not have been to surreptitiously import its problems over here. As far as I'm concerned, Wikipedia's entry on the Ukraine war should be "It is currently too early to establish what has happened, here's a list of external sources where you can see coverage of it". See also about 95% of BLPs other than genuinely major figures where it would both be perverse not to cover them, and where the subject is so high profile that the expectation of privacy no longer applies.) ‑ Iridescent 19:49, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Of course, such contentious articles and biographies can attract a very large number of pageviews... So while they represent a small proportion of what's there, they represent a much larger proportion of what's actually being read on any given day (outside of wrestling articles). In the tech world, whose perspective is dominant in Wiki(m/p)edia, traffic is all that counts. Not having biographies and articles on current affairs would run counter to Wikipedia's entire reason for being: they're among Wikipedia's big traffic success stories. I have to admit that looking up actors, TV shows and developing news stories etc. makes up a significant part of my own Wikipedia usage. Quality-over-quantity thinking would require a completely different management. Andreas JN466 23:29, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't really buy the 'pageviews=importance' argument—it just sounds to me like a slight variation on the 'core topic' idea which is one with which I've never agreed. (Besides, quite often the articles with the highest readership are on topics which no sane person would consider important.)

Wikipedia's strength is the breadth of its coverage, and the fact that people can find out about Little Thetford as easily as they can find out about France. IMO the measure of the importance of a Wikipedia article is "if we shut Wikipedia down, how easy would it be for someone to find out about the topic from a Google search?". To me, Apororhynchus is a more important article than Ant.  ‑ Iridescent 05:14, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

A nice example, and I do get you point. To be clear, I didn't say I was endorsing the pageview criterion. It's just important to be clear that this is a key criterion according to which this project is being run.

Take for example this report on Project Tiger, which mentions that "Google has also been pushing for translation of popular Wikipedia articles in Indian regional languages ... While Wikipedia is run by an independent non-profit, it does work closely with Google to identify pages that need quicker updates or more translations based on search volumes."

So if you look at it from this angle, the list of Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (I had been looking at the April Signpost Traffic Report, which shows much the same ...) makes perfect sense. It all boils down to how you define "important". As Jimmy Wales said on Facebook, there are outside interests that don't necessarily have Wikipedia's core values at heart – values which he characterised thus: "that we are a community-first project, that we are a charity, that we are neutral, that we strive for quality, and that we work towards governance that means safety for all these values in the long run."

I believe that all these values are expendable to some of Wikimedia's biggest supporters today. What's important to a Big Tech company, for example, is to have as many eyeballs as possible on their pages for as long as possible. It's how they make their ad money. To them, Wikipedia is there to deliver copyright-free, cost-free, freely reproducible and freely mineable text on popular topics in as many languages as possible. This helps them do good business. Andreas JN466 09:52, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

What's important to a Big Tech company, for example, is to have as many eyeballs as possible on their pages for as long as possible. It's how they make their ad money. To them, Wikipedia is there to deliver copyright-free, cost-free, freely reproducible and freely mineable text on popular topics in as many languages as possible. describes the situation back in the day, but I don't really think it's the case now. Wikipedia's value to Google and Facebook isn't as a source of text, it's as a source of data.

From the perspective of Big Tech, the platonic ideal of Wikipedia is as a huge repository of free data, on which eventually they'll run Reasonator-style algorithms to generate articles on the fly tailored to both the requirements of their readers, and the interests of their sponsors and advertisers. (How much would Disney be willing to pay if everyone looking at United States who'd recently been searching for holidays saw mention of Disneyland in the first couple of paragraphs of text, but equally importantly didn't give the same prominence in the case of users whose histories didn't give any indication they were considering a vacation, to avoid people thinking "I'm sick of hearing about this" and developing subconscious negative associations?). Strip away all the 'metaverse' buzzwords and "create the appearance of giving the people what they want, to the point where they assume that if they're given something it must be what they want" is the long game on which all the Big Tech companies, in particular Facebook, are betting the farm. In this context, Wikipedia editors and non-English versions of the projects are just the unfortunate price they need to pay in order to convince people to create and curate their database for free.

(I'm not sure as many languages as possible was ever true. I doubt Mark Zuckerberg would lose a second's sleep if we shut down even German Wikipedia, let alone Lezgian or Cornish; from their perspective the main point of non-English versions is to encourage editors on topics that aren't popular in English-speaking countries so they can extract the data from those as well. Google in particular also likes minority-language wikis as when people translate pages from English/French/Spanish/etc onto Atikamekw Wikipedia they tend to translate directly so it gives their translation software a free dataset of vocabulary and grammar.) ‑ Iridescent 18:27, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

You're right to mention data – there wouldn't be a Wikidata if what you said weren't true. And of course Wikidata hoovered up a huge amount of CC BY-SA content from Wikipedia and turned it into CC0 data for reusers – exactly what Wikimedia originally promised wasn't going to happen: "Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all. Wikidata will provide data that can be reused in the Wikipedias. And a CC0 source can be used by a Share-Alike project, be it either Wikipedia or OSM. But not the other way around. Do we agree on this understanding?" That's what Denny Vrandečić said ten years ago.

However, by the same token, there wouldn't be an Abstract Wikipedia, designed to have volunteers create CC BY-SA Wikifunctions articles which can then potentially be machine translated into CC0 (!) human-language articles, if there weren't a significant interest in having Wikipedia articles – text – in those currently underrepresented languages. If you ask Google a question, e.g., it'll quote text passages from relevant pages found in an answer box, and now even highlight the passage when you go to the page in question.

But another key reason why texts are wanted is the rise of voice assistants. I mean, these days it's not just Amazon's Alexa, Siri and Google's voice assistant that read you Wikipedia articles, even your car speaks Wikipedia when it talks to you. And many of these African and South Asian languages have tens of millions of speakers, so there are markets to be conquered there that may become very lucrative in a decade or two – if volunteers somehow, be it via Abstract Wikipedia or incentivised native Wikipedia editing, create the requisite texts.

(I think Reasonator was an earlier incarnation of this idea that Magnus Manske came up with. As both your Rajneesh example and this one for Obama illustrate, Reasonator output never really got to a stage where it would have been any use for a voice assistant ... nobody'd want to listen to that.) Andreas JN466 07:29, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I didn't know until now about the CC0 issue. It seems to me, if I understand correctly, that taking CC-by-SA content from here, and making it CC0 at Wikidata is not only a broken promise, and not only a bad idea functionally, but also downright illegal. At least if some content contributor here were to make a legal issue out of it (something I have zero interest in doing, myself). (Oh, wait, does that mean that the UCoC is going to give me an NLT block?) --Tryptofish (talk) 20:16, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

See Whither Wikidata? in the Signpost. Heather Ford later wrote a great chapter for the "Wikipedia @ 20" MIT book that touches on this as well: Rise of the Underdog. Andreas JN466 21:00, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I strongly suspect voice assistants in their current form are a fad that will be forgotten in a few years. They're great as glorified hands-free remote controls, but I'm not sure I've ever known anyone other than small children who carries on using the "Tell me about…" functions once the initial novelty wears off.

If I had to gamble on where the next big jump takes place in terms of how Wikipedia's information gets used, I'd put my money on tailored versions of what Britannica pretentiously calls "Micropedias"; an algorithm that, based on your previous search history and known profile, serves up a one- or two-paragraph summary of an article giving only those parts in which you're likely to be interested. Lila's Silicon Valley gibberish was impenetrable, but I think something like that is what the whole Knowledge Engine boondoggle was ultimately supposed to be. ‑ Iridescent 14:15, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

I am really curious how the voice assistant thing will turn out too. I don't use Alexa on the Kindle and originally thought much the same like you, until I observed a mate (middle-aged, not technically minded at all) who would routinely ask his mobile questions while I was visiting with him ... suddenly I wasn't so sure any more. The Echo seems to sell well too for now. Andreas JN466 14:59, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Alexa is a special case because Amazon run it as a loss leader to pull people into their ecosystem in the hope that once they're there, they can sell them things. The signs that the bubble is bursting are already there—Microsoft has for all practical purposes killed Cortana, Apple is keeping Siri on life support but no longer appears to be doing any significant work on it, Samsung Bixby is a bad joke. The only one that's still being kept alive is Google Assistant, and I suspect that's as much an artefact of bet-hedging and not wanting to hand a monopoly to Bezos as anything else. ‑ Iridescent 19:00, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jayen466 As a daughter of parents who are substantially less technically-minded than both their children, I wouldn't bet on people such as them sustaining any technological market. Any substantial (even if substantially cosmetic) update will confuse the easily confused...and if substantial cosmetic updates wouldn't confuse your mate, he's at least slightly more technically inclined than my dad. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 19:25, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

There isn't much of an interface that one could update. My mate says "Hey Google", asks a question and either gets an answer or not.

For what it's worth, carmakers – not just premium brands like Mercedes (typically driven by older people), but even volume manufacturers like Volkswagen – are currently falling over themselves building voice assistants into their cars. There's intense competition, and I'd be really surprised it they were to remove them in five or ten years' time, or were to stop working on them to make them better. Andreas JN466 20:52, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jayen466 There isn't much of an interface that one could update. Most likely true. I was assuming that there was something updat-able that I hadn't thought of myself. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 21:00, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

With a hat-tip to WO – a Professor Philip M. Parker at INSEAD is working on Botipedia – a content engine to generate millions of articles for underserved languages. This could make editors obsolete, and he says it'll cost 1% of what Wikipedia costs a year (well, heard claims like that before ...). One interesting feature illustrated in Parker's video on Botipedia is the ability to choose which parts of the political spectrum the article's sourcing should come from. Andreas JN466 09:13, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't see that working, for the same reason Reasonator doesn't work and the same reason I can't see Abstract Wikipedia working. That approach is fine for creating stubby articles that just deal in facts and figures, but I've yet to see an AI script that can handle nuance convincingly. When one is purely looking for "how many goals did David Beckham score during his spell at Preston North End?" information this works, but there's a chasm between the "infobox converted into text" approach and an actual article that passes the "would somebody not already familiar with this topic find it interesting?" and "why is this apparently uninteresting topic actually significant?" tests.

When someone can create a bot that can explain coherently why The Princess Bride is considered culturally significant despite its lack of commercial success, the difference between rugby union and rugby league and why fans in different areas tend to support one or the other, what the Holy Roman Empire was, why so many musicians cite Mark E Smith as an influence despite his absence of commercial success and lack of apparent musical ability, or how tontine financing worked and why it's no longer used, then we'll talk. Until then, I'll continue to consider every "I can create an internet that writes itself" claim to be just another piece of tech bro bullshit. ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

There's a difference between an in-car voice assistant and the voice assistant on your phone, even if they rely on the same underlying cloud-based voice recognition and mass data collection technologies. There's an obvious use case for someone controlling a moving vehicle to be able to input a destination into a satnav, make a phone call, or control the in-car sound system, without taking their hands off the wheel or their eyes off the road. There's considerably less of a use case for someone controlling a moving vehicle to be able to find out the name of the bass player in Aerosmith. The sort of questions for which a voice-controlled search function is useful when driving ("Google, is it going to rain in the next 45 minutes?", "Siri, where is the nearest florist?", "Alexa, how long will it take to drive to the airport?") are precisely the kind of real-time questions for which Wikipedia/Wikidata are of absolutely no use. ‑ Iridescent 06:13, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't exclude the possibility of in-car conversations touching upon the Aerosmith line-up, but you're right that those use cases will probably be of minor importance. On the other hand, the report I linked earlier on the Mercedes MBUX system specifically mentions Wikipedia articles. One use case that has been around for years is Wiki local, designed to be accessed while on the road. This provides access to Wikipedia articles whose geodata match the vehicle's location, so you can learn about places you've passed, nearby points of interest etc. --Andreas JN466 13:59, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

If notability standards were like the way you wanted, we'd have less articles, but would still find a way to argue about notability. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 02:06, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

We'd have arguments about notability whatever the definition was, since as long as an edge exists there will be edge cases. Taking a more active stance against recentism wouldn't affect the scale of arguments about notability and if anything might increase it, but it would have an impact on the potential for us to get things wrong, and on the potential real-world damage caused when we do get things wrong. (This is the entirety of what Britannica currently has to say about the current situation in Ukraine; a full and accurate summary of those facts on which there's broad agreement, but a complete absence of he-said-she-said or "according to some reports".) ‑ Iridescent 05:01, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing writes, "It's also worth noting here that this action was taken by a group of volunteers who were implementing their local community-approved policy." WhatamIdoing is actively employed by Wikimedia Foundation Inc. And the "group of volunteers" she's referencing includes m:User:Martin Urbanec (WMF), m:User:ASarabadani (WMF), and m:User:MusikAnimal (WMF). Kunal recused in this case, but he previously worked for Wikimedia Foundation Inc. as well. And of course at least two of the auxiliary members are actively employed by Wikimedia Foundation Inc. So when you say this action was taken by a group of volunteers, it's—charitably—misleading.

Most organizations have ethics policies that prohibit taking retaliatory action against people who are accusing their organization of malfeasance and corruption. It's also fairly relevant that this group itself was not elected by the community and new members are chosen by current members. This is painfully obvious self-serving bullshit. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:53, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

That community is largely populated by current and former WMF staff, so it's unsurprising that their volunteer structures would also involve a lot of current and former staff (and even the occasional person who hopes to be hired at some point in the future – Ladsgroup was on the committee for several years before the WMF hired him). However, people who serve on that committee do so as volunteers, in their own spare time, and without compensation or direction from the WMF. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:38, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

As per my comments elsewhere in this sprawl I know nothing about the Mobilefrontend team so can't really comment here. What I would say though is that the WMF does have recent form for packing committees with the payroll vote and omitting to mention it on the grounds that they're participating as volunteers not employees/grant recipients; regardless of whether MZM is right on this occasion, it's not conspiracy-theorizing to suggest it might be happening. ‑ Iridescent 13:14, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Also, the TCoC was not approved by the community; the promised process for the full text as a whole never happened. I don't think this group of WMF appointees (or appointees' appointees' etc) can be considered to be a community group. --Yair rand (talk) 18:12, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't keep up with the indenting, but on the point regarding eyeballs and attracting users, I'll point again to the opening paragraphs of m:experiments, which I think very clearly and concisely capture some of the issues specific to Wikimedia. It's now nearly a decade old, but the points are still very relevant in my opinion.

Regarding content translation and data mining, I think you're right that Facebook and Google and others want to algorithmically create content for readers using Wikimedia wikis as one of many sources/backends. There are actually active efforts backed by Wikimedia Foundation Inc. and Google Inc. to do this with Abstract Wikipedia / m:Abstract Wikipedia. I remain pretty skeptical that what we need is a metalanguage to solve our problems. Apologies if this topic has already been thoroughly discussed here. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:57, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

If they don't hurry, they'll miss the window for being able to blame it all on Katharine Maher, and will need to wait until the next chief exec resigns before they can cancel it without losing face…

I don't think algorithmically created content tailored for specific users is necassarily a bad idea in theory even from the point of view of Wikipedia, let alone from an advertiser's perspective. If I visit the articles on Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa and in each case jump straight to the sections on architecture and sports and ignore the rest, I'd consider it a benefit if when I visited Calgary the sections on sports and architecture were at the top. (Whether that would justify the intrusive surveillance and mass data retention on reader activity that would be necessary to make it work is another matter, but we have examples like Mozilla to show that it's possible to at least try to reconcile "personalized user experience" with "allow the user control over their own privacy". If it's clear that algorithmically created output is the destination, then for all the WMF's many faults I'd probably trust them more to be the ones driving the train than Zuckerberg and Bezos's goons.)

Another issue is that during the transition phase when we're still writing articles rather than just inputting data to a giant database it would mean having to rewrite every piece of content from a modular approach as we'd no longer be able to rely on "as previously mentioned…" etc. I personally think we should at least aspire over the very long term to be doing this anyway, to cater for mobile readers who are being directed straight to a particular section and for whom the rest of the page is collapsed and may as well be invisible, but it would be a massive cultural shift.

Auto-generating articles for those languages in which the articles haven't been written and for which Google Translate doesn't work (like the Haitian Wikipedia experiment) certainly makes a degree of sense. To stick with the Little Thetford example I've already used, if I were a Haitian who wanted to find out about it then the page that's autogenerated by the WMF's experiment, even in its current very rough form that resembles MS Access c. 1995, is certainly more useful than a red link (and I'd argue, probably more useful than French Wikipedia's human-written effort). ‑ Iridescent 05:05, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Allow me to briefly recommend DeepL Translator. It has fewer languages than Google Translate but in my experience does a much better job with the ones it does have. Andreas JN466 11:25, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Metalanguage is the right word. What I don't get is how someone can argue with a straight face that while the article in the metalanguage should be CC BY-SA, the human-language derivative – the translation into Swahili, or Kannada, or whatever – should be CC0.

To give an analogy, if I translate a short story into a metalanguage like Wikifunctions and then have the result machine-translated into Swahili, this does not magically remove the original story's copyright. Andreas JN466 21:45, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

See meta:Universal Code of Conduct/Enforcement guidelines/Voting/Report/Comments- posting this here as I think it is in the interest of those who frequent this page and the community in general, and it could spark some constructive (or not) discussion. Some PII was been removed but they otherwise seem pretty complete. I believe you are allowed to out yourself, so I will say I was #237, “I don’t understand this really, so I cannot support.” The meta pages were too obtuse and what meant what confused me, so I opposed it: don’t support something you don’t understand. That might seem silly, but I believe it’s fair. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 05:08, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure 349 is me, or someone very much on my wavelength. Not sure if whoever put my words there under a CC-BY-SA licence understands what the BY bit of CC-BY-SA stands for, but understanding community norms such as attribution hasn't been the WMF's strong point. ϢereSpielChequers 12:41, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

They're damned either way there—if they dont publish the comments they'll be accused of secrecy, if they publish the comments without attribution they're breaching CC BY-SA, and if they attribute the comments they'll upset people who spoke frankly on the assumption that their comments wouldn't be attributed. ‑ Iridescent 13:06, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't remember what was promised when I wrote those comments, but if they'd published them as CC0 rather than CC-BY-SA then I'd be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they collected them under CC0. If anyone from the WMF notices this discussion, this could easily have been avoided by collecting the comments on a CC-BY-SA basis and making it clear when people voted that they were making and signing an "optional public comment". Then just copying them with signatures. And to encompass anyone who wanted anonymity, they could have given the option to sign as "Anon". ϢereSpielChequers 13:34, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Thinking about it, if anything I'd hope it wouldn't even be possible for them to attribute the comments. People are less likely to be honest if they know the WMF are keeping a log of who said what. The WMF isn't exactly noted for being open to constructive criticism; if I thought there was any possibility that in future I might want to apply for a grant from them, I definitely wouldn't want to have my name on their records as the one who said their pet project wasn't going to work. ‑ Iridescent 13:28, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

I see your point, but I was approaching this from the issue that they were publishing these unattributed comments under CC-BY-SA. WMF pet projects come and go: Threads, Image filters, knowledge engine, strategy (two unrelated ventures a decade apart). The WMF people and pet projects of five years time may have little connection to current projects, and while they rarely respond well to criticism of current pets, their very American hire and fire practices limit their institutional memory. ϢereSpielChequers 16:07, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. Even if the people reading over the comments hypothetically weren't in charge of grant funding, what if they leaked your username to those who were, intentionally or not? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 18:05, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Unless I've radically forgotten what I wrote (I mentioned the "ethnicity" line), mine isn't there. Clearly they didn't like it. Black Kite (talk) 19:47, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't remember what I put but I can't see anything there which I remember writing. ‑ Iridescent 13:20, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

I do remember what I wrote and it is not there. So that list is either omitting some, has refactered the comments to the point where I dont recognise mine, or the vote was disregarded for some reason. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:23, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

FWIW, what I wrote is there, though it took me a while to find it. (I would have put more care into it if I'd known it would be published.) Andreas JN466 05:50, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

@Jayen466 (I would have put more care into it if I'd known it would be published.) Yikes! I agree, you should've known that it would've been published, even anonymously. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 06:20, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

• That's a lot of comments and I can't remember which one I wrote but put me down for any of them (or they didn't publish it). Obviously releasing them is only a clearly pruned but routine exercise in the name of 'transparency'. The WMF's carefully selected drafting committee or any other governing body isn't actually going to do anything about it. A majority pass is a majority pass, just like UK elections and referenda... Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:57, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Assuming File:SecurePoll interface - UCoC Enforcement Guidelines Ratification vote.png is a genuine screenshot and hasn't been subject to after-the-fact tampering—and I've no reason to doubt it's genuine—then the "comments" box on the voting form was labeled "Comments will be summarized and posted on wiki without identifying information". Assuming that's the case, they do make it clear both that the comments will potentially be published, that what's posted will be a summary rather than the exact wording, and that whatever's republished won't be attributed. The WMF may have a lot of faults but this doesn't seem to be something over which to attack them. It looks to me like the only issue here is one of good design practices given that numerous people, all of whom have significant experience with the Wikiverse and with the WMF specifically, all managed not to notice the caption despite it being fairly prominent. ‑ Iridescent 10:20, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

• Excellent point. Thank you. --Andreas JN466 12:17, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

  I agree it was collected CC0, but it was then published CC-BY-SA. Call me a pedant, but this isn't the first time that content has moved between those two statuses in ways that imply those two copyright licences are more similar than the legalese might indicate. ϢereSpielChequers 19:50, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

  We (collectively) don't want to be strict about material that's actually in the public domain being marked at CC BY-SA. Wikipedia is full of material taken from public domain sources but marked as CC BY-SA, and in general even when the page is marked correctly that it contains PD text, it's not at all clear which parts are PD and which still need attribution.

  And those are on pages where there's at least nominally a commercial implication as material from mainspace articles gets reused in print where attributing correctly is a huge nuisance. With regards to this vote summary page, it shouldn't make any difference since other than the complete-mirror content forks (which I'm not sure even exist on meta) nobody's ever going to re-use it. ‑ Iridescent 04:14, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
  Disclaimer as on re-reading this, I appreciate it makes me look like I'm advocating ignoring legitimate copyright concerns. Attribution is essential for Wikipedia to function—it's deeply annoying when other people pass their work off as their own—but there needs to be a de minimis point. Strict compliance with our own attribution rules would mean a Herculean task of going through every single page with any kind of "this article incorporates material from…" tag and clearly marking up which parts were verbatim from 1911 Britannica (or whatever), which parts were paraphrased, and which parts were sourced elsewhere. I do not volunteer to do this and I can't imagine anyone else doing so either. ‑ Iridescent 15:11, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

  I think what threw me off was the word "summarized". I sort of envisaged them summarising what people had said, rather than quoting them in full and verbatim (which is what they seem to have done with what I wrote, and given the length of some of the other comments, seem to have done with what others wrote too). Similarly, at meta:Universal_Code_of_Conduct they said (and still say), "A summary of comments will be posted when available." But anyway, no big deal. Andreas JN466 17:24, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

  I agree with you in the interpretation of "comments will be summarized", but "we won't post every comment but we'll post a representative sample" would be a valid meaning of summarized. As you say, this really is no big deal; there are a lot or reasons the WMF deserve criticism but "slightly confusing wording on a form" is really not up there.

  FWIW, if you still run Wikipediocracy can I take vague exception to "Iridescent's talk page is a great place for people to have discussions about how Wikipedia is going to hell, but no one there actually seems engaged in doing anything about it except complaining."? The reason myself and NYB keep being asked questions despite our having been essentially inactive for years is precisely because we have a fairly decent track record of coming up with concrete proposals rather than just saying "something must be done". (In the particular case of UCOC, my first draft at squaring the circle would be "Declare its literal wording a guideline rather than binding policy, but have a committee comprising stewards, T&S staff and representatives from the big wikis with the authority to make it temporarily binding on individual projects against their will should credible concerns be raised about the editing environment of that project and the steps being taken to address it".) ‑ Iridescent 18:02, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

  Pot and kettle. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:47, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

  To be fair, I imagine their collective answer would be "the solution is to close it down". My position is different, that of "Even if we shut it down it would just continue under a different name, so the job of critics is firstly to think of ways it could be improved, and secondly to think of how to put those proposals into action". I at least try to make concrete suggestions rather than just kvetch about the Good Old Days. ‑ Iridescent 19:24, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

  I haven't logged into Wikipediocracy in five years or so, though I still read the site quite regularly. (After Kohs had my wife thrown out the second time, my time there was up, really.) Andreas JN466 18:17, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

  As for your suggestion, I think it's a good one. Much more poportionate. Note that Meta pages have now been opened to discuss changes both to the UCoC and to the Enforcement Guidelines:

  • meta:Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Policy_text/Revision_discussions
  • meta:Universal_Code_of_Conduct/Enforcement_guidelines/Revision_discussions Andreas JN466 13:03, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

  Ironically of the diehard critics Kohs was probably the one I got on best with. I do think he was slightly different from the norm—most of the critics are just people grumpy that at some point someone didn't do exactly what they wanted, but he was genuinely treated appallingly by the WMF, and demonized for his "noindexed incubator space for potentially COI content that can then be vetted by neutral third parties" proposal that turned out to be pretty much verbatim what the WMF themselves adopted a decade later when they introduced draftspace. I can't blame him in the least for being bitter about it. ‑ Iridescent 19:30, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

I was comment 234 on the list of comments. They included me in their Feedback report. I believe I was supposed to represent the most extreme end of negative feedback. I will post my comment below for reference, and I'll highlight in yellow the portions that they DELETED from my comment before they included it in their report:

The Foundation displayed a gross lack of respect for the community, and a gross lack of understanding of the community, in trying to push through a Code without bothering to seek community approval of the Code. The enforcement guidelines are irrelevant, and revising the guidelines won't change my vote. The process to create the Code was botched, the Code itself was botched. If you want to try again you need to start from scratch, letting the community develop something new and seeking consensus for it.

Here's a link to the revision as-they-posted-it. It is ironic and sadly predictable that the three deleted portions are EXACTLY the three most important points of my comment:

1. They deleted the key point about refusing to submit the Code itself for community approval. Their edit arguably misrepresents me as blindly hostile to producing any code of conduct at all. They turned me into an imaginary strawman for unconstructive blind opposition.
2. They deleted that the Code itself was botched. They arguably misrepresented me as just making frivolous whines against a perfectly good Code. Again this edits my comment into a strawman.
3. They deleted the solution - seeking consensus (on a new Code). I don't think this is so much misrepresenting me, but rather reflects a failure mentally to process "seeking consensus" as a meaningful part of the sentence.

The Foundation's biggest problem has always been a pathological unwillingness or inability to acknowledge or engage the concept of consensus. They literally deleted it twice when they "quoted" me for their report. They also have a significant pathology regarding the concept that any pet product could be so badly flawed that they need to scrap it and potentially start again. That was the middle deletion.

I presuming their rationale for the deletions was was to trim for length, so I re-edited the quote. I put all of the key points back in, while ensuring the new text is strictly shorter. Alsee (talk) 08:47, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Filed as another wonderfully illustrative example of WMF "sort of telling the truth and crossing their fingers at the same time and hoping that people are not too forensic ..."

Iridescent is right, this approach towards the truth is just ingrained by now, second nature. Andreas JN466 10:15, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Wow. My comment about the Code was that I opposed it because I didn't trust the Foundation. I didn't think that off-the-cuff comment -- I only learned of the vote the last day it was open -- would prove so insightful. -- llywrch (talk) 17:20, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

I opposed it because I didn't trust the Foundation sounds about right. I haven't been following this in great detail, but my general attitude towards the WMF has become so jaded, I now assume that even the most innocuous proposal is part of a hidden agenda to impose control. In the last few years I've seen little to change my mind. ‑ Iridescent 10:19, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone know of an Wikipedia essays about the problem of etymology and "rational" ideas of what words mean?

I have found Wikipedia:The problem with elegant variation by Popcornfud, which I think is the closest.

I was hoping for something like Wikipedia:Lies Miss Snodgrass told you, except that not even Miss Snodgrass would have told you that Chronic fatigue syndrome means that you're tired all the time, or that just because people used a word one way doesn't mean that it still has that meaning and the same connotations one or two centuries later. Miss Snodgrass might have her limitations, but even she knows that kids these days don't say unbelievable to indicate that they don't believe it, or fantastic to indicate that there's fantasy involved, and she definitely knows that spinster no longer means someone who spins yarn, regardless of age or marital status.

Wikipedia:Queen Elizabeth slipped majestically into the water is delightful but not apparently relevant. What have I missed? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:34, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Not a Wikipedia essay, but I think etymological fallacy may be relevant? Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 06:08, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

There is a learned aside mentioning semantic drift in Wikipedia:Red_flags_in_edit_summaries. That's all I found in essays. A nice (!) example of semantic drift is nice. Andreas JN466 10:57, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Perhaps, if you can't find the essay you need, you can write it yourself, if you want. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 17:41, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Writing it means that you have to choose a title, and mw:Naming things is hard. I open the bidding with Wikipedia:The twin temptations of perpetrating etymological fallacies and ignoring semantic drift. That's awful enough that anyone here ought to be able to offer a better option. (Awful is another one of those words.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:27, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Writing it means that you have to choose a title, and mw:Naming things is hard. No advice, but this is relatable. Heh. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 02:37, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

There's a similar discussion at Wikipedia talk:No original research#Lexical cohesion in sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

This was something Eric Corbett was always interested in—you might want to poke him to see if he has any input. (Although he's currently blocked, I imagine he still keeps a vague watch on his talkpage.) The example he used to use was an old description of St Paul's Cathedral as "awful and terrible" (that is, awe-inspiring). If you want live, current examples where you can see semantic drift in action, I'd nominate 'rape' as an obvious example—The Rape of the Lock makes no sense without knowing the way the meaning of the word has changed recently. I'd also say the numerous words and phrases that mean different things in different varieties of English are an obvious one to bear in mind ("Everyone invited to the ambassador's reception must arrive in their best fancy dress"). ‑ Iridescent 10:19, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

Update: Someone has written Wikipedia:Use our own words. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:12, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

That's a start, but it still doesn't address the context issue; people can have different ideas as to what words mean to the extent that it doesn't even occur to them that people in different fields, or different geographic locations, understand them completely differently. (I sometimes say that the moment when I started to feel I'd genuinely become more English than American was when someone told me their job had tenure and my automatic reaction was "I'm sorry to hear that".) ‑ Iridescent 18:43, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Happy adminship anniversary! Hi Iridescent! On behalf of the Birthday Committee, I'd like to wish you a very happy 15th anniversary of your successful request for adminship. Only 85 years to go until you reach your centennial! {{u|Sdkb}} talk 05:14, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

{{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:14, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Happy adminship anniversary! Hi Iridescent! On behalf of the Birthday Committee, I'd like to wish you a very happy anniversary of your successful request for adminship. Enjoy this special day! CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 15:48, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

15 years is frightening. To put that in perspective that's more than 2⁄3 of Wikipedia's existence. (The pedant in me needs to point out that in my case "15 years since RFA" doesn't equate to "15 years of being an admin", owing to desysopping/resysopping). ‑ Iridescent 03:50, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

• Happy 15 my friend. That was a long time ago. Oddly I thought you'd been an admin much longer than I had. Star Mississippi 19:01, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks… No, I was in the same batch as you—one of the wave of people who got around to creating accounts in 2006 when the crackdown made it harder to edit as an IP, and passed RFA a year later. We're Wikipedia's equivalent of the baby boom. ‑ Iridescent 04:13, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

There are probably some Wikipedians around now who weren't born when you passed RfA, which is probably a bit of a sobering thought really. Certainly I can remember editing WP as an IP before my eldest son was born, and he's now taller than me. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 22:15, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Not even probably but certainly, given how many outreach and editor-recruitment drives are aimed at schools.* I'd be surprised if there aren't at least some admins under the age of 15. ‑ Iridescent 05:32, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
*FWIW, I think targeting recruitment at schools is a totally misplaced use of resources. Even Wikipedia:WikiProject AP Biology 2009—usually held up as the high point of outreach—as fas as I know didn't result in even a long-term editor once the school project was over, and in the meantime sucked up a vast amount of the time of other editors hand-holding the participants throughout the process.

I started editing as an older teenager because my older brother used to edit and I was bored. Honestly, I think that's the best way to retain editors; 'recruiting' organically. The first step: raising awareness that yes, you can edit Wikipedia, which sometimes people don't know. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 05:59, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

I totally agree; the way to recruit and retain editors is to see what the people who've drifted into our orbit want and to try to keep them, rather than to try to decide the kind of people we want and set out to reach them. Good luck convincing the WMF of that, though; for at least the past decade their attitude has been that all the problems could be solved if they could somehow dismiss the community and appoint a new one. ‑ Iridescent 08:39, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

(EC) That event was over a decade ago, I'm pretty sure the focus of outreach has since been undergraduate and above. I worked for the UK chapter for a couple of years (2013-2105) and I don't remember being involved in High school outreach then, and neither of the retired teachers who used to do that or argue for it in the UK are still on Wikipedia. Though even outreach to 14 year olds isn't going to result in 15 year old admins. I could see some logic in outreach to 6th formers if 6th form work requires an understanding of reliable sources, but if I was still involved in outreach and trying to recruit new editors I'd be going to retirement fairs and the university of the third age; places where people are open to getting involved in a new sedentary hobby. As for the idea that any of our current admins might be under 15, we only have twenty who created their account in December 2015 or more recently the rest of us would need to be less than eight years old when we took up the hobby of editing an encyclopaedia. Given that we have some RFA regulars who would oppose on "maturity concerns" if they thought a candidate was under 18; and the de facto requirement to have mastered the art of doing an inline cite to a reliable source; and the general greying of the pedia that has come with requiring sources and not having a decent editing environment on the smartphones and tablets that young people use; I would be surprised if we had more than one or two admins passing RFA before their 18th birthdays in the last half dozen years. We may not have any current admins under 18 years old, and I would be astonished if we currently had one under 16. ϢereSpielChequers 07:05, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

The WMF probably have some statistics somewhere, albeit they'd rely on people telling the truth in surveys. You make a good point (obliquely, at least) in that Wikipedia 2022 has a much steeper learning curve than it did in the days of Acalamari. That said, I'd still be surprised if there weren't at least some admins—or at minimum, people with a high level of community respect who act as de facto admins—under 18. ‑ Iridescent 08:39, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree with you re our de facto admins and am encouraging one to run an RFA when they are legally adult. As to whether any of those twenty will surprise us in the next few years by announcing they've now graduated from university five years after becoming an admin? Time will tell, but there are only twenty of them, I've had a good look at several to the point of being sure they are legally adult. If we'd run the same stats fourteen years ago then every single admin we had had an account new enough that they could have been nine when they started editing. I assume you accept the logic that if someone has had an account here for nine years we can safely assume they are now at least 18? ϢereSpielChequers 09:26, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers Besides losing support at RfA from !voters citing concerns over maturity, is there any reason to wait until one is 18 before running for admin? As far I'm aware, admins aren't responsible for managing money, negotiating and signing contracts, or anything else that requires guardianship over self and property. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 20:57, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Articles/drafts in the speedy queue reasonably often contain material that we should not be promoting minors encountering. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:16, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Espresso Addict I hate to break it to you, but you have a false sense of security. Before a draft or article is deleted, it's still viewable to the public. They're "no-indexed" so search engines can't find them, but humans can still find them (accidentally or not!). One reason why Wikipedia isn't censored is because we can't censor to everyones needs. That's why I'm focused on the legal rights of adults that children don't have, like the right to sign binding contracts, instead of inevitably variable cultural values. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 00:57, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sure, but no-one is actively pointing minors at them. And the hypothetical admin minor would also be able to look through deleted articles, including those deleted as attack pages. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:32, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

@Espresso Addict I have concerns that you'd want the sort of security that would require a level of age verification beyond what most editors would be comfortable with, to confirm that all admins are adults with self-guardianship/conservatorship. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:45, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Every edit involves a legally binding contract.

I suppose someone should have another go at changing the language in pages like Wikipedia:Drafts#Publishing a draft. It isn't about "publishing" at all, and I worry that some enterprising lawyer will be sending sternly worded letters to an innocent AFC editor about "publishing" libel, since some of them have insisted that they, rather than the original editor, are the ones "publishing" the articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:21, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Every edit involves a legally binding contract. Hmm. You have a point. There is a partial copyright waiver, at minimum. Perhaps any parent who'd have issues with their child editing Wikipedia would figure out to prevent access to the site, which means the kid wouldn't be an admin; it'd certainly fall on the parent or guardian to do that.

I worry that some enterprising lawyer will be sending sternly worded letters to an innocent AFC editor about "publishing" libel, since some of them have insisted that they, rather than the original editor, are the ones "publishing" the articles. It doesn't make sense to insist you're the one publishing the draft instead of the one who moved it. I might fix it at some point. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 03:56, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

@I dream of horses, I'd strongly recommend leaving that change to WAID to handle since as a WMF employee, she can run it by legal to confirm any proposed new wording is correct. I have no idea what California law is on the matter, but in at least some jurisdictions "moving the page to a more visible location" would legally be as bad or even worse when it comes to defamation and/or copyright issues—§230 may shield the WMF itself to some extent but won't necessarily shield individual editors particularly if they don't live in US jurisdiction. People have certainly been hauled off to court for things like retweets, and this would seem to be an analogous situation. ‑ Iridescent 04:56, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I wasn't thinking of doing anything, and no one else should do anything unless they know about that sort of thing and work for the WMF. I get that. No worries. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 05:09, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

If y'all want work-me to talk to Legal, then I can, but they can't always provide a public response, which can make it complicated to get people to go along with it. As the staff person who coordinated the change from the old "Save" button to the modern "Publish changes" button, I do think they want people to know that the publication happens when you click the big blue button, not when (e.g.) someone else later approves it for indexing by a search engine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:36, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I do think they want people to know that the publication happens when you click the big blue button Making sure people know what happens is a good idea. Of course, that does require people to read; there's still the odd "I thought I was privately saving this" confusing at en-help, for example. As to whether or not you should talk to legal, I'll leave that up to you. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 02:22, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

• Get back to work slacker. *whipcrack* (also congratulations. My wife has been watching someone in the US who walks around cemetaries and I thought of you.) Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:56, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
• I was 17 when I passed RfA in 2020. @WereSpielChequers, on your ...more than one or two admins passing RFA before their 18th birthdays in the last half dozen years..., I'm aware of at least 4 (counting myself) who passed between 2020-2022. I would guess the actual number is a little higher than that. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 04:38, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Moneytrees I remember a conversation on IRC with a couple of oversighters; they told me that "Some children edit better than some adults," then reminded me they often oversight[ed] age disclosures of those 15 and under. I'm not surprised that there are at least 4 [admins] who passed between 2020-2022. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 05:06, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

  @Moneytrees I'm glad to be proven slightly wrong, clearly my theory about the greying of the pedia is not quite as bad as I thought, and my ability to spot young editors is a bit rubbish. Good thing I'm not a barman. However, my theory that very few of our admins can currently be under 18 still holds up. You created your account in 2018, and it is the tenth newest among our admins, and you are now over 18. So going back to "As for the idea that any of our current admins might be under 15, we only have twenty who created their account in December 2015 or more recently the rest of us would need to be less than eight years old when we took up the hobby of editing an encyclopaedia. Given that we have some RFA regulars who would oppose on "maturity concerns" if they thought a candidate was under 18; and the de facto requirement to have mastered the art of doing an inline cite to a reliable source; and the general greying of the pedia that has come with requiring sources and not having a decent editing environment on the smartphones and tablets that young people use; I would be surprised if we had more than one or two half a dozen admins passing RFA before their 18th birthdays in the last half dozen years. We may not have any current admins under 18 years old, and I would be astonished if we currently had one under 16." I'd be interested to hear what you and the other teens, and recently ceased to be teens think of my comments re mobile editing. Am I correct in thinking that your generation is skewed towards using mobile devices rather than PCs? Are you in a minority of editors who use smartphones, or do most teens have proper PCs in their bedrooms? Also are there any among you who created your accounts before your mid teens? @I dream of horses, my personal test of whether someone is old enough to be an admin is Do your parents and guardians allow you to have a computer password that you can't share with them? others have other concerns. As a crat I accept that age and maturity concerns !votes are valid. As a nominator if I know a potential candidate is on the young side I tend to advise them to wait until they can say they are legal adults, though I might now review that advice. As a voter I consider that the sort of teenagers who take up editing an encyclopaedia as a hobby tend to be more responsible than the oldies like me. ϢereSpielChequers 07:09, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

  @WereSpielChequers Not being able to share a password is honestly a concern for any advanced user right, but particularly for user rights you need to go through a !voting process for. That makes sense; it's a security issue. Thankfully, my parents weren't interested in logging into any of my internet accounts when I started editing Wikipedia, even though they technically had the right to do it; I was a minor at the time.

  Generally speaking, if you get offers to run for adminship from multiple people, you probably have the emotional maturity to go through the process with dignity or the insight to refuse to go through with it, regardless of age. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 07:21, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

  I wouldn't say Generally speaking, if you get offers to run for adminship from multiple people, you probably have the emotional maturity to go through the process with dignity or the insight to refuse to go through with it is particularly true. I don't think you were around during the time when we were getting RFA candidates more regularly so we had a large sample to work with, but I was there and can say with some confidence that there wasn't a particularly obvious correlation in either direction. If anything, the long-standing and well-regarded editors were the ones who tended to take opposition at RFA as a personal insult and flare out spectacularly, whereas the self-nominations who garnered a stream of "oppose, clearly unsuitable" comments didn't have such high expectations and tended to shrug it off. (Have a wade through the archives of Wikipedia:Unsuccessful adminship candidacies (Chronological) if you want to conduct your own sampling exercide.) ‑ Iridescent 05:06, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

  Don't particularly believe in "the cabal"; as anyone who has been around long enough can tell you, there's plenty of people who don't like each other in the upper echelons of Wikipedia's bureaucratic caste, but its also worth noting that the being popular on Discord and/or IRC will often get you offers to run for adminship because respected community members think of you as their online friend, and then you crash and burn because the rest of the community has reasonable concerns about your suitability for adminship. The standard result after this is a post by one of your friends at WT:RFA about the unfairness of the process. Then a monologue by the failed candidate agreeing with their friend that they were unfairly treated and that RfA is broken, but said in a way where it is clear they are trying to rise above the fray because they still want to be an admin even though they deny it vigourously.

  In other words; getting multiple offers to run for adminship doesn't really indicate all that much. TonyBallioni (talk) 05:13, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

  Iri: Yeah, when I started paying attention to RfA, it was because of RfA reform, not because I wanted to run.

  @TonyBallioni: Hmm. So my inclination to decline such offers might be more inituive than I thought. I know, years ago, when my contributions were analyzed to see if I'd passed during a phase when people really wanted me to run, the consensus seems to be I'd pass by the skin of my teeth due to lack of content editing. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 06:03, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

  I'm always very, very sceptical of any decision based on IRC, Discord etc. They don't reflect Wikipedia, they reflect the tiny subsets who use them and whose views are often wildly out of line with community consensus. As I regularly say, the circumstances in which conversations genuinely need to take place off-wiki are fairly limited. Given that some of Wikipedia's most fundamental functions—and the whole "assume good faith" culture—rely on the basic principle of everyone involved having access to the same information, I generally take "I am active on IRC/Discord" as prima facie evidence that this is someone temperamentally unsuited to be trusted in any position in which they can make decisions affecting other editors. If I had my way, we'd even have Arbwiki and arbcom-l regularly audited and anyone found to be using them to discuss anything that doesn't genuinely need to be discussed in camera summarily kicked off Arbcom. ‑ Iridescent 08:20, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I'd be willing to preemptively consent to have any conversation I have on Discord and IRC, outside of private messaging (and I don't PM much, tbh), be screenshotted, logged, etc. If I'm in a 'public space' on the internet, I expect it to be not private. However, my understanding is that there's a consensus to oversight such logging, not that I agree with doing that indiscriminately.

If I had my way, we'd even have Arbwiki and arbcom-l regularly audited and anyone found to be using them to discuss anything that doesn't genuinely need to be discussed in camera summarily kicked off Arbcom. The only concern I have with that is any audit would have to be private for reasons of safety; you wouldn't want to, for example, accidentally doxx ArbCom members, or anyone else who'd be involved in a case. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 09:37, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I'm not suggesting we make public the sensitive legal discussions, potentially baseless allegations, and private disclosures of family and business relationships which constitute the legitimate aspects of Arbwiki and arbcom-l; nor am I suggesting we recruit volunteers off the street to do so. If we went down this route, I'd imagine it would at least initially become a function either of the Ombuds commission, or of a paid employee at WMF Legal. ‑ Iridescent 09:44, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I can see the logic behind that. Yeah, the occasional audit by WMF legal can be a good thing. I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 09:51, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers Your questions made me think a lot about my time growing up, so I'd thought I'd write some extended thing. I would guess most American teenagers have access to some sort of home computer or laptop, and almost all of them have access to some phone/tablet. I had limited access to a "family computer" which I would sometimes read Wikipedia articles on when I was a little kid. I think I read my first article when I was eight? I remember thinking Wikipedia was boring and it used too many big words. I got a tablet when I was 11, but I mostly used it to watch Youtube videos, listen to music, and play Minecraft. If I was ever reading Wikipedia, I would make sure to switch over to the desktop site since I thought the mobile site was too restrictive and I didn't like how it looked. When I was 13, all the students in my school district got Chromebooks for schoolwork, I got a phone the next year, and I started editing Wikipedia with the Chromebook not long afterwards. I would say I got a tablet and phone later than most kids do– one of my younger cousins got a tablet at six. I would sometimes edit on my phone and tablet, but I preferred the laptop since it was easier to revert stuff on and you could use it in class. The Chromebooks were cheaply made and mass produced, they could barely load most sites and would break within three to four months of use. One of the only sites they could consistently load was Wikipedia. I'm not sure if mass laptop give aways are typical in American schools, but I would guess they are as my education was poor on almost all fronts. If my school could afford them, I would think most could. I took a break in 2017 and then returned in 2018 with my current account, and again mostly edited using the Chromebook, using my phone to check my watchlist and my tablet to check community discussions. Like several other younger editors, I stuck to anti-vandalism early on. It was a fun distraction that couldn't get blocked by the school like several Browser games eventually did, and I found the required competency was lower than when it came time to write articles or get into more complex behind the scenes work. I slowly became more and more interested in the site before withdrawing from it and other hobbies in later 2018 due to real life issues. I was very depressed and was increasingly believing there was no "good path" for me in life. After getting help in early 2019 I returned to regular editing and found myself enjoying copyright related work, which has led to my current wiki-career.

Like I said, the school I went to was not very good. Doing research while thinking about these questions, I noticed for the first time how high the turnover rate is– the administration almost completely changes every two or three years. Wikipedia ended up teaching me a lot about actual research and writing, at least as much as my school did. There were no lessons on distinguishing between misinformation and reliable sources– if it was on the internet, you could cite it. I didn't know what an Academic journal or a conflict of interest was until I really started editing Wikipedia. I didn't know there were databases you could look up news articles in either. None of that was taught to me in school. How common this is in the American school system, I'm not sure. At my current university, at least half of the freshmen seem to have decent knowledge of the aforementioned things. But media literacy and understanding does seem to be a serious issue among people my age (and maybe for all ages, honestly), and I would think that it would be a barrier to contributing for most. There are some examples that stick out from my time in high school:

• In an honors English class, students could not believe the teacher when he said Born in the U.S.A. (song) was critical of America.
• In an Advanced Placement class on U.S. history, only 1/3 or so of the class believed climate change was real.
• In a psychology class, the Stanford prison experiment was taught as fact. I had no idea it wasn't actually taken seriously in psychology until I read our article.
• In another dual-enrollment college level class I took for English, another student was genuinely surprised and upset when I implied someone could work hard but not make much money during a group discussion. With complete seriousness, he told me something along the lines of, "That's not true, if you work hard, you'll always get rich." I was dumbfounded someone who was almost voting age could claim this. It's somewhat disturbing to think someone with so many more advantages compared to me didn't understand such a basic thing.

I'm not sure how common this stuff is in current high schools, but it was rampant in mine. I see effects of a lack of media understanding on social media platforms among people my age all the time; the amount of fake stuff that goes viral on Reddit or Twitter is immense. I've noticed that if you ever see a screenshot of a silly headline but no link to an actual news article, then it's almost always fake. This is where we've succeeded in my opinion; Wikipedia is far from perfect, but we're able to usually prevent the equivalent of fake news getting over 100,000 likes on Twitter.

The way I've seen the site talked about over time is interesting. Throughout middle school and most of high school (ages 11-18 about), teachers would lecture at least once a semester about how you can't cite Wikipedia or plagiarize from it because it's unreliable etc. Every other source was fine though. The site was still used a ton by students, whether they were following the citations used, ignoring the teachers and copying from it anyways, or just reading it to fill in for some questions they missed. There's been a fair number of classes where I've relied more on Wikipedia than the readings; one was written better. In college and more advanced classes, professors have said not to cite it but that that Wikipedia has useful information and encourage looking at the sources we cite. Generally, it seems like Wikipedia has gotten a lot more respect over the last few years, especially among people my age; there's a kind of joke that it's one of the most important things in you'll need in getting through high school and college. To me, it seems like there's been a large influx of younger (still in high school or middle school) editors over the last year or so; I think this partially stems from the viral popularity of Depths of Wikipedia, a meme account that has encouraged editing. I think the age of a candidate is mostly semantic when it comes to RfA- most people seriously running probably aren't younger than 16 anyways.Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 06:07, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Moneytrees, my teenage years were long long ago, but I remember being a Von Daniken fan until I saw a debunking documentary; So I was as gullible as any modern teenager. I don't remember how old I was when I was told to cite sources when I wrote, but I'm very sure that didn't come up in my Olevels, so I'd have been at least 16 before I came across that burden, and I suspect that is a barrier for us now in getting people to cite before they have to for school or college. I agree with what you say about vandal fighting being our entry point for many younger editors, and I suspect that the bots and edit filters mean we have far fewer opportunities there than we had a bit over a decade ago. ϢereSpielChequers 12:45, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

From anecdotal evidence, I think expectations for referencing in schools might have increased over the years, at least here in Australia. A few years back I was talking to someone born in the late 1980s who recently went to university as a mature-age student in an environment where this was uncommon. A major thing she noticed was that students fresh out of high school now are expected to know far more about citing sources than they were in her (and my) high-school days. A sample of one, but there it is. Graham87 13:46, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

That's interesting. I have been making two assumptions, firstly that our increasing insistence on sourcing is deterring a bunch of editors and potential editors to whom it isn't second nature, and secondly that the young don't get taught to cite things until university. My second assumption may well be incorrect, my own teenage years being quite a while ago. It would be interesting to know at what age students typically are taught about citation, sourcing and so forth. Especially if that marks the age at which we are likely to start getting them as editors. I suppose a third assumption is that the age when you are taught to cite will vary by education system. ϢereSpielChequers 15:16, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

I was taught media literacy, including evaluating and citing sources, in high school. I was expected to have properly formatted sources in the sort of homework where you'd expect such things (and there was not a single student who felt manually formatting into precisely correct mla style was actually worth the time it took). I don't know how widespread it is, but these sorts of courses are definitely out there. CMD (talk) 16:38, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

I think we started writing research papers with citations around age 13 ("research" means that we went to the library to read things written by someone else, not developing new knowledge ourselves). We manually formatted the citations because there wasn't any other option: we wrote the final copies of our papers in cursive, using ink pens (and Correction fluid, until someone invented the Erasermate pen), and we were marked for neatness as well as content. Usually we were citing encyclopedias from the school library, so it wasn't too difficult: the teacher put up a sample on the chalkboard (the kind that uses chalk), or handed out a Mimeograph (the kind with purple ink – do those still exist?), and you just substituted your article title and other details into the form. Also, we tended to cite just two or three sources, so it didn't take that much effort.

Some years ago, I saw a comparison of papers written by first-year university students, compared to students taking the equivalent grammar and composition class more than 50 years before. The conclusion was that today's kids are working at a much higher level. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:32, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

A few year back I was at a school governors meeting when they circulated some questions that the kids were expected to answer and I was as completely outclassed as the time I played a six year old at chess. So I learn something new, there are 13 year olds out there being taught to cite sources. ϢereSpielChequers 07:56, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, "the kind with the purple ink" was more likely a spirit duplicator, which according to Wikipedia, co-existed with a Mimeograph. I recall my primary school teachers used a "Banda machine" in the school office, and remember crudely copied sheets of purple writing that smelled of meths. -- Colin°^Talk 10:20, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Having had a bit more international exposure than the median American millennial, the problem you're describing isn't exactly unique to the United States. The US certainly has its fair share of problems in education, and they're probably better documented than most other countries, but I really doubt that the median young Spaniard has all that great an understanding of the equivalent topics in Spain. I could also write a book with examples of factually incorrect information about the Spanish language I have been told by native speaking tutors from Latin America or about things that in the US would be considered outlandishly bigoted outside the most fringe circles that I've heard from people in other parts of the world.

All that to say - the lack of understanding about these things you're describing in my opinion really isn't a US high school problem; its a human problem. I'm hardly a nationalist or anything of the sort, but there's a trend in the US of speaking down on our own systems to the point where it ignores that there are also very real issues with systems in Europe, the UK, the Southern Cone, Australia, and the more highly developed regions of Asia, which is usually what we're comparing ourselves to. More of a commentary on the header than the content, but worth pointing out that the distinction between what people know to be true and what is actually true isn't just a North American problem. 00:45, 12 October 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by TonyBallioni (talk • contribs)

Yes and no, as the US does have a set of unique issues that generally aren't the case elsewhere. The school board>county>state>federal structure means both budgets and curricula are generally less consistent than elsewhere. Plus, the lack of linguistic, cultural and legal barriers to movement can provide a perverse incentive for schools to do a poor job—if your city or your state isn't either a major employer or an academic center of excellence in a particular field, then by investing in teaching in that field you're just spending a lot of money to encourage people to move elsewhere and stop paying taxes in your district. You do see this elsewhere—the health services of the UK and France in particular have a well-deserved reputation for syphoning off the graduates of Asia and Africa's medical schools—but not to anywhere near the same extent; it's a lot easier to move from Kansas to Los Angeles than it is to move from Chisinau to Paris. ‑ Iridescent 18:22, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

The claim that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" is a famous line from Stephen Colbert and I've seen it used in Wikipedia discussions. Reading Elon Musk declares Twitter ‘moderation council’ – as some push the platform’s limits I'm struck by the fact that those testing the limits of misinformation are on the right of politics. Ok, so I'm a Guardian subscriber which might make me a member of the "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati" if only I liked tofu. Perhaps my paper is just listing the right-wing people and groups who challenge mainstream views about reality/truth. On the left, Piers Corbyn comes to mind, who is quite some way from having his own TV show or podcast with millions of subscribers. The Right do seem to accept that their right to say whatever they want, true or false, is being controlled by the Left. For example, Trump's statement yesterday "I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country" My feeling is there is sometimes a similar problem among conservative or right-aligned editors, but I could be biased.

My question is that if this is "a thing" that is "well-known" then surely people have done some analysis on it, published papers or even books about it, and we might have an article about it. Perhaps any academic review of truth in left/right politics is dismissed as lefty nonsense and difficult to determine for neutrality. Do we have any Wikipedia essays that consider how this bias is shaping our articles or our discussions? -- Colin°^Talk 09:54, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I imagine this is more an artefact of "world values are different to American values" than an actual thing. The definition of "liberal", "left" and "right" used in the US don't really translate to other countries and particularly to other countries with similar economic and cultural setups—there's nothing at Political positions of Bernie Sanders that would raise an eyebrow if it appeared in the manifesto of the Tories, CDU/CSU, Les Republicains etc etc etc. I'm sure there's been significant research published on it, but I wouldn't know where to start—"the Overton Window in the US is to the right of everywhere else" is so culturally ingrained, I imagine most people just accept it as a given. ‑ Iridescent 17:29, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree that the centre-ground of Left/Right is quite different in the US compared to the UK at least, but the terms still have some meaning within a population group. Is there any cause-effect analysis (that an attitude towards valuing truthfulness leads one towards a political direction, or that having a political view requires adopting that attitude in order to accommodate it). Or maybe it is just cultural, that perhaps if you go back 50 years, the Left and Right didn't have such a distinction, but that culturally the Right has adopted a certain "playbook". I suppose Post-truth politics is the article I'm looking for. -- Colin°^Talk 17:53, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

I'm sure such research exists. If nothing else, it will have been commissioned by the political parties wondering whether it's worth their while trying to tap into or distract from the supposed progressive trend. (If you go back 50 years, politics was distorted by the artifical consensus created by the post-war boom and nobody wanting to rock the boat, and as such 'left' and 'right' weren't so much of a distinction—nominally right-wing governments didn't generally reverse nationalizations and the like, and nominally left-wing governments didn't try to slash welfare benefits and state subsidies. It's only with the 1970s price shocks and the emergence of Reagan and Thatcher that clear water starts to appear between mainstream parties.) ‑ Iridescent 18:06, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Iridescent, looks like this user's User talk:71.81.93.214 TPA needs to be revoked, blocked for block evasion and still using talk page for drafting article. Let me know, thanks. ❯❯❯ Raydann^(Talk) 06:35, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

@Raydann Why not contact NinjaRobotPirate, who is the blocking admin? I dream of horses (Contribs) (Talk) 06:45, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Hmm... this is my first time asking a TPA request, so is it better to ask the blocking admin to revoke TPA? If this is so, then from next time I'll make sure to approach the blocking admin. I did not contact @NinjaRobotPirate because their last contribution was a few hours ago so I thought they might be offline at the moment, and that's why I looked at recent changes and saw that @Iridescent was active from their logged actions. ❯❯❯ Raydann^(Talk) 07:01, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it matters all that much who you ask, but it's not like it's a major emergency if a sock puppeteer misuses their talk page by trying to draft articles. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 07:22, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Got it, thanks! Will be more careful from next time. Have a great day/night. ❯❯❯ Raydann^(Talk) 07:32, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

@Raydann, I've no idea why you're asking me here but what NRP said. We've always turned a blind eye to blocked users drafting articles on their talk pages, provided they're not doing so disruptively; "here's what I intend to do when I'm unblocked" is if anything beneficial to the rest of Wikipedia as it assists in decision-making. ‑ Iridescent 07:32, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Hey X

I guessed it might have been the incorrect tag, but I know I'm on the right path. On the main article for that podcast User:Soetermans deleted the episode detail as per NOTDIRECTORY and other similar policies. Lots of first timer and IP editors kicked up a stink on the article talk page and their talk page. Now a redlinked editor has copy and pasted a dump of the (correctly) deleted material to make a WP:POINT. I want that episode guide deleted as per policy. What category or steps do you suggest I take? Cheers doktorb _words^deeds 07:53, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

@Doktorbuk, "Inappropriately long list for the main article" isn't synonymous with "Inappropriate for a stand-alone list". The place to nominate this for deletion would be WP:AFD, particularly if people are arguing that the material should be kept (since in that case it's by definition not an uncontroversial deletion, and thus is ineligible for speedy deletion). ‑ Iridescent 08:05, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Fair. I'll try that route. doktorb _words^deeds 08:17, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm trying to use a lighter touch on my nominations, it's a work in progress. Unbroken Chain (talk) 06:55, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Speedy deletion only applies in the most obvious cases (and that's verbatim from Wikipedia policy, not my personal interpretation); if you're not certain that tagging a given page for speedy deletion is appropriate, then by definition tagging it isn't appropriate.

Except in cases when people are literally posting adverts, {{db-spamuser}} is almost never going to be appropriate; it's for those cases when User:Bob's Widget Shop has a user page reading "Bob's Widget Shop has the best deals on widgets, visit us at 123 Main Street", not people just saying who they are. Since we expressly advise new editors to write something about themselves on their userpage (and You are also welcome to include a simple link to your personal home page is specifically included in the instructions) it's fairly WP:BITE to then complain when they do so!  ‑ Iridescent 18:22, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

User, in spite of your final warning, is spamming his bio again. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 05:11, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

There are only so many last chances I'm willing to give; indefblocked. ‑ Iridescent 06:21, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

November songs

... is on the Main page, and I smiled when I wrote it -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:32, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi, @Iridescent! I'm Unlimitedlead, and I'm currently working on getting Edward I of England to FA status. I saw on Wikipedia:FAM that you identified yourself as someone who could help with this process, and I was wondering if you could help guide me through this process. It's alright if you are unable to, though! I was just hoping to get some advice for my first really major FA nomination (my other two other FA nominations only had around 1000 words each). Thanks, Unlimitedlead (talk) 21:44, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

@Unlimitedlead, could I make a suggestion? I think you need to consider the links in the lead from the POV of a person who is unfamiliar with English history, and who maybe has English as a second or third language. Looking at just the first paragraph, I see these words and phrases:

• duchies
• vassal
• accession to the throne
• a rebellion by the English barons
• a baronial reform movement
• hostage
• crowned

that I think should be considered for links. Some of the links may not be possible (e.g., accession to the throne and similar phrases do not lead to a relevant article; there might not be a separate article on that particular rebellion or that particular reform movement), but others (e.g., Duchies, Vassal, Coronation – even Coronation of the British monarch) are all possible, and links would be helpful to the person who wants to hover over the word and find out what that sentence means. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:50, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Thank you for that! It never even occurred to me that a lack of hyperlinks would be an issue. Unlimitedlead (talk) 01:57, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm happy to do reviews/read-throughs, but I'm not the best person to give guidance in this case; it's not a topic in which I have any particular knowledge. For this one you want Dudley Miles and Ealdgyth, who are without doubt the go-to people for medieval English royalty on Wikipedia. ‑ Iridescent 02:20, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

This second message is due to the User talk:Iridescent 2 redirect. If only they hadn't included the "alternate accounts" note, you could vote twice. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 00:56, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

The moral being, never declare your alternative accounts, and invest in a VPN… ‑ Iridescent 02:36, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
Before anyone gets excited, this is an in-joke, not a confession. Way back in the day, it was MZM who alerted me to the fact that the CUs were engaged in a fishing expedition against me, for reasons that were never apparent. ‑ Iridescent 02:36, 29 November 2022 (UTC)