Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2022-01-30

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2022-01-30. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: New arbitrators look at new case and antediluvian sanctions (703 bytes · 💬)

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• The current scope is "all pages related to India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan"; the amendment would expand it to cover "all pages related to political or religious topics and closely related people in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, including but not limited to castes". — Isn't that a contraction rather than an expansion? —2d37 (talk) 21:45, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

You're right, I believe. I will double-check to make sure. jp×g 22:09, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Black History Month: What are you doing for Black History Month? (6,126 bytes · 💬)

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• Thanks for this! TrangaBellam (talk) 20:41, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

You're welcome. Please join in. It pretty much has to be one article at a time, although Wikidata really surprised me at the end. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:56, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• While I'm surprised that the John C. Calhoun article didn't cover the topic better, I'm not on the whole surprised that Wikipedia didn't cover slaveholding for many congressmen, nor am I surprised that the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress didn't mention it that often (as seems to be the case). If you were a wealthy man from the South/border states up to the Civil War, it kind of goes without saying that you enslaved people. The reverse of being a man of such status and not owning other human beings would have been seen as more worthy of mention as an odd thing. Enslaving people was kind of a mundane (if brutal) fact of life for rich (and even middle class) landowners for much of American history. Only recently has it been seen as something especially worthy of mention and only recently have historians really tried digging through the weeds to fully understand the actual people who were enslaved. Thank you to Smallbones for structuring this in such a way to make it easy to fill the content gap. -Indy beetle (talk) 05:43, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• Thanks! It appears the WaPo data for many/all entries do not include when the congressmen owned or how many souls (and although some congressmen have a link for more sources, not all do), or am I misreading? This info would help our articles better than yes/no, but it is a start, hopefully such data can be expanded. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:17, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Your reading looks correct to me. They are expanding the database via crowdsourcing (checked by reporters) updated maybe every 2 weeks. But your basic question< IMHO (based on some very limited database construction and intuition about WaPo fact checking standards) is that they have more data columns in a publishable form that they don't think their general audience would care to read. And behind that there should be another dataset that records the minor details and double checks that only would be used in case something has been called into question. And behind that would be organized notes or another dataset (or 2) documenting the process the records have gone through, comments, etc,) But I doubt that you'll see anything published in a reliable source (other than the updates) anytime soon. *Unless* they go through the extra step of describing the database in an academic journal and the academic editor asks for sourcing notes or additional data. That might take a year or more before its published. Exact counts of slaves on exact dates probably wouldn't be available anyway. More like census dates and page numbers. And I am just guessing.

All that said, I have to say that I contacted the main author before, and will do so again. She's been extremely cooperative and pleasant to deal with. You never know what people can do until you ask! 18:29, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• One related thought: these articles will need watching, to prevent white-washing. Being a slave-owner is a touchy subject: when, while performing genealogical research, my step-mother discovered her ancestors owned people, her children were disgusted at the discovery. Undoubtedly there will be people who will try to remove those facts from articles. (As another example of white-washing, I was surprised that Winston Churchill has no mention of his love of alcohol. He drank heavily, even for his time.) -- llywrch (talk) 20:34, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• Editors making improvements in this area may also find it useful to consult the highly-reliable (peer reviewed) open-access Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, including its database Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 18:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)]
  • L Thank you for informing us about the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. I hadn't been aware of it, and it looks like a very impressive journal that meets a tremendous need. I had to take a quick look at it when you mentioned it, and that quick look turned into a couple of hours. There are 14 datasets included in the journal, with 3 published per quarterly issue. They are quite varied, with about 3 being about Rio de Janeiro, another on Blacks and the British legal system, etc. The only dataset I saw that might apply here was court and other records from Louisiana which turns out to be a series of datasets. It is an academic journal, so may not be that useful in general to newby editors or non-academics, but it has certainly grabbed my interest. Thanks again. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:46, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

• I think more attention needs to be given to African-Americans who owned slaves and prospered, as represented for example in Category:Black slave owners in the United States. This, like direct involvement of Africans (as catchers, transporters, sellers, etc., both before and after European involvement began, which was after the earlier Arabian and Indian involvement) in the profitable African slave trade (which was originally a solely in-Africa-only trade), is one of the important and lesser-known aspects of the history of slavery here in the U.S.A. and elsewhere – Athaenara ✉ 18:44, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Crossword: Cross swords with a crossword (3,000 bytes · 💬)

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• The external crossword site worked well last time (with auto-check and no bugs)—why not just use that again? czar 00:23, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

(not jpxg) I'm personally weakly opposed to using an external site for things like this due to privacy and related concerns. I would love a Toolforge tool that can do crosswords though! 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 00:45, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

The site that was used (crosswordlabs) doesn't let me specify the grid -- it only lets you type in a list of words and automatically arranges them. Frankly, I wasn't planning on doing the crossword for this issue, but I was indisposed for a while yesterday and started coming up with a grid while not at my computer. I also have some concern about using a random external site (mostly because it can go down or become unusable without us being able to do anything about it). If I have time, I plan to make a better version of this template for future editions. It might have to be a page on Toolforge, though, since Wikipedia is very limited in what kinds of input I can give (and I can't run any kind of scripts from the page for obvious security reasons). jp×g 01:25, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Save progress?

Newbie question - this is my first Signpost crossword and I am finding it slow going. There is no way I can finish it in one sitting - is there a way to save my progress, so I can pick back up tomorrow?--Gronk Oz (talk) 06:36, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, that makes two newbies, since this is my first Signpost crossword as well :-)

I'm not sure if it's possible to save progress -- the template I made to embed an interactive crossword inline was very ad-hoc, and is built (ab)using a couple other templates, like the search field. I think that if I wrote a standalone app for it, it'd be possible, but I don't know if there's any way to make such a thing work here (although I could try). jp×g 00:13, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Solution?

Now that the next issue has been published, is there a solution to this crossword someewhere?--Gronk Oz (talk) 21:53, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, it's at User:Ganesha811/crosswordanswers. Hope you enjoy the new crossword as well! Ganesha811 (talk) 22:35, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Now, let the learning begin... --Gronk Oz (talk) 00:22, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Deletion report: Ringing in the new year: Subject notability guideline under discussion (8,694 bytes · 💬)

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• As a note, I'm the one who made the list about baseball bats. And I regret it. Mobius Gerig (talk) 05:29, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
• Something went wrong here:
  

  NPROF, for example, allows college professors to have articles even if they fall far short of GNG. Conversely, GNG allows professors to have articles even if they fall far short of GNG.

  FeRDNYC (talk) 20:48, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

(I should've pinged JPxG in my original comment.) FeRDNYC (talk) 20:50, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

On the assumption that was supposed to read, "...fall far sort of NPROF.", I've edited it that way. If that was incorrect, please fix my mistake. FeRDNYC (talk) 20:59, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, this is what it was supposed to say -- although I'm sure some would argue that the original mistaken version was more correct in practice ;) jp×g 21:03, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

@JPxG: I confess my quick correction was... not not motivated by a desire to avoid providing that community with any additional ammo. FeRDNYC (talk) 21:13, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Oof, the hazard of proofreading (my error in this case): letting the eyeballs see what it should say and not what it does say. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• Can we get a "weirdest statistical correlation" category for future AfD metareports? I nominate The first nomination after I took a shot of whiskey in California. FeRDNYC (talk) 21:11, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
• Point of information - NSOLDIER was never an SNG, it was always just an essay, though at times it was treated like an SNG. To what extent it was deprecated, the MilHist project simply decided to stop endorsing it. WP:PORNBIO is an example of an SNG that was deprecated. -Indy beetle (talk) 05:49, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Also worth noting that the Lewis baseball player article suffered from quite a few WP:SYNTH violations which would be unacceptable for an FA. -Indy beetle (talk) 05:54, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• @JPxG: almost the second you spoke! - overturned for admin close. Generally right response in the DRV, but belief that it should be a) closed by an admin and b) needs a detailed close explanation Nosebagbear (talk) 10:40, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Why Wikipedia Sucks was closed as speedy keep: wrong venue because Why Wikipedia Sucks is not an article, but a redirect; the subsequent RFD closed as no consensus. As such, it probably doesn't belong in the Kept articles with freaky titles list. Lennart97 (talk) 13:44, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• The person nominating the Tek Fog article (whose lede says its a software used by India's infamous political party the BJP) getting indef'd because their username was an obscene phrase in Hindi is hardly a surprise -Gouleg🛋️ ^harass/_hound 14:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

FAs on the chopping block

I was informed that I was directly mentioned in this article (I would have appreciated being pinged, since it directly discusses my actions) so I figure I might as well explain my rationale a bit. The AfD for Doug Ring 1948 was a long time coming - it was TFA in October 2021, and a number of editors expressed dismay that the article even existed at its FAR which was opened on October 19th. Eventually, consensus there became that the article quite simply should no longer exist, and I was the one to pull the trigger and launch an AfD. Following that one closing with a strong consensus to merge, I've been evaluating the other forks on "Player name with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948" within this featured topic, many of which seem ridiculous to me. There were some very on point comments in 2015 at the first AfD for Ron Hamence 1948:

• "Each one is full of redundant info and even what they did after...This is WP and site-wide notability guidelines apply - We don't have a similar page for every player on the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins."
• "Thirdly, I think it is fair to compare the scope with that of other WP articles. The comparison to "every player in the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins side is an apt one. The tour is certainly notable - the presence of individual players is not. Or to take another analogy, consider actors appearing in films. As I've argued elsewhere, Donald Bradman with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 would be like Brad Pitt in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Are there lots of sources discussing Pitt's performance? Yes. It is Pitt's most important work? Probably not. But Ron Hamence with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 is in a different order together. That would be more like Jennifer Morrison in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. And even then, I'm sure we would find more reliable sources discussing Jennifer Morrison's role than we have discussing Hamence's role. Finally, it's not just about sourcing - we could probably find enough sources to write an article on the food that the players ate during the tour. But I hope we all agree that this doesn't make it a notable topic for an encyclopedia."

More of these will likely end up at AfD in the future, whether nominated by me or someone else. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 15:39, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Have you got the feature to notify you on new userpage links turned off? I used those (instead of {{noping}}) for user mentions in this article, so that people would get notifications. jp×g 20:19, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I checked my preferences, and notifications for new userpage links are on. Not sure what happened, but I was not pinged. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 22:36, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Okay, this is the diff -- looks like I spelled it right. I may need to go make a sock and test this (or read the documentation for how userlink pinging works)... jp×g 01:00, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I vaguely recall there being some rule where pings don't work unless included with a signed comment, could that be what happened? Trainsandotherthings (talk) 15:04, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, a ping is only sent if the link is in a new line and followed by a signature. See WP:MENTION. Nardog (talk) 07:25, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• Big fan of Deletion report! And you were right, this was a spicy month for AfD-related policy discussions, eheh. Pilaz (talk) 10:15, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
• The FA (effective) deletion is a really interesting case study. I can see the case for deletion of somebody whose first name is not even known, and for keeping any topic where you can write so much about it. But, redirection was probably right, and it is surprising (in a good way) to see the main article author happy to engage with comments about it being non-notable and even start the AFD. This sort of constructive and collegiate attitude is very impressive when compared to the usual ownership and knee-jerk angry escalation of rudeness we find when someone's hard work is challenged. — Bilorv (talk) 22:15, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Gallery: No Spanish municipality without a photograph (6,950 bytes · 💬)

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Great initiative and great report! Bravo! --Hispalois (talk) 00:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Agreed, this is a great idea! It would be great if the US could do this. ♫ Hurricanehink (talk) 04:15, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

i heartily agree. When I first heard about this, I knew we had to put it in The Signpost. It even turned out that there was a distant connection to a similar project that I'd actively worked on and thoroughly enjoyed in Pennsylvania. I'll encourage anybody who is doing anything similar to this to get a list of photos and a few words together and we can do a gallery for that country, state, province, metro area, etc. This should be especially good over the summer, when folks are thinking about getting out, doing something different for the 1st time in a couple of years. The project doesn't have to be "complete" - in fact I'd guess most of them will never be 100% complete. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:47, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• What a lovely thing! I've been doing the same in my home home state of North Carolina for a few years now and have visited 220 different towns, learned some cool stuff, and added over 100 photos of unique places to Commons that didn't already have any (plus several more pictures that seemed of interest). I fully encourage this activity, it's a very enriching thing to do! The Spanish Wikipedia editors should keep at it! -Indy beetle (talk) 06:31, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

See above - should I pencil you in for June? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:47, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• • Gladly, just remind me around May so I can assemble something. Fair warning, I don't own a great camera so all my photos are from my phone and thus are of varying technical quality. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:45, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Illinois may or may not be the state with the most municipalities. Not that I'm going

to fly back and check... kencf0618 (talk) 02:10, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• What a great story. I've done something similar, as a soloist, on several occasions. At the end of 2010, I decided to spend about three months translating one Italian Wikipedia article into English each day, being an article about a significant railway station in Italy. It felt a bit like going on a tour of Italy, except that I never left my home country, Australia. Since then, I have also ventured out into the Western Australian countryside several times to photograph small towns, and have also done something similar in other places, eg East Timor. But I have generally been photographing buildings, rather than people, plates of food, piles of carrots, etc. Maybe next time I will target a wider range of subjects. Bahnfrend (talk) 13:54, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
  • At first we centered on places, meaning mainly panoramas or monuments. But we realised that understanding a place takes more than that. So we started taking more pictures of wash houses, police stations, railways, schools, health centers... My wife and I try no to picture people, but other companions do like the subject a lot (one says that a school without pupils loses its meaning). Foodstuff is something we still don't master but it's pretty significant (everybody knows paella and gazpacho but who has tasted zarajos?) so we keep trying. B25es (talk) 10:10, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

• A really lovely story—images like these can really help bring places to life. It's one thing to read a stub of statistical details that says the municipality has a population of 118 as of 2006, and another to see a simple but beautiful image of the small town. — Bilorv (talk) 22:31, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
  • Small places are really worth going. We went to Toril y Masegoso in 2018. A local man was there and we told him that they were very few people, some 25 we thought. He said that population was officially 36 inhabitants, but that in fact they were only 12, and mentioned all of them one by one. That's small! B25es (talk) 10:10, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

• What a wonderful project! I'm very curious how you organized so much work over such a long time. Was there a talk page or project page where you coordinated? Or was this more of a real-life effort? Thank you for your hard work! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 01:16, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
  • We have a coordination project: es:Wikiproyecto:Ningún municipio español sin fotografía. We also talk a lot on Telegram. Sometimes we coordinate a lot, specially for places that are large or complex. It can be to hold a Wikitakes, as we did in Cuenca, Burgos or Zamora, but sometimes it's just that we are going to places in an extended area that cannot be done at once, and you have to know if somebody else is going or has just gone. For instance, Calera y Chozas, the last municipality we did in Toledo, is quite far away for all of us, an hour and a half from Madrid. But there were three of us planning to go! We barely avoided duplicating the effort. But any of us can go to a place on in individual activity and that's how most places have been pictured.
    I have to stress that the coordination page being in Wikipedia in Spanish does not mean that the project is only in (Castilian) Spanish. In fact Galician, Catalan, Basque and Asturian speakers have helped a lot. Galicia and Catalonia have always been above the average in this project! B25es (talk) 10:10, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

• Such an incredible project! Much respect to you and your friends! The photos are lovely. Why do the people of Rueda create the path of carrots? What happened to the delicious carrots afterwards? (Hopefully people didn't actually walk on them?) Thanks for sharing the results of your five year project. I am reminded of Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, perhaps a soundtrack to these impressive photographs. Best wishes, Tribe of Tiger ^{Let's Purrfect!} 21:45, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

In the media: Fuzzy-headed government editing (963 bytes · 💬)

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• That WikiTrivia game is a lot of fun and a great reuse of content outside of the projects. My highest streak is 11. Ckoerner (talk) 15:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • I somehow managed 22 on my first try via beginner's luck, but haven't been able to do better than 10 since then. --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE) 20:02, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
• I am glad SOMEBODY is watching over this. It makes my brain bend, but we have to keep Wikipedia as honest as possible. Best wishes to all. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 20:23, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Interview: CEO Maryana Iskander "four weeks in" (3,971 bytes · 💬)

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• In short the CEO has been flying around too much dealing with external stakeholders, to have the time to deal with the internal situation at the WMF. What type of CEO will you be?. The answer to this question was a typical politicians' non-answer, and sadly for one of the most important aspects in the heirarchy (or should I say 'anarchy') of WMF management and and its bloated paid 'labour force', hence the issues raised by the real stakeholders: the editors who provide the content for free, the maintenance workers and admins who keep it from falling apart - for free, and the readers who take it all for granted but contribute their donations that keep the CEOs in the luxury of near permanent business travel. Still, it's early days yet, and 'nothing pleaseth but rare accidents' . Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:21, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• I hope Ms. Iskander took seriously the suggestion she create an account & anonymously edit Wikipedia -- or one of the other projects. Reading this interview, & related articles on diff, I see no clear indication that she had done this. Doing this matters because too many Foundation staff act as if volunteers create articles simply by sitting down & deciding, "I'm going to write so many words on this subject I'm interested in"; these staff appear to be unaware or indifferent about all of the other steps required to create, revise or maintain articles. (For instance an important step is researching the subject, which usually takes far more time than the actual writing.) In the end, all of the websites live or die by their content -- not policies created by people lacking direct experience with the content. -- llywrch (talk) 18:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • It's pretty subtle but I think the 1st thing she should do according to the original suggestion is *keep it a secret* as much as possible. I take this sentence almost as a confirmation "Even as I’ve started making my first edits, I can see that there are many types of ways of contributing to the movement." Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:18, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• I'd feel better if she did state she has an anonymous account on one of the Wikis. No more need be said. Not only for the reason we could hope that she has a sense what average contributors are doing & what they need to do a better job, but that a newbie out there is the CEO of the Foundation could encourage more civil interactions. Or less haste to act. -- llywrch (talk) 20:39, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Pretty subtle maybe, but perhaps for background while doing it WMF CEOs should read The Signpost more often. At least some relevant back issues. In the end, all of the websites live or die by their content -- not policies created by people lacking direct experience with the content., There are some good people in the WMF, but without required levels of understanding and expert leadership for what we do here, it's pretty much like herding cats and that's perhaps an argument for promoting 'managerial' CEOs from within. Wikipedia encyclopedias may amount to one of the most consulted projects in the world (disregarding its many subsidised forks), but even Big Tech has some semblance of management infrastructure. That's why they are 'BigTech' and why Apple brought Jobs back to save what was almost a bankruptcy to becoming the planet's richest company in not much longer than Wikipedia exists. It's all about having the right people in the right jobs (pun intended). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

News and notes: Feedback for Board of Trustees election (11,504 bytes · 💬)

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• Whither WMC User Group? Irrespective of the controversy over the blocks, it's disappointing to hear that the outcome may be a fork. Forks are one of the worst possible things for the Wikimedia Movement because of how they split contributors. There's already Baidu Baike to contend with in China, so I really hope there doesn't end up being a third major encyclopedia. My hunch, however, is that a WMC-controlled project may not end up being distinctive enough from Baidu Baike to gain a readership. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • I have gained access to the New Project, Qiuwen Baike, mentioned above. I've checked the statistics: as of today, there has been ~620,000 articles, including thousands of articles originally published there. The number is still growing. I am confident that the number of articles can surpass Wikipedia in the not-too-distant future.
  • We Chinese Wikipedia and Qiuwen Baike editors never consider Baidu Baike as a serious competitor. There is no doubt that Baidu Baike is an encyclopaedia of plagiarism, copyright violation and commercials, which is full of trash. In mainland China, there is rarely no big encyclopedia site using CC BY-SA license, or even other CC licenses. Other Chinese encyclopaedia with high quality in China, e.g., Encyclopedia of China, which is fully copyrighted, pay-walled and expert-led, has costed over 100 million dollars on its recent revision.
  • Due to the Internet censorship in China, few people reads Wikipedia. As far as I know, WMC felt difficult to recruit new editors massively from mainland china due to the blockade of Internet. I believe that A free (both in copyright and price), high-quality Wikipedia-based encyclopedia would gain much audience across China. — Listen, the wind blows… 12:58, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • @听风吹过的声音: I really hope the forking group managed to get some legally-binding protections/guarantees from their new hosts, hopefully including things like the usergroup holding any relevant trademarks and the right to leave and get another host.
      The amount of difficulty one can have with a commercial host that wants to take advantage of an associated volunteer community is immense. Incidents like what happened with Internet Brands, StackExchange, and others... Things can get absolutely awful for communities tied to such organizations without proper protections and procedures. --Yair rand (talk) 00:43, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
      • @Yair rand: Thanks. I believe that organizer(s) of the fork would appreciate your comments. --— Listen, the wind blows… 11:02, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

What is "the largest Chinese-language Wikipedia" meant to signify here? You mean the largest Sinitic-language Wikipedia? Well, since Mandarin is by far the most commonly spoken variety and Standard Chinese by far the most commonly written, and we only have one Wikipedia per language, it's no wonder it's the largest, is it? I don't think you meant what you said there. Nardog (talk) 06:04, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Nardog: Please see Chinese Wikipedia (the intro and several sections have good info on your question) but especially Chinese_Wikipedia#Wikipedia in other varieties of Chinese which has a table with 6 versions of Wikipedia in "Chinese" and discusses another. I'm not a linguist or a Chinese speaker (of any type - though I know a very few "words to avoid" in Cantonese). The key here, I believe is your assumption that "we only have one Wikipedia per language." In Chinese as I understand it - it has a lot to do with the writing system. I'm not exactly sure why we have 2 Norwegian language versions (maybe one is an older, more formal version?). I have a pretty good idea why we have Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, *and* Serbo-Croatian versions (hint:war and nationalism). I'm wondering whether we have both Romanian and Moldovan? So there are lots of exceptions to the very general rule of "one Wikipedia per language." Hope this helps. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Oh, so you do mean it. Then my point remains that it adds nothing. Mandarin is by far the most commonly spoken variety and even speakers of other varieties are often proficient in the standard written variety based on it as it is the primary administrative language in mainland China and Taiwan, so it goes without saying that the Wikipedia written in it is the biggest of its kind. It's just such a bizarre thing to say I thought you were trying to say something else. Nardog (talk) 10:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

In fact, the "largest Chinese-language encyclopedia" is an official catchphrase of Baidu Baike, written in its homepage, and persumably regarded as a sell point. In fact, it has roughly 5x articles than English Wikipedia here. I believe it qualifies as the largest single-language online encyclopedia of all time. (You can't just add up all ~300 Wikipedia sites altogether and compare it with Chinese-only Baidu Baike, right?) Milky·Defer >Please use ping 18:11, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

By the way, according to another independent source in Chinese, the "big-tech company" WMCUG refers to turns out to be ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. Although the reliability of the news is still not verified, it sounds plausible. Milky·Defer >Please use ping 18:16, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Admin decline. 2011 inactive admin rule was a really dumb idea

My 2 cents. The July 2011 inactive admin suspension rule was a really dumb (and possibly coercive) idea. Editors don't get suspended when they are inactive. Admins should not be suspended either.

See Widefox charts on admins: User:Widefox/editors.

Contrast the drop in admins with the steady number of 40,000 active editors (5 or more edits per month) on English Wikipedia for the last couple years:

• https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/active-editors/normal%7Cline%7C2-year%7C(page_type)~content*non-content%7Cmonthly

--Timeshifter (talk) 16:06, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I see the suspension rule as more of a security measure than anything else. Per the community discussion that created the policy, if an inactive admin returns to Wikipedia, they may be resysopped by a bureaucrat without further discussion. And plenty do just that. I hardly see this as grounds for losing admins who really want to return to engagement. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the community discussion link. I previously looked at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-07-31/Special report.

As someone else said, the 2011 rule was a solution in search of a problem. The security risks were small and infrequent.

But as someone who dabbles in this and that, it bugs me to no end when any bureaucracy gets in my way. So I understand why many previous admins would be bothered by this 2011 rule.

Having to figure out where to ask for reinstatement. Having to dig around old bookmarks to do that. Having to wait even a few minutes to get back my admin rights.

Why bother just to make a few admin edits. I operate on inspiration. Once started I can sometimes do an amazing amount of work. Any interruption takes a lot of the fun out of it. I work on multiple projects. So I go to a different project that I can work on right away without any bureaucracy. And without any coercion being applied to do a certain amount of work.

--Timeshifter (talk) 21:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

If "having to figure out where to ask for reinstatement" exceeds your interest in following processes, I personally am fine with you not being an administrator, looking at WP:ADMINACCT, WP:WHEEL, WP:AC/DS et cetera. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:50, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Having to figure out where to ask for reinstatement. Having to dig around old bookmarks to do that. Having to wait even a few minutes to get back my admin rights. Why bother just to make a few admin edits. Exactly. Working as intended. Levivich 22:55, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

It's hard to be interested in a process if it's a huge pain in the ass and you don't think it's a good idea for the process to exist. Surely, if using rollback required me to solve two sudokus and a Wordle, I'd be allowed to complain about it without people suggesting a revocation of the user right. jp×g 09:12, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Speaking generally, it's my experience that bureaucrats like bureaucracy. It gives them a sort of passive aggressive power. In the various discussions on this it is obvious that there are 2 camps on this. Those that get it, and those that don't. Fine. Let them feel powerful in their diminishing group of admins. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:05, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Comment. An automated process for reinstatement would solve the problem. Maybe require 2-factor authentication for returning admins. Reinstatement would be near instant. Inspiration would not be lost through delays and bureaucracy.

If admins provide an email address and one or two phone numbers to Wikipedia, then at least one of them will probably be working even after years of inactivity. Choice of text, email, or phone call. Just like my local bank when I sign in. The authentication would only be required to automatically re-enable the admin tools. Authentication not requested again for at least a year, regardless of admin-related edit count. Authentication not required for normal editing that non-admins do. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:07, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

By the way, here are the relevant pages on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons:

Wikipedia:Inactive administrators

commons:Commons:Administrators/De-adminship#Activity

--Timeshifter (talk) 22:05, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Obituary: Twofingered Typist (1,632 bytes · 💬)

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• How did he end up dying? So sad. Tyrone Madera (talk) 18:58, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• FWIW, neither obituary links say what happened, so I guess his family wanted privacy given the circumstances. Tube·of·Light 15:54, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• RIP Kent. What a great Wikipedian! Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 03:04, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
• Rest in peace. jp×g 09:39, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
• Rest in peace. Tube·of·Light 15:55, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
• Damn. GMG^talk 15:39, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
• Two-Fingered Typist received the Editor of the Week award in May of 2017. Rest in peace. ―Buster7 ☎ 15:50, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
• Huge loss. RIP.--Kew Gardens 613 (talk) 12:57, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Op-Ed: Identifying and rooting out climate change denial (17,793 bytes · 💬)

Climate change denial 1.0 is old news

Climate change denial 1.0 is old news. Probably at least 1/2 of the people ostensibly denying it know better are are just doing conversational tactics to monkeywrench conversations about the currently promoted solutions, or as a part of the US culture war. Climate change denial 2.0 is denial that population is the main cause and an essential part of the long term solution, of course implemented gracefully. Also denying that some measures (such as nuclear power) that are currently unpopular with those advocating the other measures are an essential part of the solution. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:49, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I looked for other types of misinformation as well in all the articles. For instance, I removed twice the statement that there would me more tropical cyclones under climate change (rather than more intense). The myth/framing that population growth (which typically occurs in countries with very low emissions) is the main cause I saw only about three times. Most of these articles are relatively abandoned, and don't talk about solutions at all. I did not encounter any climate myths about the costs of net-zero for instance.

That said, the old misinformation is still having a effect. Only 10% of people believe humans not responsible at all, but soft denial (humans are 50% responsible) is still massively big in Europe and the US. Femke (talk) 21:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your work! Once you get into "partially responsible" then you get into the nuances of the exact definition of "climate change" and "cause." My definition would result in calling humans 100% responsible, but there are other arguable definitions. Your growth in countries with low emissions" does not negate the point. The US has massively reduced "per capita" emissions but those gains have been more than erased by US population growth. And per capita emissions and also birth rate do overall correlate with standard of living although of course there are exceptions. North8000 (talk) 21:23, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I suspect even within the US, population growth is higher among people that pollute less. That said, on a long term, you want poverty eradicated everywhere, and that will be easier within planetary boundaries if population is smaller rather than larger.

This issue is highly sensitive, and there is a long history of racist discourse and practices around "overpopulation". There exists policy to stop population growth that is not horrible (women's education being the prime example), but once you put too much emphasis on the overpopulation framing, it's unclear what policy politicians will come up with. Overpopulation isn't mentioned much in high-quality RSs on climate change, so in that sense we don't have to cover it extensively. There is a chance scientists self-censor overpopulation as a cause, being aware of historical horrors around the topic. Femke (talk) 22:10, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to planetary boundaries. That's a good way try to be more specific about the issue. BTW it can be gracefully implemented.....it tends to happen naturally with an increase in standard of living. E.G simply starting with recognizing Japan as a success story rather than saying that it's a "problem" due to reducing GDP growth and endangering retirement program pyramid schemes. Of course graceful implementation will not bring improvement soon enough without the other measures being discussed. North8000 (talk) 01:04, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• Another concern for climate change articles is that many articles are out of date. This is true both for content and the sources cited. I recently put in time updating citation urls on Economics of climate change, where a large number of citations had dead links. I found working links for most of them, but many of the sources cited are still from 2001-2007. The entire page would benefit from rewriting and up-to-date information. MaryMO (AR) (talk) 23:58, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

  Great work on that article :). Outdatedness is also a problem on the English Wikipedia, definitely. We don't have the capacity anymore of the 2006-2010 years. EMsmile is doing great work by merging a lot of these outdated articles into "higher" articles. We have too many middle management articles. For instance: climate change -> effects of climate change -> regional effects of climate change -> effects by country. Or climate change -> effects of climate change -> effects of climate change on humans -> economics of climate change. Chidgk1 is also very active pruning old research, so that people can more easily add new.

  It was a bit of a problem for this project too. Our article climate change controversy was used as an argument by a Chinese editor to not remove some outdated information about the solar impact on global warming. The article still implies that it is a significant minority opinion that solar impact was quite strong.. Femke (talk) 18:09, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  Yes thanks for spending time on Economics of climate change. I for one find economics extremely hard to understand. Part of the difficultly is maybe the timing of spending (for example on electricity grids) versus the time that various climate change effects arrive or are prevented. Hoping that the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report working groups 2 and 3 will include economics in one or both summaries for policymakers. If they can make it easy enough for politicians to understand then I might understand too. As the economics is becoming political we need some non-political economist (are there any?) to explain it in simple terms. Chidgk1 (talk) 07:32, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  I'm myself slowly working on improving the Carbon bubble article, but it'll take a while. Relating climate change to stock market valuations is tough! A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 13:27, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  What I've heard so far is that the IPCC AR6 WG3 report will contain mostly optimalisation-type of economic models, which have historically underestimated renewables on quite a big scale. Working in simulation-type economic energy modelling, I'm not sure that's the best source. Normally the IPCC is quite good at describing significant minorities. Maybe they'll contain more simulation-type models or arguments after peer review. Femke (talk) 17:09, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• This story of cross-wiki communication sounds logistically difficult and time-consuming, but really valuable. I don't know that we need huge structural changes like "best before dates" (though possibly this could be organisationally useful within the community), just initiatives like these arranged on an ad hoc basis when someone notices a problem. It seems that here that problem was noticed by a journalist—it's good to see some reporting that's (a) investigative; (b) puts Wikipedia in context as written by volunteers; and (c) is actionable criticism. In regards to why Wikipedians weren't fixing the issues until prompted by an English-language explorer, I have tons of pages on my watchlist that I've not fully read or had time to improve and I often do a double take and go "actually this needs fixing now..." when someone makes an edit or talk page reply to bring my attention to it. — Bilorv (talk) 22:52, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

  I think the problem with the outdatedness of climate change articles is particularly acute. The peak in Wikipedia editor activity (2007-2010) coincided with a period of high media attention, so that we have a very large collection of articles to maintain. Because outdated climate change articles are usually biased towards downplaying climate change, I would support large structural changes. I think medical editors may feel the same, as medical misinformation may lead to harm. Whether that is a "best before date" or a warning on top of the article (if it hasn't been reviewed in X amount of time), or some other more strict monitoring, I don't know.

  I find it curious how little critical journalism here is around Wikipedia. Given our large role in perceptions of politics, it would be good if there was more actionable pieces like the BBC has done. Femke (talk) 20:35, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

The Broad Brush

I have a problem with the way the word "climate change denier" is often used. (Before firing up your flamethrowers, please see WP:YWAB for my positions on the scientific consensus on climate change and on global warming conspiracy theories.)

My problem is that the term "climate change denier" is all too often a broad brush used for painting people who hold any of the following views:

• The scientists are all lying. It is a huge conspiracy. I read it on Infowars so I know it's true.
• Climate change? What climate change? I haven't bothered to read anything by a scientist, but I don't believe it.
• The climate is changing, just as it always has. Nothing unusual about the last few centuries.
• The climate is warming, and that's a good thing. It's ice ages that are bad.
• The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but I am not convinced that the change will be as large as is predicted.
• The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but in my opinion methane has a higher effect and CO2 has a lower effect than claimed.
• The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but decreasing CO2 emissions is not the best answer. I believe that sequesting CO2 is a better plan.
• The climate is changing, and humans are to blame, but I don't believe that increasing the size and power of the federal government is the solution. The polluters will just buy off the politicians as they always do.
• Everything the climatologists say about climate change is 100% true. I accept all of the climate models and simulations. My problem is with the economic predictions that get tacked on. We have an awful track record when it comes to computer models of the economy.
• I believe all of it. Climate, economy, proposed solutions, I accept them all. I also believe that it is too late. We are already doomed.
• I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having western countries reduce CO2 emissions while letting China increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
• I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having the US reduce CO2 emissions while letting the rest of the world increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
• I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having California reduce CO2 emissions while letting the rest of the US and the rest of the world increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
• I believe all of it. I just don't agree that having the City of San Francisco reduce CO2 emissions while letting the rest of California, the US, and the world increase them without any restrictions will solve the problem.
• I am a scientist. As scientist are in the habit of doing, I am questioning one small part of established science and am doing research into a new theory. I realize that the orthodoxy is usually right, but challenging the orthodoxy is how we do things in science. Alas, I picked an area where any and all opinions that are not in perfect lockstep with the scientific orthodoxy are called "climate change denial"

You can call me a climate change denier now, because the entries about San Francisco and economic models make a lot of sense to me. --Guy Macon Alternate Account (talk) 18:53, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Absolutely, there are a lot of degrees of "denial": from pseudo-science to fringe, and from science to politics. We were lucky that much of the POV content we encountered fell in easier categories (proper pseudo-science to fringe), and that we did not have to engage much in the grey area (a political stance that may be considered denial by some). A lot of the articles stopped after describing the science, and did not mention anything about human impacts, adaptation, mitigation or politics. Femke (talk) 19:18, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

I just looked over our coverage of climate change Most of the articles, such as Attribution of recent climate change, are excellent. Others, such as Carbon bubble, not so much.

Consider this article in Wired: The Quest to Trap Carbon in Stone—and Beat Climate Change]. (If you hit a paywall, try here:[1])

Our Carbon bubble article acts as if the idea of Carbon sequestration doesn't exist, and makes absolute claims like "these new reserves are unlikely to be exploited, meaning the value of those investments will suffer serious decreases" (sourced to an archive of a claim by advocacy group carbontracker.org that they removed from their site in 2014). If ClimeWorks or Carbon Engineering are right, then not exploiting those reserves isn't the only possible way of meeting CO2 goals. --Guy Macon Alternate Account (talk) 03:14, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

As our society/ civilization crumble, we find these sorts of socio-political divides, where the chattering class has already decided their orthodoxy and the rest of us, Wikipedia editors included, are expected to embrace that orthodoxy without reason. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:09, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

English edit summaries on "non-English versions"

• It is great that editors from English Wikipedia are trying to counter denial of climate change on other Wikipedias. But I suppose that if somebody bothers themselves to translate non-English article in Google Translate to find what parts of it should be changed or removed, they should also do other Wikipedia editors a favor and translate their edit summary in the language of that Wikipedia (using same Google Translate). When someone comes to Belarussian Wikipedia, removes something and leaves edit summary in English, it really looks as something like foreign invasion, however good "invader's" edits and intentions are. Arado Ar 196 (talk) 20:06, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks for your feedback. That was something we did think about. It depended on the reliability of machine translations on whether I did this or not. For Belarussian, I suspected the quality would be rather low. On talk pages, I sometimes provided both the original and a machine translation. One of our team, User:Dtetta, went further and worked with native speakers he knew to translate text before posting anything (for the Chinese version).

  One of the things that went a bit wrong is that sometimes multiple people involved in the project made edits to one language. While it's okay if one person only does non-controversial edits (like updating figures), it isn't great when two editors come in arguing for the same controversial edits. Femke (talk) 20:32, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

  Good point - with hindsight it would probably have been better to have put change comments in local language first (via machine translation) and then English in brackets - provided the comment box was long enough (for your info/amusement? Google Translate says what I just wrote is in Belarussian: Добры момант - азіраючыся назад, верагодна, лепш было б спачатку змясціць каментарыі да зменаў на мясцовай мове (праз машынны пераклад), а затым на англійскай у дужках - пры ўмове, што поле каментарыяў было дастаткова доўгім) Chidgk1 (talk) 09:47, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

  Arado Ar 196 If you or any other Belarussian speakers have time could you comment at be:Размовы:Глабальнае пацяпленне Chidgk1 (talk) 06:38, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Opinion: Should the Wikimedia Foundation continue to accept cryptocurrency donations? (19,870 bytes · 💬)

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• @GorillaWarfare: While I don't agree with the article's conclusions, the arguments posed here (particularly the summaries in the final two paragraphs) are, in my opinion, much stronger than those put forward in the RfC itself. (The ideas in the RfC that accepting crypto could lead to meaningful reputation damage, or be equivalent to Wikimedians' endorsement of crypto investing, are both ideas I find very problematic. In contrast, the analysis here about the balance of limited potential benefits to the WMF and donors versus the ethics of incidental normalization of the technology, I find this to be on sound footing even if many may disagree about the details.) I would recommend linking to this article from the RfC. Just my opinion. (Also, a typo: "...largely ified by the...".) --Yair rand (talk) 22:21, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

  Ha, looks like some sort of weird null bug with the Signpost script. I've fixed it, and put a note at User talk:Evad37/SPS.js#Problem if the page includes the word "null". Good call on linking from the RfC, I'll do that too. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 22:26, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

This was actually published from my copy of the script, which probably has the same bug -- a real head-scratcher. Will have to remember this for February! jp×g 01:38, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• A really compelling argument. For anyone who wants to learn more, the very densely packed Line Goes Up sheds some light on the misguided motivations behind participants in this form of gambling (cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens). I know I am not an outlier in the Wikimedia community for being a sucker for a good bit of maths/theoretical computer science, so I saw a fair bit of the maths behind Bitcoin before really understanding what was in it for regular users/investors, almost none of whom understand the simplest mathematical aspect of it. Cryptocurrency and NFTs are a form of market speculation—a Ponzi scheme in which the already-rich will assuredly reap huge rewards, while the tech bro middle class gamble with lottery odds at becoming rich. They are decentralised and open source in name only, and the industry is rampant with fraud and scams, which are often not illegal. — Bilorv (talk) 22:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  I would also highly recommend this video, for what it's worth. GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 00:42, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  I wouldn't go so far as to call the token itself a Ponzi scheme. It has its technical up and downsides of course, but the more speculative hypes around it come from the usual lot. CurryCity (talk) 21:57, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• Cryptocurrency is banking for countries where governance is poor or non-existant. All of your arguments applicable tothe traditional banking sector, especially where Cryptocurrency thrives - and where it is the lesser of the money evils.. Most of the big wallets belong to cryptocurrency exchanges. Cryptocurrency is better at curbing money laundering and enforcing capital controls than fiat currencies. Here are some happy stories about Crypto commodities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VT_zpHQzBE. Here's an article you might want to expand, and currencies you might want to stop taking if you care so much about the things you mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 102.165.232.228 (talk) 21:15, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• I invite you to consider the notion that the use of Bitcoin for remittances and financial inclusion is yet another move by Western capitalists to use lower-income countries to their benefit, by increasing the number of holders of their preferred financial asset in order to increase its value. If you want examples of local initiatives that are actually making a difference, see India's Unified Payments Interface and Africa's Pan-African Payment and Settlement System [2][3][4]. JBchrch talk 23:00, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• Thank you, I invite you to invite me to consider how I can take part in this without a birth certificate or a passport? Or if I need money to escape my slave master, or if my slave master keeps my documents.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 102.165.232.228 (talk) 13:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

  Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? How many slaves do you think have crypto currency wallets? How many slaves do you think have computers, or access to one? How likely is any of your dumbass scenario? Jorm (talk) 21:02, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

• How am I not a slave if my forced husband owns me by law? How is my phone not a computer? Just because you don't know how to hide things on your phone doesn't mean that I can't, it also doesn't mean that I can't explain this to everyone I know. Just because I was born into an open air prison doesn't mean that I should not have means that allow me to make trades and hide them. I can do translation, accounting, design, almost anything for you on my phone, and you can pay me in any token, and one day I will have enough to escape. I can even get paid to play games. But I don't espect you to understand. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 102.165.235.134 (talk) 07:31, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

• Logic has never been the strong suit of crypto-bros. TrangaBellam (talk) 14:59, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

• Bitcoin is at best a solution in search of a problem. But I believe it is little more than a high tech ponzi-scheme whose only realistic uses are mostly illegal and immoral. It has no utilitarian value. I can't eat it. I can't cook with it. I can't build anything with it, and it doesn't conduct electricity. It has no intrinsic value and the idea of it functioning as a widely accepted store of value is risible given its legendary volatility. I can't take a bagful of Bitcoin and lock it in a safe deposit box or bury it in my back yard. Unlike gold (which does have a credible claim to being an alternative store of value) you can't even use it for dental work or jewelry. Excluding El Salvador, the only really large entity that seems happy to accept crypto as a medium of exchange for goods and services that I am aware of, is organized crime. BTC is ideal for money laundering, tax evasion, hiding assets from creditors and ex-spouses. But I really can't see any other function. And the idea of the WMF utilizing a system employed by drug cartels and kidnappers, who post videos of children being tortured and demanding ransom payment in Bitcoin, strikes me as well beyond "ethically questionable." I would have difficulty sleeping at night if I ever touched anything so dirty. -Ad Orientem (talk) 00:02, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

• How are traditional currencies any different in this regard? If the WMF held on to its crypto assets, and didn't spot convert it, its crypto donations would've dwarfed all other income 5x, and it would've today had 7 years of runway, instead of just 18 months. To boot, how do banks protect themselves against corrupt employees? Gold's value is not from jewelry and dentistry, it has value because it's fairly useless, yet scarce, but chiefly because it's a measure of the excess mining capacity and energy an economy has, so it's a peg on that. Similarly, oil is a peg on economic activity. Similarly, crypto commodities are a measure of how much excess energy and computing power an economy has. It smokes out cheap energy and computing, and with its hyper transparency it also smokes out corruption, and it rewards those who build it, three things that have much amplified value to our economies. This whole thread strikes me as the remarks of people who have never found themselves on the wrong side of any authority or regime. Count yourselves privileged and lucky, and I truly hope it stays that way for you, but don't assume that this is a luxury that everyone shares and don't expect everyone to await your imperial liberation with abated breath and don't forget that Wikipedia does not belong to the WMF. Actually, I just realized that WMF not accepting Crypto donations is totally fine, I am glad the WMF spot converted its Cryto donations, because I don't think it having more influence and power to spread its ignorance will change much.

• Your explanation of gold and oil pricing is completely fabricated. I don't have the time to deconstruct it in detail but gold has not been a mesure of any country's economy since the end of the Gold Standard and oil pricing is heavily determined by what the OPEC does. In fact, this false explanation seems to be specifically built to justify the pricing of crypto. As for the authority or regime thing, I invite you to consider that a public and "hypertransparent" blockchain is not the best way to hide from an oppressive government. In fact, this notion is completely contradictory to your argument that crypto is good for anti-money laundering, anti-corruption and capital controls. JBchrch talk 14:01, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
• And I don't resist adding that if the WMF had a stock of assets with returns so high that it would dwarf all their other assets, then the CFO should be fired, because they would have taken way more risk than a careful and long-term approach would dictate. It's a joke that Matt Levine has made a few times. JBchrch talk 16:29, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

To answer your question: yes, we should. That crypto currency is misused here and there doesn't change the fact that's it is a promising technology that could revolutionize how Wikimedia contributors are rewarded, etc. We should encourage more integration between Wikimedia and blockchain technology - of course, with the strong nod to the currencies that are more eco-friendly (not proof-of-work) and not scammy like memecoins etc. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:32, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikimedia contributors should not be "rewarded" for contributions (compensation in a small minority of cases is separately motivated). If you want to focus on blockchains that are not proof-of-work then you will be focusing on cryptocurrencies that are not backed by any major authority and are therefore subject to large fluctuation in value based on market competition. (You can't even call pump and dump schemes, Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes or other confidence tricks a "misuse" of the technology, because this is the only serious purpose of crypto.) I can't see in what way cryptocurrency is "promising" in achieving any positive goal. We already have a perfectly good open source system on Wikipedia (importantly: with no transaction fees for committing diffs), and there's no reason it would be advantageous for all financial transactions in a private individual's life to be made open source. Blockchains could speculatively be used for copyright in the future, but we're part of the open source community, so that would be mostly antithetical to our values. — Bilorv (talk) 11:16, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Why "should not"? I fear that the fact that we aren't is responsible for a knee-jerk reaction each time someone is found to be rewarded or suggests others should be, and one stemming from simple jealousy (I could be wrong, but we need psychological research to understand this better, shrug). I have no idea what you mean by currencies backed by any major authority. Which authority is backing bitcoin anyway? Proof of stake is tied to some major altcoins that some are saying will eclipse bitcoin in few years (Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot and Solana). I see plenty of cool ideas related to such tech, from gaming to creating a new IoT network (Helium) to many others. While the tech can be used unethically, such uses represent a minority of totals - at least that's how it has always been when it comes to social uses of pretty much all general technologies, and I see no reason why crypto should be different. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:02, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

I have no idea who you think I am jealous of, but I would make different decisions about where to spend my time were Wikipedia a paid enterprise. El Salvador has Bitcoin as legal tender, to answer your question. I see no use for Helium when natural monopolies like wireless infrastructure are most efficient when nationalised rather than subject to market competition (as they will be in the cryptocurrency HNT). I have yet to see a game inherently dependent on cryptocurrency that is enjoyable in and of itself, rather than dull and play-to-earn mechanic-based, nor can I see how one could possibly exist with advantage over in-game currency (unless you happening to be a thrill-seeking gambler). You have not understood my point about the market mechanics of crypto being inherently a pyramid scheme and confidence trick. Line Goes Up, which I linked above, makes the case for this in a compelling manner. — Bilorv (talk) 16:24, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Another, slightly more thorough, source on this last point: [5]. JBchrch talk 16:36, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Ha, I can't agree on the moral conclusions but it's a very direct derivation of Bitcoin as an inherent Ponzi/pyramid scheme. Very interesting reading. — Bilorv (talk) 20:53, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

• A really compelling argument. For anyone who wants to learn more, the very densely packed Line Goes Up sheds so
• GorillaWarfare stated that:

1) "..but the space has overwhelmingly become an opportunity for self-enrichment at the expense of others and the environment." However, that is not the case. Bitcoin's energy usage is very green, and some of it is even carbon negative. 2) "People are regularly scammed for enormous sums of money,..". That won't hold either. If you read the referred Chainanalysis report deeper than the title, you will notice that A) It doesn't apply to Bitcoin, B) Crypto space has grown so big that the 14 Billion is just a tiny part of it. According the report "Crime is becoming a smaller and smaller part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem" so things are going to better direction, not worse. 3) "Rather than empowering the unbanked" .. just when El Salvador took it in use for that. 4) "Furthermore, the underlying technology is enormously slow and difficult to scale". There has been build a second layer network on top of Bitcoin called lightning that will scale to process up to 1.000.000 transactions per second. 5) "As a result, the decentralization of the web that was supposed to result from the adoption of blockchain technologies has only resulted in the centralization of power in a handful of companies and venture capital firms." Outright wrong. Bitcoin is decentralized (and even more so after mining moved out of china) and it is by far the biggest, and not owned by venture capital firms. Second biggest is Ethereum and same applies for that. Otherways Crypto currencies were used a lot for donations, and the amount has been growing. --Editor92345 (talk) 18:12, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

• I just want to add that those interested in helping fight financial misinformation (as related to crypto) should consider helping out at WP:Finance and WP:Cryptocurrency. Whether the WMF accepts crypto or not (I personally don't think they should), the bad state of many important articles in this topic area leads to much more misinformation and adoption through promotional, unencyclopedic, and evangelical editing. Experienced hands are always welcome at these projects.A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 09:45, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

References

Recent research: Articles with higher quality ratings have fewer "knowledge gaps" (977 bytes · 💬)

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• This analysis resonates with personal experience. So what can we do about it? It also brings back memories of the disastrous feedback experiments, which elicited large quantities of garbage, at least partly due to prompting useless feedback. Intelligent questions can be extremely helpful to understand the gaps in coverage, which is probably why FA scores so high, and GA next - the reviewer gets to provide feedback on comprehensibility for a person who is not usually a subject matter expert, and more eyes detect more bugs. There also seems to be less reader feedback on talk pages now than 5 or 10 years ago in the areas I work on. Is this a general tendency? Has it been measured? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:37, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Serendipity: Pooh entered the Public Domain – but Tigger has to wait two more years (905 bytes · 💬)

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In what world is "public domain" a proper noun, though?--~TPW 18:56, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

• Public Domain was walking around Big Meadow one day, feeling very happy and whistling a little tuneless tune to himself. The grass was green, the sun was shining, and he had more and more pen friends from faraway places who said he was their best friend. But just at that moment, Skunk popped out of a hole and said "Why are you ruining my business?", sounding very cross. "Oh", said Public Domain. "I, er, didn't mean to offend anyone." The End. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:37, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Special report: WikiEd course leads to Twitter harassment (128,441 bytes · 💬)

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• Am I correct in assuming that Lianna Davis is a paid employee of the WMF? Her comments (defending an instigator of harassment against a 15-year-old volunteer) are very unprofessional. Schierbecker (talk) 21:11, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of Lianna's comments. I thought she made several reasonable points about the context. And it's also very unclear to me that @kibona intended to instigate harassment. The subsequent harassment is still unacceptable, of course. Chris Troutman's comments, below, also strike me as an overreaction. Ganesha811 (talk) 23:57, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm very thankful Sdkb gave this subject a fair write up, at my suggestion. I am appalled by Mkibona's conduct; these violations of WP:CANVASS and WP:MEAT call for a topic ban if not an outright block and removal from WEF's program. Because the harassment involved should have been prevented by WEF, LiAnna (WikiEd)'s failure to address this matter and her passive-aggressive "I'm sorry anyone was hurt" statement after the fact should result in her removal from WEF, as well. As I've read, this isn't the first time WEF's efforts created suboptimal results for en-wp which calls into question Helaine (Wiki Ed)'s leadership. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:19, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• WikiEd is a separate non-profit from the Wikimedia Foundation so Liana is not a foundation employee but is an employee of WikiEd. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:56, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• Thanks, Barkeep49. Is Davis compensated in her role at WikEd? Schierbecker (talk) 22:26, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

  @Schierbecker yes. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:30, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• Wow. Schierbecker (talk) 22:52, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• I am a paid employee of Wiki Education, not WMF. I fundamentally disagree that the instructor in this class instigated harassment. The tweet the instructor sent requesting support is quoted above: "I don’t know where the Black (& allies) nerds are, but I really need support in editing & saving" two articles. This was not instigating harassment. The AfD nominator somehow found this tweet and responded to it. Other users on Twitter — none connected to the course or Wiki Education — did harass the AfD nominator (and I'll repeat my comment that the initial wording of my post was a mistake, not an attempt to minimize or deny the unacceptable Twitter harassment — it was harassment, and I'm glad Barkeep49 pointed that out at the time so I could clarify). But her asking for help identifying additional sources for two articles is not instigating harassment. It's also worth noting that while one article she requested help with did get deleted, the other one she asked for help for in the thread (Ratchet feminism) got some additional sourcing and is now an article. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:56, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

  It is still unacceptable to canvass votes at AfD. (t · c) buidhe 08:06, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  • • The disconnect between the thread you are replying to and the actual content of your comment is jarring. The exact content of the message says nothing about AfD votes. If anything, it is a call for editors to improve an article. And if an article is clearly being worked on and improved this is usually considered a reason to keep at AfD. Nothing untowards with that suggestion in itself. JMWt (talk) 09:01, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

      It's clearly canvassing if you tweet to followers asking them to "save" an article at AfD, because it is a biased message. An unbiased message would be asking for input on a particular discussion, without specifying if you support deleting or keeping. See WP:CANVASS. (t · c) buidhe 09:40, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Ok sure, show me where the tweet specifically discusses a !vote at AfD rather than trying to improve a WP article. JMWt (talk) 09:46, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• I don't get why I am "Administrator Barkeep49". The fact that I am an administrator is immaterial to this situation but this kind of labeling suggests it is. If you're going to name a PERM that matters in this context it would be "New Page Reviewer Barkeep49". Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:56, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
• Three points from BHG:

1. It seems that those running this course did not give (or did not succeed in conveying) to the students a proper grounding in WP:V, WP:RS and WP:GNG. Those policies are absolutely fundamental to writing any article on en.wp, yet the students who have commented seems to be woefully lacking in that understanding; one even suggested dding refs to press releases as evidence of notability. I count that as grave failing by the course director, and more broadly by WikiEd.
2. A lot of the commentary refers to "harassment" by and of various parties, but none of the posts cited show any evidence of harassment. There are many critical responses, and some of those are heated or harsh ... but the harassment is normally used to describe a pattern of hostile behaviour, rather than just individual acts of hostility. This misuse of the word poisons our ability to discuss contentious issues.
3. It seems to me to be very unlikely that a 15yo is suitably experienced to be able to assess the significance and availability of sources related to a politically-contentious topic which is not well-covered in mainstream media. I intend no criticism of the individual concerned, who I assume is diligent and well-intentioned ... but the ideal choice of person to assess such matters would be someone with a lot more experience. That is a structural problem arising from wp's fundamental policies relating to editors. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:42, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Regarding 3.: Looking at the AfD discussion, it appears that five other editors agreed with the nominator's concerns about the sources cited, and two of them reported having made unsuccessful efforts to find suitable sources themselves. Do you think all five lacked competence as well?

And are there concrete examples of sources that were overlooked or misjudged in this case (in particular due to the alleged incompetence issue)? Regards, HaeB (talk) 23:24, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

@HaeB: I am not here to re-run the AFD debate or to find sources.

I remain concerned at the lack of expertise and experience. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:51, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

It seems that those running this course did not give (or did not succeed in conveying) to the students a proper grounding in WP:V, WP:RS and WP:GNG. Sometimes there's a gap between what's written and what people take away from what's written, but we do communicate these concepts to thousands of students each term. We could say more in our trainings, but longer, more detailed instructions don't equal better retention (cf the existence of "tldr").

Those policies are absolutely fundamental to writing any article on en.wp, yet the students who have commented seems to be woefully lacking in that understanding; one even suggested dding refs to press releases as evidence of notability. I count that as grave failing by the course director, and more broadly by WikiEd. Yes, something didn't connect here. In a conversation with Mkibona after the blow-up, she mentioned that the students why they didn't use the sources she supplied in class, for some reason. Sometimes people don't get it. But there were almost 6,000 students last term, who worked on over 6,000 articles. The vast majority did much, much better than the average brand new editor - because of the training and support we provide.

I remain concerned at the lack of expertise and experience I suspect there aren't more than 100 people who have more expertise with article creation or policy than I do. And after supporting tens of thousands of new editors over the last 7+ years, I don't believe there's anyone who has more experience working with new editors. I did my best working with the students who wrote the BWR article, I exchanged many messages with them trying to help them understand the issues of V, N and RS. That I failed goes without saying. But it wasn't for lack of either experience or expertise. Guettarda (talk) 00:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Guettarda: it seems to me that WikiEd has three functions here.

The first is to teach the policies. I accept your good faith assurances that WikiEd worked hard to teach that.

The second function of WikiEd should be to test students learning of key policies, and make a pass compulsory before letting them loose to add content to the 'pedia. Is there a structure for doing such tests before students start editing?

The third function of WikiEd should be to provide a structure for reviewing the quality of students' work before it is moved out of draft space or userspace, so that a) it isn't left to volunteer editors to clean up after WikiEd, and b) the students get guidance on how to resolve any problems. Does WikiEd have any process or structure for such reviews? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:29, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I do not support the idea that we should test new editors any more than we should bite them. I understand all the reasons why Wiki Ed students aren't the same as the random new editor but this cuts both ways. The typical Wiki Ed student has some qualities that are better than the average new editor and some qualities that make them more challenging. We shouldn't be testing new editors and bottomline Wiki Ed students are a kind of new editor so they should not be tested. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I believe that the idea that new editors have to pass some test before they're allowed to edit is antithetical to the model of Wikipedia. And honestly, the only way to implement what you're asking would be to partially block - and then unblock - 6,000 accounts each term. Some of whom are experienced editors, either because they were Wikipedians before they signed up for a class that involved Wikipedia editing, or because they are taking their second or third class that includes a Wikipedia assignment.

Our current model scaffolds the assignment. They do trainings - some before they start drafting their work, some while they're doing it. They are taken through the process of evaluating an article, which is supposed to help them understand what makes a good article, and what some common problems are. They assign themselves an article to work on. They're supposed to construct a bibliography as an exercise to make them look at source quality. They draft their work in their sandboxes. They peer review each other's work using instructions about what an article should look like and a set of leading questions. A lot of instructors review their students' work before they move things to mainspace. The system isn't perfect, but working with these systems has made me a better editor, even after all this time. And to be clear - the vast majority of students aren't working on new articles, they're improving existing articles.

While it's impossible to monitor everything students do, we do monitor a lot of it. There are something like 20 different categories of notifications that the Dashboard send out regarding what students do. We're currently working on a system to use Headbomb's source quality script to monitor the kinds of sources students are adding to their drafts. (I wish there was a way to switch that on automatically for all new editors.) IIRC, something close to 20% of new editors in the active parts of the year come through Wiki Education. Each term several students take their work through GAN successfully. Lots more of the articles they expand are taken through GAN by established editors. As a volunteer I see lots of student work pop up on my Watchlist, but unlike a lot of contributions by new editors, most of the time it's not the stuff that needs to fix immediately. Guettarda (talk) 15:53, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• • @BrownHairedGirl very unlikely that a 15yo is suitably experienced to be able to assess the significance and availability of sources related to a politically-contentious topic which is not well-covered in mainstream media: I do not really see the concern here? If the nominator's assessment is wrong, the AfD process would typically result in the article being kept. Also, even in the case where there are sources out there somewhere that would show notability but they are not found during the AfD and the article ends up deleted... later, any editor who knows of or finds those sources can recreate the article, and the article they create would likely be better for using those sources than the deleted one was. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 21:11, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

    @PJvanMill: I am touched by your faith in the collective wisdom of AFD, but I don't share it.

    Everyone at AFD missed the central fact: that the topic had been approved by an academic scholar specialising in this area. That should have led to attempts to engage in dialogue about the types of source which Wikipedia requires. But instead of reaching out, most of the AFD participants just robotically applied the rules. Even worse, when Mkibona posted on Twitter asking for help to improve the article (no mention of AFD), they were falsely accused of canvassing.

    So in this case I regard the AFD as at best a failure. At worst it raises unpleasant questions about the dismissal of some African American scholars who wanted to bring their skills to Wikipedia. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:16, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

    @BrownHairedGirl There is no reason to believe that an academic specializing in the area has a comprehensive understanding of Wikipedia's notability guidelines. I have seen at least one course instructor explicitly approve an article as having enough sources to count for notability when it clearly, clearly did not. (Sorry, don't remember enough about this to find a diff; it was not the Chicana art class that ended up with so many articles going straight to AfD, but other than that all I remember was my horror.) In my despair I went looking for, and found, WikiEdu course materials. They are utterly insufficient on this topic, to a degree I consider unethical. I say this as an editor and a teacher. There are always going to be some student-created articles that are deleted; you can lead an undergraduate to sources but you cannot make them read. But the obvious, profound failure of some course instructors to understand even the basic idea of notability is a clear indictment of WikiEdu. Instructors are busy. Wikipedia policies can be arcane. But the basics? They're not that difficult. It can be so, so much better than this. -- asilvering (talk) 23:33, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• Not about the specifics of what happened in this case, but about the context in which it occurs. There is a desire to increase coverage of under-represented topic areas and to increase involvement of editors from under-represented demographics. However, combining the two isn't the ideal solution. Getting new editors to write new articles runs the risk of these articles having problems with notability and other policy violations and ending up at AfD or other unpleasantness. And, if the group of new editors from under-represented demographics is being asked to write about topics relating to their own demographic, then there is also scope for conflict of interest and WP:GREATWRONGS. I say this from the perspective of someone who has been involved in supporting edit-a-thons of this nature. While there is a lot of good intention from all involved, it creates a high-risk situation (as the story reported above illustrates). Put simply, inexperienced contributors and new articles is not a good combination. I think we need to de-couple the two goals. Initiatives to increase content on under-represented topics should involve more experienced contributors and initiatives for engaging new contributors from under-represented demographics should focus on improving existing articles on uncontentious topics in the first instance. More generally, I think we should be lifting the bar on the creation of new articles, which is currently 10 edits or 4 days since sign-up. While this threshold may be OK to predict intent to vandalise, I don't think it's sufficient experience for new article creation. Maybe 100 edits *and* a month since sign-up for entry into Article for Creation, maybe 1000 edits *and* 3 months since sign-up for article creation straight into mainspace. In that way, contributors will have more experience when they tackle their first article and we will reduce conflict-of-interest article creation. As a side benefit, it will make it harder for the undisclosed paid editors, who currently create a new account, do 10 quick edits to random articles and then create the article (and then presumably repeat the pattern with a new account). Kerry (talk) 22:48, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
  • There is a desire to increase coverage of under-represented topic areas and to increase involvement of editors from under-represented demographics. However, combining the two isn't the ideal solution. - But there's a reason these two are connected, and combining the two is unavoidable without telling people "please stop writing about the things that are relevant to you -- let people of other demographics write about them instead". Dealing with systemic bias, both on and off-wiki, can be high-risk (at least in the sense of the weight of context), and just the fact of being underrepresented (subjects or people) makes them a bit trickier and weightier in some ways. If we actually want to bring more people to Wikipedia and cover more topics, we have to be ready to face some of that risk and potential challenges. I do want to be clear, though, that my response, at least, is a bit of an abstract tangent in that I'm not saying any Wikipedian should have to deal with the kinds of Tweets mentioned above. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
    • Thinking about systemic bias is good. Thinking hard about systemic bias is good. Thinking about systemic and systematic bias as they impact Wikipedia as a supply chain issue is good. Thinking about the whole upstream and downstream supply chain issue for reliable sources around Wikipedia, without blame games, is even better. Then, perhaps, what goes on at AfD can be parsed in a way that makes more sense. Where is this explained? Charles Matthews (talk) 05:54, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
      • This seems like something I could put in the next edition's deletion report (which is a fairly new feature, and the non-statistical part of this month's report was mostly about the NSPORTS proposal. If you've got any topic suggestions, I'd be interested in hearing them. jp×g 07:48, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
      • I may misunderstand your intent here, but stating "let's all think hard about systemic bias, but let's not play blame games" is precisely how you get nods and a round of "quite right"s from members of the majority while eliciting some frustrated tweets from people who are actually affected by that systemic bias by virtue of their very existence. :P — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:33, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
        • My point, made a while back on Twitter, is that Wikipedia, the tertiary source, can get the blame for an absence of enough secondary sources; while the actual effect of that deficit is that Wikipedia coverage then suffers. Shooting the messenger combined with victim blaming. That is why you need the supply chain metaphor. My intent is that it should not be elided. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:13, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
        • This page out of what is an interesting article by an academic (area New Hampshire Native American writers) shows that academics can get some of what is at issue here. The whole article is worth reading, in exactly the context of this Signpost report. I remember when I came across it thinking "but, but ... if these writers are significant, where are the academic secondary sources?" If it is only by setting writing assignments for students that academics realise the absence of the independent, third-party sources Wikipedia wants, what does that tell us? Charles Matthews (talk) 08:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• • 1,000 edits seems unbelievably steep. The first article I wrote (1-pentadecanol) came after way less than that, and it's very unlikely I would have stuck around if the threshold were that high (remember that jumping in to make a bunch of gnome edits is much harder for newcomers). jp×g 01:21, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  @Kerry Raymond writes increase coverage of under-represented topic areas and to increase involvement of editors from under-represented demographics. However, combining the two isn't the ideal solution.

  Au contraire, WP:WikiProject Women in Red has combined the two with great success. It just needs to be run a lot better than this WikiEd course was. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:54, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

  • Yes, if it wasn't for an edit conflict, I would have gone on to make the point that such programs needs better risk management. Saying "we have to be ready to face some of that risk" begs the question of who "we" are. It is not just the people who design these programs who are choosing to accept the risk. On the contrary, they create risks for others who did not agree to those risks. A new contributor who has a bad experience probably didn't accept that risk (or didn't understand the risk they faced). The community members who responded to the problematic contribution have had their time wasted and, in some cases, will be accused of having taken their action because they are "anti" whatever the topic area is. They didn't agree to this risk. If the new contributor does not continue, then the movement has lost someone who might have continued if their early experience was more positive. The reader is impacted as they may see the problematic edits and misunderstand something because of them and they are also impacted by the loss of contributors as it leads to less content in the encyclopedia in the long run. Any analysis of risk must consider ALL of the stakeholders. I have been running Wikipedia training sessions here in Australia since 2013 and I have evolved them to reduce these risks, so I say these things from practical experience. Kerry (talk) 00:06, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 1

• Hi, I'm the editor who was harassed. If anyone has any questions, please ask me. wizzito | say hello! 00:08, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  Well I hope you are doing well now. I am not 100% up to date regarding the situation, but no one, and I mean no one, derserves to be harassed and called names, for simply taking good faith actions regarding the enclyopedia. Rlink2 (talk) 00:23, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  @Wizzito: as far as I can see, you were subjected to some criticism. Why do you call that "harassment"? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:17, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I felt harassed. People were insulting me for my age and accusing me of being racist. wizzito | say hello! 01:34, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, how do you not see this as harassment? It is a vile personal attack, and when such behaviour is repeated by multiple accounts, it is harassment. They have not had the grace to delete it; the tweet is still live on Twitter. W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 03:05, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI: I see that tweet as a cry of frustration from members of a community who face obstacles and worse at every turn, and have now faced yet another setback.

As I wrote above at more length, I think it is thoroughly wrong for someone as young as 15 to be taking the lead on removing content from an encyclopedia. I am saddened but unsurprised to see that the response to that complaint is determined offence-taking.

There is plenty of documentation on the structural and institutional barriers which African Americans face when trying to tell their story. An older person might have more awareness of this, and understand where the complaint is coming from, but there is no sign of any such awareness in wizzito. Instead, when faced with African American people having difficulties in telling their story, wizzito and a few others are trying to make the white guys the victims in a dispute about how to tell African American history. That is a very bad place to be.

I stress that I am not suggesting that wizzito is racist. My point is more subtle: that wizzito is unaware of how actions which wizito perceives to be reasonable look very different to people who have spent a lifetime on the receiving end of often-violent prejudice and pervasive discrimination. It feeds into the longer experience of discrimination and invisible barriers, and some of the people who have been on the receiving end of that can be blunt in how they express themselves.

African Americans are woefully under-represented on wikipedia, and African American history is under-represented in our articles. That is a systemic failure of WP:NPOV. This attempt to remedy it has not gone at all well for anyone involved, and we need to do a lot better. But if the takeaway from this is that nasty black people monstered poor white person, then we will have inverted the societal reality and erected even higher barriers to African American participation on en.wp.

What I would like to see coming out of this is for all the editors involved to collaborate on writing encyclopedic articles on these topics. Both wizzito and Clark could learn a lot from that.

And more broadly, I contrast the pile-on to delete this article with the outcomes at AFD for the sports topics which attract the young white males who dominate wikipedia. The notability rules have been rigged by that dominant demographic to give an automatic free pass at AFD to hundreds of thousands of sports biogs which fail GNG, while subjecting topics such as African American women's activism to a much higher standard. This has gotten so extreme that my research found a few month ago that bout half of all biographies of people born since the 1930s were of sportspeople. That is a massive, systemic imbalance.

Wizzito did not create that double-standard, but I do hope that there is some way in which the community can reflect on how this double standard has created a form of structural discrimination which understandably infuriates people interested in the topics which face these structural barriers. The talk pages of WP:WikiProject Women in Red contain many many long discussions of how those barriers seriously impede their work. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:59, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

The 15-year-old has demonstrated more expertise in reliable sourcing than the freaking Ph.D. So maybe it's the professor that lacks maturity and who shouldn't be editing Wikipedia. The ageism shown in your comments is incredible. Schierbecker (talk) 04:14, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I fully agree regarding the NSPORTS issue but I think it is problematic to say that wizito should not be nominating articles like this for deletion when as far as we know his decision was the correct one. Further, there was no "determined offence-taking"; wizito was harassed (see the discussion at WP:EDUN) and we cannot blame the victim for their harassment, and we definitely cannot blame them for it on their basis of their ethnicity and gender. BilledMammal (talk) 04:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

"There is plenty of documentation on the structural and institutional barriers which African Americans face when trying to tell their story. An older person might have more awareness of this, and understand where the complaint is coming from" I find this a bit ironic. From all I've seen, heard and read, in the US at least, while perhaps the average 15 year old has less understanding of such things than the average 25 year old or 35 year old, I expect the average 55 year old actually has less understanding than the average 15 year old. Nil Einne (talk) 20:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I note that Mkibona herself has said on Twitter that she found the experience emotionally taxing. When the very person who started the chain of events and who is surrounded online by like-minded people on her side herself feels emotionally taxed, it is by her own definition harassment when her followers go after an editor who cares about WP guidelines and accuse them of racism of the sickest kind (and, in one case, even paedophilia). I note also that Mkibona has put out several tweets talking about her problems with Wikipedia's processes, but not a single one asking her followers to not harass or to stop harassing the editor. Indeed, in response to Mkibona's thread, BWR themselves plainly ignored V, N, and RS, and went after the editor, painting them as some sort of villain, and continued to be passive-aggressive in their tweets to Ian Ramjohn from WikiEd. W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 04:27, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I was astonished to read that you (User:Wizzito) went to twitter to try to explain what you were doing on Wikipedia. It would never occur to me to try to explain the workings of Wikipedia to people who aren't in it. "The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club." One would have to expect that they wouldn't understand what we are doing, why we are doing it, or how we are doing it. If all you got were nasty comments like the one linked to above, you must have been dealing with an exceptionally restrained and forgiving audience. And look, they even said you were bold -- how could you not be grateful for that? Bruce leverett (talk) 00:34, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I agree, Bruce. I have looked at all the tweets I can find in this storm, and I was surprised by the mildness of the snark. In the corners of Twitter where I follow mainstream European politics, the tone of discourse routinely includes a lot of stuff which is way more robust than this.

Wizzito's action in going to Twitter, identifying themself as a kid, and then trying to school actual academics was at best utterly crass. It's easy to see how some black people would regard that as deeply offensive and patronising, and I would expect a much much harsher response than about half-a-dozen snarky tweets.

I assume that Wizzito was in no way aware of how badly that would come across, and had no ill intent. But that lack of awareness is a function of the lack of experience at the core of this saga. If we did not have 15yos making decisions on deletion, we would not have one of those 15yos making a foolish foray onto twitter, foolishly outing themselves, and then kicking off a whole child protection drama over a small dose of mild snark. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:11, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Bruce leverett, you said I was astonished to read that you... went to twitter to try to explain what you were doing on Wikipedia. It would never occur to me to try to explain the workings of Wikipedia to people who aren't in it. I would agree, but that is not the situation here. Wizzito did not tweet to random people complaining about the deletion discussion, but to Mkibona, who was (and still is, apparently) a Wikipedia editor and WikiEd course instructor. While it is true that one would not expect a non-editor or a brand-new editor to understand what we are doing, why we are doing it, or how we are doing it, one would expect someone who has made editing Wikipedia a part of their profession to do so, especially at WikiEd where they make their students do it too. As for And look, they even said you were bold -- how could you not be grateful for that?... I sincerely hope that was in jest, and that you do not actually suggest our editors should be grateful for receiving personal attacks. W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 11:39, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the observation about "bold" was intended to be comic relief. Bruce leverett (talk) 14:21, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Ah, okay. Even so, it doesn't seem to be in good taste, but that's just my opinion. W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 14:41, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• The canvassing issue is minor, although it does demonstrate a failing of WikiEd that Mkibona was not aware of the guideline. However, Mkibona appears to justify and blame the victim for offwiki harassment, and that is not minor. BilledMammal (talk) 00:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• I'm assuming that Mkibona was initially acting in good faith, that her thread started out as an innocent request for help with finding better sources. But when she, in her own words, anticipated the reaction, why did she not preemptively stop the harassment? Or tell her followers to stop once the comments clearly got out of hand? Or apologise at all? Or am I missing those tweets? (There's a lot of deleted stuff in that thread)

Such actions by Mkibona and BWR are actively harmful to the very causes they seek to support. We desperately need editors like them, with their lived experiences, to help bridge Wikipedia's knowledge gaps. But when they refuse to understand core guidelines and, on top of that, disrupt our environment of collaboration, coverage of those communities suffers. Speaking from experience, it feels difficult and very lonely to edit in niche non-Anglosphere topics, doing one's best to stick to guidelines (amid all the lack of RS, spotty coverage, lack of verifiability and copyright violations) while everyone else around you in your niche keep getting reverted, blocked and banned for failing to understand those guidelines despite repeated attempts to teach and warn. W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 04:28, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• I posted my concerns about the structure of WikiEd and pinged both Ian and LiAnna to the noticeboard with regards to this incident several weeks ago, and got no response, not even an acknowledgement. You can read my concerns about the process at length there, but long story short I think good editing ethics and understanding of notability need to come before trying to fix content imbalances. It doesn't help that WikiEd and WMF basically encourage WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, or simply don't know to separate that from WP:CSB, which can be done if you know your stuff. I am not currently confident that if this event repeats in the future there will still be improvements or changes to WikiEd, simply more "Uh oh, well, what can you do?" -Indy beetle (talk) 05:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Responding to this comment: i think you have it entirely backwards. Notability is a thing in and of itself, what we have in AfD is a bunch of guidelines we use to assess it. It is entirely fair for a group - particularly composed of under-represented people - of editors to believe that a specific campaigning group for the recognition of a minority group are notable. It is entirely fair to believe that the editors are aware of that campaigning group and the impact within the minority group to an extent that the rest of us struggle to understand and which may not be obvious on a quick Google. None of those things make an article unsuitable for WP. One can, in my opinion, legitimately ask what else the WikiEd editors were expected to do: here is an organisation they feel is important to note, they've made an effort to source and reference it but have fallen short of notability guidelines that not only would it be unreasonable to expect them to know about, may even actually illustrate and exacerbate the exclusion that they are talking about in the first place! JMWt (talk) 07:52, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • @JMWt: I would direct you to my comment at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard for a fuller take on my views (unless that is what you take issue with, not just my comment here, I can't tell). I think we should give them (the student editors) a basis for understanding our notability guidelines before encouraging them to write Wikipedia articles. That way, the sources they provide when they write the article are obvious so the AfD discussion, should it crop up, is not so bitter. AfD is not meant for quality control, but it's much harder to delete articles if SIGCOV in RS is demonstrated up front. That is an ethic that has to be emphasized up front. But what can you expect from people who didn't really volunteer to spend weeks observing how Wikipedia works and writing encyclopedia articles (a strange hobby of ours), they just signed up for a class and were given an assignment telling them to do it for a grade without the necessary orientation. If the best Wiki-Ed can do is yell "Fight racism! Edit Wikipedia!" then toss a book of guidance at the instructor and duck out the door, we might as well abolish the program. And, realistically, I'm afraid Wiki-Ed does not have the oversight capacity to do much more than that. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:14, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
      • I don't know if I can be bothered to process and then discuss here your views on WikiEd, which at best seems like a tangent to the main topic of importance. I hear what you appear to be saying here about editing for class credit but personally I think that's probably of minor importance (outside of things like medical articles, where there are other processes and monitoring to ensure accuracy etc). Personally, I think more editors with more perspectives and knowledge about issues the rest of us are unaware of are a good thing. In the main, I think articles should only be deleted for extremely good reasons (of which I don't think being part of a class assignment is enough in itself) and that there is way, way too much gatekeeping going on in AfD discussions at times.JMWt (talk) 08:28, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
        • Personally, I think more editors with more perspectives and knowledge about issues the rest of us are unaware of are a good thing. I wholeheartedly agree, I just think that the message will never be found if the people with the other perspectives are dragged in by an externality (class assignment), fundamentally don't know how to edit properly, and aren't properly guided. I'm not at AfD often enough to feel super qualified commenting on generic trends of gatekeeping there, though I am admittedly probably more of a "deletionist". -Indy beetle (talk) 08:40, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
          • Take it from someone who has spent way too much time in AfD discussions that there are many ways that even seasoned editors can fall foul of the notability guidelines and that it is entirely unreasonable to expect anyone to have a full understanding of the "proper" way to determine notability. Particularly when the trends of AfD are like shifting sands depending on who is paying attention at any given moment. JMWt (talk) 08:46, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

            @JMWt Definitely. But there are some things that are very easy. For example: book articles. Read an academic book. Write a summary. Grab some reviews to keep AfD away. Students (should) already know how to do this to a reasonable degree of success. You can also easily cut off a lot of non-notable topics by telling students something like "don't write about an organization that was founded in the last five years" or "don't write about someone early in their career". Does wikipedia have some articles on topics in those categories? Of course. Will students be significantly less likely to fall afoul of notability policies if they avoid them? Yes. -- asilvering (talk) 23:41, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

      • @Indy beetle: If the best Wiki-Ed can do is yell "Fight racism! Edit Wikipedia!" then toss a book of guidance at the instructor and duck out the door, we might as well abolish the program. And, realistically, I'm afraid Wiki-Ed does not have the oversight capacity to do much more than that. Per my comment above, we have a lot more oversight capacity than that. And, of course, we do nothing like yell "Fight racism! Edit Wikipedia!. We spend far more time saying "improve species articles!" Guettarda (talk) 18:00, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
        • @Guettarda: So what went wrong then, and how can we and Wiki-Ed try to avoid it in the future? Would you consider this an exceptional case (I know most Wiki-Ed courses don't result in this much drama and chaos, but the overall results seem decisively mixed). -Indy beetle (talk) 22:29, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
          • @Indy beetle: So that's the thing - I don't really think the results are mixed. I'd characterise them as "mostly positive". I mean, granted, it's a bit of a challenge to decide on what basely to compare them with (and I think it would be bad form to go pick out a lot of other programmes that are doing valuable work and say "we're doing better than you?") I don't expect you to just take my word on it, and I'll try to put together something concrete to support what I'm saying as soon as I have the time. I'm a Wikipedian first, a Wiki Education staffer second. If I didn't think this was a positive for Wikipedia, I would have found another job.
          • How do we avoid it in the future? There were problems specific to this class. The ratchet feminism article was declared non-notable and redirected despite the fact that a few seconds on Google Scholar made it clear that there was a fair bit of scholarship on the topic. That's the kind of thing that would have been an easy fix I was editing myself. But it got worse because the instructor got involved directly - by her own words, she felt guilty because she had brought her students into an environment where they felt harassed, and felt a responsibility to shield them. (And honestly, I think some of what they experienced was BITEy.) [An aside: a lot of people complain about instructors not engaging with the community, but the worst incidents seem to happen when they do engage. While some instructors engage very productively with the community, there are a lot of times when things go better if we act as a go-between, translating messages full of references to policies and TLAs.] So yeah, part of the problem was me. Since the course was over, I thought it could wait a while, and I told the instructor I would come back to the ratchet feminism article once things quieted down. I was bothered by that one because it was being declared "non notable" by people despite the fact that a few seconds on Google Scholar made it clear that there was a fair bit of scholarship on the topic. I also said that I wasn't sure what to do with the BWR article, because it's almost impossible to figure out if this is a notable topic when the name is also a generic phrase. (This is probably what prompted her to ask for help with sources on Twitter in the first place.)
          • This Fall, it really became apparent to me that we were running into new problems with students. It could be related to pandemic stress, or remote learning, or a changing culture among students...I don't know. But I was planning to make concrete changes in the way we do things, in the way I do things, even before this incident reached Twitter. An unusual number of students were moving their sandboxes to mainspace after they added their contributions to existing articles in mainspace. (As an aside, the vast majority of students contribute to existing articles.) Around November I started watching the "new user moving page out of userspace" tag as a way to catch these sorts of things (I don't know why I never thought to watch that before). At some point I asked Sage to build functionality into the Dashboard to send me a notification when things like this happened. Since this incident began with student work being moved to mainspace that wasn't ready, I think this would help in the future. I can't call it a response to this incident, but it is something that should help.
          • The first thing we did was to meet with the instructor, to try to understand what happened from her perspective. Some things are specific to this class, and probably won't help avoid future incidents. Some things apply to more situations. We've revamped some of the ways in which we're going to support classes working on a certain intersection of topic areas.
          • The second thing we did was to change the wording in the leading questions we pose in the bibliography assignment. It's easy to tell people "use good sources (like these ones)", but an awful lot of people can't tell a bad source from a good one (which is why we have the problem we have with misinfo). But when you ask someone "what makes this source reliable" and you provide them with clues to look for, they do better. Hopefully these changes help. We're also looking into ways to monitor student sandboxes for hits against User:Headbomb/unreliable.js. That isn't going to catch everything, but it should help us head off a certain subset of poor sources.
          • There's also the issue of how we communicate with instructors and students. The longer you leave problems unresolved, the worse they get. Convincing students to approach us first, when they encounter problems, gives us the best chance of a good outcome. But people (students and instructors) tend to want to figure things out on their own instead of "bothering people". That's how humans work, I suppose. Getting past this - making students feel like they can ask me questions, making instructors feel comfortable asking Helaine or me questions - is important. Making instructors aware of what went wrong in a previous class is also important. Helaine did office hours last term, and an introductory session. I hope to show up to more of these.
          • The last big "drama and chaos" was five years ago, iirc. After that we changed things - we did more to limit class sizes we would support, we did more to ensure that the instructors or TAs working directly with the students did the instructor orientation, and were in directly contact with Helaine. We haven't had anything of that magnitude since.
          • You'll note I haven't said anything about telling instructors not to post to Twitter, and I'm definitely not planning to tell Black academics that they can't participate in Wikipedia. For starters, just because someone works with us doesn't mean they surrender their right to participate in their peer community. It wouldn't work if we asked them, and it would be unethical to ask. So while this is a cautionary tale, the post to Twitter was only the icing on the cake. Guettarda (talk) 00:21, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
• What bothers me about this incident, and much of the discussion above, is the failure to appreciate that there is in and of itself systematic bias when we look for sources relating to excluded groups. So we have the frustrations of that minority group who feel like things they hold as being important are held to an unfair standard at AfD.

Second, I think there are some who have a strict, rules-based attitude to the notability guidelines which can sometimes get backs up, to the extent that it can feel like a small number of editors are ganging up on another group to get content removed in a deliberate and systematic way that underlines the unwelcome attitude that in general keeps away that minority and/or unrepresented group from en.wp. One needs to have a thick skin to rewrite and recreate articles that have been to AfD, my guess is that many who feel like they have been bruised by the process never bother.

JMWt (talk) 06:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• • This would be less of a problem if we had a way to better ensure that novice Wiki-Ed course editors were familiar with our processes. It would also be less of a problem if organizations such as Black Women Radicals didn't try to hijack the situation for self-promotion (apparently nobody bothered to mention WP:COI during the orientation process). It is a true shame this how things turned out; Howard University probably has a wonderful library on minority people/subjects that aren't covered on Wikipedia, and it seems those resources were never fully brought to bear. The problem is that Wiki-Ed courses seem to welcome activist editing (bound to piss off plenty of the regs here) but has no effective ways on keeping tabs on student editors for quality control. Meanwhile half of the students involved probably just want to get an A on their assignment without turning it into an extensive research affair and will rush about using poor sources to write an article for a topic they chose at random, only to be horrified that its been deleted and are now fearful they'll fail their course. The system seems built to cause agony for everyone. Most of what I write would fall under countering systemic bias topics, but that does not make me blind to the serious issues with carrying on like this. -Indy beetle (talk) 07:03, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • I think there's an argument that the AfD has failed in this situation - to the extent that I'm tempted to rewrite the article and have a more informed AfD debate myself. I'm not involved in this organisation, I knew nothing at all about it before seeing it here and cannot now see how the original WP article was written. But I think the AfD 'warriors' need to have a better debate than simply discarding an article because they can't effectively use Google. The fact is that the group in question has had research funding from a third party foundation and is named as an on-topic source in several major media outlets. If I spent a bit more time I think it may well be possible to make a much better argument for 'keep' at a informed AfD. For me this is a much deeper issue about systematic bias within AfD itself than a rather circular discussion about who might have created the article and for what purpose - which, I'd note, is not really a major point of discussion on 99% of WP articles. Generally speaking, a small group of WP editors should not unilaterally be able to decide that an organisation which clearly a) exists and b) is considered notable (in the most literal sense) by major media outlets should be considered non-notable however the WP page currently looks. That's it up and down. JMWt (talk) 07:36, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• My two cents on this: While the canvasser's behavior was unacceptable (which may warrant an indef block for MEAT and CANVASS), the AfD nominator was not very wise in replying to the comment. They should've reported this to admins in an appropriate manner. Instead, they replied and even disclosed their age, causing harassment and other safety issues.

Regarding my thoughts on the canvasser, I pretty much agree with Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI and BilledMammal that the canvasser was pretty much complicit (and even supportive) of the harassment and abuse of the victim. Firestar464 (talk) 06:34, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 2

• I hate to say, but what if this associate professor was a Right-wing activist who was overseeing their students creation of articles for small time Candace Owens type figures and that during a deletion discussion, that professor appeared to canvass ideological allies who went on to harass the nominating editor? Seems like there would be quite a different conversation going on, which is in my view the severe problem right now. These gaps that are being created in deference to perceived marginalized groups can be exploited by groups who may have beliefs quite the opposite of the people being differed to. Wikipedia should never be taught to fist time users as a place to push a certain ideology. There are tens of thousands of red linked plant species that would be a far more appropriate creation project for first time student editors. Thriley (talk) 08:01, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Riiiight. You are seriously suggesting that instead of trying to improve this encyclopedia's coverage of issues relating to visibility of black people, student editors should direct their efforts to plant species. JMWt (talk) 08:09, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • I am suggesting that first time editors should first learn the foundational rules of the encyclopedia before anything else. Making a simple article for a species of grass would be helpful. Thriley (talk) 08:14, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
      • If you lack the self-awareness to see the problem with that suggestion, in this context, I can't help you. JMWt (talk) 08:20, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
        • I am not looking for help! Thank you, Thriley (talk) 08:24, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
          • No, I see that. JMWt (talk) 08:29, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

    JMWt, I think you're jumping to coclusions there. I do not see an "instead of" argument in Thriley's message, but rather a "before" one. Do you not think it is a good idea for students who are new to editing and the policies around it to first create some simpler articles before delving into complex ones? (WikiEd as an organisation itself apparently encourages that, scroll up to read Guettarda's long reply to Indy beetle) W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 11:48, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

  • I don't think I fully agree with the premise, though I can imagine that if the Heritage Foundation or some other uber-conservative group launched an edit-a-thon with as much political inflection as these things tend to attract there would be hardly any sympathy for those aggrieved. If the editor who was attacked on Twitter was in fact of a racial minority minority group and was mocked by a racial majority, I'd doubt we'd see any excuses on behalf of the aggressors from Wiki-Ed or the community. Bigotry is bad. Systemic biases are bad. Edit-warring is bad. Editing from an ideological point of view is bad. Knowing how Wikipedia works is good. These can and should all be understood in tandem by everybody with regards to everybody. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:34, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • Yes, that’s more the point I was inarticulately trying to make. Thriley (talk) 08:36, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • Nobody disagrees with this. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:17, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • How sad that someone says "hey, POC, come write about POC and the things most relevant to you" and here on Wikipedia that bunch of people will always frame that as "pushing an ideology". Yep, if you're from an underrepresented community just here to write about things that are important to you, you're by default trying to "right great wrongs". edit: added a link to clarify common wikijargon. When a Wikipedian accuses someone of "righting great wrongs" they mean it in a bad way. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:17, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • Indeed, and one of those "great wrongs" is well illustrated here when one editor tells another that not only should they not be creating articles on issues they find important, but that instead they should be helping the wider en.wiki community create articles on something entirely different - and which require specialist skills and knowledge in Botany. JMWt (talk) 16:46, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
      • Botany? That's actually where my PhD is :D Guettarda (talk) 18:19, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

      JMWt, as someone who has created several articles about newly found species, I can assure you that writing articles about them does not involve any specialist skills or higher-than-middle-school knowledge of botany (or zoology... or taxonomy :-)) W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 11:50, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

    • I understand the point you're getting at, but I think it's pretty obvious that political topics are not a great place for new editors to start out, especially if they're being guided in their journey by someone who isn't themselves familiar with processes on the project. This doesn't mean that the topics are unimportant. Clearly, they are very important, which is why people spend hundreds of hours arguing about them here. New editors deserve to be treated better than being thrown into the deep end of ongoing, decades-long Wikipedia drama with no explanation. If it's really that important to the program that a student article be written on a contentious topic and written as a new article and not an edit to an existing one, the professors and TAs (who are getting paid for this) should be copy-editing them and reviewing them before submission to make sure they're viable articles. jp×g 20:14, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
      • But people don't spend nearly enough time editing about these topics. I've been coming to this website almost every day for the last 17+ years. And every day I have to contend with articles full of casual racism, with articles that ridicule my culture and question my humanity. We keep saying "we need to address underrepresented topics" but we aren't doing it. FFS, I get comments in a GAR which ask me to add quotation marks, if not, please remove (as OR and POV) to a (sourced and contextualised) statement in an article that mentions that enslaved people were, in fact, humans with their own cognitive abilities. Our current editor base has shown itself unable to address the casual white supremacy in our articles. According to WMF's survey of editors, less than 1% of our editors in the US are Black or African American. My experience talking to Black editors and former editors makes it clear to me that the reason for this has little to do with their interest in contributing, and lots to do with the overall atmosphere here. But you're saying that if people want to contribute to this, they need to meet standards that we don't ask of any other editors? Guettarda (talk) 20:46, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

        Tsk tsk, @Guettarda. You'll get yourself monstered by the people who deplore any discussion of this.

        All you are allowed to say is that the African Americans were wromg. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:58, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

        • I do entirely disagree with the premise that was offered above that people should be discouraged from writing about topics relevant to them (as long as COI isn't breached and people have demonstrated their ability to be neutral). That, for example, is largely how we got so many great articles and photos of places in the Western world, because the editors who were from there decided to contribute in that way. I am excited that Wikipedia activity is picking up in new places, such as West and Southern Africa. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:37, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

      • I understand the point you're getting at, but I think it's pretty obvious that political topics are not a great place for new editors to start out This, to me, is illustrative of the whole problem. There are ongoing edit battles and wars on en.wp, but a) they are not always on "political topics" and b) Black American marxist thought does not seem to be obviously an area that new editors should avoid - and only became a controversial topic when someone decided to AfD and critique stubs relating to a WikiEd class. I'm not a doyen of the botany pages on WP, but who is to say that there are not swirling controversies there that a new editor could get entangled with? The fact is that for some on wikipedia, pages which document black political action are deemed by some controversial in a way that many others are not. I repeat; there was nothing objectively controversial about the topic that this class was working on, the edits were not universally of a high standard but were not universally terrible and there was no obvious reason why the stubs created couldn't have continued for a very long time. The fact that we have to grapple with is why their work was undone so soon after it was completed. If that's not an example of systematic bias (which, to be clear, is exactly what the Black Women Radical organisation is campaigning to highlight - if it was entirely accidental then WP has ironically given them further stories about how they are shut out of cultural discourse and held to a higher standard than others) then I don't know what is. JMWt (talk) 07:28, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
        • There's a long list of topic areas where the Arbitration Committee has officially instituted discretionary sanctions on all editors. These include "all edits about, and all pages related to post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people, broadly construed" and "all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related disputes or controversies or in people associated with them". "American politics" sanctions have existed since 2014, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say that it "only became a controversial topic" when an AfD nomination was made in November 2021. And AP2 is almost always the most active area of arbitration enforcement; per the chart I made for the November arbitration report, it made up 143 out of 809 enforcement actions in the year 2021 up to that point. I'm also not sure what you mean when you say the student editors are being "held to a higher standard than others" -- every editor is subject to these sanctions, and every editor is held to higher standards of collegiality in these topic areas than in (for example) botany or machine learning. The fact of the matter is that editing (or writing) articles about hot-button political issues exposes you to a bunch of drama, and this has been the case for a long time. I don't understand how student editors could be shielded from this if we're actually treating them like normal editors, because normal editors get thrown on their asses and have their articles deleted in this topic area constantly. jp×g 08:21, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
          • I'm sorry, are you seriously trying to tell me that young and new editors should be discouraged from editing or starting new pages on black radical politics because of a superseded and very general Arbitration case from 2015 about 'American Politics' and a 2021 Arbitration case which concluded

            "Standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, any gender-related dispute or controversy and associated people.

            . These are not applicable to this situation - what is it that you think you are saying? Black radical politics are uniquely important and controversial that students shouldn't be allowed to start pages on the topic? JMWt (talk) 08:55, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
            • I am not seeing where AP2 has been superseded. There was a motion in January 2021 changing the cutoff from 1932 to 1992 -- the sanctions very much remain in effect. What I'm saying is that I do not understand what changes you'd prefer be made on Wikipedia, or what about the current state of affairs you dislike. You've said that you don't want student editors to be "discouraged" from editing about political topics, but you've also said that they should be treated the same as everyone else. But everyone else is subject to AP2/GENSEX sanctions. For that matter, everyone else is also subject to sanctions on the Liancourt Rocks. If I were teaching a college class about geography, students had to pick a topic for a new Wikipedia article, and one of them picked the Liancourt Rocks, what should I do? Tell them nothing, and just let them get BTFO when there's a bunch of drama? jp×g 09:29, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
              • We appear to be talking past each other - I don't believe there is any reason to sanction or restrict anyone from starting or editing pages on black radical politics and I don't believe that your lawyering efforts to bring in unrelated sanctions are relevant. These things exist, they're not relevant to this topic. Bringing them into this discussion is another example of systematic bias. JMWt (talk) 09:35, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
                • I'm not sure if you read the pages I linked or not -- an ArbCom discretionary sanction does not mean nobody's allowed to create or edit pages in a topic area. It means that people who do so are expected to adhere to policies and guidelines more strictly than in other topic areas. Surely, "radical politics" at an organization founded in America in 2018 falls under the topic of "post-1992 American politics". jp×g 09:52, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It is only 'american politics' in the sense that almost everything could be considered American politics. It only becomes contentious when people start having heated edit wars about the contents: in the situation described there is no dispute about the facts on the deleted page whatsoever. Black Women Radicals as an organisation exists, their activities are well-known and can be described. There's absolutely nothing for which the guidelines you erroneously link to are in any sense relevant. JMWt (talk) 09:56, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I guess I don't know how to explain to you what I am trying to say here. jp×g 11:00, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• • • • I have written a fair amount of content about Black American Marxism, and it is true that Black history and culture topics are often scrutinised excessively because of some unconscious racism and often quite conscious racism. This, however, is simply not an example. This narrative falls apart not because there isn't racism and systemic bias, but because it just doesn't fit the situation. WP:N is the reason the article was nominated for deletion. Massively overstretched and overworked Wikipedians doing a thankless job (that can get them harassed on Twitter and attacked by WikiEd paid staff and other Wikipedians) is the reason that the ideal BEFORE does not always happen. There is no control variable in this situation because you've not seen how similar articles on non-Black organisations are treated.

        JPxG has explained quite patiently about AP2 but you have chosen not to listen. — Bilorv (talk) 17:42, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

        @Bilorv: Why is it that only white people are acceptable arbiters of what racism is? Why is the judgement of the rest of us never good enough? Based on my experience living more than half my life as a non-white person in the US and Canada, I would say that the edit summary here which described the topic as OR content fork with insurmountable issues and no indication of independent notability for stand-alone article suggests that a the very least implicit bias comes into place here. And, can you explain what you mean by attacked by WikiEd paid staff? I assume you're talking about me here (it's obviously not LiAnna, and I don't believe anyone else has weighed in). If I did anything that can be construed as attacking someone, please let me know and I'll try to do better in the future. I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Guettarda (talk) 18:50, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

        No, I am referring to LiAnna, who caused considerable offense by describing a victim of harassment as merely having perceived harassment ("... multiple people feeling harassed"). I thought the majority of your comments here were insightful and important to the discussion, but you let yourself down with the inflammatory non sequitur Why is it that only white people are acceptable arbiters of what racism is? I see nothing out of the ordinary in the edit summary you link (I see such styles of writing everywhere across my watchlist, NPP work, AFC work etc. in all topic areas), but your views on the matter are just as important as mine. Either of our views, however, will be much better-informed than a non-Wikipedian's. — Bilorv (talk) 20:39, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

        LiAnna clarified the miswording of that particular comment immediately after Barkeep49 pointed it out. I was also following the incident closely as it unfolded on-wiki and on Twitter, and I can tell you that among Wiki Education staff, there was never any confusion about the fact that Wizzito was harassed on Twitter, nor any intention to minimize that.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:33, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

        @Bilorv: I don't see it as a non-sequitur at all. Despite the fact that Mikonia saw it this way, despite the fact that I've already raised the issue, you felt comfortable saying it just doesn't fit the situation. It doesn't matter that it wasn't just one edit summary, but a whole slow-motion car wreck. It doesn't matter that I've spent the last 17 years watching one Black editor after another flame out after a death of a thousand little cuts - each of them "nothing out of the ordinary", until suddenly an Angry Black Person™ emerges "out of nowhere".

        It's not a non-sequitur when it's a constant experience - you talk about your experience, and white people feel comfortable saying you're overreaching, that there's no racism here. Everyone gets the benefit of the doubt except us. I'm not saying I'm right and you're wrong. While it was inflammatory, that statement is consistent with my experience, and it seemed fitting here. Guettarda (talk) 21:49, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• Across the Wikimedia movement, "education" is understood in different ways. This may not be such a bad thing; but my experience is that it presents some problems. In the volunteer context, there is always a need to address both motivation/consciousness raising and know how/making what volunteers do comprehensible. A balance needs to be struck. I am actually not much of a fan of the WikiEd approach, but then I'm probably in a different part of the forest as far as education goes. This story suggests to me that WikiEd needs to take a look at the balance I mention. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:27, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• The initial response to the harassment was not ideal, but it is comforting to see the general support against it offered here, and so no need to add to what has been said on this topic. However, reading through the discussions, another point surrounding WikiEd struck me that I do not believe has been discussed. The statement by LiAnna (Wiki Ed) that "Wiki Education supports more than 300 instructors each term, and it's rare that we have an instructor as dedicated to engaging with the community as she is", if true, highlights a problematic situation. Engaging with the community is a core aspect of editing Wikipedia, for any editor. It is as important as understanding policies such as notability and COI. For an instructor, it is even more crucial, as they will likely be the interface for communication between the community and their class. It should be a core requirement, rather than something seen as effort above and beyond expectations. Any program which promotes editing here without an understanding of the editing community is going to run into issues again and again. CMD (talk) 15:28, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • This is just nonsense, in my opinion. There is no obligation on any editor to engage with the community here in precisely the form that you appear to want - and frankly, it often feels like a total waste of effort anyway when people seem more interested in destroying each other than improving the content of this encyclopedia. Engagement takes many forms, but if one is an instructor of a class of novice editors who are seeking to improve pages in an area which is dramatically underrepresented as a whole the priority may well not be to engage with people who - it might be perceived - only want to rain on the parade. The instructors cannot largely will never win a battle when there is well-versed opposition to the created pages from people who can quote the guidelines.

And anyway, the fact remains that systems exist. If a student creates pages that are total garbage either a) nobody notices because it doesn't matter or b) eventually it is edited or removed by the community as a whole. I don't believe in the main the WikiEd pages or edits are garbage, so I don't really understand why people here seem so keen on being critical. As always, if you don't like the pages that they produce, then either focus on another area or improve them yourself.JMWt (talk) 17:00, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• • • I am not sure what the "precisely the form that you appear to want" refers to here, as I did not specify any precise ways that editors are expected to engage. However, to the general point, Wikipedia operates by consensus, which by definition requires engagement. The structure of Wikipedia, with its talk pages, edit summaries, and community discussions, is built around this principle. An editor who does not engage will likely find their editing less successful than otherwise. CMD (talk) 18:29, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
      • Nobody, individually, is forced to engage at all. Of course, if they don't things are likely to happen that they don't like. But it is you here who seem to be saying that it is of critical importance that instructors engage with the community, and if you don't mean engagement with discussion about the guidelines and debate about edits on talkpages, what do you mean? Consensus clearly doesn't mean that absolutely every editor engages in any of the ways you want them to. JMWt (talk) 18:36, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
        • In general, nobody is forced to engage as nobody is forced to edit. However, this seems to be a situation where some, ie. the students, are forced to edit, given it is part of coursework. It is incumbent on those in a position of responsibility over such requirements to be able to provide reasonable support and facilitation. As to your point about consensus, I do not understand what it might mean if it does not include guidelines and discussions over editing. Those are the methods through which Wikipedia consensus is developed. CMD (talk) 05:29, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
      • If you don't engage you basically lose the right to revert others' edits or contest things you disagree with. Refusal to communicate is how many an ANI ban have occurred. If no one questions your work obviously you don't need to engage with anything. But if one is going to say to a student editor that they're not obligated to communicate with us, then we are just as much not obligated to try to understand them. That's a recipe for disaster. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:26, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • This has always been one of my biggest issues with WikiEd since looking into it after having to clean up a lot of their 'work'. Not only do most teachers never actually log in and monitor their students, the WikiEd instructions, last I read them, actively encourage the students to not engage with other editors - they have special sandboxes and are told to message each other, review each other, etc. Some have been scared and wondered how editors not from their class managed to leave them a message, and I don't know if some of them think they are editing a private Wikipedia or whatever, but it causes massive conflicts because many of them think their edits are indestructible even though they haven't been through all the training modules they need to (because teachers can't be bothered). Very little work actually gets done because of this, but I know more edits are taken to fix or delete it all. I also do not think it, except in one exceptional case I have seen, ever achieves the goal of getting more students into editing Wikipedia, not least because they are thrust into an editing bubble and don't get involved in the community. There are better ways to encourage participation, like hosting more edit-athons at universities, but having them add three sentences to an article for an easy A is not it. They do it for the real grade. Kingsif (talk) 21:56, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 3

• I just want to leave a general note about the privacy of Twitter accounts on Wikipedia and how it applies here. In general, it is a violation of Wikipedia policy to post another editor's personal information on Wikipedia, unless that person has voluntarily posted their own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia: see WP:OUTING. An editor's Twitter account (or other social media account) is considered personal information. In such cases, the Twitter links could be suppressed per the oversight policy. In this case, it appears that the various parties involved in this incident have indeed previously self-disclosed their Twitter accounts at some point, so I would not suppress anything here. Nevertheless, I want to be clear that this article should not set a precedent for linking to the Twitter accounts of any Wikipedia editor in the future. If you believe that another Wikipedia editor is harassing you using an account on another website (e.g. Twitter), but you're not sure whether you would be allowed to post links to those off-wiki accounts, I would encourage you to first contact the Arbitration Committee by email (either by using Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee or by directly emailing arbcom-enwikimedia.org). Part of their responsibilities is responding to incidents where privacy precludes public discussion, and off-wiki harassment is a prime example. Mz7 (talk) 18:47, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• Just another reason WikiEd should be scrapped; we have seen student editors be upset but gracious at their poor efforts (led by poor instructors) being deleted before, but for an actual course convener to go to social media and lead first a canvassing and then harassment campaign is almost inconceivable. That tells me that the course convener thinks of Wikipedia as their tool and any of its processes as hurdles, rather than wanting to edit Wikipedia as (and for the benefit of) Wikipedia. Not that I have really seen any WikiEd course benefit Wikipedia - even decent new articles require hefty cleanup, but I am always more concerned about the kids whose courses ask them to review existing articles and them suddenly thinking they have divine authority over a 10yo FA. Burn it, burn it all before it gets worse. Kingsif (talk) 21:37, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Also, permaban the course convener. Blaming the editor for 'getting themselves harassed' because they tried to educate her after she deliberately riled up her followers against them is absolutely vile. Even if she felt frustrated, it is more than a minor lapse in judgement to rally twitter activism for things that are absolutely not their business and for which they can't even affect change - especially begging specific groups in order to form a mob mentality. That terrible teacher has undoubtedly done more to harm Wikipedia's reputation among those minority groups than letting a bad article be deleted would, too. Kudos that a teacher actually stuck around for their course, as most are useless, but I am almost glad if they would all treat Wikipedia like their playground. Kingsif (talk) 21:47, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

    @Kingsif: please link to the tweet(s) or other posts in which you claim the course convenor deliberately riled up her followers against them (i.e. against wizzito).

    I have not seen any such posts or tweets, but am happy to look at whatever evidence you can present. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:37, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• @BrownHairedGirl: Er, it is the first one linked and quoted in the special report; saying "come to Wikipedia because they're not listening to me", when referring to the AfD that was started by the user and leaving out any reference to Wikipedia policy, is deliberately misleading people so that they go on a warpath against someone innocent, whether they understand that's what they're doing or not. In comments above I can see you have been consistently trying to deny the convener and her twitter army have done anything wrong, so I would question your judgment, too. Kingsif (talk) 01:18, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  @Kingsif: the special report does not contain any quote of the words "come to Wikipedia because they're not listening to me". If you want to invent a quote by putting quote marks around a phrase which is not present in the original, please have the decency to refrain from casting any aspersions on anyone else's judgement.

  So I ask again: please link to the tweet(s) or other posts in which you claim the course convenor deliberately riled up her followers against them (i.e. against wizzito).

  At this stage it looks like you prefer fabrication to verifiable evidence. However, I am still open to evidence in support of your extreme claim -- if you choose to actually provide it, and if you are willing and able to distinguish between a) the words written by someone else, and b) your interpretation of those words.

  I also note that you appear not to understand the word "deliberately". Merriam Webster defines it as "with full awareness of what one is doing : in a way that is intended or planned". wikt:Deliberately sys "Done on purpose; intentional". However you write that they were "deliberately misleading people so that they go on a warpath against someone innocent, whether they understand that's what they're doing or not". That is self-contradictory: if they were not aware of doing that, they were by definition not doing it with intent and not doing it on purpose, so they were not deliberately doing it.

  That's the problem with this sort of discussion on Wikipedia. There is always a risk of the discussion being disrupted (as this one has) by someone such as Kingsif who cannot or will not i) quote accurately; b) distinguish between words written and their interpretation of those words; iii) cannot use simple dictionary terms without contradicting themselves ... and yet who is ready to rudely disparage the judgement of others. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 03:22, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• @BrownHairedGirl: As mentioned, the first quote from the special report: During the [AfD] nomination, Clark posted on Twitter [linked] "I don't know where the Black (& allies) nerds are, but I really need support in editing & saving" the article - that is just as I described it, no? It's being deliberately obtuse to take my offhand summary extremely literally so you can continue to hound someone. Stand down, it seems like you have hijacked this discussion to try to defend the indefensible actions of the convener, repeat policy breaking and going to social media when they don't get their way, and to rag on everyone who criticizes them. The tweet was a deliberate act, the omission of context and implication of racism and unfairness was a deliberate act - the tweet and its intentions were deliberate even if they didn't understand how far it would go - don't try to school me. Writing three paragraphs with no other content or purpose than effectively calling me a disruptive idiot breaks WP:CIVIL, so I suggest you don't engage further, BHG. Kingsif (talk) 03:29, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  @Kingsif: wow!!!!

  Let's unpick that.

  In your post of 01:18, you wrote:

  the first one linked and quoted in the special report; saying "come to Wikipedia because they're not listening to me", when

  Now at 03:29 you write

  m the special report: During the [AfD] nomination, Clark posted on Twitter [linked] "I don't know where the Black (& allies) nerds are, but I really need support in editing & saving"

  Each time you put the words in quote marks, indicating that the words are taken verbatim from the original.

  But those two quotes are completely different. Your 01:18 quite is a complete fake: despite being quote marks, it is not a quote. It is your interpretation of what was written, but you do not acknowledge it as your interpretation, you present it as a quote.

  I expect that a civil editor would apologise for that misrepresentation, and apologise for your comments about my judgement based on your misrepresentation of the source. But instead of having the basic decency to apologise for your own misconduct, you chose to :

  1. falsely accuse me of having hijacked this discussion to try to defend the indefensible actions of the convener. I have not "hijacked" anything, and believe that you and some others had radically misunderstood (and/or misrepresented) the actions of the convener.
  2. still provide precisely zero evidence in support of your 21:47 claim that the course convenor deliberately riled up her followers against them. In her actual words, she asked others to edit the article, and did not express any antagonism.
  3. Post a templated warning[6] on my talk page accusing me of a personal attack and civility violation for having objected to your personal attack on me and for dissecting your misrepresentations and misquoting.

  Shame on you. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:41, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• As a separate note, I have yet to see anyone link the Education noticeboard discussion and the convener's disgusting victim-blaming there, where she says the twitter harassment wasn't real and the perpetrators she rallied aren't in the wrong because they have 'been silenced before', saying that the harassed user is trying to shift the narrative and shouldn't have started a twitter discussion (which they didn't) if they didn't want to be harassed (which should never be an inevitability of trying to engage). Not a user I would want to engage with, and their activist goals aren't for Wikipedia. Kingsif (talk) 01:40, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• I've seen really good stuff come out of WikiEd. One recent article is easily GA. It is an economic history topic, not controversial, fairly technical and obscure. New editors tend to want to do controversial 'important' things and get into trouble because those are the hardest topics. Instructors should discourage hot button controversial topics to help students succeed. -- GreenC 22:43, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  @GreenC WikiEdu students aren't new editors who want to do controversial things. They're students doing academic work to receive a grade. If your course is on a contemporary political issue of some kind, you don't really have a choice as a student to write about something that isn't controversial - or at least, not an obvious one. -- asilvering (talk) 00:41, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

  Then perhaps those courses shouldn't be invited to participate in the WikiEdu program. BilledMammal (talk) 00:43, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• The lack of ability to educate themselves on the basic principles of Wikipedia has left Mkibona indirectly responsible for the vile harassment of a child more mature than an associate professor. I am a feminist and an anti-racist. Both of these values are related to my belief in empathy and community self-governance. Some members of the Black Women Radicals have made clear their rejection of these values, building a bad reputation for what I can only assume to be an organisation with worthy principles and important goals.
  I am glad wizzito used the term "ageist" in their summary of the harassment they received, because it's an important word. On Wikipedia, we do (or should) not care how old a person is, only how mature they are—what they are capable of contributing (as an editor) and what value we can provide to them (as a reader). The world would be a better place were this value universal. Those who waste their precious time on Twitter rather than contributing to the largest educational resource in the world, may feel proud about causing harm to a child, but at the end of the day it is the mature young adult who is doing something valuable with their time.
  The discussion above about "righting great wrongs" is a strange and unproductive one. Wikipedia has a systemic bias problem and the way to solve that is with dedicated editor attention and increasing our numbers of editors, but all of this must be done within Wikipedia's guiding principles. Sometimes you think something is notable but the community will disagree and it will be deleted. Tough. You need to respect the outcome.
  As for where WikiEd stands, I see its value, but it does not seem to me that it is very wise in its choice of article topics. There are a thousand books on Black history that have no article and pass WP:NBOOK#1, in a way that can quickly and easily be checked by an expert Wikipedian providing guidance. There are another thousand stubs on Black-related topics that demonstrate notability but need expansion. But WP:NORG is one of our most complicated SNGs, and creating an article one of our most difficult tasks, so why WikiEd would have any part in recommending or condoning the creation of borderline notable or non-notable organisation articles is beyond me. It has been my experience for a while now that the choice of articles is the #1 problem with WikiEd. — Bilorv (talk) 22:52, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  @Bilorv There are a lot of things about the culture on Wikipedia that are arcane, confusing, or even simply invisible until you walk into them headfirst. I don't think it's fair to just say "Tough", especially when the culture here at times becomes rules-for-rules'-sake about things. This AfD [7] still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. No one's harassing anyone. The project's guidelines are being followed. It really was not a borderline case. But to this day I cannot comprehend the lack of empathy shown there.

  On everything else, though... yes. Last term, I wrote to WikiEdu, as an undergraduate course instructor myself (I mention this because I like to think this gives me some idea about how to make teachers' lives easier), about WP:NBOOK. Stubs and WiR lists would be another great place to start. No response: fair enough. But watching WikiEdu editors commenting here as though they have no way to solve or even ameliorate this problem... well. I'm not looking forward to March. -- asilvering (talk) 00:34, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

  I am not a fan of how jargon-heavy and unintentionally hostile our dialect on Wikipedia is, nor how steep the technical and social learning curve is. Nonetheless, I expect a WikiEdu instructor who is encouraging students to create articles to be aware of basic norms around the area. I'll be specific: I'm not asking anyone to know how the community views posting on Twitter. I'm asking someone to be aware of where to find the pages Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and then consult them for more information when AfD is invoked.

  I would not even recommend WiR lists for WikiEdu (at least not Wikidata-based ones) because they may seem falsely authoritative on topics that are appropriate for Wikipedia, whereas many entries are non-notable. For intermediate and experienced editors, they are fantastic, and I've been inspired to make several articles from them. On the other hand, it is good that someone is trying to bring WP:NBOOK to WikiEdu's attention. — Bilorv (talk) 17:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• As an admin who primarily sees drafts on their way out of Wikipedia, I don't think that "student editors" have less skills than our average new editors and I dislike some of the generalizations I read above my own comment. And we have NO idea, absolutely none, of what goes on in the teaching about writing and editing on Wikipedia as none of us have been in the classroom or Zoom room, however the classes are conducted.

I will say that towards the end of every school term, I do run into some students who seem to think that their grade is dependent on getting their draft article out of their sandbox and into the main space of the project, which is almost always premature, but when I have brought it to the attention of WikiEd instructors, like Ian, they have always reached out to the student and moved the page back into User space, I have found them consistently helpful and considerate in guiding students and they make themselves incredibly accessible and available to them when they have questions. At times, when I have suspected a problem, I can see in the page log that the instructor has already addressed it.

As for harassment, as someone who was doxxed repeatedly during the Gamergate period, I sympathize with our young editor. Not only have I been doxxed but once I randomly criticized a TV show host on Twitter who ReTweeted my message and I saw all hell rain down on my account. It's no fun to be attacked. So I can empathize but also say that I think it was a bad decision to go on to social media, enter into a discussion where your actions are being criticized and you are clearly not wanted and try to correct the readers. It was naive to think your "feedback" would be welcome. I think it would be akin to going into a local sports bar and telling the occupants why their team sucks. And I think the decision to engage and to reveal personal information about oneself does show a casualness about social media communities that is a sign of youth. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:08, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

And we have NO idea, absolutely none, of what goes on in the teaching about writing and editing on Wikipedia - really? Ha. We can see the teaching modules, we can read all the advice essays, we interact with students who have been left floundering by their teachers. It's a shambles, it is, because as an editor (what does your adminship have to do with this) who has had to intervene on more than one occasion and follows most new courses as a precaution, I know that student editors may have the same skills as other new editors but they: are not integrated into a community to get feedback from experienced editors; at least some feel they have been given the authority to OWN articles they have been assigned; and, without wanting to stay on Wikipedia very long, they have no desire to improve. Their editing skills may not be technically worse, but the way they are introduced to Wikipedia is inherently non-collaborative, and I don't think there is any way for WikiEd to fix that. Having conveners that are either never on Wikipedia to help or who attack Wikipedia when their course isn't treated like god, is not helping its legitimacy at all. Kingsif (talk) 01:18, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• BrownHairedGirl noted (above) that the word harassment "is normally used to describe a pattern of hostile behaviour, rather than just individual acts of hostility." That is correct. For clarity and precision, let us instead say that at least one person on twitter assailed and vilified the 15-year-old editor. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 03:54, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  @Markworthen: thank you for agreeing that the charge of harassment is false. That is progress.

  However, I have not seen any post which I would describe as having assailed and vilified the 15-year-old editor. The posts which I have seen would be better described as snarky. They are way milder than stuff which I routinely see on twitter elsewhere.

  You seem to disagree, so please identify by link and/or verbatim quote the tweets which you believe assailed and vilified the 15-year-old editor. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:30, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  In the past week alone at least seven baseless ANI reports have been opened on Wizzito by different IP's, which appear to be related to this. I would consider that a "pattern of hostile behaviour". BilledMammal (talk) 04:42, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  @BilledMammal: I took a quick peek at the current ANI page and the most recent archive, but I found no such activity. Maybe my quick scans were too fast and I missed something ... but please help out by linking to these alleged seven baseless ANI reports. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 05:02, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  Some of them have been revdeled, but there are still a few accessible. BilledMammal (talk) 05:11, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks, @BilledMammal. Those 3 ANI posts seem to be all from roughly the same area of Colorado. The juvenile-style text looks identical, but that doesn't mean that the poster(s) were juvenile. However, there's nothing threatening in them, just childish gibberish which could have been written by an 8yo.

  Maybe the redacted posts were more serious. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:13, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

• We should evaluate an editor's ability and skill based on the quality of their contributions regardless of their age, ethnicity, gender identification, etc. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 03:59, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  @Markworthen: AIUI, the issue of Wizzito's age was brought into play by Wizzito.

  Having chosen to make their age a factor in a dispute, it seems to me that they have little grounds to complain when others treat that factor as a negative. BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:44, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  As an editor of the same age, no. I've seen immature adults and mature teens, some more mature than I am. And I've seen adult vandals more immature than the 15-year-old. I have to admit that I mess up sometimes while editing, but I don't think you can just say it's my age that causes that mistake. I have autism and I don't wanna play the autism card all the time but it can take me places. Instead of blaming my age and making it seem like I'm unworthy of editing, I would prefer a civil discussion, and being treated like other editors. I've been in many of these and it made me a better editor, as it's constructive criticism. Age may be a factor but bringing it up isn't gonna bring discussions anywhere. GeraldWL 19:00, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  Fair enough. I intended my comment as a general guideline. IMHO of course. ;^) Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 05:52, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  Ok, "assailed and vilified" is probably too strong. Looking back, I like how the Signpost article characterized it: Other users ... responded with hostility. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 05:58, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Having further researched aspects of this story, there are various other aspects that are troubling to me. First, the narrative would have us believe that there is a 15 year old editor that is so active on the WikiEd noticeboard that they are actively and regularly critiquing class edits in real time and is seeking to make dramatic changes soon after certain classes finish via AfD nominations. Second, this same 15 year old appears to be so engaged and enraged by something (exactly what, I'm not sure) that they go looking on twitter for further engagement relating to a deleted page. It isn't for me to make a judgement about the specific twitter engagement, but it is surely factual that if the AfD-nominator had not gone looking for a continued discussion on twitter then the likelihood is that nothing would have happened to them personally. In general, I think it is troubling when one self-identified young person hangs around on a noticeboard looking to critique the WP edits of other young people. Even if this isn't a direct effort to remove content that they disapprove of, it is surely not something particularly constructive for them to be doing. I'm not sure it is something particularly useful for anyone to be doing to be honest, and to me this is an important part of the whole affair. Finally, having reviewed the work of the class in question, I think on the whole the edits are solid, so I really can't see why this is said to be an example of WikiEd somehow failing beyond repair. Again, I fundamentally disagree that any of the pages should have been deleted by the AfD process. JMWt (talk) 07:03, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I personally don't find it very hard to believe that a 15-year-old could be an involved Wikipedia editor. I mean, you can look at their contributions if you really want to -- this information isn't being hidden from anyone. The deletion isn't entirely on the nominator, either: there were five other people (perhaps of ages you consider more acceptable) who !voted to delete as well, and an administrator who closed it. jp×g 08:48, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Believe what you like. If you think it is normal and healthy for a 15 year old to make many hundreds of daily edits, including admonishments and engagements on other editors talkpages, and for that person to get so far into the weeds on en.wp that they're a regular feature on a noticeboard and in taking pages to AfD, then you have a different definition of the words to me. JMWt (talk) 09:08, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, no, I think anybody who edits Wikipedia is a little fucked in the head, but it's not like adults are the only ones capable of being bonkers enough to edit an encyclopedia for fun. I'm a bizarre nerd now, and I was also a bizarre nerd when I was 15. jp×g 09:35, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

That may or may not be the case, that doesn't mean we have to support the behaviour when it appears to be contributing to the general sense that there is a form of systematic bias acting against editors who wish to include subjects that are deemed unworthy by a different 15 year old. I accept that the AfD process was followed but the result was wrong. JMWt (talk) 09:38, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

@JMWt: please retract this comment. As well as a personal attack against a specific individual, it also insinuates mental illness (that a person is "[not] normal [or] healthy") among a large number of people in our community, who are or have been child editors, including myself. — Bilorv (talk) 17:58, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I have to agree with Bilorv's request - JMWt, your comment is way off-base in a general sense, and uncivil (and just incorrect, on top) in an individual sense. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:37, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

JMWt your continued harrasment is dispicable and needs to stop. Aircorn (talk) 10:33, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• A related discussion was the recent application of a 16 year old to be an Administrator.[8]. They didn't make it, partly because of their age. But in the discussion somebody said that people as young as 13 have become Administrators. Changing the subject, what I think is incumbent upon Wikied is to ensure that teachers and student editors understand that they may get a lot of grief whatever they do on Wikipedia. That's part of being a Wikipedia editor. Teachers and student editors should also be warned that going off Wikipedia to complain will not likely win them much sympathy.Smallchief (talk) 18:21, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

This is a fucking shitshow. Therapyisgood (talk) 02:47, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• • Per a database query, currently the fifth-largest shitshow in the history of the Signpost after only three days of discussion. jp×g 08:18, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
• Far be it from me to avoid the fifth largest shitshow @Wizzito: I just thought I'd reaffirm that this definitely was harassment (while people can feel harassed without actually being so, this was not a case of thin-skin-itis), and that your on-wiki actions were perfectly correct, and that regardless of whether it was wise or not to post on-twitter, you had every right to do so. That @BrownHairedGirl: seems to be suggesting that your age alone is enough to rule you out of not merely something like adminship but content-work and core processes of Wikipedia is disturbing to me, and I repudiate that position to the strongest degree I can, let alone the position of one editor above saying that editors of your age shouldn't edit at all. Bonkers. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:37, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Finally, having reviewed the work of the class in question, I think on the whole the edits are solid, so I really can't see why this is said to be an example of WikiEd somehow failing beyond repair. Again, I fundamentally disagree that any of the pages should have been deleted by the AfD process.

Unless you were watching all the new pages/drafts as they came out of the class, your impression is very strongly biased towards the minority of contributions that are visible to non-admins. You could not have seen the copyvios or the content of the now-deleted articles, for example. Issues with the class were brought up much earlier here, apparently leading to a conversation between WikiEd and the instructor. Evidently the extra guidance was not enough to prevent the Twitter shitshow (why didn't the instructor reach out to the same WikiEd people who assisted her earlier and ask for help navigating the redirect/AfD processes? This avenue was clearly available).

As for whether any of the articles should've been deleted via AfD...why should WikiEd contributions be protected from normal collaborative editing? Like others said above, the edit summary about OR/claims to notability was entirely routine and appropriate, a standard AfD situated around WP:NORG was held, and a consensus was achieved that SIGCOV in multiple independent, secondary reliable sources could not be found to support GNG. It's not like no one looked; Ian directly asked BWR on Twitter to send him links to coverage they said they had garnered. I don't know if they ever followed up on that, but the article remains deleted so I would guess these sources were largely mere mentions rather than SIGCOV. JoelleJay (talk) 02:13, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@JoelleJay: I had forgotten about that. No, I never heard from anyone. Guettarda (talk) 03:50, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

• If we look at the U.S. population, 21 percent of us are between 10 and 24 years of age [9]. If we look at Wikipedia: Who writes Wikipedia we see that 27 percent of Wikipedia editors are 21 years old or younger. In other words, we have a larger percentage of young people editing Wikipedia than young people in the general population. That raises the question: why do we need WikiEd to attract younger people? We're already attracting a large number of youth as editors. The quality of the willing volunteer editor is probably better than that of the coerced, i.e. the student. Smallchief (talk)
  • @Smallchief: Good question. While the goal of Wiki Education is not to attract younger editors, if about 19% of "new active editors" are Wiki Education's students (per WMF's data), a large chunk of those editors are the people we bring. (Also a fair number of students are older than 21, especially non-traditional students and graduate students.)
    But student editors are different in another big way. According to WMF's survey data, only 0.5% of Wikipedia editors in the US are Black or African American, while 8% of our student editors are. Only 5.2% are Hispanic, while 12% of students are. And while 22% of Wikipedia contributors are women, 67% of our student editors are. So if you put the content they contribute aside, and simply looking at them in demographic terms, they bring something extremely important to Wikipedia - themselves. Guettarda (talk) 14:15, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

  I did not know that! Thank you for sharing those stats Guettarda. My experience with WikiEd students has generally been positive. They tend not to accept offers of help or reply to encouraging messages left on their talk pages, but there are understandable reasons why this might be the case. Most importantly though, as a group they write (edit) content that improves Wikipedia content. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 14:36, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

  They tend not to accept offers of help or reply to encouraging messages Part of the problem is that many don't see messages. I can't remember the stats, but shockingly many of them edit on mobile devices or tablets, and the mobile editor apparently doesn't show notifications (or didn't, as of Wikimania this summer). Guettarda (talk) 15:00, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

  @Guettarda: Perhaps a benefit then that as of late last year this is supposedly no longer the case on Androids (see euphemistically named Wikipedia:Mobile communication bugs). CMD (talk) 17:49, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Having read through all the above, and having viewed the deleted content, I'd like to simply observe that, personally, I see nothing special about the deleted article - it's typical of many that are deleted every week for being either non-notable or promotional, and which come from all corners of the globe and on all forms of interest or minority groups. It's unfortunate that behind the editing activities there lay, off-wiki, a small number of somewhat zealous people who were encouraged to help save that article, but went about it in quite the wrong way. It seems unfortunate that the AfD nominator appears to have tried to defend their position on social media too. This is never a good idea, whichever standpoint on an article one takes. I would make the following observations:

• Prior to its AfD, the article had already been been deleted twice for copyright violations (a key policy we take extremely seriously and that all course tutors would be expected to make clear)
• Based on their AfD History, the nominator (with over 8,000 edits over the last 13 months) can hardly be accused of having a habit of targeting deletion discussions on related topics. They have average AfD stats (67% success rate) that are similar to many who stand and pass at WP:RFA, though they could be better.
• The AfD nominator gave a far more detailed and better deletion rationale than we often see at AfD, finishing with the following line: "And before anyone comments that this AfD is meant as an erasure of black people or accuses me of erasing minorities, I am not. I am simply stating that the article does not fit notability standards, in my opinion."
• The AfD Nomination garnered 5 deletes (including one from an administrator) and one 'keep'. There did not seem to be any evidence of outside involvement in the AfD itself, nor anyone coming in new to try to help 'save' the article with additional sources.
• One experienced user who voted 'delete' (and whose userpage says "I enjoy focusing on BLPs for women and non-binary people, both underrepresented categories on WP.") commented that " It looks as if the instructor of the course is canvassing on Twitter"
• It appears the AfD Nominator then took to Twitter, perhaps to defend or explain themselves, but I have not looked in detail at off-wiki evidence.
• Unusually, the nominator then returned to AfD to report that they felt they were being harassed. They also reported the incident to WP:EDUN (see here)
• To me, the deleted article seemed typical of so many that are created by well-meaning groups out of enthusiasm or commitment for their interest area, but which unfortunately fail to meet WP:NCORP at this time, being based upon mostly insider sources, brief mentions or interviews. It could simply be WP:TOOSOON for this organisation, formed in 2020.
• No editor should have to face unpleasant off-wiki communications for their routine contributions here. And all contributors and course leaders should encourage participants to engage on wiki to improve articles so that they can be welcomed as a part of the editing community, rather than as outsiders who might then feel aggrieved at how things operate here.
• Apart from regretting that they tried to engage on Twitter to explain their editing stance, I am personally impressed to see a 15 yr old editor with autism handle this AfD nomination and its subsequent fallout with such maturity and calmness. There are many 'grown ups' that would not fare so well.
• Having personally adopted (mentored) an elderly professor and a high school student on Wikipedia, I found they came across equally as competent and as mature as one other. It was a surprise when I discovered the younger person's age. We have some incredible young editors who contribute to Wikipedia, and it saddens me the attitude that some above have taken when they see intelligent young people making worthwhile policy-based contributions to this encyclopaedia - possibly using their time during periods of prolonged lockdown to help maintain this encyclopaedia.

Declaration: I'm white, middle-class, European, and old enough to feel suitably experienced to be able to assess the significance of cited sources in articles. OK, I might just have voted 'weak keep' at AfD myself, but more to help add a small voice to highlight some of the content imbalance that we do see here on Wikipedia than because of any inherent notability of this young organisation, wherever in the world it is based (something that wasn't even stated in the article) Nick Moyes (talk) 22:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Traffic report: The most viewed articles of 2021 (2,803 bytes · 💬)

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The user pageview in year 2021
(Sources: pageviews.toolforge.org and Wikimedia API)

Rank	count	Page
1	48791444	Bible
2	46054221	Cleopatra
3	44937556	Deaths in 2021
4	26292469	Microsoft Office
5	25353057	Elon Musk
6	25305973	XXXX
7	24763417	Elizabeth II
8	22938916	Squid Game
9	22084275	YouTube
10	19928059	Spider-Man: No Way Home
11	19486268	Cristiano Ronaldo
12	18432710	Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
13	17655900	UEFA Euro 2020
14	17371970	Joe Biden
15	16838160	United States
16	16742725	Donald Trump
17	16563552	WandaVision
18	15115748	Wikipedia
19	14756966	2020 Summer Olympics
20	14542602	Skathi (moon)
21	14364523	Google logo
22	14200541	F5 Networks
23	13666382	Dune (2021 film)
24	13475899	Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
25	13272917	Lionel Messi
26	13213690	Eternals (film)
27	13082868	List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films
28	12888806	No Time to Die
29	12689093	Google
30	12561579	India
31	12538472	Tom Brady
32	12063989	Godzilla vs. Kong
33	11754551	Charles, Prince of Wales
34	11422321	Taliban
35	11203521	Critical race theory
36	11186167	Zack Snyder's Justice League
37	11138294	Black Widow (2021 film)
38	11091273	Kamala Harris
39	11088077	Afghanistan
40	10856142	COVID-19 pandemic
41	10809922	The Suicide Squad (film)
42	10754301	Bridgerton
43	10606712	Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Four
44	10575080	QAnon
45	10536072	Richard Ramirez
46	10534979	XXX (2002 film)
47	10468586	BF
48	10458906	Diana, Princess of Wales
49	10091070	Dwayne Johnson
50	10015298	List of James Bond films
51	9907938	United Kingdom
52	9865341	Zendaya
53	9841518	Loki (TV series)
54	9662331	DMX (rapper)
55	9642081	Jeff Bezos

✍️ Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 15:48, 6 February 2022 (UTC) & ✍️ Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 15:55, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

WikiProject report: The Forgotten Featured (1,470 bytes · 💬)

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• Thank you for this interview, and to the members of the working group for their efforts! Very interesting to learn about. Ganesha811 (talk) 03:52, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• Many more eyes are needed on this important project with huge scope. It is good to see this coverage of URFA/2020. It is confusing and misleading to editors that FAs often have substantial issues, as it is not obvious to all that the promotion date indicates lower standards or a long timeframe over which the article may have been left to rot. I relate to Z1720's experience of finding company FAs inadequate when I have looked for examples of strong FAs in other topic areas to show people. It is also really valuable to bring these FAs up to modern standards, for the sake of readers, and sometimes also as a nice tribute to an editor no longer on Wikipedia who can be remembered through their contributions. — Bilorv (talk) 23:05, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
• I'd like to compliment these users on their organizational skills. This is an inglorious but vital task for the project, otherwise those shiny stars would mean nothing. -Indy beetle (talk) 09:27, 3 February 2022 (UTC)