Putin's Wiki-censor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way we were, or the way we are?

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

Two musical interludes

San Francisco's heated political debate overflows into Wikipedia

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

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

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

Taylor Tomlinson hosts a wikirace on live TV – again !

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

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

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

In brief

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

• 149 New Montgomery Street default: The new owners of the former Wikimedia Foundation Headquarters building went into default, amid a crash in San Francisco office space rental rates – the building's value is down 40% since the 2010s, according to The Real Deal.
• Baidu Baike app to close: The South China Morning Post reports that Chinese company Baidu is set to shut down their semi-regulated, Wikipedia-like app, Baidu Baike, on June 30, reportedly in order to re-invest the resources in AI initiatives such as Ernie Bot. It's not clear, from the report, whether "app" in this context refers to the entire website or simply a purpose-built application for mobile phones to access the website.
• Blind faith: Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) reports on a study by University of Tartu researchers showing that Estonian schoolchildren frequently use Wikipedia for school assignments and to find information quickly, although teachers often tend to consider the platform "a nuisance", fearing that their students might "place blind faith" on the encyclopedia's content. See this issue's Recent research column for more details.
• Jonathan Livingston... Seagullis?: Indy100 reports on the vandalism Jonathan Gullis's Wikipedia page has been subject to since his promotion to deputy chairman of the British Conservative Party. Acts of vandalism include changing his last name to Seagullis as a reference to a Reddit meme.

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

Partial victory for public domain as Italy eases restrictions on digital reproductions of cultural heritage

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

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

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

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

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

WMF white paper on privacy and research ethics: community feedback request

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– AK

WMF proposes solution to year-long graphs outage as communities start to resort to workarounds

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

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

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

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

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

Iranian ex-Steward globally banned by WMF

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

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

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

Brief notes

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

WikiConference North America 2023 was held in Toronto from 9-12 November 2023. Here we share outcomes of this event including newly published videos and photos, the archived conference website and program, and share some attendee reflections on its significance.

Background

WikiConference Toronto was the 10th annual WikiConference North America and the first in-person conference since 2019 in Boston before the COVID-19 pandemic. Wikimedia volunteers organize the conference for other volunteers, and the invited programming includes whatever issues seem most important to the volunteer community. The format of the conference is to have a day of "culture crawl", which are trips to local museums and sites of Wikipedian interest, followed by two days of presentations and workshops. The conference counted 440 attendees. Funding for about 80 scholarships to attend came from the Wikimedia Foundation, which has a practice of sponsoring diversity in participation. Wikipedia's friend Craig Newmark, who supports aspects of Wikipedia including contributor safety and the fact-checking of the content itself, also funded parts of the conference, as did the nonprofit organizations Hacks/Hackers, which promotes community journalism, and Credibility Coalition, which is concerned with increasing accuracy in popular media.

As the conference changes city with every iteration, local people wherever it is held are always a large portion of the attendees, and the most likely to attend as inexperienced Wikimedia editors. Organizations which have completed a Wikimedia project in the last year use the event to share results, so attendees from universities, museums, and other knowledge centers are always present. Wikimedia functionaries attend the event to have in-person discussions on topics which are challenging to address in wiki talk page posts or virtually otherwise. This conference was the first in-person meetup of the English Wikipedia Functionaries User Group. Members of other Wikimedia movement affiliates were in attendance, but of more general interest to the North American Region, the North American Hub Research Project surveyed attendees and presented focus-group findings which included intent to better support Wikimedia contributors who are not members of a Wikimedia community organization.

Every event is also someone's first event, and some new attendees are experienced Wikimedia contributors. New attendees unfailingly remark and wonder that they have followed the discussion topics online, but did not anticipate how it would feel to talk face-to-face with their virtual collaborators whom they meet in person for the first time.

It is common knowledge among Wikimedia organizers that transparency is a value of our community. WikiConference North America organizers practice this transparency with the budgets of Wikimedia community events. The conference team identifies themselves on Meta-Wiki. They approach the Wikimedia Foundation meta:Grants:Conference program to submit a funding request for the conference. Interpret the budget for yourself, but at a glance, it requests US$110,000 total, of which $50,000 is for travel scholarships, $22,000 is catering, $12,000 reserves the conference venue, and $11,000 pays for language interpretation and translation services. The final report closes out the grant with accounting updates and a narrative of the event impact.

Programming

The conference program is the best published description of the conference topics which framed conversation at the event. Any summary of the conference would be subjective, but many conference attendees remarked that many of the presentations – regardless of how they were described in the program – veered into discussion and bewilderment of how suddenly artificial intelligence is changing Wikimedia activities (though this was already a topic at Wikimania 2015, see prior Signpost coverage – eds.). Topics discussed included users submitting AI text to Wikipedia, generating AI images for Commons, summarizing long talk page discussions with AI, the state of Wikimedia tools developed with AI features, and especially, what Wikipedia's place might be in a future where more readers interact directly with an AI rather than browse our encyclopedia.

The bravest, most welcome, and most celebrated conference attendees are those who come to report and recruit collaborators for community projects. These kinds of projects are often the most original in scope, surface new social and ethical issues in knowledge sharing, and have a precedent of bringing new engaged editors to Wikimedia projects. Examples of these include "An Alternative to the Pushpin Map in the Neighbourhood Infobox", "Indigenous Artists and Wikidata", "WP:WELW Women Electronic Literature Writers Project editathon or round table". Again, reading the presentation titles in the conference program is a reflection of the interests of the time.

Wikimedia governance was continually discussed. Our Wikimedia Movement Strategy gives recommendations for how to achieve our goals. Everyone has their own way of discussing what Movement Strategy means to them. One perspective is that it concerns money, including US$17 million in grants to community projects out of the Wikimedia Foundation's US$154 million revenue as noted in the latest reports for each.

Bomb threat

The Signpost previously covered a bomb threat targeting the conference. Discussing harassment, terrorism, and threats against Wikipedia editors is difficult online, but easier in person. This bomb threat took hours out of everyone's conference while the bomb squad searched the building. Those hours were costly, and that was in addition pondering the unnerving reality that editing Wikipedia greatly increases one's likelihood of attracting stalking and harassment. There was no bomb. The threat was a hoax to waste time and scare people.

Efforts to address Gender bias on Wikipedia or develop LGBT and Wikipedia are routine targets, but also vulnerable are those who edit content on any controversy in Wikipedia, which can include any topic. The Signpost previously reported that the international Wikimania conference in Singapore in 2023, protestors came to the event to protest the availability of gender-neutral toilets. Previously at WikiConferences, the 2016 WikiConference in San Diego included a yelling protestor who ran around until security was able to physically remove them, and the 2014 WikiConference in New York City included someone who communicated their objection to the event by pooping on the floor. Typical conferences and gatherings do not attract such hostility, and these generalized attacks are in addition to the personal attacks against attendees which they often keep private, and which they often assume is a rare occurrence rather than the systemic problem it is.

In their own words

User:Bluerasberry invited attendees to the conference to come to the video room and share whatever brief message about Wikimedia projects anyone would like to record. See them and hear their own words.

• Victoria Alcántara discusses Wikipedia articles on women
• Tim Moody shares medical info through Wikipedia
• Helaine and Brianda support student editing at Wiki Education
• Cameron Woods supports minority representation in Wikipedia
• Peter Meyer argues that Gordo the dinosaur should have a Wikipedia article
• Ximena Gallardo invites English literature students to edit Wikipedia
• Andrew Leung presents WikiJournal and Wikipedia-connected peer review
• Martin Ferrera warns how lies in media oppress the people
• Daniel Mietchen uses Wikidata to open scholarly communication
• Mark Graham at Internet Archive protects Wikipedia references
• Kunal Mehta invites beginning coders to develop MediaWiki
• Linda Fletcher with AfroCROWD supports African diaspora Wikipedia editing
• Lorenzo Losa loves Wikipedia collaboration
• Clovermoss attends her first Wikipedia meetup!
• Elli brings news journalism into Wikipedia articles
• Andy discusses translation of Wikipedia between Spanish and English
• Rhonda Yearwood on Wikidata for open museum data sharing
• Rosie Stevenson Goodnight on coming to Wikipedia after retirement
• Will Kent on Wikidata's usefulness for university knowledge sharing
• Adam - Amanda shares how Wikipedia has accompanied them in college and life
• Andrew Lih describes Wikipedia's partnerships with museums
• Orange Mike edits Wikipedia on Wisconsin politics
• Bob Reichert on maps in Wikipedia's neighborhood infobox

Commons:Category:WikiConference North America 2023 presentations

• Mary Mark Ockerbloom on Defense Against the Dark Arts - Disinformation on Wikipedia
• Thamilini Jothilingam presents the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive
• Jackie Rubashkin on podcasts in Wikidata

The Signpost is the newsletter that anyone can edit. If anyone identifies additional subjects of in-focus pictures in Commons:Category:People at WikiConference North America 2023, then please edit this gallery to include them.

• 
  User:CaptainEek
• 
  User:SuperHamster and Jennifer 8. Lee
• 
  Sue Gardner
• 
  User:Peaceray
• 
  User:Newyorkbrad
• 
  User:Enterprisey
• 
  User:Econterms, User:Mary Mark Ockerbloom, and User:Ocassi
• 
  User:Risker
• 
  User:WWB
• 
  Mehrdad Pourzaki, and User:Another Believer
• 
  Nevin Thompson
• 
  User:The Earwig
• 
  User:Laurentius
• 
  User:Daniel Case
• 
  User:Buidhe
• 
  User:Phoebe and User:SJ
• 
  User:Pharos
• 
  User:Mahir256
• 
  User:Helaine (Wiki Ed)
• 
  User:Rhododendrites
• 
  User:Jmabel
• 
  Lane Rasberry user:Bluerasberry and Fabian Garcia User:Fabebk
• 
  Lane Rasberry and Daniel Mietchen User:Daniel Mietchen

Further reading

• Valade, Sophie (24 November 2023). "WCNA 2023: an key event for North American users". Wikimedia Canada.
• Thompson, Nevin (31 January 2024). "WikiConference North America 2023: Toronto meetup brings community together for first time since 2019". Medium. MisinfoCon.
• Germain, Louis; Knipel, Richard (17 January 2023). "Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/WCNA/WikiConference North America 2023". meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Canada.
• Germain, Louis (31 January 2024). "Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/WCNA/WikiConference North America 2023/Final Report". meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Canada.

WikiProjects Newspapers and Magazines spun from WikiProject Journalism and like WikiProject Academic Journals, these projects focus primarily on the textual periodicals themselves rather the humans or organizational structures behind them.

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Survey dataset of over 100,000 Wikipedia readers and contributors

From the abstract:^[2]

"The dataset focuses on Wikipedia users and contains information about demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents and their activity on Wikipedia. The data was collected using a questionnaire available online between June and July 2023. The link to the questionnaire was distributed via a banner published in 8 languages on the Wikipedia page. [...] The survey includes 200 questions about: what people were doing on Wikipedia before clicking the link to the questionnaire; how they use Wikipedia as readers (``professional and ``personal uses); their opinion on the quality, the thematic coverage, the importance of the encyclopaedia; the making of Wikipedia (how they think it is made, if they have ever contributed and how); their social, sport, artistic and cultural activities, both online and offline; their socio-economic characteristics including political beliefs, and trust propensities. More than 200 000 people opened the questionnaire, 100 332 started to answer, and constitute our dataset, and 10 576 finished it."

This dataset paper doesn't contain any results from the survey itself. And from the communications around it (including the project's page on Meta-wiki at Research:Surveying readers and contributors to Wikipedia) it is not clear whether and when the authors or others are planning to publish any analyses themselves. Hence we are taking a quick look ourselves at some topline results below (note: these are taken directly from the "filtered" dataset published by the authors, without any weighing by language or other debiasing efforts). It remains to be hoped that more use will be made of this data soon, also considering that various questions appear to have been designed for compatibility with certain previous surveys.

These gender ratios are notably somewhat more balanced than e.g. the figures from the Wikimedia Foundations "Community Insights" surveys of recent years; however, those targeted a different population consisting exclusively of contributors. Still, the gender gap in this new survey data is even somewhat smaller than that found for English-language Wikipedia readers in a past survey by the Wikimedia Foundation (cf. below).

Unless we are dealing with a data anomaly here, this chart shows a general preponderance of left-of-center political positions among Wikipedia users, partly balanced out by a substantial share of far-right users (10 on a scale from 1 = left to 10 = right)

Briefly

• The Wikimedia Foundation invites feedback on a whitepaper about "Wikimedia Research Best Practices Around Privacy" (until April 30), see also News and notes in this Signpost issue
• The Wikimedia Foundation's research department invites proposals (deadline: April 29) for the "Wiki Workshop Hall", a new feature of the annual Wiki Workshop online conference consisting of two 30-minute sessions "for Wikimedia researchers and Wikimedia movement members to connect with each other."
• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

"Global Gender Differences in Wikipedia Readership"

From the abstract and introduction:^[3]

"From a global online survey of 65,031 readers of Wikipedia and their corresponding reading logs, we present first evidence of gender differences in Wikipedia readership and how they manifest in records of user behavior. More specifically we report that (1) women are underrepresented among readers of Wikipedia, (2) women view fewer pages per reading session than men do, (3) men and women visit Wikipedia for similar reasons, and (4) men and women exhibit specific topical preferences"
"Across 16 surveys, men represent approximately two-thirds of Wikipedia readers on any given day. Additionally, we observe that women view fewer pages per reading session than men do. However, we also find that on average, men and women visit Wikipedia for similar reasons. That is, the depth of knowledge that they seek, referred to as information need for the remainder of this paper, and their triggers for reading Wikipedia, referred to as motivations, are remarkably similar. Finally, men and women exhibit specific topical preferences. Readership of articles about sports, games, and mathematics is skewed to-wards men, while readership of articles about broadcasting, medicine, and entertainment is skewed towards women. We further observe evidence of self-focus bias[...], i.e. that women tend to read relatively more biographies of women than men do, whereas men tend to read relatively more biographies of men than women do."
"closing content gaps is not a panacea as evidenced by prior research on Welsh Wikipedia, where a majority of the biographies are about women [...], a majority of Welsh speakers are women,[...] but readership is still heavily skewed towards men"

See also project page on Meta-wiki: m:Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Demographics_and_Wikipedia_use_cases and a subsequent literature review which formulated various potential explanations for the observed gender gap in Wikipedia readers.

"Hunters, busybodies and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity"

From the abstract:^[4]

"A recently developed historicophilosophical taxonomy of curious practice distinguishes between the collection of disparate, loosely connected pieces of information and the seeking of related, tightly connected pieces of information. With this taxonomy, we use a novel knowledge network building framework of curiosity to capture styles of curious information seeking in 149 participants as they explore Wikipedia for over 5 hours spanning 21 days. We create knowledge networks in which nodes consist of distinct concepts (unique Wikipedia pages) and edges represent the similarity between the content of Wikipedia pages. We quantify the tightness of each participants' knowledge networks using graph theoretical indices and use a generative model of network growth to explore mechanisms underlying the observed information seeking. We find that participants create knowledge networks with small-world and modular structure. Deprivation sensitivity, the tendency to seek information that eliminates knowledge gaps, is associated with the creation of relatively tight networks and a relatively greater tendency to return to previously-visited concepts. We further show that there is substantial within-person variability in knowledge network building over time and that building looser networks than usual is linked with higher than usual sensation seeking."

See also an explanatory Twitter thread by one of the authors

"Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership"

From the abstract:^[5]

"[...] most curiosity research relies on small, Western convenience samples. Here, we expand an analysis of a laboratory study with 149 participants browsing Wikipedia to 482,760 readers using Wikipedia's mobile app in 14 languages from 50 countries or territories. By measuring the structure of knowledge networks constructed by readers weaving a thread through articles in Wikipedia, we provide the first replication of two distinctive architectural styles of curiosity: that of the busybody and of the hunter [in reference to the above paper involving some of the same authors ...] Finally, across languages and countries, we identify novel associations between the structure of knowledge networks and population-level indicators of spatial navigation, education, mood, well-being, and inequality."

See also research project page on Meta-wiki: m:Research:Understanding Curious and Critical Readers

"Quantifying knowledge synchronization [between Wikipedia language versions] with the network-driven approach"

From the paper:^[6]

"[...] we explore the dominant path of knowledge diffusion in the 21st century using Wikipedia, the largest communal dataset. We evaluate the similarity of shared knowledge between population groups, distinguished based on their language usage. When population groups are more engaged with each other, their knowledge structure is more similar, where engagement is indicated by socio-economic connections, such as cultural, linguistic, and historical features. Moreover, geographical proximity is no longer a critical requirement for knowledge dissemination.
We used Wikipedia SQL dump of 59 different language editions on February 1, 2019. [...] Specifically, we used two collections of the Wikipedia dump: category membership link records (*-categorylinks.sql.gz) and interlanguage link records (*-langlinks.sql.gz). [...] From the linkage between Wikipedia pages and categories, we extracted a hierarchical knowledge network of each language edition. [...Based on these per-language structures] we constructed the similarity network from the pairwise knowledge structure similarity, where nodes represent the language of Wikipedia, and the link's weight indicates similarity between languages.
"English is in the center and serves as a hub node, while intermediate hub languages such as Spanish, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Dutch also function as cluster centroids"

Despite teachers' skepticism, 86% of Estonian high school students use Wikipedia at least a couple of times per month (female students more often)

From the abstract:^[7]

"The article is based on a quantitative study in which 381 Estonian school children [9th and 12th grade students] participated in filling out an online survey. The questionnaire included both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Findings: Statistical analyses and responses to open-ended questions showed that students often use Wikipedia as a primary source of information, but that their use of the site for learning tasks is guided by teachers’ attitudes and perceptions towards Wikipedia. Students perceive Wikipedia as a quick and convenient source of information but are uncertain about its reliability."

From the "Results" section:

"[...] 5% of the students surveyed use Wikipedia every day, 51% at least a couple of times a week and 30% a couple of times a month. To compare the groups, we conducted a t-test, which concluded that statistically significant differences were present across gender and grades. For the purpose of the calculations, we treated responses as numerical (rarely/not at all = 1, a few times a year = 2, a few times a month = 3, a few times a week = 4, every day = 5). For gender, the mean is 3.73 for women and 3.46 for men (p < 0.05). Thus, there is a statistically significant difference in the frequency of Wikipedia use between the two groups, with female students using Wikipedia more often than male students. [...] 24% of the students surveyed said that teachers had no objection to using Wikipedia, 3% said that teachers did not allow to use Wikipedia, 47% said that some teachers did and some did not and 10% said that they did not know. Teachers do not explicitly forbid students from using Wikipedia for learning tasks, but they do recommend that students use more trustworthy sources [...]"

"With or without Wikipedia? Integrating Wikipedia into the Teaching Process in Estonian General Education Schools"

From the abstract:^[8]

The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 49 teachers from 11 general education schools in Estonia. The results of the qualitative content analysis of the interviews indicate that teachers consider the use of Wikipedia to be a suitable for teaching, alongside other information sources and environments. However, teachers acknowledge some uncertainty and caution towards Wikipedia, as they do not consider it a very reliable teaching tool: an attitude largely inherited from the early days of Wikipedia. While teachers themselves are active and frequent Wikipedia users, and allow students to search for information, they do not assign Wikipedia-based text-creation tasks to students. "

References