Upcoming vote on the revised Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced, on the mailing list and on Meta, that there will shortly be another vote on the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct:

In mid-January 2023, the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct will undergo a second community-wide ratification vote. This follows the March 2022 vote, which resulted in a majority of voters supporting the Enforcement Guidelines. During the vote, participants helped highlight important community concerns. The Board’s Community Affairs Committee requested that these areas of concern be reviewed.

The volunteer-led Revisions Committee worked hard reviewing community input and making changes. They updated areas of concern, such as training and affirmation requirements, privacy and transparency in the process, and readability and translatability of the document itself.

The revised Enforcement Guidelines can be viewed here, and a comparison of changes can be found here.

Voting will open on 17 January. For information on how to vote, eligibility, and the like, see the detailed Voter information page on Meta. – AK

Amanda Keton to leave Wikimedia Foundation

WMF General Counsel Amanda Keton has announced that she will move on to her "next adventure". She joined the Wikimedia Foundation in 2019, having previously served as head of the Tides Foundation and CEO of Tides Advocacy.

Amanda will be succeeded in her role as General Counsel by current Deputy General Counsel Stephen LaPorte (also known as User:Slaporte), who will take over on 1 February 2023.

The Signpost wishes Amanda and Stephen all the best. – AK

Large language models on Wikipedia: friends or foes?

Note: JPxG, who wrote some of this section, also wrote WP:LLM.

For the last few weeks, a discussion at the Village Pump has been ongoing about the potential use of text generated by large language models (like GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-J and ChatGPT) in Wikipedia; near the end of December, a thread on the wikimedia-l mailing list discussed the issue as well, going over the potential benefits, drawbacks and use cases for these models.

Recent coverage in Slate describes a series of discussions which took place at Talk:Artwork title concerning the article (Artwork title), whose initial draft consisted of prompted output from ChatGPT. Various demonstrations have been done of the use of these models to assist in writing, editing and formatting (User:JPxG/LLM demonstration and later User:Fuzheado/ChatGPT). Currently, a proposed set of guidelines for the use of these models is under discussion (and, frankly, could use some more eyes on it).

The August 2022 issue of The Signpost explored some of these issues as they concern this publication; see the From the editors page titled "Rise of the machines, or something" for an introduction. – J, B

Brief notes

• 2023 Steward Elections: The 2023 Steward Elections will be starting on 5 February. Eligible candidates and voters are encouraged to participate after reading the guidelines.
• Community Wishlist Survey: Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023.
• Wiki Project Med Foundation publishes annual report: Published on the Foundation's own wiki, MDWiki.org, the report presents highlights of the Wiki Project Med Foundation's work carried out in 2022.
• Annual report from North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group: The North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group, too, has published its annual report for 2022, in both English and Russian, describing how the user group's work has been affected by the fraught situation in Russia.
• WikiProject Organized Labour Edit-a-thon throughout February. Participate online if you are interested in improving coverage of worker organizations, strike actions and more! Stay tuned for the WikiProject Organized Labour report coming out in a future Signpost issue!
• Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.
• Request for adminship: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/MB was closed "no consensus" after a 'Crat chat 8–9 January, with 173 !votes in favor of adminship, 80 opposed, and 15 neutral.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: West Frisian, 50,000 articles. Hausa, 20,000 articles. Shona, 10,000 articles. Tswana, 1,000 articles.
• Anniversary: Happy Wikipedia Day! Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is kiddie ride, to be followed next week by brochure. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!

Media coverage of Arabic Wikipedia bans reveals two Wikimedians are serving long prison sentences in Saudi Arabia

Last month's global bans of sixteen users in the Middle East/North Africa region, including over a quarter of Arabic Wikipedia admins and three of the four founders of the Saudi Wikimedia User Group, sparked a spate of press coverage over the past two weeks.

During the fracas, there was much coverage of a seemingly unrelated event that came to light during investigation: that two Wikimedians with a long history of editing in medical topics, Osama Khalid (User:OsamaK) and Ziyad Alsufyani (User:Ziad), had been serving long prison sentences in Saudi Arabia since 2020. For detailed coverage see our Special report. – AK, J

Paris court orders Wikimedia Foundation to hand over user's data

Legalis.net, a French site specializing in legal news in the tech sector, reports that a Paris court has ordered the Wikimedia Foundation to hand over a user's data, under article 145 of the code of civil procedure – with a penalty of 500 euros for each day of noncompliance. Previously, the WMF had refused to provide the information, prompting the plaintiff to seek a court order. The editor in question, Sulpyensid, is a banned user accused of creating an attack article on a French businessman.

For discussion of the case in the French Wikipedia community, see fr:Wikipédia:Le Bistro/6 janvier 2023#Laurent de Gourcuff. Opinion there seems divided: one user, says: "In my opinion, this is something that had to happen. In this case, it affects a user already banned by Wikipedia. For the rest, we'll see." However, asks: "So is the end of the protection of IP addresses by the WMF for France? (Even if here, the request is quite justified) What obliges an institution under American law to obey a French summary?"

One point made in the discussion is that the user was banned in May 2022, so the IP data – usually only kept on WMF servers for 90 days – ought to no longer be available. Given the speed at which courts operate, this may well be a common occurrence. – AK, J

Tired of the libs?

Larry Sanger, known to some as the co-founder of Wikipedia, prefers to be called the "ex-founder". He's announced – well, he's announced a lot of things, and we've covered most of them: Digital Universe in 2005, Textop in 2006, the Encyclopedia of Earth (also in 2006), Citizendium (also also in 2006), WatchKnowLearn in 2008 (which we missed), Everipedia in 2017, and Encyclosphere in 2019. Time has not been kind to them: Digital Universe and Textop are deadlinks; Encyclopedia of Earth and Citizendium are basically zombies if their recent changes are any guide; WatchKnowLearn was last updated in 2020 (but wished Wikipedia a Happy Birthday on its main page back then. How nice!); and Everipedia... "rebranded" into IQ Wiki and now exclusively covers Cryptocurrency and NFT scams. The jury is still out on this latest thing, a browser plug-in that may be the solution to your tiredness. It lets you see articles from the multi-headed mega-'pedia known as Encyclosphere. You can even block Wikipedia articles from your searches. His general take is that our project has overrun the net, squashing out other perspectives in favor of a biased view run by a cabal of libs. Sanger's 'sphere allows those other perspectives to write their own articles in their own encyclopedias, which are then collected in the 'sphere, where you can choose an article in whatever flavor you like best. And now there is a browser plug-in to display them when you search at Google and DuckDuckGo. There is even an option to rinse the taste of Wikipedia out of your mouth by automatically removing our articles from results. It only works with Chrome and Brave, though (no Firefox compatibility – ouch!).

That is the idea, anyway. Encyclosphere's main page looks fairly impressive (nice gradients!) but The Signpost couldn't find a way to search for articles there (or a link to the aforementioned plugin). Homesick Wikipedians will be relieved, however, to see that they are also asking for donations. The list of projects has some neat links, but no articles. If you actually want to use Encyclosphere, you need to do some scrounging – or read the results of our scrounging – to wind up at Encyclosearch. As of press time, searching here resulted in a HTTP 500, although they were helpful enough to return a stacktrace: java.lang.RuntimeException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /mnt/sdd/encyclosearch/encyclosearch/public/index.html (Too many open files). When they're back, have a look at the results for "Larry Sanger", "Gilbert and Sullivan", or "Fermat's Last Theorem" – all of which rapidly go off-topic within a handful of results. Trying a few subjects that are more difficult to explain well, the first relevant result (after a bunch on software, games, and a dictionary definition) for "Evolution" comes from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia and is barely comprehensible. Another way of searching for articles is the Encycloreader, a web application that is operational as of press time; it uses a different configuration and includes Wikipedia (as well as Citizendium) by default in its searches. Feel free to report your results in the comments.

This is being advertised with Sanger's usual bluster: according to his Knowledge Standards Foundation, "If you want to participate in the world's largest encyclopedia, you must collaborate with a shadowy group of anonymous amateurs and paid shills on exactly one article per topic." He adds, "No small group of elites deserves the power to declare what is known for all of us." However, Encyclosphere does not really seem to provide a vastly different viewpoint – there aren't any pages endorsing Qanon, or slobbering over Donald Trump. Encyclosphere, in the end, seems to consist of at least somewhat decent, somewhat neutral, and somewhat reliable sources: it seems Conservapedia didn't make the cut, and there is no weal of Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About. The worst you can say about the encyclopedias it draws from is that they aren't necessarily as well-written, well-polished, in-depth, or as consistent as Wikipedia. Well, that and they use Java. – AC, Sb, J

Happy birthday Wikipedia!

Wikipedia's twenty-second birthday was celebrated by the multilingual news site Pressenza. They quickly review Wikipedia's founding with the roles played by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger; the movement's cumulative achievements; and the idealistic motives behind what we do. "It shows the strength of voluntary, collective, and collaborative action dedicated to the common good and shared knowledge, [which is] far superior to the pettiness of the private, the restricted, the exclusive, and the paid." While these motives may seem simplistic or naïve to those who have struggled to build our encyclopedia over two decades, we should never forget that these ideals are the rock that supports the encyclopedia.

Pressenza may be biased toward Wikipedia, however. They were founded in 2009 and publish multilingual news and commentary with unpaid contributors. Their articles are all published under a Creative Commons license.

Other media noting the anniversary include Wired Italia, Firstpost, and an Argentinian website called Tecno.

Congratulations to all who have helped build our encyclopedia! – Sb, B

In brief

• How to start editing Wikipedia: Annie Rauwerda's Depths of Wikipedia on Twitter has covered many amazing topics, but none so amazing as giving us all an introductory guide to editing in 18 tweets. Lifehacker picked up the story and published it on a regular web page. I may have a COI on this, but the most amazing part is the photo that starts the story. – Sb
• Nigerian fans celebrate Wikipedia wedding update: Fans of Nigerian singer Davido rejoiced over Wikipedia's update of his marital status, reports Vanguard. The update had actually been made by User:Archer1234 back in November. As Vanguard explains, the couple married last November but had lost their three-year-old son in an accident a month prior to the wedding, which meant that Davido was only recently able to complete his traditional Umunna rites.
• Interesting, Dark, And Cool: BuzzFeed reports on Interesting, Dark, And Cool Wikipedia "Facts" based on the Wikipedia subreddit. Seventeen Wiki articles covered include Missing white woman syndrome, Alex the grey parrot, and Umarell. But "Prisencolinensinainciusol" may be the best. It is an Italian song which only uses the words "all right" and gibberish meant to sound like American English to Italians. A video link is included.
• Udderly ridiculous: Solanum mammosum has a Wikipedia article describing how "its usefulness extends beyond its delightful [non-scientific] name and appearance", as reported by Boing Boing.
• "Why is Cleo so popular?" wonders Taha Yasseri in The Conversation. The article Cleopatra was viewed more than 55 million times in 2022.
• "Why is Wikimedia Commons so broken?": That is the question asked and answered in a YouTube video by User:Ziko that compares Commons community dynamics against those of other Wikimedia websites.
• "Should ChatGPT Be Used to Write Wikipedia Articles?": Stephen Harrison, who has covered Wikipedia extensively for Slate, examines the issue of AI-generated encyclopedia content with input from prominent Wikipedians. See related content regarding community discussions at this issue's News and notes.

View it! is a new tool to access all the images related to articles on Wikipedia. It was created to show Wikipedians relevant Commons media depicting, or otherwise related to, the article they are looking at.

The goal of View it! is to enrich content pages by illustrating a given subject, and aid Wikipedia editors by surfacing images that can be used in articles. This tool allows readers access to the breadth of images available on Commons, beyond the limited images (if any) curated for inclusion in the article.

How to use

The primary way to use View it! is a user script, which can be installed using the instructions on Meta.

View it! has two different versions which can be installed, depending on the type of experience you would like. With the Lite version, the user script simply adds a "View" tab to the page, which will link you to the image results from our Toolforge project. The Full version will actually display the images on the Wikipedia page, with a “View” tab that opens a full-screen gallery. Both of these versions ultimately lead to the view-it.toolforge.org page, where more advanced features can also be accessed.

In the Lite version, which is now mostly stable, the "View" tab will have the number of results (if any) in parentheses. Clicking the button will take users in a new window to Toolforge and the results. In the Full version, which is actively being developed, users will see an image carousel across the top of articles. The carousel can be expanded, while clicking the tab opens a dedicated gallery page. Eventually, we plan for the carousel to be accessible from the edit mode, so that editors can use this tool to click to select images to insert while editing.

How it works

View it! uses the Commons API to search for images based on properties associated with the article. The default configuration displays images which are either in an article’s associated Commons category (as listed in its Wikidata item) or where the article matches the value of a Commons image's Wikidata "depicts" statement. When searching directly on Toolforge, you can search any Q-number. And with the advanced search, you can view results with other properties: "Main subject" (P921), "Created by" (P170), and "Commons Category" (P373). You can also add freeform text to the search, which comes in handy when looking for images of buildings or neighborhoods in a particular city, specific images from a creator (like images of the moon from NASA), or similar situations. You can also adjust the results for specific assessments and resolutions. When an image is clicked, you're taken directly to the file on Commons, where you can copy code to add the image to the article. The tool runs on a View it! API we built, which is the same one that powers the user scripts.

NEW: You can now add an image directly from the View it! results! When you edit an article, you will see a copy button on each image in the View it! results. You can copy the code for the selected image and paste it into the editor - works in both visual and source editor.

Development

During development, we held many community discussions about the tool, and collected additional feedback through View it! talk pages on Wikipedia and Meta. From user suggestions, further features were developed, such as the advanced search (which can be accessed through Toolforge). Advanced search allows for more refined searching, including free text, using alternate statements, and Commons category results.

View it! is currently in use by 114 users, and has particularly been helpful on smaller wikis to help add images to articles that previously did not have any. View it! is also valuable for identifying items with inaccurate data statements, and can be used to improve associated metadata and results.

What's next

While the Full version is currently usable, it is under active development. We are working on more editor-focused features, such as improving the inserting an image while editing feature. If you'd like to provide suggestions or feedback on those features, or anything else, please comment on this Signpost article, or visit the View it! Talk page. The team responds to all comments we receive, and we incorporate good ideas into our design. Please check out our Launch video from January 12th!

Everything you're ever told in a tour is wrong. Well, maybe not everything, but stories and ideas turn into facts, which telephone-game into new facts. For a historian who loves to tour historic sites, it's a deeply concerning notion.

If you've ever taken a guided tour of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, I humbly hope you will put aside what you've learned. It's been my single largest project to rewrite this Wikipedia entry – on one of the busiest train stations in the country – and find out the truth behind widely repeated myths. I teamed up with about a half-dozen other Wikipedians, historians, journalists, and photographers to find the truth and write out this immense project. It's there that we began myth-busting most of the modern works about Grand Central.

There's four bold statements, repeated in semi-official tours of the terminal (and especially for its centennial in 2013) that we'll cover in this article. Journalists attending the celebratory events that year are responsible for repeating these statements. They've stood out as so unbelievable that I felt they warranted looking into.

1. Grand Central has a four-sided clock in the center of its Main Concourse, made of the precious gem opal, and worth $10 to 20 million.
2. The front of the terminal has a massive clock, designed by Tiffany Studios, and the largest Tiffany clock in the world.
3. The terminal's secret sub-basement, holding an electrical substation that powers the terminal and its tracks, was a target of the Nazis during World War II, which they failed to sabotage.
4. The terminal's famous constellation ceiling is backwards, either on purpose "the way the Gods would see the stars" or by mistake "Oops the reference sketch was held at my feet, not at the ceiling".

I'm hoping to better establish a permanent record on these. Let's dive into the first tale. While some sources have identified it as opalescent glass, due to its opacity, news began spreading the myth of "pure opal" in 1999 and 2000 – and again in 2006. Wikipedia (!) picked up this tale in 2006, where it remained until 2013. In this time, Smithsonian Magazine, PBS, LA Times, CNET, Mass Transit Magazine, 6sqft, Time Out New York, and even Grand Central Terminal's official website picked up this idea as a fact. Bill Burns was the first one to act against this myth, emailing research to the news site Untapped Cities. He emailed me as well, and working with User:Epicgenius, we found enough reliable sources to dispel the myth, and found no mentions of "opal" prior to 1999; instead sources referred to the clockfaces as glass. The New York Transit Museum, which has one of the original clock faces (replaced after being shot out with a bullet or BB), confirmed that their clock face is made of opal glass. And so, using all of our research, Untapped Cities published "Is the Grand Central Clock Worth $20 Million?", finally disproving this rumor in a concrete way.

The second "fact" is easy to disprove, again simply with how it's been described over time. There is a massive glass-faced clock on the building's exterior, but it's not from Tiffany Studios. Sources from 1995 into the present day claim it, again including Grand Central Terminal's own website. But yet most of the sources that mention the clock, and all those from before 1995, do not mention Tiffany. Some go far into detail about the clock, and the notable glassmaker would have been mentioned.

As well, none of the five books about Louis Comfort Tiffany that I referenced mention the clock. I would love to examine the clock to better-ascertain its creator(s), but I was denied access to that space and all other non-public areas of the terminal. Anyhow, portions of the glass have been replaced during restorations. The restorer, Rohlf's Studio, found no signatures on the original glass pieces, and a 1913 list of contractors included Tiffany as a metalworker on the terminal project, but listed four completely different contractors for glass work and clock work. I am awaiting Untapped Cities as their journalists have further evidence that makes it clear it is not a Tiffany work. Until then, this myth cannot be fully busted with a reliable source.

The third "fact" is a little trickier. All good lies have some truth to them. The M42 sub-basement and power station actually was an area of concern during World War II, according to reputable author Sam Roberts. Its entrances were patrolled by armed guards, and the space was removed from any floor plans of the building. He even claims the saboteurs met in the terminal, by its information booth and in its newsreel theater. These facts are themselves somewhat questionable, though the reliable source merits their inclusion in the M42 article. But any ideas of a failed sabotage event taking place there are debunked by Roberts in his Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America. The more obvious falsehood is about secrecy: the station was far from secret, it was even advertised! It saw an incredible amount of press coverage over the century.

The fourth myth is perplexing. Every source states something similar, but different. It is a plain fact that several of the constellations are correct, and some are reversed, along with the overall arrangement on the ceiling. So the ceiling is neither fully correct or fully backwards. A pamphlet from when the terminal opened claimed "it is safe to say that many school children will go to the Grand Central Terminal to study this representation of the heavens." So at least some of the New York Central Railroad's staff believed the mural to be correct. What's great is you can read The New York Times' March 1913 account of a Westchester commuter who noticed the constellation mistakes, not even a month after the station opened in 1913. I believe the Vanderbilts claimed the mural to represent a "divine perspective" as a cover-up for such a literally massive mistake. So there's never been agreement over what's incorrect or why, and the only way I imagine finding the truth is if some of the artists, painters, or astronomers had some private notes or journals. All of the explanations either involve disinterest in the technicalities, finger-pointing, or the boisterous claim that it was intentionally incorrect.

My takeaway is, why even bother making up or believing in such tall tales? The strongly-documented history of the terminal is an interesting story enough. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

I bought Wikipedia last week. Well, in fact, I only bought volume 147 of the German print version of Wikipedia, which started with the article on 'Anarchismus in den Niederlanden [de]' and ended with the article on 'Anatopia [de]'. As it happens, it wasn't even the complete German language version of Wikipedia that was printed, as it was missing images and even recent references – and it was the 2016 version. This volume of over 700 pages cost me EUR 87.03, including postage and taxes. Foolish, of course: the information was, first of all, already outdated at the moment I bought this volume. Secondly, it was incomplete, given the lack of images and recent text and references, and overall, the paper version doesn’t have all the extras that an online version has (like working hyperlinks, searching, zooming in, and switching to other language versions). But then again, I like to do foolish things.

PrintWikipedia

A printed version of Wikipedia is nonsense, of course, as Wikipedia holds not just the current version, but the history of all its articles. Well, is it nonsense? Some call it art, or use it to show the size of all human knowledge. The exhibitions of Michael Mandiberg in New York (2015), Berlin (2016), Ghent and Belgium (2018) were clearly intended to help understand the true size of Wikipedia, or in the artist's words "both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data".^[1]

Not a complete print

We were lucky: Mandiberg, helped by the Lulu company, didn't print the complete Wikipedia. In New York he made his case with 106 printed volumes out of the 7,473 volumes that would have been needed to print the complete English language version of Wikipedia in 2015. In Berlin dozens of volumes were displayed (out of the needed 3,406 for the full German language version). If you want to buy a volume, print-on-demand technology will still cater to you. If you want to see how a print Wikipedia looks in 2023, you have to go to Eindhoven (in the Netherlands) and visit the current exhibition (open till March 2023) in the futuristic building Evoluon, where the Dutch language Wikipedia can be seen printed in 68 books of 700 pages each.

Other books on the basis of Wikipedia articles

It gets far wackier than art exhibits, though: Books LLC, in Memphis, was a company that sold books compiled from a category of articles from Wikipedia. In 2009, they had some 224,000 titles for sale, but it looks like they went defunct some time around 2017. One of the last volumes they published was Graffiti in the United States (2013), ISBN 9781233100187. Earlier publications included such titles as Dam disasters (2011) ISBN 9781156436356 and 20th-century national presidents in Africa (2010), ISBN 978-1-15-597499-6, the latter of which consisted of fifty Wikipedia articles glued together in one volume, for sale at $32. No kidding: see the photo.

Wikipedia is not for sale

Back to where we started: the economics of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not for sale, for several reasons. The most important reason is that the capital of Wikipedia is its community. Members of our community write the text, create the images, and edit the encyclopedia. The articles may be licensed under Creative Commons, but the users are not. One nice thing about our licensing arrangement is that, in theory, we could just pick up the content and continue elsewhere (although this still requires the support of a large community that can help build the house further). The Wikimedia Foundation owns the servers on which the different language versions run, but the Foundation doesn't own the content. Indeed, Wikipedia as a concept looks like something so odd it can never work in practice. That's why it does.

References

Sick of waiting eons for a proposed deletion to go through for a landmass that obviously needs it?

Many kilobytes of discussion, workshopping, and debate at Wikipedia:Village Asthenosphere (policy) concluded this week with a decision to adopt several new criteria – L3, L4 and L5 – for speedy deletion of land masses, rock formations, and other geological features.

Long-time editor User:Ariana Granite said, in opening the RfC:

“

The problem we're having now is that there is a lot of new material being formed on Wikipedia, typically when articles in suspension settle out of the fluid in which they're entrained, come to rest against a barrier, and over a period of time, ions carried in groundwater chemically precipitate to form new crystalline material between the infoboxes and categories. And there are too damn many of them, and they aren't very good. It's not the Hadean eon anymore.

”

Many who supported the RfC, including Ariana, argued that problems were being caused by outdated policies enacted billions of years ago, when Wikipedia was still cooling down from its original formation. Wikipedia:Be volcanic, a policy written during the Hadean eon (and still one of our 5 Speleothems), encourages users to "simply deposit material without talking about it". Some argued that this was no longer appropriate for an encyclopedia whose surface is now mostly covered by water.

"I'm not saying that we never see writing created by exposing reliable sources to elevated temperatures and pressures which cause them to recrystallize dramatically", said administrator User:CliffordWeathering. "Just that they overwhelm our review processes, and we need some way to handle substandard content without waiting seven million years for an Articles for Subduction discussion to close. That's too long."

Several geologically speedy deletion criteria already existed, like L1 (patent scree) and L2 (uncooled magma), but RfC participants reached a solid consensus that more were necessary to deal with quality issues. In fact, the discussion broke records, meriting its inclusion in Wikipedia:Times that Wikipedians reached a consensus harder than Mohs 9.5.

The three criteria to be added are L3 (pure sediment and blatant alluvium), L4 (recreation of material that was subducted at a convergent boundary), and L5 (formations available as identical copies on Wikimedia Plutons).

Implementation

Like the previously existing geologically speedy deletion criteria, L3, L4 and L5 can be added to any formation that meets them, whether during newly uplifted land patrol or in the course of editing Wikipedia normally. It is estimated that it will take some time to get through an initial surge in articles tagged under the new criteria. Admin User:JasperQuartz, who carries out speedy deletions regularly, told the Signpost:

“

There's going to be a lot to deal with in the beginning. It's going to take us a while to get to the point where you can expect someone to take care of blatant alluvium the same millennium you tag it; it still requires some manual review, and realistically, for this first spate of tags, it's been taking a couple of glacial periods for someone to get around to it. But if you're an administrator, and you're reading this, I encourage you to help out and deal with the backlog: it's fun, it's rewarding, and it helps keep Wikipedia a quality resource.

”

Of course, there have been concerns that deletions may proceed without sufficient care. User:Ash Slater warned, in her RfC close, that editors should "avoid going pyroclastic" and avoid the urge to tag something as soon as it's created: "Newly uplifted land patrollers have a guideline to wait 7,000 years for the original editor to improve articles before tagging them, which it would be wise for us to keep in mind".

Text of new criteria

The new criteria are as follows:

L3. Pure sediment and blatant alluvium

This applies to pages that consist solely of material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, or loose clay, silt, sand, or gravel that has been deposited by running water in a stream bed, on a floodplain, in an alluvial fan or beach, or in similar settings. This also applies to redirects that exist because of glacial deposition. Articles about notable sedimentary or alluvial deposits are acceptable if it is clear that they have undergone lithification.

• {{Db-L3}}, {{Db-sediment}} – for sediment
• {{Db-alluvium}} – for alluvium

L4. Recreation of material that was subducted at a convergent boundary

This applies to sufficiently identical copies, having any title, of a page brought to the mantle via its most recent discussion (whether it is Wikipedia:Landmasses for subduction, Wikipedia:Miscellany for magmification, Wikipedia:Categories for compression or Wikipedia:Templates for liquefaction.

It excludes pages that are not substantially identical to the subducted version, and landmasses for which the subduction zone is no longer active. It excludes pages in userspace and draftspace where the content was converted to a draft for explicit metamorphic processes (but not simply to circumvent Wikipedia's subduction policy). This criterion also does not cover content brought to the surface via a subduction review or diapir, or that was only subducted via proposed deletion (including discussions closed as "soft subduct").

• {{Db-L4}}, {{Db-reuplift}}

L5. Rock formations available as identical copies on Wikimedia Plutons

Provided the following conditions are met:

• The Plutons version has the same crystal structure and is of the same or finer grain size.
• The rock formation's copyright and source status is beyond reasonable doubt, and undoubtedly accepted at Plutons. To avoid deletion at Plutons, please ensure the Plutons page description has all of the following:
  • Name and date of death of the creator of the rock formation, or else clear evidence that a free license was given. If anonymous, ensure the mineral description provides evidence that establishes the anonymous status.
  • Tectonic plate where the formation was situated, or where it was first published.
  • Date when the formation underwent lithification or first assumed its current structure, depending on the copyright law of the origin country rock.
• The image is not marked as {{Do not move to Plutons}} or as {{Keep consolidated}}.
• The rock formation is not protected. Do not subduct protected formations, even if there is an identical copy on Plutons, unless the formation is no longer in use (check Special:WhatFaultsHere). They are usually locally uplifted and protected here since they are used in orogeny or in some widely used high-risk terrane. Subducting the local copy of a rock formation used in the interface does break things. See more (here and here) about cascade-protected and Cascadia-protected formations.
• {{Db-L5}}, {{Now Plutons}}

Broader implications

When asked about the broader implications of this new policy, members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Geology had a number of comments, including "This isn't real", and "What the hell are you talking about?"

Project coordinator Hubert Glockenspiel said:

“

This whole article is made up, including the part where you reached out to WikiProject Geology for comment and they had no idea what you were talking about. No such communication ever occurred. And neither did this one you're quoting from right now. Indeed, there is no such editor as "Hubert Glockenspiel" on the English Wikipedia, and he certainly isn't the coordinator of WikiProject Geology. This paragraph was not written by a real person; it is just JPxG shitposting.

”

Thanks, Hubert! We'll be looking forward to your takes in the months going forward.

Can you write an article lede l*d* l*ad intro without any Es?

From shortly after its creation in the early wiki-days of 2003, until a point in November 2006, the article Gadsby (novel), about a work that is a lipogram, was itself a lipogram. In other words, both the novel, and the Wikipedia article about the novel, were written without the letter "E". There had been some attempts before 2006 to revert the article to standard English, but it looks like either the joke was too good to spoil, or the sense of fun and wonder in creating not just an incredible free contribution to human knowledge extended to the fun and wonder of trying out constrained writing.

What happened on that fateful day in November? Why did the forces of normality and mundanity win? Was it a sign of the future of a rigid, formalized, bureaucratized, and un-fun experience for contributors? Will another recursive word-experiment ever be possible again?

As for the original author, an anonymous user – perhaps they joined us as a named account, and are still around? The editor who broke the three-year E-less run is now an administrator, and the person who first lipogram-ized it hasn't been seen since 2020.

Fun volunteerism

Lipogram-izing the article was a Wikifun challenge in 2004. Now, Wikifun was not exactly a big deal, but it wasn't outlandish at the time, nor attended by the officially irredeemable. Remember when Wikifun was allowed? Or any fun? We all knew it was too good to last.

The anti-anti-lipogrammers used edit summaries like "Deleted non lipogrammatical sentence" as late as 2008. The word "novel" appeared in the lede sporadically, apparently shoving aside "work of fiction" to come home to roost for good in late 2008.

In-article comments asked well-meaning editors who were not in on the joke not to add the dreaded vowel, even being upgraded to ASCII art in a December 2008 edit just before they were removed. Things went on like that, with strictly under-the-radar fun allowed, until late 2010, when an official, sternly worded editnotice, with promises of "administrator action or warnings" for those who dare to restore the fun, was added.

The editnotice is still in place, and I sure don't encourage anybody to test it. They helpfully say you can go have your fun on another website, an active community devoted to all manner of wiki-flavored jokes and japes. You can tell it's from 2010 because this other website is Uncyclopedia.

Random coincidence, or portent?

What else happened in November ought-six? Google made its first billion-dollar purchase.

Coincidence, or are these both symptoms of the beginnings of the modern, corporatized, hyper-real, buttoned-down, no-fun-allowed (unless profitable) World Wide Web? Or to use a more modern word, "cyberspace" – whose usage has more often than not seemed to me to ironically miss the intent of the term's creator (or at least its popularizer). William Gibson was not praising a future digital Eden: quite the opposite, he was sharing his dystopian future visions with us as a warning.

Ten years ago: January 2013

We started the year with a Op-Ed, "Meta, where innovative ideas die", detailing the problems and benefits of that vitally important but very poorly attended sister site. We also predicted 2013 would be the year of "Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor", which was largely true, although given the disastrous launch of the Visual Editor later that year, one of those wouldn't be for the right reasons. I don't think we talk about Lua enough, though: Lua is a programming language that got added in to Wikipedia via MediaWiki and managed to replace a lot of complicated workarounds used by templates with more elegant code. I'm not even sure its full potential has appeared yet; for example: Could we use Lua to make filling out forms for our featured content candidates easier by, for example, letting people choose which category they want to file the featured content into from a list before starting the nomination? Wikivoyage launched 15 January, and we attempted reform of Requests for Adminship. However, the saddest story was the death of Aaron Swartz, who died by suicide after downloading content from JSTOR, not disseminating it, reaching an agreement to delete the files, and then being prosecuted for it anyway:

“

Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26. Aaron wore many Internet hats during his life. At the age of just 14 he played a key role in the initial RSS specification. While still a teenager, he served on the RDF core working group at the World Wide Web Consortium, defined the RDF XML content type and founded Infogami, which quickly merged with the social news and entertainment website, Reddit. Around the same time, he was part of the team that started Creative Commons. In 2006 he ran into controversy for downloading and posting the bibliographic metadata of every book in the Library of Congress, which was in the public domain but available only for a fee. A more serious controversy occurred in 2008 when he downloaded about 20% of the entire PACER database, which allows public access to public domain US federal court documents, although ironically this required users to pay a fee. By taking advantage of a pilot program offering free access at certain public libraries, Aaron was able to download nearly two million documents before his access was revoked. He posted these documents openly on the Internet, prompting an FBI investigation, but no charges were ever filed. In 2010, he co-founded the Internet activist organization Demand Progress, which played a central role in the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), alongside Aaron's separate, personal contributions to the debate. In July 2011, Aaron was charged with four felonies, three stemming from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. At issue was his use of an automated program to download 4.8 million scholarly articles from JSTOR by deploying the network infrastructure of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (Signpost coverage). Ironically, Aaron did not disseminate any of the files, and after he handed over to JSTOR the copies he had made, the digital library settled "any civil claims [it] may have had". These felony charges could have sent Aaron to prison for 35 years and have fined him more than $1 million. Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor overseeing the case, said "stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." In September, the government added nine charges, moving the total from four to thirteen felonies, which could have put Aaron behind bars for more than 50 years, with a fine of $4 million dollars. On January 9, Ortiz's office rejected an arrangement that would have kept Aaron out of prison. Two days later, he was found dead in his New York apartment.

”

Tributes and a rather deeply felt comment section can be found here.

Fifteen years ago: January 2008

Kind of a quiet month. From a Signpost perspective, perhaps the most notable thing was WikiWorld, that long running comic series, starting to reach its end. On 28 January 2008 we announced, "WikiWorld has ceased its weekly schedule, but will continue to run occasional new comics, as well as 'classic' previously-published comics." In fact, new comics would come to an end by the end of the year. I'm sure CommonsComix will one day follow suit. Or be opened up to more creators.

In Wikipedia news, the big announcements were the "controversial" creation of rollback rights, which lets one instantly revert an edit with a click of a link, if you're trustworthy enough to be given the right. Rollback is now pretty uncontroversial, and a boon to vandal fighters.

Secondly, two articles detailed the new parser preprocessor, which, not remembering the 2007-era parser is kind of hard to fully grasp. It did give the new #iferror parserfunction, though, so that's something.

Finally, we interviewed User:John Broughton, who had just written Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. This would later be released under a free license and incorporated into the help pages of Wikipedia.