WMF strategy consultant brings background in crisis reputation management; Team behind popular WMF software put "on pause"
6 February 2017
Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails
24 April 2016
[UPDATED] WMF in limbo as decision on Tretikov nears
24 February 2016
Search and destroy: the Knowledge Engine and the undoing of Lila Tretikov
17 February 2016
New internal documents raise questions about the origins of the Knowledge Engine
10 February 2016
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An in-depth look at the newly revealed documents |
“ | Two community quotes addressing organizational communication, from the talk page of Tymkiv's status report:
"If your communication channels are clogged, it may be because you do not have facilitated communication...." – Slowking4 "The WMF has hundred of employees and tens of millions of dollars of income. It spends money on a wide variety of things, many of which are not obviously more important than securing its own good governance. The costs of lack of transparency, both in terms of loss of opportunity and reputation, and more directly in terms of waste of staff, board and volunteer time and "bandwidth" are already large. How much did the "Knowledge Engine" row cost? How much did the Geshuri row cost? How much did removing James Heilman from the Board cost? How much did Superprotect cost? Would it not have been better to try transparency instead?" – Rogol Domedonfors |
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Discuss this story
More to highlight for 2016
I wish this wasn't as WMF focused. Did we achieve so little as a community this year that we don't have much to highlight other than what is in the last paragraph ? That's a bit sad. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:17, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Missed highlights
Cheers!
{{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk}
17:55, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]How very 2014
"no substantial change in the overall decline in Wikipedia contributors that began in 2007" would have been trueish in an annual review of 2014 but things have moved on a bit. After the rally of 2015 numbers now seem stable, though below the 2007 peak (individual language communities will vary). Since I broke the story of the editing rally over a year ago in the Signpost it seems odd to recycle a 2014 story today. If you want to be specific to the English Wikipedia numbers are clearly up on the 2014 minima with User:Katalaveno/TBE showing a shift from 10 weeks per ten million edits to more like 9 weeks.ϢereSpielChequers 16:57, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
750 millionth edit
A better stat to have included would have been that the English Wikipedia's 750 millionth edit took place on the 17th November 2016. OK the actual edit was a vandalism, but it is an impressive stat. ϢereSpielChequers 19:16, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The year of user rights
On the technical side, we saw three new user access levels created this year: extended confirmed, page mover, and new page reviewer.
The first, extended confirmed, was originally intended solely as a means of enforcing the various arbitration remedies that prevented editors with under 30 edits/500 days threshold to edit various topic areas, such as Palestine-Israel articles – see this village pump discussion in February authorizing its creation. In a widely attended request for comment in July and August, the community expanded the scope of extended confirmed protection to include "any form of disruption (such as vandalism, edit wars, etc.) on any topic", so long as semi-protection has proven to be ineffective. Supporters argued that an intermediary between semi-protection and full protection was needed, while opponents argued that the widespread implementation of the new protection level would discourage newcomers – a consensus developed that extended confirmed protection should not be used as a first resort and that all implementations would be posted to User:MusikBot/ECPMonitor/Report, transcluded on WP:AN. There is currently a request for comment in progress as to whether the scope should be expanded to include high-risk templates and creation protection.
The second, page mover, received wide support from the community for its creation – see the request for comment in April and May. The RfC simultaneously approved the flags to be added to the new user group:
suppressredirect
(which allows users to move pages without leaving a redirect behind) andmove-subpages
(which allows users to move subpages when moving their parent pages). There were additional proposals to include the ability to override title blacklist, the ability to apply move protection, and an increased throttle limit for page moves to the user right, but those did not receive consensus.The third, new page reviewer, was a bit more complicated. In late August and September 2016, a request for comment discussed a proposal for a new user right called “New Page Reviewer”, whose stated purpose was “to ensure that users are suitably experienced for patrolling new pages.” The RfC’s introduction presented arguments stressing the importance of the new page patrol process and the need to get it right in order to avoid biting newcomers. There was significant opposition within the RfC to any restriction to accessing functions of Twinkle, but that was ultimately deemed beyond the scope of the RfC, and it closed with a “clear, community-wide consensus for the technical changes proposed.” A second RfC was then held in October 2016 to determine the qualifications for granting this newly endorsed user right, proposing a set of criteria which received wide community approval. These guidelines for granting the permission may be read at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Reviewers.
In accordance with these consensuses, on 16 November 2016, the technical ability to mark pages as “patrolled” was restricted to users with the newly created new page reviewer right, as well as administrators. As this transition took place, a dispute was brought to ANI revolving around whether users without the “new page reviewer” user right were still permitted to identify themselves as “new page patrollers” through user boxes like {{User Newpages with Twinkle}} and {{User wikipedia/NP Patrol2}}. Some said no, arguing that as a result of the prior RfCs, users without the “new page reviewer” user right should no longer participate in the new page patrol process. Others said yes, arguing that the prior RfCs only restricted the technical ability to mark pages as “patrolled” to a group of editors, and that the general tasks of “new page patrolling” (e.g. adding maintenance tags, copyediting, nominating for deletion) could still be performed by anyone. A request for comment was started late November to resolve that dispute, which is still partially open as of now. Mz7 (talk) 17:53, 22 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]