Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2019-11-29

Please vote in the current ArbCom election, if you haven’t already. As of November 28, 1,483 voters have submitted a ballot, compared to 1,858 last year with 4 days left to vote. Ballots may be submitted until 23:59, 2 December 2019 (UTC).

Several indicators of Wikipedia’s progress will be celebrated over the next several weeks. The English-language Wikipedia is likely to mark its six-millionth article, sometime between New Year’s Eve 2019 and January 8, 2020. Wikipedia itself will mark its 19th birthday on Wikipedia Day, January 15, and The Signpost reaches its 15th birthday on January 10.

Like Wikipedia, The Signpost has been involved in a few disagreements but continues on an upward path. The Signpost, we are convinced, is the best place on Wikipedia for Wikipedians to write about, read about, and learn about Wikipedia. You can help us prepare for our upcoming birthday by contributing in many ways. No, we're not asking for money, but your participation in our little newspaper will ensure our continued success.

You can contribute in several ways:

• Comments – just add your thoughts to the comments section below the articles. Unlike many online publications, our comments sections are a feature, not a bug. Starting an organized, well thought-out discussion on important subjects is a major goal of our articles. Please let us know what you think.
• Suggestions – if you think we should cover a story but you don't want to write it yourself, drop a suggestion off at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions, including as much solid information as you can such as links to Wikipedia pages or to news stories.
• "In brief" sections in "In the media", "News & notes", "Discussion report", and "Arbitration report" – if you'd like to write one or two sentences about a story that fits in these columns, please just write it up. We’ll fact check it and may extend the coverage if we find something else. Be sure to sign it or leave a short note if you want credit: for example, -S
• Adding a paragraph or more to a story – if you'd like to write more than a couple of sentences, please mention this at the newsroom talk page and we'll get you started.
• Submit an article – if it's your first submission to The Signpost it might be easiest to start a draft in your user space and drop us a note at the newsroom talk page. If the proposed article is sensitive, e-mail it to the editor-in-chief. Submitting the article via Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Submissions at least a week before the next issue is the usual method.
• Start a new regular column – let us know what you'd like to write about on a regular basis and we'll consider it. Right now it would be great to have a regular column on the cultural and academic sectors – call it GLAM+ if you'd like. We'd love to have a column written by a woman – but we don't want a "woman's column" – nothing like Better Homes and Gardens anyway. There are women Wikipedia editors who have different interests than most male editors and we’d love to offer something to these editors – but please don't assume that there won't be male editors interested in the same material. Regular columns on Wikipedians in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, or South America could work. Any proposals for new columns will be carefully considered.
• Join our copyeditors – by letting us know on the newsroom talk page.
• Become an editor – this involves writing, selecting stories, editing with the aim of improving content as well as presentation, basic copyediting, finding Wikipedia editors who have a story to tell, and helping the other editors in planning the newspaper's direction. In short doing everything that it takes to get this publication out every month.
• Any other improvements that you'd like to suggest and can work on – just let us know.

Our system of writing and publishing is a combination of individual work and group effort. You will get credit via a byline in most cases, but at least one other editor will check your work, and help you with fact checking and copyediting. The editor-in-chief will then check that Wikipedia's rules have been followed.

What are the rules that apply to writing for The Signpost? This is a WikiProject like many others, such as

There is another way that our regular readers can contribute to The Signpost. Some Wikipedians love to argue vociferously and at length about what many people consider to be minor matters. Some writers find it difficult to accept that one of their submissions has been rejected. Others love to argue about grammar. It would do wonders for the morale of our staff if readers would occasionally let these folks know that we are volunteers contributing our time and just trying to do our best. Reader participation really is the key to our future success.

There are some types of "contributions" that we do not accept. For example, sometimes a subject of an article decides that they are better qualified to report on themselves than our reporter is. This almost never works out. If you are the subject of an article and anything the least bit controversial is reported, then the reporter will contact you for your side of the story. Letting the article subject write the article itself will likely deprive our readers of other sides of the story. If you'd like to write an opinion piece about yourself, you may contact the editor-in-chief, but this type of article is not in great demand.

A particularly obnoxious "contribution" that we will never accept is from those people who try to inject their point of view into a news article, or into some other author's opinion piece in the couple of hours just before publication. There are multiple aspects of articles we have to check and recheck before publication. Interfering with this process is at best obstructionism. Uninvited submissions are generally not accepted during the day before publication. Trying to edit war your opinions into an article at this time is a form of censorship, and is simply unacceptable.

So please do consider how you can best contribute to our upcoming birthday celebration. We appreciate your support.

English Wikipedia new milestones

There are currently 6,817,413 articles on Wikipedia.

The English Wikipedia will reach six million articles around January 1 or perhaps a bit later, according to our estimate. Previous milestones are noted below.

• Astronaut Christina Koch, aka User:Astro Christina made the first direct edit from space on November 17, 2019, correcting an article about a space walk that she had made. Earlier edits have been composed in space, but had been relayed through an Earth-bound editor. For example, in a November 2017 edit the first content made for Wikipedia in space—a voice recording—was published. Editor Darenwelsh, who is an extravehicular activity flight controller at NASA, helped organize the new edit and first reported it on Reddit. Darenwelsh and his coworkers have set up 10 wikis at NASA.

Brief notes

• Amazon donates $1 million.
• .ORG registry sold to for-profit company: .ORG domain names will be registered by a new for-profit company, which is likely to cost the WMF some money. Sj reports that Ethos Capital—which has two staff—is buying the non-profit Public Interest Registry (PIR) at an estimated price of a billion dollars. The Electronic Frontier Foundation objects, as does the Wikimedia Foundation and 25 other non-profits, in an open letter to the Internet Society.
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval, on September 25, of three new Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Wikimedia Stewards User Group, Wikimedians of Santali Language User Group, and meta:Wikimedians of Saint Petersburg User Group.
• Tim Berners-Lee approves: Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web received notice in The Guardian and The Verge. He also wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, saying the World Wide Web that he invented needs a re-do, although he lists Wikipedia as an example of what he's OK with.
• FRAMBAN denouement: WMF published a statement, "Community consultation on partial and temporary office actions".
• Translation pilot project: WMF is hiring up to six paid translators for each of these languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish.
• UNC Edit-a-thon: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center hosted a Newspapers in North Carolina Edit-a-thon on 24 October. The edit-a-thon sought to improve articles on newspapers in the U.S. state of North Carolina to give readers context for the sources they use, and to combat fake news.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, EvergreenFir and ToBeFree (11 November 2019), Girth Summit (26 October 2019), Kees08 (14 October 2019), GermanJoe (6 October 2019), Nosebagbear (3 October 2019), and Barkeep49 (11 September 2019).

"We all want to change the world"

External videos
Revolution 1 (slow version), (4:15)
The Beatles – Revolution (fast version), (3:27)

Everybody wants to change Wikipedia in some way. Our model of knowledge production and distribution depends on it.

But not all change is good. This month saw examples of people striving to systematically change the content of our encyclopedia, Wikipedians and others trying to tweak the Wikipedia model of many small content contributors and many small financial contributors, and governments trying to dictate what an online encyclopedia should look like.

• "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao": How Baidu Baike has faced off against Wikipedia to build the world’s largest online Chinese encyclopaedia. The South China Morning Post, based in Hong Kong, reports on the on-going controversy surrounding the Chinese Wikipedia and compares it to Baidu Baike, the giant Chinese encyclopedia with more than 16 million entries owned by Baidu, the giant Chinese internet company.

Baidu Baike offers its editors prizes, experience points, and wealth points in order to incentivize text contributions. Entries are reviewed before publication to filter out "reactionary content", racial and religious provocations, and the promotion of superstitions and cults. Advertisements, porn, fraud and gambling promotion are banned.

Some Chinese editors prefer Wikipedia because of the difference in review processes. According to the SCMP, one editor said "The operation process at Wikipedia is transparent – you can see why entries are published or deleted. At Baidu, the [review] process is in a 'black box'."

Hong Kong editors respond by editing articles on the

the current protests, and Carrie Lam. Reuters has published an interactive graph

that displays the editing activity to show how the Hong Kong Police Force page has changed over time.

Previous coverage in The Signpost: Chinese Wikipedia and the battle against extradition from Hong Kong, The BBC looks at Chinese government editing, Carl Miller on Wikipedia Wars, and Observations from the mainland

• "You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow": For the third month in a row, the media have announced Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposed Wikipedia replacement as if it were something new. Putin says the Russian language is being attacked by "cave-dwelling Russophobes". He says "It would be better to replace it (Wikipedia) with the Great Russian Encyclopedia in electronic form. At least this would be credible information." If you don't read the stories very closely, you might think that Putin is proposing a new online encyclopedia designed to replace the Russian Wikipedia with neutral and more reliable content, strongly supported by the Russian state budget.

  That would be completely correct except:

  • The Great Russian Encyclopedia, which traces its predecessors back to the 1926 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, has published in print since 2004.
  • The GRE has been publishing on-line since 2016.
  • It will continue to be written by experts associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences and published by the RAS.
  • The state funding increase is only about $10 million per year for 3 years.

If you have a calm and conservative attitude, you might instead conclude, along with

Moscow Times contributor Ilya Klishin, that the additional funding is just a way to siphon off state funds to favored individuals. Or, if you have a less trusting attitude, perhaps by reading stories in Euronews and Reporters without Borders

, you might conclude that the attacks on Wikipedia could be related to Russia's contingency planning to separate itself from the outside world's internet.

• "You better free your mind instead": Finding Truth Online Is Hard Enough in The New York Times Magazine is a story on internet censorship in Turkey, of which a ban on Wikipedia is only a part. The entire issue of the magazine is on the future of the internet. Over the last decade the Freedom House's index of Turkey's internet freedom has fallen sharply, following Russia's index level down, but still well above China's. Different countries experience censorship differently and this report emphasizes the quirks and contradictions of Turkey's experience.
• "You say you got a real solution": The Financial Times (paywalled) reports in Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launches Twitter and Facebook rival that WT:Social is operating as a social media site, trying to avoid "clickbait", misleading headlines, and the other flaws of Facebook. The site had about 50,000 users as of a few weeks ago, but "obviously the ambition is not 50,000 or 500,000 but 50m and 500m" says Jimmy. Users and wait-listers number about 270,000 as of November 27. The BBC podcast "Tech Tent" interviews Jimmy (starts at 1:35), who says that the site is not optimized for addiction.
• "You tell me it's the institution": National Library of Wales to Lead on Welsh Wikipedia Project in Business News Wales. The library in Aberystwyth will prepare Welsh-language material from Wikipedia for the 100 most important topics and themes in the school curriculum in Welsh history. Much of the work will be done by Jason Evans, who is the library's National Wikipedian, presumably a promotion from Wikipedian-in-residence.

Meanwhile, folks at the Milner Library at Illinois State University have completed their own revolution by connecting Wikipedia's List of African-American writers to the library catalog records.

Taking it a step further, ISU archivist April Anderson-Zorn and grad student Stephanie Collier document women and minority archivists on Wikipedia, including Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, Brenda Banks, Sara Dunlap Jackson, and Kathleen D. Roe. "It’s really important that we get this information out there; we fight to make sure that all voices are heard," said Anderson-Zorn.

• "We all wanna see the plan": Larry Sanger in Introducing the Encyclosphere states that "If you want to participate in the world's largest encyclopedia, you must collaborate with a shadowy group of anonymous amateurs and paid shills ... If you're new, you won't be treated very nicely. If you don't play their strange game, you'll be summarily dismissed. Like the social media giants, Wikipedia has become an arrogant and controlling oligarchy." Sanger's blog post includes an 18 minute lecture.
• "You say you'll change the constitution": Building a More Honest Internet in the Columbia Journalism Review divides the internet into three business models: the main current global model that they call "surveillance capitalism", the Chinese and Russian model "where the unfettered capitalism of the US internet is blended with tight state oversight and control", and the "public service" model, which is exemplified by Wikipedia.
• "We all wanna change your head": How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet. According to Wired, Netblocks calls the impact "near total".
• "Don't you know it's gonna be all right":
  • Young Ghanaians create Wikipedia pages on migration at an edit-a-thon in Accra. The articles created include information on how to properly apply for visas to Germany. Funding was supplied by the German Foreign Office.
  • Is Wikipedia telling the truth? Addressing systemic bias in Wikipedia entries in
    Seattle General Strike of 1919
    . According to the The Daily, four articles were created at the edit-a-thon, eighteen other articles were edited, and 44 references were added.
  • Re-editing Wikipedia in the name of Pacific Northwest womxn: Perhaps The Daily is getting a bit carried away. Another edit-a-thon, this one on women artists, resulted in seven new articles, 17 other articles edited, and 66 added references. A participant explained "We want to address omissions in history as a form of social justice activism."
• "You ask me for a contribution/ Well, you know/ We're all doing what we can":