Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2020-03-01

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2020-03-01. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Two prominent administrators removed (4,229 bytes · 💬)

You might also mention that Kudpung was previously editor-in-chief of the Signpost, not simply a contributor. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:34, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

• Thanks @Liz:. Yes, he was editor-in-chief at a time when The Signpost really needed him and Bri. I definitely have mixed feelings on Kudpung's desysopping. I once got on his bad side for something I didn't do. It was terrible for a week. Only one other time on enWiki was I more offended. I stayed a long, long way away from him for 6 months. But I actually have the feeling that he forgot about the whole thing after a week. After 6 months we worked together wonderfully. We had some disagreements after that but everything still worked ok. There's a great deal of respect between us. So I certainly know why he was desysopped, but I don't think it was necessary. I don't like it when folks who are down get kicked in the teeth.
• Short version. Bri was writing a news story and was likely trying to avoid anything that looked POV. I should have written something in From the editor, I still may next month, but given my rambling above, maybe it's best to wait a month. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:38, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

• The way traditional news media (and other media formats) handles a potential COI, is by placing a small note of disclosure in italics at the end of the piece, noting that the subject was once an editor-in-chief of the publication. There are some media outlets who will place the disclosure at the top, but that’s less common. Viriditas (talk) 23:23, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

• Most of the work Kudpung has done for Wikipedia has been invisible, the stuff we see is to 10% of the iceberg. Similarly Roger has been a very prolific contributor, which could perhaps have been noted above. Maybe they have both been at fault, but the need to desysop does not seem to have been present. I have a sincere dislike of the way we treat long-standing prolific contributors, not on a personal level, where we are usually reasonably well behaved, but on a systems level, where we chew them up and spit them out. There is no statute of limitations, or time served, in fact rather the reverse. In 10 years time these two editors will be characterised not for what they have achieved before or after today, but as "Problem editors for over a decade."

All the best: Rich Farmbrough (the apparently calm and reasonable) 19:45, 2 March 2020 (UTC).

• Without any knowledge of this specific case, and without any desire to personalize the issue: There is nothing more destructive to a community than to announce that long-term members are exempt from the rules. If an administrator is actually "innocent", fine, but litigate that point, then. If they are performing inappropriate actions, the fact that they are a "prolific contributor" or did a lot in the past should not be anything more than a minor mitigating factor. It's a genuine shame if we lose a long-term member who did amazing invisible work, but the standards of community conduct come first. "But they're a prolific contributor" is always a weak defense. SnowFire (talk) 01:37, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

• I forget when and where it was, but User:BrownHairedGirl was recently desysopped. Willbb234^Talk (please {{ping}} me in replies) 21:01, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• You are right, it was an outcome I missed at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals ☆ Bri (talk) 01:22, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

By the numbers: How many actions by administrators does it take to clean up spam? (7,757 bytes · 💬)

Slight inaccuracy?

"Other than a global lock, which prevents an editor from editing on all WMF sites, a block is the most serious action that an editor faces on Wikipedia."

I'd consider a site ban more serious than a block. --kingboyk (talk) 18:54, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

You are right, I missed that during copyediting prior to publication. I hope that the new sentence makes more sense. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

@Kingboyk: Now I think I see your point better, ban versus block. Maybe the text should have said the block is the strongest technically enforced action that an editor faces. Perhaps I'll leave this to the original author to consider. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:12, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

The problem is, none of the variations on blocks are meaningful deterrents to spam. Spam accounts are free, disposable, and easily replaced. The only thing a spammer cares about is the content, since that's what they get paid for. -- RoySmith (talk) 19:06, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

We think they actually get paid for getting spam to stick for a finite period of time. Which is why detecting and removing it early is so important. There's another UPE model of long-term article "monitoring" for a set fee, but that's a different story. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:08, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I've read similar info about spammers' terms of payment and the resulting need to remove offending material quickly written by the spam-fighting Charcoal team over at Stack Overflow. I would wager you are correct. --kingboyk (talk) 19:19, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

From a look at the numbers above it appears that the workload of all editors in fighting spam would be made substantially lighter if edits by only registered users were permitted. The spammers would then be much easier to trace as it would not be so easy for them to hop to another IP address. In lieu of that I would like to see administrators take a much more proactive approach to semi-protection. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:02, 2 March 2020 (UTC).

There is nothing that will actually solve the problem unless we ask for identification of editors working on certain types of articles, and I think most of us would regard it as a last-ditch measure, an\ unacceptaable compromise of "anyone can edit". What might help is explicitly asking editors to declare whether or not they have a COI, and if so a paid COI. Some will blatantly deny it, but I think about half the people with coi would in fact declare. This will at least provide a solution to editors with a nonfinancial COI to come clean about it. (I did propose this a year or two ago, and it was soundly rejected. Maybe by now there will be a better reliazation of the problems. ) DGG ( talk ) 06:21, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

On my watch page of a few hundred articles I identify at least a score with likely abusive editing: suspected paid editors and professional reputation managers, POV editors, ego editors, attack editors etc. I do not have the resources of time to follow them all up and these editors usually have unlimited energy to pursue their individual obsessions. The suspected rogue contributors are registered editors, often redlinks, and IPs in roughly equal proportion. The result is that the articles that they attack degrade as time goes by. There will never be a complete solution to the problem, but I think it could be made a bit more manageable by banning IP edits as this would push those into becoming the more traceable registered editors. I know that there has long been a prejudice to allow anybody can edit as IPs, but I have never seen the force of that as anybody can register anyway. Because of its growing maturity, Wikipedia is different to what it was fifteen years ago, and because of its size, it is becoming more difficult to maintain its quality in many areas. A change in the policy of IP editing is needed now to make curation easier. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:36, 3 March 2020 (UTC).

WMF has a proposal I think you would like, Xxanthippe, if I understand your point and the proposal IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. [E]dits will be recorded using an automatically-generated, unique, human-readable identifier instead of the IP address when an edit is made by an unregistered user. This identifier will stay consistent over a session and possibly longer... What do you think of it? ☆ Bri (talk) 05:03, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing my attention to this proposal, which I had not seen before. Unfortunately I was unimpressed by what I saw. I found the proposal obscure, incomplete, and likely to make vandal detection more difficult. There was even a suggestion to put cookies on people's computers. Most security conscious users delete their cookies on a regular basis, so this would not work. The proposal seemed like a Heath Robinson contraption (any unnecessarily complex and implausible contrivance). The direct solution is to ban IP edits. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:14, 4 March 2020 (UTC).

Keeping peoples contributions associated with a single account, if possible, I believe will help. Of course there is always work arounds. But many will not bother to figure them out, especially initially.

We could disallow IPs editing of certain types of articles (such as small companies and BLPs) if we so chose. Anything with a specific project page on the talk page could be semi protected automatically for example. We would need to figure out how we would measure if this is effective or not before we do it though.

Well Wikipedia accounts involve zero investment, those at Upworks/Fiver etc require significant investment before they become useful. We really need to push these entities to work with us. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:52, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Your suggestion of not allowing IP edits on some categories of topic is excellent provided that it is allowed by the system and that community-wide consensus is obtained. BLPs would be a good place to start. I have seen BLPs, for example B. Wongar: Revision history or Alain de Botton: Revision history (I don't know why these are redlinks), that have been blighted for years by tendentious IP edits of all sorts. Semi-protection works for a while, but when it ends the trouble resumes. Assessing if the suggested scheme works can be done by seeing how many complaints arise. If an IP wants to make a change to one of these protected BLPs they can ask on the talk page, as at present. If they don't wish to be geolocated by their talk page edit they can register and make their complaint that way (and make their edit anyway as a registered editor!). Xxanthippe (talk) 03:41, 6 March 2020 (UTC).

@Xxanthippe: These links work: Special:History/B. Wongar and Special:History/Alain de Botton ☆ Bri (talk) 04:57, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Thx! Xxanthippe (talk) 05:02, 6 March 2020 (UTC).

Community view: The Incredible Invisible Woman (14,623 bytes · 💬)

Nominated for deletion yet again.

• Clarice Phelps is another prominent example. The repeated deletion of this black woman has generated adverse media coverage such as this. The good news is that the public are now allowed to read about this person again, following a recent appeal at Deletion review. But there are still attempts to make her invisible again.

Her image (right) is displayed as public domain by both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy, but we now have vexatious attempts to argue otherwise – novel arguments not previously presented for our many other good faith images from that laboratory.

Likewise the nomination for Did You Know is mired in noisy and unpleasant discussion, quite unlike the usual process. The extent to which such subjects attract hostile attention is quite remarkable so thanks to Megalibrarygirl for her timely article about this.

Andrew🐉(talk) 15:42, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

No editwarring over joke photos. It could very easily be taken that you are making fun of non-binary people. We don't do that. Thanks for your understanding. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 12:06, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

I've removed the photo once again. It has been re-inserted 3 times now, so I'd take another re-insertion as editwarring.

In the first issue after I became editor-in-chief, I wrote "The Signpost must be more sensitive to potential offense or insult among our diverse readership..

"We pledge that we will never attack or mock any group whose members include those who do not have a choice about their membership in the group. Groups covered by this pledge include, but are not limited to, those based on race, nationality, sex, gender, age, disability, social or economic status, veteran status, body type, or religion."

I intend to keep that pledge as best as I know how.

@EEng: has written in his edit comment "No, but non-binary vs. analog is a joke, and there are no special groups immune to good-natured humor." So we disagree. I'll just ask a couple of admins here to take a look if the photo is re-inserted again and decide on the best way to keep it out. @TonyBallioni and MER-C:. If no admin wishes to enforce WP:3RR or the wishes of The Signpost EiC, then I'll suggest just leaving it in and make sure that readers here are aware that The Signpost is not responsible for including it. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:14, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

re-inserted 3 times – Apparently you're not even paying attention to what got posted each time. The very first post to this thread inserted a photo of Clarice Phelps carrying the caption, Nominated for deletion yet again, misleadingly implying that Phelps herself was nominated for deletion (if that were possible), or that her article is up for deletion (which it's not – it's a garden-variety dispute over the image's licensing). So I posted the following image parodying misleading captions:

As a counterpoint to the ENIAC photo, these three women operating a differential analyser are an early example of non-binary people in computing.

-EEng

Note: The Signpost is not responsible for the inclusion of the above. Obviously. A simple good-natured pun (apparent only after you check what's behind behind both links) on an accident of the English language mocks nobody. But some can't see that and removed it. OK, so instead I posted a comment on that removal:

This image has been subject to repeated vexatious, noisy, and unpleasant attempts to delete it [1][2][3].

Now that last caption, I will openly admit, does mock a certain group, to wit people intolerant of criticism of themselves. So you removed that too? Really? Because ... why? Because woke-scolds are a group whose members include those who do not have a choice about their membership in the group? Are you truly so lacking in self-perception? EEng 22:26, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Followup: Stimulated by useful discussion here [4], particularly comments by Levivich, I think the following makes my original point much better:

There may be some non-binary people among those operating this differential analyser, but from the historical record there's probably no way to know it.

-EEng

---

I am personally a bit surprised to see the extent to which anyone connected with this Phelps article seems very eager to assume bad faith. I would recommend that before you accuse others of vexatious attempts to make women disappear, you should maybe check to see if hypothetically, their last two GAs were biographies of women, and their next one is about to be too. GMG^talk 17:50, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

The WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS philosophy driving subaltern studies explicitly states bad faith must have been involved. While I myself wrote articles about women and persons of color, I have warned against these sorts of initiatives asserting that history hasn't represented enough of the right groups. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:12, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Andrew Davidson, I like you, but this is just bullshit. I don't know about last year's PRODs or speedies or whatever, but at this point no one's trying to "delete" Clarice Phelps, or even her article, or questioning her notability. There's a question about the licensing of the image, and that is all. To see a conspiracy in this is asinine. Cool your jets. EEng 16:02, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Numerous images of the subject have been deleted or nominated for deletion and the discussion for the image to the right is still open. The article too has been nominated and deleted so many times that it has been difficult to make an exact count. The issue here is of making such women (in)visible and it's a live one. Andrew🐉(talk) 16:40, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

You're right, it's an ongoing conspiracy. EEng 04:57, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

The nature of what's happening in such cases was discussed in a special report in last month's Signpost. Consider the image of Clarice Phelps shown here (above right). If it weren't for my caption, the ordinary reader would not even know that it has been tagged for deletion because there's no sign for them. If they click on the image, they are still not told. You have to click again and again through a maze of links to arrive at the deletion discussion which has few comments because it is so hard to find. It's the bureaucratic obfuscation satirised in HHGTTG:

"But the plans were on display…"

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That’s the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

Andrew🐉(talk) 10:20, 4 March 2020 (UTC) '

In other words, you uploaded an image locally to try to avoid a deletion discussion on the copyright status of the work, and you're annoyed that your attempt to circumvent that discussion didn't completely work. You wan't to complain that no one knows about the deletion nomination, when we actually have a bot for that which would have notified the talk page of the original nomination that you tried to circumvent by uploading locally, except you already did so. And you've already been advised that attempts to comply with copyright are not harassment, but you'd rather spend more time here having an opinion in entirely more edits than you've actually contributed to the article itself (exactly one), while disparaging people who are working to bring missing articles on women to GA status.

You are free to publicly express personal outrage to your heart's content, but please don't act like it's actually accomplishing anything. GMG^talk 22:29, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Can't you see that the rules magically work to hide deletion discussions involving nonwhite nonmale nons? EEng 23:00, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

• @Coffeeandcrumbs, Flyer22 Frozen, and TJMSmith:, myself, and others are working towards improving Katherine Johnson and other Hidden Figures. GorillaWarfare did a commendable job getting Mary Jackson to Good Article status. Dorothy Vaughan's article could use some work, and I could particularly use assistance at the book and film pages, since I typically edit biographies and not film/book articles.

  I also want to generally note that the Resource Request has fast response times and can be used to find "invisible" information.

  Lastly there is an ongoing destubathon this month, and one of the Amazon voucher prizes (£50 (c.$66), kindly donated by Ser Amantio di Nicolao) is for Most articles destubbed and improved on British and Irish women. Vouchers can be used to purchase more books to add "invisible" information to Wikipedia. Kees08 (Talk) 19:06, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• As I often have stated, one of the problems with many topics where our coverage is inadequate comes back to lack of reliable sources. And then there is getting access to those that exist, & finding those that exist. Surmounting these issues is often much more difficult than those who don't write articles think. (FWIW, if anyone is interested in creating more articles on women of the Early Roman Empire, the definitive work is Marie-Therese Raepsaet-Charlier, Prosopographie des femmes de Prosopographie des femmes de l'ordre sénatorial (Ier - IIe siècles) (Louvain: Peeters, 1987). Not only am I unable to find a copy anywhere close to me, it is in French, a language I cannot read.) -- llywrch (talk) 01:12, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

That, of course, is the problem in a nutshell. Verifiability and 'only reflecting what reliable sources are saying' are vital principles here, but when reliable sources largely ignore someone, that gives us a problem. Neiltonks (talk) 10:56, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

@Neiltonks: It does not give us a problem because WP:V is a policy. Rather, our insistence on things like verifiability present a limit to the imaginations of a certain chattering class that thinks any outlet is only acceptable if it observes their preferred orthodoxies. I posit that we should recognize these RIGHTGREATWRONGS editors for what they are and encourage them to write for periodicals and publishing houses where their screeds could become source material instead of allowing them to circumvent policy altogether out of fear of their reprisals and persecutions. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:04, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Discussion report: Do you prefer M or P? (753 bytes · 💬)

• The ITN discussion was archived quite a while ago. Perhaps a link should be added ([5]). Regards, Willbb234^Talk (please {{ping}} me in replies) 20:41, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Thanks. I changed the link. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 22:34, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

From the archives: Is Wikipedia for sale? (1,144 bytes · 💬)

• In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, the first stage of the expansion of the Foundation to the rest of the galaxy was based on religion: the Foundation's influence would flow out of a religious and semi-mystical respect for the power of the Foundation, which in turn was based on their detailed scientific knowledge as opposed to the general ignorance of the surrounding planets. However, the second stage of the expansion of the Foundation was based on commerce: a new leader arose that understood that the power of religion was limited and fading, and conceived a scheme to continue pushing the influence of the Foundation through commerce. See Wikipedia:Asimov's prophecy for more context. If you're like me and don't take Asimov's words lightly, maybe we should start thinking on how to harness the power of commerce in favor of our vision, rather than fight it. Sophivorus (talk) 02:52, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

From the editor: The ball is in your court (11,767 bytes · 💬)

Four comments:

1. The WMF needs to start crawling before they run. They need to fix the entirety of the admin tool package before I consider supporting any attempt by them to deploy any form of machine learning to tackle the problem.
2. The technical bar to create a new article for spammed subjects should increase a little. The moratorium proposed last month is too extreme and counterproductive. Something like 20-50 edits should do.
3. The remaining suggestions are sensible, though I very much prefer a total ban altogether.
4. Other suggestions include increasing sourcing requirements for determining the notability of BLPs to a similar standard to WP:CORP and increasing specific biographical notability guidelines (the various sports notability guidelines are probably the worst - sports players commonly become businesspeople after retirement from sports and thus join the UPE target market).

As I pointed out in November, UPE is an intractible problem because a $10k spend on Wikipedia spamming buys nearly a year's worth of English speaking third world labour, which is extremely cheap and plentiful. The conclusion that we need to streamline as much as possible the removal of UPE is correct. MER-C 18:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

That's a good point #4 I hadn't considered before, especially if you include endorsements in ex-sportspeople's business interests. Just one quickly searched example: Alejandro Villanueva (American football)#Endorsements. Obviously a notable BLP, but is the endorsement encyclopedic? ☆ Bri (talk) 19:04, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I'd regard that as trivia. MER-C 19:14, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I removed the section in the Villanueva article. The sole source was military.com, which fails WP:RS. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:20, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

One more thing: spam grows exponentially. An attention seeking entity sees spammy articles about similar attention seeking attention seeking entities and decides they want their own. The rate at which spam gets added to Wikipedia is proportional to the amount of spam already there. MER-C 19:18, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

• If a partial informal approach was being considered, notifying companies that use of certain paid-PR companies will be automatically prohibited from even otherwise legitimate paid editing. While I'm reticent about giving a positive list of potential paid editors, having a firm, very public, blacklist might help provide some economic incentive Nosebagbear (talk) 20:20, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
  • I had mixed feelings when I wrote that the WMF should give out the usernames to all suspected UPE editors. I guess it comes down to "what degree of suspicion", but I'd like to make sure that if another Status Labs situation comes along the entire community is informed about it. In general the position should be to disclose to the community. OTOH, I wrote in the next paragraph that the WMF should investigate some of the claims of UPE in an informal manner - just to get information - they should do this as well - finding out what is going on is hugely important. Hopefully they can find a way to do both that is not contradictory. I would never suggest providing a white-list. I've seen 3 paid editors who credibly claimed to follow our rules, but after watching for awhile I'm sure I would never recommend 2+ of them. OK, 1 is sorta ok, but I wouldn't want it on my conscience if I made a mistake!
  • We've already got something of a blacklist going @Bri: should have the link. Certain we should maintain and formalize a blacklist. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:10, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
    • It's WP:PAIDLIST. The entire first section is for companies whose actors have been blocked at least once. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:15, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
• MER-C is dead on about the "exponential" bit, and I suspect a lot of that is about ignorance rather than malice. I have more than once had a spammer come to my talk page protesting a G11 deletion, telling me "But X, Y, and Z look like what I wrote, and I based it on that!". In more than one case, that's led to nominating X, Y, and Z for deletion too (generally successfully), because the spammer was right: Those were PR puff pieces too, and still got into the encyclopedia. I can't even find myself to too much fault the paid editor in that case; they looked at similar stuff and figured that must be the acceptable way to do things. We've got to get better at ensuring we stick to encyclopedic subjects, and strictly enforce the requirements for sourcing. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:24, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
• The saddest thing is that a lot, and I mean a lot, of users are actually indifferent to paid editing - there are diffs, but I'm not going to dig them out now. Paid editing is an area for which there is no way of obtaining any metrics. It's probably enormous and it's probably even happening among the 300+ WMF employees - because it's happened before. The scale of it is so large that an RfC to ban it outright would probably fail. Somewhat indirectly, and perhaps ironically, it also contributed to yesterday's Arbcom decision to desysop another admin. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:48, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• An easy way to help: please comment on discussions at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Companies. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:52, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• These stories always tend to miss the forest for the trees. One reason our coverage of companies is so bad and so easy to be exploited by spammers is because editors who do quality work frequently can't be bothered with the extreme risk of nonsense deletion: it's rare that there's a household-name major corporation that someone hasn't tried to whack at least once. And so the neverending attacks on legitimate business content that these discussions inevitably wind up inciting (as the above comments demonstrate) make the problem worse by driving anyone not doing NPP from the whole area (editors who could be doing an efficient job of watching for paid editing, much as editors in other areas of interests keep crap out of their own areas). The Drover's Wife (talk) 09:37, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
  • If your point is that there are too many people spending too much time deleting company articles, I have to disagree. As soon as we let up on this, or say something like "we're going to be kinder and gentler on business articles" the flood of corp spam will become a deluge. There are at least a million new businesses in the US each year. They'd all love to get free advertising, most of them will get a write up in a local newspaper if they want to go to the bother. 90% will be defunct in 5-10 years, and we won't even be able to get a news story in confirmation of their non-existence. There's a reason that routine coverage doesn't count for notability. There's a reason that companies will ignore that.
  • And this isn't about big, obviously notable (BON) companies. I figure there are about 60,000 BONs in the world max. That would include all the actively traded stocks in the US as approximated by the Wilshire 5000 which now has less than 4,000 companies in the index. Add in similar sized private companies (Cargill, Koch Industries, etc., government sponsored companies Fanny Mae, etc., some other financial business, accounting firms, etc. that are (or were) usually partnerships, and that might be 10,000 BONs in the US. Adding in all the BONs in the UK, EU, Japan, China, and India wouldn't multiply the US number by 6. Adding in the top 10 companies in each country of the world only gets another 2,000. So 60,000 companies in the world that we should be able to get good info on. But when I look for these big companies, I'll estimate that half of them are missing here. Why? a lot of them aren't consumer businesses that are looking for advertising. How many businesses have Wikipedia articles? I'll estimate 4.8% of 6,020,000, which rounds up to 290,000. So something over 80% of Wikipedia articles are small, hard to find info on, usually consumer businesses looking for free ads. That's a fairly quick, broad brush approach. There will be lots of exceptions, but it gives you an idea of what we're up against. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:09, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
    • @Smallbones: - I know what we're up against: I'm an AfC reviewer who, when I do it, is as reject-happy with corporate crap as everyone else. The problem is that, if there's (as you say, and a reasonable estimate) 60,000 notable corporations in the world, we've got a culture that means people are likely to try to whack about 59,000 of those at some stage. Happens all the time. This is a huge disincentive to anyone apart from NPP people being active in the business space. That's why most of those notable companies don't have articles. It's also a huge barrier towards having the amount of editors doing quality control that you'd get in other spaces. We need to find a way of stopping people trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater because it's hugely detrimental to our coverage of the area (both in terms of building good content and pruning crap). The Drover's Wife (talk) 23:39, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• WP:AfD is one of the best processes for getting rid of spam. Bearian (talk) 15:00, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
  • And painfully slow at times. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:09, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• I dissented last month from the proposal to institute a moratorium on new articles about businesses. This article is much more positive and pragmatic. There are several excellent proposals here, and I commend Smallbones for these ideas. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 08:34, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
• Don't get your hopes up about the legal system fixing things. Law enforcement doesn't care about this kind of stuff. A civil suit would likely be tough because to get damages you have to show the court that some party was harmed and how. I'm not sure if an injunction would be easy to get or would accomplish much. Given that Status Labs has some well-heeled clients there's also the non-zero risk of someone wealthy getting upset about all this and deciding to try to bleed the WMF dry through legal fees. Fees easily can climb into many millions for any case that drags on. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 06:30, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Humour: The Wilhelm scream (1,314 bytes · 💬)

An article by Greg Williams about Greg Williams says nothing why there is no Greg Williams on Signpost anymore. Care to comment? Staszek Lem (talk) 23:16, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you are asking about. You might see the original, Or just tell me what you know that I don't (on this topic, that is). Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:53, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

I did find the byline somewhat confusing as the natural inclination as a reader is to assume the text right beneath it (in normal type) to be written by the person credited. Maybe that's what Staszek Lem is talking about. Nardog (talk) 15:08, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusing form of the question. I was asking why there is no Greg's cartoons in Signpost anymore. Since this is a Signpost article signed by Greg, I guess he is alive and well. ...But no cartoons. Why? Staszek Lem (talk) 19:31, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

In the media: Mapping IP editors, Smithsonian open-access, and coronavirus disinformation (340 bytes · 💬)

Re "Another blind spot", I created a stub for 2018 Sudan floods as a start. Any help would be appreciated. Kaldari (talk) 21:50, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

News and notes: Alexa ranking down to 13th worldwide (7,090 bytes · 💬)

• That's a remarkably fast fall, from #5 most visited website to #13 in 7 months. Does that includes mobile views? I wonder if Alexa changed the way they gauge popularity over the past year. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:24, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Comparing the two Alexa Top 500 Global lists, the newcomers are Tmall and Login.tmall.com, QQ.com (Tencent QQ), Sohu, Taobao, 360.cn (360 Safeguard), JD.com. My guess this is not a methodology change, but genuine increase in Chinese consumer activity on the Internet. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:37, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, if they are being newly added to Alexa's survey of sites, I guess this "sudden" fall is not so surprising. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:43, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

That's not what I meant. I meant the newcomers to the spots above Wikipedia. China had something like 50 million new Internet users last year [6]. That kind of growth will show up in Alexa. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:54, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I understand how many internet users they are in China but Wikipedia was at #5, #6 or #7 for over a decade. It's surprising, at least to me, to fall so far practically overnight. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:50, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, 'fall' is a questionable manner in which to describe the change, insofar as the actual number of people using the encyclopedia has not diminished (at least not appreciably) and its ranking remains the same in almost all regions. All that has changed is that there are new major services in China and a significant number of new users in that market as well (where Wikipedia is incidentally unreachable as a technical matter). But the figures (in terms of real numbers) have not really changed and Wikipedia remains roughly as popular as it has been over recent years. Frankly, the byline is a little misleading, bordering on click-bait-ish; it really ought to read "Immersion of major new Chinese social media sites drops Wikipedia's relative ranking on Alexa" or something along those lines. The existing wording of the byline suggest an absolute drop in traffic and even the language that follows fails to appropriately clarify what is going on here. Snow ^{let's rap} 12:20, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• It's also sad to hear about Wikimedia Space. It sounded so promising when I first heard about it...a forum where editors from different projects could gather and communicate other than Meta. I thought it would be a great place to direct those editors from other language Wikipedias who show up at AN looking for help. Sorry they threw the towel in so soon. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:43, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Quite disappointed to hear the setback in Alex's rankings but the worse thing we will witness in the future is the speculations over closing of Wikipedia market in India. It will even cause a significant drop in Alexa rankings and Indian government ruling BJP has planned to follow strict data protection policies ever since the Citizenship Amendment Act protests. I personally believe Indian government purposefully wanted to shut down Wikipedia because Wikipedia has huge collection of information about Citizenship protests and also recently the North East Delhi riots article seems to have caused headaches to ruling BJP. The author of North East Delhi riots article User:DBigXray faced criticisms and political attacks for providing accurate information about the protests by maintaining neutral point of view. We need to protect our valuable Wikipedia editors from these attacks. Abishe (talk) 19:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• Not really suprising that Wikipedia is blocked in China, they block a lot of stuff there they don't find picture perfect for their ideology. I believe there was a skirmish with the Chinese and the article on Taiwan in the past. dibbydib ^💬/_✏ 22:56, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• "it does not appear in the top 50 in China where access to Wikipedia is blocked" is a bit of a non-comment. Because Wikipedia is blocked in China, any traffic from China would've come via VPNs in other countries. For what it's worth Wikipedia may well have been the #1 website in China and Alexa won't include it in their statistics because all that traffic would appear to have come from other countries. Deryck C. 15:53, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

But VPN adds another layer to accessing Wikipedia. It is like anti-theft devices. They are made to frustrate ordinary people long enough to give up and seek alternatives. In China there are alternatives (i.e. Baidu's Baike) to Wikipedia, even if they are being censored. We wouldn't ever know what would have been the true traffic as such, even if somehow Alexa manages to know that the users are from China behind a VPN. robertsky (talk) 03:08, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Widespread transclusion of Wikipedia content is undoubtedly a major contributing factor to the statistical decline as well. We have reached a point where everything from Google searches to Windows Start Menu queries and Smart TVs and mobile phones all include cached summaries or versions of articles. We should get more aggregate data from public surveys and major organizations like Google and Facebook, but you can bet that the real rate of access is far beyond Alexa's take.   — C M B J   03:41, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

On the bright side: What's making you happy this month? (5,409 bytes · 💬)

• I am pity happy that I came back to my best form of my life whereas I managed to contribute to Wikipedia significantly in the month of February. I am also very much happy that this year is my first leap year as a Wikipedian and managed to even deliver a barnstar to an anonymous user on 29 February User talk:2601:188:180:B8E0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63. Most importantly I am also happy that I managed to progress towards of round 2 of Wikipedia:WikiCup with 27 points and I think with this achievement I made my country proud. Abishe (talk) 19:01, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• Thanks, Abishe, for sharing what's making you happy this week. I've also seen 2601.19188:180:B8E0:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 doing good work. Congrats on the WikiCup achievement, as well! Clovermoss (talk) 01:53, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

• I wrote my 9th article for the Women in Red project today! Sylvia Rose Ashby. Made me happy :-) Chris.sherlock (talk) 13:39, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

• I'm sorry for the delayed response. Thank you, Chris.sherlock for sharing what made you happy. I have read the article, and my interest was definitely piqued. I can't imagine surveying people on the opinions of the prime minister during World War II. Her dedication and persistence to the field of market research is incredibly admirable. I don't know much about the history of Australia in general, but I've been more learning more about many different subjects with how much time I've been spending at home lately. Anyways, Sylvia Rose Ashby made some very important contributions to history, and I appreciate your efforts to write about her. Clovermoss (talk) 18:43, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Righting Great Wrongs or, euphemisms for "agreement"

"The community decided to celebrate..." The community did not decide that. A handful of editors steeped in a particular viewpoint chose unilaterally to make that article the six millionth as if it would help our floundering website; it will not. Chris Troutman (talk) 16:59, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

@Chris troutman: It's possible that the process of choosing the article itself might have received a different response if more people took part in it, and that this is something that you care deeply about, as I've seen you comment elsewhere about the lack of participants. I usually think about "the community" as what the overall result was and how other people reacted to it. From what I've seen, most people have reacted quite positively. There were other articles submitted on that timestamp, which is why they were included as part of that week's content. I think that it would be better if we had some way to concretely determine what the 6 millionth article acually was, because it's more fair to everyone. I hope something about this can be done before the 7 millionth article, because I can't imagne the disappointment of finding out that an article may or may not be the one that met that milestone. Clovermoss (talk) 18:26, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

@Clovermoss:Just to clarify, the determination of the 5,000,000th article was a bit more straightforward. This time, a few editors decided that they would prefer to pick which article they liked the best under the guise that you can't really tell which article was number six million. I don't want a wider community participation as I prefer an objective, technical determination. My objection is that the action of a few editors is here portrayed as if it were the whole community, which it wasn't. As this process is now political, I won't bother with seven million except to deride the editors arrogating authority. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:55, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

@Chris troutman: Thanks for the clarification. I agree that a technical determination that is objective is the best way to determine something like this. I disagree that this is political or that the people involved are arrograting authority, but we're different people with different viewpoints. I hope you'll understand that I don't really feel like discussing this at length. I'm not really sure what else to say. Clovermoss (talk) 19:15, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Op-Ed: What I learned as Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator (1,327 bytes · 💬)

• That was an interesting article to read. That Glastonbury was so willing to allow 2 photographers through Wikimedia - could be an interesting route for certain areas. Nosebagbear (talk) 20:41, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

We should act as legitimate press more often. My local user group affiliate has issued press credentials recognized by the U.S. Government for access to their facilities, for instance. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:58, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Very much agree. It was a great shame that Wikinews wasn't able to have simple press pass procedures. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 11:39, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Not a new thing. Laura Hale and her WP colleague did well out of it. Too well, if some of the critics are to be believed. Sitush (talk) 22:17, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

• You completely owned on Twitter. Top-class volunteer social media! - David Gerard (talk) 23:59, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Opinion: Wikipedia is another country (20,819 bytes · 💬)

• I frequently think that one of the more productive things we could do would be to create into/rough and ready guides for the 20 most accessed areas. There are 2 or 3 (e.g. refbegin, which is still relatively complicated), but they're definitely an improvement from the main documents. Nosebagbear (talk) 20:49, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
• Great essay, see also the similarly titled and themed Wikipedia:Editing Wikipedia is like visiting a foreign country from user:Deisenbe. I think that describing Wikipedia as a community with a culture is a good way to explain it. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:54, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
• The Military History Project recognised Gog's work with Golden Wikis for newcomer of the year in 2018 and military historian of the year in 2018 and 2019. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:50, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• I honestly don't remember what being a newbie is like anymore. I joined in 2006 though I lurked for most of those years and it isn't until recently that I started becoming more of an active editor again. I think having some new user messages when accessing certain pages or coming across certain events like deletion for the first time would be helpful. For example, the Teahouse already does a fine job of posting messages in users' talk pages when a draft article they've submitted don't make the cut. --Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝) 02:43, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

• I joined in 2006 too... but I still occasionally feel like a newbie. Like when I'm trying to do things like incorporate the nuclear reactor template as a sub-template of the rocket engine template. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:47, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

  Hey, at least it's not nuclear rocket science! Mediawiki templates are literally a full programming language that grew like kudzu. This is a thing that often happens when programmers add some kind of "dynamic" functionality and then keep expanding it with more capabilities that users want. Eventually the Mediawiki devs admitted this had happened and added support for embedded Lua, a "real" programming language, because templates had become such a mess. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 23:01, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

• @Gog the Mild: thank you for sharing this. I copied a portion of it to an active thread on Wikimedia-l at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2020-March/094392.html. ↠Pine (✉) 06:28, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• This strongly reminds me of my own newbie days. Good read, thanks for sharing. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 07:00, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• Though I signed up to Wikipedia in 2015, I only really started editing in September 2019. One of the biggest obstacles to a new starter is the prolific and unnecessary use of obscure abbreviations. And I'm afraid this article is full of them! Topo122 (talk) 12:22, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

  It's fancy, but using the {{Abbr}} template on high-traffic help pages could help a lot. For instance, RfD Sdkb (talk) 19:45, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Yup. Protip: try putting "WP:" before the abbreviation and punching that into either the search box or your browser's address bar (replacing the title of the current page). Most of the commonly-used abbreviations have redirects. Example: WP:RFD. Doing a search through a search engine often works too, if you prefix it with "wikipedia", like "wikipedia rfd". --47.146.63.87 (talk) 06:05, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

• Or perhaps there is no typical experience for newbies. I think this is the truth. Wikipedia is so vast that your experience will vary hugely based on chance. If your first edit is to an article that an edit thinks they WP:OWN then you're in for a bad time. If you stumble across the Teahouse or make a first edit which coincidentally happens to accord with our 6 billion policies or make a few edits to completely unwatched pages and get to learn the ropes slowly before interacting with other users, you might have a better time. Milhist is an exceptional WikiProject and definitely a good one to have as your area of interest, not that you would know this before joining. — Bilorv (talk) 14:25, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
  • That's particularly the case when so many editors' first edits are trying to create an article. Certainly that was my plan, so after a couple of dozen edits to get the basic concept down I went that route. And to no-one's huge surprise I'm sure, it didn't turn out that well. Bad enough that it would be another 6 years before I returned. I occasionally debate refunding it, but I'm not sure I'm strong enough to see just how poor it was! Nosebagbear (talk) 17:55, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
    • Things would have been quite different when Wikipedia started but now creating articles is definitely not a good place for users to start out. In many ways it's unfixable that the most obvious task someone can do—creating their very own article—is not a large part of what needs to be done in 2020. But we could definitely be doing a better job to introduce new editors to our basic policies and show them the simplest things that need doing. The biggest problem, I fear, is how hostile many of our users our to new editors. Sometimes I understand the urge myself—it's hard when you're monitoring hundreds of edits to take the time to explain to a new editor the seventeen different reasons why their edit isn't an improvement in a way that won't make them feel discouraged or annoyed, but it's also impossible for the new editor to know many of those reasons. — Bilorv (talk) 22:36, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
      • This begs the question about what is a good place to start. Too many newcomers start by trying to fiddle with a vital article when they are not an expert on the subject. Starting by creating an article though puts the user on a steep learning curve, as they not only grapple with the markup but with our policies like WP:GNG, WP:COI, WP:V and WP:BLP. I've seen articles by newcomers deleted within seconds of creation. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:10, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

    Oh hey, another data point for the obvious truth that letting new users create "live" articles is an ongoing disaster that drives potentially-useful editors away when they inevitably mess up and get bitten. Obviously the default should be to force article creation to go through some draft process, but such proposals always get shot down by the "don't change anything" and "anyone can edit, which means anyone should be invited to blow their leg off with no warning" crowds. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 23:01, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

    • • And then there's stuff like this Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:07, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Personally I would recommend fiddling around with stubs tagged with "Copy edit needed". They are listed at GoCE, you can pick topics that appeal and/or about which you know something, and it is almost impossible to make the article worse, and you get practice at putting new prose into existing articles. And every so often someone will point out a new policy or bit of the MoS you were unaware of. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:47, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

• Nice piece! And what I have found out over time is that every language version of Wikipedia is a different country as well, with its own rules, codes and procedures.--Hispalois (talk) 10:02, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
• @Gog the Mild: I'm still fairly new (been extended confirmed for little over a week), so I can relate to your experience. I actually had someone offer to mentor me in my first week of editing, which was super helpful. I wish all newbies could receive the same sort of welcoming experience that you and I did... King of Scorpions 16:37, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

  It would be useful to have some software stuff that lets people "follow" new editors and get alerted when they have possible issues. Probably also stuff that "encourages" new editors to go to places like the Teahouse. There really needs to be some "I need help" thing that any editor can go to immediately. Only half-joking: a Big Red Button labelled "Help Me!" on every page. More seriously, probably something like a search field for "help questions" that people can enter their problem into, which pulls up help pages and also lets you easily request help from a human. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 23:01, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

@47.146.63.87: - the follow editors function actually was a community wishlist item in the past, but rejected out of harassment concerns. A big "help me" button that was like the "help me" template would probably overwhelm our ability to answer them. However, a big button that directed to the teahouse would be very worthwhile, I feel. A search field for help questions would also be a good option - wikipedians like tagging stuff, so indexing wouldn't be an issue. Nosebagbear (talk) 12:26, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Right, a follow thing would have to be restricted to approved users. And yeah, you need to put some filtering between people requesting help and people volunteering. Obviously it's impossible to guarantee a live volunteer can always be available immediately. I was kind of envisioning something that lets you look up help resources, and if the person still needs help, they can submit a request into a ticket system. We already have OTRS, which seems to function adequately, but most people don't know about it. I wonder how difficult it would be to integrate with OTRS. Allowing answered questions to be posted publicly would also be good, so then those are available to others seeking help. What would be really nice would be having screen sharing between helpers and helpees, but that would probably be a big technical undertaking and also comes with privacy issues. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 06:36, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Reading the decline, I suspect they wouldn't be happy even if the userright was at admin level, and it wouldn't be of much use if set at some functionary point. Quite a few people find OTRS, but I'm sure plenty don't. I don't know how many more active OTRS agents we could get (there's only a couple of dozen active agents on the en-wiki queue, and lots of inactive), but we could probably get some. One issue I've found is that practical editing help is much easier to give on-wiki, through Teahouse etc, rather than by email (even with references to on-wiki content), due to not writing in markup. Answers would need to be scrubbed - OTRS operates under confidentiality for all our tickets. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:55, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

The idea is if someone has a question like "How do I get these two templates to look like this on Foo", and they need human help, the helper can then save what they told the helpee to some page that will then show up in help results. That way people don't waste time answering the same question. Things can be cleaned up for any privacy issues; worst-case scenario, helpers just have to write a page from scratch. Places like the help desk of course have archives, but most people seeking help tend not to look through them, partly because they're not "surfaced" prominently. Yeah, we'd like everyone to be perfect and go digging thoroughly for an answer to their question before asking, but of course people aren't. If you "encourage" people to go through the help query search thing to get a human, and it searches through archives automatically, it ameliorates that. Wikipedia in general could probably benefit from some experienced user interface design people spending time using the site and suggesting improvements. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 04:54, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Regarding the "help me" button. At least on the skin I use for desktop WP interaction, there is a prominent Help link on the left hand navigation menu. It takes one to Help:Contents with pretty decent instructions for first-timers on both reading and editing. That said, however, the mobile view has no such equivalent link that I can find. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:47, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Right, while on the default skin it's one of the dozens of teeny text links in the sidebar that most people's brains just block out. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 04:54, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

• I'm not sure why Wikipedia's help resources aren't in better shape. It'd be a lot easier to write useful guides than to have to personally tutor every new editor in different areas. I think part of the problem is that, whereas we have no qualms about merging duplicates in article space, in help space we allow clear duplicates like WP:Tutorial and Help:Introduction to remain separate, leading to a maze of resources, none of which get the full attention they deserve. I've recently been working on some basic improvements to the standard welcome template; more voices to build consensus at the Village Pump proposal would be extremely useful. Similarly, we could use some help at the WP:Task Center, the basic go-to page for new editors trying to figure out where they can be of help. Sdkb (talk) 20:06, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

  Pinging the other commentors here: @Gog the Mild, Hispalois, Nosebagbear, Bilorv, Topo122, Vami IV, Pine, Hawkeye7, Bluerasberry, Deisenbe, Tenryuu, and King of Scorpions:. Sdkb (talk) 20:06, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

  One of the problems with documentation -- all documentation -- is that it is written by people who know the subject. Sometimes they have no idea how to explain what they know; doing that is always tougher than it looks. Sometimes they assume everyone else knows what they know & therefore don't need to explain what is obvious to them. And sometimes if you explain to the people who write the documentation where it fails, they will listen, understand what is wrong, & fix it. -- llywrch (talk) 07:31, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

• @Sdkb: Wikipedia's elements are maintained and developed to varying degrees. You may recall that for awhile The Signpost wasn't published due to lack of volunteer labor. Wikipedia would benefit from having many more good faith and competent people than it has now. Specifically with regards to working on documentation, technical writing is a somewhat specialized skill, and not everyone can do it well or wants to take the time to do it well. On related points, you might want to look at the NavWiki project which is slowly but surely proceeding on my volunteer time, and WMF's Growth Team. ↠Pine (✉) 04:53, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

• To enable e-mail: click this >>>Special:Preferences<<<, find the field for entering your e-mail address, enter it, save preferences. Then you should get a confirmation e-mail, and you have to follow the link in that e-mail. To become a patroller you just ask at the page. The flowcharts are references for use when patrolling. Patrolling is all about marking new articles as either "okay" or "problematic". --47.146.63.87 (talk) 06:05, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

@47.146.63.87:, I assume you didn't mean to post this here. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:59, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

@Nosebagbear: From the article: "Yet I have little doubt that on reading this several people I have never met, and never will, are going to send me instructions as to how to resolve each of these conundrums." Gog the Mild (talk) 11:18, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

• I'm a newish contributor (3000 edits) and like to weigh in. My editing is still at a very basic level. When I try to learn more I'm 9 out of 10 times confronted with a page full of wiki-jargon with plenty of links to more wiki-jargon. Whenever I've asked for help, I got answered with more wiki-jargon. That is, when I got an answer at all. A while back I read somewhere that Wikipedia has trouble retaining editors. I found myself nodding along because I understood. Dutchy45 (talk) 14:16, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
• Nicely-done, interesting/good piece of writing. Wikipedia also has many culture subsets - what might work best with one Wikiproject community won't work as well in another one. It's like walking into a school...everyone is there to learn or to teach but each classroom has its own separate culture, its own personality, its own "best practices" - sometimes relearning things every time I walk into a new "Wiki-classroom" is still overwhelming to me and I've been around for a while. Oh! and I think the idea of putting a link to the "Copy edit needed" in a welcome or encouraging new editors to edit those articles is a GREAT idea. Shearonink (talk) 15:41, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
• Believe it or not, everyone has its own story on Wikipedia. After almost four years here on Wikipedia, I still struggle with some things (like jargons) and learn every day more. It took me some time to realise what I wanted to become on Wikipedia first as a copy-paster and now as a reviewer. Most of the things I've learnt about Wikipedia were my poor reviews. It took me some time to realise what and how the guidelines of Wikipedia looked like and should follow them. And at the end of the day, we all can be happy to see an article whether it is B or GA-class or A or FA-class and that's the thing what I makes happy. Some people are asocial and others like to collaborate to make Wikipedia a better place. I'm happy to have people like Gog on our team; I'm also happy to see more people like him here on Wikipedia. Cheers. CPA-5 (talk) 14:56, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Special report: More participation, more conversation, more pageviews (2,182 bytes · 💬)

It depends what you call 'desktops', and possibly laptops should be included. Mobile devices mainly use iOS or Android. The phenomenon could possibly be explained with: Serious, dedicated users probably make up the majority of readers of The Signpost and will be using proper computers rather than editing from phones. Just my opinion, nothing to get uptight about. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:47, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

@Kudpung: I'm probably a massive outlier in this, but I've edited exclusively on my tablet since June 2019. I mainly edit using desktop mode though, so my views probably don't count as mobile ones. Clovermoss (talk) 07:17, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Ditto, I edit from an Android phone or tablet more often than not. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:59, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

• I applaud the ten top contributors to Signpost content, two of whom serve(d) as Editor-in-Chief. The Signpost is one of the community's very few levers against the WMF and clearly we publish content for which there is a readership, so much so that some elements seek to censor us. The Wikimedia projects are too-widely read to not be accompanied by critical examinations of their goings-on. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:58, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
• Phones and tablets are “proper computers” in 2020, and I’ve been using them to edit Wikipedia since 2005, first with the HTC Apache. The desktop and laptop market has been on a downward spiral since 2012, and is unlikely to get better. Instead of looking to the past, Wikipedia should be looking towards the future. Viriditas (talk) 20:14, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Traffic report: February articles, floating in the dark (1,823 bytes · 💬)

Rather biassed summation of the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case. Yes, "prosecutors dropped the case", but only after the victim refused to testify and subsequently settled out of court for a reported $2.5 million. WWGB (talk) 11:40, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

This is one yike -Gouleg (Talk • Contribs) 14:38, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

@WWGB and Gouleg: Thank you both for expressing your opinions here. I edited this material before publication, and I can see why you disagree with my edit. I can also see where other people might agree with the edit or disagree in the other direction. It was a tough call for me. I can only explain some of my reasoning and let our readers make the call. I don't like to accuse people of crimes after their death when they can't defend themselves, or might upset their family at a very bad time for them. In this case it would not be a BLP violation, but in similar cases it might be. I do see why people would want more information here, but please realize that there is only a limited amount of space in this article. There would be no room for subtleties. I have a rule of thumb when editing that seldom fails me: "when in doubt, report the facts in the simplest way possible."

I'd prefer that this page did not become a forum on the rape accusation - there are better places for that. But readers should feel free to express their feelings on my editing. Thanks again. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:42, 2 March 2020 (UTC)