Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-04-25/News and notes

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By Bri

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

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Research_Best_Practices_Around_Privacy_Whitepaper/Draft

Former Steward User:Mardetanha globally banned by WMF

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Brief notes

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• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this month's newest Wikimedia movement affiliate, the .
• New administrators: None to report; the last RfA was conducted in February.
• Record low active administrators: still falling since the record reported in the last issue of The Signpost 439, update before publication
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week:
  • Simple English Wikipedia reached 250,000 articles.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is ARTICLE. Please be bold in helping improve this article!

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• News has just come in on the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Persian Wikipedia has surpassed 1 million articles. --Andreas JN466 14:46, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

@Jayen466: Thank you, I'll add it to the list! --Oltrepier (talk) 17:06, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

• Do you have any information for the reason for the global bans, especially for Mohsen Salek? Your links just take one to a log page. Was there a discussion about this? Or was it just a mysterious "office action" where no justification is provided? It just seems like this global ban might be based in political reasons which would be a huge disappointment I think. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:56, 25 April 2024 (UTC)```

There was some speculation in the Signpost newsroom, but it didn't progress to where we thought it made responsible elaboration on what was published. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:37, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I met Mohsen at a conference — such a gregarious conversationalist and delightful person to have around! I'm very curious about what happened. I'll miss seeing him around. Crunchydillpickle🥒 (talk) 19:04, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Liz, this is very worrying. It reeks of political censorship. --NSH001 (talk) 20:50, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

It's so weird there's no note on why, or the lack or a reason, especially given the last Signpost issue's discussion of Wikipedia's transparency mentioning blocks as an example. //Replayful (talk | contribs) 21:17, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

• About the Graph Extension: I made the comment on the Telegram channel that this is one of the cases where the relationship between the volunteer community & the Foundation has not been successful. By this I am not blaming the Foundation (well, not having a prompt fix is arguably their fault), but that we volunteers have allowed ourselves to become helpless when faced with a problem like this. There was a time when a problem with the software presented itself that the volunteers with programming experience &/or knowledge would simply come up with a patch themselves to fix the problem. But now we expect the Foundation to fix all of the problems we encounter.
  So what was preventing one or more people who were tired of the Foundation's lack of action doing something? The source code is available for download; it could have been put on a test bed & one or more volunteers could have hacked out a patch, then submitted it to the Foundation. That patch then would have to be seriously evaluated -- rejecting it out of hand would be a bad look for the Foundation. Definitely it would require testing before being applied, which would lead to bugs identified, & the submitters informed. That's part of the software development process. Worst case would be volunteers confirming the Foundation's statement that fixing this was a difficult task. Nevertheless, something would be happening, & we volunteers would feel empowered.
  In short, this issue about the Graphs extension is a sign that the volunteer community have adopted learned helplessness into our culture. And it is up to us to expunge this defect, because it does not critically affect the Foundation. --- llywrch (talk) 18:05, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

We at Wiki Project Med have been working on integrating OWID for nearly a decade now. This initially began as a collaboration with WMF staff using the graph extension. When that failed we duplicated OWID on the wmcloud.[2] And than imported that into a mediawiki.[3] To get it on WP we were told it needs to move to production servers and have a WMF team to manage it. We next looked at just bringing OWID in directly via a gadget after getting reader consent which is now live in EU WP.[4] There is currently discussion regarding if this will be permitted.[5] I guess we will see. But the community is working on various potential solutions. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:29, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

While i agree that learned helplessness is part of the problem here, i think it goes further than that. It looks like the articles were intentionally kept in a broken state in order to try to put presure on WMF to implement a preferred solution. There are failures here on all sides. That said, i think the biggest problem is that once you dig, there is wide disagreement among the community about what "graphs" should be. Its hard to fix a problem when you can't even figure out what you are supposed to be fixing. Bawolff (talk) 02:11, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

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