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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2023-04-26. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Holocaust in Poland, Jimbo in the hot seat, and a desysopping (461 bytes · 💬)

If anyone wonders what the desysop was about, this is the archived case request. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:41, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Featured content: In which we described the featured articles in rhyme again (1,043 bytes · 💬)

  • I enjoyed the poetic descriptions. The one for Bennerley Viaduct (my nom) made me chuckle. Keep up the good work! HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 14:33, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
@HJ Mitchell: Glad you like it! It was honestly one of the ones I had the most trouble with, as there's a lot to fit in information-wise, so I'm glad the extra effort paid off! Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600th FP! 07:52, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

From the archives: April Fools' through the ages, part two (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-04-26/From the archives

Humour: The law of hats (441 bytes · 💬)

In the media: Contested truth claims in Wikipedia (1,025 bytes · 💬)

Elon Musk has essentially shown why you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source. In all honesty, Elon Musk is basically an example of everything you should not do if you control something. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 17:19, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Quite. Whenever I see criticisms of the WMF or Jimbo, I always think "things really aren't bad. Things could be a lot worse." We now have a case study of how much worse it could be. Blythwood (talk) 21:07, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Washington Examiner doing the "mainstream bad" thing again. --Firestar464 (talk) 20:42, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

News and notes: Staff departures at Wikimedia Foundation, Jimbo hands in the bits, and graphs' zeppelin burns (16,058 bytes · 💬)

Two Wikimedians currently have access to the new account according to its Meta-wiki page: * Legoktm and Annierau. Are there 2 Wikipedia mastodon accounts? Cause I thought TNT had access to it. Or have I been fooled by the fox..../lh ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 13:24, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

You indeed have. Tails Wx 13:29, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
@Blaze Wolf You are confusing @wikipedia@wikis.world and @mediawiki@wikis.world. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 15:02, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
Oh... I see now. Similar but also different at the same time. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:05, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
Sooner or later TNT will probably have access to the @wikipedia account too, it's mostly on me for not having done so already :) Legoktm (talk) 18:32, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • I'm curious if Signpost writers follow a different manual of style than the encyclopedia itself and, if so, where one might review it.--~TPW 13:55, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
@True Pagan Warrior Content in the Wikipedia namespace is not subject to the MOS because they are not articles. More info at WP:PRJ. – The Grid (talk) 16:35, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
I ask because there is value to any news source having a style guide, be it the one from the Associated Press, or the one for Wikipedia entries, or a house guide. Based on what @Bri provided, it looks like the Signpost style guide is more about navigating mediawiki formatting than what one might find in the AP or Chicago guides. ~TPW 17:18, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
@True Pagan Warrior Yes and no. When I'm copyediting I give credited authors a lot of leeway. But I routinely correct things that are WP standards like straight quotes and Oxford comma. The complete Signpost style guide is here. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:50, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
Thank you! I've written a style guide for a news site, and will enjoy reading this one. ~TPW 17:09, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • It would seem prudent if Wales were to retain the ability to view deleted pages and oversighted revisions. As a figurehead and de facto spokesperson, I suspect he occasionally gets asked about deleted content and BLP disputes involving oversighting. Read-only access to deleted material doesn't seem like a serious site security issue. Sandizer (talk) 14:54, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • I just wanted to say I love the use of the word "Abdicate" here, it seems to say just enough about the situation. Jimbo is still on the board of trustees, so at the end of the day I'm sure he has access to whatever info he needs through somebody else. ASUKITE 18:23, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Regarding turnover of WMF staff, 7% in the first four months of 2023 would be - if continued - 21% for the full year. That's actually better than the December 2022 percentage ("Staff members are staying, on average, for about 3.8 years" is the equivalent of a 26% annual departure rate), and better than the departure of 142 of 472 employees in the June 2021 to March 2022 period (perhaps as high as 40%, depending on how many of the new hires during that nine-month period also quit during the period).
Regardless, for an organization that has had zero financial problems, losing 20 to 40 percent of employees every year seems higher than desirable. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:10, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • I wonder if anyone has looked into the reasons for this high turnover. Is it the workplace? Or just typical of the San Francisco region? (Silicon Valley is known for its employees moving back & forth between companies.) -- llywrch (talk) 19:23, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the update about general quality assessments, I totally missed it! Does anyone know if extensions such as Rater will be updated to support the new setup? Oltrepier (talk) 19:21, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
    Scripts and tools like Rater do not conflict with the updated assessment format. So, these are safe to use. However, we would ask the maintainer, or in their prolonged absence, ask anyone familiar with JS to take up the script and modify it such that complete functionality can be introduced. But a lot of BTS work remains to complete, and it may not be soon enough. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 09:22, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

The Foundation has 711 staff members (up from 525 last I read)? Where is Elon Musk when we need him to cut that number in half, or quarters, or a tenth, and with the right people it would run fine. No wonder they are trying to seep into Wikipedia in numerous ways recently, they have to give 711 employees something to do. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:43, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

@Randy Kryn:, this is flawed in quite a few ways at once (and I say as someone who has spent 4 years disputing WMF overreach). Putting aside that it's somewhat crass at a point when there have just been a round of WMF layoffs, several aspects come to mind: that is a truly terrible analogy - Twitter has egregious issues since Musk slashed their staff count. Additionally, the areas where the WMF try to "seep into Wikipedia" aren't really "recently". Instead, they date more from 3 years ago. The staff count was about 60% of its current tally at that point, so that's not holding up. Nor would it really hold up generally, if you take some time to look at where the staff generally are - tech development remains the biggest area, and the biggest increase on the community side is in reps who can function in more languages. Which major languages would you suggest we drop a community liasion for? Finally, I'd finish with a note that AGF applies to Foundation staffers singularly and in aggregate as well, not just to volunteer editors. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:21, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks Nosebagbear. You say the staff has grown by 66% in the last several years, even though it was very large even then. No surprise that they feel like they can reach into more control of Wikipedia. Tech and language functions are well and good, hopefully they continue. But a 711 member staff, up from 525 in a recent listing? Sounds like a fully functional organization, yet also an organization that promised the public and Wikipedia editors that a large amount (in the many millions of dollars) would be used on Wikipedia community projects, and those accumulated funds (how many years wasn't the announced amount spent?) should be both offered and provided to worthy projects. I and others have suggested many projects and other ways to spend the promised funding, and the foundation should also be funding major conferences around the world on an almost monthly basis. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:13, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
That...doesn't really answer any of my rebuttals at all. Some are worthwhile additional points to your initial post, but my answer was never intended to be a complete defence of the WMF's spending focuses, but a response to your statement above. Nosebagbear (talk) 15:27, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikis World

Thanks for featuring all the efforts that have been going on to improve Wikipedia's presence on Mastodon and the broader Fediverse. If anyone wants an invite to the Wikis World Mastodon server, let me know :) Legoktm (talk) 19:11, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

@Legoktm: Do you prefer invitation requests on your Meta user talk page? ☆ Bri (talk) 19:43, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
Anywhere that I'll get notified about is fine :) I just need to be able to email you the invite link or some other private communication mechanism. Legoktm (talk) 19:50, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

The change to the Wikipedia portal allowing @wikipedia@wikis.world to be verified has been reverted for now. Nevertheless, that account remains active, helping this project to reach the Fediverse/Mastodon audience. – Minh Nguyễn 💬 19:35, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

@Mxn: Was hoping someone else would ask, but: what does "verified" mean in this context? ☆ Bri (talk) 14:03, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bri: Verification makes the profile look more trustworthy by confirming that the website link in the account profile “belongs to” the account in some fashion. For the @wikipedia@wikis.world account, the idea is that the account belongs to the Wikipedia community. Minh Nguyễn 💬 15:34, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, new to Mastodon. So the website has to do something to attest that the Mastodon account is connected to itself? In other words, account verification is something the website provides to "the world"? ☆ Bri (talk) 16:18, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bri: No worries, we’re all rookies, it’s the Wild West! It’s sort of a handshake protocol: the Mastodon account claims to be controlled by the same entity as a website, and the website claims to be controlled by the same entity as the Mastodon account. Once Mastodon sees the link in both directions, it adds the verification checkmark so readers can see that it wasn’t just someone randomly claiming to be Wikipedia. I don’t know if it’s possible for a site to claim to be multiple Mastodon accounts, but it isn’t a general service the way that, say, Twitter was deciding on a list of verified accounts. Minh Nguyễn 💬 03:56, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

So, I think it works like this (I couldn't access Mastodon from where I was yesterday). If your Mastodon profile links to a website, and the website links back to the same Mastodon account with a rel="me" attribute, then Mastodon will display that account profile to others with a "verified" checkmark on the website. And we had this all set up for a while for the @wikipedia@wikis.world account linking to enwp, until WMF un-verified the account. Correct? ☆ Bri (talk) 14:44, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Essentially, yes. There’s some uncertainty about when the wikis.world Mastodon instance or other Mastodon instances will actually notice that the account has been unverified, but long-term the verification does depend on the wikipedia.org portal. Minh Nguyễn 💬 16:10, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Is it OK with you if I condense this conversation and include it in News and notes with both of our names listed as author for the item? ☆ Bri (talk) 16:17, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
That’s fine with me, though note that the discussion is still ongoing with the Communications Department about Mastodon and this account in particular. Minh Nguyễn 💬 16:36, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Graph extension

The Graph extension is used widely on Wikipedia to display charts and graphs of all sorts, as well as on sister projects, and even on non-Wikimedia sites – it's included in MediaWiki, so there are about 884 public sites using it.

What does "included in MediaWiki" mean here? HaeB (talk) 01:10, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

MediaWiki is the wiki software that provides the platform on which Wikipedia and sister projects run, as well as many other sites. Presumably the phrase means that the Graph extension is included in the standard release of MediaWiki. I suspect, though, that many sites that run on the MediaWiki platform do not make actual use of Graph.  --Lambiam 20:12, 29 April 2023 (UTC)
means that the Graph extension is included in the standard release of MediaWiki...except it isn't though, which is probably why HaeB was asking. Legoktm (talk) 03:50, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
Most of those 884 are probably just wikimedia websites (and maybe miraheze, i don't know if they were using it, but they usually enable any extension wikimedia uses). Its certainly still a popular extension (Most extensions that wikipedia articles depend on are, as people often want to copy stuff from wikipedia), but the 884 number is very misleading without context. Bawolff (talk) 06:19, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

News from the WMF: Collective planning with the Wikimedia Foundation (1,463 bytes · 💬)

Completely unrelated to this article, but I find that image interesting. It shows how really the only 2 places that are exactly opposite each other (or form a straight light with each other) are the North and South Poles. Rio and Townsville are close to being in line with each other, but are ever so slightly off... or maybe they are and the person who made the sign just made them offset to fit that many signs. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 13:32, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

  • I also like the image. Perhaps it might be a new logo for The Signpost? Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:04, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps, but it might be better to get an updated image, one where San Francisco isn't curiously blotted out with paint. jmho - wolf 23:22, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
  • I am mildly curious: Rhumb Line, or Great Circle? Jim.henderson (talk) 23:00, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Obituary: Remembering David "DGG" Goodman (2,779 bytes · 💬)

  • DGG was an editor who set many, many standards for this site, and will be missed.--~TPW 14:05, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Very well-written obituary! Lectrician1 (talk) 17:27, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • This is a very fitting tribute to DGG's legacy. He will be missed, but not forgotten. – bradv 17:39, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia has lost a man of intelligence, integrity and compassion. His name matched his character. RiP, with thanks and condolences to his wife and family. --Andreas JN466 17:44, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Though I have never had the pleasure of working with David, reading this gives me the impression that he was truly one of a kind. He will be missed dearly. TimTheDragonRider (talk) 19:45, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • David was the consummate Wikipedian, a gentleman and a scholar. Steven Walling • talk 23:40, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Weeks later and I still can't believe this is real. I always was one of his (talk page stalker) and can't bring myself to unfollow. What a huge loss to the community, but especially his family and grandchild. Star Mississippi 00:33, 29 April 2023 (UTC)
  • One of the very best people. I'll miss his good sense a lot. My condolences to his family. Blythwood (talk) 21:08, 29 April 2023 (UTC)
  • David was one of the very best. A great loss for our community, but his work has left an indelible mark. Onceinawhile (talk) 18:32, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
    Just a note: his family is more likely to see condolences on his talk than on this talk of an internal newsletter. -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gerda Arendt (talk • contribs) 18:54, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Op-Ed: Wikipedia as an anchor of truth (3,916 bytes · 💬)

  • There was a recent wikimedia-l discussion of systems such as Google's RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision) to prevent LLM hallucination: paper, Twitter thread, video. That system is clearly not currently part of Google Bard. Sandizer (talk) 15:26, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • I'm skeptical that models can simply be trained to distinguish between factual and non-factual information. To do that successfully, I think they would actually need to be able to internally represent semantic content, reason about it, and verify that against trusted prose. Something like Cyc might be the seed of the first part of that; having all of it might be equivalent to artificial general intelligence, which I expect is decades away. -- Beland (talk) 02:10, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
    While it is not quite clear how it does it, GPT-4 answers questions of the nature "is this statement factually correct?" with higher accuracy than a random oracle, especially if you also ask it to explain in detail why it thinks so. It helps if it can access the Internet, but a current weakness is that it cannot discern which sources are reliable and which are not. GPT-4 also appears capable to a considerable extent of reaching correct logical conclusions from statements provided in natural language. Again, researchers do not quite understand this, but apparently the patterns and meta-patterns needed to pull this off are sufficiently represented in the corpus on which it has been trained. I am not so optimistic about how far off AGI is; I expect that it will take less than a decade before AI models can not only reliably translate statements in natural language into formalisms like Cyc and OWL, but even devise extensions to these frameworks to represent aspects currently not covered.  --Lambiam 14:58, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
  • Quote from the article: "A system intended for deployment could then be made to include an "is that so?" component for monitoring generated statements, and insisting on revision until the result passes muster." Ding ding ding, bingo, give lolly. "A long time after inventing automobiles, humans began to realize slowly that perhaps all four of the wheels could have brakes on them, and some sort of so-called 'Seat-Belt' might possibly keep the humans' gelatinous innards from interacting with the dashboard. Humans thought about and talked about such newfangled concepts for quite some time before they gradually decided to start tentatively pursuing them." Lol. But seriously, if LLMs themselves cannot provide the "is that so?" component (as Beland mentioned), then humans need to get serious about chaining (shackling) the LLMs in series behind various things that can provide it. For example, an LLM will gladly hallucinate a totally fake reference citation, pointing to a fake/made-up book. Humans should already be capable of building some software that says, "If I can't find that book in WorldCat or in Google Books or in other database-full-of-real-books-X, within the next X milliseconds or seconds, then you're not allowed, Mr LLM confabulator, even to release your answer to the human who asked you the question, at all." It wouldn't be the full ontologic sanity check that Beland mentioned, but there's no excuse not to have at least this low-hanging fruit to start with, ASAP. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:50, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Opinion: What Jimbo's question revealed about scamming (17,054 bytes · 💬)

  • What's a UPE page please? Ashwin Baindur (User:AshLin) (talk) 13:52, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
    • It's short for "undisclosed paid editor." Many on this site are loath to use full words.~TPW 14:11, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
      • UPE was defined in the article, perhaps he's wondering about where it's defined in policy. Try WP:PAID, but also WP:COI (for Conflict of Interest) can be useful as well. Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:40, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • I think the user is asking for a sample article written by a UPE. Schwede66 18:34, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
Most known UPE articles have been deleted, but 888casino is one that was retained for whatever reason. I pulled it from a list I compiled of one prolific UPE editor. It looked like this after they created it; note especially the long "accolades and awards" section, which is typical and listed at WP:Identifying PR.
I have a bunch of lists like that. I used to do a bunch of work identifying conflict-of-interest editing before joining The Signpost. If you want to see more recent examples, go over to the conflict-of-interest noticeboard and search for "UPE", there's plenty. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:33, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
  • The user page "I don't do paid editing" flag is cool, but ultimately meangingless. There have been a number of paid editors with similar comments on their user page that also had no trouble finding work, as paid editors have found ways to explain the need for secrecy and denial to their clients. Accordingly, while it is probably better than not having that flag, it neither means that the person concerned doesn't do paid editing, nor does it prevent them from getting jobs if they are looking. It is a difficult mess. - Bilby (talk) 11:10, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
    • I have mixed feelings on the user page flags. On one hand, it's a way to raise awareness on the scams—though far less visible than the warning that your bank may put on their website telling you to be vigilant about scammers pretending to be them (and with time, they become background noise and are no longer noticed). On the other, it's almost shifting the burden onto editors who are being joe jobbed to have to defend themselves. This is a volunteer project, and volunteers shouldn't be kept up at night wondering if their username and hard work is being misused to scam people out of their money, tarnishing their reputation in the process. Frankly, if even Jimbo fell for the scammers, we have a much bigger problem that user page flags won't fix. —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 19:22, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
      • I agree that some flags on user pages is not the ultimate answer to this very serious problem, but it is not entirely useless. As @Bilby: wrote "it is probably better than not having that flag". So why not do it?
      • I consider doing something about the extortion problem to be a moral imperative. We have to try to stop it, or just admit that Wikipedia is never going to be anything approaching a credible source. Scammers are putting in bad articles, deleting (better) articles, and if you come to edit Wikipedia somebody is going to try to rip you off. There are little things that I can suggest, but ultimately the things that get done will be done either by the WMF or by our elected/appointed representatives. I do think that a lot of flags on a lot of active user pages could have a good effect on them.
      • There's one similar case that I'll point out. The U.S Congressional Cemetery in SE Washington, D.C. is something of a national treasure. A couple of decades ago. It was becoming a center of crime - drug dealing and prostitution - with violent crime seemingly just around the corner. The local neighborhood started coming up with some simple answers, maybe just to protect the investment in their homes. They formed a "Friends of" group and ended up managing the cemetery that the true owners (an inner city church) had essentially abandoned. They organized some clean up events, did some minor lawn mowing. And started a dog walking group. The dogs, surprisingly enough, were a major victory. Fido fights crime! They got a short appearance on C-SPAN. The cavalry (Air Force personal on their time off, actually) showed up with lawn mowers unexpectedly. Then they got a $1 million grant (from Congress of course). At that point, it looks like now, the ultimate victory was inevitable. So don't write off doing little things. We've got to start somewhere. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:55, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Something editors who haven't been here for 15+ years may not know, but it used to be that Jimmy Wales would habitually raise an issue like this thru email, often with the subject line "Personal & Confidential". If he had communicated to Bradv like that in this case, there would not have been any controversy & he might have kept his privileges. Sometimes old, established ways are best. -- llywrch (talk) 19:39, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

lists of paid editing articles

There's a lot of different types of articles written by UPE. Here's one with the bunch of awards (like Bri focused on) right after a Percepto editor completely rewrote it (page down to the top of the actual article). But I've written many Signpost articles on these guys, there are pages or blocked editors linked there. I'll fill in the links as I find them:

Smallbones(smalltalk) 21:25, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

The Nygard was a great before/after! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:31, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
  • Excellent piece. Minor point, "To the outside world, it might have still seemed that he was the embodiment of Wikipedia." Oh, I am entirely confident almost all the outside world knows nothing of this business. Those who have heard of Jimbo Wales continue to assume that he is Wikipedia's owner, president, chairman, whatever. We have had a bit of a storm, and we are nervous for the future, but thus far it's all in our own little teacup. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:46, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Convenience break

  • I see this was toned down a bit from the draft version, but I still feel it misses the point. While I agree that we should work to raise awareness of these scams, to make it clear to one and all that Wikipedia articles are not for sale, what happened here is that a wealthy person was perfectly ok with working with people who claimed to have corrupt admins on their payroll. So, they knew they were dealing with trashy people, but they figured their money would buy them what they wanted, so they did not care. They only became upset when the scam that they willingly participated in turned out to be targeting them as well as Wikipedia. So (this goes to the point in the above comments) they reached out to the person they thought was the boss of the whole operation to complain that their attempt to buy their way in had not succeeded. And Mr. Wales fell for it and made a ridicualous accusation. I've seen the evidence, and it is so bad, so obviously, completely, laughably fake. The screengrabs I saw were most likely created on a private wiki used for faking things, to an experienced eye it obviously was not en.wp at all, and obviously not Bradv at all. I get how it could've fooled an out-of-touch businessman for whom money is all that matters, but I don't get how it could possibly have fooled any experienced Wikipedian, let alone literally the first person to ever edit Wikipedia. Wales was the one who critically failed to assume good faith here, not just in the tone of his remarks, but in his apparent lack of any skepticism about these claims, assuming the absolute worst from the get go, and having to be pressured over a period of several days to please share the supposed evidence with the Arbitration Committee, the body the community elected to deal with, among other things, admin misconduct. One would think the first assumption one would make was that this couldn't be real, and a few moments of actually looking into it would have easily confirmed that. To be clear: if this had any substance to it at all, I would be at the front of the line calling for Brad's head. This was on the level of people who cold call phone numbers claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service and demanding a back tax bill be paid by Apple gift card in the next 30 minutes or the cops are coming to arrest you, it was that stupid. Beeblebrox (talk) 17:46, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
  • @Beeblebrox: thanks for bringing your views here. I don't think that my article misses the point, just that you and I have different points to make. You believe that Bradv is an honest respectable person, and shouldn't have his honesty questioned. Please note that I never questioned his honesty, and I was quite surprised when people (not you) started accusing me of this. My point is that (almost?) everybody in the discussion agreed that there was a scam, including extortion, but nobody had any suggestions on how we could deal with that huge problem.
  • I do disagree with you about "what happened here is that a wealthy person was perfectly ok with working with people who claimed to have corrupt admins on their payroll. So, they knew they were dealing with trashy people, but they figured their money would buy them what they wanted, so they did not care. They only became upset when the scam that they willingly participated in turned out to be targeting them as well as Wikipedia." That way of dealing with extortion is exactly the opposite of the approach we need to take. Let's say there was a situation where the police were collecting protection money for the mafia from a business owner. The business owner gets angry that neither the mafia nor the police are actually protecting him from anything, so he reports the arrangement to a higher level of the police.
  • So what should the higher level say to the extortion victim? Definitely *not* the following "you've been bribing the police to pay the mafia. You are guilty of bribery, you've been breaking the law!" Technically, that may be true, but it won't stop the crime by dealing with the ultimate victim that way. A better way to stop the crime would be to get the police officers' names and properly investigate that part of the case. (In the analogous Wikipedia case it looks like somebody was impersonating the police). Only then could you begin to get information on who in the mafia was responsible.
  • The part of the article where I mentioned that nobody is 100% honest is very important. In classic con games this is very important. As the grifters say "You can't cheat an honest man." They will put an ordinary person into an unusual situation where the rules aren't very clear and push, tempt, or trick them into being dishonest. Then when they take the money and run, the mark finds it very difficult to report the crime. In other words, the grifters are counting on the victim or the police to say "I (or you) can't report this; I was (or you were) being dishonest." So 90%(?) of the crimes go unreported. To get the crimes reported you have to sympathize with the victim, knowing that anybody can be scammed like this.
    • The very first thing we have to do is to make clear rules about paid editing and let the world know about them. I hope the WMF is listening! *Get the word out* covering it up doesn't help!
    • Next we have to gather information about the scammers (rather than just about the victims). You get the info about the scammers from the victims.
    • To gather that information, we need a clear reporting mechanism with somebody on the receiving end to ask the right questions. Maybe those folks should be specially trained for this, which might suggest that the T&S folks do it. But in any case, if you don't ask the right questions you won't find the right answers, so why bother going through the charade?
    • Then something has to be done. Perhaps this might just be a year-end report on how many victims have come forward. Hopefully it can be more than that, but something has to be done at this point.
  • Otherwise, the only option I see is to tell the victims to call the authorities. There's a list at the end of the article Confidence trick, so I don't see a problem giving them those contacts. We might even prepare a packet of information on what we know about the scam in general. I know that some editors will object to this advise, based perhaps on "No legal threats", but I'm not making any legal threat here. I'm just saying if we see a victim of a crime that involves our website, we just say "it's a shame that we can't help you more, but maybe you should contact the authorities." If there isn't anybody on-Wiki or at the WMF that can handle the situation better than that, I'll suggest that the WMF contact the California State Attorney General and just ask them. "We've got an extortion racket going on on our website. Can you help us in deciding how best to handle the overall situation?" I'll bet that the AG has a special office that handles con games and they have seen organizations in a similar position and will have some suggestions. Hope this helps. Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:37, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
    I think the key difference in how we formed our opinions on this matter is that I actually saw this person's conversations with the scammers. Unless Jimbo shared that with you as well, I assume you have not.
    This business only seems suddenly urgent to people who aren't involved in combating UPE. This is going on all day, every day, although this particular case does appear to involve larger sums than most. The committee has been contacted by numerous people targeted by such scammers, and we advise them that it is an attempted scam and not how Wikipedia works.
    I don't see how the state of California can help these people. I do like the idea that Google, which has a fairly cozy relationship with the WMF, might be able to help with SEO-type options. Perhaps give the WMF free "sponsored" placement at the top of certain search results.
    Where I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion is that you seem to somehow blame the volunteer community for not doing enough. The volunteer community is doing what it can. Those in the know, know, that this sort of thing is being actively combated every day by dedicated volunteers, but by the same token it is the community's responsibility to detect UPE, remove the paid editors, and review and possibly delete material generated by them. It is not and never has been the community's responsibility to police the entire web for people making dishonest claims about Wikipedia. Beeblebrox (talk) 15:53, 1 May 2023 (UTC)


Special report: Signpost statistics between years 2005 and 2022 (4,452 bytes · 💬)

  • Statistics "between" 2005 and 2022 would not include statistics from either year. These are actually statistics from 2005 through 2022.~TPW 14:13, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
    • @True Pagan Warrior:
      Query~ ResultsRatio
      from 2020 to 2022~602,000 results (google)~67.488%
      between 2020 and 2022~290,000 results (google)~32.511%
      --Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 21:57, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
      If an online search isn't good enough for sourcing, I'm not convinced it's good enough for definitions, either. ~TPW 01:21, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
      @True Pagan Warrior: So formal and colloquial English … Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 02:11, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
      "colloquial" presumes a particular audience, which isn't realistic for a news article on one of the most widely-used sites on the internet. Precision is more inclusive. ~TPW 13:41, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
  • The book Common Errors in English Usage – cited several times in Common English usage misconceptions – does not agree with TPW's complaint. Prof. Brians says "Between 1939 and 1945" is better written as "1939–1945", but they mean the same thing. ☆ Bri (talk) 04:28, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
  • "Home Wiki" is a meaningless data point. A user's "home wiki" is wherever they created their account, and has nothing to do with what they consider their main project. This data point is why English Wikipedia always appears to have such a huge proportion of global editors, while the number of edits on English Wikipedia has a much smaller proportion of total global edits. (As an example, the majority of active contributors to projects like Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikinews, Wiktionary have their language's Wikipedia project listed as their "home wiki".) This is a data point built into the MediaWiki system, and it is apparently extremely complex to modify this. Wearing my Movement Charter Drafting Committee hat, we are actively working with the WMF to modify polling software so that users can select their "voting wiki" from all projects for which they have met activity criteria, so that it is more likely to give us a better and more accurate perception of the opinions of individual projects. The MCDC has published its "early draft" of the ratification process here and invites editors from all projects to participate in the discussion. Risker (talk) 19:28, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm not so sure. When a user goes to www.wikipedia.org, they choose a language, which may become their "home wiki". You don't think that has anything to do with which language they prefer to utilize? Lacking any other information I don't see this as a poor default choice for reporting (especially informal reporting like this). ☆ Bri (talk) 19:49, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
@Risker: For me, partial results are better than none at all. Maybe it shouldn't be taken so seriously. Do we have something better (rhetorical question)? In Special:Contributions, the "homa wiki" indicator could be characterized in one or two sentences, with its pluses and minuses. --Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 21:57, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Traffic report: Long live machine, the future supreme (4,252 bytes · 💬)

Gun illustration

Why is 2023 Covenant School shooting, which was committed with a Kel-Tec SUB-2000 and AR-15 style rifle illustrated with a 200-year-old Brunswick rifle? We have plenty of images of the relevant guns, and the type of gun used is very much part of the subject and the conversations around it. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:28, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

I just wanted to put a picture of a gun and get it over with. Replaced with the first one of those at your suggestion. igordebraga ≠ 01:23, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Indian Premier League

As an Indian, very surprised to not find it in lower lists. Must have been excluded due to mostly mobile views, which was noted in the second week's list, which implies that it isn't actually a great metric for exclusion. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 13:55, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

@CX Zoom: Even if I know some Indian subjects are sought mostly by phone (Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan entered the last two WP:TOP25 with a 90.1% average), we exclude over 94% (as well as less than 10%) of mobile views because it's common that it denotes traffic that is not natural - just see the 2022 annual list, where articles with such numbers include Bible, Skathi (moon), Ansel Adams, Gmail and everything starting with a 'XXX' (plus Cleopatra, which as we told before, is boosted by a Google Assistant prompt). igordebraga ≠ 21:48, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
Let's say some article get 9.4M traffic from Google Assistant, or equivalent services; and 0.7M from normal humans. So, would it feature in the Top 25 report, but if the figure for humans were 0.5M it would not because it would enter the 94% criteria? —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 15:10, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Hard to have many cases to deserve this fractioned view, specially with numbers like the ones you put up - keep in mind that as much as we work with weeks, ever since the tool that gave us percentages for such periods went down we work with that one that only gives mobile numbers on a day, month and year basis (primarily the first - and only remember 3 breaking 8 million in a day, Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman and Queen Elizabeth when they died; 84.8%, 87.5%, 73.5% mobile views). Hardly something crosses the thresholds without mostly automated views rather than "people actually mostly seeing it through mobiles (or desktops)", hence we exclude only to be safe, with exceptions whenever necessary. igordebraga ≠ 22:56, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 23:53, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Periods, not commas?

I understand it is convention in certain places to use decimals, not commas in large numbers. But I'm not sure that is supported by MOS:NUMBER, nor by any style guide I own. Nor has that been historical practice for TOP25. What changed? CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 18:56, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Given my country uses periods, Toolforge puts them by default. Other contributors sometimes fix them to commas, but this time they skipped it. igordebraga ≠ 21:48, 1 May 2023 (UTC)


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