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On the bright side

What's making you happy this month?

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By Clovermoss and Pine

The content of this Signpost piece is adapted from email threads titled "What's making you happy this week?" that are sent to Wikimedia-l.

We encourage you to add your comments about what's making you happy this month to the talk page of this Signpost piece.


Week of 26 January 2020: Шта вас чини срећним ове недеље?

From Clovermoss and Pine, writing together this week

Thanks to User:Dungodung for the Serbian translation of What's making you happy this week?

English Wikipedia passed the 6 million article milestone.

Determining the exact 6 millionth article is challenging. A community discussion narrowed the list to a few likely possibilities. There is no tool that currently exists that can determine which article is the 6 millionth. One difficulty in determining the winner is that articles are moved and deleted while others are being created.

On the 18:59 timestamp on 23 February 2020, 15 articles were submitted: Auto-trolling, Castle Folds, Mysore Sand Sculpture Museum, Egon Hartmann, Kalashree Seashell Museum, Giovanni Ricci (mathematician), Enno Dirksen, Giovanni Prodi, David Notkin, A. Nico Habermann Award, Videniškiai, Lidia Kulikovski, Maria Elise Turner Lauder, Andrei Bolocan, and Raymonde Verlinden.

The community decided to celebrate the article for Maria Elise Turner Lauder, who was a Canadian philanthropist and writer. The article was created by User:Rosiestep.

Rosiestep is well known in the community. She joined Wikipedia in 2007 and was elected an administrator in 2009. She is an co-organizer for WikiConference North America and WikiProject Women in Red, and is a member of the Affiliations Committee. On her user page, she shares that her academic degrees include a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Business Administration. She can communicate in English, Spanish, French, and Serbian.

Maria Elise Turner Lauder (1833-1922), was a Canadian teacher, linguist, and author. She wrote under the pen name Toofie Lauder, and was also known as Maria Elise Turner de Touffe Lauder. Lauder spoke several languages fluently, including Greek and Latin. Lauder was a linguist and she taught at Whitby Ladies' College. She was a prominent member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Lauder travelled extensively and formed friendships with many notable individuals. She received the honour of a private audience with Queen Margherita. Lauder and her son were also presented to the papal court of Pope Leo XIII. Her travelling experiences inspired the authorship of three books: My First Visit to England (1865), In Europe (1877), and Legends and Tales of the Harz Mountains (1881). Lauder also published other works during her lifetime, including songs and verse. Her other works include Evergreen Leaves: Being Notes From My Travel Book (1884), and At Last (1894).

Remembering a public servant

Jim Lehrer, seen in 2011

I am grateful my country forced me to serve my country. Not for my country's sake, but for my own. In that diverse company, I learned to be responsible for others. I learned to be dependent on others. I learned there was more to life than me, me, me, me.
— Jim Lehrer, who was a United States Marine Corps veteran, an author, a longtime news anchor of PBS NewsHour, and a moderator of numerous debates of candidates for the office of U.S. President. This quote is from a speech that he gave at Harvard University. Lehrer passed away peacefully on 23 January 2020.

Postscript

After this week, User:Pine is taking a break from writing What's making you happy this week? and On the bright side for at least the next few weeks. User:Clovermoss plans to continue writing for the aforementioned publications in the meantime, and will continue to send weekly emails to the Wikimedia-I mailing list.

Week of 1 February 2020: Що робить вас щасливими цього тижня?

The logo for WikiWomenCamp 2017

From User:Clovermoss

This week, I learned about m:WikiWomenCamp 2020, an initiative I wasn't previously aware of. The page is still under construction, and I'm looking forward to when it will become more complete. Previous WikiWomenCamp events have been held in 2012 and 2017.

On break

An image of a stopwatch created with focus stacking

Clovermoss and Pine took a break from writing What's Making You Happy This Week? and "On the bright side" for the remainder of the month. The features will probably resume in March.

Regarding translations

Skillful translations of the sentence "What's making you happy this week?" would be very much appreciated. If you see any inaccuracies in the translations in this article then please {{ping}} User:Pine or User:Clovermoss in the discussion section of this page, or boldly make the correction to the text of the article. Thank you to everyone who has helped with translations so far.


Your turn

What's making you happy this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.


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  • 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]

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)[reply]

@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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
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