Last call for Wiki Loves Monuments; Community–WMF tension over VisualEditor

On 30 September, Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the Wikimedia community's global photo competition, will reach the end of its submission period. The proceedings have been underway since the first of this month; national juries will start reviewing submissions for the first round of selections after it closes.

At the time of writing, WLM had achieved nine featured, seven valued, and 149 quality images on Commons. Similar to past years, it will take the media file repository's community and the related content projects months to work through all submissions and evaluate candidates for predicates. In quantitative terms, the continent of the competition's origin (Europe) is currently dominating: Poland is leading the national selections with 31k submissions, followed by Germany with 25k, and Ukraine with around 21k. Notably, bicontinental newcomer Armenia has submitted more than 13k images. Among the African states, South Africa leads before Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt with 3.5k to 890, 710, and 430, respectively. Among Latin America, Uruguay (4.2k) is in front of Mexico (2.9k) and Argentina (1.9k); the latter is also hosting images of Antarctica, though none have been submitted. In Asia, India, which won last year's international jury prize for the best image, holds a commanding lead with 7.3k files, with China lagging with 2.1k submissions. The US, which has taken part since 2012, currently has 6.8k.

Community aggravation with one of the Wikimedia Foundation's signature initiatives, the VisualEditor, came to the fore again this week with the announcement and implementation of code blocking the tool.

Kindled by Kww, the action came as part of implementing prior consensus in the English Wikipedia's VisualEditor request for comment. The code, which was reviewed and altered after community comments prior to going live, was removed minutes after being deployed as the Foundation decided to officially change the English Wikipedia to 'opt-in' status'. The VisualEditor's product manager castigated the editors involved for deploying "known-broken code ... despite direct warnings to the participants of the damage it would cause", while the WMF's engineering team considered it "badly flawed" code that would put an "unacceptable load on the servers".

Fallout from the disagreement includes a debate over whether Foundation employees are members of the community; the VisualEditor is currently opt-in only, on the English Wikipedia, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Previous Signpost coverage of the VisualEditor includes its deployment and an op-ed from the Foundation's Deputy Director, Erik Möller.

• Should the community logo be trademarked?: Four community members have declared their formal opposition to the Foundation's attempt to trademark the Wikimedia community logo in the European Union. The opposition, which includes the logo's original creator (Artur Fijalkowski), was careful to note that "it is not our intention to damage anyone; our actions are a challenge against what we perceive as unilateral declaration of ownership of an asset that has always belonged to the wider community, and not to one or another organisation that is part of the movement." The original discussion behind this can be found on Meta. The Foundation was quick to file a request for consultation on Meta to determine the wider community's opinion; the Foundation legal team's position is that without trademarking, others could register the logo and restrict the community's use of it. A possible solution (which currently has majority support) lies in a collective membership mark, which would "allow community members to use the mark freely to show their connection to the Wikimedia movement, while still protecting the mark against abuse from non-community parties."
• Featured lists election: An election to select two new delegates for the featured list candidates process is being held from 1 to 30 October. Nominations will be accepted from 1 to 7 October. Voting starts on 15 October.
• Indian gender gap: A draft work plan for the Indian gender gap project has been posted on Meta, though few specifics have been entered.
• Brazilian education group proposal: A new grants proposal from Ação Educativa, a non-profit Brazilian educational group, has been published on Meta. Their objectives can be viewed on their FAQ page; the program would run for ten months with a proposed budget of approximately US$551k.
• Croatian Wikipedia: Following on Last week's coverage, there is a request for comment on the alleged right-wing bias on the Croatian Wikipedia.
• First article, simplified: Your first article has been ... simplified.
• New openings: The Foundation is looking for a software engineer for data analytics (full-time, San Francisco or remote), along with various other posts, and Wikimedia Germany is looking for an English-speaking front-end Javascript developer, primarily for Wikidata.

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• Those who are interested in the Visual Editor situation might be interested in a similar situation at

Wikipedia talk:Flow#No edit conflicts? where many of the same issues are in play. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:54, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• As someone who voted for opt-out, even I got the hint that VisualEditor was opposed by most editors active enough to participate in the RfC, with good reason. WMF must understand the proposal was premature. It is not production ready enough for English Wikipedia expectations. This was said over and over (and over). I do consider the comments to the effect that VisualEditor should be disabled to make it harder to edit Wikipedia as "nonresponsive"; that is a policy decision that was not under discussion. But even with that said, consensus was still very strongly against because of technical concerns. So I reiterate that the proposal should be re-submitted in the mildly distant future after it is technically sound, with any and all comments to the effect that edits should be made more difficult ignored as against some WMF policy (a policy or whatev should be passed to reflect this if necessary). Int21h (talk) 07:20, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• I must have missed the Declaration of Independence that Antarctica seems to have made.... Peridon (talk) 07:25, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Antarctica has about eighty internationally-agreed historic monuments - see Historic Sites and Monuments in Antarctica - few if any of which are on the equivalent heritage lists of any specific country. Handling it as an extra "country" seemed the most practical way to do it! There have been 19 submissions so far... Andrew Gray (talk) 19:31, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • It seems to be a very religious place! Johnbod (talk) 20:09, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Anasuya is not a new hire for WMF. She joined WMF in July 2012. Her title has changed but I think the role is more or less the same. I think Nonprofit Quarterly is a little behind. ASengupta (WMF) can you clarify? --Pine^✉ 07:28, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ack, that's my fault for not double-checking. It looks like she was promoted earlier this year. My apologies, Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 19:17, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks for noticing, Pine and Ed! It's true I was hired in July last year, but the NPQ did have it right in that Frank Schulenburg and I are the two 'newest' members on the leadership team at WMF, even though our promotions took place a while ago. :-) ASengupta (WMF) (talk) 03:46, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• James Forrester is actually the product manager for VisualEditor. While it is true that product managers often also act as project managers and therefore what is written here is not incorrect, it would be more correct to refer to him by his proper title. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 10:51, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks Dan, fixed. - Dank (push to talk) 15:17, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks to both of you. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 19:17, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• A modern editor emulating a 1980s word processor is so retro. Get with the times: 140 character per article (and type with your thumbs). ~ 16:29, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

What's a collective membership mark? Is this another term for collective trade mark? If so, once this is confirmed, please redirect it. Otherwise, a stub would be nice. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:43, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"Featured lists election: An election to select two new delegates for the featured list candidates process is being held from 1 to 30 October. Nominations will be accepted from 1 to 7 October. Voting starts on 15 October."

• I checked the Talk Page and it said that these elections were canceled and might be rescheduled (see FLC Elections). Can you find out what happened? I couldn't find any information explaining it. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 18:29, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]