Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson chows down on Tucker Carlson's two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an opinion piece published by the Daily Mail. Many reviewers found the interview to be boring, e.g. Masha Gessen writing for The New Yorker (paywalled). When asked what brought about the current "special military operation", Putin elaborates on Russia's origin myth (phrased as actual history) starting with Veliky Novgorod and Kyiv in the year 862, moving onto the baptism of the Rus in 988, and barely getting to Catherine the Great (who reigned from 1762 to 1796) in the first half-hour. The next hour, which goes up to the fall of the Soviet Union, is little better.

Johnson says that he:

Perhaps Johnson was irritated by Putin's claim, made two or three times, that Johnson had stopped truce negotiations in Istanbul early in the war. Otherwise, Johnson sticks to his main point, that Carlson showed "bum-sucking servility to a tyrant."

The mystery for Wikipedians is Johnson's claim that Putin's story had anything to do with Wikipedia. My review of Kievan Rus', Christianization of Kievan Rus', Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and Dissolution of the Soviet Union gives little support to Putin's views.

Azernews reports: More than 600 articles related to ICT published on "Wikipedia" in Azerbaijani language. The Azerbaijan Information and Communication Technologies Industry Association (AICTIA), Azercell Telecom, the Azerbaijan I, and a government agency led a five-month-long project which created 600 articles on the Azerbaijani Wikipedia.

A major share of Azercell is believed to be owned by the ruling Aliyev family, according to a 2015 report from OCCRP. Ilham Aliyev, the president of the oil-rich former Soviet republic, is widely considered to be a dictator.

I don't claim that the Azerbaijani editors are effectively acting as paid editors for a dictator. What else are they supposed to do, if they want to contribute to Wikipedia in this field? But it does look like a clumsy and potentially problematic arrangement.

As recently reported by Kazakhstan-based, English-language newspaper Astana Times, over 100 academic scientists and researchers attended a seminar in Astana, hosted by the Kazakh Ministry of Science and Higher Education, on building scientific content in the Kazakh language on Wikipedia.

In the past, the neutrality of the Kazakh Wikipedia was disputed due to its suspected ties to the national government; a controversy that notably involved (albeit indirectly) none other than Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

– S, B

Members of the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group appear to be taking an active role in reforming the standardization of the Yoruba language, a language which is spoken by over 40 million people in West Africa. According to a post published on the Wikimedia Foundation's Diff blog, this effort comes as a collaboration between the user group and the International Centre for Yoruba Arts and Culture. The partnership has been ongoing for a couple of years, though the effort seems to have become increasingly organized and concrete in recent times.

Nigeria's The Nation reports that a group met at the University of Ibadan on January 12 in order to discuss this topic, describing the gathering as "a pivotal inaugural meeting". Nigeria's The Guardian reported in mid-January that a joint committee that seeks to "examine and harmonize the current orthography" of Yoruba had been formed and was partnering with Wikimedia. According to The Guardian, members of the committee contain representatives from a number of Nigerian and Yoruba civil society groups. The joint committee has scheduled a conference for the weekend of February 20, 2024, to continue the group's orthography standards reform efforts.

According to a 2013 paper published the Journal of Arts and Humanities, a standardization of Yoruba orthography was first published in 1875. The 1875 orthography remained the standard system for writing Yoruba for nearly 100 years, though reform efforts that began in the 1960s culminated in a committee of Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Education writing and approving of new standards for the language by June 1974. The 1974 orthography has remained the language's official standard through the present day. – R

• People are interested in Oxford and Cambridge: The Tab, a British publication targeted at college students, published a list of the top 10 U.K. universities by Wikipedia page views during 2023. Oxford took first place with 1,353,397 views and Cambridge second with 995,733. The top Scottish university by page views, St. Andrews University, took fifth place with 349,988 views. No universities from Wales or Northern Ireland made the cut. (See also: WikiProject Higher education's popular pages list)
• Which Wikipedia page this week: The Independent. "She obviously can't decide which Wikipedia page to copy this week." PM on shadow chancellor. (see prior coverage, "U.K. Shadow Chancellor accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in her new book" from the November 6, 2023, issue of The Signpost)
• Wikimedia CEO to speak at university: According to a release from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander will give a lecture at the university on the topic of "the future of the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia in an era of artificial intelligence". Iskander will speak at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time on Thursday, February 22, in the university's Cowell Hay Barn. The lecture is free and open to members of the public, though organizers encourage prospective attendees to register ahead of time.
• How should we use Wikipedia?: Euronews Bulgaria speaks with Sofia University professor Iglika Ivanova, who provides some guidance on how to use Wikipedia as an informed citizen.
• Boston, we have a problem...: In a recent edition of Here and Now, Boston-based public radio WBUR-FM reported that conservative Wikipedia fork Conservapedia is "laced with falsehoods"; indeed, the site's views on several social and political topics have been under scrutiny since its very foundation in 2006.
• Honey, how you grew!: Back in January, Andrea Daniele Signorelli reflected for la Repubblica on the 23rd anniversary of Wikipedia (in Italian), stating that "in a [digital] world that is usually based on the so-called surveillance capitalism, Wikipedia represents an unicum for its relevance, longevity and size". Fun fact: Signorelli also interviewed Gianluca Moro, an IT consultant for the University of Padua, who reportedly created the first article on the Italian Wikipedia, about communication.
• Wikipedia's coverage of the Arab Spring causes uproar in Ghanaian treason trial: In Ghana, several individuals were recently tried for the capital crime of high treason, with the prosecution alleging that the defendants had plotted to engage in a coup d'etat in 2021. Two of those charged were acquitted, while six individuals were convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Part of the trial had focused on references to the Arab Spring that had been made by a high-ranking police official. During the trial, the Attorney General of Ghana attempted to rely on a definition of Arab Spring that had been taken from its Wikipedia article. The defendant, who had publicly argued that Wikipedia was not credible as a reference source in this context, provided an alternative definition in his defense. The judge, in issuing the final ruling in the case, agreed with the defendant.