According to Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, the country's İyi Party has made Wikipedia access a campaign issue, promising to restore access if elected. This announcement came a day after the one year anniversary of the 2017 block of Wikipedia in Turkey, which began on 29 April. (Reported by The Verge) The Wikimedia Foundation has also published a video on the occasion, promoting its #WeMissTurkey campaign.

The block began as a result of Turkish Law No. 5651, when in the English Wikipedia's article on state-sponsored terrorism, Turkey was described as a sponsor country for ISIS and Al-Qaeda. In a 27 January interview with Hürriyet, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher, stated "We are not sure why there is still a ban on Wikipedia. The Turkish authorities may not have examined the latest versions of [this] content."

The most cited work on Wikipedia (see a Wikimedia blog post) was revealed to be an updated world map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification, which was cited 2,830,341 times – more than 130 times the count of the second most cited study.

The findings were widely reported with mentions also appearing in The Guardian, Wired and South China Morning Post. The authors of the paper themselves were completely unaware about the use of their research, with one writing "Those numbers blew me away, none of us had any idea about this. We didn't know Wikipedia collected this information or anything about it."

The Köppen-Geiger climate classification was first proposed by climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1884, after being revised several times, including in 1918 and 1936. Rudolf Geiger worked with Köppen in 1954 and 1961. The system they created, used for climate classification, divides climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on seasonal precipitation and temperature patterns. The five main groups are A (tropical), B (dry), C (temperate), D (continental), and E (polar). Each group and subgroup is represented by a letter. All climates are assigned a main group (the first letter). All climates except for those in the E group are assigned a seasonal precipitation subgroup (the second letter). The authors of the study used the same system, and applied it to the current world.

Contributions from Smallbones and Bri

• Monkey Selfie at last resolved: The monkey selfie copyright dispute has been in the news since the picture was taken in July 2011 (see previous Signpost coverage). In April 2018, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that animals can not legally hold copyrights. (Reported by the Associated Press and story promoted by Bing search; also see legal decision)
• New movement on a 'lazy' topic: The Lazy Nigerian Youths movement got their own Wikipedia page, and TheCable noticed.
• Crypto policy makes German News: English Wikipedia policy made international news as German cryptocurrency websites as well as the magazine Focus took note of cryptocurrency users being prohibited from editing articles related to cryptocurrencies. Focus coverage was unusually discerning, noting that merely holding cryptocurrency does not qualify one for the "subject-matter experts" quasi-exception to the policy.
• On cryptocurrency at WP:COI: The cryptocurrency news site bitcoin.com tells enthusiasts "If You’re a Wikipedia Contributor, Owning Cryptocurrency May Be a Conflict of Interest". The piece links to WP:COI.
• Cinco de Mayo vandalism: A high school student inserted his name into Cinco de Mayo page as a prank to impress his friends, writing that "Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for "fifth of May") is a Mexican civic holiday held on May 5 that commemorates Jimmy Lovrien, a general in the Mexican army, and his unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862." The man, now a columnist for the Duluth News Tribune reported in this article on how it was picked up, and repeated hundreds of times.
• Todd Howard-centered vandalism: Coordinated vandalism centering around Todd Howard (video game designer) (the designer of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls) largely committed by his fans, led to tens of pages being vandalized and locked. (Reported by New York magazine.)
• A mistake: North Jersey Media Group newspapers reported on how Gloria Struck was incorrectly listed as an original member of the Motor Maids.
• Good ol' Larry: Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote an 8000 word essay on what's wrong with Wikipedia and how to fix with blockchain-based 'pedias. (Reported by thenextweb)
• Another COI: The article on Mark Lindquist, the Pierce County, Washington, prosecutor, has been edited by Lindquist's public relations guy, according to The Tacoma News Tribune's story, reprinted throughout the Northwest United States.
• Artist re-writes Wikipedia article from scratch: The Adrian Piper article has lots of issues related to COI, largely because she rewrote her article. These have now been reasonably resolved. (Reported by Artnet)
• A Wiki meetup runs into issues: IndigenizeWikipedia meetup at the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre, Whitehorse, Yukon, was "first of its kind" but had difficulty citing unwritten traditional knowledge of tribal elders. (Reported by CBC.ca)
• Bringing Wikipedia into libraries: American Libraries magazine published an excerpt from Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge, written by a WMF employee and a Wikipedian in Residence (WiR) at National Library of Wales. Leveraging Wikipedia was published by American Library Association. The excerpt discusses bringing Wikipedians into libraries, "allow[ing] staffers to justify Wikipedia programming within their jobs", employing a WiR, etc.
• Google Lens using Wikipedia: Google Lens draws augmented reality knowledge from Wikipedia. (Reported by The Verge and Tom's Guide)
• We're going to the moon! The Arch Mission Foundation and Astrobotic Technology aim to "Put Wikipedia (and More) On the Moon to Preserve Humanity's History" with the Peregrine lunar lander in 2020. The Arch Mission Foundation plans to send 50 million pages or so to the moon, much of which will be the English-language Wikipedia. Apparently it's fairly easy to print all these pages on tiny nickel sheets - the sum of all knowledge will fit in a package the size of a CD (and worth every cubic centimeter). It will only take a week to print. (Reported in Space.com, and others)
• Brave:Edit: Amnesty International's global Brave:Edit editathon for women's biographies, held May 19–20, attracted international media note, from Scotland's The National, America's US News, and India's Deccan Herald, among others. The program was coordinated under Amnesty and Wikipedia on Meta-Wiki.
• Advertorial Tones and Paid-For Posts: How Are Brands Trying to Game Wikipedia: The Fashion Law, a blog covering the fashion industry, reviews some specific abuses, deletion discussions, and notability requirements in an intelligent manner.

A mapframe map showing the location of Wikimania 2018

English Wikipedians can now use the mapframe function to embed maps right on a page. The map shown here (which indicates the location of this year’s Wikimania conference) demonstrates the functionality. Mapframe was requested by the English community via RfC last year and the request was reconfirmed this spring. If you’re new to mapframe, this Kartographer help page shows how to use it.

Expect more significant new features in the coming weeks, with the implementation of the long-awaited map internationalization features. After internationalization, maps will display in the content language of the wiki they’re published on. Until then, they will continue to display in the language of the territory mapped. (You can experiment with internationalized maps on testwiki now—here’s a page of examples.)

These features are brought to you as part of the Map Improvements 2018 project. Let developers know what you think on the project talk page. — JMatazzoni (WMF) (adapted from VPT post)

Since May 8, AdvancedSearch has been available as a beta feature in your wiki. The feature enhances the search page through an advanced parameters form and aims to make existing search options more visible and accessible for everyone. AdvancedSearch is a project by WMDE Technical Wishes.

AdvancedSearch serves as an interface for some of the special search options that are already provided in CirrusSearch, but are difficult to find or to remember – especially when you want to combine several of them. E.g. you would get the same results if you manually type intitle:foo into the search field or use advancedSearch for that. The advantages of AdvancedSearch include visibility of existing options, syntax discoverability and easier combination of search parameters. – Birgit Müller (WMDE) (adapted from VPT post)

TemplateStyles allow custom CSS pages to be used to style content without an administrator having to edit sitewide CSS. This will make it more convenient for editors to style templates; for example, those templates for which the sitewide CSS for the mobile skin or another skin (e.g. Timeless) currently negatively affects the display of the template.

TemplateStyles is currently enabled on MediaWiki.org, German Wikipedia, and Swedish Wikipedia. Discussion for its deployment is taking place at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#RfC: Enabling TemplateStyles, and usage guidelines are being developed at Wikipedia:TemplateStyles.

Further information is available on MediaWiki.org, including a help page and examples.

Referencing multiple sections of the same work in an article is currently cumbersome. Editors have asked for an easier way to do this for more than ten years. In 2013 and 2015 a wish to change this made it into Wikimedia Germany’s Technical Wishlist and it was wish #24 in the international Community Wishlist survey 2015.

WMDE's Technical Wishes team conceptualized an idea how the problem could be solved: A generic solution that can be used for any refinement, such as pages, chapters, verses etc., and that could be used as a voluntary option, not forcing the users who don’t want to change their working mode to use it.

In order to find out if they can start working on this solution, the team is inviting editors from all wikis to have a look at it and tell us what they think in a feedback round from May 14th to May 27th. – Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (adapted from VPT post)

• Subpages^[1] (source) by User:Bellezzasolo – add a "Subpages" link to the toolbox, which shows subpages of the current page
• Vote Symbols Plus^[2] (source) by User:Pythoncoder — modified version of Vote Symbols with new keywords and icons, plus a few bugfixes from the original Vote Symbols.
• KmlToJson^[3] (source) by User:Evad37 – converts KML files into GeoJSON, for use in mapframe maps.
• Metadata-timeless^[4] (source) by User:Evad37 – hack to load the Metadata gadget when using the Timeless skin

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #18, #19, & #20. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

• The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version, funded by a WMF individual engagement grant. It is now easier to find nearby places that need pictures. It helps you with direct uploads and title and category suggestions. The app only works on Android phones. [1]
• The parameter for unpatrolled edits in recent changes filters changed name. You might need to update saved filters and links. [2]
• You will be able use CodeMirror in the 2017 wikitext editor on all wikis. CodeMirror helps with syntax highlighting. It has previously been a beta feature and only available on wikis with scripts that are written from left to right. [3]
• When an administrator blocks someone they will have a calendar they can use to choose when the block ends. This is to make it easier to pick a specific date. [4]
• You can soon turn on the Performance Inspector in the Editing section in your preferences. It shows information about the performance of pages. This could be the size of modules in the page, how many CSS selectors are defined on the page and how many are used, or the size of the images on the page. This tool is intended to help editors fix pages that load slowly. [5]
• There is a new abuse filter function called equals_to_any. You can use it to check if its first argument is equal (===) to any of the following ones. For example you can use it to check if the page's namespace is amongst a given set of values in a more compact way than you could earlier. You can read more on mediawiki.org.
• The advanced search function beta feature will be on all Wikimedia wikis. It makes it easier to use some of the special search functions that most editors don't know exist. [6]
• Dynamic maps are now available on most Wikipedias. Labels on maps can also be in different languages.
• The new Advanced Search interface is now available as a Beta Feature on all wikis. This makes it easier to learn about and to use many of the powerful options in our search. Feedback is appreciated. [7]

• Tech team are migrating wikis from Tidy to Remex. Because of a bug the 250 wikis which do not yet use Remex were switched on 23 April. This is two months early. This meant that pages with broken wikitext showed wrongly to readers. The bug was undone the next day. You can help fix broken wikitext to avoid this problem when your wiki switches. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. You can follow the process on Phabricator. [8]
• The abuse filters had a problem with blocks where you had changed how long they last. It used the default length everywhere. This was in late April. Abuse filter users should make sure the right block length is used and change them if needed. This is only for filters where how long blocks last had been changed. [9]

• The Wikimedia Cloud Services team is working on a new project called Toolhub. The goal is to make it easier for Wikimedians to discover software tools they can use. You can leave feedback on the talk page or email jharewikimedia.org to leave private feedback.
• All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in all namespaces will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 16 May. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Wikibooks wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch on 9 May. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [10][11][12]
• In the mobile view, warnings for when something is wrong with a page are not as clear as they should be. The developers are working on this. You can give feedback and suggestions.
• The developers are working on making the Wikipedia Android app available in more languages. You can give feedback, suggestions and help test it. Read more on mediawiki.org [13]

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 3 to 4 pm UTC. See how to join.

Hurricanehink is a musician, a composer, a member of WikiProject:Tropical cyclones since 2005, and a member of WikiProject:New Jersey since 2018. His featured articles include Hurricane Isabel, 1991 Perfect Storm, and Typhoon Tip.

The most recent article I've nominated for good article is Cape May County, New Jersey, where I've spent most of my life. When I was 16, I attended Ocean City High School. I have played piano for two city mayoral inaugurations, and I have spent much time at Ocean City City Hall (including at a town council meetings, where I argued on behalf of the Ocean City Repertory Theatre, now defunct). In my adult life, I have spent time traversing much of Cape May County (and going across Great Egg Harbor Bay several times a week) for various jobs and gigs, or to visit some of my area's great breweries, including Cape May Brewing Company, now the third largest brewery in the state. I have edited all of these articles linked, mostly in the past few months.

This might sound like a bland story for the Signpost, but I have been a Wikipedian since 2005, and in most of 13 years of editing, I have almost solely worked on hurricane articles, with an occasional nor'easter. I have taken many breaks as an editor. I think we all have to take a break from anything in life that becomes routine, or worse, if it's becoming toxic. A part of me got tired of writing about destructive cyclones killing thousands of people each year, but a part of me also knows my role in the #Resistance.

In a world where the Turkish government has banned its country's access to this great human experiment where knowledge is free for everyone, it is more important than ever to recognize what we are doing. We aren't just writing an encyclopedia – we're documenting the history of our world, at the same time when politicians and foreign adversaries are attempting to sabotage the freedoms we take for granted (see net neutrality for a topic of concern since I first became a Wikipedian). There is a downward trend in the Press Freedom Index around the world, especially here in my own United States, where my President said (on November 6, 2012) that "[t]he concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." The same man has significant conflicts of interest, has installed a Cabinet of people diametrically opposed to doing their job. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has gone to extraordinary lengths to undermine the environmental regulations.

Facts are more important than ever, and it all starts at a local level. In my research for Wikipedia, I have found some unanswered questions in my research. For example, there is apparently a "Great Sound State Park" located in Cape May County that has been designated since 1927, but it only has 2 pages of Google hits, hasn't been developed, and doesn't seem to make sense why New Jersey resources were going. I thought at one point that it was some nefarious scheme involving money laundering, the mob, and some environmental conspiracy. It turns out it's even cooler. On the site of the state park is the Cape May Plant Materials Center, which provides plant resources to nine states. I couldn't find a way to integrate that into the article, but I hope to visit their office one day, see what science is being done around me.

I've also come across some dead ends. When writing about Atlantic Cape Community College (I should disclose that I am an employee there, but not a paid editor in any means – I only teach music), I learned that a new campus in 2005 was built on environmentally sensitive land (which is pretty much the entire county), and the county was supposed to secure land. According to some forums in my search, the county hadn't done it as of 2012. I asked the staff and emailed the freeholders, but I haven't heard anything. Perhaps it wasn't publicized, or perhaps they never intended to secure the land, instead hoping that no one would dig up old articles.

I am still searching for answers, and I expect to find more mysteries about my area. One of the most pressing issues in my county is our unemployment rate (14%, worst in New Jersey, but it plummets to 5% in the summer because of the shoobies, who also give me a source of income, I should disclose). My county also drinks more per capita than any other metropolitan area in the state. There is significant poverty, and because of our isolation, the county is losing population with each passing year. I wanted to find out why. That question drove me to Wikipedia, that curiosity about how the world works. I used to primarily wonder how clouds could become some of nature's worst beasts, which is why I wrote 75 featured articles about them (give or take a few clunkers: older ones that no longer meet the criteria). Now though, I turn more local to make more sense of my world.

I am a musician, a writer, a teacher, a hurricane enthusiast, a resident of South Jersey, a Wikipedian, and an environmentalist (Team Earth!). Lately, my worlds are merging, and I'm incorporating what I've learned on Wikipedia into my songwriting, my daily conversation, going to meetings I wouldn't otherwise attend, and just enhancing my view on my own corner of the world. I'm in the planning stages for a Tricentennial in 2023 for three area municipalities, and I'm writing a musical about an upcoming 250 year Revolutionary War anniversary. If everyone learned a bit more about their world, we could all understand it a little better and make it a bit better.

To you, the Wikipedia community of editors and writers, I thank you for your time in reading my words. I end my rant with a few questions that I hope emphasize my point, and I would love feedback in the comments on them.

• How often do politicians finally act once the media attention reaches a certain point, and is knowledge/information a factor in those decisions?
• How many businesses/politicians/organizations thrive on us, the people, being ignorant to less pleasant truths?

TL;DR version: keep editing and stay awesome, Wikipedians.

A brute force attack on Wikipedia accounts took place on May 3 and ended a day later without definite result. In the course of the attack, more than 70,000 accounts received "a failed attempt to log in to your account" alerts. The Wikimedia Foundation later released an internal statement calling for stronger password security.

As the Administrators' noticeboard would like to remind you: Strong passphrases consist of long, standard English sentences.

After Bitcoin and cryptocurrency holders were already placed under Conflict of Interest when editing articles on the topic (see this issue's In the media), general sanctions have now been placed on all articles related to blockchain and cryptocurrency (broady construed). The sanctions were not placed by the usual venue of an Arbitration Comittee ruling, but rather as community sanction discussed and unanimously adopted on the Administrators' noticeboard, with the sanctions on Syrian Civil War cited as another case of this procedure. Smallbones seemed to be in the general spirit of the discussion:

The discussion was also under the general idea of following established internet practice, with other large websites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter already having banned cryptocurrency advertisements.

The Wikimedia Affiliations Committee has withdrawn its recognition of the two Wikimedia user groups based in Brazil, Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil and Wiki Education Brazil. The affected user group agreements will be terminated by the Foundation legal department "as soon as possible", and there will be a one-year ban on primary contacts of the two groups serving as primary contacts to other group applications or existing user groups. According to a statement by the Affiliations Committee, this comes as a result of "a severe and protracted conflict" between the two user groups, "which has resulted in significant harm to past, ongoing, and planned Wikimedia movement activities in Brazil".

From 20 to 22 April, Wikimedia Conference 2018 took place in Berlin. The event has a tradition of the Wikimedia community funding representatives of Wikimedia movement affiliates to attend the conference and there have discussions about the outreach practices and inter-organizational collaboration of Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups. When these various communities select their representatives to attend, many of them ask that that their representative draft a report describing their experience at the event. Readers of The Signpost may ping Wikimedia organizations to publish their report anywhere they like and to put it into the category for Conference reports. A good report can be as brief as five sentences, a page with a few photos, or any communication which captures any aspect of what was important about this conference.

Snippets from two Conference reports:

On Saturday, I engaged with the topic of Wikimedia organisations. Wikimedia Deutschland is by far the largest Wikimedia country organisation (at the moment, we have over 100 staff, the next largest country organisation about 10), so that question concerns us especially. I would like to present two quotes from participants of the corresponding discussions: "Wikimedia right now is more like a government than a charitable organisation", and, alluding to Eric Raymond, "Wikimedia has to evolve from a cathedral to a bazaar".
— Gnom, personal blog

It looks like WMF are reconsidering whether this conference should continue to exist in this form. One proposal was that the Wikimedia Conference be restricted to governance/strategy, and that the other aspects of this might better be handled by a set of regional conferences.

I (Joe) think that may be a good idea, but I would hope that:

• At least one of those regional conferences is held in conjunction with the governance/strategy conference, so that the governance/strategy people don't become too detached from other aspects of this movement.
• At least once every three years, things are all brought together in one place. The hothouse atmosphere was stimulating and productive, and I don't think it can be reproduced any other way.
  — Jmabel, Cascadia Wikimedians

• New Pages backlog drive: New Page Reviewers are holding a concentrated effort to cut down on a growing backlog. Anyone with the required qualifications and demonstrated experience is welcome to apply for the NPR user right at WP:PERM and lend a hand.
• Editathons: Upcoming editathons are Wiki Loves Pride, Women singers & Women+Song, Geo-focus: Russia/Soviet Union, and Women and GLAM.
• Privacy policy updated: As detailed in this blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation has updated its privacy policy. Feedback is invited on the Privacy policy talk page for the next month.
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this month's newest Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Wikiesfera Wikiesfera Grupo de Usuarixs, the Igbo Wikimedians User Group and Wikitongues.
• Facebook rolls out information feature: After a Beta launch in October (see previous Signpost coverage), Facebook has now made an information button linking to Wikipedia articles accessible to all News Feeds. According to Facebook tests, this resulted in 500,000 additional Wikipedia views a day; meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation writes in a statement that it "encourages companies who use Wikipedia's content to give back in the spirit of sustainability".
• Wikimedia Deutschland publishes Impact report form for 2017: The report looks back on a successful year with increased fundraising and membership and two new members of the Board of Directors, Peter Dewald and Dr. Gabriele Theren.
• New Board for Portugal: Portugal Wikimedia elected a new board on April 15. The new president is Gonçalo Themudo.
• Foundation News: The Wikimedia Foundation has appointed Heather Walls as Chief Creative Officer and Kui Kinyanjui as Vice President of Communications.
• Milestones: Congratulations to the Russian Wikipedia, which reached 900,000 articles this month.

Wikipedia Talk:Requests for adminship, once the most lively forum on the project with the exception of ANI, is becalmed. The babble of noise at peak times akin to the background din of a noisy Manchester pub on a Saturday night has dropped not just to a whisper, but to a stony silence. It's become an empty space. Walk through it and you'll make conspicuous footprints in the dust gathering on the floor. Your footfall echoes in the deserted room, "Is there anyone there?" you call halfheartedly before turning round and going back outside into the sunlight. In the street there is also little activity. A kid sits on a doorstep poking vandalism into K-Pop music bios through his cheap Chinese smartphone. A bunch of teenagers sit round their Samsungs seeing who can tag the most new pages in sixty seconds.

The whole place has the feel of a deserted Wild West film set. Across the almost traffic free road, you enter a half open door with a dilapidated sign hanging on one nail: Café Anna it announces in sun-faded coloured letters. Inside the pretty room with many colourful interactive pictures on the wall, there is a stuffed effigy of 'The Founder' in an armchair, but there is no busy bustle in this place either. There's a lady editing an article about a golf complex in Hainan. The article is almost as complete as the complex. She's looks startled when you enter – she obviously wasn't expecting anyone. "Yup, it's kinda quiet here," she says. "April's customers are down to a fifth of the usual month's average."

German war effort: Case opened on 22:45, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

Has an attempt to prevent historical revisionism become a content battleground? K.e.coffman, one of the involved parties, is the author of the op-ed "World War II Myth-making and Wikipedia" in last month's issue of Signpost.

At 00:26, 25 April 2018 DGG's vote to accept became the fifth vote of nine, constituting a majority of Arbitrators accepting the case. These words of Opabinia regalis, quoted often in recent arbitration reports, are clear and informative: "allegations of subtle POV-pushing in hot-button topic areas is one of those that benefits most from a careful inquiry taking place at a measured pace in a structured environment". Comments from Arbs suggests the matter will be considered as behavior-centric, keeping content at arm's length; and will widen to editing on WWII topics in general, not just Clean Wehrmacht.

By May 11, the arbitrators' votes stood at 9/1/0, indicating consensus to open a case.

In response to multiple requests for status update on the unusually long period of time to open a case, with by one commenter calling the Requests for arbitration department a "ghost town", arbitrator Euryalus said on May 14 "there's a slow-moving discussion on scope happening on the mailing list; I've advanced a point of view and a proposal to outsource the content component of the case and then just look at any underlying conduct issues, but I'm in a small minority as evidenced by my lonely "decline" vote in saying the same thing on the case request page. There are suggestions from several arbs to simply get on with it via a regular case, which also seems like good advice given the passage of time."

Upon opening the case, clerk L235 commented: "The Arbitration Committee has not decided on a specific scope – instead, the Committee has decided to take a broad view of the dispute" (emphasis added).

Since 19 May, arbs have commented on the evidence talkpage.

Questionable BLP reverts by blocked editors
Withdrawn by filing party 4 May 2018 diff

Formerly titled "BLP reverts by blocked editors", the central question of the request is whether WP:BLP trumps WP:SOCKING, i.e. can "good reverts by socks" (as stated by Opabinia) be left as-is? Or should they be reverted per policy? The request was voted down by Arbcom 0/6/0, then withdrawn. A workaround was enunciated by Black Kite and endorsed by the committee: "revert it [the sock] and then re-revert to take responsibility for it myself".

I am not being allowed to contribute from genuine sources
Declined as obviously premature 1 May 2018 diff

Brought by an editor who started contributing on 18 March 2018 and received a tban on caste-related articles under the South Asian social groups discretionary sanctions. Declined by clerk.

I sometimes find myself slipping down the rabbit hole and landing into the realm of the third-grade-wikipedia-reader. I can't help it since I had the privilege of raising four boys who always had dirty faces. They were connoisseurs of all things 'gross' and would laugh endlessly about the jokes they made up about bodily functions. What does any of this have to do with the English Wikipedia (you ask)?

We forget that a large numbers of our readers are boys who are bored. They are mired in school much of the of the day and can only fall into their default mischievous mode when they arrive in their computer lab at 10 am so their homeroom teacher can get a break. Vandalism rates also increase during this time slot. Why do you think the articles about female anatomy have such high page views, hmmm? I caught my boys plenty of times pretending they were doing something educational when they were actually studying the finer points of anatomy. I am NOT mocking any editors, cultures, genders, etc., etc., _etc. – I am a product of my Midwestern US culture and only propose that different types of food strike me as funny and incomprehensible.

Well, things probably haven't changed much, at least in my little corner of Western civilization. If Wikipedia had been around in the 1990s, you can bet my boys would be learning details about female anatomy and bathroom humor. They would have enjoyed Wikipedia's articles on food and nutrition while laughing their heads off while they read:

• Balute – The ducks are understandably worried and the chickens sigh deeply in relief.
• Soylent Green – Why not have some friends for dinner?
• Casu marzu – Not exactly the ketogenic diet but close.
• Honeypot ant – I am actually willing to try these. I don't anticipate that I will enjoy picking the little ant legs out between my teeth. These are so good that fans dig down two meters through the soil to find them.
• Hypoderma tarandi – A historical food, "tastes like milk" and its practice is supported by "Copious art dating back to the Pleistocene."
• Cendol – "[T]he swollen green worm-like rice flour jelly", counts as one serving of vegetables but only because it is green
• Mezcal – Not much of a disincentive for those who like tequila.
• Vincent M. Holt – Probably wasn't tasty himself but was a leader in lobster rights movement
• Sujuk – Keep tabs on your horse.
• Fermentation of unusual things – There are those who practice the fermentation of fish heads, walrus, sea lion, and whale flippers, beaver tails, seal oil, and birds. Then they wonder why they get botulism.
• Mud pie – I was disappointed to find this article was missing so I created it. Watch for pebbles breaking your teeth.^[1]
• Crazy-named food – This ancient dish is "compounded of all kinds of dainties, fish, flesh, fowl, and sauces."
• Chocolate Salty Balls – Imaginary, pop culture, detailed plot summary. External links to recipe sites might be an improvement.
• Cockle bread – Not really appropriate for the third graders.
• La Tomatina – I know Wikimania has already been hosted in Italy but ATTENTION all organizers we really need to go back there to participate in this event. It would be worth the inconsistency of rotating conference sites.
• Flies' graveyard – I don't care how good this is, I loose my appetite when I see these words put together.
• SPAM – This almost indescribable delicacy is highly appreciated in Hawaii. It is sometimes disguised as sushi. What are the ingredients again....
• Truffles – Though eating fungus is not unusual, the reasons pigs like them is interesting: "The female pig's natural truffle-seeking, as well as her usual intent to eat the truffle, is due to a compound within the truffle similar to androstenol, the sex pheromone of boar saliva, to which the sow is keenly attracted."
• World Pie Eating Championship – "In December 2014, pies of the wrong size were delivered to the event, while the intended pies were sent to a nearby divorce party."^[2][3][4]
• Goldfish swallowing – Encyclopedic tone but THIS version was much better. Just read the first paragraph. You will find it to be quite profound. If you can get past the first four sentences, good for you.
• Super Size Me – Despite all the pshaws from a well-known fast-food giant, you might want to stagger the meals you get at the drive-through over the course of a year rather than 30 days. See also: Happy meal.
• Don't eat this
• Rhinotillexis – "[Has] benefits for the human body.^[5] Friedrich Bischinger, an Austrian doctor specializing in lungs, advocates using fingers to pick nasal mucus and then ingesting it, stating that people who do so get "a natural boost to their immune system".^[5][6] The mucus contains a "cocktail of antiseptic enzymes that kill or weaken many of the bacteria that become entangled in it", so reintroducing the "crippled" microorganisms "may afford the immune system an opportunity to produce antibodies in relative safety".^[7]