In the field of human conflict, tens of millions of people, fighters and civilians alike, have lost their lives over the millennia. Some of these conflicts have sadly been necessary in order to protect civilisation from greater evil. An article asking us to reflect on one major war reminds us that most conflict is unnecessary. Perhaps Wikipedia users could bear that in mind when hastening to be unpleasant to each other, exerting authority over others, and turning some discussion venues into a sordid mire of grave dancing and battlefield behaviour.

DiplomatTesterMan takes us on a journey of a new user on Wikipedia, told in their own words. You will read about what the user has been up to here so far, about how the motivations to keep editing have changed over time, what the user thinks of Wikipedia now and some deliberation on what the future aims could be. The user tries to keep it humorous (Wikipedia:Humor) here and there, so bear with them, from the pie at the beginning right till the prayer at the very end. So let's begin...

With a global edit count reaching 3,000, and with 2,641 edits on Wikipedia, I still consider myself a newbie here. On my user page my first line still stays "I am still getting the hang of Wikipedia" and I think that’s gonna stay there now, forever, as a memory to remind myself what it was like to be a newer newbie with around just 50–60 edits ten months ago. (Yes yes edit counts matter, see Wikipedia:Edits Per Day & WP:EDITCOUNT [quality + quantity] hence all the numbers! :P) And I am also a noob since I joined after 2000AD according to Wikipedia:Please bite the newbies.

Wikipedia is an amazing example of collaborative human effort that everyone can be a part of. All Wikipedians know this, but hearing this from just one more person reaffirms the thought, always.

• The Wikipedia community at large has amazing people and amazing editors, even if some love to create sock puppets and pick on each other every now and then.
• Personal motivations to edit Wikipedia will keep changing for a young user like me.
• Editing Wikipedia is a thankless job most of the time (WP:THANKLESS) This is where the community aspect that happens behind the scenes makes a difference in the long run. Simple things like sending "thanks" do work in cheering up people (WP:THANKS,WP:THANKYOU) (I guess psychologists use the term instant gratification for this, a more relatable example maybe would be cat pictures for others, oh the joy!)
• But at the end of the day, Wikipedia does not need you aka "Get over it". If you think Wikipedia owes you something for the stress of editing articles, then no. Read this: Wikistress for getting the facts into your head such as "that you're just getting sucked into a scheme to line Jimbo's pockets" just to feel even more depressed :D :D
• If you think you're the only one cribbing about how flawed Wikipedia is, you haven't seen sites such as Wikipediocracy.
• Wikipedia has more strengths than flaws. The strengths clearly outweigh the faults (only if you are an optimist and you keep your own ego in check, or you like pie).
• The parts of Wikipedia that are transparent are the best parts: being able to see page histories, user histories, talk pages, being able to see how decisions are being made, being able to see whether the core principles of Wikipedia really are honourable or just the biggest Wikipedia hoaxes of all. :D
• Take a break from Wikipedia when your stress goes up. (WP:ENJOY) It helps. Being on Wikipedia should be rewarding, and shouldn't feel blood sucking or even worse, soul sucking! WikiVampire Slayers needed.
• I now have a reason to pray and believe in God... to pray that Wikipedia doesn't implode or explode anytime in the near future. I am young and am so curious related to how Wikipedia will have evolved say after fifty years. (WP:ARMAGEDDON, LOL wiki essays cover it all, WP:TOOMANYESSAYS, stop, no more..... WP:FUCKIT)

On a more serious note, this year I have been consistent on Wikipedia and have managed to create 43 new articles in main space, all which still need improvement, some closer than others to "GA" status such as Delhi War Cemetery. Just recently Cwmhiraeth accepted my first DYK submission for a page I initiated and expanded: National Police Memorial (India). (The day I found out that this memorial had just been revamped and was open to public again, I actually rushed out in the morning to take pictures with my mobile phone just so that I could put it onto Wikipedia! Newbies huh!) Then I voted like a diligent Wikipedian in the Arbitration Committee Elections December 2018 and learnt of Isarra's pie diplomacy. At another level I have got into arguments with users and sock puppets here and there, but now looking back, I was at fault most of the time (WP:CLUELESS, WP:FALLIBLE) and have learnt a lot from the encouragement and guidance of various experienced editors here such as DBigXray, Kautilya3, Vanamonde, Adamgerber80 and so many others.

My first burst of motivation to start editing Wikipedia was related to creating a new article which wasn't there on Wikipedia in 2013. I had noticed that Wikipedia always kept popping up in my Google search results, somehow always managing to appear right at the top of the search results and I felt that this organisation "deserved" to have a page of its own. After a gap of four years the next burst of motivation came when I realised that some of my teachers in college were blatantly picking up matter from the lead of Wikipedia articles word for word and using it as a class presentation without any reference to where that information came from; and just to rub in their laziness even more, the final nail was when a teacher came to me asking if I could collect some matter on interpretative journalism. I soon found that probably the only reason the teacher said that was because Wikipedia didn't have a page on it at the time, which I then created.

Over time my motivations to continue editing Wikipedia have changed, one of the grandest being wanting to learn the secrets that hold the Wikipedia universe together. I wanted to understand who made the gel that keeps the hair straight and sexy, I wanted to understand the hukana to the matata, to understand who is the wife here and who is the husband and who are just the angry neighbours next door. I wanted to understand why Wikipedia editors are volunteers when the joker has clearly told us not to work for free. But trying to understand the secrets of Wikipedia and how it works was in a way like Master Po's revelation in Kung Fu Panda, when he is told there is no secret, there are no secret ingredients.

Another burst of motivation spread from knowing that edits I was making and pages I was initiating on Wikipedia were being viewed by many many people. Just how many I wondered so I even checked once – over 1.2 million views at the time of counting in August 2018. This was mainly because of Satyameva Jayate which already has crossed 2 million page views in just a few months. Now pageviews do not give me the same motivation as it did before. Pageviews also aren't a good way to decide whether to contribute to a particular page or not in the long run. This hunger for pageviews and recognition also resulted in a classic example of 'Wikipedia:Most ideas are bad' as depicted in the picture.

Aims of mine in the future include:

• Not letting my mainspace contribution fall below 60% (As if that's going to happen)
• Help improve existing articles. (And forgetting about whether this is a never ending process or not. BTW, it is never ending)
• Contribute and help out at The Signpost more!
• Deletion percentage of articles I create needs to reduce and accordingly get a couple of other tags such as autopatrolled and NPR
• Work on idea suggested at Idea Lab
• I am an Indian Wikipedia user living in India. Utilise this to your advantage!
• umm...
• Help out new editors, they may just be a WikiDodo
• Figure out whether a user is better off staying anonymous or revealing a real identity on the userpage in brief? (WP:ANONYMOUS, WP:BLESSING, WP:ANONYOVERUSE)
• Keep sleepwalking the basements of Wikipedia for pages such as Wikipedia:Esperanza, WP:SPIDERMAN and Wikipedia:Wikipedia is an MMORPG

(From most serious to least serious, for those who didn't get it. I guess that is the beauty of the humour here too, that the humour is also crowd-sourced from around the world)

As I close this article here,

I request all citizens of Wikiville to please bow your heads in prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,

The courage to edit the pages I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

(Source: WP:HOLIC; adapted from The Serenity Prayer)^[1]

Amen.

The team is headed by product managers Niharika Kohli and Joe Matazzoni, and managed by Danny Horn (aka Toughpigs) whose briefs as Director of Product Management encompass: Editing, Growth, Community Tech, Anti-Harassment Tools and the Language team. The team was created by Toby Negrin, Chief Product Officer. Negrin, who joined the WMF in 2013, took on the responsibility in November 2017 of leading the departments concerned with the development of software products. His tasks include "...cultivating a culture of excellence, engagement, and sustainability within the product engineering teams."

Mission

What was (in my opinion, but perhaps I'm old fashioned after 25 years of the Web) a nice, clean newsletter-style blog, has, like most of the other readily accessible and commentable – and sometimes commendable – stuff, been incorporated into one of those quick-build WordPress sites that are taking over the creative art of web design; those WordPress sites are all instantly recognisable, aren't they? Content management systems have their advantages of course though, but sometimes only for those with privileged access.

The news to come out of the Wikimedia Foundation's effort to the Word Wide Web this month is an eclectic mix of essays and reports, and certainly a worthwhile browse for whatever takes one's fancy, and this is just my quick pick:

• As if they can't give it a rest, Robert Fernandez on November 2018 brings up the issue again on Wikipedia lacking an article on Strickland, but provides some excellent advice on how to volunteer and contribute to Wikipedia.
• Saskia Ehlers, Houssem Abida and Ed Erhart on 9 November 2018 go into compulsory heterosexuality. This concept, reported by Ed Erhart, Senior Editorial Associate, Communications Wikimedia Foundation, describes how heterosexuality is assumed, enforced and viewed as an obligation regardless of one’s own sexual preferences – something they originally discussed at an event way back in August in Stockholm, when in just two days, over 80 LGBT-related Wikipedia articles in more than 10 languages were created, translated, or improved, and added over 300 photos. Now if all editathons could be as productive as this excellent contribution by the LGBT group whose event was supported by the Germany, Swiss, and Austrian chapters.
• Jan Gerlach on 29 October 2018 talks about the Wikimedia Foundation being honored to join the Global Network Initiative (GNI) as an observer, "an opportunity we hope will advance our efforts to champion freedom of expression and privacy for the Wikimedia community and beyond. GNI is a channel for collective action, advocating to governments and international institutions for policies and laws which promote..."

...and much, much more than I had time to read. This will probably change the shape of The Signpost's WMF blog column in future issues. Anyway, it's all out there on Wikimedia Foundation News for anyone who wants to keep abreast.

The Wikimedia Summit 2019 will be in Berlin during 29–31 March 2019 and is accepting registration from Friday, 2 November 2018 to Monday, 17 December at midnight CET (UTC+1). While this is an exclusive conference which typically limits invitations to one person per Wikimedia movement affiliate, the conference broadly affects group Wikimedia engagement everywhere as this global conference seeks to include representation from most or all Wikimedia community organizations. This gathering, previously known as the Wikimedia Conference, and before that the Chapter's Conference, focuses on discussion of global Wikimedia strategy through near future planning at meta:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20 and longer term ambition of what Wikimedia should be in 2030. Anyone who is part of a Wikimedia community organization should choose and register your representative. Anyone not part of an organization can join one or start one. Anyone who does not want to be in an organization, but who wants to be part of strategic planning, can join a working group and participate online. Anyone else who does not want to join any group can say whatever they want on the talk pages of any of these projects and plans.

This year's award for the Reviewer of the Year goes to Onel5969. Around on Wikipedia since 2011, their staggering number of 26,554 reviews over the past 12 months makes them, together with an additional total of 275,285 edits, one of Wikipedia's most prolific users.

Top 10 from the last 365 days:

Rank	Username	Reviews
1	Onel5969	26,554
2	JTtheOG	15,059
3	Boleyn	12,760
4	Cwmhiraeth	9,001
5	Semmendinger	8,440
6	PRehse	8,092
7	Arthistorian1977	5,306
8	Abishe	4,153
9	Barkeep49	4,016
10	Elmidae	3,615

Cwmhiraeth, Semmendinger, Barkeep49, and Elmidae have been New Page Reviewers for less than a year — Barkeep49 for only seven months, while Boleyn, with an edit count of 250,000 since she joined Wikipedia in 2008, has been a bastion of New Page Patrol for many years. See also the list of Top 100 reviewers. The 2017 award was received by PRehse. (Data provided by Insertcleverphrasehere)

This was the twelfth edition of the WikiCup, an editing competition which has been held annually since 2007. In its first year it had twelve competitors, the only entrant from that contest who still participates regularly at Wikipedia being The Rambling Man, who came third in the Cup's inaugural year. Two years later there were 60 entrants, and in the ensuing years, contestant numbers peaked at around 150 and stayed steady for several years, although there has been some tailing off of entrant numbers recently. Originally, points were awarded for the number of mainspace edits done as well as for working on articles that were promoted to GA and FA status during the competition. The former criterion has been dropped, and now points are awarded for creating or expanding articles and improving the quality of articles; featured articles, featured lists, featured topics, and featured pictures, good articles and good topics, in the news items, did you knows and good article reviews all qualify, and bonus points are awarded for articles on important topics.

This year's contest was won by Courcelles (submissions), largely on the back of good articles on nations competing in the Olympic Games. Second was Kosack (submissions), who focused on footballers particularly from Cardiff City. Third-placed Kees08 (submissions) mainly scored by improving content on astronauts and the space programme. In fourth place was SounderBruce (submissions), who concentrated on articles relating to the state of Washington, and fifth-placed Cas Liber (submissions) created a range of featured content encompassing astronomy, fungi, plants, and birds.

Altogether, during the course of the ten-month competition, contestants achieved 28 FAs, 18 FLs, 463 GAs, 72 GTs, 210 DYKs, 46 ITN items and 644 GA reviews. Participants who improved featured content helped by reviewing the nominations of others, and the number of good article reviews done greatly exceeded the number of good articles for which points were claimed, and this will have contributed towards reducing the backlog of articles awaiting GA review. The number of DYKs averaged fewer than one a day, so it did not clog up the DYK process as has sometimes been claimed. The next WikiCup will start on January 1st 2019, and anyone who wishes to join in can sign up here.

• The Mediation Committee was closed down on 13 November and marked as historical. Following a debate at the Village Pump proposed by Beeblebrox, the 'ayes' have it at 38 to 13, leaving some tweaks to snippets of text here and there to be updated to reflect the consensus. See also this issue's Discussion Report.
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this week's newest Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network, AfroCROWD User Group, and Muj(lh)eres latinoamericanas en Wikimedia
• Special user group notice The Affiliations Committee is accepting applications for new members. Members of this organization determine which community groups should get Wikimedia affiliate status and the benefits that come with that. See details and apply at meta:Affiliations Committee/Candidates/December 2018.
• Worst year ever for new administrators: In this last issue of The Signpost for 2018, we note that there have been fewer than ever successful RfAs, only 9 this year versus an all-time low of 16 the year before last. We won't beat the drum on this any further, but you can read various op-eds on the subject in our archives including a January 2017 News and notes report in which Kudpung prophesied last year's bump to be a "flash in the pan due to the hard work of those who scour the land for possible candidates".
  • Three administrators were desysopped on 1 November in accordance with the admin inactivity policy.
  • One administrator resigned their tools due to heavy commitments in real life.

Dr. Raymond Ward Arritt, who we knew as Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (formerly Raymond arritt), a valued member of the community since 2006, died suddenly on November 14; his last edit was shortly before. Just a sampling of the comments left on his talkpage in the wake of his passing include:

"We lost a friend ... in a rough situation, he was the one to bring me back to serenity." – Gerda Arendt

"His wit is scattered on the pages of WP. Together with his article contributions, they make for a cool monument to him." – Simon Adler

"Ray was one of the best people here. Whenever I saw he'd posted somewhere, I knew it was going to be insightful, or funny, or both." – Floquenbeam

"Absolutely one of the best people here. And people aren't just saying that now. We knew it the whole time." – Swarm

"His guidance in improving and motivating my writing and teaching will forever be appreciated. And his sense of humor, as displayed on this site, shone through in person as well." – Jason Patton

"One of the kindest yet straightest-shooters among us." – Jytdog

"One of my favorite people, which is an odd thing to say about someone whom I never met in person and only interacted with in the context of this website. He was smart, insightful, humane, and funny, and most of all I valued his sense of perspective" – MastCell

"Raymond has made a substantial contribution [to Wikipedia] and to the world at large, for which we can all be grateful and from which we can take inspiration." – EdChem

Since his death, volunteer Wikipedians have created a new article, Raymond Arritt, where readers can find out more about him, including his involvement in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

This Signpost piece is adapted from an email that is part of a semi-regular series on Wikimedia-l and Wikitech-l. The editors of The Signpost would like to encourage those moved by this piece to review meta:Europeana/1914-18 for some of the WWI-related events, activities, and contributions that have been organised over the past few years, and consider their own ability to contribute.

The 11th of November is commemorated in some parts of the world as Armistice Day, Remembrance Sunday, or Veterans Day. The year 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. I would like to take a moment to reflect on the subject of Armistice Day, and on the roles of Wikimedia – especially Wikipedia – in sharing knowledge of history and being a repository of our collective memory.

"Armistice Day is commemorated... to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918."^[a] World War I was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, with a total of approximately 17 million civilian and military deaths.^[b]

I would like to share a story.

John McCrae was a medical doctor and Canadian soldier during World War I. He wrote a famous poem, “In Flanders Fields". The poem refers to the red poppies that grew over the graves of soldiers who died in the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium. There are variants of the wording of the poem. I quote one of them below.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Here are a few images:

• 
  Poppies in the sunset on Lake Geneva, Montreux, Switzerland
• 
  Canadian Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
• 
  Remembrance Day 2010 in Ottawa, Canada
• 
  Memorial of "In Flanders Fields"

In our contemporary world where there are many disputes about history, resources are limited, and sometimes it is difficult to be optimistic about human nature, I am especially grateful for Wikipedia's aspiration to be a place to share neutral, reliable, and verifiable information with an open license.

Wikimedia has remarkable success at being a collaborative endeavor for the education and information of humanity. Wikimedia content is collaboratively developed by thousands of diverse individuals, many of whom are volunteers and never meet in person. Content that is shared on Wikimedia sites is viewed by millions of people around the world. Although we sometimes caution the public that Wikipedia is not a primary source, for many people Wikipedia seems to be a good starting point, and the references that we provide allow people to perform their own research regarding history and many other topics.

Thank you to everyone who documents history on Wikimedia, and to the people who support this effort behind the scenes. We all benefit from your generosity to our common memory. By documenting and learning about our history, I hope that we improve our understanding of ourselves and our potential, and can make wise decisions about our future.

I close with a poem by Catherine Munro:

THIS IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA

One gateway to the wide garden
of knowledge, where lies
The deep rock of our past,
in which we must delve
the well of our future,
The clear water we must leave untainted
for those who come after us,
The fertile earth, in which
truth may grow in bright places,
tended by many hands,
And the broad fall of sunshine,
warming our first steps toward knowing
how much we do not know.

Ever onward,

Pine

Writing in Heise Online on 2 November, Torsten Kleinz reports that the State Court of Berlin (file reference 27 O 12/7) has ordered the German Wikipedia to remove a critical passage on language researcher Alexander Waibel. "Just how far can one go in making supposedly reputation-damaging claims without substantiating them?" Computer scientist Weibel had sued Wikipedia following a claim sourced to the MDR magazine Fakt, in which he was linked to surveillance programs of the US intelligence services. Weibel, a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, sees the allegations of being connected with espionage programs as reputation-damaging. "One needs to be very careful before claiming a scientist has connections to the secret service", recommends the presiding judge. Whether the claims were justified or not was not taken into account by the court. The Wikimedia Foundation, which admitted to not being aware of any lack of veracity in the Fakt article, has not appealed the verdict. The corresponding text has since been removed from the encyclopedia's article.

Wikipedia 'Deaditors': The People Who Let The World Know When Famous People Die, says Antoinette Lattouf, senior reporter of 10 daily on 11 November. Revealing that Conor Crawford, a 30-year-old from Missouri who edits Wikipedia as Conman33 was the first to update the Wikipedia biography on the 2009 death of Michael Jackson, she continues by explaining that he was also involved in the reporting of the passing of Prince in 2016. According to Lattouf, "Wikipedia’s page view statistics show that the site is the first stop for many when actors and entertainers pass away". Crawford told 10 daily that "...in the 'era of fake news' Wikipedia needs to be more stringent".

• Consensus: Why some Wikipedia disputes go unresolved – Study identifies reasons for unsettled editing disagreements and offers predictive tools that could improve deliberation. Rob Matheson reporting on November 6 in MIT News . More on the story of the research is published in the 6 November issue of Science Daily.
• Paid editing: Yet another exposé, this time by Stephen Harrison in his 29 October column in Medium which includes a brief interview with admin SmartSE and David King (CorporateM) of Ethical Wiki. Entitled Wikipedia’s Top-Secret 'Hired Guns' Will Make You Matter (For a Price), it demonstrates again how hard it is to both combat undeclared paid editing, and to convince declared paid editors that despite the rules, their work is nevertheless unethical.
• Music: In Loudwire on 31 October, Graham Hartmann claims to prove and disprove what’s written in the Wikipedia article about the Megadeth lead guitarist Marty Friedman. Perhaps a training exercise for would-be New Page Patrollers could be to delve into the history and see who is right and who is wrong. Maybe Tina S the French teenage shred guitar phenomenon would know.
• Wikipedia: Sportfans schiessen bei Wikipedia gerne übers Ziel hinaus (Sport fans like shooting wide of the goal posts). The Executive Director of the WMF was in Berne, Switzerland on 10 November for a ten minute interview with editor Mathias Born of the German language Swiss daily newspaper Tages Anzeiger. The questions were routine and expected, as were the well-practiced answers, emphasizing the problems with contributions from sport fans, the need for more female contributors, and reassurance that the volunteer community's wishes for support are heard by the staff.
• Docufilm: Pitchfork's Kristen Yoonsoo Kim in a 2 November review describes the docufilm Bohemian Rhapsody about Queen as "...Basically Queen's Wikipedia entry as a biopic", "Even without all the problems attached to the production, Bohemian Rhapsody is not so much a film as it is a dramatization of a Wikipedia entry, watered down and overedited."
• Notable vandalism: For obvious reasons, The Signpost doesn't usually cover routine vandalism, but major media have reported on a recent incident at the Donald Trump article. Administrator TheSandDoctor explained the nature of the edit warring vandal or vandals to The Verge in a story widely reprinted (USA Today, Gizmodo, Newsweek and others). The UK media The Independent and Metro also carried a story. It does show that despite our very open policy towards editing, we are fairly quick to revert vandalism.

Wikipedians reached a consensus on the village pump to close the Mediation Committee and mark all its associated pages as historical. The closer, Winged Blades of Godric, pointed to the wide support of the proposer Beeblebrox's argument that MedCom's original purposes have been supplanted by (and are better served by) RfCs. WBG also pointed to MedCom being too opaque and bureaucratic in the eyes of many Wikipedians, and concluded that many of the "oppose" !votes were not sufficiently convincing when compared to the rebuttals. Alternative routes for content dispute resolution (as suggested by Wikipedia:Dispute resolution requests as well as commenters in the discussion) include requests for comment and the dispute resolution noticeboard.

Several admin accounts – some of which were largely inactive but stayed in compliance with the policy on removing inactive admins' tools – were recently compromised to insert vandalism into articles. This led to a proposal to tighten the policy on the policy village pump. The changes would remove the requirement that admins be notified before their mop is removed, as well as requiring that a logged action be made every 12 months to keep the bit, such as a block, deletion, or page protection; not just an edit. Both changes were proposed with the intention of discouraging admins from "holding on to the bit" despite not actively editing. These vandal attacks have led to a proposal on the Administrators' Noticeboard to temporarily restrict editing the main page to interface admins.

In other admin news, after a bureaucrat desysopped an admin who removed someone else's block of their account (see the arbitration report) and several compromised admin accounts unblocked themselves (resulting in global locks for the affected accounts), an RfC was created on the village pump about whether self-unblocking by admins should ever be permitted by technical means. In addition to an outright ban (option A) and the status quo of "admins are technically capable of self-unblocking but also see the policy for whether it's acceptable" (option C), another option was offered of bureaucrats being able to self-unblock but not other admins (option B). Four days after the RfC was created, developers implemented option A, though admins will still be able to remove blocks they made on themselves.

• On WT:Bot policy: Should bot approval group members have an activity requirement à la admins?
• On WT:Notability (people): A proposal for changes to notability criteria for deceased members of marginalized groups.
• Wikipedia has a lot of short articles.^[a] One user, Dr. Blofeld, created several of these articles,^[b] and started an RfC on whether they should be moved to draftspace.
• On Meta, the m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019 is now open for voting closed. This is your chance to make your voice heard about what features the Wikimedia Foundation should implement on wikis. Check it out.
  • There's also some related controversy on how much canvassing on the proposals is acceptable; see RFC. Users over on Meta encourage it to some extent, but some EnWPans have become worried about spam on the village pumps.
• This one's less of a discussion than a vote, but Arbitration Committee elections are going on now, so don't forget to vote if you're eligible.

• Page movers can now override the title blacklist, as determined by unanimous consensus at the village pump.
• Consensus was reached on the village pump that Wikipedia:today's featured articles should not be pending-changes protected, but that non-autoconfirmed users should be blocked from adding images.
• Enough about mediation and wheel-warring, let's talk about something much more important: padlocks! Specifically, they have a new design. Enjoy!

The Halloween holiday (#12) inspires the entertainment industry to release scary products in October, and this is reflected by Netflix topping the list with a show about a haunted house (#1, #5), adding in a series starring a teenage witch (#14) — and in an unintended case, there's the equally disturbing subject of miscarriage of the law (#10, #17), along with a fictional assassin (#13) — while Hollywood brings back the Halloween slasher movies (#3, #20, #22), and is still making money out of a questionable comic book movie that evokes more terror than justice (#23). Scares are also provided by terrorism attempts (#11), urban legends (#21), life-threatening disease (#4) and life-ending (#9) manhunts (#6). On less spooky notes, there's movies about musicians (#2, #8, #18) and actors (#19), some sports (#15, #25), video games (#5), Google Doodles (#15) and boneheaded TV moments (#24).

"Here we are, born to be kings, we're the Princes of the Universe!" Or at least of Wikipedia, as the late, great Freddie Mercury (#1) and his band Queen (#14) gather lots of views with the release of Bohemian Rhapsody (#13), starring Rami Malek (#15), in a great performance that to borrow from another musical hit, might lead to people saying "A Star Is Born" (#17). Readers are also celebrating Halloween (#2) – and on a lesser level, the Day of the Dead (#8), them who never leave this list (#12) and have two high entries (#3, #5) – by watching slasher movies (#16) and binging on Netflix shows about haunted houses (#11, #21) and teenage witches (#6, #18). The other prevalent topics are a record-breaking Indian statue (#4, #10), Western-themed video games (#9, #22), wrestling events (#7, #20), and politics, with the results of the elections in my country (#23), to borrow from that man still blaming everything wrong in the U.S. on immigrants (#24, #25), can be summed in just one word: "Sad!"

This week on Wikipedia, the King of Queen (#1) meets the King of Scots (#11), opera rock (#7) meets political theater (#5), and Google heroes (#12, #15) meet Indian greatness (#23), while rising stars (#2, #9, #10, #17) keep on fighting till the end. In a nod to the simulation hypothesis winking at us, a movie focusing on election fraud in India (#21) was released in the midst of U.S. elections (#24, #25), where accusations of fraud have become routine.

A very upsetting week for comic fans, as one of the pioneering champions of the medium died. Stan Lee was a legend, a perennial figure of respect and renown for nerds and dorks worldwide. Lee will be greatly missed. Aside from the passing of a hero, the week was evidently the domain of cinephiles, with films, film subjects, and actors galore reaching the top 25. This week's iteration of the report is strange yet intriguing, and was a joy to compile. Hopefully it is as fantastic to read as it was incredible to pen.

• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Reviewed by Bri

This paper^[1] begins with a review of prior research on various reasons for editor dropout on Wikipedia, which focus on the stress of interpersonal conflict and overburdened volunteers, especially admins. It then adds the methods and findings from new research on "more experienced and active Wikipedians", the 1% contributing the most time and content. One startling perspective gained from the survey of the 300 most active Wikipedians (with a 41% survey response rate!) is a lack of recognition from the wider academic and professional community. Volunteer Wikipedia editing is not often treated as a "legitimate" volunteer activity contributing e.g. to professional development. The author also states "the current Wikimedia Foundation efforts directed at increasing positive reinforcement, developed with a focus on increasing the retention of new editors ... may be much less efficient ... when it comes to ... long-term highly active contributors" and concludes that more research on interpersonal conflict as a motivation for retirement needs to be conducted.

• The Wikimedia Foundation's "Audiences" department (which develops and maintains software features for Wikipedia and its sister sites) has published a series of draft essays designed to inform their longer-term product development planning, each drawing heavily from existing research (much of which has been covered in this research report over the year). They focus on the topics of "Trust", "Experience", "Scale", "Augmentation", "Culture", and "Tools".

See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

From the proceedings of OpenSym 2018:

From the abstract:^[2] "This research aims to find the extent to which a particular group of university students vandalize Wikipedia, while also exploring their perceptions of vandalism. Data is obtained from a questionnaire sent to university students in educational psychology, early and primary childhood education, and related master’s programs, as well as a focus group involving a sample of these students and interviews with editors in charge of maintaining Wikipedia. [...] it seems that students and editors have some preconceived ideas (boredom, amusement, or ideological motivations) about what pushes individuals to vandalize."

Among the 928 survey participants, only 39 (4%) reported to have vandalized Wikipedia. Younger students were vandalizing more often ("there is a meaningful difference between students under 23 (5.3 % of them vandalize) and both students from 24 to 30 (1.9 %) and from 31 to 40 (0%)"), but on the other hand there was no significant difference between male and female respondents.

From the abstract:^[3] ".... in comparison to photosharing sites like Flickr and mobile apps like Instagram, Commons is largely unknown to the general public and under-researched by scholars. We conducted an exploratory study to determine if an alternative means of contribution—a mobile application that gamifies implicitly desirable and useful behavior—could broaden awareness of and participation in Commons. Our findings from an online survey (N=103) suggest that by creating value around implicitly desirable behaviors, we can create new opportunities and alternative pathways for both increasing and broadening participation in peer-production communities such as Commons."

From the paper:^[4] "The analysis shows that the introduction of a few key terms acts as milestones for the evolution of the article. When a factoid is added, more knowledge related to that factoid is likely to be added. However, different users get triggered differently, leading to the inclusion of diversified knowledge into the articles." (compare also "Do less active participants make active participants more active?" below)

See also our earlier coverage of other OpenSym 2018 papers:

• "Estimating the Value of Wikimedia Commons"
• "Stigmergic Coordination in Wikipedia"
• "Do we all (still) talk before we type?"
• "Evaluating the Impact of the Wikipedia Teahouse on Newcomer Retention"

Other publications:

From the abstract:^[5] "In this study, we probe the indirect influence of less active participants' contributing behaviors on the quality of knowledge collaboration. [...] Using the edit data of featured articles in the Chinese Wikipedia, we examine the proposed causal path. The main findings of this study are as follows: the productivity of active participants of a Wikipedia article increases when they are triggered by less active participants' editing activities; the additional edits of active participants triggered by less active participants can improve the quality of an article; and less active participants play a major role in reviving the editing work of dormant articles. These findings reveal that less active participants play a substantial role in knowledge collaboration in online communities, as their contributing behaviors sustain collaborative work and eventually improve the quality [of Wikipedia]." (compare also "Triggering" paper above)

From the paper's^[6] introduction: "51% of entity attributes in English Wikipedia infoboxes are not described in English Wikipedia articles. We aim to fill in this knowledge gap via a system that can take an entity as input and automatically generate a natural language description.”

From the abstract:^[7] "Nowadays, editors tend to separate different subtopics of a long Wikipedia article into multiple sub-articles. This separation seeks to improve human readability. However, it also has a deleterious effect on many Wikipedia-based tasks that rely on the article-as-concept assumption, which requires each entity (or concept) to be described solely by one article. This underlying assumption significantly simplifies knowledge representation and extraction [...] In this paper we provide an approach to match the scattered sub-articles back to their corresponding main-articles, with the intent of facilitating automated Wikipedia curation and processing." (see also related earlier coverage: "Problematizing and Addressing the Article-as-Concept Assumption in Wikipedia")

From the abstract:^[8] "We consider the network of 5 416 537 articles of English Wikipedia extracted in 2017. Using the recent reduced Google matrix (REGOMAX) method we construct the reduced network of 230 articles (nodes) of infectious diseases and 195 articles of world countries. [...] PageRank and CheiRank algorithms are used to determine the most influential diseases with the top PageRank diseases being Tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and Malaria. From the reduced Google matrix we determine the sensitivity of world countries to specific diseases integrating their influence over all their history including the times of ancient Egyptian mummies. The obtained results are compared with the World Health Organization (WHO) data demonstrating that the Wikipedia network analysis provides reliable results with up to about 80 percent overlap between WHO and REGOMAX analyses."

From the abstract:^[9] "The Spoken Wikipedia project unites volunteer readers of encyclopedic entries. Their recordings make encyclopedic knowledge accessible to persons who are unable to read [...]. However, [these recordings] can only be consumed linearly [...]. We present a reading application which uses an alignment between the recording, text and article structure and which allows to navigate spoken articles, through a graphical or voice-based user interface (or a combination thereof). We present the results of a usability study in which we compare the two interaction modalities. We find that both types of interaction enable users to navigate articles and to find specific information much more quickly compared to a sequential presentation of the full article." (see also code on GitHub)

From the abstract and paper:^[10] "This paper builds upon previous research, where we identified six common participation patterns, i.e. roles, in Wikidata. In the research presented here, we study the applicability of sequence analysis methods by analyzing the dynamics in users’ participation patterns. The sequence analysis is judged by its ability to answer three questions: (i) 'Are there any preferable role transitions in Wikidata?'; (ii) 'What are the dominant dynamic participation patterns?'; (iii) 'Are users who join earlier more turbulent contributors?' [answer: "the earlier an user joins Wikidata, the more turbulent his/her dynamic participation pattern is"] Our data set includes participation patterns of about 20,000 users in each month from October 2012 to October 2014."

A major carrot-teristic of our favorite orange vegetable (sorry pumpkins) is their affectionate nature. Don't be fooled. Just like the smiling family pit bull, they will eventually turn on you. While this underground root can be oddly shaped, others are heralded for their amusing appearance for obvious reasons. Carrots can kill.^[1]

We reprint this article below written by Michael Snow, in the 16 July 2007 edition of The Signpost on the creation of the Article Rescue Squadron (ARS). Snow is the founder of The Signpost, is an admin, though has not edited for many years, and has also served on Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation and as chair of the Board of Trustees.

Perceived trends in the deletion of articles led to a new Wikipedia organization after a number of Wikipedian bloggers voiced concerns. Following recent arguments that substantial numbers of articles were being inappropriately deleted, the blog discussion prompted the creation last Friday of an Article Rescue Squadron, dedicated to saving articles on "perfectly notable topics" from deletion.

Ben Yates, who runs a Wikipedia blog, launched the group on the premise that many of the articles nominated for deletion are in jeopardy primarily because they are targeted as being "ill-formed", often by inexperienced Wikipedia contributors, even though the topics they cover would be appropriate subject matter for Wikipedia. A primary concern was that "making sure that articles about notable topics don't get deleted because of writing style, or because they're stubby." His idea drew on examples highlighted by Andrew Lih in a provocative blog post on Tuesday titled "Unwanted: New articles in Wikipedia".

Lih pointed to an entry he himself recently started, about PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, which was tagged within an hour for speedy deletion. The tag used was the {{db-empty}} template, even though the article consisted of a complete sentence identifying the subject, a properly formatted external link to Getler's PBS biography, and a stub template. A quick expansion explaining his background as an experienced journalist and the first ombudsman appointed at a major American television network kept the article from being deleted.

Near the same time several other Wikipedian bloggers posted about deletion issues, including Geoff Burling [1], Urpo Lankinen [2], and Kelly Martin. Martin criticized the deletion of an article on web startup Pownce, a project of entrepreneur Kevin Rose that recently received a round of publicity. Mentioning the fear that Wikipedia is being used to boost the profile of other projects, Martin commented, "Basically, any web property less prominent than Wikipedia itself may not have an article on Wikipedia under the current mindset." Pownce had been through speedy deletion along with both Deletion review and Articles for deletion before Lih stepped in to restore the article.

The Article Rescue Squadron has begun signing up members, including both Yates and Lih along with current arbitrator Matthew Brown and former arbitrator Rebecca. Examples of inappropriate deletions were being collected along with strategies for dealing with the problem. The launch also prompted an extended discussion on the English Wikipedia mailing list. Yates tried to emphasize that the effort is about improving articles that might be threatened with deletion, not mobilizing to control deletion debates, but some thought the concept still fundamentally questioned the judgment of those nominating articles for deletion.

Cultural issues with the overall deletion process, and concerns about the perceived detriment to Wikipedia, have long been fodder for debate. A previous cycle in 2005 was particularly intense, something manifested most dramatically when Ed Poor deleted the page then known as "Votes for deletion" (see archived story). After several previous alternatives stalled, early 2006 saw the introduction of Proposed deletion, a more lightweight process that relieved some of the pressure from the volume of nominations at Articles for deletion.