As anyone paying attention to The Signpost this year has noticed, the publication has been struggling. So has the team. One of the struggles that has recently cropped up is in how to deal with reporting that involves specific members of the Wikipedian community and wider Wikimedia movement. For example, what type of Wikimedian-specific content, if any, should we cover? Are critical pieces of specific Foundation members acceptable? What about controversies surrounding members of the community, such as chapter board members or notable Wikimedians? Is the line drawn at trawling AN/I for juicy threads, or is that acceptable, too? At what point does investigative journalism become sensationalism, or community news become gossip?

Prior issues have contained content which criticized specific people, and which reported on conflicts and controversies between particular users; reader responses have been mixed, with some condemning it, others criticizing it, and still others commending the commentary. While the support is encouraging, the criticisms, some of which are borderline personal attacks and harrassment in a venue that is considered by some to be a safe haven from our Wikipedia policies, and complaints tell us where we may be falling short of the hopes and expectations of our readers.

At The Signpost, as in Wikipedia generally, the readers come first. We write for you, so your input is paramount in deciding the content of what we write; and if you write, we publish. Like the rest of Wikipedia, we also value consensus in determining what to publish—and not just the local consensus that may be achieved in the newsroom. That is why we are bringing this to you, the readers:

Please, tell us what you think in the reader comments below! We want to understand where the line is—and what you want to be reading—when it comes to reporting on controversies, conflicts, scandals, and other news involving specific members of the community. The better we do, the better we can provide the content you will want to read - or in the worst case scenario, if you wish to continue reading The Signpost at all, and whether or not the editorial team is fighting an uphill battle to keep it in print.

Finally, the editors and contributors to The Signpost would like to wish our readership and the Wikipedia community a very happy holiday season. Enjoy a well deserved break, and we'll see you after the new year.

Smallbones has been a Wikipedia editor for 13 years, contributing to The Signpost regarding paid editing and financial market regulation. He has a Ph.D. in finance and professional experience in finance.

On November 30, 2018, the United States Federal Trade Commission released a series of emails and other documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related to the Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker's work on the advisory board of World Patent Marketing (WPM). The company was a scam, taking up to $400,000 from any hopeful inventor it could hook, while providing few if any services to them.^[1] WPM was fined $26 million, the total of its alleged fraudulent take, and was shut down by the FTC in May of 2018.^[2]

Whitaker's selection would be controversial even without his involvement in an obvious patent scam. His November 7 appointment by President Donald Trump is widely viewed as having the potential to limit the Mueller investigation into the President. The appointment is being challenged as unconstitutional in several court cases because it avoids the process of confirmation by the Senate. Four hundred former Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have petitioned Trump to replace Whitaker.^[3]

The FOIA release included an email from the head of the scam company, which stated "Let's build a Wikipedia page and use Whitaker to make it credible."^[4] The editing of Wikipedia articles by scammers is nothing new. For example, editing by employees of binary options scammer Banc de Binary was at times openly declared. Politicians and government officials have also edited articles promoting their careers, including Corey Stewart, who ran in the 2017 Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary while telling CNN of his campaign's Wikipedia edits.^[5] But the possible combination of edits made by outright scammers with the possible participation of an official who later achieved a position as high as Acting U.S. Attorney General is unprecedented.

A Signpost investigation of the released documents^[6][7] has revealed that an editor with an account name almost identical to that of a WPM PR agent, as named in the FOIA release^[8] edited the article on Whitaker, adding external links in the text to both WPM's website and Whitaker's law office. It should be remembered, of course, that no purely on-wiki evidence can prove the editor's real world name. "Joe jobs" are possible, where a user account is created to embarrass the named person. Other suspicious edits include the creation of the English Wikipedia article on Whitaker as a possible autobiography. A resume that Whitaker sent to WPM is included in the released documents. It contains the false statement that Whitaker was awarded the prestigious Academic All-American honor while playing college football.

Whitaker's football career plays an important part in this investigation. He played football at the University of Iowa for the 1990, 1991, and 1992 seasons including the 1991 Rose Bowl.

While he played in 33 games as a tight end, he was not really a star, catching only 21 passes in his career for 202 yards and two touchdowns.^[9] In 1991, his best year, at least four other Iowa receivers surpassed him in each of the above categories.^[10] But he was a good student, being honored with the Big Ten Award for University of Iowa student-athletes for each of his three years.

His resume, shown in the FOIA release, was attached to an email to Scott Cooper, CEO of WPM. Both the resume and email contained the claim that he was named an Academic All-American.^[11] He was not. A spokesperson for the awarding organization, the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA), told the Signpost that Whitaker is not listed as an Academic All-American.^[12][13] Whitaker made the claim not just while applying for an advisory board position at WPM, but also later on the website of the law firm where he was the managing partner,^[14] and on a Department of Justice website announcing his 2009 resignation as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa.^[15]

Whitaker graduated while still playing football and immediately began his legal studies. His law career began slowly with several small law firms. In 2002, he ran for the Iowa state office of Treasurer, losing with 43% of the vote.^[16] In 2004, as a fairly young and inexperienced lawyer, President George W. Bush appointed him to the office of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. A Democratic U.S. Attorney replaced him in 2009 and Whitaker resumed private legal practice in a small firm that he headed in Des Moines, Iowa.

In 2006, while Whitaker was still U.S. Attorney, the editor User:Whimat made his only four edits, taking a total of less than 15 minutes. The first and last edits were to the Iowa Hawkeyes football article, listing Matthew G. Whitaker as a "notable player". The editor's second edit was to create the article United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa which named Whitaker as the current officeholder. The editor's third edit was to create the article Matthew Whitaker (attorney), a short and factual article that named him as a former Iowa football player.

While continuing to work with his law firm, on October 15, 2014, Whitaker joined the WPM advisory board. Several members of this board did not actively contribute to WPM's operations, but allowed it to use their names and photos for marketing purposes. Whitaker was more involved with the company. He was paid for some legal advice and answered or forwarded emails from disgruntled customers. He even discussed appearing in WPM marketing videos.^[17]

On November 21, 2014, WPM's CEO, Scott Cooper, suggested "Let's build a Wikipedia page and use Whitaker to make it credible".^[4] There's no record of an attempt to create an article on WPM at this time, but on December 29 User:Vinnylabarbera added links to the websites of both Whitaker's law office and WPM to the article on Whitaker. The FOIA release lists a business associate of WPM with a nearly identical name as the CEO of an online PR firm. The same editor drafted an article on another member of the WPM advisory board at User:Vinnylabarbera/sandbox.^[18]

The simple external links added to the text were later supplemented by other editors, with the section on WPM in the Whitaker article growing into a very large paragraph by the time Whitaker was named Acting Attorney General.

In October 2017 Whitaker was appointed to be chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The FTC had previously subpoenaed documents from Whitaker related to the WPM case. A surprised FTC investigator emailed his colleagues "You're not going to believe this. Matt Whitaker is now chief of staff to the Attorney General. Of the United States."^[19]

FTC staff reminded Whitaker by voicemail that the subpoenaed material was overdue. Whitaker's voicemail response was included in the FOIA release. According to The Washington Post, the subpoenaed material was likely never given to the FTC.^[19]

On November 7, 2018, the FTC staff were surprised again. Whitaker had just been appointed Acting Attorney General by President Trump. The staff anticipated questions from reporters and seemed anxious about how much information about Whitaker and the scam was already public. What to do? They checked the Wikipedia article on Whitaker. One staffer wrote

With Sessions' resignation, the Acting AG is Matthew Whitaker. Whitaker was an "Advisory Board" member of World Patent Marketing, and may have done some legal work for Scott Cooper. We subpoenaed his law firm last year. His Wikipedia page has a whole paragraph on his involvement with WPM (as of the sending of this email). Wanted to give you a heads-up in case there is press/public attention.^[20]

The section of our article on Whitaker that started with the insertion of an external link to WPM had grown to a 218-word paragraph with five references.

Several questions about Matthew Whitaker and World Patent Marketing were considered in this Signpost investigation.

• Did WPM, as it had planned, submit an article about itself to Wikipedia using Whitaker's name to give the company credibility?
  • No evidence of such a submission was found.
• Did WPM edit Wikipedia to help promote its scam?
  • Some of the evidence relies on the name of a user account that is nearly identical to the name of the CEO of a PR firm that worked for WPM. Like much on-wiki evidence, it can not be definitively proved that the user account was used to edit by WPM's PR agent. That said, there is circumstantial evidence that WPM’s PR agent linked the article on Whittaker to WPM's website, and that he submitted a draft article about another member of WPM's advisory board.
• Did Matthew Whitaker create an autobiographical article on Wikipedia?
  • Given the limitations of on-wiki evidence it is impossible to say for sure, but there is evidence that he did create the Wikipedia article about himself.
• Did Whitaker mislead the American people?
  • Based on evidence contained in the FOIA release published by the FTC and other evidence discovered in this investigation about his claim of being awarded the prestigious Academic All-American honor:
    • Whitaker misled Scott Cooper of WPM when he submitted his resume and a cover email.
    • He misled his current and potential legal clients when he posted the claim on his law firm's website.
    • He misled everyone when he repeated the claim on a Department of Justice website.

Matthew Whitaker and the Department of Justice's Office of Public Affairs did not respond to emailed requests for comment by copy-deadline.

After the publication of this article, Steve Roe, the University of Iowa Assistant Athletic Director for Communications contacted The Signpost, noting that the 1993 Media Guide for University of Iowa Football cited Whitaker as "GTE District VII academic all-American", which might explain Whitaker's claims.

The media guide should have more accurately stated "GTE District VII Academic All-District".

Given the possibility that Whitaker might also have been confused about the status of his award or relied on the Media Guide, we have replaced the word "lied" with "misled" in the text under "Conclusion".

In 2018, the fourteenth year of The Signpost, a total of 157 articles have been published spanning 12 issues from January to December. Collectively these 157 articles, created by 64 Wikipedia users, have received a total of 353,134 pageviews until 7 December. After including views from the first page and the single-page edition the pageviews sum reaches 388,484. These 12 issues have also seen a total of 1,222 comments, totaling 96,473 words.^[a]

The Signpost statistics 2018, an effort to understand The Signpost, throws up various other findings, such as:

• The article in The Signpost which has the highest all-time pageviews in 2018 is "Death knell sounding for The Signpost?". Out of the 157 articles it is the only article to have crossed 5,000 views this year. However, when considering highest page views attained in one week, the article "News and notes: Flying high; low practice from Wikipedia 'cleansing' agency; where do our donations go? RfA sees a new trend" has the most with 2,290 pageviews.
• On average, an article in 2018 got 848 pageviews in one week and 2,387 all-time page views.
• Only five articles in 2018 have crossed 4,000 page views (all time), listed below:

• Average views per article (one week total) for the first six months – January to May – is 780, and for the last six months – June to December – is 906. Although this indicates a general increase in readership per article from the beginning of 2018 to the end of the year, this increase in readership cannot be observed when average all-time views per article are considered.
• Over 80% of all page views of any given Signpost article come in the first four weeks.

• "Op-ed" and "From the editor" articles have the highest average pageviews (one week totals). "Op-ed" articles get an average of 1,340 pageviews and "From the editor" articles 1,320 pageviews. Gallery articles get the least pageviews.

• 10 Wikipedia users for The Signpost in 2018 amount to 72.8% of the total byline mentions, with the remaining 54 users accounting for the remaining 27.2% of byline mentions. (This includes bylines for 'essays', 'from the archives' and 'blogs', which may have just been "selected" by the user.)
• 103 articles out of the 157 have only one name in the byline; that is, 65.6% have either been written or compiled by one user. The remaining 54 articles have two or more names in the bylines.

• Seven articles in 2018 (Issue 1 to Issue 12) generated comments crossing 4,000 words. 42 articles got one or no comments.

A total of 1,149 users have added their names to the user-talk page delivery list. Template subscription transclusions total 2,007, whereas the global delivery list currently has 227 users.

A total of 2,209 users voted for the 13 candidates in the running. Of these, 91 were discarded because the voter had voted twice, and 13 were struck. The full list of voters was published at List votes: 2018 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election. The results were announced on 14 December, with Mkdw, GorillaWarfare, AGK, SilkTork, Joe Roe, and Courcelles being elected for a 2-year term. At this year's election the number of committee positions is reduced from 15 to 13 members. Full details of the election results are here.

Remaining in office for the second year of their term are BU Rob13, Opabinia regalis, KrakatoaKatie, Premeditated Chaos, Callanecc, RickinBaltimore, and Worm That Turned.

As reported in last month's issue of The Signpost in Special Report, the WMF's wish list poll for software development closed on 30 November. The results were announced on 4 December with a total 7,282 support votes recorded for the 212 proposals. Leading the poll in the top position with 157 votes was the request by the New Page Reviewers with a proposal by Insertcleverphrasehere for 19 urgently needed open Phabricator tickets to be addressed. A fairly close second with 130 votes was the request for work on five open Phabricator tickets was the proposal by Premeditated Chaos for 'Some kind of toggleable dark or night-mode like YouTube or TV Tropes', because: "Wikipedia skins are very bright, and at night they can be hard on the eyes."

The rationale for the improvement to the suite of New Page Curation tools was: "New Page Review is a key process on Wikipedia, and the only firewall that prevents inappropriate new pages being added to the Encyclopedia. However, there are many longstanding issues with the Page Curation tools and the New Pages feed which inhibit efficiency and cause problems to be overlooked. Aside from a few additions made when the Growth Team added Articles for Creation (AfC) drafts to the New Page Feed last year, the tools haven't been supported for many years and the list of proposed developments is long. These include bugs, features never implemented, and suggested improvements which have been left unaddressed. While a few requests for improvement of the tools used by New Page Reviewers can be addressed by on-wiki customisation by volunteers, most others are part of the Mediawiki software and require the intervention of the WMF developers."

The full list of results is at m:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Results.

• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Galobtter, who obtained the suite of admin tools at their RfA with 208/46/12 (82%) in yet another contentious RfA that incited much discussion in the comments section – reinforcing the new trend. With three admins nominating, over 70 of the 208 supporters were admins. Among the 46 voters opposing were 6 admins. The oppose rationales included claims that the candidate's edit count was 'only' 25,000 with 'only' 8,000 to mainspace, and relatively short tenure. One support and one oppose both from the same sock farm, were struck. This makes a total of 10 new admins for 2018 – less than half the number for the previous year, demonstrating again RfA's inverse Moore's law.
• Emergency desysopping: The level 1 desysopping procedures for compromised accounts were effected on the accounts of Orangemike, Killiondude, Garzo, and Esanchez7587 precipitating a discussion that is taking place at the Village Pump on a proposal to tighten up the admin inactivity procedure with suggestions for mandatory two factor authentication (2FA) for admins. Following satisfactory explanations, the tools were restored to the accounts Orangemike and Killiondude while Garzo and Esanchez7587 are users whose accounts have been dormant for many years.
• Retired admins: Six admins were desysopped on 1 December under the inactivity policy. One further admin voluntarily retired their tools for personal reasons and inactivity.

• WMF staff reshuffle: Maggie Dennis is "...excited that we have located a new chief [of Community Engagement (CE)], who will join us in January 2019, whereupon I will transition to the role of Vice President of Support and Services. CE is a Wikimedia Foundation staff department of over 40 people focused on the goal of increasing the quantity, quality, diversity, and reach of free knowledge by supporting people and organizations aligned with the Wikimedia Foundation mission. We support contributors by representing them in the development of new technical tools."

• Wikipedia engages the ‘nuclear option’ after Trump penis hack: reported in The Verge on 4 December, Russel Brandom's article discusses the recent spate of vandalism on Donald Trump's Wikipedia article, compromised administrator accounts, and the 'self-unblock' feature. Mentioning posts by users Swarm and John Cline, Brandom refers to a thread in which criticisms are expressed on unilateral action from the WMF. The Foundation responded to The Verge with: “Our Security department will be implementing new, more comprehensive password policies,” and “working with volunteers to raise awareness of password best practices among our volunteers to help prevent this kind of vandalism and account abuse in the future.”

• British member of parliament blacklisted from Wikipedia: In The Sun, a UK red top, Matt Dathan, Senior Political Correspondent reports on 2 December on the blocking of Labour Party MP Kate Osamor, former Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, following her editing of her Wikipedia page as user:Midnights1. Osamor resigned her senior front-bench position in the UK shadow cabinet on 1 December, and had been indefinitely blocked from Wikipedia on 3 June 2018 for making legal threats. Osamor's shadow ministry post has been filled by Dan Carden. The issue is also reported on 2 December by Henry Martin for Mailonline, the web version of another British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail.

• In more on the Trump vandalism: Andrew Griffin of The Independent (an online-only UK newspaper) explains in a 23 November article, 'Siri doesn't appear to think highly of Donald Trump', how Apple's Siri is affected by false information in Wikipedia articles, however temporary it may be.
• Still more vandalism: On 30 November, Alex Myers, writing in The Loop (an online golfing digest) describes how the Stephen A. Smith Wikipedia article was vandalized with the addition of an amusing explanation for the initial 'A' of Smith's middle name.
• US government blames Google for Wikipedia articles: Inc. reports that United States congressman Louie Gohmert complained to Google CEO Sundar Pichai that Wikipedia's editors disallowed his paid staff member from editing the article about himself. Forbes and Vox similarly described Wikipedia's place in that public hearing. Conversation about Gohmert's editing is ongoing at Talk:Louie Gohmert.
• Google translations for Indonesia: Jaclyn Teng of TechinAsia in 'Google partners with Wikipedia to translate content for Indonesians' reports on 3 December about Google's initiative to have articles from the English Wikipedia translated into Bahasa Indonesia using their machine translation engine.
• Can't sleep? Read Wikipedia: Alan Farrell tells reporter Niamh Horan of the Independent on 24 November about his lifelong problems of getting to sleep: "My worst attribute is wikiloops. I might look at something on Wikipedia and I would research something and then I would click on a link to the next page and the next page and all of a sudden it's three hours later and you've gotten nothing done and you are in a wikiloop, going down a rabbit hole".
• 28,000 photos uploaded: Amid concerns expressed on infringement of copyright, The Wikipedia Israel chapter has uploaded a large number of photos taken from 1900 to 1946 in the region which eventually became the state of Israel, reports Stuart Winer in The Times of Israel on 29 November. Michal Lester, executive director of Wikimedia Israel, is confident that there has been no breach of legalities. Some of the photos are displayed on the Wikimedia Israel website (in Hebrew).

• Book: Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge, Merrilee Proffitt, (2018). 256 pages. American Library Association. In the May 2018 edition of the magazine American Libraries, Phil Morehart discusses the book with the author with a focus on her research and its impact. The Signpost June issue this year mentioned her interview with Publishers Weekly.
  Editor's note: Maybe it's time for someone to examine the potential for a Wikipedia article about the author.

Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Archive_252#Nine was a lively conversation for November and the first week of December, concerning the new record low nine admins recruited this year (now ten, still a record low). The conversation petered out without any plan for action. –B

• On WP:VPP: Should victims of tragedies who would not otherwise have their own articles be listed in the article about the event?
• On WT:N: Can interviews be used to establish notability? The argument is that they are not independent of the subject because the subject was involved in creating them.
• When the ability for admins to unblock themselves was removed from the MediaWiki software, a new feature was added to block the admin who blocked you. Wikipedians are now discussing under what circumstances such blocks should be acceptable.

• After Dr. Blofeld offered to incubate substubs he created, the community concluded that some content was better than no content, so the articles remained in mainspace.
• The following Bot Approval Group inactivity policy proposal was enacted:

  BAG members are expected to be active on Wikipedia to have their finger on the pulse of the community. After two years without any bot-related activity (such as posting on bot-related pages, posting on a bot's talk page, or operating a bot), BAG members will be retired from BAG following a one-week notice. Retired members can re-apply for BAG membership as normal if they wish to rejoin the BAG.

• The Community Wishlist Survey results have been released. Currently, every successful item is "pending investigation". More details are to be found in this issue's News and notes.

WikiProject Articles for Creation is the WikiProject whose active members volunteer to review submissions to Articles for Creation. While any autoconfirmed user can review drafts manually, it is strongly recommended that only participants in the WikiProject do so. Participants must have extended-confirmed rights in order to use the Helper Script, and permission is accorded by administrators; the full criteria for access to the tools can be found here. The introduction of this control was passed by consensus on a RfC proposal made by Kudpung in 2013.

Unlike its counterpart New Page Reviewing, as a project AfC has no formal selection or vetting process anchored in policy for its operators and their tasks, although it is often claimed that the required level of knowledge of notability and other guidelines is very similar. A move towards more formal acceptance of the project was established through the Wikimedia Foundation's 2018 efforts to develop a more structured approach by embedding a live feed for new AfC submissions in the New Pages Feed. Many AfC reviewers are holders of the NPR flag. Armed with this knowledge, any reasonably experienced editor should not find the tasks too complicated – while they may however present challenge to less experienced users, the actual instructions for reviewing are easy to follow, and are supported by a flow chart.

Narcos is back, only this time in Mexico (#13), and this means Netflix users are sorely tempted to pause their binge-watching and learn more about the drug lords (#1, #10, #23) and their victims (#12). The streaming service even got the latest Coen brothers film (#15), although on Wikipedia it did not garner as many viewers as films in theaters, about Queen (#2, #16, #25), A Kind of Magic (#5, #18), and someone who will Spread Your Wings and Gonna Fly Now (#21). Regular TV also leads to extra entries regarding a British reality show (#9, #19, #22) and the latest WWE event (#11). And in spite of being Thanksgiving (#6, #17) — followed by the usual shopping sprees (#8) — some people instead had a week where they were hardly thankful for: a rapper got arrested (#3), a missionary joined the never-leaving death list (#14) for trying to convert an hostile and isolated tribe (#4, #7), some European footballers fell short in their latest tournament (#20), and Trump got into the usual problems (#24).

The top story of the week of November 25 to December was the death of former President of the United States George H. W. Bush. Second place was the release of new Indian film 2.0, and third was the death of SpongeBob SquarePants creator, Stephen Hillenburg. Further down the list, a number of the subjects of Netflix's Narcos: Mexico were in the list, as were the lead pugilists of Deontay Wilder vs. Tyson Fury and a motley crew of musicians, TV personalities, and Baroque painters.

George H. W. Bush died on a Saturday, so the following week still had lots of people searching for what the former U.S. President did, and led him to repeat as the top article while inspiring half the articles on this Top 25 (13, because counting the never-leaving death list as the 14th is a stretch), including George's dead wife, all his offspring (including another White House occupant and a daughter who died in her infancy), a daughter in-law, and the guy who he was VP for. Otherwise, we have India giving lots of money (#25) to 2.0 (#3) and seeing celebrities also spending a similar fortune to get married (#4, #5), the UK searching for a celebrity in the jungle (#18) with a famous mom (#20), three guys who returned from last week (#10, #11, #19), and another who'll probably take a while to leave (#22).

For the week of December 2 to 8, 2018, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

• 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.
• Exo (band) and BTS (band): the Billboard Social 50 might accept the EXO-Ls and the BTS Army checking the pages of these K-pop groups many times daily for their rankings, but we won't condone this gaming of the system.

For your final Gallery of 2018, here are some images of the Sun and Moon (and humanity) in perspectives you may not have seen before.

How the Wikipedia search engine works, and what's in a name - a rose perhaps?

The anatomy of search
by Trey Jones

A facinating series of articles entitled The anatomy of search by computational linguist Trey Jones, WMF Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform, some of which were published in the Wikimedia blog earlier this year. Easily readable even by non-language scientists. Of particular interest to editors working on redirects and disambiguation pages, but nevertheless highly entertaining for absolutely anyone. My top choice – but of course as a linguist and lexicographer, I'm biased (and envious of Jones's knowledge of the subject...) Enjoy. – K

More on searching - the WMF announces a new tool

Eureka! A new visual interface for specialized searches
by Johanna Strodt, 13 December 2018

Have you tried the new search page on Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia wikis) yet? Now everyone can carry out specialized searches without specialized knowledge. With over five million articles, finding the exact Wikipedia article you want can sometimes feel like you’re searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. That’s why if you go and search the world’s largest encyclopedia, you will see a new interface that provides several common search terms. No longer will people looking for their favorite salad be faced with the dilemma of 50,000 search results for rocket. More specifically, search pages now have an additional visual interface that provides several common search options. For instance, when you type space, Nasa, and missile into the field “Not this text” and salad into “One of these words”, you can narrow your search for rocket down to little more than 100 results. Other options are to search in page titles, for exact text, to look for pages in certain categories, with a particular template, and more...

Hershenov resigns as General Counsel

Eileen Hershenov departs from General Counsel position at the Wikimedia Foundation
by Katherine Maher, 2 December 2018

Eileen Hershenov will be departing from her role as General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation in December. It is with deep regret that I share that Eileen Hershenov, General Counsel and Board Secretary, will be departing from her position at the Wikimedia Foundation. On behalf of the executive team, Foundation Board, and myself, I want to thank Eileen for her critical contributions to advance our legal, public policy, and advocacy work during her time with us at the Foundation.

Eileen will be departing from her position in early December, and Tony Sebro, current Deputy General Counsel, will act as Interim General Counsel as we look to fill the position permanently. I thank Tony for his willingness to support this transition period and know and trust the Legal Department will be under excellent leadership during this time...

Maher signs deal in Jordan

Hashemite University, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia volunteers partner to expand access to free knowledge resources in Jordan
by Wikimedia Foundation, 30 November 2018

Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia community members in Jordan, and Hashemite University—one of the most esteemed higher education institutions in Jordan—signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to advance cultural cooperation and access to free knowledge resources in the Arabic language. It is the first MOU of its type signed with any university in the Middle East. The partnership was announced at a roundtable discussion hosted at Hashemite University by Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Professor Kamal Bani-Hani, Hashemite University President. They were joined by Hashemite University staff, students, the Wikimedians of the Levant User Group—the local Wikimedia community of volunteer editors—and other guests...

A patchwork of copyright exceptions and limitations in European education

We’re endorsing a proposed copyright treaty that adds educational and research exceptions. Here’s why
by Hugues Plessis, 19 November 2018

The Wikimedia Foundation, and 15 other civil society and research organizations, have endorsed the Proposed Treaty On Copyright Exceptions For Educational And Research Activities that introduces exceptions and limitations to copyright, supporting open knowledge and the free culture. The proposed treaty will be presented to the World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights at its 37th session from November 26th-30th.

This may come as a surprise, but copyrighted works often cannot be used in educational and research materials.

For example: students in France, Italy, Luxembourg and Romania cannot legally quote an entire artwork in a digital presentation. In Denmark, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom a teacher may not send an email to her students with excerpts of reading materials. In Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom an educator in a nonprofit cannot legally show parts of a video from a DVD they own in a free history class. (You can read more about this in a recent COMMUNIA report.) ...

Winners of the photo competition announced

Lose yourself in our planet’s beauty with the winners of Wiki Loves Earth
by Ed Erhart, 17 December 2018

"A lonely monastery. Sunrise over the desert. A walk through a national park. These are just a few of the spectacular sights captured in the winners of the international Wiki Loves Earth photography competition, announced today. Coming in first place, seen at top, is a shot of the famed columnar basalt of Cape Stolbchaty, located in the Kuril Islands. Ekaterina Vasyagina’s photo was praised by one competition judge for its “brilliant composition and depth,” with another saying that it simply “makes you want to breathe...."

Requests for Medication is the most important step in formal dispute resolution on Wikipedia. High volumes of stress can often manifest when the desire to continue to have the privilege of editing Wikipedia overrides the body's innate desire to choke the living shit out of some bastard who really has it coming. Medication is administered by members of the Medication Committee and has proven time and again to aid in resolving content disputes, curing headaches and averting the occasional natural disaster. Side effects may include:

• watery eyes
• blurred vision
• not giving a crap anymore
• smiling way too much
• missing work the next day
• not giving a crap anymore
• staying home instead to edit Wikipedia
• loss of Internet access or residence due to non-payment.

Before requesting medication, you should invite some friends over so that they may benefit from the humor of your behavior, tease you about it for the remainder of your life and post pics on your talk page. If medication fails to bring about a resolution to your dispute, tell the other guy to chill the fuck out. If this still doesn't work, then try taking up a different dispute or a hobby; you're probably wrong anyway. I mean, really, I lost a dispute and started knitting instead and I'm much happier. With the proceeds from the sweaters that I sell, I've accumulated enough money to pay my ISP again.

Editing Wikipedia unmedicated can lead to boring content, which will get speedily deleted before you even get a chance to click on the Save page button, so don't even try it!

• The Last Word
• No angry mastodons
• Nobody cares
• Don't-give-a-fuckism
• Wikipedia is not about wining
• WP:Requests for meditation

Four recent desysoppings (two of which were restored) – see News and notes – remind us that strong and uniquely used passwords are required, especially for admins. The article reprinted here from The Signpost from 2007 shows that although first published 10 years ago, hijackings of admin accounts are still a reality and that all users still need to be vigilant and report anything unusual. The author, Thatcher, is an admin and has not significantly edited since 2010.

Editor's note: Admins KnowledgeOfSelf, AndyZ, and Conscious were later desysopped for lack of activity; user BuickCenturyDriver was first blocked in 2012 for sockpuppetry and the extensive SPI is still ongoing as of 2018.

Administrator status restored to five accounts after emergency desysopping

Last week the Signpost reported that four administrator accounts which had used weak or insecure passwords were indefinitely blocked and desysopped after they were hijacked by an unknown person who cracked the password.

This week, a fifth administrator account was temporarily hijacked by the same vandal, although it was restored to the user's control a few hours later. All four of the original administrator accounts have been unblocked and resysopped. Mangojuice has proposed a method by which editors may place encrypted identifying information about themselves on their user pages, so they can easily confirm their identity in case of future password attacks (see related story).

KnowledgeOfSelf

On Tuesday, May 8, KnowledgeOfSelf (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) reported (via an alternate account ActWonActToo) that he had been logged out of his account and his password and e-mail address had been changed. Commenters on the Administrators' noticeboard were initially split on whether to accept the claim, but when KnowledgeOfSelf uploaded an obscene image with a deceptive name, the account was immediately blocked and desysopped. Checkuser confirmed that ActwonActToo was KnowledgeOfSelf, and that the account had been hijacked by the same user who was responsible for hijacking four other administrator accounts the day before. KnowledgeOfSelf stated that he had used a strong password [2] [3], so the method of hijacking remains unknown. KnowledgeOfSelf was able to identify himself to Brion VIBBER, who reset the account password to enable KnowledgeOfSelf to retake control about 5 hours later. Bureaucrat Raul654 restored his administrator privileges.

AndyZ

AndyZ (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was blocked and desysopped on Monday, May 7, after his password was compromised and his account used for vandalism. AndyZ was unblocked on Tuesday, after establishing his identity to Mark. His administrator rights were restored on Wednesday.

Jiang

Jiang (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), who was also blocked and desysopped Monday morning, was unblocked Monday evening, May 7 and resysopped Thursday evening, May 10.

Marine 69-71

Marine 69-71 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was unblocked and resysopped on Monday, May 7, a few hours after the hijacking.

Conscious

Conscious (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was unblocked and resysopped Thursday after checkuser confirmed that he was still in control of his account.

BuickCenturyDriver

Finally, the indefinite block on BuickCenturyDriver (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was lifted three days after the incident, based on an apology and on checkuser evidence that he was responsible for blocking Ryulong from AndyZ's account but was not the culprit behind the attack.

• Template:User committed identity
• Wikipedia:Security
• meta:Don't leave your fly open
• Strong password