Wikipedia’s constitutional crisis may have come to an end.

The Wikimedia Foundation agreed that the English-language Arbitration Committee would have full power to review the one-year ban against administrator Fram. Three months later ArbCom unbanned Fram and removed his admin status while allowing him to apply for its reinstatement. The RfA failed and Fram withdrew. The details of the Fram case are covered in this month’s Special report. This article explores how we can address the underlying issues of the case moving forward.

At first glance, Wikipedia’s multilevel decision making process has shown that the en:Wiki community can protect its independence from the WMF, can make nuanced decisions about admin incivility and harassment, and protect editors against harassment once they file a complaint.

But on closer inspection, none of that was accomplished. The process was agonizingly slow, confused, and just ugly. The community did not come up with a method to minimize harassment in everyday practice. The difficulty of giving accused harassers enough information to defend themselves while protecting their accusers against potential further harassment was underlined. And any cooperation between the WMF and ArbCom or the community to prevent harassment was trashed as the WMF was routinely derided as the cause of the whole affair.

We believe that three issues must be addressed simultaneously before the constitutional crisis is resolved:

• How to protect editors against harassment? If we can’t protect our editors, we’ll lose our best and brightest. Wikipedia may become the playground of trolls.
• Can we find a reasonable method for accused harassers to defend themselves while still preserving the accuser’s ability to file a complaint without further harassment? and
• Can we cooperate using all the tools of the community, ArbCom, and the WMF to prevent harassment before it happens and deal effectively with it after a complaint is made? If we treat the WMF as the enemy, we’ll be losing many of the tools that can minimize harassment.

— The Signpost

A proposal that ignores one of the issues will ultimately fail on all three counts.

ArbCom will soon start a request for comment on these and similar issues. The Signpost asked over a dozen well-respected editors how we can move forward rather than dwelling on the wounds of the recent past. Perhaps because the wounds are still fresh only 6 agreed to comment using their usernames. Another allowed their comments to be used without their username. All responses were edited for length.

Our movement has more or less relied on an unwritten division of power between the Foundation, the affiliates, and the communities. Our communities are generally self governing, except in a few clearly defined cases... Individual communities of course can and should be held to account if they are not meeting movement norms by the movement as a whole.

As our movement grows and brings in new people we need to move from an unwritten to a written division of power (ie a movement charter or constitution). Thankfully this has been proposed in our 2030 strategy process.[1]

With respect to the decisions of ArbCom, when the case was handed over I made it clear at the time that I will stand 100% behind whatever decision ArbCom makes and that is still my position.

— Doc James (in his volunteer capacity, not in his position as a WMF trustee)

Levivich wrote, "The project will not succeed if we ignore or outsource maintenance of the pillars. Each of us can see harassment when it happens on-wiki; each of us has an obligation to not tolerate it. If bystanders spoke up more often, victims wouldn’t need to report."

Levivich's proposal appears to be very difficult to implement. He is suggesting a complete change in Wikipedia’s culture. Perhaps this is the only way forward.

Wikipedia needs to improve the sometimes hostile and toxic environment for article creators and editors, both new and old. People who edit WP need to understand that encouragement of good faith new editors is equally as important as quality control …. There are guidelines and policies on WP that need to be respected, but these requirements can be handled with grace and cooperation, not the kneejerk I Don't Like It reactions too often seen.
— MontanaBW

One editor who preferred that his username not be used was skeptical that progress could be made "because one person's harassment is another's defending the encyclopedia." It would be easy to swamp ArbCom, “but if it were possible to filter out … misguided claims of harassment, a complainant might email ArbCom. The remedy might be to separate the people involved along the lines of ‘if the edits need attention, let someone else deal with it’…. There might be volunteer mentors who would act as intermediaries.”

I don't expect easy answers to the harassment and fair process conversations…. our open forms of dispute resolution seem particularly unsuited to addressing long-term poor behaviour that is countered with positive contributions...

Ultimately this is something that the community needs to decide on, and the Foundation needs to respect and support -- not take over.

While I am not happy with how the community interacts with Foundation staff (insults, personal attacks, and the like), this is ultimately a problem of the Foundation's own creation.

— Ajraddatz

Guy felt the WMF was to blame. His suggestions included:

• WMF needs to write a policy for interventions on projects that details the amount of autonomy those projects have and offers office escalation as an option where a project has no ArbCom equivalent...
• WMF needs to enact and document an internal review process, such that we can be confident that a ban is not enacted without fully independent review.
• WMF needs to set up an appeals process for bans, and allow third party appeals from functionaries / ArbComs of projects...

The mechanics for (reporting harassment) do exist, in that people could and should inform the arbitration committee or functionaries mailing list confidentially if they are concerned about their safety. However in practice, I do recall situations where the committee has been slow to respond or act.

Regarding providing a adequate means of defense for the accused, the general principle in the workplace is that the origin of a complaint must be known to a person as a default to allow dispute resolution or management to take place. This should be the case on WP unless a complainant can make a case to the committee that there is a compelling reason otherwise.

— Casliber

There are some areas of agreement in all these views. Everybody recognizes that there's a problem with harassment or with the WMF's approach to it. Some respondents believe that we have a system in place to deal with harassment, but perhaps it can be improved. Others think that for Wikipedia's approach to harassment to change, our editors' attitudes must change. Nobody praised the WMF's approach to the problem. The RfC to be run by ArbCom will be interesting.

As always, your opinion, politely expressed in the Comments section below, is appreciated.

• 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.

Wikipedia down: 'Malicious attack' brings down online encyclopedia after pages fail to load according to The Independent on Saturday, September 7. The attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS). About a dozen other news outlets reported the story, but few went beyond the report on the WMF News which condemned the attack and attributed it only to "bad faith" actors. One exception was Haaretz, which reported that a Twitter account named "@UkDrillas" (since suspended) had claimed responsibility for the attack, indicating that it was exploiting an Internet of Things (IoT) vulnerability. Haaretz quoted an expert (Alp Toker, head of NetBlocks) as saying that the attack had lasted at least nine hours, and that "our data suggest at least two regional networks were targeted, in the U.S. and in Europe, causing different parts of the world to be out at different times."

Toker also pointed out that "organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation seek to maintain a direct relationship with users in the interest of privacy, which means they can't readily opt for commercial DDoS protection services. Developing defenses against large-scale attacks while running a free and open service is an unsolved technical problem." He was apparently referring to the fact that Wikimedia's privacy principles generally preclude the sharing of private reader data such as IP addresses with third parties, whereas e.g. Cloudflare's standard DDoS protection service involves redirecting traffic to the company's proxy servers. However, on the day after the attack began, WMF Executive Director Katherine Maher stated that Cloudflare was indeed coming to the rescue: "they’ve been absolutely top notch, helping us roll onto a new service offering of theirs that was barely yet in the wild, direct lines of collaboration between staff on both sides" - apparently a reference to the "Magic Transit" service Cloudflare had announced in mid-August, with presumably somewhat differing privacy implications. In any case, the apparent attacker had already announced they would stop targeting Wikipedia (at least for some time) and take down certain video gaming services instead, with Twitch.tv and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft subsequently seeing major outages as well. On September 20, PC Gamer reported that a suspect had been arrested, quoting a Blizzard employee.

Perhaps something good came out of the attack: Wikipedia Gets $2.5m Donation to Boost Cybersecurity from Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, according to InfoSecurity. Other coverage followed that of the WMF News.

Turkey's ban of Wikipedia to be overturned? Citing a pro-government journalist, Ahval News on September 11 was the first of several outlets to predict: "Turkey’s top court set to rescind Wikipedia ban". But there's no actual news yet.

Russia's internet to be sealed off and the Great Russian Encyclopedia is still the future of the Russian internet according to Belsat, a Belarusian-language broadcaster funded by the Polish government. Tests are scheduled on equipment that has already been installed that will enable the Russian government to isolate the Russian internet in case the World Wide Web threatens its stability. The Great Russian Encyclopedia, which has been proposed since at least 2016, is predicted to cost the state $30 million and to be available in four years. It will be edited exclusively by experts. The Signpost predicts that the GRE will always be the future of the Russian internet and that Belsat will continue to have a contentious relationship with the Belarusian and Russian governments.

Grant Ingersoll has been hired as the Chief Technical Officer of the WMF (WMF News). His background with Apache Solr (now part of Lucene), and especially Apache Mahout led him to be interviewed by Java technology zone technical podcast series back in 2011. During the discussion, Ingersoll speaks primarily about scalable machine learning. More recently, Ingersoll has been the CTO of Lucidworks. Ingersoll is a recognized expert on automated data retrieval.

XOR'easter cleans up. The Washington Post reports that editor XOR'easter cleaned up the Hunter Biden article after the former Vice-President's son became news last week. The article was reportedly biased by sources including the Epoch Times and The New American. WaPo quoted XOR'easter saying "I had to get in there and clean it out like a garbage disposal. Sometimes you just have to muck around."

BuzzFeed News reports that This Website Will Turn Wikipedia Articles Into "Real" Academic Papers. If only it were that easy. The so-called academic papers are missing a few things, like a listing of the authors' names, abstracts, publishing dates, footnotes, graphs, tables, and other illustrations. But if your professor has never read an academic paper, you may be in luck citing the "academic paper".

The best way to view the output is to go to the site https://m-journal.org/ and enter the name of your favorite Wikipedia entry. The site then generates the "article" and can also generate a citation. If you resubmit the same Wikipedia entry, you get a nearly identical article, but with a different title, authors and publication dates. See the two citations for Seth Kinman below.

• McGrath, Tony. "The Complete History of Exploding whale." JournalOfm.org, M-Journal, 31 July 2010, https://journalofm.org/article/the-complete-history-of-exploding-whale.pdf.
• Richards, Margaret. "The Complete History of Seth Kinman." JournalOfm.org, M-Journal, 5 August 2003, https://journalofm.org/article/the-complete-history-of-seth-kinman.pdf.
• Richards, Stephen. "How Mad Gasser of Mattoon Altered U.S. History." JournalOfm.org, M-Journal, 12 April 2017, https://journalofm.org/article/how-mad-gasser-of-mattoon-altered-u.s.-history.pdf.
• Smith, Darien. "How Seth Kinman Altered U.S. History." JournalOfm.org, M-Journal, 2 August 2014, https://journalofm.org/article/how-seth-kinman-altered-u.s.-history.pdf.

Those who get upset at violations of the CC-By license will have enough material to be angry for at least a year. But don't take this seriously folks. Please don't take this seriously.

• Automated translation of English to Hindi Wikipedia: The Hindu reports that the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology is using automated processes including artificial intelligence to translate articles into the Hindi language Wikipedia. Scientists will also help translate and create new articles in Hindi and other Indian languages costing up to $US1.4 million over three years.

• Ask Alexa (and an Anonymous Crowd Answers?): Denyse O'Leary on Mind Matters questions the use of crowdsourcing as it's being tested by Amazon to answer questions posed to Alexa. Her argument is that "Wikipedia is a classic example of how crowdsourcing can go wrong", so why would it work for Alexa? She gives five reasons why it doesn't work on Wikipedia:
  • hidden points of view can be inserted
  • doubtful claims can appear to be well-accepted
  • crowds can shout down experts on obscure topics
  • sourced, but untrue, information can be accepted as factual
  • the end result can be "appallingly biased" — where she's quoting Larry Sanger

The ultimate source of these problems, according to O'Leary is the anonymity and lack of accountability of the authors. Mind Matters and O'Leary are associated with the Discovery Institute which is known for its strong support of intelligent design over Darwinian evolution. The Discovery Institute has previously taken issue with how Wikipedia handles intelligent design content.

• Which witch, when and where? Try Wikidata: Emma Carroll, a new Wikipedian, landed a challenging internship "to use the data recorded within" the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database and "find visually interesting ways to document the data for public viewing through the form of digital maps and Wikidata." From this June through September she tracked down the residences of many of the over 3000 accused Scots witches from the period 1563 – 1736, then displayed these and other locations on digital maps and uploaded the data to Wikidata. The Scotsman covers the details of the project with the help of Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh. About 20 accused Scots witches now have Wikipedia articles.
• Mad Gasser of Mattoon: The Matoon Journal Gazette & Times-Courier cites Wikipedia 75 years after they first reported this case. No, it's not a time warp. The Journal Gazette first reported the story in 1944, which was then reported in academic journals, which were then cited by more questionable sources, which were cited in the Wikipedia article. For the anniversary of the event, the Journal Gazette & Times-Courier cited Wikipedia. The case may have resulted from mass hysteria. Or was it industrial pollution? Spilled nail polish? A real "mad anaesthetist"? Or was it just a normal case of the paranormal?

• New high possible for WIKI on the stock exchange: The shares of Seattle-based marijuana advertiser Wikileaf Technologies, which makes no claims to be related to Wikipedia, began trading at C$0.40 per share on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) using the ticker symbol WIKI. The unusual listing is reverse takeover of an already trading company which avoids the regulatory scrutiny of an IPO. The CSE is Canada's youngest stock exchange and has a budding business trading the shares of over 100 marijuana companies. Marijuana company shares have been smoking hot this year, but are widely considered to be speculative investments.
• The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet: The book of that title by Jeff Kosseff is reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. The 26 words are

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,

in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Every Wikipedian could benefit from knowing the issues surrounding these words and how this law might change.

• Defending Wikipedia's honor: Vice has Asked a Wikipedia Contributor Why Everyone Thinks They're Unreliable? The administrator on the Indonesian Wikipedia, whose user name is not given, does a very good job defending our honor.
• New West cops blocked in attempt to scrub off-duty assault from Wikipedia: The Police Department of New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada was caught removing the history of an alleged bad cop from "their" Wikipedia article. In 2009 the cop allegedly participated in a robbery and assault. He got a conditional discharge in court, with a year of probation and no permanent criminal record, but lost his job as a policeman. The New Westminster Police Department was almost as lucky, getting a permanent soft block for a promotional username NWPD media. So who policed the police department?
• Cannibalism: a minor media outlet continues the custom of sensationalizing Larry Sanger's activities. It's a wild ride through Larry's tweets, but in the end Larry comes down "firmly against cannibalism."
• Read a random article on your Apple Watch: MiniWiki unofficial Wikipedia Apple Watch app adds ‘Random’ articles, independent language. If the illustration in the article is a good guide, you can read up to 21 words on the watch.

At the 2019 Wikimania conference, Europeana – a Europe-wide digital cultural platform – held several associated events, including the inaugural meeting of national libraries which work directly with Wikidata and its underlying software Wikibase. The event was organized by Liam Wyatt in his professional role as Europeana's Wikipedia liaison. This article was also written in that role and originally published at the Europeana blog.

In his other role as a Wikipedia volunteer he is usually called Wittylama. He is one of the founders of Project GLAM and the original Wikipedian-in-Residence - as a volunteer. Also in this role he was program chairman of Wikimania 2019 –S

As Wikidata becomes an increasingly large, densely connected, web of linked data, the cultural heritage sector is leveraging the platform more and more. None more so than national libraries, who have been at the forefront of innovations. Thirty institutional representatives participated in this meeting from three continents.

The meeting began with a series of short demonstration talks from institutions already working with Wikidata and Wikibase in-house. These are notable not only for the variety of activities undertaken and the successes already being reported from these young projects, but also for the fact that until recently, they have all been happening largely in isolation with limited knowledge-sharing.

Demonstrations of projects currently underway were given by:

• Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales (slides)
• Kansalliskirjasto/National Library of Finland (slides)
• Bibliothèque Nationale de France/National Library of France (slides)
• Deutsche Nationalbibliothek/National Library of Germany (slides)
• Library of Congress – United States (slides)
• Linked Data for Production project (LD4P) – United States (slides)
• OCLC – International (slides)
• Kungliga biblioteket/National LIbrary of Sweden (slides)

The new director of the National Library of Sweden, Karin Grönvall, on quite literally her first day at the job, also took the time to greet us.

Heading into the meeting, approximately 40% of the attendees reported that their institution had already undertaken export of their own information into Wikidata. Afterwards, more than 50% reported that as a specific result of what they had learned they would now investigate undertaking further exports; over 60% also reported they would now be investigating the Wikibase software for in-house use, and 100% of responses received stated a high satisfaction with the day's usefulness for their institution.

Following the initial presentations, the meeting moved on to discussions informing – and also getting valuable feedback about – the 'roadmap': the forthcoming developments in Wikidata and Wikibase.

This began with a section on the work of the Structured Data on Commons project – which is bringing the power of linked data to Wikimedia Commons – and was followed by in-depth discussions of two specific areas of Wikibase software development that are common requests for libraries: permissions and federation.

The former request, permissions, refers to the nuanced read and/or write permissions that cultural institutions would like to provide when managing their own catalogue infrastructure on Wikibase. While in Wikidata the general principle is that everyone can see and edit any part of any item, for libraries this might not be sufficient. Potential outcomes include: designating certain users with advanced permissions to edit specific sections of items, or certain items in entirety; and making certain items or sections of those items visible only to particular users. Having a 'second opinion' check-function before a change is published was also discussed. These features might be necessary, for example, in catalogue management where some library staff have the right to edit bibliographic metadata, while other designated staff might have the right to view particularly sensitive information about acquisitions.

The latter request, federation, refers to the principle that multiple Wikibase instances can work with each other – each containing different information, but being able to sync elements so as not to duplicate effort and in order to propagate up-to-date information. However, as Lydia Pintscher – Wikidata product manager – explained to the group, everyone believes federation is a good idea, however everyone also has a different understanding of what it would mean in practice! In the meeting we talked through various practical options of federated Wikibase including but not limited to: shared properties but local items, shared items but local properties, and shared querying.

Almost simultaneously to this event, the Wikidata team published four strategy papers, including the high-level vision, and a specific paper discussing the future of the Wikibase ecosystem. This latter report provides the specific motivation for why the cultural sector – particularly national libraries – are investigating Wikibase:

This strategy is consistent with the extensively researched Association of Research Libraries April 2019 whitepaper discussing the use of Wikibase and Wikidata in the library context.

For more information about any of the discussions during the Stockholm meeting, please consult the comprehensive notes taken during the day itself.