I don't really like writing about myself, but I guess there is no way out of it this time. As EpicPupper has left Wikipedia and resigned their position with The Signpost, I am now the official bull goose looney of this joint.

What does this mean?

Well, my first job is to decide what it means. I would be remiss to simply read the Wikipedia article and call myself an expert – especially not when I can simply read the Signpost and call myself an expert instead. There are 3,528 talk pages, and 7,960 subpages of The Signpost, of which 5,935 are articles (give or take a few). They go from January 2005 up to today: I have gotten through one year already, which means there are only 16 left until I catch up to when I started publishing last November. I am taking notes during this process, so by the time I get through I should be able to write a fairly comprehensive history of the paper. By the time I get caught up, I expect to have a clearer idea of what the hell has been going on for the last two decades, what is currently going on, as well as (hopefully) some galaxy-brain ideas for how to make it be even more going on.

For now, I am going to be continuing to fix things on the backend, like updating and improving some of the Signpost templates – those couple illustrated issues we had just now were the result of me manually adding images to each article item on the front page because the template can't embed images or bylines. Whoopsies daisies!!! As you are probably already starting to realize, most of this stuff is fairly boring, but my idea is to make the whole experience a little better, while lowering the amount of effort required to read, write, and comment on Signpost articles. I am also going to try to implement (or get out of the way during the implementation of) some galaxy-brain ideas that wiser people than myself have come up with.

Before I get to that, though, I must apologize for some errors: my proofreading was rather lazy throughout the publication of the September issue, and the Gallery was an incomplete draft not meant to be published. I gave you a crappy Signpost, and for that, I am sorry. This issue will be somewhat thin as well: I have spent most of my time in the run-up working on technical issues (like documenting the confusing ecosystem of internal templates) instead of writing and editing and soliciting submissions. I have a few diabolical schemes in the works – which you will see more of as they unfold – so keep your eyes peeled.

Anyone looney enough to want to help with any of this is invited to pop on over to the newsroom talk page, where more detail can be found on most of these goings-on.

On October 11, a Twitter user pointed out that millions of dollars donated "to Wikipedia" had been used for non-Wikimedia grants. Above two pictures of Wikimedia fundraising banners, the user (@echetus) said:

If you use Wikipedia, you've seen pop-ups like this. If you're like me, you may have donated as a result.

Wikipedia is an amazing website, and the appeals seem heartfelt. But I've now learnt the money isn't going where I thought...

The tweet attracted well over 10,000 retweets and more than 35,000 "likes" (NB: perhaps helped along by OP's tasteful Haruhi av).

What was the Twitter user talking about?

The thread attached to the tweet focused on the Knowledge Equity Fund, "a new US$4.5 million fund created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, to provide grants to external organizations that support knowledge equity by addressing the racial inequities preventing access and participation in free knowledge".

The money was transferred to an outside organisation, Tides Advocacy, sometime in the 2019–2020 financial year when the Foundation found it had a large amount of money left over because of an underspend. This transfer of millions of dollars of donated funds to Tides Advocacy bypassed established grants processes, and was not publicised at the time.

The creation of the Tides Advocacy fund thus remained unknown to the community and the public at large until December 2020, when the Wikimedia Foundation's 2020 Audit Report and associated FAQ were published, leading to instant controversy. Concerns expressed then focused on the secrecy of the grant, the break with the participatory grantmaking principles the Foundation had until then embraced, and the fact that the transfer coincided with Amanda Keton's move in the 2019–2020 financial year from General Counsel of the Tides Network and CEO of Tides Advocacy to General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Subsequently, in 2021, a little over $1 million was given to three U.S. grantees as well as one Brazilian, one West African and one Jordanian organisation in the first round of grants from the fund, leaving several million dollars in Tides Advocacy's accounts to this day.

Community questions

This October (the 12th to be precise), Wikipedian and former Wikimedia UK trustee and fundraiser Chris Keating inquired on the Wikimedia-l mailing list about the fund's status, specifically referencing the Twitter thread:

Meta (1) suggests 6 grants were made in September 2021 and that a second more community-focused round of grants would be made in 2022. No details of a second round have been published that I'm aware of; is this still active? Are there any public details of impact or progress reporting from the September 2021 grants?

There is also a somewhat-viral Twitter thread which focuses, alongside some general criticisms of Wikimedia fundraising, on two grants specifically from this fund and the WMF making itself a participant in US 'culture wars'. (2) I wonder if there is any response from the WMF to that?

(For what it's worth, my perception is that the Knowledge Equity Fund was initially a deliberate attempt led by US-based staff to have the WMF 'do something' to align itself with a broader progressive movement in the USA. I believe the main advocates for this have now departed, that it was never a particularly good fit with the WMF's overall approach to grantmaking, that the evolution of the WMF's approach to this fund was positive, but still if the whole thing is now forgotten about that's probably no bad thing).

Wikimedia Foundation Chief of Staff Nadee Gunasena replied on the fund's talk page on Meta-Wiki:

The short answer is that because the Equity Fund is a pilot initiative for us without any dedicated staff, it has taken us longer than we anticipated to hit some of our milestones. It’s been a learning process. [...] Our goal is to choose grantees for a second round of grants and to make that process visible. I can share more about the timeline there when I have more details.

Long-time Wikimedian Steven Walling and Wiki Education Foundation Executive Director Frank Schulenburg expressed their disagreement:

Hi Nadee, when I said I supported Steven's proposal, I meant specifically "Given that this is a pilot and there have been serious concerns expressed about the ROI and ethics of funding grantees not doing any work that has a direct measurable impact on Wikimedia projects, I would encourage you to stop". I've recently seen enough voices online expressing concern about the fact that they thought they donated to keep Wikipedia's servers running, but ended up having funded some other organization and cause. I think this is a reasonable question and I'm interested in hearing what the Wikimedia Foundation will be doing to ensure that the Knowledge Equity Fund is in line with generally accepted principles of ethical fundraising. --Frank Schulenburg

The discussion is ongoing at the time of writing.

WMF response to a user cancelling his donation

On Twitter meanwhile a user shared that they cancelled their donation after reading the thread and received the following response from the Wikimedia Foundation:

I can confirm your monthly donation has been cancelled, and you will see no further charges from the Wikimedia Foundation.

We always appreciate fair criticism and questions about our practices, as well as the opportunity to make our processes clearer and more transparent. With that said, the recent messages shared on Twitter about our fundraising practices and the growth of Wikipedia are misguided and don't reflect an accurate understanding of what it takes to sustain a top global website.

Since Wikipedia first started, the needs of the site have significantly evolved, and the Wikimedia Foundation has adapted in response to meet those changing needs. For example, the growth of Wikipedia to more than 1.5 billion visits a month has required making steady investments in our product and technology work to ensure the site loads quickly, is available across devices, and in readers' preferred language.

Because of our volunteer editors and the support of our donors, Wikipedia has become a go-to resource for millions of people across the world. We want everyone, everywhere, to experience its benefits and have the world's knowledge reflected in its articles so it's a better resource for you. That's why we are working to address gaps in knowledge in our projects. Part of that work includes increased support to volunteers, affiliate groups and other organizations working on issues like diversity and women's history.

Over the past fiscal year, we have increased grant funding to volunteers and groups working to address barriers to free knowledge by 51 percent year over year. We distributed grants across more than 90 countries around the world to help ensure Wikipedia continues to be a trusted place for reliable, relevant, and trustworthy knowledge.

We hope this provides more information about our fundraising practices and how we steward reader donations to best support Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and our free knowledge mission.

What stands out in this response is the claim that the Foundation "distributed grants across more than 90 countries around the world". The first thing to say here is that according to its most recent Form 990 tax filing, the Wikimedia Foundation spent over 95% of its money in North America and Europe. Grantmaking in the global South accounted for just 1.2% of revenue (see previous Signpost coverage for figures).

Moreover, a look at the overall budget shows that grants to the community, emphasised in the above response, are a very minor part of the overall budget and not constrained by any budget shortfall. In the Wikimedia Foundation's most recent audited financial statements, "Awards and grants" amounted to $9.8 million, of which $5 million (possibly $5.5 million) represented a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation's own Endowment held by the Tides Foundation. This leaves somewhere between $4 and $5 million for actual grants made to the community – a figure dwarfed by the Wikimedia Foundation's $50 million budget surplus in 2020–2021. There was no lack of money for grants.

The auditors also point out on page 14 of the financial statements that the actual sum transferred to Tides Advocacy was $8.723 rather than $4.5 million. They add that a part of this money ($4.223 million, presumably) would be used "to fund the annual operating expenses of other Wikimedia chapter organizations".

A side effect of this arrangement is that neither the Wikimedia Foundation's audited financial statements nor its Form 990 filings will now show if, when, or how this money is or was spent by Tides Advocacy to fund chapter organisations – just like there has never been any public accounting for the over $100 million in Wikimedia Endowment funds held by the Tides Foundation (see previous Signpost coverage as well as the WMF's Governance update in this Signpost issue). Whatever purpose these arrangements with Tides organisations serve – it is not transparency. – AK

Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander announced last month that longstanding Chief Advancement Officer Lisa Seitz-Gruwell now also serves as Deputy CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, in addition to her responsibilities for fundraising, strategic partnerships and grantmaking. Moreover, a recent advertisement looking for at-large directors of the Wikimedia Endowment described Lisa Seitz-Gruwell as President of the new Wikimedia Endowment organisation, whose application for 501(c)3 non-profit status has now been approved (see News from the WMF).

Other C-level changes announced by Maryana Iskander included Stephen LaPorte taking on the role of Deputy General Counsel, working closely with Amanda Keton, and Maryana Iskander herself temporarily heading up the Talent & Culture department in addition to serving as CEO. Nadee Gunasena's role as Chief of Staff has been broadened to include supporting the entire organisation and movement rather than just the CEO. As previously reported, Product/Technology is now headed by Selena Deckelmann, who came to the WMF from Mozilla, where she was head of Firefox.

Iskander said that while the Wikimedia Foundation's headcount had grown by over 200 since 2020, this growth would not continue. Instead there would now be a period of stabilisation. – AK

Nadee Gunasena, the Wikimedia Foundation's chief of staff, has announced that the WMF will no longer publish the presentation decks from its quarterly reviews or "tuning sessions" providing an update on each WMF department's progress against Annual Plan targets. Instead of this year's fourth quarter tuning session decks, which in the past were posted on Commons by mid-July (the WMF's fiscal year runs from July to June), there will now only be an unspecified but most likely very abridged "update" posted on Meta-Wiki "by mid-November" – a delay of at least four months.

The community and public are thus deprived of timely information that the WMF had been happy to provide for the past ten years – including reports of financials, staffing levels and partnerships that formed the basis of Signpost and media reports in the past. – AK

The programme documentation for last month's Wikimedia Summit 2022 is now available on Meta. As announced this week on the Wikimedia-l mailing list –

The documentation consists of a description and summary of each conference session of each of [the] three days and topics to follow up on. Additionally, a short summary of the documentation provides an overview of the topics discussed, and has been translated into 6 languages by our colleagues from the Wikimedia Foundation.

An English-language report on the event is also available on Commons as well as on Meta-Wiki.

The Wikimedia Summit is an annual meeting of Wikimedia Foundation leadership – both trustees and executives – with affiliate representatives and members of movement committees. The event is usually held in Berlin, Germany. It was cancelled last year due to COVID; this year, around 150 people from around the world attended in person, with a similar number participating online.

Early indications are that this hybrid format – mixing in-person attendance and online participation – worked better this time round than at the recent Wikimania (see previous Signpost coverage). Survey results on this aspect will be reported around the end of next month, along with the event's budget.

Key topics discussed at this year's Summit included the Movement Charter, Hubs, and Revenues & Resources.

The run-up to the Berlin Summit also saw WMF board members coming together in person for a quarterly board meeting. During the meeting, it was decided to keep the size of the board at 12 members for the next two years, this size being deemed more effective than a larger board.

The minutes of the previous quarterly board meeting held in June 2022 were approved and are now online here. In addition to updates on the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and the Movement Charter, the minutes also spell out the board's expectations for the 2022–2023 financial year:

FY22–23 is not anticipated to be a year of rapid growth. The Foundation anticipates 17% growth to a budget of $175 million with moderate growth in terms of staffing. Next year, the fundraising team will be increasing targets in each of their major streams, with a particular focus in Major Gifts. A motion was made by Tanya Capuano and seconded by Nataliia Tymkiv to approve the Wikimedia Foundation 2022–23 Annual Plan. The motion was unanimously approved.

The Annual Plan, as shown in the Resolution, envisages total expenses of $175 million. Total expenses in 2020–2021, the most recent year for which figures are available, were $112 million; the most recent projection for 2021–2022, in the third-quarter Finance and Administration tuning session deck, forecast total expenses of $142 million for the financial year ended June 30, 2022. – AK

An open letter was published on Commons on 10 October, asking the Wikimedia Foundation to invest in Wikimedia Commons:

We, the undersigned, are involved with Wikimedia Commons, the central media platform of the Wikimedia movement. Commons is where the movement comes together: we take pictures, we upload files, we embed images in Wikipedia articles, we deal with legal questions, we teach others how to use Commons, we work with cultural institutions (GLAM), or we support Commons in other ways.

Commons is one of the largest online media collections in the world. It offers freely licensed files to everyone: via Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis, and also many other websites and individuals in the world. This makes Commons vital for millions of people on the planet.

But we are concerned about the present situation and the future of Wikimedia Commons. Our platform is fighting to remain relevant in a world that is dominated by visual platforms (such as YouTube, Instagram, flickr etc.) that are constantly evolving. Commons, in contrast, fails modern standards of usability and struggles with numerous foundational issues. [..]

At the time of writing, the open letter has attracted well over 200 signatures. – AK

• Some more admins and some fewer: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Whpq and Isabelle Belato, and thanks Atama, Athaenara, Eddie891, Marianocecowski and Pratyeka for their service.
• Administrator desysopped after RfA comment, arb case in progress: Athaenara was desysopped and indefinitely blocked pursuant to these two threads at the administrators' noticeboard for incidents. An Arbitration Committee case regarding the subsequent reversal and reinstatement of this block is open as of press time, with Lourdes (who reversed the block) and TheresNoTime (who reinstated it) as named parties.
• Admin resignation: Pratyeka (signature "prat") resigned from Wikipedia and requested removal of the tools after an editing dispute, saying that "every time I have added good content for the last few years I get hassled or it gets outright deleted".
• Articles for Improvement: For the week following publication, the Article for Improvement will be Moulay Hassan, Crown Prince of Morocco. Please be bold in helping improve this article!

This article was first published on October 26, 2022 on the Wikimedia Foundation's Diff blog, with the title "Governance updates for the Wikimedia Endowment", CC-BY-SA 3.0. Lisa Seitz-Gruwell is President of the Wikimedia Endowment, as well as Deputy to the CEO and Chief Advancement Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation.

A year ago we announced that the Wikimedia Endowment reached its initial $100 million fundraising goal. Launched in 2016 to support the future of Wikimedia projects, the Endowment is a permanent fund that helps protect Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in times of uncertainty and enables long-term investments to support their growth. This early achievement was a testament to the generosity of Endowment donors and the value of Wikimedia projects in today’s world.

Today, we’re sharing more updates on the progress of the Endowment since last year, including new governance and operational policies to set the Endowment up for success to serve Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

The Endowment itself has performed well despite significant fluctuations in the global economy this past year, and our generous Endowment donors including individuals, corporations, and foundation donors have continued to support its growth.

As part of this continued support, Amazon has renewed its annual $1 million gift to the Endowment again this year, bringing the company’s donations to the Wikimedia Endowment to a cumulative $5 million since 2018. Commensurate support from companies like Amazon helps sustain our projects and mission of delivering free knowledge to the world.

“Since 2016, Amazon has supported our mission to ensure that the free knowledge movement thrives. We are thankful for their continued commitment to Wikimedia, which helps to build a more sustainable future for our projects,” said Lisa Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation.

To learn more about our benefactors and their contributions, please visit our Benefactors page.

Last year, we announced our plans to establish the Wikimedia Endowment as its own independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States. This year, our application was approved and we are in the process of setting up the Endowment’s strategic and operational policies and systems. This will help solidify and protect the independence of the Endowment, allowing its management and investments to be aligned directly to the needs of the Wikimedia projects.

The Endowment Board has also formed several new committees to establish strategic and operational planning for the Endowment as a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit. This includes:

• The Grantmaking and Community Committee is tasked with tending to the relationship between the Endowment and the communities of the Wikimedia movement. This committee will be chaired by Phoebe Ayers, and Patricio Lorente is also a member of the committee. They are both Community Directors of the Wikimedia Endowment, former members of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, and long-time Wikipedians.
• The Finance Committee is responsible for overseeing the Endowment’s investment portfolio, budgetary planning, accounting and financial reporting processes, and financial audits. The Board intends to publish financial updates via an annual report. The Board meeting minutes from the July meeting (which include an updated Endowment total) will also be shared on Meta once they are approved in the coming weeks.
• The Governance Committee will help to ensure the Board’s compliance with its legal and fiduciary duties and to ensure the Board is governed efficiently and effectively.

In addition, we have added new policies to better direct the work of the Endowment. This includes a new Open Access policy pledging that any research supported by the Endowment will be published freely and openly for reuse, and the Endowment Gift policy to provide greater transparency into how gifts to the Endowment are received.

As we get closer to 2030, there is still much work to be done to advance our strategic direction and address the challenges that lie ahead for our movement. This foundational governance work will help to ensure the Endowment is set up for success to meet these challenges and support Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects and communities in the ways that will best serve them over the long term.

More details about the new policies and committees are available on the Endowment Governance Wiki. We invite you to ask questions and join the conversation via the Endowment’s talk page on Meta where Fundraising staff will be reviewing and responding to comments and questions.

Jess Wade, a scientist and Wikipedian, had several media reports appear about their article-writing prowess this month:

• "This 33-year-old made more than 1,000 Wikipedia bios for unknown women scientists" (today.com), also republished under the headline "Jessica Wade Makes Wikipedia bios For Unknown Female Scientists" (yahoo.com)
• "Jess Wade has written 1,750 biographies of women scientists" (The Washington Post)
• Physicist on a mission to add top women scientists to Wikipedia (nbcnews.com)
• "This Woman Was Honored By Queen Elizabeth For Writing 1,750 Bios For Women Scientists on Wikipedia" (Entrepreneur)

The deletion debate for Clarice Phelps, a scientist whose biography was created by Wade, was covered by Today and in readers' comments on a previous Signpost's Community view "The Incredible Invisible Woman" by Megalibrarygirl, and an Op-ed by Wade herself. – B

The Wikimedia Foundation has decided that the Growth Team features are ready for the public spotlight. Adi Robertson, a reporter at The Verge, Vox Media's technology news outlet, picked up the pitch, running with the headline "Wikimedia is adding features to make editing Wikipedia more fun".

"Wikipedia is one of the sturdiest survivors of the old web, as well as one of the most clearly human-powered ones, thanks to a multitude of editors making changes across the globe," she writes. From there, the article provides a straightforward overview of the new mentorship system and suggested edits tool. It is mostly deferential to the foundation's perspective, although Robertson notes that gamified interfaces have been criticized as addictive, and that "the algorithm's own accuracy rate isn't exemplary: editors deem about 75 percent of the link recommendations accurate". (After the newcomer chooses which recommendations to adopt, 10 percent of edits have been reverted.)

The Indo-Asian News Service published a short, thinly reported version of the same story. – Sdkb

The time draws nearer for the WMF's annual plea to donate, accompanied by a plea from Andrew Orlowski to not donate. This year, appearing in Unherd, he argues that –

These banner ads have become very lucrative for the NGO that collects the money – the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco. Every year the NGO responsible for the fundraising adds tens of millions of dollars to its war chest. After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March. [...] Wikipedia’s Administrators and maintainers, who tweak the entries and correct the perpetual vandalism, don’t get paid a penny — they’re all volunteers. What has happened is that the formerly ramshackle Foundation, which not so long ago consisted of fewer than a dozen staff run out of a back room, has professionalised itself. It has followed the now well-trodden NGO path to respectability and riches.

Much to think about. For additional coverage on the subject, see this month's News and notes. Orlowski has been a harsh critic of the project since at least 2004, when he described Wikipedians as "the Khmer Rouge in diapers". – AK, S, J

In June, trans comic artist Jul Maroh, the French creator of the graphic novel Blue Is the Warmest Color posted to Instagram about the turmoil they were experiencing as a result of discussions on fr:Discussion:Jul' Maroh around misgendering and the repetition of their deadname on their French-language biography. They also posted to Instagram Stories asking for support from Wikimedians. This was lightly covered in the media at the time, mainly by French-language online magazine ActuaBD. After the discussion, they posted a toolbox for other trans BLP subjects and attended the annual general meeting of Les sans pagEs, the French-language equivalent to Women in Red.

After that AGM, Les sans pagEs announced that they were professionalising, having secured funding from the French national chapter (with grants proposals under review with WMF and Wikimedia CH) to employ project founder Natacha Rault as a director, causing several days worth of heated discussion on Le Bistro, the Francophone equivalent to our Village pump. As a result, Wikimedia LGBT+ organized an Open letter of support for Les sans pagEs, criticising "bad-faith arguments" and "harassment" that included calls for the disestablishment of the project. The open letter has been signed by 77 wikimedians, including representatives of affiliates such as AfroCROWD, Art+Feminism, Noircir Wikipédia, Whose Knowledge?, WikiDonne, Wikimedians of Slovakia and the Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network plus national chapters including Wikimedia Belgium and Wikimedia UK, as well as individuals. (Note: the author here was lead organiser on the Open letter.)

Les sans pagEs came back energised from the controversy, with Natacha presenting with Wikimedia LGBT+ to promote Queering Wikipedia 2022 at Wikimania before working on gaining a consensus update to frwiki's MoS guidelines on trans biographies and being featured in young-women's magazine Madmoizelle, headlined " 'Wikipedia reproduces the sexist bias of our society': Les sans pagEs, the collective filling in the encyclopedia's gender gap".

Which brings us neatly back to Jul' Maroh, who in October led an open letter in French news-weekly L'Obs, reported in literary news magazine Actualitte denouncing insensitive coverage of trans, nonbinary and intersex biographies on the Francophone Wikipedia and crediting the efforts of Les sans pagEs and Noircir Wikipédia in countering systemic bias. – O

James Vincent in The Verge offers a hearty recommendation of Wikipedia's mobile app as an alternative to Google Search. He says it's more useful, less bloated, and more fun.

After a frustrating search session blighted by nearly a full page of ad-cruft, the author sums up their experience: "why the hell am I Googling this stuff anyway? If half of my Google searches on mobile are just Wikipedia lookups, why not cut out the middleman altogether?" The Wikipedia app goes straight to the juice and provides diverting and illuminating side trips for "a nerd with an affinity for factoids" in the bargain: "Wikipedia is actually one of the true wonders of the internet", they say.

"Up with the knowledge keepers and down with the middlemen," he concludes. We're blushing.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette also acknowledged that "some people" use the Wikipedia app instead of searching with Google, but found an error in a pirate-related search that resulted in the answer Alexander von Humboldt – who, the Democrat-Gazette reminds us, "was not a pirate". – B, Sdkb

Think tanks Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Centre for the Analysis of Social Media presented a report discussing the possibility of state-sponsored bad actors using Wikipedia as a channel for disinformation, propaganda, or as part of an information warfare campaign. Various media sources reacted. El País in particular called out the study's concern over "long-term infiltration by state-sponsored actors" to take over Wikipedia's "underlying policies and governance processes". Later, an ISD employee was able to add enough citations to the organization's article to save it from a nomination at Articles for Deletion. – B, BR, J

• "The Hunt for Wikipedia's Disinformation Moles: Custodians of the crowdsourced encyclopedia are charged with protecting it from state-sponsored manipulators. A new study reveals how.": Wired
• Researchers: Wikipedia a front in Russian propaganda war: The Record by Recorded Future
• "Wikipedia's 'suspicious' edits could be pro-Russian campaigns, study suggests": The Independent (via Yahoo! News)
• "Catching spies on Wikipedia, a new report warns of elaborate state-sponsored disinformation campaigns on one of the most widely used and trusted websites": El País

See also Disinformation report and Recent research in this month's Signpost.

• "Deaditors", again ...: This time in The Face. Mentions of these mythical beasts in press sources now outnumber uses of the word "deaditor" on Wikipedia itself (outside of discussions of articles on death and Wikipedia, that is).
• Too many crises: The Telegraph noted (archive) that Wikipedia had to disambiguate its article on the 2022 United Kingdom government crisis ... readers could no longer be relied upon to have just this particular one in mind. PWilkinson, who added a hatnote, was duly credited for the important intervention. Gizmodo picked the story up a few days later, by which time 2022 United Kingdom government crisis had become a full-fledged disambiguation page.
• Expansion: Wikimedia Community User Group Rwanda hosted a "WikiVibrance 2022" challenge from September 14 to 30, netting 557 new articles on Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, reports The New Times [1]
• Contrasting TikTok's "quantum flapdoodle" with Wikipedia: Wikipedia beat journalist Stephen Harrison observes in a Slate article that in response to the 2022 Nobel Prize winners research in quantum entanglement, popular TikTok content promotes quantum mysticism while Wikipedia continues its attempt to promote and verify science.
• "Why I sued Wikipedia": Author and BJP spokesman Tuhin Sinha is suing the Wikimedia Foundation as a reaction to the community's March 2022 decision to delete the article featuring him as a subject. In a public statement published in news18.com, Sinha expresses his belief that Wikipedia deleted his biography because of his political beliefs, and that Wikipedia in India is a channel for disinformation and propaganda by bad actors in Western states and corporations. Media outlet republicworld.com reacted with additional opinions.
• Wildfires, ranked: 247wallst.com presents a report of the worst wildfires in United States history as determined by reading Wikipedia articles.
• Reptiles, ranked: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch identifies the world's most popular reptiles by examining Wikipedia's Pageview Statistics. This journalism may be referring to the 2016 study on a similar topic. Casual users can access different but similar data quickly through Massview Statistics.
• High school furries are not litterbox trained: KTEN describes how a United States politician's campaign claims that toilet training for American high school students in furry fandom includes classroom access to a litter box. Wikipedia has an article for the litter boxes in schools hoax, and describes the claim as disinformation and propaganda often tied to a bathroom bill for denying toilet access to queer and trans youth.
• Those who work to feed the AI will get their ideas promoted; or, influential but anonymous: thought provoking ideas about the future information apocalypse utopia? From Tyler Cowen writing for Bloomberg [2]: "those who are happy to produce content with little credit, such as Wikipedia editors, may gain influence."
• "Would I be knitting?": Aussie editor Annie Reynolds creates biographies instead of knitting – over 400 of them (SBS World News). See the list of creations at User:Oronsay#Articles I have created.

A recent academic report, widely cited in the mainstream press (see this issue's "In the media"), has suggested that Russian agents have edited Wikipedia through the use of sockpuppets. Readers of The Signpost should not be surprised by this report. I have documented similar allegations about paid editing by Russians and others several times, for example in The oligarchs' socks and "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein …".

I have edited articles I thought were written by foreign agents and interacted with some of the Wikipedia editors mentioned below. The opinions expressed below are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost or its staff, or of any other Wikipedia editors. – S

Do Russian agents, paid directly by the government or by people close to President Vladimir Putin, edit Wikipedia? There are many reasons to think that they would if they thought it would be successful. Russia interfered with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and other Western elections by means of the internet, according to the Mueller report. Much of their effort used social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or video sites. Russians are certainly aware of Wikipedia's reach and credibility and the Russian government has attempted several times to establish Russian online encyclopedias as alternatives to Wikipedia. Its agents have the motivation and opportunity to spread their disinformation, but do they have the ability to avoid Wikipedia’s defenses?

A report from the Centre for Analysis of Social Media division of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue titled Information Warfare and Wikipedia examines this question, and proposes a potentially useful method of assessing whether Russian agents have edited Wikipedia.

The lead author of the report, Carl Miller, may be familiar to Signpost readers through his reporting on the BBC on disputes between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese editors (program) in 2019 and disputes between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese editors in 2021. I’ve also interviewed him in The Signpost.

The report starts with a review of the current state of disinformation operations on the internet. The review may be especially useful to Wikipedians who haven't followed recent changes in disinformation techniques. It then gives the basics of Wikipedia operations, and factors that could make the site attractive to spreaders of disinformation. This section should be quite familiar to many Wikipedians, but is followed by a more challenging section on how Wikipedia fights disinformation. If you need to learn about sockpuppet investigations and checkusers, this is a good short introduction.

The most interesting section is a case study of the article on the Russo-Ukrainian war, which was started in March 2014 (soon after Russian soldiers seized two Crimean airports and deposed the prime minister of Crimea, but before Russia illegally annexed the region). The goal of the case study was to explore potential Russian disinformation inserted in the article over the next eight years, by using methods that could be automated at scale and used by other researchers in other studies of disinformation on Wikipedia.

The authors identified article editors who were later banned by administrators or checkusers, generally via sockpuppet investigations. The beauty of this method is that outside researchers do not need to judge whether Wikipedia rules have been broken – an often difficult and contentious task. They only need to know that the editors have been banned, a fact reported in the article's edit history, with data gathering fairly easily automated.

They identified 89 accounts that were banned, mostly for sockpuppeting. After eliminating three bots, they were left with 86 "suspicious" editors. These editors' editing history was examined, including edits made on other articles where two or more of them crossed paths, describing a network of editors and articles edited by them.

Some of the media articles about this report seem to take the existence of this network as "proof" of Russian government editing. In reality, it is clearly not that easy to draw such a conclusion. What they found was people inserting pro-Russian bias; whether this was commissioned by the Kremlin remains unclear. The report’s authors find the existence of the network only as suggestive of coordinated editing, and conclude that there is evidence of "a particular strategy used by bad actors of splitting their edit histories between a number of accounts to evade detection". They stress a possible strategy of entryism, or infiltration of Wikipedia by Russian agents. While there are clearly limitations on using this methodology, it looks like a step forward in the search for a way to examine particularly contentious topics where hundreds of editors may be making thousands of edits across dozens of articles.

So where do we stand now? Do Russian agents edit Wikipedia articles? The academic approach to this question has so far given an answer of essentially we have a method that has identified 86 editors, with many of them looking suspicious. Fortunately we have the complementary methods of journalism which generally look at the cases of individuals or small groups. I believe that most Wikipedians who look at the following cases will conclude that yes, there appear to be some Russian agents editing Wikipedia. But we must note that no analysis of Wikipedia edits can prove to the standards of a criminal court the identity of a Wikipedia editor.

Maria Butina was a Russian student at American University, who was also working with the high ranking Russian politician – Deputy Governor of Russia’s Central Bank (and suspected member of the Russian Mafia) Aleksandr Torshin. Butina and Torshin attended meetings of the National Rifle Association together, attempted to connect with associates of Donald Trump, and are suspected of attempting to donate money to the Trump campaign via the NRA. In 2018, she was convicted of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia while in the U.S. and served 18 months in federal prison before being deported to Russia. She received a hero's welcome on her return, became a television presenter, and was soon elected to the Russian State Duma.

In 2018, the Daily Beast published an article titled "Who Whitewashed the Wiki of Alleged Russian Spy Maria Butina?" strongly suggesting that it was a specifically named editor, who was Maria Butina. Furthermore, there was an anonymous unregistered IP editor from the same university as Butina.

That article, and five other articles from reliable sources reporting similar facts, are listed at Talk:Maria Butina. The editors of the talk page noticed the first news article, generally accepted it as factual, and cleaned the article of the offending edits. The editor suspected to have been Butina denied the allegations on their user talk page.

In the March Signpost article "The oligarchs' socks", I reported on eight well-known Russian oligarchs: Alisher Usmanov, Roman Abramovich and his son Arkadiy Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Alexander Nesis, and Andrei Skoch.

Usmanov hired the PR firm RLM Finsbury, who then edited his Wikipedia article. Finsbury admitted this in 2012. The articles on A. Abramovich and Nesis were almost certainly edited by the disgraced (and now defunct) political PR firm Bell Pottinger.

Fifty now-blocked sockpuppets edited the article on Roman Abramovich, thirty edited the Deripaska article, but less than ten edited the articles on Fridman, Khan, and Skoch. There is a overlapping pattern of edits by the same sockfarms (large groups of sockpuppets named together in sockpuppet investigations).

Banned user Russavia edited two of the oligarch articles. He was a very active administrator on Wikimedia Commons, who specialized in promoting the Russian aviation industry, and in disrupting the English-language Wikipedia. After finally being banned on the English Wikipedia, he created dozens of sockpuppets. Russavia, by almost all accounts, is not a citizen or resident of Russia, but his edits raise some concern and show some patterns.

In 2010, he boasted, on his userpage at Commons, that he had obtained permission from the official Kremlin.ru site for all photos there to be uploaded to Commons under Creative Commons licenses. He also made 148 edits at Russo-Georgian War, and 321 edits on the ridiculously detailed International recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Both of these articles were, at one time, strongly biased in favor of Russia.

The Russian government is now engaged in a brutal war in Ukraine, or as they call it, a "special military operation". They are widely reported as supporting this war and other controversial activities with a disinformation war, including inserting disinformation on social media sites. Wikipedia is apparently not immune from these activities. Russian agents have the motivation and opportunity, and allegedly the ability, to insert their disinformation here. We should continue to investigate and report this activity, using the tools of journalism and the tools now being developed by academic researchers.

See also In the media and Recent research in this month's Signpost.

I've written several hundred journal and newspaper articles. For decades I've written a piece, had it corrected by an editor and then seen the article published. I write hastily, make mistakes, and am very glad the editors are not like me. So when I began writing for Wikipedia 15 years ago, being bold and just publish came as a shock to me. It was the open peer review that helped me cross the line: it’s all in the open, and Wikipedia is really "the encyclopedia anyone can edit". Which also means that your own mistakes are blatantly clear for anyone to see. Do I make mistakes? Sure, everyone does. And if you have made a few hundred thousand edits on Wiki, it is likely that you have made at least a few dozen mistakes. I can even see a pattern in my mistakes.

• Stealing copyrighted text. Well, by stealing I mean: taking two paragraphs from a ten year old text that is straight to the point. It's a deadly sin in academia. It happened to me on Wiki at least twice. It happens to others. I hope we all get busted and corrected.
• Uploading images with no clear license. It happens a thousand times a month at Wikimedia Commons. It really happens to me too, especially with photos from 1938.
• Writing articles about semi-notable people. It happens frequently, especially if you like minor poets and sculptors.
• Adding incorrect photographs of people. Mistaken identities occur but why with female chess players? I really thought this Katarina (pictured) was a young Mária Ivánka.

At first I thought the whole "be bold" thing in Wiki was a bit ridiculous. But after years of working in Wikipedia, I see it's one of the main assets of Wikipedia. "Wikis like ours develop faster when everybody helps to fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, make sure wording is accurate, etc." True, really. But the mistakes you then inevitably make need to be corrected by fellow Wikipedians. So don’t be cross if someone tries to improve your text or images. Enjoy. This is one of the most important elements of Wikipedia.