On December 6, the Wikimedia Foundation enacted a group ban on 16 editors, all from the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. The announcement was made in a post to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and re-posted on Meta, saying

As Wikimedia projects have risen in prominence across the world, it has attracted increasing attention of those who would like to control the information published on it, for political or other reasons. Community members have addressed concerns of this sort for many years, but sometimes volunteers who intervene in such cases may themselves face retaliation for their actions....
In January of 2022, the Foundation began an investigation into alleged conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects in the MENA region. In that investigation, we were able to confirm that a number of users with close connections with external parties were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties. These connections are a source of serious concern for the safety of our users that go beyond the capacity of the local language project communities targeted to address.

There was a request for comment at ar:ويكيبيديا:الميدان/إدارة (in Arabic). NANöR reflected the views of many in his community:

Did the Foundation take into account whether the Arab Wikipedia community was able to receive such a shock in this way and on such a scale? Are we able to recover? The decision was harsh and the way it was issued made it harsher on a community that has enough problems. I think it's time to think about changing the mechanism for making decisions and for empathy to be a priority for everyone before anything else.

Ten of the banned editors, including seven admins, edited mainly on the Arabic Wikipedia. Six edited mainly on the Persian Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation globally banned 7 of the 26 administrators that were active in the Arabic Wikipedia. The banned accounts are listed in order of edit count on the Arabic Wikipedia. They all also had contributed to the English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata.

• User:جار الله (with 219,488 edits to Arabic Wikipedia)
• User:حساب ملغى 123321 (formerly User:سامي الرحيلي) (with 202,246 edits)
• User:صالح (with 134,216 edits)
• User:وسام (with 114,741 edits)
• User:FShbib (with 98,572 edits)
• User:بندر (with 59,030 edits)
• User:Glory20 (with 35,444 edits)

The Wikimedia Foundation also banned the following 3 Arabic Wikipedia editors who are listed by their edit counts in Arabic Wikipedia. They all had also contributed to Commons and Wikidata.

• User:مصعب العبود (with 42,976 edits)
• User:أسامة (with 8,523 edits)
• User:حاتم العتيبي (with 5,547 edits)

The Wikimedia Foundation banned the following 6 editors of the Persian Wikipedia, listed in order of edit counts on the Persian Wikipedia. Most had also contributed in Arabic and English Wikipedias, as well as to Commons and Wikidata.

• User:4nn1l2 (with 74,778 edits)
• User:Shobhe (with 27,680 edits)
• User:Shiasun (with 9,525 edits)
• User:M.Nadian (with 3,966 edits)
• User:Aye1399 (with 1,743 edits)
• User:فاطمه_جان (with 747 edits)

• Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (June 2016)
• Faisal F. Alibrahim (May 2022), a Saudi government minister
• The Line (city) (January 2021), a Saudi public project
• Saudi Art Association (July 2020), espouses government "cooperation"; not clear if it is government funded
• 2022 Iran–Greece naval incident (July 2022), nominated for DYK by the creator, initially approved but ultimately rejected after re-review

One of the editors also significantly softened descriptions of Saudi government detention of journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was later murdered and dismembered. – AK, Blu, Bri, SB

As of December 30, the number of active administrators for the English-language Wikipedia stood at 497, the year's high point.

In a News and notes column of January 2022, we touched on the "Administrator cadre continues to contract" issue. Since then, not much has changed and according to Signpost analysis, 2022 was the first year in modern wikihistory that the number of active administrators never rose above 500. In 2022, the high point for active administrators was 497 – compared to 521 in 2021. The low point was 449 on April 4 – compared to 434 in 2021.

During the entire year there were only fourteen new admins, the third lowest since adminship started in 2002. While not as bad as last year's low of seven, and better than the ten in 2018; fourteen a year would only maintain the current admin cadre if the average new admin lasted over thirty years as an admin. We will reiterate our statement from a 2019 special report, and say about all these data "Whether that is a problem, or how a problem would manifest, are questions still to be answered." – Bri

On Friday December 16 the Coolest Tool Award committee announced this year's winners. The 30-minute award presentation is on YouTube. Winners were

• Coolest Tool – Citation Hunt – https://citationhunt.toolforge.org/en?id=0fc6e1a2
• Coolest Tool – More Menu – meta:MoreMenu
• reusable – PetScan – https://petscan.wmflabs.org/
• developer – Patchdemo – https://patchdemo.wmflabs.org/
• newcomer – Bullseye – https://bullseye.toolforge.org/
• diversity – Wiki99 – meta:Wiki99
• impact – Scholia – https://scholia.toolforge.org/
• mobile – TwinkleMobile – User:Plantaest/TwinkleMobile
• eggbeater – OpenRefine – https://openrefine.org/

• WikiProject Military History's newsletter, The Bugle, has reached 200 issues: It has run monthly since March 2006, with only two months skipped in that entire time.
• Passing of Effie "Digitaleffie" Kapsalis: Digitaleffie, Wikimedian at the Smithsonian Institution, advocate for many Wikimedia community programs related to WP:GLAM, and community advocate for Wikimedia District of Columbia, passed away on December 11, 2022. Anyone may share condolences or memories on their user page at User talk:Digitaleffie.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Extraordinary Writ, who passed the bar with 99% approval on December 15, and ComplexRational who passed with 100% on December 21.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Summer Palace of Peter the Great. Please be bold in helping to improve this article!

The stories you are about to read are true, or at least they have been reported in sources we generally consider to be reliable. But on some of them you might think we are pulling your legs, or that we just made them up out of whole cloth. Is the WMF really climbing in bed with Google and Facebook? Do Russian troops in Ukraine really train by reading Wikipedia? Can you really announce your divorce in a Wikipedia article? Does Elon Musk really think that anybody will believe a word he tweets? Does a single Wikipedia article get 250 million pageviews each month? No, we didn't make these stories up. But please use your own better judgement in evaluating whether what the media writes about us is true.

The proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was defeated with the help of a dormitory-full of odd bedfellows including Alphabet (formerly Google), Meta (Facebook), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Wikimedia Foundation. Editor & Publisher reported the defeat of the bill, which was not included in the final omnibus bill of the 117th US Congress.

The proposed act would have given news organizations the right to collectively bargain with social media organizations – by creating a four-year antitrust exemption – to get a share of the social media's advertising revenue for news posted on the platform (similar to the News Media Bargaining Code implemented in Australia). Meta responded that, rather than being forced to pay for news content that it did not post on their own platform, they would "consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations," according to CNN.

CNN and The National Review highlighted the WMF's participation. – Sb

Rebecca MacKinnon, WMF's Vice President, Global Advocacy, and Phil Bradley-Schmieg, WMF Lead Counsel, point out in the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA):

The UK's proposed Online Safety Bill would require platforms to screen and monitor all activity and content when uploaded to predict whether it is illegal or harmful. Such a general monitoring obligation is prohibited in the European Union's Digital Services Act.

One may be forgiven for predicting that this is not a simple task, and probably not possible; accordingly, the authors urge the UK to reconsider the proposed bill. – Sb

According to an hour-long read in The New York Times on the way the combat in Ukraine is being managed [1], "Russian soldiers go into battle with little food, a few bullets and instructions grabbed from Wikipedia for weapons they barely know how to use." A printout of the Wikipedia article VSK-94 [ru] (probably from the Russian Wikipedia) was in the possession of a soldier named Ruslan, who "seemed to be learning to use his weapon on the fly" and "had little else besides the printouts" in his pack, which Ukrainian soldiers recovered with what they believed to be his body in September. The rifle next to him suggested he was a sniper. But while snipers in modern military units often go through weeks of additional special training, "Ruslan's teacher appeared to be the internet."

Prolific Wikipedia reporter Stephen Harrison turned his attention to Wikipedia's fundraising banners (covered in last month's issue) in his latest column for Slate, headlined "The Huge Fight Behind Those Pop-Up Fundraising Banners on Wikipedia".

Though "many people see the banner ads on Wikipedia as something like the site's version of a PBS fundraising drive – a bit annoying because they distract you from your regularly scheduled wiki browsing, but not particularly painful," for others, "many of Wikipedia's most dedicated contributors, this year's proposed banner ads presented something like a moral crisis," he writes. "The Wikipedia editing community recently held a poll rejecting the proposed banner ads, pressuring the foundation that supports the site into drafting alternative ads with softer language."

Harrison discusses the aforementioned RfC and the foundation's response, quoting extensively from well-known Wikipedians including Lane Rasberry, Jim Heaphy, and Ryan McGrady.^[a]

Harrison explains to readers the difference between the foundation and the community, the latter of which CEO Maryana Iskander tells him produces "healthy democratic noise." He also traces the foundation's growth from its early days operating on a "shoestring budget" to its current status as a large, well-funded nonprofit.

On the question of whether or not those with means should donate, Harrison writes, "It depends. In my view, people who volunteer a lot of time improving Wikipedia's content have already made their 'gift' and should feel no obligation. For everyone else, the calculus is personal."

He concludes: "Clearly, Wikipedians are right to engage in vigorous discussion about how donations are solicited from visitors, and to oversee how those funds are actually spent." – Sdkb

"Hi Example! Thanks for letting us know that your last name contains two q's and a z rather than two z's and a q. But can you prove it with a reference to a reliable source?" This sort of interaction may be part of our daily grind, but the outside world still finds it more than a little perplexing.

Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel recently had this experience trying to get the article on her updated to reflect her divorce earlier this year. An unidentified IP, presumably Mandel, made a COI edit request for the update at the article talk page, surpassing the vast majority of COI requests by including a source in the form of a court record number. But it was declined, with the comment, "The requested edit violates Wikipedia policy as expressed in WP:NOR and more specifically in WP:BLPPRIMARY: 'Do not use trial transcripts and other court records, or other public documents, to support assertions about a living person.' Basically, Wikipedia should not be the place of first publication of any information that has not already been published elsewhere, particularly in WP:BLP articles. If this information is sufficiently public and important enough to be reported by reliable third-party sources, then it may be updated here."

Mandel then took to Twitter, tweeting, "Friends, did you know that if you have a Wikipedia page and you get a divorce, the only way to update your Wikipedia is to say you're divorced in an interview?"

She continued, "It sounds crazy, but wikipedia runs on citations! So anyway all I want for Christmas is for a journalist writing a story for publication (online-only is fine!) to ask me if I'm still married. Also if you're reading this and you're one of my girlfriend's friends, she's not actually dating a married woman, it's just that my wikipedia page is a time capsule."

Wikipedian Hayden Schiff replied to her that, per WP:ABOUTSELF, her tweet should be sufficient. But Mandel had been (mis-)informed by "a guy who's been a Wikipedia editor for a very long time" that nothing short of media coverage would do.

Thus, two hours after her tweet, Slate ran the article, "A Totally Normal Interview With Author Emily St. John Mandel," in which Dan Kois asked her, "So, are you married these days?"

"My Wikipedia entry was essentially a time capsule," Mandel told him. "It bothered me that it was no longer accurate, but also it was kind of awkward for my girlfriend. I didn't love that if her friends looked me up, they'd think she was dating a married woman."

The BBC, which had gotten scooped, ran their own article a few days later, which referenced a similar incident in 2012 with author Philip Roth. Business Insider also ran coverage, choosing to contact a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson rather than learn to read a talk page. Upworthy arrived late to the party the next day with a GIF-filled article that nevertheless ran with "scoop" in the URL.

Back on Wikipedia, discussion has moved to whether we ought to modify WP:BLP (consensus is leaning no as of press time) and whether we ought to mention the incident in Mandel's bio (consensus is leaning yes). – Sdkb

A remarkable spat started on December 2 when Elon Musk promised an "awesome" announcement and then the Twitter files were released via a series of tweets, followed by a series of similar stories in cooperation with Musk, all critical of Musk's newly purchased Twitter platform and its reaction to a news story about Hunter Biden's laptop.

A Wikipedia article on the Twitter files was soon started and quickly nominated for deletion. An AfD participant called the story a "nothing burger". Musk was tweeted and he called the proposed deletion evidence of Wikipedia's "non-trivial left-wing bias" tweaking Jimmy Wales in the process. Another tweeter asked Musk if he was considering buying Wikipedia. Wales said that Wikipedia was not for sale.

Fox News, Metro (UK), Vice, Gizmodo and others noticed the Twitter spat between Elon Musk and Jimmy Wales involving the supposed offer from the former to buy Wikipedia. Fox characterized it as a "slam" against Wikipedia for considering deleting the article Twitter Files. Vice countered with the label "conspiracy theory" for reading left/right content inclusion intent into the deletion debate. Gizmodo, puzzlingly, says in a headline that Wales "Indirectly Tells Elon Musk the Site 'Is Not for Sale'" emphasis ours, but in the same article states that he's "going head-to-head with" the billionaire.

The deletion request was snow closed as "Keep".

In the meantime

• Inc. opined that Jack Dorsey Wanted Elon Musk to Turn Twitter Into Wikipedia. Here's Why That Failed.
• Musk surveyed Twitterers on the question of whether he should let somebody else run Twitter, promising to abide by their decision.
• When 17.5 million (57%) responded that somebody else should run Twitter, Musk replied "I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams."

Jimmy Wales, who has serious experience running a social media platform, is not likely to be foolish enough to apply. Neither would any other qualified applicant. So was this whole episode a charade or a publicity stunt right from the beginning? – B, Sb

• Fascist-free: "How the far-right is keeping Giorgia Meloni's Wikipedia page free of any ties to fascism" (The Daily Dot).
• I Don't Wanna Dance with Somebody's Wikipedia Page: IndieWire reviewed I Wanna Dance with Somebody calling it Whitney Houston's "Wikipedia page set to song", panning the "abject laziness of the film's construction". Apparently, the standards for a good screenplay don't follow WP:BLP, who knew? This is not the first time such criticism has been leveled at a film (see The New York Times' critique of Solo: A Star Wars Story in prior Signpost coverage). Gråbergs Gråa Sång points out a couple more which were discussed at WP:Film:
  • Contains nothing you couldn't get from Wikipedia or YouTube: Netflix's Pelé reviewed (The Spectator),
  • The Big Bull Review: This Harshad Mehta Story Feels Like a Wikipedia Entry Made More Dull by Abhishek Bachchan (Arre). – B
• Official state Wiki-words?: crossword-solver.io has a list of the "most uniquely popular words" for the Wikipedia article on each U.S. state and the countries of the world; we found out from KX Television in North Dakota about the Roughrider State's special word: "oil".
• Running out of grammatical, fluent English: Social media gobbledygook isn't good enough for machine learning (model training for natural language processing), but Wikipedia is [2] (VentureBeat).
• You say potato, I say potāto: Inside Wikipedia's great macron war (The Spinoff).

• Filthy e-waste: Agbogbloshie is no longer the filthiest as Wikipedia has it. Agbogbloshie, a slum near Accra, Ghana is "the worlds's largest e-waste dump" according to a video from the World Economic Forum. Accra Regional Minister Henry Quartey disagrees and blames Wikipedia for saying so. Surprisingly, a music video by Placebo may give an even more detailed view of the situation.
• Wikipedians collab with Smithsonian Institution: Kelly Doyle and Andrew Lih collaborate on new children's book We Are Here [3] (Smithsonian magazine blog).
• Dueling Hong Kong anthems: The Hong Kong government has told Google to change their search results for "Hong Kong national anthem".

External videos Glory to Hong Kong, written by "Thomas dgx yhl" and Hongkongers in 2019 on YouTube

The official Hong Kong anthem is March of the Volunteers – Mainland China's anthem. An alternative that has been used by protesters is Glory to Hong Kong.

The top results of an English search of "Hong Kong national anthem" on Google is the Wikipedia page for "Glory to Hong Kong" with text saying that some have dubbed it the "national anthem of Hong Kong." The next result is the Wikipedia entry for "March of the Volunteers"

See "Hong Kong demands Google bury protest song in online anthem search results", from The Washington Post via MSN.

• French cookie monster: SFgate shows that an article in the French Wikipedia is getting over 250 million pageviews per month. The Signpost has confirmed that Cookie (informatique) tops Pages populaires, by a factor of over 120× the pageviews of the #2 article, Coupe du monde de football 2022.

In 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation began working on Abstract Wikipedia, which is envisaged to become the first new Wikimedia project since Wikidata's launch in 2012, accompanied and supported by the separate Wikifunctions project. Abstract Wikipedia is "a conceptual extension of Wikidata", where language-independent structured information is rendered in an automated way as human-readable text in a multitude of languages, with the hope that this will vastly increase access to Wikipedia information in hitherto underserved languages. Both Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions are the brainchild of longtime Wikimedian Denny Vrandečić, who also started and led the Wikidata project at Wikimedia Deutschland before becoming a Google employee in 2013, where he began to develop these ideas before joining the Wikimedia Foundation staff in 2020 to lead their implementation.

An evaluation published earlier this month calls the project's future into question:

"This is a sympathetic critique of the technical plan for Abstract Wikipedia. We (the authors) are writing this at the conclusion of a six-month Google.org Fellowship, during which we were embedded with the Abstract Wikipedia team, and assisted with the development of the project. While we firmly believe in the vision of Abstract Wikipedia, we have serious concerns about the design and approach of the project, and think that the project faces a substantial risk." [...]

"We find [Abstract Wikipedia's] vision strongly compelling, and we believe that the project, while ambitious, is achievable. However, we think that the current effort (2020–present) to develop Abstract Wikipedia at the Wikimedia Foundation is at substantial risk of failure, because we have major concerns about the soundness of the technical plan. The core problem is the decision to make Abstract Wikipedia depend on Wikifunctions, a new programming language and runtime environment, invented by the Abstract Wikipedia team, with design goals that exceed the scope of Abstract Wikipedia itself, and architectural issues that are incompatible with the standards of correctness, performance, and usability that Abstract Wikipedia requires."

That Fellowship was part of a program by Google.org (the philanthropy organization of the for-profit company Google) that enables Google employees to do pro-bono work in support of non-profit causes. The Fellow team's tech lead was Ori Livneh, himself a longtime Wikipedian and former software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation (2012–2016), where he founded and led the Performance Team before joining Google. The other three Google Fellows who authored the evaluation are Ariel Gutman (holder of a PhD in linguistics and author of a book titled "Attributive constructions in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic", who also published a separate "goodbye letter" summarizing his work during the Fellowship), Ali Assaf, and Mary Yang.

The evaluation examines a long list of issues in detail, and ends with a set of recommendations centered around the conclusion that –

"Abstract Wikipedia should be decoupled from Wikifunctions. The current tight coupling of the two projects together has a multiplicative effect on risk and substantially increases the risk of failure."

Among other things, the Fellows caution the Foundation to not "invent a new programming language. The cost of developing the function composition language to the required standard of stability, performance, and correctness is large ..." They propose that –

• "Wikifunctions should extend, augment, and refine the existing programming facilities in MediaWiki. The initial version should be a central wiki for common Lua code", Lua being "an easy-to-learn and general purpose programming language, originally developed in Brazil" that is already widely used on Wikimedia projects, with the added benefit of satisfying "a long-standing community request" (for a "Central repository for gadgets, templates and Lua modules", which had been the third most popular proposal in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey).

Regarding Abstract Wikipedia, the recommendations likewise center on limiting complexity and aiming to build on existing open-source solutions if possible, in particular for the NLG (natural language generation) part responsible for converting the information expressed in the project's language-independent formalism into a human-readable statement in a particular language:

• Rather than present to users a general-purpose computation system and programming environment, provide an environment specifically dedicated to authoring abstract content, grammars, and NLG renderers in a constrained formalism.
• Converge on a single, coherent approach to NLG.
• If possible, adopt an extant NLG system and build on it."

A response authored by eight Foundation staff members from the Abstract Wikipedia team (published simultaneously with the Fellows' evaluation) rejects these recommendations. They begin by acknowledging that although "Wikidata went through a number of very public iterations, and faced literally years of criticism from Wikimedia communities and from academic researchers[, the] plan for Abstract Wikipedia had not faced the same level of public development and discussion. [...] Barely anyone outside of the development team itself has dived into the Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions proposal as deeply as the authors of this evaluation."

However, Vrandečić's team then goes on to reject the evaluation's core recommendations, presenting the expansive scope of Wikifunctions as a universal repository of general-purpose functions a done deal mandated by the Board (the Wikimedia Foundation's top decision-making authority), and accusing the Google Fellows of "fallacies" rooted in "misconception":

The Foundation’s Board mandate they issued to us in May 2020 was to build the Wikifunctions new wiki platform (then provisionally called Wikilambda) and the Abstract Wikipedia project. This was based on the presentation given to them at that meeting (and pre-reading), and publicly documented on Meta. That documentation at the time very explicitly called out as “a new Wikimedia project that allows to create and maintain code” and that the contents would be “a catalog of all kind[s] of functions”, on top of which there would “also” (our emphasis) be code for supporting Abstract Wikipedia.

The evaluation document starts out from this claim – that Wikifunctions is incidental to Abstract Wikipedia, and a mere implementation detail. The idea that Wikifunctions will operate as a general platform was always part of the plan by the Abstract Wikipedia team.

This key point of divergence sets up much of the rest of this document [i.e. the evaluation] for fallacies and false comparisons, as they are firmly rooted in, and indeed make a lot of sense within, the reality posed by this initial framing misconception."

(The team doesn't elaborate on why the Foundation's trustees shouldn't be able to amend that May 2020 mandate if, two and a half years later, its expansive scope does indeed risk causing the entire project to fail.)

The evaluation report and the WMF's response are both lengthy (at over 6,000 and over 10,000 words, respectively), replete with technical and linguistic arguments and examples that are difficult to summarize here in full. Interested readers are encouraged to read both documents in their entirety. Nevertheless, below we attempt to highlight and explain a few key points made by each side, and to illuminate the underlying principal tensions about decisions that are likely to shape this important effort of the Wikimedia movement for decades to come.

In an April 2020 article for the Signpost (published a few weeks before the WMF board approved his proposal), Vrandečić explained the concept of Abstract Wikipedia and a "wiki for functions" using an example describing political happenings involving San Francisco mayor London Breed:

"Instead of saying "in order to deny her the advantage of the incumbent, the board votes in January 2018 to replace her with Mark Farrell as interim mayor until the special elections", imagine we say something more abstract such as elect(elector: Board of Supervisors, electee: Mark Farrell, position: Mayor of San Francisco, reason: deny(advantage of incumbency, London Breed)) – and even more, all of these would be language-independent identifiers, so that thing would actually look more like Q40231(Q3658756, Q6767574, Q1343202(Q6015536, Q6669880)).

[...] We still need to translate [this] abstract content to natural language. So we would need to know that the elect constructor mentioned above takes the three parameters in the example, and that we need to make a template such as {elector} elected {electee} to {position} in order to {reason} (something that looks much easier in this example than it is for most other cases). And since the creation of such translators has to be made for every supported language, we need to have a place to create such translators so that a community can do it.

For this I propose a new Wikimedia project [...] to create, maintain, manage, catalog, and evaluate a new form of knowledge assets: functions. Functions are algorithms, pieces of code, that translate input into output in a determined and repeatable way. A simple function, such as the square function, could take the number 5 and return 25. The length function could take a string such as "Wikilambda" and return the number 10. Another function could translate a date in the Gregorian calendar to a date in the Julian calendar. And yet another could translate inches to centimeters. Finally, one other function, more complex than any of those examples, could take an abstract content such as Q40231(Q3658756, Q6767574, Q1343202(Q6015536, Q6669880)) and a language code, and give back the text "In order to deny London Breed the incumbency advantage, the Board of Supervisors elected Mark Farrell Mayor of San Francisco." Or, for German, "Um London Breed den Vorteil des Amtsträgers zu verweigern, wählte der Stadtrat Mark Farrell zum Bürgermeister von San Francisco."

Wikilambda will allow contributors to create and maintain functions, their implementations and tests, in a collaborative way. These include the available constructors used to create the abstract content. The functions can be used in a variety of ways: users can call them from the Web, but also from local machines or from an app. By allowing the functions in Wikilambda to be called from wikitext, we also allow to create a global space to maintain global templates and modules, another long-lasting wish by the Wikimedia communities.

In other words, the proposal for what is now called Wikifunctions combined two kinds of functions required for Abstract Wikipedia ("constructors" like the elect example and "translators" or renderers for natural language generation that produce the human-readable Wikipedia text) with a much more general "new form of knowledge assets", functions or algorithms in the sense of computer science. While the examples Vrandečić highlighted in that April 2020 Signpost article are simple calculations such as unit conversions that are already implemented on Wikipedia today using thousands of Lua-based templates (e.g. {{convert}} for the inches to centimeters translation), the working paper published earlier that month (recommended in his Signpost article for "technical aspects") evokes a much more ambitious vision:

Imagine that everyone could easily calculate exponential models of growth, or turn Islamic calendar dates into Gregorian calendar dates. That everyone could pull census data and analyze the cities of their province or state based on the data they are interested in. [...] To analyze images, videos, and number series that need to stay private. To allow everyone to answer complex questions that today would require coding and a development environment and having a dedicated computer to run. To provide access to such functionalities in every programming language, no matter how small or obscure. That is the promise of Wikilambda.

Wikilambda will provide a comprehensive library of functions, to allow everyone to create, maintain, and run functions. This will make it easier for people without a programming background to reliably compute answers to many questions. Wikilambda would also offer a place where scientists and analysts could create models together, and share specifications, standards, or tests for functions. Wikilambda provides a persistent identifier scheme for functions, thus allowing you to refer to the functions from anywhere with a clear semantics. Processes, scientific publications, and standards could refer unambiguously to a specific algorithm.

Also, the creation of new development environments or programming languages or paradigms will become easier, as they could simply refer to Wikilambda for a vast library of functions. [...]

Indeed, a function examples list created on Meta-Wiki in July 2020 already lists much more involved cases than unit conversion functions, e.g. calculating SHA256 hashes, factorizing integers or determining the "dominant color" of an image. It is not clear (to this Wikimedian at least) whether there will be any limits in scope. Will Wikifunctions become a universal code library eclipsing The Art of Computer Programming in scope, with its editors moderating disputes about the best proxmap sort implementation and patrolling recent changes for attempts to covertly insert code vulnerabilities?

This ambitious vision of Wikifunctions as spearheading a democraticizing revolution in computer programming (rather than just providing the technical foundation of Abstract Wikipedia) appears to fuel a lot of the concerns raised in the Fellows' evaluation, and conversely motivate a lot of the pushback in the Abstract Wikipedia team's answer.

Another particularly contentious aspect is the Fellows' recommendation to rely on existing natural language generation tools, rather than building them from the ground up in Wikifunctions. They write:

Clearly, as Denny pointed out, the bulk work of creating NLG renderers would fall on the community of Wikipedia volunteers. [...] Hence, the necessity of a collaborative development and computation environment such as Wikifunctions.

While the core argument is correct, the fallacy lies in the scope of the Wikifunctions project, which is intended to cover any conceivable computable function (and also using various implementation languages [...]). Since NLG renderers are specific types of functions (transforming specific data types into text, possibly using specific intermediate linguistic representations) it would suffice to create a platform which allows creating such functions. There are many extant NLG systems, and some, such as Grammatical Framework, already have a vibrant community of contributors. Instead of creating a novel, general computation system such as Wikifunctions, it would suffice to create a collaborative platform which extends one of these existing approaches (or possibly creating a new NLG system adapted to the scope and contributor-profile of Abstract Wikipedia, as suggested by Ariel Gutman).

The Foundation's response argues that this approach would fail to cover the breadth of languages envisaged for Abstract Wikipedia:

Some of our own colleagues, like Maria Keet, have noted the inadequacy of those systems for many of the languages Abstract Wikipedia is intended to serve.

In particular, according to Keet, Grammatical Framework notably lacks the flexibility to handle certain aspects of Niger-Congo B languages’ morphology. The traditional answer to this kind of critique would be to say, “Let’s just organize an effort to work on Grammatical Framework.” The design philosophy behind Abstract Wikipedia is to make as few assumptions about a contributor’s facility with English and programming experience as possible. Organized efforts around Grammatical Framework (or otherwise) are not a bad idea at all. They may well solve some problems for some languages. However, the contributor pools for under-resourced languages are already small. Demanding expertise with specific natural languages like English and also specific programming paradigms contracts those pools still further.

(However, in a response to the response, Keet – a computer science professor at the University of Cape Town who volunteers for Abstract Wikipedia – disputed the Foundation's characterization of her concerns, stating that her "arguments got conflated into a, in shorthand, 'all against GF' that your reply suggests, but that is not the case.")

The Abstract Wikipedia team goes on to decry Grammatical Framework as a –

[...] solution designed by a small group of Westerners [that] is likely to produce a system that replicates the trends of an imperialist English-focused Western-thinking industry. Existing tools tell a one-voice story; they are built by the same people (in a socio-cultural sense) and produce the same outcome, which is crafted to the needs of their creators (or by the limits of their understanding). Tools are then used to build tools, which will be again used to build more tools; step by step, every level of architectural decision-making limits more and more the space that can be benefitted by these efforts.

Grammatical Framework would probably give a quick start to creating the basis for a NLG system perfectly suited to "about 45 languages of various linguistic families" – less than 10% of all existing written languages. However, while designing a system that is explicitly focused at covering the knowledge gap of languages that are underrepresented on the Internet, basing the architecture on a framework that gives support to less than the 10% most represented languages defies – by design and from the very start – the bigger purpose of the project.

The 2022 election of the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee closed on Monday 13 December 2022, with about 1,570 votes cast in the secret poll (a very similar number to the 2021 election). Twelve candidates contested the eight seats to be filled.

Having completed their previous two-year terms, Barkeep49, Primefac, CaptainEek, and user:L235 were re-elected to serve for a further two years. Other candidates elected for two-year terms were SilkTork and Guerillero, both former arbitrators; new to the committee (and also for two years) are GeneralNotability and Moneytrees.

Sdrqaz and Robert McClenon (a non-admin) achieved over 60%, which would have qualified them for positions if the eight seats had not already been filled. Candidates neither elected nor achieving a threshold for a seat were Tamzin and BoldLuis. The Signpost thanks all candidates for having volunteered to serve the project as arbitrators.

Additionally, seven sitting arbs will complete the second year of their terms.

Just over half the votes were cast on day 1, and 83% of the votes were cast by the end of day 7 (2021: 84%). There was a slight uptick on the final day. The full results table was published on 21 December, at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2022.

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

This paper,^[1] presented earlier this month at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference, applies a modified version of Graham's hierarchy of disagreement to classify talk page comments on the English Wikipedia. As explained by the authors:

"[English] Wikipedia recommends the hierarchy of disagreement formulated by Graham (2008) as a guide for constructive dispute resolution [in the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution policy]. Graham’s hierarchy posits that there are seven levels of disagreement, ranging from namecalling (at the bottom) to refuting the central point. [...] Despite its popularity, this hierarchy has not been verified empirically."

The authors call these "rebuttal tactics", and distinguish them from a second category of dispute tactics, "attempts to promote understanding and consensus (referred to as coordination tactics)." Coordination tactics are classified with a separate set of "non-disagreement labels" which is combined from comment types identified in several previous research publications about Wikipedia talk pages (e.g. a paper by Ferschke et al. that was summarized in our March 2012 issue: "Understanding collaboration-related dialog in Simple English Wikipedia").

• "Bailing out" ("An indication that an editor is giving up on a conversation and will no longer engage.")
• "Contextualisation" (where "an editor 'sets the stage; by describing which aspect of the article they are challenging. This does not directly disagree with anyone")
• "Asking questions"
• "Providing clarification"
• "Suggesting a compromise"
• "Coordinating edits" to the article page ("This can signal that a compromise has been found.")
• "Conceding / recanting"
• "I don’t know" (i.e. "Admitting that one is uncertain. This signals that an editor is receptive to the idea that there are unknowns which may impact their argument.")
• "Other"

The authors provide a dataset "of 213 disputes (comprising 3,865 utterances) on Wikipedia Talk pages, manually annotated with the dispute tactics employed in the process of resolving a disagreement between editors", allowing multiple labels for each comment ("up to three rebuttal strategies and two resolution strategies per utterance", see examples below).

These discussions are drawn from the authors' own "WikiDisputes" dataset, which provides information "which is annotated according to whether the dispute was resolved without the need for a moderator." This allows the researchers to identify relations between specific dispute tactics and the risk of a conversation escalating. For example, they

find that a lower mean rebuttal level in a disagreement is correlated with less constructive dispute resolutions, providing empirical validation of the ordering proposed by Graham (2008) and recommended by Wikipedia to its editors.

In particular, they examine the effect of personal attacks, finding e.g. that conversations can still recover after a personal attack happens:

"We define recovery in terms of having an utterance labeled as rebuttal level 5 or higher and no further personal attacks. By this definition, half of the disputes were found to recover after a personal attack, indicating that personal attacks do not necessarily result in conversational failure."

Furthermore,

Of the escalated disputes with personal attacks, only 44.3% are found to recover, whereas 59.2% of resolved disputes recover post attack. This indicates that although personal attacks also occur in non-escalated disputes, participants are better adept at moving beyond them. We further find that immediate retaliation (i.e. a personal attack being followed by another personal attack) occurred in 25.7% of cases. In disputes where at least one personal attack had occurred, the probability that the initial offender will re-offend in the same conversation is 53%, while the probability of another user using a personal attack at some point subsequently is 64%.

The study proceeds to use machine learning for automatically classifying talk page comments with these multi-labels. A BERT-based model performed best (according to three different performance metrics), but still struggled with some of the labels:

"The label most frequently correctly predicted is coordinating edits (111 of 137 cases), which is also the most common label in the training set. The next most correctly predicted label, proportionally, is contextualisation (75%, or 24 of 32 cases), despite not being a commonly used label. This is likely due to the additional positional information available to the model, since this label is often applied to the first utterance in a conversation. On the other hand, refutation and refuting the central point are never correctly predicted (out of 44 cases), with counterargument often mistakenly predicted instead."

Lastly, they apply this to the separate task of predicting whether a conversation will escalate, already examined in their earlier paper that gave rise to the "WikiDisputes" dataset. Namely, they use "multitask training with escalation as the main task and tactics as the auxiliary task, such that the features that are predictive of dispute tactics are incorporated in the escalation predictions." This improves upon their earlier prediction algorithm, "indicating that knowledge of these dispute tactics is useful for tasks beyond classifying the tactics employed."

The following table (adapted from Figure 1 in the paper) shows the labeling of several comments by two different users in one talk page discussion:

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
• The Wikimedia Foundation's Research team published its seventh biannual activity report.

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

From the abstract:^[2]

"This study analyses Wikipedia’s sites for negotiating convergence, conflict and identity, concentrating on two aspects. First, convergence and conflict at the macro-level of intercultural comparison are investigated using the example of the construction of concepts of nationalism, citizenship, identity and tribe in their English and German language versions. Second, the English articles serve as a basis to examine the types of convergence and conflict tendencies at the micro-level of the Talk-section."

From the paper's section on talk pages:

"[...] in our data, criticism of content (81 instances/31% of all 259 conflictual codings) is the most frequent conflictual category [...], followed by general metapragmatic criticism concerning clarity and more general stylistic features [...], metapragmatic criticism related to Wikipedia's principles (each comprising about half of the total of 81 metapragmatic tokens), or a mixture of both [...].

Giving reasons for disagreeing is the mitigating strategy used most frequently in all for Talk1-sections, followed by suggesting, inviting and hedged imperatives to induce further improvement of an article, agreement and additional explanation to clarify an issue [...]."

From the publisher's description:^[3]

"This book provides a concise yet comprehensive guide to Wikipedia for researchers and students of linguistics, discourse and communication studies [...]. Drawing on Herring's situational and medium factors, as well as related developments in (critical) discourse studies, the author studies the online encyclopaedia both theoretically and empirically, examining its origins, production and consumption before turning to a discussion of its societal significance and function(s). "

From the abstract:^[4]

"We studied views of articles about psychology on 10 language editions of Wikipedia from July 1, 2015, to January 6, 2021. We were most interested in what psychology topics Wikipedia users wanted to read, and how the frequency of views changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. [...]. We made two important observations. The first was that during the pandemic, people in most countries looked for new ways to manage their stress without resorting to external help. [...] We also found that academic topics, typically covered in university classes, experienced a substantial drop in traffic, which could be indicative of issues with remote teaching."

From the abstract and paper:^[5]

"The pilot detailed in this paper is about creating a large freely-licensed public repository of transcribed speech in the Odia language as such a repository was not known to be available. The strategy and methodology behind this process are based on the OpenSpeaks project [which is hosted on the English Wikiversity at https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/OpenSpeaks ].

"The 'Methodology' section details the process of collecting words [from a dump of Odia Wikipedia], compiling a wordlist [making use of Wikidata lexeme forms to generate additional forms], recording the pronunciation of those words, and uploading the speech data to Wikimedia Commons using Lingua Libre."

I am an ardent lover of poetry, but I understand the beauty of football. Ballet-like movements, wonderful goals, the ecstasy of the crowd, and yes: even the tension that comes with a penalty shoot-out. It comes as no surprise that the match results during FIFA World Cup 2022 were reflected immediately on Wikipedia. Many Wikipedians love the game, and took pride in updating articles on this championship as quickly as possible.

The power of Wikipedia showed in three aspects during this football tournament:

• accurate, balanced and factual reports about the tournament and the matches;
• fast reporting of new match results and other facts;
• reflection of all positive and negative aspects, such as the corruption allegations over the bid, and the horrific working conditions in Qatar during the building of the stadiums.

Iranian photo press agencies deserve special mention. Fars, Tasnim & other photo agencies from Iran have been using Creative Commons licenses for years, and their photos are used thousands of times across many language versions of Wiki. FIFA World Cup 2022 also showed Iranian craftmanship, with photographers Hossein Zohrevand, Mehdi Marizad and Nima Najafzadeh shooting photographs all over. More than 500 of the photos from Fars & Tasnim Photo Agency made in Qatar were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Their photographers are professionals. Of course Tasnim and Fars mainly show the more official photos. Personal photographs made by visitors add a special flavour, like photos of the crowd and photos of protests in the stadiums. And yes: Mehr News Agency from Iran even made videos from the tournament available online under a CC-license. Regarding copyright: as there is no freedom of panorama in Qatar, detailed photos of football stadiums are not allowed to feature on Wiki. A pity? Well, I didn't like the stadiums anyway.

Wikipedia editors proved to be able to deliver a quick, balanced and competent reflection of the FIFA World Cup Football Tournament 2022. I do wish that poetry and Africa would at least once get the same attention.

In December 2017, we reported on an allegedly stolen seagull on a banknote from Kazakhstan.

Marcel Burkhard (User:Cele4)'s photograph of a seagull...

Suspiciously similar 500 tenge bill from Kazakhstan

WIKIPEDIANS IN SPACE!: Paolo Nespoli records himself aboard the International Space Station, the first creation of content specifically for Wikipedia to happen outside the Earth's atmosphere. The Women in Red WikiProject held a contest that blasted through their original plan to create 2,000 new articles and ended up with around 2,900 new articles on women who had been left off the project.

We also interviewed Charles J. Sharp, a prolific photographer here and on Commons. Here's a few samples, and the full interview is here

We already covered the history of the Toolserver saga in some detail back in October, but things were particularly bad this month: The same report that covered MediaWiki's update covered DaB. agreeing to stay and help out, but by Christmas Eve everything was in crisis again.

Visual Editor, the now-rather-good default functionality that allows you to edit without knowing Wikiformatting, launched ten years ago this month as an opt-in process. We'll cover the many problems of its launch as the window moves forwards, but long story short: It was pushed out too aggressively, too soon, too early in development, and that caused a lot of issues that overshadowed it being a really good idea.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened 14 December 2012. Back then we used to edit our articles to update them, so there's a bit of overlap, but we had an op-ed on the 17th and an update on the 31st. It seems madness today that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was repeatedly nominated for deletion, but how much and when Wikipedia should cover recent news, since encyclopædias traditionally couldn't do that, was still a matter of debate back then. Of course, that it would still be in the news ten years later thanks to the Alex Jones trials couldn't have been predicted back then, nor how normalised school shootings happening would become.

In a lighter vein, an interview with Brion Vibber, the Wikimedia Foundation's first employee. It documents Wikipedia's early development, and a film school graduate who got pulled into the world of tech through Wikipedia.

However, given the report in today's (New Year's Day 2023) issue about the mobile interface, that it focuses heavily on how well and how quickly the mobile interface was coming together is somewhat ironic.

Finally, we had a "From the Editor" which began:

In the interests of clickbait, I shan't explain.

This... was a big month for Wikipedia. First off, in 2007, Jimbo was still in charge of basic things, and, in December, could be found appointing arbitrators and ruling, by himself, that inactivity was enough for an arbitrator to be removed from the position. Also around the start of the month Sue Gardner was appointed executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2007, a job she would keep until 2014, and The Signpost, naturally, had an interview with her. Well worth reading!

On the technical side, after Commons had began accepting Creative Commons licenses a few months before, the first seeds of Wikipedia switching to Creative Commons were sown, but it literally required an update to the GDFL license Wikipedia was licensed under for the switch to be able to happen, which it eventually did in June 2009. On the even-more-technical side, the number of uses of the #ifexist parser function on a single page had to be curtailed because it was creating such a heavy load on Wikipedia's servers and better options existed, which just goes to show that if you give people access to a really simple-to-use bit of code, you'd better expect them to abuse it. Also, Google Knol launched, which arguably was the first forays into what would eventually become those Wikipedia-based infoboxes Google puts on searches, albeit as an attempt to compete with Wikipedia that died five years later, in 2012.

Meanwhile, over on German Wikipedia, Wikipedia had a criminal complaint filed against it for using too many Nazi symbols while talking about Nazis, on the basis of German's law against using Nazi symbols except for educational purposes. Yeah. We don't seem to have updated on The Signpost, but it appears that "[a]fter a conversation with Wikimedia representatives, Schubert withdrew her complaint the next day".

And, finally, Antonio Santiago (User:Marine 69-71/Tony the Marine) was honoured by the Puerto Rican senate for his work documenting Puerto Ricans on Wikipedia.