National Public Radio has announced that former Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher will take the reins as NPR's CEO at the end of March, following a conference ending her five month gig as CEO of Web Summit. NPR itself (maintaining its editorial firewall) introduced her as the former CEO of WMF, quoting her saying "There is a strong alignment in both [Wikipedia and NPR] around integrity and autonomy." The New York Times emphasizes the challenges currently facing NPR, and indeed most of the media, writing she "will take over at NPR during a critical period. Listenership of traditional radio is waning as Americans adopt alternatives ... pressuring NPR to reach its audiences in new formats." RTÉ, an Irish public service broadcaster, highlights her recent connection to Web Summit. Maher was formerly Chief Communications Officer at the WMF before her CEO role; she has resigned from the US Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board following her appointment to NPR, remaining Chair of the Signal Foundation and on the board of Consumer Reports.

The Signpost wishes her all the best. Congratulations Katherine!

See this 2019 interview with Maher in The Signpost

– S, F

The New York Post was shocked to learn that Katherine Maher, the new NPR CEO, had tweeted in 2018 that "Donald Trump is a racist". They consider the six year old personal tweet to be inconsistent with NPR's policy that they provide "fact-based reporting; opinion and commentary are secondary." The Post also seemed shocked that some time since 2018, Maher deleted the tweet, implying that she was hiding something.

They might also be shocked to learn that many people have called this guy that thing, since early in his term as president. In 2018 and 2019, a majority of Americans agreed with the statement "Donald Trump is a racist", according to two polls; in 2019, 84% of African-Americans agreed. Nevertheless, another 2018 poll had only 49% agreeing against 47% disagreeing; at any rate it's difficult to see this as evidence of extremism.

The controversy about Trump's perceived racism has not subsided since. His attacks this month on Asian-American Nikki Haley are even causing more controversy. – S

Media watchdog Media Matters for America reports on Matt Walsh's use of Wikipedia to verify the skin color of Nikki Haley, the other candidate for the GOP nomination for the U.S. presidency. Walsh's commentary is simply dishonest. He says he never noticed that Haley is brown skinned and had to "check Wikipedia" to see if it's true. With a sleight of hand he reports that Wikipedia confirms the fact that her parents are from India. (More precisely they are Sikh.) Then he says Haley's claims of discrimination in a 1980s South Carolina beauty pageant based on her skin color "strain credulity" and that all kids get teased about something.

What did he leave unsaid?

• Wikipedia doesn't report her skin color.
• discrimination based on skin color in the 1970s and in 1980s South Carolina was quite common, though not as horrific as it was in Wisconsin in 2012 or at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015.
• Haley doesn't dwell on her ethnic heritage in public, as is her right, but was asked directly on television about her experiences with racism.

In less than five minutes, he puts race back into the presidential race. – S

In Il Post (in Italian), Viola Stefanello breaks down the last ten years of the evolution and decline of the open access movement in academic publications, focusing on the controversies involving "shadow libraries" such as Sci-Hub and Anna's Archive, the legacy of the late Aaron Swartz and the current state of Wikipedia.

Anna's Archive, a website which hosts some 25 million books and 100 million papers totally unencumbered by copyright law (generally by virtue of just not following it), has recently been blocked by AGCOM, at the request of the Italian Publishers Association.

Among the experts cited by Stefanello for her article, former Wikimedia Italy president and Wikisource admin Andrea Zanni stands out. Now a digital librarian for openMLOL and a journalist for several Italian media, as well as the co-author of an e-book about the life of Aaron Swartz, Zanni says the death of the American hacktivist is not the only reason why the open access movement has lost the momentum it had gained throughout the 2000s and the early 2010s. According to him, this also happened due to the different priorities many of the people involved had to focus on when transitioning to adulthood – Zanni left Wikipedia himself, in order to spend more time with his family – and a decline in interest by newer generations, whose best IT talents often choose to make a personal profit out of their skills, instead. The former Wikimedia Italy president also reflects on the changes that have made the Internet more "capitalistic" and "egotistic" than it was ten years ago, underlining the web’s "centralization" in just a handful of privately owned social and entertainment media, its "mobilization" as a result of the shift of most online traffic from computers to smartphones, and its "dopaminization" through the wide spread of personalized content and advertisements.

Zanni ends his reflection on a high note, celebrating the success and the very existence of Wikipedia for over twenty years as one of the "huge battles won" by the movement, a topic he already wrote about for Domani in 2021. Given the disputes related to open access and public domain we still witness worldwide and the challenges Wikimedia projects will likely face in the near future, perhaps his words should be taken as more than just a good omen to start from. – O

• Ruwiki launches officially: The non-Wikipedia version of the Russian Wikipedia, Ruwiki, officially launched on 15 January. You can now edit their articles, even without registering an account. Coverage from Reuters [1] (featured e.g. in the New York Post [2]) cites Kommersant in saying that the founders have not yet disclosed who the financers of the project are. See prior Signpost coverage: "Wikimedia Russia director starts Russian fork and is replaced" (June 5, 2023), "Ruwiki" (July 17, 2023)
  The ruwiki.ru website also includes what appears to be a fork of Wikidata, at data.ruwiki.ru, titled "РУВИКИ.Данные" ("RUWIKI.Data"). The wiki's recent deletion log (archive) includes various items related to the Russo-Ukrainian war, e.g. Q111467700 ("Bucha massacre").
• Wiki Loves Monuments image highlighted: "George Washington Masonic Memorial photo honored in Wikipedia photo competition" ALXNow, based in Alexandria, Virginia covers Daniel M Horowitz's image that earned a place at commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2023 winners.
• "Editorial Malpractice": Annie Rauwerda lets Harper's Magazine know what she really thinks of The Hofmann Wobble in her letter to the editor. See previous coverage in The Signpost.
• Pathological optimist at Davos: Jimmy Wales is listening and learning at Davos about AI and this year's elections in his usual pathologically optimistic way. On YouTube, CNBC
• State control of content: "Wikipedia, relying on a community of volunteers to edit and maintain its content, has become a prime target for spreading disinformation and state propaganda", says Majid Rafizadeh in a Townhall.com opinion. He claims to report on the contents of "an expert report that has conducted a comprehensive review of the edits made by users affiliated with the Iranian regime on Wikipedia over the past year".
• Do we have anything to do with this?: Italian newspaper Il Secolo XIX, based in Genoa, reports (in Italian, behind pay-wall) that the regional tourist guide union of Liguria has raised concerns over a law included in the Budget Act approved by the national government for the year 2023, which set new universal requirements for professional tourist guides. According to representatives of the union, some of the bill's key provisions might damage local tourism, by allowing "Wikipedia-like guides" – in other words, guides who are not as qualified as union members.

• Denigration: In a long and wide-ranging interview for Haaretz (behind pay-wall), Israeli historian Moshe Zimmermann calls out incorrect claims on his page on Hebrew Wikipedia about statements he had made about the ultra-nationalist politician Meir Kahane, settlers and Nazism, saying, "[The] more time that passes, what was written about me in Wikipedia as a denigration, becomes the Balaam-like example of 'came to curse, left by blessing' [from Numbers 24]. Because of what I was quoted as saying, which wasn't accurate, settlers and their supporters took me to court three times, and in each case the defamation suit was rejected."
• The bigger picture: Bill Ackman's (kind of) clash with Wikipedia, which we covered in the previous issue of The Signpost, is far from being the billionaire's only high-profile fight, as recently reported by New York and The Atlantic.
• SF footballer's page is heavily edited: "No one in the NFL has had their Wikipedia page edited more since Dec. 11, 2022, than 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy" notes SFGATE, with some reasons why they think it is so.
• Not so bad for research: Under the sub-title "Wikipedia has moved far beyond its initial limitations, and is a helpful—and reputable—source for conducting research", the nonprofit Edutopia published an excerpt from the 2023 book Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online, published by University of Chicago Press.

In the last issue of The Signpost, Smallbones addressed the explosive public fallout between Business Insider and Bill Ackman. This arose from the newspaper's exclusive story about the hedge fund billionaire's wife, Neri Oxman, who had been accused of plagiarizing from several academic and online sources (including Wikipedia) without any attribution. In a series of tweets on his Twitter profile, Ackman quite vehemently defended his wife from the accusations, and questioned whether somebody could even plagiarize Wikipedia to begin with.

Now, the claims of Ackman and several other commentators who dived in the original discussion have already been tackled by Smallbones in his brief piece, as well as fellow Wikipedian Molly White, who explained how Wikipedia ultimately works in a detailed YouTube video. If you haven't already, I'd suggest you to check both sources out before moving on. In this article, though, I'd like to reflect on the same theme from a slightly different perspective, which involves a user — me, myself and I, more specifically — who did fall victim of plagiarism.

So, to be fair, I come from a generation of pain, where murder is mi– [Vinyl scratch noise] No, wait, I've picked up the wrong script, I'm sorry. Allow me to do a second take, please… So, to be fair, I come from a generation that is considered to be very used to the dynamics of Internet, and rightfully so: in some instances, maybe we're even too tied to the online world. This, though, doesn't necessarily mean teens and people in their twenties are better at selecting, double-checking and, most importantly, citing their sources. In fact, I made my own mistakes as a little kid, and I suspect that there are many more students across the globe who have copied from Wikipedia or other sites for their school projects/assignments in good faith (hopefully), without knowing that using those text blocks without proper attribution potentially violates CC BY-SA license and copyright law. Although I've been lucky to have high school and university teachers who emphasized the importance of declaring and checking your sources, I had never fully understood how serious this aspect is until I got more familiar with fact-checking, while also keeping learning through my experiences on Genius, and then here on Wikipedia. This summer, finally, I had kind of an epiphany in this sense.

So, both on English and Italian Wikipedia I very often cover articles related to football –—no, not this football... not this, either... ah, there we go! Among other things, I've also tried creating new pages from scratch, including the one about French-Malian footballer Coli Saco, which first saw the light of the day roughly a year ago. In August 2023, on the “deadline day” of the summer transfer window, Saco was sent on loan to an Italian club, whose name will be kept undisclosed here — you can see for yourself, anyway. Geregen2 updated the page first, but I still wanted to check the official announcement by the club, out of pure curiosity. As soon as I started reading through the text, I was like, "Hmm… looks familiar, but they still did their research!" After a closer look, I realized it was more than just familiar: in fact, whoever wrote the announcement most likely copied the information on Saco's article, slapped it in a translator, trimmed it down slightly and, finally, pasted it on the club's website.

"They... they c-c-copied... my p-precious boy... How could you be so cruel?", I mumbled in desperation, as I felt my mind deeply descending into the arms of– [Vinyl scratch noise] Just kidding, I wasn't too bothered by that, to be honest. Nevertheless, it was quite evident that the article had been plagiarized, even when assuming good faith one more time and imagining that the club's website admin was likely scrambling to get the press release done in a reasonable amount of time — and by the way, for anyone who's not too familiar with association football, this is just one of the many and stressful phases of transfers.

Back to the topic, though. Was I annoyed by seeing "my" article^[1] getting copied so blatantly? Yes.

Was that an example of the Italian media's chronic bad habit of not double-checking their sources, or even not citing them appropriately, before publishing their articles? Yes, kind of.

Is this incident as bad as the one who is currently putting the career of Neri Oxman at high risk? Well, no, not even close. Let's try to let it sink in for a moment, though.

Do you remember I listed fact-checking as one of the reasons why I started taking sources and citations more seriously? That's because it helped me discover not only how to recognize and debunk fake news, but also how much damage they can do if left unchecked. Wikipedia isn't immune to disinformation, either: just last July, we reported on the series of over-enthusiastic edits made by a suspicious user on the article about OceanGate, which (disturbingly enough) might have played a role in the tragedy of the Titan submersible implosion. Obviously, not all the lies are this dangerous, but putting in place a solid system to detect and tackle them, as Wikipedia volunteers have done, still plays a key role in preserving a community built on trust, reciprocal respect, reliability and neutrality.

The same goes for plagiarism: whether we're talking about a plain-simple Wikipedia page, an article from a respected newspaper, your school-book or the Sacred Scriptures, they have all been written by someone who (hopefully) cared about the information or the message they had intended to convey. They might not necessarily take you to court if you don't give them credit, but in most cases, it could hurt their feelings, and you might not realize it until it happens to you.

So, even if we're all just piles of flesh, blood and bones trapped in a life-long state of imperfection, a.k.a. humans, or at least until artificial intelligence will have improved so much that we'll be toe-to-toe with humanoid versions of HAL 9000 who will constantly threat to destroy us if we don't take them to eat the best Bolognese spaghetti in the world every freaking day... [Inhalating intensely] In other words, even if we all make mistakes or go out of character sometimes, we should always remember to disclose the sources who are helping us in our research, if anything, out of respect for the people behind them. It could make their day, but also help us nurture that positive cycle of trust, accountability and quality information we all desperately need in these challenging times.

As reported by Palestinian Wikimedian Farah Jack Mustaklem, on 19 January 2024 Osama Khalid, a Saudi pediatrician, blogger and Wikipedia volunteer, turned 30 years old while still being detained in al-Ha'ir Prison, together with fellow doctor and Wikipedian Ziyad Alsufyani.

As detailed in previous Signpost coverage, Osama and Ziyad had both been arrested in July 2020 and sentenced, respectively, to 5 and 8 years in prison, with the former’s sentence having been increased to 32 years on appeal in September 2022; however, reports about their incarceration first went public in January 2023. The two, whose arrest and detention are considered to be connected to the Saudi government’s recent crackdown on online dissent, had both served as administrators on the Arabic Wikipedia for several years, while being deeply involved within the Wiki Project Med Foundation and contributing to several articles about Saudi human rights activists, such as Loujain al-Hathloul.

Nine different civil rights organizations, including Access Now and Digital Citizenship, have co-signed an open letter dated 19 January 2024 asking for the immediate release of Osama, Ziyad and all of the other activists currently detained in Saudi Arabian prisons. – O and AK

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the publication of a Child Rights Impact Assessment, described as an independent report commissioned from consultancy Article One to "understand the impacts, risks, and opportunities posed to children who access and participate in Wikimedia projects":

While the Wikimedia Foundation’s commitments to privacy and data minimization make it impossible to know just how many young readers and editors there are on Wikimedia projects, an untold number of people less than 18 years of age seek out verifiable, encyclopedic information on Wikipedia. [...] Some of them progress from readers to editors as they start to contribute their own knowledge to these pages. Protecting child safety, both of readers and editors, is a top priority not only for the Foundation, but also for Wikimedia community groups and affiliates around the globe. [...]

This Child Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA) is the latest initiative that we have undertaken in order to meet our commitment to protect and uphold the human rights of all those who interact with Wikimedia projects. In 2020, the Foundation carried out an organization-wide Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA), with a report and update on progress published in 2022. A key recommendation of that assessment was to conduct a targeted CRIA, which could help us to better understand the benefits to and risks to children participating in Wikimedia projects.

The Foundation—in partnership with Article One, a specialized strategy and management consultancy with expertise in human rights, responsible innovation, and sustainability—started work on the CRIA in late 2021, and completed it in March 2023. The publication of this report (redacted to protect security and privacy of volunteers, readers, and those who were interviewed for the report) represents both a continuation of the Foundation’s commitments to human rights, and an important opportunity to revitalize conversations across the Wikimedia movement around how to best protect children on Wikimedia projects.

– AK

An article (Google translation) in the German Wikipedia's Kurier notes that the Chinese Wikipedia (zh:WP) has decided –

• to introduce an ArbCom;
• to lower the RfA approval threshold from the previous 80% to about 70–75%;
• to trial probationary adminship for candidates getting at least 50% approval.

The Chinese Wikipedia has apparently been in administrative crisis ever since the 2021 WMF desysops (see previous coverage in the 26 September 2021 Signpost issue: 1, 2, 3). The above measures have been designed to mitigate the situation. – AK

• Unindexed: The Phabricator task "Google not indexing Wikisource properly for years" has received an update from Google, saying: "The web is really large and the search index can simply not include every single page. A page that otherwise has no problems may not be indexed for a myriad of complex reasons, for instance if the indexing process determines that the page is unlikely to be requested in search. This is in line with the Search Central documentation that states: 'Google doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if your page follows the Google Search Essentials.'" Right. For comparison, only a couple hundred of the several thousand Signpost articles accessible from signpost.news have been indexed since August. We can hope.
• Unreferenced: The WikiProject Unreferenced Articles is inviting signups for its February 2024 backlog drive, set to start on February 1st, to work on the currently over 112,000 articles without citations. At the time of writing, over 200 editors had already registered.
• Annual reports: North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group, Deoband Community Wikimedia, Gungbe Wikimedians User Group, Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova, Wiki Project Med.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Hunger strike (beginning 29 January). Please be bold in helping improve this article!