Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2022-03-27

On 11 March 2022, Belarusian political police GUBOPiK arrested and detained Mark Bernstein, a Wikipedian from Minsk editing the Russian Wikipedia article about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, accusing him of the "spread of anti-Russian materials".

The Signpost has identified one edit in Russian Wikipedia adding the text вторжения России на Украину ("of the Russian invasion of Ukraine", in a reference to the United Nations emergency special session resolution adopted on March 2, 2022), which we believe is the one that resulted in Bernstein's arrest and jailing. It is not clear what was the legal basis for the arrest, as the 2022 Russian fake news law presumably does not extend into Belarus' borders.

Bernstein was arrested in Belarus on March 11, charged with not obeying a police order, and sentenced to 15 days in jail. Early reports incorrectly suggested that he might face 15 years in prison under the new Russian law.

The story is international news, with articles covering it by Omer Benjakob, a frequent analyst of Wikipedia matters, the Associated Press, Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle, and the Financial Times. Due to community policies, The Signpost can not discuss all of the media reports in detail.

Concerning the matter, Jimmy Wales said on his talkpage:

With regard to the arrest of a Wikipedia editor in Belarus I am doing all that I can to make sure that he is released safely but taking what I consider to be highly reliable professional advice, going on a PR offensive is not likely to be productive and indeed may very well be counter-productive. My silence on the matter should not be interpreted as inaction nor a lack of caring – a knee jerk pronouncement is not always the best way to help in a very specific situation where other approaches may more likely prove fruitful.

On the more general issue of the tragic decline of rights of free expression in various places, I am happy to be publicly critical but me speaking out to say that journalism is a human right is not going to surprise or shock anyone nor change the course of human history. Sadly, the world doesn't really listen to me in that way. The question of blackouts does naturally arise, and in general I have been and will continue to be more supportive of carefully targeted blackouts by the community in an effort to protect the right to free speech and in particular the right of Wikipedians to write a high quality neutral encyclopedia without fear of criminal or civil penalties of any kind. However, a very key phrase in what I just wrote it "carefully targeted". We have to ask ourselves in every case whether a blackout will be influential or listened to. We have had successful and unsuccessful blackouts in the past. I am very proud of how the SOPA/PIPA blackout prevented the passage of terrible legislation in the US. I am regretful that we lost the vote on the European Copyright Directive by 1 vote when we failed to blackout – I am 100% sure that a blackout would have convinced at least 1 member of European Parliament to change their vote and we would have stopped that particular nonsense. In the current circumstance in Russia, it would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that a blackout would do more good than harm. Given the war in Ukraine, and the incredible state-level pressure being placed on Russia by the international community (sanctions, etc.) I do not believe that Russia is very likely to say "oh no, Wikipedia is blacking out, we have to reverse our new draconian anti-free-speech laws." Indeed, given that they have – to my understanding – currently blocked Facebook, twitter, BBC News Russia, Deutsche Welle, etc. – and given that – again, to my understanding – Russian Wikipedia is doing a decent job of remaining high quality and neutral in the face of enormous emotion and potential legal pressure – I am surprised that Wikipedia isn't already blocked. I think it a testament to how popular and respected Wikipedia is that even in Russia, people understand that it is a force for good and that to block it is a very bad sign of a government gone wrong. As ever, we should all continue to monitor the situation and reflect thoughtfully on the best path forward. It's important that even in emotional circumstances, we try not to become angry with each other – assume good faith and let's see how we can help.

Netzpolitik.org has a piece titled Festnahme und Drohungen wegen Artikelbearbeitung ("Arrests and threats on account of article editing") that mentions:

• Suppression of all edit logs of ru:Вторжение России на Украину (2022) (Вторжение России, "Russian invasion" of Ukraine) for safety of editors
• Prevention of renaming same article
• Doxxing of editors through a Telegram channel considered linked to the Russian web brigades

Netzpolitik was careful not to name the arrested individual and redacted the names of their sources who edit on Russian Wikipedia. – B

The voting for the ratification of the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines opened on 7 March 2022 and concluded on 21 March 2022. Voting closed with 2352 votes across 128 home wiki projects. The final results from the voting process will be announced on Meta, along with the relevant statistics and a summary of comments as soon as they are available.

67 additional local votes were cast bringing the total number of enwiki registrants voting to 866 (36.82% of all voters). By comparison, enwiki registrants represent 33.95% of the electorate.

The 'home wiki' value used in these charts does not necessarily represent where a user was active during the eligibility period.

These figures should be considered preliminary.

The 238 votes in the final category were from projects casting fewer than 11 votes.

See more statistics here. – E

Wiki Unseen, reported on last issue in the Signpost, has been garnering discussion on Wiki. Conversations on the relevance of one of the paintings was initiated on Talk:Asquith Xavier, a Files for Discussion item was opened on whether to delete the fair-use equivalents of the portraits, and other discussion with the Wikimedia Foundation and related parties is visible at m:Talk:Communications/Wiki Unseen. The major questions include whether artistic portraits can replace photos in articles, or whether fair-use photos should be deleted once artistic portraits are available. – E

Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, hosted an "ask me anything" on Waitroom, a software allowing for "authentic conversations" between celebrities and people. Wales says It was different and fun. I've suggested to the hosts that for the next one we switch to a 5 minute format as that's more in tune with me - I like to try to fully explain myself and tell a whole story and the 2.5 minute format was tricky for me. – E

User:BeenAroundAWhile, who will be 90 years old in April, started editing Wikipedia when he was 73. He recently made his 100,000th edit and is well on his way to 101,000. The Signpost congratulates him on all his achievements. Editors should feel free to congratulate him in the Comments section below with one caveat: he does not appreciate being called "dude".

• Shrinkage: Active administrators shrank from the beginning of 2022 to an annual low count of 450 on 19 March – see previous Signpost coverage on declining admin cadre (January 30).
• IP masking: Rollout to come later, with session-based pseudoidentity. See IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation – Implementation Strategy and next steps (25 February 2022)
• Hackathon The 2022 Wikimedia Hackathon will be held May 20–22. More coverage is available in the Technology Report.
• Alexa, what's a sound logo for Wikimedia?: "We are hoping to co-create a sound logo with communities to improve identification of Wikimedia material when it is used on audio platforms...including notifications in Wikimedia apps and third party apps that reuse Wikimedia content, audio feedback on Wikimedia and third party UIs, and branding on audio and visual content from and licensed by Wikimedia across video, TV, film, podcasts and events" according to m:Communications/Sound Logo and Diff which notes "Wikipedia content was used to answer between 81 and 84% of common desktop knowledge queries" on the top search engines.
• Server issues: According to wikitech:Incident status and other Wikimedia Foundation documentation, multiple redundant network providers powering the United States West Coast server cluster "simultaneously experienced connectivity loss" on March 1, and all traffic was rerouted to another cluster after 20 minutes of downtime. The Signpost team is monitoring to determine if this represents some kind of attack on Wikipedia.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Firefly, selected by unanimous !voting, and Sdrqaz, selected by near-unopposed !voting. Both are now listed at Wikipedia:Times that 200 Wikipedians supported an RFX, with the former noted as the highest !vote count for a unanimous RFA.
• Leadership Development Working Group applications: Applications for the Leadership Development Working Group that the Signpost reported on last issue have opened. The application period is closing on April 10, 2022.
• Let's Connect program launches: The Let's Connect working group launched their peer learning program on 25 March 2022. More details are on Diff.
• Wikimedia Foundation case dismissed in Europe: The Wikimedia Foundation's case arguing that Turkey's ban of Wikipedia violated the rights of people in Turkey was dismissed. More information is on Diff.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: English Wiktionary (7,000,000 entries), Shan Wikivoyage (newly created), Gungbe Wikipedia (newly created), Hill Mari Wikipedia (100,000 page edits).
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Articles for Improvement is Sikkimese cuisine. Please help to improve this article!

When Russian president Vladimir Putin gave the order for Russian troops to invade Ukraine, he set off a search for information on his friends and supporters known as the Russian oligarchs. Some of the sought-after information is on the location of their yachts, luxury jet planes, and financial assets, in order for Western governments to seize these assets and pressure Putin to stop the war.

There are several dozen Russians commonly called oligarchs. They include some of the richest people in the world who acquired their riches with the support of Putin's regime and in turn have supported Putin and his policies. They tend to be secretive, carefully protecting their privacy. The New Yorker in its article "How Putin's Oligarchs Bought London" cites Oliver Bullough's view that the oligarchs came to London for, among other reasons, luxury homes, experienced lawyers and tax accountants, PR firms, and "'reputation managers' for inconvenient backstories".^[1]

There are many articles on Wikipedia about the oligarchs. We selected the articles on some of the richest and best known to see if they – or more likely their employees – have edited Wikipedia to remove embarrassing information, and whether known sockpuppets have edited the articles about them.

The Signpost's investigation has found that well known oligarch Alisher Usmanov hired the PR firm RLM Finsbury, whose employees then edited the Wikipedia article about Usmanov.^[2][3] Also, employees of the infamous PR firm Bell Pottinger, who were later blocked as sockpuppets, edited the articles of lesser known oligarchs Alexander Nesis^[4] and Arkadiy Abramovich.^[5]

Bell Pottinger was exposed to the world as an unethical Wikipedia whitewasher in 2011 following an undercover investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Bell Pottinger had told the reporters, who posed as Uzbeki officials known for human rights violations, that they could remove material from Wikipedia using "dark arts".^[6] Bell Pottinger continued to represent controversial clients. In 2017 they were forced to close after it was discovered that they were working for the Gupta family using a social media campaign that promoted racial hatred in South Africa.

RLM Finsbury was exposed as a whitewasher in 2012 when they were caught editing Wikipedia for Usmanov. They admitted their mistake and promised never to repeat it. Finsbury also represented another Russian oligarch, Andrei Skoch, and attempted to have information about his yacht removed from the social media site SuperYacht Fan.

But not all the articles on oligarchs that we examined showed such direct evidence of them rewriting the articles about themselves. The article on Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea F.C. and the father of Arkadiy, more or less appeared to neutrally present the facts of his life, even though it had been edited by about 50 now-blocked sockpuppets (deceptive users of multiple accounts). The articles on four other oligarchs were of varying quality with varying levels of evidence of sockpuppeting, but together they show a pattern of sockpuppet edits, often performed by the same sockpuppets or sockfarms (groups of sockpuppets who appear to be cooperating, and who are often blocked as a group) on the articles of multiple oligarchs.

Sockpuppets do not usually whitewash the same article with each edit. Some may simply update the oligarch's net worth frequently or copy edit the article. Others may add positive information or push negative information toward the bottom of the article. Some may even appear to be working against the oligarch's interest.

We remind our readers that any investigation of onWiki editing cannot prove who edited the articles based purely on editing records and other information made available on Wikipedia. For example an editor may mimic a sockpuppet or undeclared paid editor in an effort to embarrass the subject of an article, a practice known as "joe jobbing". We can, however, gather the evidence that is available either on-Wiki or off-Wiki.

An experienced Wikipedia editor, who asked to remain anonymous, described how the oligarch articles looked before the war.

Many of these articles had all the hallmarks of conflict-of-interest editing: The subject is highly controversial, but the controversies are obfuscated. They are lost in the body of the article among extensive details, trivia and poorly sourced puffery. This may include detailed coverage of every single philanthropic endeavor the subject has ever been involved in. The same pattern can be seen in articles related to political and economic elites in kleptocracies and autocracies in general.

Exceptions to this rule include the articles on Roman Abramovich and Alexander Nesis. "I was surprised by the extent that the article covered how Abramovich earned his wealth", said the anonymous editor, pointing out a recent BBC News article with new evidence, "yet the Wikipedia article had included similar material long before". The Nesis article seems "relatively small for an article heavily edited by COI accounts. COI accounts usually fill these articles with mundane trivia and puffery while also removing negative content."

The Wikipedia articles The Signpost investigated include the following:

Alisher Usmanov is considered to be among the richest and most powerful of the oligarchs and one of the closest to Putin.^[7][8][9] Although he was born in Uzbekistan, he is a resident of Russia and owns or controls Metalloinvest, MegaFon, and the newspaper Kommersant.

From August 2007 through April 2011 a firm controlled by Usmanov was the largest shareholder of Arsenal F.C. as he tried and failed to gain full control of the club. Usmanov's yacht, the Dilbar, valued at about $594 million, was seized by German authorities in early March. ^[10]

Sixteen now-banned sockpuppets – some from well known sockfarms – have edited the article. These include CarryOn95 and AliAlvi55 – both from the Antony1821 sockfarm, as well as Alfaweiss and Creative2016 – both from the Mikenew1953 sockfarm. The editing on the talk page was extensive and contentious. It included edits favoring Usmanov by three now-blocked editors Zezen, Demiurge1000 (who is also globally locked), and FoCuSandLeArN (who was blocked for undeclared paid editing).

The strongest evidence that Usmanov's employees edited the Wikipedia article about him is provided by The Times,^[2] with additional reporting by The Daily Telegraph^[3] and The Guardian.^[11] of a 2012 story that the RLM Finsbury PR firm which was employed by Usmanov to help in the London IPO of the firm MegaFon, edited the Wikipedia article to remove Usmanov's criminal history. He was convicted for corruption, fraud and the theft of state property and served six years in prison before the conviction was expunged in 1989. Finsbury admitted making the edits, but claimed that Usmanov was unaware of the edits and did not ask for them.

Roman Abramovich is perhaps the best-known Russian oligarch. He made his first billions of dollars in the 1990s during the controversial loans-for-shares privatization in oil, and then in the aluminum industry. When Russian President Boris Yeltsin left office, Abramovich became a close advisor to the new president, Putin. In 2003 he bought London's Chelsea F.C. and turned it into a top European club. The New Yorker reports unconfirmed stories that Putin personally ordered Abramovich to buy the soccer club.^[1]

Perhaps because of his long exposure in the British press as the owner of Chelsea F.C., the controversies surrounding Abramovich have been well covered in the Wikipedia article about him. Sockpuppets who have actively edited the article, such as Avaya1, have tended to copy edit, remove edits biased against Abramovich, or document his gifts to charities, e.g. here or in one case paint him as a victim of an unscrupulous Russian scammer [1].

Over 50 now-blocked sockpuppets edited this article. These include Earflaps, who edited articles on other oligarchs and on financial articles as part of the MusicLover650 sockfarm; CoffeeStation95, part of the Antony1821 sockfarm; DeltaGr, part of the Mikenew1953 sockfarm; and Russavia, a former Wikimedia Commons administrator who engaged in broad disruption of the English Wikipedia, and promoted the Russian airline industry.

Arkadiy Abramovich is the eldest son of Roman Abramovich. He became established in business in about 2010 when he was age 17. His investments have been in the oil, gas, and financial industries.

The article was edited by the sockpuppet Charlesstewart99, who was blocked for editing for the disgraced and now-defunct PR firm Bell Pottinger. The firm admitted to using "black arts" on Wikipedia while editing for the government of Uzbekistan but not for either Abramovich.

Oleg Deripaska also made his first billions during the Yeltsin era privatizations, mostly in aluminum. He has owned Rusal, the world's largest aluminum producer and the company Basic Element. After Yeltsin left office, he became close to Putin.

Thirty now-blocked sockpuppets edited the article about him, including some of the same socks who edited the article on Roman Abramovich, including Earflaps and CoffeeStation95. Selimabner6, part of the BurritoSlayer sock farm, completely rewrote many sections of the article in nine consecutive edits [2], whitewashing much of the article, for example changing "oligarch" to "business magnate".

Mikhail Fridman may be the most sympathetic oligarch. According to a March 17 interview in Bloomberg Business Week "Broke Oligarch Says Sanctioned Billionaires Have No Sway Over Putin" he was worth about $15 billion before the start of the war and may be worth $10 billion now, but because of the sanctions placed on him, he doesn’t have access to most of his cash now. He was born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine and has spoken out against the war. He is a longtime resident of London and is a citizen of both Russia and Israel. He became an entrepreneur in 1988 before the break-up of the Soviet Union. He made much of his money in banking with Alfa-Bank and later in oil with TNK-BP.

In 2018 SmartSE, a trusted editor and opponent of undeclared paid editing, wrote on the talk page of the Mikhail Fridman article "This article was written entirely by Earflaps who was an undisclosed paid editor." SmartSE was only slightly exaggerating: from September – November 2016, Earflaps made 71 edits to the Wikipedia article, almost completely rewriting it. Five other sockpuppets who edited the article, including Glaewnis (who was blocked for undeclared paid editing), Sovietsky pioneer and Poor billionaire – members of the Pionier sockfarm, as well as members of the BurritoSlayer and Antony1821 sockfarms.

German Khan is a close business associate of Mikhail Fridman, working with both Alfa Group and TNK-BP. The Wikipedia article about him has been tagged with a conflict-of-interest warning since December 2016 which was placed there by Doc James (who was not acting in his role as WMF trustee). Doc James requested the original sockpuppet investigation into Earflaps after noticing that he had written the majority of the article. Four other now-blocked socks, including Russavia and the undeclared paid editor Glaewnis, have edited the article.

Alexander Nesis is an engineer who got his start in the shipbuilding industry. He founded the ICT Group, which owns companies in the engineering, precious metals, and finance industries. Though the Wikipedia article on Nesis is fairly modest and well written, he may deserve the rank of oligarch. He is ICT Group's largest shareholder and had a net worth of $2.9 billion in 2020.

Mofgl68, an editor working for Bell Pottinger, was a single purpose account, who only edited the Nesis article, with one edit to ICT Group. Other blocked sockpuppets editing the article were Mddkpp and Oranjblud, who were blocked during the same sockpuppet investigation, as well as LamdaGr, and DeltaGr who was part of the Mikenew1953 sockfarm.

Andrei Skoch began his professional life as a banker and then met Usmanov and entered the metals industry, and eventually became a shareholder in Lebedinsky Mining, and Metalloinvest. In 1999 he was elected to Russia's Duma. The Guardian reported in 2012 that he was suspected of having ties to the mafia group Solntsevskaya Bratva.^[11] In 2020 his net worth was reported at over $6 billion. He hired RLM Finsbury as his PR firm – which also represented Usmanov at about the same time. Finsbury tried to remove information about Skoch's ownership of the yacht Madame Gu from a social media website.^[12]

Only two editors to have been blocked for sockpuppeting after editing the Wikipedia article about Skoch, including DeltaGr, part of the Mikenew1953 sockfarm. The now-blocked paid editor Glaewnis also edited the article.

We do not conclude that all of the above named oligarchs used paid editors to whitewash the Wikipedia pages about themselves. There is little doubt, however, that Alisher Usmanov hired the PR firm RLM Finsbury who then edited his Wikipedia article. Finsbury admitted as much in 2012. The evidence on Arkadiy Abramovich and Alexander Nesis is almost as strong. Bell Pottinger admitted that they edited the Wikipedia articles of their clients, though they did not mention the specific clients. Wikipedia's checkusers were then able to identify the Bell Pottinger paid accounts, including one which edited the Arkadiy Abranovich article and another which edited the Alexander Nesis article.

The evidence on the other five oligarchs is circumstantial. Fifty now-blocked sockpuppets or paid editors edited the article on Roman Abramovich, thirty edited the Deripaska article, but only six edited the Fridman article, only five edited the German Khan article, and only three edited the article on Skoch. The pattern of editing by the same sockpuppets or sockfarms suggests that a network of sockpuppets were used to edit many articles about oligarchs.

• Earflaps and the MusicLover650 sockfarm edited at least four of these articles – Roman Abramovich, Deripaska, Fridman, and Khan.
• The Mikenew sockfarm edited at least four – Usmanov, R. Abramovich, Nesis and Skoch
• The Antony1821 sockfarm also edited at least three of these articles – Usmanov, R. Abramovich, and Fridman.
• The now-blocked paid editor Glaewnis edited at least three – Fridman, Khan and Skoch
• The BurritoSlayer sockfarm edited at least two – Deripaska and Fridman
• The former Wikimedia Commons administrator Russavia edited at least two – R. Abramovich and Khan.

The ongoing 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in a considerable amount of coverage of Wikipedia's coverage of the war. But there were a number of other Wikipedia stories in the media on other topics, so if war articles aren't of interest to you, scroll on down and click away.

• From Stephen Harrison in Slate, a journalist who has long covered Wikipedia, came an article on March 1st. His article, "How the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Is Playing Out on English, Ukrainian, and Russian Wikipedia", goes in depth on the many debates and discussions that have blossomed across the three wikis since the invasion began. The article also provides some backdrop on the endless discussions about whether to title our article on Ukraine's capital Kiev or Kyiv, which finally resulted in a move from former to latter in July 2020.

• Russians Are Racing to Download Wikipedia Before It Gets Banned. by Annie Rauwerda, also in Slate. reports how Russians are downloading offline 29 gigabyte copies of Wikipedia through Kiwix offline browser.
  • Entrepreneur magazine also covered Kiwix and the download statistics (https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/422843)

• Morning Brew from Business Insider gives a broader, slap-dash overview of the war as covered by social media in How the Ukraine war is being experienced on social media. This story leads with the Wikipedia article 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and explains it all in one paragraph.

• A San Francisco Examiner article, "Russia’s Wikipedia volunteers risk their freedom for truth", examines the problem of editing Wikipedia in a country where free speech is under fresh attack. See News and Notes for more.

• An opinion piece in the Financial Times by John Thornhill, entitled "The truth about war is messy — just read Wikipedia", was released March 18th. Thornhill, a former bureau chief in Moscow for the newspaper, generally lauds the work of Wikipedians during the war and concludes that "it may be far from ideal that an online encyclopedia carries ever-changing, contested and kaleidoscopic versions of reality in different language editions", but attributes this messiness not to Wikipedia, but to reality - "the truth is messy." (subscription required)

• Russia can't catch a break: A deputy chairman of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation complained that Wikipedia (both Russian and others) was becoming a "bridgehead for informational war against Russia", and stated that Russian law-enforcement agencies identified 13 persons carrying out "politically engaged editing" of Wikipedia's articles, and about 30,000 bloggers, "participating in informational war against Russia". (rapsinews.ru – RAPSI, formerly RIA Novosti)
• Russia and Wikipedia: According to Novaya Gazeta, pro-Kremlin structures related to Yevgeny Prigozhin are actively involved in doxing "coordinators of an informational attack on Russia" including Wikipedia's editors. Novaya Gazeta is one of the few Russian newspapers which do not bow down to the Kremlin. Last year its editor Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for work done at the newspaper. It also reports that Special Communications Service of Russia (the division of Federal Protective Service) employees are trying to disseminate pro-Kremlin propaganda through editing Wikipedia's articles.^[1] – B, G, S

People enjoy reading about the recent seizures of Russian oligarchs' yachts, according to the Washington Post. They mention in passing that some of these yachts "have their own Wikipedia pages", without mentioning which ones. The Signpost knows: see Eclipse, Dilbar, Nord, and a dozen more on the list of motor yachts by length, and A at list of large sailing yachts. – S

The Intercept documents that "an IP address at the [State of Missouri] Office of Administration building" erased information from the biography of Steven Roberts on February 7. A spokesman for the state senator denied knowing about the edits and added, "As you are aware, Wikipedia is an unregulated, unedited, largely unsourced mass of information that is often inaccurate because anyone can post almost anything." -S

• The Noosphere and Wikipedia: Human Energy, a group of academics, published an interview with Wikipedia user Risker on how the noosphere relates to Wikipedia.
• Android & butts love Cleopatra: Input magazine reported on the mysterious phenomenon of Cleopatra's Wikipedia article being constantly trending, receiving high amounts of pageviews. The culprit appears to be Google Assistant: one of the suggested searches says "Try saying "Show Cleopatra on Wikipedia."
• Lenin did not say "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen," according to an occasional Wikipedian in Stuff. She goes on to explain how New Zealanders could better use Wikipedia. This includes History is written as it happens by Wikipedia
• Things are looking brighter in Kashmir with a revival in editing the Kashmiri Wikipedia according to the English-language newspaper Brighter Kashmir. The Kashmiri language is spoken by seven million people in Kashmir – in both the Indian controlled area and the Pakistani controlled area. The article doesn't mention how many speakers live in the Chinese controlled area, but presumably they are blocked from reading or editing by the Chinese. There are currently 30 active editors. Kashmir language Makes it to Wikipedia
• A history of Wikipedia since the 1960s: The student newspaper The Mancunion gives you everything you need to know about Wikipedia's history in 1,031 words. Starting with hacker culture in the 1960s, the article covers the broad strokes of the internet, the worldwide web, and even Nupedia before it gets to Wikipedia proper. Coverage after that is a bit sketchy, but the broad strokes are there and pretty much correct. If you want a history of Wikipedia that you can read in less than five minutes, this one is for you.
• Loser.com: "It's unclear exactly when Loser.com first started pointing towards Putin's Wikipedia entry." Mashable (see previous Signpost coverage)
• Vandalized biography of living person: A parliament spokesperson decried hoax editing to the biography of Jacob Oulanyah, the Speaker of the 11th Parliament of Uganda, saying he was dead. (The Monitor (Uganda))
• Putting the nerd in "Nerdist": Nerdist found MetalBallStudios' infographic comparing the road networks of many nations, drawing its data from Wikipedia, "super compelling". You might have seen MetalBallStudios do starship comparisons and other graphics against a 3D model of Manhattan.
• Molly's famous now: Fast Company is the latest to feature an interview with GorillaWarfare about her views on cryptocurrencies, DAOs and Wikipedia. here
• Wiley opens up to editors: 22,000 books and over 1,600 journals will be available for free for high-frequency Wikipedia editors [3] through The Wikipedia Library (The Bookseller)

Reviewed by Bri

The authors of the study "Dataset of first appearances of the scholarly bibliographic references on Wikipedia articles"^[1] developed "a methodology to detect [when] the oldest scholarly reference [was] added" to 180,795 unique pages on English Wikipedia. The authors concluded the dataset can help investigate "how the scholarly references on Wikipedia grew and which editors added them". The paper includes a list of the top English Wikipedia editors in a number of scientific research fields.

Reviewed by Gerald Waldo Luis

A four-author study was published by the journal Insights on February 2, 2022 titled "Exploring open access coverage of Wikipedia-cited research across the White Rose Universities".^[2] As implied, it analyzes English Wikipedia references published by universities of the White Rose University Consortium—Leeds, Sheffield, and York—and examines why open access (OA) is an important feature for Wikipedians to use. It summarizes that the English Wikipedia is still lacking in OA references—that is, those from the consortium.

The study opens by stating that despite the open source nature of Wikipedia editing, there is no requirement to link to OA sites where possible. It then criticizes this lack of scrutiny, reasoning that it is contrary to Wikipedia's goal of being an accessible portal to knowledge. Several following sections encapsulate the importance of Wikipedia among the research community, which makes OA crucial; this has been recognized by the World Health Organization when they announced they would make their COVID-19 content free to use for Wikipedia. Wikipedia has also proven to be a factor in increasing paper readerships.

Overall, 300 references were sampled for this study. The authors also added: "Of the 293 sample citations where an affiliation could be validated, 291 (99.3%) had been correctly attributed." "In total," the study summarizes, "there were 6,454 citations of the [consortium's] research on the English Wikipedia in the period 1922 to April 2019." It then presented tables breaking down these references to specific categories: Sheffield was cited the most (2,523), while York was the least (1,525). Biology-related articles cited the consortium the most (1,707), while art and writing articles cited them the least (7). As expected by the authors, journal articles—specifically from Sheffield—were cited the most (1,565). There is also a table breaking the references down by different OA licenses. York had the most OA sources cited on the English Wikipedia (56%). There are fewer sources that have non-commercial and non-derivative Creative Commons licenses. The study, however, disclaims that this is not a review of all English Wikipedia references.

In a penultimate "discussion" section, the study says that while there are many OA references, it is still "some way to go before all Wikipedia citations are fully available [in OA]", with nearly half of the sampled references paywalled, thus stressing the need for more OA scholarly works. However, with Plan S, a recent OA-endorsing initiative, the study expressed optimism in this goal. It also proposes the solution of more edit-a-thons, which usually involve librarians and researchers who can help with this OA effort. The study notes that Leeds once held an edit-a-thon too. Its "conclusion" section states that "This [effort] can be achieved through greater awareness regarding Wikipedia's function as an influential and popular platform for communicating science, [a] greater understanding […] as to the importance of citing OA works over [paywalled works]."

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

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.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

From the abstract:^[3]

"In this paper, we aim to provide an empirical characterization of the reasons why and how Wikipedia cites external sources to comply with its own verifiability guidelines. First, we construct a taxonomy of reasons why inline citations are required, by collecting labeled data from editors of multiple Wikipedia language editions. We then crowdsource a large-scale dataset of Wikipedia sentences annotated with categories derived from this taxonomy. Finally, we design algorithmic models to determine if a statement requires a citation, and to predict the citation reason."

From the abstract:^[4]

"We are presenting a rank of academic journals classified as pertaining to psychology, most cited on Wikipedia, as well as a rank of general-themed academic journals that were most frequently referenced in Wikipedia entries related to psychology. We then compare the list to journals that are considered most prestigious according to the SciMago journal rank score. Additionally, we describe the time trajectories of the knowledge transfer from the moment of the publication of an article to its citation in Wikipedia. We propose that the citation rate on Wikipedia, next to the traditional citation index, may be a good indicator of the work’s impact in the field of psychology."

From the abstract:^[5]

"we discuss the new methodological technique that evaluates the impact of university based on popularity (number of page-views) of their alumni’s pages on Wikipedia. [...] Preliminary analysis shows that the number of page-views is higher for the contemporary persons that prove the perspectives of this approach [sic]. Then, universities were ranked based on the methodology and compared to the famous international university rankings ARWU and QS based only on alumni scales: for the top 10 universities, there is an intersection of two universities (Columbia University, Stanford University)."

From the abstract and paper:^[6]

"The ENP-China project employs Natural Language Processing methods to tap into sources of unprecedented scale with the goal to study the transformation of elites in Modern China (1830-1949). One of the subprojects is extracting various kinds of data from biographies and, for that, we created a large corpus of biographies automatically collected from the Chinese and English Wikipedia. The dataset contains 228,144 biographical articles from the offline Chinese Wikipedia copy and is supplemented with 110,713 English biographies that are linked to a Chinese page. We also enriched this bilingual corpus with metadata that records every mentioned person, organization, geopolitical entity and location per Wikipedia biography and links the names to their counterpart in the other language." "By inspecting the [Chinese Wikipedia dump] XML files, we concluded that there was no metadata that identifies the biographies and, therefore, we had to rely on the unstructured textual data of the pages. [...] we decided to rely on deep learning for text classification. [...] The task is to assign a document to one or more predefined categories, in our case, “biography” or “non-biography.” [...] For our extraction, we used one of the most widely used contextualized word representations to date, BERT, combined with the neural network's architecture, BiLSTM. BiLSTM is state of the art for many NLP tasks, including text classification. In our case, we trained a model with examples of Chinese biographies and non-biographies so that it relies on specific semantic features of each type of entry in order to predict its category."

See also an accompanying blog post.

Apparently the authors were unaware of Wikipedia categories such as zh:Category:人物 (or its English Wikipedia equivalent Category:People) which might have provided an useful additional feature for the machine learning task of distinguishing biographies and non-biographies. On the other hand, they made use of Wikidata to generate a training dataset of biographies and non-biographies.

From the abstract:^[7]

"...we investigate the synergistic effect of two different types of features: statistical and pattern-based ones with DeepFM as our classification model which has not been explored in a similar context and problem for predicting whether a Wikidata editor will stay or leave the platform. Our experimental results show that using the two sets of features with DeepFM provides the best performance regarding AUROC (0.9561) and F1 score (0.8843), and achieves substantial improvement compared to using either of the sets of features and over a wide range of baselines"

From the abstract and paper (preprint version):^[8]

"we have studied the ongoing crisis in which experienced and prolific editors withdraw. We performed extensive analysis of the editor activities and their language usage to identify features that can forecast prolific Wikipedians, who are at risk of ceasing voluntary services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which proposes a scalable prediction pipeline, towards detecting the prolific Wikipedians, who might be at a risk of retiring from the platform and, thereby, can potentially enable moderators to launch appropriate incentive mechanisms to retain such `would-be missing' valued Wikipedians."

"We make the following novel contributions in this paper. – We curate a first ever dataset of missing editors, a comparable dataset of active editors along with all the associated metadata that can appropriately characterise the editors from each dataset.[...]

– First we put forward a number of features describing the editors (activity and behaviour) which portray significant differences between the active and the missing editors.[...]

– Next we use SOTA machine learning approaches to predict the currently prolific editors who are at the risk of leaving the platform in near future. Our best models achieve an overall accuracy of 82% in the prediction task. [...]

An intriguing finding is that some very simple factors like how often an editor’s edits are reverted or how often an editor is assigned administrative tasks could be monitored by the moderators to determine whether an editor is about to leave the platform"

I love poets, painters and pianists. I even like some politicians. I like people from Russia. I like people from Ukraine. I like people from a lot of countries. I can't bear the thought of houses and cities being destroyed that were once the place of birth of people whose books, music and paintings I love. Here are photos of some of the people whose work I admire – and who were born in Odessa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Zhytomyr, Lviv, Dvirkivshchyna or Bolshoy Fontan. Nationality isn't important. Culture is. I hope that once we will only remember Charlie Chaplin, and not the dictator he made look ridiculous.

• 
  Lesya Ukrainka
  born in Novohrad-Volynskyi, 1871
• 
  Kazimir Malevich
  born in Kyiv, 1879
• 
  Anna Akhmatova
  born in Odessa, 1889
• 
  Mikhail Bulgakov
  born in Kyiv, 1891
• 
  Isaac Babel
  born in Odessa, 1894
• 
  Ilya Ilf
  born in Odessa, 1897
• 
  Golda Meir
  born in Kyiv, 1898
• 
  Yevgeny Petrov
  born in Odessa, 1902
• 
  Vladimir Horowitz,
  born in Kyiv, 1903
• 
  Sviatoslav Richter
  born in Zhytomyr, 1915
• 
  Emil Gilels
  born in Odessa, 1916
• 
  Simon Wiesenthal
  born in Buchach, 1908
• 
  Zbigniew Herbert
  born in Lviv, 1924
• 
  Mark Taimanov
  born in Kharkiv, 1926
• 
  Andriy Shevchenko
  born in Dvirkivshchyna, 1976

• 
  Moscow, 24 Febr. 2022
• 
  London, 24 Febr. 2022
• 
  Berlin, 3 March 2022
• 
  Paris, 5 March 2022

As Sting said in 1985 (and again in a new version on Instagram in 2022^[1]):
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too

The Discussion Report is back, and here to stay! The editors of The Signpost regret that the past four months were not covered. We have attempted to summarize in-depth some previous discussions and briefly report on others. Please review the archives of Wikipedia:Centralized discussion or various other logs to see further discussions.

For extensive coverage of this discussion's origins, see the January deletion report.

A discussion was initiated on 27 January 2022 with many proposals regarding changes to the subject notability guideline WP:NSPORT. 13 subproposals were created.

• Proposal 1 suggested making athlete biographies required to demonstrate GNG when notability is challenged at WP:AFD. There was no consensus for this proposal.
• Proposal 2 suggested making the guideline explicitly state articles can not use database, personal, or team pages as basis of creation. There was consensus against this proposal.
• Proposal 3 suggested removing all simple or mere "participation" criteria in NSPORT, outside of ones related to Olympics and equivalent events. There was consensus for the proposal.
• Proposal 4 proposed modifying all provisions of NSPORTS that provide that participation in "one" game/match such that the minimum participation level is increased to "three" games/matches. There was no consensus for this proposal.
• Proposal 5 suggested implementing a requirement that all sports biographies and sports season/team articles must, from inception, include at least one example of significant coverage from a reliable, independent source. Mere database entries would be insufficient for creation of a new biography article. There was consensus for this proposal.
• Proposal 6 proposed creating a PROD variant for articles that do not meet the standards set by proposal 5. There was consensus against this proposal.
• Proposal 7 suggested removing all NSPORTS-related guideline, except for a reminder to follow WP:GNG, and a requirement that articles can not use database, personal, or team pages as part of an assertion of notability. There was consensus against this proposal.
• Proposal 8 proposed rewriting the introduction to clearly state that GNG is the applicable guideline, and articles may not be created or kept unless they meet GNG. There was partial consensus for this proposal.
• Proposals 9 and 11 suggested rewriting the lede of NSPORTS. There was no consensus for these two proposals.
• Proposal 10 would require editors to do research and provide summary statistics based on a random sample of articles within 30 days in order to justify particular sections of the guideline or else those section will be removed. There was no consensus for this proposal.
• Proposal 12 was moved to the talk page of Wikipedia:Notability as a more appropiate venue.
• Proposal 13 proposed that no more subproposals be created, and was passed.

Wugapodes, RandomCanadian, and Cbl62 collectively closed all of the subproposals of the discussion. – E

A major request for comment (RfC) on administrator activity requirements was opened on 17 March by Arbitration Committee member Worm That Turned. The current standard, adopted in 2011, requires that an admin be completely inactive for a year before their bit may be removed. Many admins are only marginally active—less than half have made more than 30 edits in the past two months—and multiple ArbCom proceedings in recent months have centered on questionable behavior from marginally active legacy admins. The proposal suggests increasing the minimum to an average of 20 edits per year over five years. The (active) community appears highly enthusiastic about the idea, with the 10 oppose !votes as of press time barely noticeable in a blizzard of 170 supports. The only real question is whether there will be consensus for a further heightened standard of an average of 100 edits per year over three years first raised by ArbCom member Barkeep49. ^[2] – Sd

A Request for Comment regarding whether source deprecation RfCs should require certain user access levels (e.g. autoconfirmed, extendedconfirmed) was opened on 11 January 2022. Editors discussed a variety of viewpoints. Many editors supporting Option 1 (the status quo no protection) pointed to previous deprecation RfCs where users that were sockpuppeting were all extendedconfirmed. An example provided was The Jewish Chronicle RfC. They expressed concerns that this change would not benefit discussions for the majority of deprecation RfCs. Other contributors expressed protecting these discussion pages goes against User:Jimbo Wales/Statement of principles and WP:RULECREEP. Meanwhile, editors supporting Option 2/3 (protection) cited that if only more experienced editors were allowed to participate, quality of discussions will improve, and that deprecation RfCs are already in a very complicated field inside Wikipedia that newcomers might not understand or even have strong opinions for. The RfC was closed on 2 February 2022 with general consensus to keep the status quo of no protection. This close did not override consensus regarding ARBPIA-related RfC protections. – E

This section covers discussions that were not covered in-depth above, in chronological order.

• Talk header: SilkTork proposed that the {{Talk header}} template be allowed to be added to any talk page, including new ones, on 31 October 2021. Consensus was determined by Scottywong on 10 March 2022 that the current guidelines around the template were too restrictive, but there was no concrete consensus on specific changes to the documentation. However, there was consensus that the template should not be mass-added to pages using automated or semi-automated tools.
• Reliability of GNS: Contributor FOARP posted to the reliable sources noticeboard on 8 November 2021 seeking clarification on whether GNS (the GEOnet Names Server) was a reliable source. ProcrastinatingReader closed the discussion on 27 December 2021, finding consensus that the source was generally reliable for locations & coordinates, generally unreliable for feature classes, and that it does not satisfy the "Legal recognition" requirement of WP:GEOLAND.
• Deletion discussion for ARV: Spartaz opened a Miscellany for deletion discussion on 6 January 2022 to delete Wikipedia:Administrative action review, a forum opened after community consensus was established in a Request for Comment. RL0919 concluded the discussion on the same day with a result of "speedy keep", citing that MfD was not the proper venue for the discussion, and suggesting that a Request for Comment would be the most appropriate next step.
• Main page volunteer note: Jayen466 suggested that a note regarding how Wikimedia Foundation projects are edited by volunteers be added to the Main Page on 30 December 2021. Strong support for the change was ascertained by MSGJ on 18 January 2022. ^[2]
• Community Wishlist Survey: The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 opened for proposals on January 10, 2022 and opened for voting on January 28, 2022. Please see the Technology Report for previous coverage of the Wishlist. ^[2]
• First pillar: SportingFlyer suggested removing the mention of "almanacs and gazeteers" in the first pillar on 17 December 2021. GRuban closed the discussion on 9 February 2022, finding consensus for the status quo. ^[2]
• DS topic areas: As initially covered in the January and February arbitration reports, the Arbitration Committee requested the feedback of community members regarding removing certain discretionary sanctions topic areas which were among the oldest and did not reflect the current state of consensus among the community.
• TFA running period: Sdkb proposed to adjust the TFA (Today's featured article) running period from the status quo of not allowing articles to run twice in 5 years, to a specific proposal involving tiered rules regulated with vital article classification. This was posted on 4 January 2022. Isabelle Belato closed the discussion on 23 February 2022, finding no consensus and suggesting further workshopping and discussion. ^[2]
• 2022 steward elections: The 2022 Stewards Elections opened on 7 February 2022 and closed on 26 February 2022. For further coverage, please see News and Notes. ^[2]
• UCoC enforcement ratification: The Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines finished the drafting stage on January 24, 2022. The Wikimedia Foundation submitted the guidelines for community ratification on March 7, 2022, and the voting period closed on March 21, 2022. The result of the vote was not available before the publication deadline. For further coverage, please see News and Notes. ^[2]
• Draftification of older articles: Chess proposed on 9 February 2022 banning the draftification (moving to draftspace) of any article over 90 days old without consensus being determined at Articles for Deletion. Joe Roe found rough consensus for the proposal on 24 March 2022, but weaker consensus for many other aspects of implementing it. The closer suggested more discussion on the topic.
• Ukraine-related DYKs: SL93 questioned whether DYKs (Did you Know hooks) relating to Russia and Ukraine should be allowed to appear on the main page. Compassionate727 closed the discussion, summarizing a consensus that Russia and Ukraine-related hooks should be scrutinized more carefully for compliance with community policy, and that it is generally fine for these types of hooks to be approved.

The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 is taking place as a hybrid event on May 20–22, 2022. The Hackathon will be held online and there will be grants available to support local in-person meetups around the world. The Hackathon is for anyone who contributes (or wants to contribute) to Wikimedia’s technical areas – as code creators, maintainers, translators, designers, technical writers and other technical roles. You can come with a project in mind, join an existing project, or create something new with others. The choice is yours! Newcomers are welcome. If you have any accessibility or translation requests, please contact hlepp@wikimedia.org. A Wikimedia Hackathon is a space for the technical community to come together and work together on technical projects, learn from each other, and make new friends. The Hackathon will primarily be held online. Local affiliates can also apply for grants to host in-person local meetups. Meetups can be anything from social gatherings with food, to a party for watching the opening or closing ceremony, to renting a venue where people can participate together in the online event. The Code of Conduct for Wikimedia's Technical Spaces will be in effect throughout the event, on all platforms, discussion channels, and at local meetups. Please have a look at it and ensure you are willing and able to follow it.

It has been almost 12 years since the current default desktop skin (Vector) was deployed. Since then, web design, as well as the expectations of readers and editors, have evolved. At the same time, the interface has been enriched with extensions, gadgets and user scripts. Most of these were not coordinated visually or cross-wiki.

In 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation Web team took a close look at Vector. It was time to take some of these ideas and bring them to the default experience of all users, on all wikis, in an organized, consistent way. Inspired by the existing tools, The Web team decided to build out improvements to the desktop experience based on research and communities' feedback. So the Desktop Improvements project began.

Its goals are to make Wikimedia wikis more welcoming, increase the utility for viewing, and maintain the utility for editing. The Web team measures the increase of trust and positive sentiment towards our sites, and the utility of our sites (the usage of common actions such as search and language switching).

Improvements that the team has worked on include: logo reconfiguration, a collapsible sidebar, limiting content width, moving the search widget (and other search improvements), adding a more intuitive language switcher, implementing a user menu, programming a sticky side and article header, improving the table of contents, and rearranging page tools. Next, they will make general aesthetic improvements.

Currently, on most wikis, only logged-in users are able to opt-in individually by selecting Vector (2022) in preferences. On almost 30 early adopter wikis, the changes are deployed for all by default, and logged-in users are (and will be) able to opt-out. The team increases the set of early adopter wikis gradually.

Before June 2022, they will begin conversations with all the communities of the largest wikis, including the English and German-language Wikipedias, to make the improvements default on those wikis. They are inviting everyone to an open meeting with them which will take place on Tuesday March 29 at 18:00 on Zoom.

Sunflower is an upload tool created by Fastily for macOS which makes it easy to batch-upload files to the Wikimedia Commons. The tool has a clean, intuitive yet featured-packed interface. The project's maintainer describes it as a simple and fresh take on uploading files to Commons. This means it won't do everything under the sun, nor should you expect that. Sunflower is currently available for macOS Monterey (12.2 or newer). More details are on Commons.

In last month's arbitration report, we saw many discretionary sanctions reviewed, two cases involving long-time administrators, and the continuation of the case involving off-site coordination among some members of the skeptic movement (largely associated with the "Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia" group). This month is some more of the same, and some more of the different.

No case requests were declined in March. Two cases were processed: one was accepted and suspended, and one was closed. One motion for a topic-ban removal was enacted, one amendment was carried out, one block appeal was processed, and one request for clarification and amendment is open.

Wow, was that exciting or what?! I thought so too. Here is all of what happened (and, indeed, is happening).

No fire, but a little brimstone

The Skepticism and coordinated editing case was closed on March 2. As I participated in this case by giving a preliminary statement, I've refrained from commenting in depth (although, for the curious, my opinion^[1] is explicated at length in said statement). That said, the case's remedies are fairly straightforward. One editor (A. C. Santacruz) was reminded to be nice, and two (Roxy the dog and Rp2006) were warned to be nice. The latter of those two, Rp2006, was also topic banned from "edits related to living people associated with or of interest to scientific skepticism, broadly construed". Additionally, the "Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia" group was advised that

A presence on English Wikipedia, perhaps as its own WikiProject or as a task force of WikiProject Skepticism, will create more transparency and lessen some of the kinds of suspicion and conflict that preceded this case. It could also provide a place for the GSoW to get community feedback about its training which would increase its effectiveness.

Another open-and-suspend case

On March 16, a case was opened and suspended the same day regarding Geschichte, an administrator and editor since 2004. In preliminary statements, filer Dennis Brown described a February 19 incident in which Geschichte blocked an editor (Jax 0677) during an edit war. Brown said the block was out of process, a violation of WP:ADMINACCT, and grounds for desysopping. Many others commented in support of some action being taken, or at least investigated. Geschichte's activity dropped off afterwards – since February 22, they have made just three edits, the most recent on March 13. While opinion was divided on whether this constituted a desysoppable offense, consensus was clear that Geschichte needed to be present and respond to the issues at hand. Of course, I'm not one to speak ill about people being mysteriously absent for things they really ought to be present for.^[2] At any rate, the case was accepted on the 16th, with a 10–1 motion passing to accept-and-suspend:

This case will be opened but suspended for a period of three months.

If Geschichte should return to active editing on the English Wikipedia during this time and request that this case be resumed, the Arbitration Committee shall unsuspend the case by motion and it will proceed through the normal arbitration process. Such a request may be made by email to arbcom-en@wikimedia.org or at the clerks' noticeboard. Geschichte is temporarily desysopped for the duration of the case.

If such a request is not made within three months of this motion or if Geschichte resigns his administrative tools, this case shall be automatically closed, and Geschichte shall be permanently desysopped. If tools are resigned or removed, in the circumstances described above, Geschichte may regain the administrative tools at any time only via a successful request for adminship.

Banned user to roam free

MustafaO, an editor previously indef-blocked and community-banned in April 2020 pursuant to this SPI, was unblocked on March 21 following a successful appeal. There is a whole crapload of chatter about it on the ACN talk page – nearly thirty two thousand bytes of it, to be exact.

Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy – it just plays one on TV

Several discretionary sanctions procedures and templates were altered in an amendment process that began on March 15. Edge-of-your-seat thrills included combining multiple topic areas into a single {{Ds/alert}} transclusion, and adding a lead section to WP:AC/DS to summarize the system. The changes were approved on March 22.

Topic ban lifted

On March 22, a motion was passed lifting Supreme Deliciousness's topic ban (issued as Remedy 8 of the Kurds and Kurdistan case covered in February's arbitration report).

Get your kicks on AE 66

Additionally, there were 66 total actions in March's arbitration enforcement log. Most were in common arb enforcement areas (AP2, BLP, COVID-19, EE, and the like), although there was a rare instance of a ARB911 semi-protection.

One open ARCA for the happiest little DS area on en.wp

Currently, there is one open request for clarification and amendment, relating to Palestine-Israel topics. This concerns the vagaries of extended-confirmed protection as it applies to articles and talk pages covered by applicable sanctions.

WikiProject Tropical Cyclones members in the eye of the storm

Yesterday saw a new case request, WikiProject Tropical Cyclones Discord. This request, filed by TheresNoTime, concerns alleged off-wiki canvassing by two members of WikiProject Tropical Cyclones (MarioProtIV and Hurricane Noah) on an instant-messaging group maintained by the project. The aged and wise among us will remember when this was called "IRC", "AIM" or "ICQ". Now it is called "Discord", which seems fitting, since people are always arguing about it. Previously, the issue was brought up in an ANI thread by Compassionate727 (also a party to the requested case) – it's been brought to ArbCom due to privacy issues concerning logs of off-wiki discussions. Currently at 6–0–0, it looks quite likely to be accepted.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Vladimir Putin		3,815,361		As the invasion enters its third week, #1 gets accused of more war crimes in every passing week, not surprising, as it follows the same tactics as the Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, Europe (mostly Poland) deals with the biggest migrant crisis since the Second World War, with 3.2 million refugees (as of 14 March, 1.8 million going to Poland alone).
2	2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine		3,617,897
3	The Batman (film)		2,348,440		Breaking up the horrors of war is the tension of living in Gotham City. An exceptionally made, even if fairly long, superhero movie that emphasizes why Batman is known as the World's Best Detective (Robert Pattinson's Dark Knight has to go through much investigation against a Zodiac Killer-inspired Riddler), The Batman opened to glowing reviews and has shown that like Spider-Man: No Way Home, superhero movies will make money as if there wasn't a pandemic, with an opening of $134 million in the US alone.
4	Ukraine		1,450,466		Ukrainian cities continue to be destroyed, with the Siege of Mariupol seeing some of the worst fighting and the highest levels of casulties (the highest estimates suggest the siege has 20,000 civilian casulties, more than the rest of the war put together).
5	Russo-Ukrainian War		1,212,786
6	Anna Sorokin		1,197,275		This here writer confesses all this attention on Wikipedia made him start watching Inventing Anna, chronicling another Russian doing unsavory things – though at least Sorokin (played with an unusual accent by the woman on the left, Julia Garner) only caused financial damage as she pretended to be an heiress to infiltrate New York's high society.
7	Volodymyr Zelenskyy		1,189,635		The actor/comedian, turned Ukrainian president, turned war-leader remains defiant, refusing to yield any part of his country without a fight.
8	Elizabeth Holmes		887,288		HBO already made a documentary about Theranos and how their would-be revolution in clinical tests turned out to not work at all. And now Hulu is doing a miniseries where Amanda Seyfried plays the company's CEO whose ambitions were only matched by her willingness to lie her way to the top (and eventual bottom – Holmes managed the feat of being worth $4.5 billion in 2015 and $0 the following year, and earlier this year was found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors).
9	Deaths in 2022		866,600		I'm so insecure, I think That I'll die before I drink...
10	International Women's Day		744,903		March 8 is the date of this holiday celebrating the achievement of women, and a reminder they still need to fight for their rights.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	The Kashmir Files		2,623,323		One of India's latest big movies, The Kashmir Files portrays the story of a teacher from the Kashmir Valley fleeing the insurgency in Kashmir in 1990. The film has become a box-office hit, and its cinematography was generally praised, as were the performances of the cast. The film has been actively promoted by India's ruling party, the BJP, and has been exempted from taxation in most states it governs. If you know much about the BJP, however, what comes next will not surprise you. The film, which portrays the insurgency as a genocide, has been highly controversial, with critics accusing it of historical revisionism and attempting to stir up Islamophobia, and some calling it Hindu nationalist propaganda.
2	2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine		2,571,989		The invasion drags on into its fourth week, having failed to accomplish its goal of a quick victory. With the war stagnating, there's not much to write, other than that it continues to be awful.
3	William Hurt		2,092,026		William Hurt died at the age of 71 of prostate cancer, finishing off an acting career that included an Academy Award for Kiss of the Spider Woman, and at times causing big impact in just one scene (he had an Oscar nomination for the less than 10 minutes he appears in A History of Violence!). The Marvel Cinematic Universe crowd in particular lamented that they won't see Hurt's Thunderbolt Ross become the Red Hulk bar a recast.
4	Vladimir Putin		1,953,038		The president of Russia has now been accused of war crimes by multiple governments.
5	Scott Hall		1,646,861		A professional wrestler and member of the WWF Hall of Fame, Hall, aka Razor Ramon, passed away this week.
6	The Batman (film)		1,266,594		He is vengeance, he is the night, he is at the top of the box office for the third week in a row. Robert Pattinson's Dark Knight has already grossed more than half a billion dollars worldwide.
7	Turning Red		1,055,852		Pixar has complained about having their last three features relegated to Disney+ while Disney still put out Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto in theaters. The latest one is Turning Red, about a Chinese-Canadian teenager who has to deal with parental demands for perfectionism, getting tickets to see her favorite boy band, and the fact that strong emotions make her become a red panda. Reviews were very positive, and this here writer admits the movie is entertaining even if not close to Pixar's best as Soul or Luca were.
8	Anna Sorokin		959,677		The fraudster and subject of Inventing Anna is still on the list. Having finished the show, this here writer understands why, it's quite a compelling series, and certainly makes one want to visit Wikipedia to confirm if Sorokin, pretending to be rich heiress Anna Delvey, actually did those things that earn in every episode a variation on the disclaimer "This story is completely true. Except for the parts that are totally made up".
9	Vivek Agnihotri		926,017		#1 has also brought its director onto the list.
10	Saint Patrick's Day		909,332		Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was celebrated on Thursday March 17, in Ireland and around the world by the Irish, the Irish diaspora, and friends and well wishers. Actor John C. Reilly was the international guest of honour at the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Dublin city. This year Saint Patrick's day coincided with the Jewish holiday Purim and the Hindu festival Holi.

• Cleopatra – Turns out the consistently high views are because Google Assistant suggests people to visit the page. Still not a good enough reason for inclusion.
• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

The popular game Wordle which became viral recently appears to have a dramatic impact on the pageviews of the articles about its 5-letter answers. Our investigation into the last 30 Wordle answers (as of 6 Febuary 2022) and the corresponding article pageviews showed that each and every page had a large increase in view count. More coverage is to continue in a later issue. – E

The news, the memes, the group DMs, and the edit wars have been subsumed by a singular topic in the last month. Most of us know what it is; indeed, some of us are living through it. It follows, then, that article deletion discussions would take a similar tack. Indeed, the largest and most-active discussions of this month have been overwhelmingly focused on events, people, and topics related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with few exceptions. Usually, the deletion report explores a variety of different discussions, but this month they're quite similar, so I will try a different format. This is a fairly short deletion report, owing to time constraints; if you want more detailed information (including a breakdown of !voting patterns, close trends and overall activity) feel free to check out the March index of the Oracle for Deletion, which I wrote a few months ago and use to gather statistics for these reports.

Of the ten longest AfDs (by character count), six were related to the conflict in Ukraine. Of the ten most active (by !vote count), seven were Ukraine-related; four articles appeared in both lists. By characters:

• Marina Ovsyannikova, a Russian journalist arrested in March after publicly voicing her opposition to the war on a live news broadcast (54 !votes, 69,497 bytes, closed "keep").
• Russian fascism (ideology), an alleged POVFORK concerning a school of far-right Russian nationalist ideology (22 !votes, 49,940 bytes, closed "no consensus").
• List of Russian generals killed during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a list of... well, you get the idea (73 !votes, 48,329 bytes, closed "keep").
• Vitaly Gerasimov, a Russian Ground Forces major general and possible member of the above-mentioned list (36 !votes, 41,284 bytes, closed "keep").
• Historical background of the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, an overview article nominated for deletion by one of its editors after a dispute regarding inclusion of content in the article (10 !votes, 31,358 bytes, closed "keep").
• Azov Special Purpose Regiment, another alleged WP:POVFORK, this time about a rename of the right-wing Azov Battalion after its incorporation into the Ukrainian National Guard. (18 !votes, 31,207 bytes, currently ongoing).

By !votes:

• Mark Bernstein (Wikimedian), an edge case bringing up WP:OUTING concerns (29 !votes, 29,293 bytes, procedurally closed after WP:BLP1E concerns were addressed by a retitling of the article).
• Battle of Techno House 2022, a meme video of a Russian soldier shooting a door for no apparent reason (26 !votes, 25,020 bytes, closed "delete").
• Russian Kyiv Convoy, a procession of Russian military vehicles sent off towards the capital city of Ukraine (20 !votes, 20,996 bytes, closed "no consensus").

There were, however, some discussions representing other topics. These represented a minority of both lists: between them, only 7 concerned subjects unrelated to the war in Ukraine. By characters:

• Jessica Foschi, a former competition swimmer who was disqualified from the 1995 national championships due to apparent steroid use (16 !votes, 75,443 bytes, currently ongoing).
• Werewolves in popular culture — Awoo!^[1] (18 !votes, 34,194 bytes, closed "merge").
• Checkley Sin, a Hong Kong record producer and political candidate (6 !votes, 33,660 bytes, currently ongoing).
• STANLIB, a South African asset management company currently on its second AfD nomination (3 !votes, 32,509 bytes, currently ongoing).

By !votes:

• Archishman Sarker, a scholar in the humanities suspected by many participants of writing a Wikipedia autobiography (23 !votes, 16,008 bytes, closed "delete").
• Vaush, a left-wing YouTube pundit at his second AfD nomination, dedicated to proving that new media acolytes can be just as good as traditional TV talking heads at starting drama on Twitter. (20 !votes, 26,500 bytes, still ongoing).
• Randolph Lablache, a football player whose deletion discussion invoked long-running WP:NSPORTS concerns (19 !votes, 26,183 bytes, closed "delete").

In honor of World Backup Day on March 31, this month we look back at when early backups of Wikipedia were recovered, and reflect on the importance of keeping data safe. The following Signpost article, by Jarry1250, originally appeared in the 20 December 2010 edition as "Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News".

“	This is the new WikiPedia! The idea here is to write a complete encyclopedia from scratch, without peer review process, etc. Some people think that this may be a hopeless endeavor, that the result will necessarily suck. We aren't so sure. So, let's get to work!	”
— Wikipedia main page, January 2001

Tim Starling, a developer and system administrator working for the Wikimedia Foundation, announced this week his discovery of backups of Wikipedia pages from February, March and August 2001, which, he said, were assumed to be permanently lost. Though it was originally thought possible that the later backups might include early revisions of Wikipedias in other major languages such as French and German, it now seems that the ad hoc nature of the backups meant that they only refer to the English-language "WikiPedia".

"I've long been interested in Wikipedia's history, and I've tried in the past to locate such backups", he said. "I asked various people who might have had one. I had given up hope." However, he uncovered two UseModWiki files which contained a record of every change made to Wikipedia from January 15 to August 17, 2001. The files are available to download here; Brian Mingus has created an online index of articles in the encyclopedia at the time (example revisions to the 'boat' article), as has Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle [4], who also compiled a list of the top 20 Wikipedia contributors from these early stages. Given the discovery's timing, weeks before the tenth anniversary of the English-language (and first) Wikipedia, interesting snippets (such as the one at the top of this article) are also being collated on a special "Wikipedia in the Beginning" page.

As for what happens now with the revisions – which are invaluable in terms of correctly attributing contributors to the project in line with its copyleft licence – Tim writes, "I'm developing a script which will import the dump into a modified MediaWiki instance, the idea being that I can then export XML from it [i.e. transform it into a modern style database dump] ... I'm not sure when that will be."

This Wikipedia essay, originally titled You don't need to cite that the sky is blue; it was started in 2007 and written by 91 editors. You may edit the essay, but please do so at WP:BLUE and not on The Signpost.

Verifiability is an important and core policy of Wikipedia. Article content should be backed up by reliable sources wherever needed to show that the presentation of material on Wikipedia is consistent with the views that are presented in scholarly discourse or the world at large. Such sources help to improve the encyclopedia.

However, many editors misunderstand the citation policy, seeing it as a tool to enforce, reinforce, or cast doubt upon a particular point of view in a content dispute, rather than as a means to verify Wikipedia's information. This can lead to several mild forms of disruptive editing, which are better avoided. Ideally, common sense would always be applied, but Wiki-history shows this is unrealistic. Therefore, this essay gives some practical advice.

Not citing common knowledge and not providing bibliographic entries for very famous works is also consistent with major academic style guides, such as The MLA Style Manual and the APA style guide.

Sometimes editors will insist on citations for material simply because they dislike it or prefer some other material, not because the material in any way needs verification. For example, an editor may demand a citation for the fact that most people have five digits on each hand (yes, this really happened).^[1] Another may decide that the color of the sky is actually aqua rather than blue, pull out an assortment of verifiable spectrographic analyses and color charts to demonstrate that this position is actually correct, and follow that with a demand that other editors provide equivalent reliable sources for the original statement that the sky is in fact blue. While there are cases where this kind of pedantic insistence is useful and necessary, often it is simply disruptive, and can be countered simply by pointing out that there is no need to verify statements that are patently obvious. If the alternative proposition merits inclusion in the article under other policies and guidelines it should of course be included, but it should in no way be given greater prominence because it is sourced.

Wikipedia has several templates for tagging material that needs verification: inline templates for particular lines, section templates, and article templates. See Wikipedia:Template messages. Sometimes editors will go through an article and add dozens of the inline tags, along with several section and article tags, making the article essentially unreadable (see WP:TAGBOMBING). As a rule, if there are more than 2 or 3 inline tags they should be removed and replaced with a section tag; if there are more than 2 section tags in a section they should be removed and replaced with a single 'Multiple issues' tag. If there are more than two or three sections tagged, those tags should be removed, and the entire article should be tagged.

Verification tags should not be used in a POINTed fashion. Use only those tags necessary to illustrate the problem, and discuss the matter in detail on the talk page.

Citations should be evaluated on the qualities they bring to the article, not on the quantity of citations available. The first 1 or 2 citations supporting a given point are informative; extra citations after that begin to be argumentative. Keep in mind that the purpose of a citation is to guide the reader to external sources where the reader can verify the idea presented, not to prove to other editors the strength of the idea. Extra sources for the same idea should be added to 'Further Reading', 'See Also' or 'External Sources' sections at the bottom of the page, without explicitly being cited in the text.

A common misconception when improving an article, particularly towards Good Article status, is that everything must be cited to an inline source, which leads to comments such as "the end of paragraph 3 is uncited", without specifying why that is an issue. In fact, the Good Article criteria merely state that inline citations are required for "direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons". While that covers much, most, or possibly even (in the case of biographies of living people) all content in an article, it does not imply that you must cite everything everywhere for every single article, period.

• Wikipedia:You do need to cite that the sky is blue, the opposition essay
• Wikipedia:Likely to be challenged
• Wikipedia:Must I add a citation?
• Wikipedia:The Pope is Catholic, an essay on appropriate information
• Wikipedia:No original research § Routine calculations
• Wikipedia:Common knowledge
• Wikipedia:Don't be a WikiBigot
• Wikipedia:Wisps' Law
• Wikipedia:When to cite § When a source may not be needed
• User:Uncle G/On sources and content § There are no exceptions to everything, a user essay
• Wikipedia:Why most sentences should be cited
• Judicial notice, a legal rule that allows irrefutable, well-known facts to be introduced into evidence
• Argumentum ad populum ('Appeal to the people')
• Wikipedia:WEATHERMAN
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking § What generally should not be linked