Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2021-10-31

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2021-10-31. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Book review: Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality (8,680 bytes · 💬)

Well, I didn't like the offered online presentation (fed up with talking heads like that) but appreciated the book review text very much. Ian Ramjohn's statements about the gap between "policy as designed and as interpreted" are realistic, unpretentious and fair. I'm also an experienced wikipedian so I actually wasn't surprised by anything he described. BTW with one exception I have to point to: it isn't at all desirable to mislead any naive people to confuse an online encyclopedia with a place to edit willful private nonsense. Which misunderstanding is daily matter of procedure of our recent changes observers. Well, nothing new to any experienced people but nevertheless our policy texts don't communicate it down-to-earth.
The marketing formula phrase "Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is not really a truthful communication. No, not everyone can do (and remain uncanceled), not everybody has learnt enough skills to easily adapt to the new situations. Just try to remember the difference between going through a situation when all school students together were new or else when you have been the only new one to enter a group situation. In social life as psychology and own experience alike have found out any newcomers have to adapt gradually to the established group structures. Stranding is always possible! Some frustration is almost always part of it. The only real difference you can shift/soften a little bit is the degree of frustrations. The online scenario of Wikipedia editing is a little bit more complicated than real life newbie conflicts because the persons involved aren't present (have no faces, no smiles, no facial warning signs). --Just N. (talk) 21:15, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Go back 13 years, and I was busy writing How Wikipedia Works with User:Phoebe. This work looks more like a sequel than anything I've seen in the meantime. Early on there is a heading "How Wikipedia Actually Works", which seems fair: the old joke being that WP only works in practice, not in theory. The authors make no bones about the amount of unpacking required to bridge those two, so +1 to them for that.

That said, this is a deliberately discursive work, not the "primer" people often and hopefully request. It is based on teaching experience, and that is a good thing on which to draw. Whether you call the main WP activity "production of knowledge", "construction of reality", or simply "wiki work" which gets my vote, it is inherently messy (and at least intermittently frustrating, divisive and a time-sink). Readers of the book will probably get why, fairly soon. I didn't read further than to see that this basic point, related to the apocryphal Bismarck-on-legislation-and-sausages quote, comes through.

I once gave a pub talk on online communities and WP, in which I introduced a point made by Jacob Bronowski about art. You should ask not only what is done, and how it is done, but why it is done that way. If you applied it to WP, you might get a book like this; we need books plural, in fact. Charles Matthews (talk) 10:16, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

While I haven't read the book, I really appreciate the emphasis on the difference between the rules - or the way things are officially supposed to be done - and the application or interpretation of these official norms. These difference occur in all organizations, but it seems to me that they are particularly obvious on Wikipedia. Much of the time it seems like our rules don't determine the outcome in contentious cases, they only determine the starting point for the debate.

I certainly agree with Charles Matthews that we need more books like this - and more books about Wikipedia in general. But ultimately newbies are only going to learn by diving in, learning by experience. It would be nice if there were short learning aids for newbies organized along the path from newby to established editor. Much of that path should cover material covered in this book.

As a Signposter I ask that if anybody sees another book about Wikipedia, please bring it to our attention or just go ahead and submit a book review! Even if the book is only about the Internet ecosystem with Wikipedia's place in it - I'd love to see those reviews. Thanks! Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:00, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Or in other words, the guidelines have some wiggle room. The pedagogic point, I suppose, in line with what I said above, is to ask "why wiggle room?" Because (I suppose) it is clear enough, when the question is posed, that there should be discretion and negotiation in our mix. In any case, that kind of teaching is not the same as basic Wikipedia training, along the lines of "what you type to get what you want on the page." The endless pressure to deliver such tutorials, with their clear value, should not mean that nobody addresses higher-order issues, and supports understanding that does not come from being on the wrong end of a case study. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:14, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

On to reading Chapter 3 of the book, What Counts as Knowledge: Notability, Knowledge Gaps and Exclusionary Practices. On p. 46 it leads off with the Donna Strickland speedy deletion case study. A surprise here. Much indeed has been made of this event of March 2014. Looking at the nomination, it was for deletion under CSD G12, i.e. copyvio. Now, I can see that as an admin. But under "reliable sources", it seems that reportage has relied on hearsay. If perceived lack of notability had an impact on Strickland's inclusion in Wikipedia, and who can say that it didn't, it was not on the surface the reason for the deletion. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:22, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Gosh, such a notorious case, and it was a G12. It's a real pity that couldn't have been said some years back, indeed that it wasn't clearly displayed on the talk page. I don't know that it's actually damaged Wikipedia but it certainly didn't do the reputation any favours. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:13, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

• Yes, an academic work but highly readable - for Wiki insiders. For anyone who has been around a long time and focused on the issues of notability, sources, and gender gaps, it offers an intellectual insight, but the average editor even if a mature adult with a reasonable education might already put it down after the lengthy preface. Somewhat repetitive yawn-inducing inside-baseball coverage of the Wikipedia back office, the authors frequently rephrase themselves in the manner of one delivering a paper at an conference to keep the audience awake - it is only a one hour speech; their own meta could be reduced by a few hundred words, making this work even less than its 100 pages of content. Indeed, the phrase 'throughout his book' occurs no less than eleven times but fortunately the book falls short of being inherently ‘meta’.

In a way that is not quite preaching to the choir, McDowell and Vetter present a refreshing reminder to those of us editors who think we know it all, and that despite its enormous cargo of bureaucracy Wikipedia is still afloat and far from on the rocks - thousands of pages of policies, rules, guidelines and essays that would already require a lifetime to read them all and which would immediately scare away any newbie editors if they knew about them. I don't regret reading the 'book' - so thank you for the review, Ian - but personally, apart from a few recent statistics, which one can get any time, I didn't really learn anything new. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:16, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

• Seems to be a reasonably fair commentary, but also seems to skirt around the problem of how to remain reliable if there are no published reliable sources in the calls for wider inclusivity of content. As for "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", "terms and conditions apply". Perhaps this should be made clearer. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:49, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Community view: Reflections on the Chinese Wikipedia (3,357 bytes · 💬)

• MOS:BADITALICS, I suggest the "'''不爱思考得猪 is..." in the first line of italics be changed into "<span style="font-family:Georgia,'DejaVu Serif','STFangsong','FangSong'">不爱思考得猪</span> '''is..."(copied from zh:Template:Talk_quote_inline/styles.css.) --魔琴 (Zauber Violino) (talk) 23:04, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks 魔琴 (Zauber Violino) for your stylistic recommendations. 不爱思考得猪 (talk) 00:57, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Regarding the last paragraph, there is much evidence that some editors have been harassed by agents acting on the orders of China's government. The fact that WMC's spokespeople were not aware of any such harassment perhaps speaks more about their own behavioural biases in favour of the Chinese government, rather than the government's benevolence towards Wikimedians. In any case, the main point here is that when even prominent celebrities who have operated in the open for years suddenly get turned against by the regime, how can a little editor with skepticism of the regime claim safety? Great commentary, thank you 不爱思考得猪. Deryck C. 13:59, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks Deryck Chan for your compliments! 不爱思考得猪 (talk) 20:49, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
• Thank you for sharing your observations and perspectives. A hard decision had to be made against WMC members, and in hindsight, it was the right decision. WMC may have some valid points in their argument/polemic, but in the end, the common good of our global community shall prevail. Normchou ^💬 18:17, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks Normchou. I agree with you: in the end, the common good of our global community shall prevail.不爱思考得猪 (talk) 20:49, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
• 不爱思考得猪, Great piece. I never suspected that mainland Chinese people learned that Taiwan is a Chinese province, which explains a lot about the way they think. Recalling the Munich Agreement makes me uncomfortable, but doing something similar with neighbor countries is a logical step for the Chinese government : if they concede, they are weak. Hence... Cantons-de-l'Est (talk) 23:07, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks Cantons-de-l'Est. China's gov is testing the waters right now, if the international community shows no reactions, things will escalate over time. 不爱思考得猪 (talk) 18:33, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Discussion report: Editors brainstorm and propose changes to the Requests for adminship process (1,577 bytes · 💬)

• "Admin permissions and unbundling There is a large gap between the permissions an editor can obtain and the admin toolset. This brings increased scrutiny for RFA candidates, as editors evaluate their feasibility in lots of areas." - this is certainly a concern of mine. I use only one tool in the admin tool chest. If this was unbundled I would have no reason to need the admin bit. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:48, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

• I'm not sure if you're saying we should unbundle more, and RfA less? Or something else? ☆ Bri (talk) 20:38, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

• Maybe just that if that tool was available separately they would have no need to be an admin. Depends on the tool. If it is one that would require an equivalent process, it would not make a lot of practical difference to the procedure, but might make a lot of difference to the experience. For example, getting the tools to delete and undelete and view deleted material may attract a very different scrutiny and set of potential opposition reasons than getting the tools to block, though both sets are handed out based on community trust that they will not be misused. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 11:32, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

From the editor: Different stories, same place (14,083 bytes · 💬)

What a story. Thanks for sharing it. --Andreas JN466 01:26, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks Andreas. I'm amazed at the stories, both of them, but I'm afraid I didn't do them justice. The lynching I guess is more believable. It was documented on a day-to-day basis by state and national newspapers, and by a State historical society paper. But there is a lot of politics, propaganda, and racism mixed up in the documentation. Yes, it was a lynching, or maybe some would prefer saying a police-murder similar to George Floyd's.
• The canteen story I was pretty skeptical of at first. Somebody must be fluffing up that story, I thought. But there's a ton of documentation, and i can't poke a hole in it. I'm just incredulous that these two stories are about the same small town (12,000 population back then) 12 years apart. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:10, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • The photograph and article you linked to may explain the disconnect. It says that 55,000 women from all over Nebraska manned the canteen; it wasn't just the women in that town, although I imagine a goodly number of them were involved. Indyguy (talk) 04:56, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
    • Yes, the 55,000 number of women involved comes up many times - but I don't think "from all over the state" is quite right. Rather they were likely from that part of the state - say from 100 miles around - a neighborly distance in Nebraska - just the farmers in the area. But yes, a lot of different people were involved, but I suspect much the same background, same culture. North Platte is a bit different in that it's a railroad town, with the huge railyards so might draw a slightly different population. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 05:32, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Small-town USA holds many mysteries. Here in the South some of us have grown to accept the fact that these contradictions simply live on without much satisfactory explanation. I honestly don’t think the “lynching” was the worst thing about the North Platte incident (it was more of a police killing, at least according to what we are told), it was the mob threatening the entire black community and driving them away from their homes with clubs and rope. The problem with the town page wasn’t that the event was mentioned, it’s that there was little else about the history of the town, thus creating a perceived DUEness problem. I’ve seen it a few times where an article on a town or city will be dominated by one or two events. It’s fair for the town to want history to reflect everything that has happened in North Platte, as long as they don’t try and sweep the forced exile of a portion of their population under the rug. -Indy beetle (talk) 15:00, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• • I don't find the contradiction between the two major events, the lynching and the WW II Canteen, of North Platte history to be difficult to understand. There's something about the "madness of crowds" in which a spark unites a firestorm of bad behavior by normally respectable citizens. It happens all the time. Likewise I have no doubt that the good citizens of North Platte performed admirably during WW II, including passing out coffee and cake to "Colored" as well as white soldiers. However, I would regard as very dubious the statistics in the cited article that almost 7 million soldiers were helped by 55,000 women in the North Platte Canteen. 16 million Americans served in the Armed Services in WW II. But why in the world would 7 million soldiers pass through North Platte? It's is the middle of nowhere, militarily speaking -- and is not the only "railroad town" in the country.

• • Even the source cited in the Wikipedia article contradicts the 7 million figure. 2,000 soldiers a day, it says, got coffee and cake from the women. 2,000 a day from December 1941 to 1946 adds up to about 3 million soldiers served by the canteen. That's still an almost unbelievably large number.

• • And 55,000 women worked in the Canteen? North Platte had a WW II population of 12 to 15 thousand people. Where did 55,000 women who supposedly worked in the canteen come from? Not by train or automobile. There were wartime restrictions on civilian travel and use of cars and trains.

• • In other words, the "reliable sources" used to describe the North Platte Canteen are simply not credible. What do we on wikipedia do about "reliable sources" that are not credible? Smallchief (talk) 00:08, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• • All that being said, thanks, Smallbones, for this interesting subject and discussion. Smallchief (talk) 00:08, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
    • And 55,000 women worked in the Canteen? North Platte had a WW II population of 12 to 15 thousand people. The article says The women of North Platte and the surrounding small towns, Smallchief. Besides, the USA officially entered WWII in December 1941 so I don't think they'd've placed any restrictions in 1940 when they had the census, and they could've set up some exemptions for North Platte (After all, who'd go far enough to attack Nebraska?). Just my 2 cents. But then again, I would have imagined that there would be just 3 or 4 other small towns (giving a total of less than 40k women if North Platte was the biggest town) and still been confused. Tube·of·Light 03:24, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
      • There was probably a lot of double counting for both numbers. If a soldier got breakfast and lunch at the canteen, he was probably counted as two people served. Many of the volunteers likely worked irregular times, so a woman who worked daily might have been counted once, but a woman who worked every other Sunday may have been counted as two people over the month. Argento Surfer (talk) 15:21, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• Sometimes I wonder whether some supernatural entity, be it God or someone else, is creating so many interesting things in this small world or the world is big enough for all these interesting things to happen purely by chance. Tube·of·Light 03:24, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
  • The question to tackle is what we can do on Wikipedia about citing "reliable sources" that are obviously wrong. I wasted a few minutes of my time trying to figure out if 7 million soldiers were helped by 55,000 women in North Platte during WWII as it says in the Wikipedia article and the "reliable sources." Answer: No. The statistics are vastly inflated. This is not the only Wikipedia article in which folklore prevails over credibility. Can we do anything about it?Smallchief (talk) 12:28, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Good place for a break

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained." We should not be surprised at the seeming contradictions in the story of this small town -- nor be so quick to assume we are ourselves somehow immune to such contradictions. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 18:45, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• • (EC)@Kent G. Budge: - Thank you for this. I said above that I don't think I was able to do justice to the story, and I was thinking along these lines, but I was unable to write such a complex thought. So I just wrote basically as a news story. Solzhenitsyn with your help wrote it perfectly. Thanks again. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Smallbones (talk • contribs) 19:58, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• Committing a lynching and race riot pogrom, followed by selfless service for the benefit of the armed forces sounds like typical mid-20th century US social attitudes to me, I'm not seeing a contradiction. The incidence of racism is not the product of an absence of altruism, but rather a systematic circumscription of who is seen as a worthy recipient of altruism (among other things). I have no doubt that several people directly participated in both of these events, and likely felt that they were standing up for their country and community in doing so on both occasions. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 19:43, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
  • I too tend to think of this as being "the same people" but not exactly. I believe the lynching was almost entirely the work of men, and the canteen almost the same for women. Of course people were born or grew older or died in that time. Some folks must have moved in or out. The canteen involved many farm families as noted above, whereas the "race riot" (this term may be misleading) happened pretty much in a few hours so was more "urban", But still there must have been some overlap of the families involved. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:08, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
    • It's much easier to grasp once you (generic you) get past the idea that a town is simply a legal fiction. One town in my home state, Canterbury, Connecticut (which then as now has about half the population of this town in Nebraska) has a relatively similar 19th century version of this story arc (that's already well-documented in its article), about the life of Prudence Crandall (I've long wanted to see the inside of the museum, but this year it was being renovated and last year was... yeah..., in the years before that I had other issues getting out there, for a small state places can be deceptively difficult to get at). For what it's worth, they did it the right way at the time and do it the right way now, from the outside alone it was clear the renovations were necessary and they make sure to present what the town residents did in both the 1830s and 1870s. When presented that way it becomes more obvious that, although Canterbury was still the same legal fiction, the people residing in it had drastically changed. (The kicker is, if you go to Canterbury today, outside of that museum it's an utter wasteland; would it kill you people there to just pick up your damn trash?) The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:07, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

TBNL, why a wasteland? Looks like a typical cute, well manicured New England village, except for the burned down house on the opposite corner. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:19, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Heh. Granted I don't go out there too often, but I've been to every town in my home state (and Rhode Island, since after 169 towns 39 wasn't going to kill me!) and in Canterbury I've consistently found a whole lot of... nothing, really, except a few generic chain stores. Even the next town over, Scotland, has a far smaller population but has a building with a decent local coffee shop and liquor store. And while a lot of other towns out that way use their empty space for hiking trails, I haven't ever found anything worth going to in Canterbury. Nonetheless, if they ever get the Prudence Crandall museum up and running again I'll happily upload as many photos as I can; when I was out there earlier this year I took a few shots of the ongoing renovations too. (My own hometown is its equivalent in southwestern CT, but with a far less interesting place in history). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:03, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

TBNL, well villages are villages. At least within less than 500m of the museum there is a small supermarket (more of a convenience store really), a gas station, a DunkingDonuts, and a Middle School. I imagine the village has that natural fragrance of freshly mown grass. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:53, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

That may be it, when I first ventured there it was late fall (when a lot of people hadn't raked their lawns for some reason), and when I returned this summer it'd been fairly stormy so there were a lot of downed trees all over. Means I'll just have to go back sometime and catch the place at a better moment, I'd love to change my perception! The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:05, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

@Kent G. Budge: Thank you for that. --Andreas JN466 14:21, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Humour: A very Wiki crossword (6,707 bytes · 💬)

• This... is devilishly hard! I've gotten 16 of the 24 words figured out after a few hours of thinking, but I've absolutely no clue about the other eight. Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧ Averted crashes} 01:07, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Well, here's your first hint, then! Pretty much all the answers can be found at Wikipedia:Glossary. Happy hunting and feel free to ask for more hints. Ganesha811 (talk) 01:19, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
    • Whoop whoop is doing well, I have only 9 so far. Thanks for the hint, Ganesha, that's what I dragged myself over here for! – Athaenara ✉ 08:44, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
    • Doing better now, I nominate "Roman field treatment" for Best Clue. – Athaenara ✉ 17:58, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Whatever; I'm tired. Kleinpecan (talk) 10:23, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
ADDICT R VILLAGEPUMP O F P D T U A W ?A?T I T A E D GNOME N E A ??T? L D H N D E DIDYOUKNOW E R T S U N L???????? EDITWAR S S??E V O M E E T I D N B J TNT E????N MEDIAWIKI S D F L S G M E O M B B NPOV O X

• I've added some alternate clues for ones that seem to be tougher than others. @Kleinpecan: you're really close, but probably the reason 16 and 22 across are giving you issues is that 13 down is wrong - here's a hint for it. Nice work overall though. For a hint on 7-across click here, for a hint on 11-across, click here. @Athaenara: @Whoop whoop pull up: some clues if you want them. Ganesha811 (talk) 13:24, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• Great and very fun (if hard) puzzle! Someone needs to explain 22-across to me though -- I only guessed what it was when I already had 13- and 19-down. 15 (talk) 16:21, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• Thank you! Here's a link - the main character is an ______. The line (also from a movie adaptation) has become a bit of a meme nowadays. Ganesha811 (talk) 17:15, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• Hmmm, the one I'm really struggling with is 13 down. I'm 99% sure I know what it is, but that answer doesn't show as correct. -- Asartea ^{Talk | Contribs} 19:59, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• @Asartea:, if you'd like to double-check, the answer for 13-down can be found here. Ganesha811 (talk) 20:39, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

  @Ganesha811 Oh, like that. My brain was thinking just HTTP404, because that seemed to fit better with the clue. -- Asartea ^{Talk | Contribs} 05:54, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

  Arrgh, I was so convinced it was "redlink", though I also tried "deleted". — Bilorv (talk) 16:38, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• I fail to see how the original clue for 16 was related to the solution, but the new one might have been too easy. ~~~~
  User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 22:39, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• @1234qwer1234qwer4: my thinking was as follows (in white, so highlight to read): a signature box, as in on a form or document, is literally a "name space", a place to put your name. Ganesha811 (talk) 23:33, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• With a little bit of guessing (11 across was a fun one) and using the alternative clues that were added below the crossword here but not at the website, I've managed to figure out 19 of the words. I did not find 4, 12, 13, and 19 down, as well as 7 across. Seeing a solution has been posted somewhere in this discussion, I will probably take a look at that now. ~~~~
  User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 23:45, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Similarly for 5 down. While the alternate clue makes the answer obvious, I still have no idea how the original clue is related. – SD0001 (talk) 03:46, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• Not obvious enough for me to understand either... — Bilorv (talk) 16:38, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• Got half of them myself, and filled in most of the rest from the hints and by looking at the glossary. Very well written. Only one I don't really like is 1 across – I don't here that much onwiki (just the synonym found at "WP:[answer]"). Still missing 5 down, 6 down and 18 across. — Bilorv (talk) 16:38, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• ugg 10 was hard and 22 had me scratching my head haha Mujinga (talk) 13:32, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
• Utterly distracted by 21 across. Now listening to the AC/DC catalogue. Guess it will be a loong way back to the top if I want to crossword. Tribe of Tiger ^{Let's Purrfect!} 06:28, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

In the media: China bans, and is there intelligent life on this planet? (7,061 bytes · 💬)

• About this question "who had the idea for Wikipedia" and "who came up with the name" ... a good few people are unaware that there are extant mailing list posts, still online today, that shed light on all of this:
  • Larry Sanger, 10 Jan 2001: Let's make a wiki – No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. "Wiki," pronounced \wee'-kee\, derives from a Polynesian word, "wikiwiki," but what it means is a VERY open, VERY publicly-editable series of web pages. For example, I can start a page called EpistemicCircularity and write anything I want in it. Anyone else (yes, absolutely anyone else) can come along and make absolutely any changes to it that he wants to.
  • Larry Sanger, 11 Jan 2001: > Maybe we could install the wiki under a totally different brand name, and just let people who sign up for Nupedia aware that lots of Nupedians tend to hang out there. That'd be fine with me; I'm not sure how exactly it would be connected to Nupedia, though. We wouldn't call it "the Nupedia wiki" though that's what it would be. We might have a question on the "about" page: "Q. Do you have a place where I can simply write down ideas, post articles, etc., for public consumption? A. Yes. Use the _wikipedia_!" On the "wikipedia" we would say that this is a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently. Larry
  • Jimmy Wales, 31 Oct 2001 (today, 20 years ago): Nupedia was started first, and is extremely high quality in the limited content that it does produce. After a year or so of working on Nupedia, Larry had the idea to use Wiki software for a separate project specifically for people like you (and me!) who are intimidated and bored (sorry, Nupedia!) with the tedium of the process.
• See also History of Wikipedia. --Andreas JN466 21:40, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
• "Angela Merkel gave up her job as chancellor of Germany which she has held for 16 years." - No, as her article says, she's still there and will remain in place until a new governing coalition is formed after the recent elections. This may well take until Christmas, or beyond. Also, if you are going to mention the BBC's Click piece, you should mention the wildly inaccurate graphic and voice-over explaining how WP picks different administrators for America, Europe.... . Johnbod (talk) 00:07, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • I just checked out the BBC graphic to see how bad it is. Sure - to a Wikipedian it looks bad. They took a full 30 seconds (out of almost 10 minutes) to explain how our system of administrators work and all they could get across is that each country elects its own admins. Other than the flags on the graphic with some fairly meaningless arrows - the mistake would be corrected by saying "language version" instead of "country." I'd guess you don't spend a whole lot of time reading or viewing media stories about Wikipedia. They're almost all filled with much more serious mistakes than that.
  • As far as Merkel - yup, we made a mistake. She declared she'd be leaving a while ago (2 months perhaps?) Her party finished in 2nd place a month ago. I thought Germans were supposed to be efficient! How long do Germans usually take to change a departing Chancellor? (Another stereotype bites the dust!). Sorry. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:04, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
    • Sorry to to crumple your stereotype, Smallbones. It's precisely their efficiency that makes them very careful about making decisions. Until the FRG in 1949 German political history had never been a role model for democracy - and it still wasn't complete until 1990. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:41, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
      • A) they showed continents not countries, and yes I do spend quite a lot of time doing that, & that's a pretty bad unforced error. I wonder if they checked the story with WMUK? B) Merkel first said (well ahead of time) she'd be leaving about 18 months ago. The Germans usually take 2-3 months to form a coalition, about the same as the Italians, but a lot faster than the Belgians. I'm not sure this is the year for Americans to crow about smooth transitions. Johnbod (talk) 04:34, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Wikivoyage also used to be blacklisted by Google. The reason was that Google originally considered it a mirror of Wikitravel, the project it split off from. Maybe the other search engines are doing this as well. Nosferattus (talk) 05:37, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• The bulletin "Wikipedia is so politicized and dishonest it's no longer worth reading: if you believe Tucker Carlson (Fox News)" should have been followed by one reading "Tucker Carlson (Fox News) is so politicized and dishonest he's no longer worth watching: if you believe Wikipedia". — Bilorv (talk) 14:56, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Or, as a number of reliable sources have pointed out, Tucker Carlson is not a reliable source. -- llywrch (talk) 16:18, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia does not characterize any commentator as "not worth watching". That would be a serious violation of NPOV. This isn't a situation of symmetrical criticism. --Yair rand (talk) 05:39, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
• Did I black out and talk to a podcaster without remembering any of it or is there just a brief mention of my username in this dot com podcast? GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 05:01, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
• @GorillaWarfare: I can't rule out the scenario of you blacking out, but you don't speak in the first 30 minutes of the podcast. Perhaps a copy editor switched you and Larry S. in the paragraphs above. No, I figured out what happened - and of course it is my fault. You are mentioned at 27:41 of the podcast. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:35, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

News and notes: The sockpuppet who ran for adminship and almost succeeded (12,251 bytes · 💬)

• Re: Vacancies at WMF. What is "the C-team"? DuncanHill (talk) 20:30, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
  • The term refers to the top level management of an organization such as a corporation, also known as the c-suite. Ganesha811 (talk) 20:32, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
    • (they're called the "c-suite" or "c-team" because their titles all usually start with "c": CEO, CTO, COO...) AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:40, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
      • Thanks, I did google the term and only found something to do with Dungeons & Dragons, and I tried typing it into the search box and got redirected to a radio station in Australia. It might be a good idea to explain obscure jargon. DuncanHill (talk) 21:04, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
  • Linked from the caption but not the body text. Oops. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:23, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
• The sockpuppet who ran for adminship and almost succeeded: This is the first time an RfA has been stopped dead in its tracks, but it's by no means the first case of a totally corrupt admin, and it won't be the last. The scary part is not knowing just how many admins of this kind are undetected? Some, for sure. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:35, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

• It is scary, but it also makes me think about this xkcd. If a malicious actor looking to damage Wikipedia has to maintain an account with thousands of useful or neutral contributions while participating for years, just to get found out, who's really getting played here, us or them? Ganesha811 (talk) 20:39, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Socking with determination is not difficult. Those who have an agenda create sleepers from different IPs and user agents. CU is basically useless unless a sock is really stupid. The Duck test is best. It's apparently what caught this clown out, but it's only coincidence that puts a researcher on the right track. But even that needs some training, a sharp eye, a huge watchlist, and being everywhere all the time. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:49, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

I never understood why Icewhiz went off the rails but I hope they get the help they clearly need. I'm glad CU was able to protect the community from such corrosive influences. I wish CU could be used more freely to catch many other socks which I suspect have long been operating. Chris Troutman (talk) 22:31, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

What happened with them? DogsRNice (talk) 07:00, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

@Ganesha811 and Kudpung: It is scary, but it also makes me think about this xkcd. Very much this. (I don't even have to click on it to know which one you're referencing. Mission f--- accomplished indeed.) Our entire vocabulary around socking has evolved to obscure the fact that it isn't a thing you are, it's an action you take — a "sockpuppet" is an account abused by someone socking, it can't take any actions because it isn't a real person. A sockpuppet didn't almost succeed in their RFA — Icewhiz nearly succeeded in obtaining adminship using their sock account. That's a bit more different than people seem to be acknowledging.

I certainly get that it would be undesirable, and I don't even disagree with our guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude towards socking. (Meaning, if you're operating a sock account everything you do using it is presumed malicious, regardless what the actual intent of the actions are.) But people are acting like, if a user ever obtained adminship using a sock account, we should just pack up this whole failed Wikipedia experiment and head home. That strikes me as a bit histrionic. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 14:17, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Actually, correction — if you're operating a sock account, everything you do is presumed malicious, period, under any/all of your accounts. Again, I'm not saying that's even incorrect, but it means that Icewhiz's RfA itself becomes a malicious act by default. Which is why this report is implicitly interpreted as "ATTACK ON WIKIPEDIA NEARLY SUCCEEDED", when I'm not convinced that's quite the correct read. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 14:37, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Revealing Icewhiz's mistake to him, merely helps him avoid that mistake in his 'next' bid for administratorship. GoodDay (talk) 03:00, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

You'd best tell that to the folks at WO, GoodDay. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:47, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

I'll let'em figure it out. GoodDay (talk) 07:49, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Icewhiz spent two years, making 22,000 edits, to get to a failed RFA with his/her sockpuppet. At two minutes per edit (to be conservative), that's more than 700 hours contributed to a project that he/she doesn't seem to believe. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is to spend one's time elsewhere? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:58, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

@John Broughton, Ganesha811, and FeRDNYC: to this point, and the "mission accomplished" analogy, sadly the Eostrix account only made c.8,500 mainspace edits, of which 84% were automated.[1]. So the account only made 1,429 normal mainspace edits, using John Broughton's 2 mins per edit that is only 48 hours. That pales into insignificance against the time wasted by the community in order to identify, prosecute and post-mortem this mess. Onceinawhile (talk) 09:47, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

@Onceinawhile: That's fair, and thank you for reminding us of the real cost of this situation: Not that our admins' collective (and completely imaginary) Shield of Absolute Trustworthiness was nearly breached (as Daniel Case points out below, that's happened before and will happen again), but that a lot of already-overtaxed Wikipedians' time was wasted on this. That's Not OK™. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 10:05, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• Eostrix has nothing on Law, for those who remember that debacle ... a sock of the undertow who became an admin with the full awareness of several other admins, all of whom had IIRC had to resign the mop as a result.

  And before that there was Archtransit ... who, well, wasn't a sockpuppet but a sockmaster who gave himself away after getting the tools because he went and unblocked all his previously blocked socks ... when people wondered what was going on, someone ran a Checkuser which revealed all the socks, included some he still hadn't unblocked.

  I still see the latter incident as the worst RfA failure, ever. Daniel Case (talk) 22:18, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• "The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities" - this is facinating, and I agree with the page's point that this is likely to become more common as other companies add similar features. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:40, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Re Icewhiz + "wiki discussion site" - is the word "wikipediocracy" verbotten here? It seems unusual to do such a dance to avoid naming a publication. 142.157.234.234 (talk) 22:10, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• re: the "wiki discussion site" I believe it is still the case that they are blacklisted (i.e. we can't link to them) IMHO - gained from my personal experience - they were properly blacklisted. I don't believe this means that anybody who posts there is automatically persona non grata, but my personal opinion of the website as a whole is very negative. It's essentially a site where all the rules of Wikipedia don't apply (e.g. personal attacks, banned-by-Wikipedia editors, outing, incivility, battleground behavior) are the norm. That's fine if they keep it there, but when they want to import their garbage into Wikipedia - its absolutely wrong. Using that site as a convenient way to work around Wikipedia rules, IMHO is - I repeat - absolutely wrong. I won't mention their name on The Signpost and I have nothing more to say on the matter. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:29, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, of course that place is a total cesspit, Smallbones, but ironically its founder and major Wikipedia critic everywhere is a former E-in-C of The Signpost and still writes major articles in it... Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:13, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

• Re: Mass block coming for many Apple users --- Is the WMF gonna tell iOS users what the issue is when they are blocked? Common sense suggests that the WMF has already figured out how to remind iOS users not to use iCloud's "VPN", but I can't shake the feeling that they'll not do something like that. And Re: Eostrix --- Wow. Professor Quirrel didn't put that much effort to hide his secret. Stories like this one just show how important The Signpost is for people who live under a rock like me. Tube·of·Light 03:03, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• Mass block coming for many Apple users Apple is doing the right thing for Apple Safari users. Unfortunately, the setting is all or nothing. I hope Apple users will not turn the feature off. I have done so since the early days of the developer beta program. Toggling the feature on and off lies too deeply in the settings for most editors to do so dynamically as they shift from Wikipedia editing to other web browser activity. I hope we do not lose too many valuable edits and I also hope Apple users keep the setting on. —¿philoserf? (talk) 21:28, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
• That was scary in reference to Icewhiz. Imagine a sock got sysop powers the damage they could do. I think the RFA system should be slightly redone so that there are roadblocks in place in an attempt to prevent this from happening. The nominating admins were very well known ones as well and he fooled them. Bobherry Talk Edits 13:16, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

  Looking at the sock's RfA nom, I'm thoroughly disturbed that a sockpuppet became a trusted contributor at SPI, but also a little comforted by the fact they were still detected. I also hope something will be done to make this less likely in the future. Daß Wölf 19:07, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

Opinion: A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life (52,109 bytes · 💬)

Comments

• I'm not really buying that the Wikimedia Foundation's response was out of line. The community responded promptly once notified of the issue - a problem that nobody knows about can't be fixed. This case is different from the Seigenthaler incident where a vandal just made stuff up. The issue here is that a good faith editor trusted a source, and it turns out that source was wrong. Under the current Wikipedia model of verifiability, not truth and aggregating what existing news sources say, there's an understanding that sometimes these sources will be wrong, and then Wikipedia will echo that wrongness - the blame is with Discovery, here. The only way to stop this would be for Wikipedia to do boots-on-the-ground fact-checking, which would essentially not be Wikipedia anymore - that would require the resources of the paid news media, a step far beyond Nupedia (and many mainstream newspapers don't even bother with fact checkers anymore, at least for most stories!). That said, I do agree that being more stringent on image sourcing would be a good idea - bringing up bad sources on the reliable source noticeboard and deprecating them would certainly be a step forward if the goal is to inform good-faith editors of what can be used (and maybe adding in some sort of soft-blacklist edit warning if a link to a deprecated site is noticed in an image description). But, this is ultimately just whack-a-mole that will reduce the frequency of this happening, not eliminate it entirely. Even really solid sources will still make mistakes sometimes. So I don't think it's realistic to expect that this kind of mistake will never happen, again without Wikipedia stopping being Wikipedia and instead becoming a normal magazine with a staff; fixing such errors promptly when detected is far more feasible, and it's what happened here. SnowFire (talk) 20:59, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

  The Wikipedia addition occurred several months prior to the Discovery coverage, so I don't agree that it was Discovery who was to blame. The issue was a well-intended author sourcing an image of someone with the same name and assuming that it was the same person as the subject, and that we don't have any means of picking these up - thus we need to own the issue. (Oddly, we do when it comes to text, where WP:BLPPRIMARY is intended to prevent this from occurring). Perhaps we need something like BLPPRIMARY for images, in that we required sourcing connecting the image to the specific subject prior to including it, and that sourcing needs to meet BLP. - Bilby (talk) 23:29, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

  There's a contradiction here, because what you write above doesn't agree with the current version of the article. According to the caption currently in the article, "Vwanweb captioned Mr. White's picture as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the Wikipedia article but named crimefeed.com, a site associated with Discovery, Inc., as the source in the picture upload." That means the uploader was citing Discovery's crimefeed website which apparently at the time claimed its picture came from the Department of Corrections, and thus it was Discovery that made the error in misclassifying the picture, and the uploader was properly citing their source - just the source, Discovery/Crimefeed, was incorrect. If the caption is truly wrong and your order of events is correct, then the article should be updated; I'm just going by what the article says. SnowFire (talk) 23:39, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

  We don't actually know what Vwanweb saw. I've been unable to find the Aug 2 2017 article (Crime History: Serial Killer Nathaniel White Gets Busted, Blames “RoboCop” August 2, 2017 by Mike McPadden) in the Internet Archive. You can see the blurb for it here in the Internet Archive: [2] So we don't know whether the picture was present in the article or not, and whether it was captioned as originating from the New York State Department or whether Vwanweb just optimistically assumed that must have been the source. At any rate, Vwanweb should arguably not have said the picture came from the New York State Department if all he had seen was crimefeed.com. This is what WP:SWYGT tells editors to do for text: cite what you've actually seen. And moreover you can certainly argue that editors should check state records rather than relying on true crime sites that have no or poor professional oversight – just like we don't allow editors to cite tabloids for articles on cancer.

  The timeline was, as far as I have been able to piece it together:

  1. The crimefeed.com article listed here appears in August 2017. It is now lost (unless someone smarter than me can find it).

  2. The picture is uploaded, citing this article, and added to the serial killer article in May 2018.

  3. The Discovery Channel broadcast is shown in August 2018. --Andreas JN466 23:52, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

  My fault for the earlier error - I was going by the broadcast date. - Bilby (talk) 00:13, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

  The potential issue you raised is just as valid. --Andreas JN466 00:47, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

There's an earlier article, dated July 1, 2017, on Monsters and Critics website that also sports the same photo of the wrong Nathaniel White, so Mike McPadden's article at crimefeed.com can't have been the original source of the misidentification (or not the only one, at least).

2001:8003:1DF2:D00:2482:6F1C:C109:DAC6 (talk) 07:02, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning it, you're absolutely correct. I was aware of that page but had missed that it preceded the crimefeed article by a month. The show referred to on that monstersandcritics page, CopyCat Killers, was produced by another defendant in the suit, Reelz. This also seems to have a Discovery connection. The program is listed e.g. as episode 4 on https://www.discoveryuk.com/series/copycat-killers/?ss=2#episodes It should be obvious that Wikipedia has no business citing this sort of material. Discovery used to be reputable but has descended into the realms of pseudoscience and reality TV. --Andreas JN466 09:51, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

• • @SnowFire: "Verifiability, not truth" was never supposed to mean that verifiability is all that matters and truth does not count. The complete phrase was "the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth." In other words, things had to be both true and verifiable in a high-quality source before they could be added to Wikipedia. It's precisely because of this common misunderstanding that the phrase "verifiability, not truth" is deprecated today, and has been for years. If we propagate incorrect info by relying on poor sources then we are actually spreading fake news. Cf. the Paula Angel picture mentioned in the image sidebar: we're creating an alternate reality. --Andreas JN466 09:56, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
    • Of course the goal is truth, but that's just a desired end state. It's like a coach telling their sports team to score more points - sure, but how? VNT makes people uncomfortable precisely because it's honest and accurate about what the Wikipedia process really produces. The problem of garbage in, garbage out is not one easily fixed - it can only be mitigated.
    • That said, I agree with the suggestion below on being stricter on sourcing in articles on purely negative aspects of people, as this is suggesting a useful change - to simply not accept anything on certain topics without ironclad sourcing, and to perhaps cover such topics in less detail in general. SnowFire (talk) 21:29, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Inmate photos for the New York prison system are not as readily available as in Florida, which has a broad public records law. So this guy's problem is compounded by the Internet's inability to find an actual photo of the serial killer to replace the "bad photo", which helps the "bad photo" continue to propagate. The Internet hates a vacuum, and insists on filling it with anything it can easily find. Wikipedia editors could play a fact-checking role by attempting to verify facts or photos provided by secondary sources by attempting to obtain verification from primary sources. – wbm1058 (talk) 03:42, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• At the bottom of every page in Wikipedia is a link, "Contact Wikipedia", which goes to Wikipedia:Contact us, which has very clear instructions as to what to do about problems in a Wikipedia article. There is no indication that Mr. White or a friend or relative ever followed that link. If the photo in the Wikipedia article was causing a lot of pain, why wasn't something done by Mr. White before he paid a lawyer (I presume) and a process server? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 05:33, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • John, at the time the WMF was added to the suit, the picture was already gone. I don't think he was aware of it during the two years it was on here. --Andreas JN466 09:35, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
    • Which was sort of my point. It's true that harm can be caused even if one is unaware of the underlying source of libel, but if he was unaware, and no friends or family or acquaintances mentioned it, then it's more difficult to argue for large damages. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:23, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
      • He was aware of being threatened with violence by people who thought he was the perpetrator, John. Think about it: he could, without ever being aware of the WP image himself, quite realistically have been beaten up, stabbed or shot by someone who'd looked him up online just before to check they really had "the right man". He took to donning disguises ... Covid restrictions may have saved his life.
      • Conversely, if Wikipedia had had the correct image, or even no image, this would instantly have reduced the level of threat to him, and he would not have his image all over Google even today. Do you see what I'm saying? I can't imagine that you would not feel aggrieved upon learning that your picture had been in a Wikipedia article like that for two years, if you had experienced threats and feared for your safety during that time. --Andreas JN466 19:15, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • @John Broughton: Your response is still going round my head this morning. You speak like someone who – like me – spends hours online each day. I'm sure you're old enough to remember what life was like before the Internet. Well, there are people living much like that today (I'm sure some of us here have (grand)parents for whom that's true ...). Even among people who do go online, many don’t consider Wikipedia part of their lives. According to survey data in a recent UK study, 32.14% of the UK online population say they do not use Wikipedia. This matches my own observations. I used to play competitive pool in a local league (badly) until Covid put a kibosh on all that. For many of the people who competed there Wikipedia was like something from a different universe. Just not on their radar.
  • This notion that we can rely on injured people to complain if something goes wrong here neglects to take that into account. Do you remember Jimbo's 2014 suggestion to James O'Brien (who'd been vilified in his WP biography) in a BBC interview that it’s a good idea for people to check Wikipedia regularly to see whether it says anything bad about them? Even O'Brien, a professional media person, said he had been unaware of his Wikipedia biography until his wife accidentally spotted it, and thought it would be "kind of hard to get the message to Wikipedia". What seems natural to you or me now, from our perspective as long-time, regular users of Wikipedia, just does not match the world other people live in. Nor, I'm sure, would you have spoken or thought with the same assurance and conviction about Wikipedia on the day you made your first edit. Regards, --Andreas JN466 10:59, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

    @Jn466 This is so true. Though I am new at editing with a logged-in account and attempting to make changes of substance, I have occasionally just edited a page from an anon ip for years; generally to fix a spelling error or improper link. Recently my wife showed me a legal error (she is a lawyer); specifically a law attributed to the wrong statute. I told her "don't complain, fix it". She was shocked that she could just go in and fix the article (again, minor error, the period was in the wrong place, leading to a completely incorrect Texas code). So she moved the period one spot to the left.

    The ideas that Wikipedia has become an authoritative source AND that anyone can just change it are mutually exclusive to many people. FranMichael (talk) 14:19, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

    Yep. Exactly the way people in my family have reacted. And actually, if you click "Contact us", you are first presented with a bewildering array of discouraging disclaimers like "edits will not generally be made in response to an email request" that look almost designed to instill a sense of hopelessness. Regards, --Andreas JN466 15:05, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

    When you click on "Contact Wikipedia", the upper left of the large box with content says, in fairly large font, under the link "Readers", "How to report a problem with an article, or find out more information." Since English speakers normally read starting on the upper left of a page/article, this is fairly prominent. (I do agree that the disclaimer you mention is overly broad; it should include something like "except when legal issues are involved".) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:23, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

    Surprisingly, the "left to right" often doesn't apply to web pages, especially if someone is trying to glean information about a subject quickly. Check out this image for a common web consumption method; basically it's a 'z' pattern. I think this overlay on Facebook's login page is fairly representative, which would land viewers of contact us into the disclaimer and then into "article subjects". here is a good article on the overall theory of z-shaped UX ).

    That's all a little outside my overarching point, though; I have never went to the Britannica website to see if I can edit their entries. I just assume I can't. Back when WP was considered an extremely unreliable source, I believe many people did believe they (and anyone else) could change things at will. Heck, I did it in 2009; the article I wrote would have gotten deleted before I hit save now (rightfully so, it was overly-biased, poorly sourced, and I worked for the company).

    However, once Wikipedia first started deserving respect as a place for accurate and fairly unbiased information, and then a few years later actually started getting recognized as such, I think the idea that you could just change something exited the (non-wiki) collective consciousness. Of course, that is an opinion with anecdotal evidence at best, but it has been my experience. FranMichael (talk) 18:54, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• This is horrible. I'm not saying the WMF was legally responsible for it, but regardless, I am disappointed in the way this was handled. I'd like to see the community go through existing BLPs on criminals and check that the photos are accurate, and implement a stronger policy going forward, to reduce the chance of such a case occurring again. 70.175.192.217 (talk) 17:32, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Much the same point was made by (retired, I think) journalist Dan Murphy at WO. He said,

  In a weird way this appalling screw up should have been a communications person's dream, because the response is so obvious.

  "tktktkt. While we appreciate the ruling that reaffirms the legal protections that have helped us become the world's leading online reference work, we also want to send our heartfelt apologies to Mr. Florida Man. Legal liability is not the threshold for doing the right thing, and this incident has illustrated failings in our rules and procedures. We need to do better. In that vein, we are taking steps x, y, and z to ensure this doesn't happen again."

  And they couldn't do it.

  It's surely worthwhile to think about why this is not what was done. --Andreas JN466 16:12, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

What could the WMF have done better

• Instead of gloating over a win on a legal technicality, WMF should had paid some compensation. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:39, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
  • @Hawkeye7: That was my instant response to the blog post: it felt like gloating, and so inappropriate in this context where Wikipedia had evidently harmed someone who had done nothing to deserve being tarred with this particular brush. (I've added a subheader above, as this is a new and important aspect in this discussion.) And it seemed to me from looking at the Google results for Nathaniel White serial killer that no one at the WMF (or Google, for that matter, who were also sued along with the WMF, back in February) seemed to have lifted a finger to even do as much as clean up Mr. White's Google footprint.
  • There was a bit of correspondence with Smallbones and the WMF's Greg Varnum prior to publication of this piece (in particular, the WMF asserted that I should not have interpreted their blog post as telling people that lawsuits should be directed at Wikipedia contributors rather than the WMF; we added a paragraph to that effect and made some other changes). Subsequent to that I put it to Greg a couple of days ago (Monday) that when you bump into someone in the street, and they drop their shopping, oranges rolling across the sidewalk, surely the most natural thing to do is to stop, voice concern and help the person pick everything up. This situation here, I said, is surely much the same: Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation were demonstrably instrumental in creating Mr. White's undeserved Google footprint, even if thanks to Section 230 they weren't ever going to be held legally responsible. (It's worth noting that if Wikipedia had had the correct picture, it would have countered rather than amplified the misinformation from the Discovery TV broadcast. Even no picture would have been better.)
  • I added that the WMF are well placed to help here: they have plenty of contacts at Google. Jimmy Wales even once went on holiday with Larry Page, years ago, and User:Denny, as a former Google staffer who worked for years on the Google Knowledge Graph and is now a WMF employee, could provide expert advice on how best to help clean up Mr. White's appalling Google footprint, which continues to dominate searches for the serial killer. It just seems the decent thing to do.
  • I have had no reply to date, not even a brief note to confirm receipt. It feels like nobody cares, which would be very concerning, because if you stand by when an individual is crushed by the wheels of the system it makes all the talk about George Floyd empty virtue-signaling – more than that, hypocrisy. I'd like to see the WMF live up to its words and at the very least try to do this much for Mr. White. --Andreas JN466 11:24, 3 November 2021 (UTC) While I was writing this post, Greg posted the WMF comment below. --Andreas JN466 12:01, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

  I disagree. They should have organized a wiki-thon on social justice or such. But wasting money on just saying sorry? No, that's not smart. Give people the fishing road, not the fish. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:03, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

  @Piotrus: Making a few phone calls to Google, or contacting a few sites that picked up the wrong picture, does not cost money and would be a decent thing to do. I do wonder why Google aren't cleaning the Knowledge Graph panel up anyway. They know about the case (they were a party to it). They have done as much for other people – see Vox article, where a Swiss software engineer had the same problem. Apparently it takes "a few hours" to fix. Yet in Mr. White's case, they're letting it go on for years. --Andreas JN466 13:28, 10 November 2021 (UTC) I got confused by the way the indent displays. I thought you were replying to me rather than to Hawkeye7. Cheers, --Andreas JN466 13:33, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

  Right, I was replying to him. I agree with you re the other issues. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 15:12, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

BLP policy implications

• It seems to me that if we have a system where someone can be falsely labelled as a serial killer then we have a system which is broken - it doesn't really matter if the sources we used were broken too, as we're still responsible for what we allow to be accepted. In BLP there's a section on photographs. It only speaks of not including photos to disparage the subject, but I don't see why that can't be extended to require photos to be "reasonable depictions of subjects", and to require high quality sourcing for the use of photos where the subject is accused or convicted of a major crime. - Bilby (talk) 12:37, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • I've started a thread at WT:BLP#BLPs and image sourcing. (I also added the section header above.) --Andreas JN466 19:42, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Sourcing and verification on Wikipedia is poor all round

Before people get too hung up on thinking this is about image sourcing, or policy or images in general, can I direct your attention to the very next edit after the mysterious stranger who removed the image. Another IP editor has changed the date of birth. They didn't say why, and didn't provide a source. Which is perhaps immaterial, because the original date, added all the way way in 2008, never had a source either. Who knows which is correct, if either even is. Why would that be important? Well, obviously, dates of birth are one way you can prove you're not the serial killer that Wikipedia says you are. On current evidence, a malicious actor, on seeing the press coverage, could have altered the date to make it look even more like the misidentified man is the serial killer. There's nothing here that suggests anyone would have even noticed. Even now, even after this article has been subject to much attention for lack of editorial oversight, still nobody appears to have noticed (or perhaps have but just don't care) that the date of birth is unsourced. A basic and obvious violation of BLP, if ever there was one. Policy is clear, and has been for a very long time. That unsourced DOB should be removed immediately. Would take seconds. And yet, it hasn't happened. There have allegedly been efforts to improve Wikipedia's sourcing. If those efforts have not even reached a quick first pass over dates of birth, it doesn't instill much confidence. One wonders what's behind the delay. Perhaps it is lack of editors all round (see below section for a related observation). Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, and while BLP are rightly a particular concern, it's poor sourcing all around. Most of my editing time on Wikipedia is on STEM articles, mostly geology and mostly noncontroversial. Much of that time is supplying missing sourcing. I find myself hesitant to rip out entire sections of articles that lack sourcing, out of fear that some source, somewhere, might support it, and because I am as prone to anyone to the magical thinking that if I simply put a "citation needed" mark on the statement, the source will magically appear. In spite of the fact that I can count the times that has happened on one hand with fingers to spare.

But, not long ago, I found that most of a geology article I had started reviewing was extremely well-written but suspiciously devoid of any sourcing. Sure enough, after some digging on Google Scholar, I found that it was a flagrant, extensive, and 16-year-old copyright violation. Copyright violation may not be as serious a moral issue as libelous BLP, but it's nonetheless a serious legal issue.

I am strongly inclined now to put a "citation needed" on an unsourced statement only if it really, really sounds right, is interesting and important, but for some reason I can't immediately dredge up a supporting source. Otherwise I just cut it and be done with it.

I am coming round to the view that if a statement in an article is unsourced (whether a BLP article or a definition of a igneous rock type) it should be removed immediately. It's nice if the editor makes a good-faith effort to find a supporting source first, but I'm beginning to think there is no obligation to do so. Sure, if we pull every "citation needed" statement out of Wikipedia today, the encyclopedia will lose half its content -- but I suggest that this content will not be much missed and the rest will acquire a much better reputation.

Apologies for the long rant. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 19:13, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Kent G. Budge is right on the money here. Large amounts of Wikipedia articles, even highly viewed ones, have tons of uncited material that is very difficult to deal with, usually the easiest solution is to rip it out and start again, but it's so much work. Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:36, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Mackabrillion, the article actually had two birth dates for more than six years, ever since this 2014 edit: [3] – 26 July in the infobox, 28 July in the lead paragraph. No one noticed or cared. The edit you mention made the two dates the same ... both wrong. The date in the article now (28 July in both lead paragraph and infobox) is sourced ... The article had nearly 12,000 views in a single day in August 2018, when the TV program aired. Overall, there were more than 128,000 pageviews during the time when it contained Mr. White's photograph. As a system for writing a reliable reference work, at least in this subject area, it's surely a very, very far cry from being "very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur". Cheers, --Andreas JN466 21:28, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Low participation is also a factor

What should also be noted is that although a mysterious IP editor did notice and remove the incorrect image, in all likelihood because of the press coverage of the lawsuit, they didn't detail why they were doing it. It could quite as easily have just been vandalism for all anyone knew. And after that edit was made, no other edits are made to either the article or the talk page for at least a year. While we can't know for sure, it seems quite likely that no established editor noticed the removal, or they did but they weren't sufficiently moved by the unevidenced claim that Wikipedia had misidentified a serial killer, to investigate and provide their colleagues with a positive indication that they had chased this down and found the press report. There was, as far as I can tell, nothing stopping the image from being readded from one of the sources that had reused it from Wikipedia. Most likely by someone who might never have even seen the IP editor's note in the edit history. Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

The folly of being mostly right, most of the time

The Wikimedia Counsel cited a study in Wikipedia's defence that says Wikipedia editors are quite quick to removed most bad edits. And who knows, maybe that study is true. I am dubious of the Berkmam Klein Centre's findings, ever since it was quite obvious that in the case of a publication of theirs that mentioned Gateway Pundit, they had sourced basic descriptive information from Wikipedia. Information that didn't have a source here, and appeared nowhere else on the internet before it appeared on Wikipedia, suggesting quite strongly that this had been simply made up by a Wikipedia editor, and other Wikipedia editors either never noticed or simply didn't care (for obvious reasons, the Gateway Pundit isn't exactly going to get a gold star service from Wikipedia). The folly of resting on some assurance that you'll get it right most of the time, is when you have the risk of the few times times you do get it wrong, it can quite easily be very, very, harmful. It has been suggested that BLP articles should be fully protected. And to be honest, when there is nothing to suggest that in similar cases the editor community would not make the same mistake here again (chiefly to not notice press coverage of a lawsuit that mentions Wikipedia), that looks like a wise move. As this case showed quite well, other often suggested changes, such as preventing IP editing, might not yield the same level of protection. Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

The identity of the IP editor

Probably futile, but an explicit on the record denial from the Wimimedia Counsel that to the best of their knowledge, neither he or anyone in the Wikimedia Foundation is behind the IP that removed the image from the Wikipedia article, would go some way to better understanding the true weaknesses of the Wikipedia model. Mackabrillion (talk) 18:17, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Comment from Wikimedia Foundation

First, we note that the editorial makes some thoughtful suggestions regarding the possibility of taking greater care when dealing with articles and photographs of people accused of crimes. We agree with the editorial that the most ideal outcome would be that the mistaken photograph on Wikipedia had been caught and removed immediately after upload and we are supportive of the community's ongoing efforts to develop processes which improve the quality of potentially sensitive articles. At the same time, we also believe that the overall Wikipedia process for this case worked once the problem was discovered. It appears that the broader internet was not aware of the original research mistake until after the Discovery TV program came out. Once the mistake was reported on, Wikipedia’s open structure allowed someone (an IP editor) to remove the image quickly and there was no further problem on Wikipedia. This is a considerably better outcome than how the TV program responded and compared with other websites that hosted the same content. We would point to this as an example of Wikipedia’s open structure working well while agreeing that it could still be further improved to catch future mistakes sooner.

Second, we wish to offer a clarification regarding a misunderstanding in the Signpost editorial. The original blog stated “Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made.” The Signpost editorial interprets this to mean that one should sue a specific Wikipedia editor, but this was neither the intent nor what the section stated. In this case, the “statement at issue” is the original research conducted by Discovery Television that misidentified Mr. White. Our intent was to highlight the fact that Mr. White actually did sue Discovery Television in his lawsuit and the case against them was not dismissed by the motion that ended the case against the Foundation. It is fairly likely that Mr. White will be able to proceed with the court and receive a full hearing regarding his claims of harm from the misidentification or to reach an agreeable settlement with Discovery Television. We would also note that in the cases that are most difficult to address on Wikipedia because they have an existing reliable source, there is very often a corporation that can be held responsible for what they originally published.

The goal of the people from multiple departments within the Foundation that came together to help Jacob author and factcheck the Diff article was to show that this is a successful case where the law worked well: Mr. White still has a route to compensation for his harm from the business that appears to have made the original mistake while the Wikimedia Foundation was protected from legal liability that could have significantly disrupted open community editorial processes. While many other websites have feedback links to report errors, this is yet another example of how and why it often takes less time to address these issues on open platforms like Wikipedia in comparison to closed platforms.

--Stephen LaPorte, Wikimedia Foundation Associate General Counsel — Preceding unsigned comment added by GVarnum-WMF (talk • contribs) 10:36, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

For reference, the relevant passage of the WMF blog post reads:

It is important to note that Section 230's broad protection of Wikimedia projects and other online services does not leave litigants like Mr. White without options. Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made. This both allows litigants to challenge the appropriate parties responsible for their harm and protects online hosting companies like the Wikimedia Foundation from the costs associated with liability for user-generated content.
— Diff

If Wikipedia is the forum that was improperly sued here, then the Discovery Channel is not "the individual who made the statement at issue" in this forum.

I am certainly not alone in having interpreted the post this way. For reference, the top-rated post at last month's Slashdot discussion (which I was unaware of until a couple of days ago) of the Diff post reads as follows:

It is important to note that Section 230â(TM)s broad protection of Wikimedia projects and other online services does not leave litigants like Mr. White without options. Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made.
So they want him to subpoena the IP address and sue the contributor who posted his image.
Seems like a fair compromise.

The effectiveness or otherwise of the quality control system is amply covered by others in the discussion above. I don't think the system works at all well in the True Crime area. Also, why should it matter what the "broader internet" is aware of? Reality matters. People matter. Mr. White matters. (And there actually has long been what I believe is a real photo of the killer on the Internet. It does not look like Mr. White, beyond their both being African-American men.) Regards, --Andreas JN466 11:38, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Some thoughts

• Even though Section 230 in Wikipedia's case does not lay the blame for any damaging edits on the responsible editor, it also does not mean they won't get sued; it just immunizes the Foundation. In this case, Vwanweb can still be sued, & even if they successfully defended themselves in court, lawsuits are expensive.
• It can be surprisingly easy to misidentify people in photos; there are only so many combinations of names, & even people with uncommon names can find someone else in the world with the same exact name. For example, years back I was surprised to find a car salesman in Australia with the same first & last names as me, same spellings -- & my birth name is unusual. (While I do have some distant relatives living in that country, AFAIK the salesman is not related to me.) Further, based on incidental surfing, I suspect a non-trivial number of teen-aged & college-aged women happen to have names identical to the stage names of female pornstars. So caution is warranted.
• I had a look for that "Contact Wikipedia" link. Now I have more experience with Wikipedia than probably anyone else reading this article, but I had some difficulty finding that link. And once I did, & followed the link as if I were the concerned subject of the article, the remedy I was offered was to leave a note on the Talk page.
  That's not feasible.
  Anyone with more than casual Wikipedia experience knows the vast majority of pages are reviewed by volunteers maybe once every few years. A note on the talk page of one of those articles may never be read. There ought to be a link to some place where it will receive immediate attention. (Yeah, I know such a place exists, but the name slips my mind at the moment.)
• And I agree with Andreas above: when derogatory information is identified & removed from Wikipedia, Google should have a process for scrubbing its echoes from their search engine. Once upon a time, their motto was "Don't Be Evil"; it would be nice if they still tried to follow that occasionally. But they are a for-profit business, unlike the Foundation. -- llywrch (talk) 17:29, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

If we learn any lessons from this, one of them ought to be that the nonprofit status of the Foundation does not automatically keep us from doing evil. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 17:46, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

An additional point I forgot to make, in addition to my first 2 points above. Since it is easy to make mistakes with articles about living people, the dangers of editing them could have a chilling effect on new editors -- which is not desirable. I would hope that the Foundation has some plan of action for those cases where an editor is being sued over a good-faith mistake. As I wrote above, lawsuits are expensive to defend, & editors should not be penalized for such mistakes. Even experienced editors can make mistakes that less haste or more sleep would help them avoid. -- llywrch (talk) 15:27, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Invalid fair use rationale

Fair use rationales are not valid for images living people, this image should never have been uploaded in the first place. Hemiauchenia (talk) 21:05, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

I can't see deleted images, but the image was likely uploaded under a claim of being public domain - which is accurate for mugshots taken by the federal government, and I have no idea for mugshots taken by New York State Corrections. (See File:Thomas_Hagan.jpg for a suspicious example that's still current - is this really public domain?). That said, even if it was copyrighted, there are rare exceptions that do allow fair use images for living people when taking a fresh compatibly licensed photo is not reasonable, and prisoners may qualify. (As usual, no guarantees, FFD is a roulette wheel.) SnowFire (talk) 22:38, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Here is the log entry, which you don't need special permissions for: [4]. It says,

• "(== Summary == This is an inmate photograph (mugshot) of American serial killer Nathaniel White, by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, United States, dated: after 1993. == Rationale information == {{Non-free use rationale 2 |description = After 1993 inmate photograph (mugshot) of American serial killer Nathaniel White. |author = New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, United States. |source = http://crimefeed.com/2017/08/31713...)" (The picture was only deleted because it was an unused non-free fair use image.) --Andreas JN466 23:02, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Never mind, then. Guess it was uploaded as fair-use, surprising. SnowFire (talk) 00:24, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

This part of the edit that added the rationale was truncated in the edit summary:

|commercial  = If this image is subject to copyright, it belongs to the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.  Which is a government (or government contracted) public service and not a commercial entity nor artist, and by using this low-resolution image it does not impact the department of any monetary value.  
|other information = Source (no image):  provides inmate data from the state’s department of incarceration:<br>
http://nysdoccslookup.doccs.ny.gov/kinqw00 <br>
DIN (Department Identification Number):   93A4050 <br>
Fair use: Ensured conformance with the image’s “low-resolution” sizing by using the recommended [https://tools.wmflabs.org/cp/resize.php Image Resize Calculator].

Vwanweb acknowledged that there was "(no image)" on the NYS Department of Corrections' website, and wrongly assumed that this was where crimefeed.com obtained the image from, despite the failed verification. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:49, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

An observation: Good intentions do not justify cutting corners. I have to remind myself of that frequently. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 14:55, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I've added a sentence covering images and media files to WP:SWYGT. Also, I learned today that the Discovery program only featured the picture very briefly, right at the end of the program. Of course that's long enough for anyone who knows a person to recognise them, but for everyone else it would have been far harder to memorise the face from that than from a stationary image on an internet page. --Andreas JN466 18:44, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Discussions of this story elsewhere

• Thread on Hacker news
• "Wikipedia Criticized After Years of Using the Wrong Man's Picture to Depict a Serial Killer" (Slashdot news story)
• Tweet by Elon Musk in response to Slashdot story
• "Wikipedia editors insisted a black guy was a serial killer for years" (Fudzilla)
• 連続殺人犯と同姓同名の他人の写真がWikipediaに2年にわたり掲載される事態が発生 (Gigazine, Japan)
• "Sur Wikipedia, la photo d’un homme utilisée par erreur pendant deux ans pour illustrer la page d’un tueur en série" (Le Monde, France)
• "2:00PM Water Cooler 11/8/2021" (Naked Capitalism)
• "Wikipedia and Google Identified Wrong Man as a Serial Killer for Years" (Motherboard (Vice))
• Wikipédia a Google roky zobrazovali fotografiu nesprávneho muža ako sériového vraha (ŽIVÉ, Slovakia)
• Википедия и Google годами называли серийным убийцей не того человека (видео) (Focus, Ukraine)
• Wikipedia και Google έδειχναν αθώο σαν κατά συρροή δολοφόνο, (iGURU, Greece)
• Durante anos, o Google e a Wikipédia identificaram um homem inocente como um assassino em série (Zap.aeiou, Portugal)
• Google ve Wikipedia'nın masum bir adamın fotoğrafını yıllarca seri katil diye gösterdiği ortaya çıktı (Tükenmez Haber, Turkey)
• Masum adamın fotoğrafını seri katil diye gösterdiler (Milliyet, Turkey)
• Évekig tévesen mutogatott valakit sorozatgyilkosként a Google és a Wikipedia (Index, Hungary) --Andreas JN466

Bottom line: We have just provided Exhibit A in favor of repealing Section 230, which already has broad bipartisan support. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 15:39, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Note that there is a difference between social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, where each post appears with the name of its author prominently identified, and Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, the names of the authors are obscured. Everything is published under the name "Wikipedia". And the Wikimedia Foundation collects hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of "Wikipedia". A lawyer could actually argue that the volunteers are not social media users, but unpaid Wikimedia Foundation staff. --Andreas JN466 15:51, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Recent research: Welcome messages fail to improve newbie retention (5,055 bytes · 💬)

• As a fairly frequent sender of talk page welcomes (probably 75+), I've gotten maybe 1-2 responses total. It's interesting to read that research seems to back up their limited impact on editor retention. On the other hand, the growth team features seem to be making a difference and are expanding, so I've signed up as a mentor there. Ganesha811 (talk) 20:30, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, the new Growth features are important context there - I had meant to cover that in the review (now amended). Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:34, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

@HaeB: That growth team looks amazing! Clovermoss (talk) 02:36, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• I don't think I've received a double digit number of responses to talk page welcomes I've given, bespoke or template. I'd estimate that I've given 200 bespoke welcomes and 1000 template welcomes. Certainly no welcomes will be well-received when most recipients can't hear us, by design of the WMF. Unfortunately, such superficial projects can only make a limited impact when the root causes of low editor retention are twofold: inordinately and arbitrarily high learning curves, both in technical processes and bureaucratic policy reading; and a highly toxic community that provides to all editors significantly more negative (and unconstructive) feedback than positive feedback, but particularly provides to newbies very low-fuse temper comments and a huge degree of suspicion (due in part due to the genuine overwhelming levels of sockpuppetry that perhaps outnumber good faith newbies at this point).
  As for the Growth features, they are a very well-considered attempt to lower both root causes by more personal volunteer feedback. Nonetheless, they are not going to singlehandedly change the tide on a rotten community that hates both itself and outsiders, and the features are still technically bottlenecked by how few new people can successfully add a message to a talk page! (Yet Flow was almost universally condemned...) — Bilorv (talk) 12:51, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Like Bilorv, the way i see it, welcome message can only help retention if the follow up experience is there. When ppl don't know how to edit and everything is super strict, when they get told off by a bot or a user when they make a mistake, when they don't understand how to reply to a messages, when they are not allowed to contribute the information they want to because 'thousands of reasons' then no amount of welcome is going to help honestly. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:21, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Automated greetings don't help, heh. I could have told you that- I was genuinely either mildly annoyed or wholly uninterested in the greeting message I got when I first joined. The technical learning curve and various policies, oddly, wasn't an issue. --SilverTiger12 (talk) 18:04, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • @SilverTiger12: for me, the technical side was intuitive and the various policies were interesting, an active attractor. But this is a selective bias among people who stayed (and are invested enough to read The Signpost). — Bilorv (talk) 15:05, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• I was surprised to read this. A non-trivial contributor to my initial "retention" was User:Vanjagenije's welcome message with a plate of cookies. As a TW user I now know it was just three clicks of a button, but back then it seemed like a really nice gesture. Though I did not respond to the message itself, it did make the atmosphere more... friendly. But eh, anecdotal evidence and all that... W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 07:06, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
  • I like to think that the messages do still make a difference in a non-measurable way (after all, I keep sending them). Maybe I leave a message to an IP and the person creates an account. Maybe a welcome stays prominently in the mind of a person who's an account for a one-off edit, and months later they return, but have to create a new account as they've forgotten their password. However, if there is a difference, I think it has to be a fairly small one. — Bilorv (talk) 15:05, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Serendipity: How Wikipedia helped create a Serbian stamp (1,954 bytes · 💬)

• Nice little piece. I shared this with my chess enthusiast father. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:48, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Very nice story, but conclusive statement is a bit streeeetched, as they did not really worked together, but rather in succession contributed and used Wikimedia projects, that gave these results. A common simplification that reduces understanding of the high complexity of intentional collaboration among Wikimedians. --Zblace (talk) 04:33, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Great story! I wonder if WMF or WMRS should, as follow-up, gently nudge Serbian Post to cite their sources (if they hadn't done so publicly already)? Deryck C. 11:59, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • The Matulović image is CC0, so they are filling the legal obligations there. If any of the others are CC BY-SA then it looks like they're doing the "SA" bit (the stamps are public domain) but maybe not the "BY" (attribution) bit. — Bilorv (talk) 15:16, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• A thoughtful post, an example on how collaboration rocks.--Vulp❯❯❯here! 08:19, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
• This was a very nice read - it often impresses me just how much Wikimedia projects can achieve. Remagoxer ^(talk) 10:46, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Traffic report: James Bond and the Giant Squid Game (622 bytes · 💬)

Alt text to images would be interesting. Now when the mouse hover over an image, any text doesn't appear. Alt text would give a descrition of image related to the article. Hope editors would consider the idea. Ex: Cheers!--Chanaka L (talk) 10:33, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

WikiProject report: Redirection (1,397 bytes · 💬)

• Thank you for conducting this interview, I learned a lot I didn't know. Ganesha811 (talk) 20:42, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
• From an editor perspective, one reason redirects are important is that without them, I sometimes create content not knowing it already exists because it just wasn't findable. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:13, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Redirect is essential for proper experience of Wikipedia so a dedicated WikiProject is very helpful. Great interview!--Vulp❯❯❯here! 08:28, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
• I had not given any thought to categorising redirects, I will read up on it. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 13:05, 8 November 2021 (UTC)