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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2019-11-29. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: Two requests for arbitration cases (3,053 bytes · 💬)

Portal peace

  • I sincerely hope the Arbcom Portal case will put an end to the squabbling among those who put so much of their time into portals. GoodDay (talk) 01:25, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
@GoodDay: - I've been wondering how extensive they'll look to resolve the conduct issues. We started with 20 parties, which the accepting arbs seemed to state was way too many, so we'll lose most, but there might be a couple who should be added. I suspect a bevy of TBANs, and potentially the extension of DS to the Portal namespace depending on the makeup of the new Arb corps. Nosebagbear (talk) 18:27, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
Hopefully, pro-portal editors will come to an agreement on a quota for portals on Wikipedia. An agreed upon quota, would end any mass creations or deletions. GoodDay (talk) 19:45, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm guessing I'm not quite getting what you are suggesting, which surely isn't that we decide how many portals is the right number and allow only that many? Beeblebrox (talk) 00:25, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Should only be x-number of portals on Wikipedia. GoodDay (talk) 00:43, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Ok, so I did understand it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for anyone to agree that this is a reasonable solution to the problem, but thanks is for replying. Beeblebrox (talk) 01:45, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Blocked user

It's certainly not the norm that a user with almost 17,000 edits gets indefinitely blocked, but a look at Wumbolo's block log indicates that this is not exactly surprising. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:28, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Not just that, but Wumbolo actually announced his retirement over a quarter year before getting indef blocked. ☆ Bri (talk) 01:49, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
A good deal of the block log is recent but the indef seems deserved given the legal issues he could've caused for the WMF with his edits. Looks like Wumbolo intended to retire, made almost no edits until that final spree, almost all of which were TBAN violations anyway. If the name ever gets widely reported by reputable sources Wikipedia can allow it, until then edit filters and oversight blocks for anyone who repeatedly trips them or attempts to evade them are appropriate. 47.23.142.18 (talk) 00:56, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

Essay: Adminitis (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-11-29/Essay

From the archives: WikiProject Spam, revisited (2,958 bytes · 💬)

  • We have identified BLPs as a special class of articles which have unique rules. We might designate other classes, for example anything that is "living" such as currently-sold products, companies less than X years old, etc.. and hold them to a different threshold of notability due to their status as being prone to abuse by impossible to detect PR efforts. First step is look at a known UPE corpus of articles and classify articles into common classes that are unique enough to set them apart. -- GreenC 01:06, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
    • We've raised the sourcing standards for WP:CORP not too long ago. Spammers don't care about notability and will submit their spam anyway. WP:BLP hasn't stopped UPE spam either. Spam pages need to be evaluated at WP:AFD. This is problematic for two reasons - AFD has a finite capacity and it also has been infiltrated by spammers voting to keep their own articles and delete those of their competitors. That said, I agree with your point in part - we should start by adapting and applying the stringent sourcing requirements of WP:CORP to biographies. MER-C 10:38, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
      • Regarding apply NCORP-equivalent rules to BLP articles has really obvious arguments in favour of it, there are benefits of the field-specific rules as well (now if you can find some more people to support a future effort to rewrite NSPORTS to be less absurdly generous I'll be the first one there). Regarding GreenC's suggestion, it's not that they're impossible to detect - if they were, AfD (or any equivalent) would be pointless. It's that they take experienced editor time to assess and, if need be, fix - and as we are all too aware, that's Wikipedia's ultimate bottleneck resource. One minor change to start with is just reminding both reviewers and patrollers that products are held to the same rules as NCORP. Nosebagbear (talk) 18:35, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
        • "... AFD has a finite capacity and it also has been infiltrated by spammers voting to keep their own articles and delete those of their competitors..." Exactly. All it takes is for one editor to have a page on watch when an AfD is proposed and he/she will rally responses. Consensus will then appear to support retention. One example of this was Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sew Fast Sew Easy (2nd_nomination): A small neighborhood store with puff added by one of the store's principals. It's been closed for years yet still had a loyal base who rallied to its support. Blue Riband► 13:39, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

From the editor: Put on your birthday best (2,356 bytes · 💬)

Is the Featured Content section ever coming back? GamerPro64 06:37, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

If we can find somebody who would like to write it up every month we'll start it up again. A couple of difficulties that people have found in doing it.
  • It's pretty long to write up with text now that we are on a monthly schedule. If we could find a subset of "all things featured" that might make it easier to write up.
  • We tried to do it all with images, but that's a lot of images which can mean long loading times and it even gets boring just having so many images.
If anybody can figure a way around these problems, please let us know or just let us know that you'll write it up. Thanks. Smallbones(smalltalk) 12:03, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
I used to do Featured Content and there isn't a lot of human thought required if there's a concise lede; it's pretty tedious to do the cut-paste to put it together. Image selection for FAs and FLs is a final touch that would require a human, but I bet scripts and/or a bot could probably put most of it together and make the whole job a lot more enjoyable. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:36, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
I wonder if a more intriguing approach for both readers and writers would be a curated set of say 6 to 12 items selected by whoever writes the report, in a similar style to the Traffic report or this issue's Gallery – i.e. something intriguing (and possibly amusing) for each, rather than just a trimmed down lead or file description. The rest of the recently promoted items could just be presented in simple lists - or perhaps even omitted in favour of links to the relevant WP:GO pages - Evad37 [talk] 18:17, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Sounds like your begging for help or your "newspaper" will go out of business. I cannot help in any way but you should not sound so desperate. Eschoryii (talk) 09:04, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

Gallery: Winter and holidays (698 bytes · 💬)

Cultural bias

You do know it's summer in half of the world now? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:39, 29 November 2019 (UTC)

Two of the eleven pictures are from the Southern Hemisphere, one is from near-equatorial Thailand. Is there a problem? ☆ Bri (talk) 17:41, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
It's 29˚C here right now in winter (that's 84.2˚F). Warm enough? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:35, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

In focus: An update on the Wikimedia Movement 2030 Strategy (1,951 bytes · 💬)

I can only hope that the WG members who have gone into this one are more willing to actually communicate. With 1 big exception and 1 minor exception, all the WGs were terrible at communicating during the consultation stages despite requests and outright pleading by participants: both at feedback about the recommendations but also requests for clarification. That there were no substantive changes between the two bouts of consultation suggests that the couple of hundred edits made to ask or indicate (most frequently) concerns did not receive great deals of consideration. As such I'm not feeling confident that the ultimate set of suggestions will bear in mind both sets of feedback. Risker's presence is one of the few things that gives me hope in it. Nosebagbear (talk) 18:41, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments, Nosebagbear. I can't really speak for all of the working groups, but I know that many of them had a large amount of feedback from a lot of different streams coming in, and at minimum they were read and considered, even if there weren't written responses to everything. This has been a challenging process - some groups did a lot of information gathering and research, some of which was suitable for publishing; the Roles & Responsibilities group on which I sat read dozens of scholarly papers and treatises to try to find concepts that could be workable within our movement. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort into their group's work, and it can be difficult to step back and dispassionately prioritize recommendations. That work continues. Risker (talk) 05:20, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

In the media: You say you want a revolution (7,170 bytes · 💬)

  • Smallbones, you are not the best person to write about Russia, are you? ∯WBGconverse 15:01, 30 November 2019 (UTC)o
  • Smallbones, this is a really helpful investigation & summary into all of the efforts to manipulate & protect Wikipedia. I'd seen some of these in the news, but there's a lot more that I need to read. Also, kudos for carrying the Beatles all the way to the end. :) -- Toughpigs (talk) 20:53, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
Thanks @Toughpigs:. This one started with the song, which has been popping up in my head for about a third of all articles I added to this review for the past several months. Looking back at the article draft history it looks like it just hit me over the head with the China story and Jimmy's social network. Of course this is about the manipulation of Wikipedia, but it's not just manipulation, everybody's doing it. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, but your goose is going to get cooked. My only remaining question is whether the slow version or the fast version is better. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:51, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
Um, obviously the fast version. The guitar is so much meaner :) -Indy beetle (talk) 02:52, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
Yes, but I'm a sucker for "dooby doo wahs" Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:58, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
As my poetry teacher back in college once put it, "sometimes the Muse hands you a cookie." -- llywrch (talk) 23:21, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
  • While I will admit that, based on over 18 years contributing to Wikipedia, Wikipedia has numerous faults, some of which are critical, nevertheless it always seems that almost anything Larry Sanger writes about Wikipedia is just another serving of sour grapes. And if you've sampled one sour grape, you know what they taste like. -- llywrch (talk) 20:00, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
  • I'm finding Larry's rants absolutely hilarious given that his first "I'll show you how to make a damned encyclopedia" project was the exact opposite of what he is proposing now. The plan, if I understand it correctly, is to take all available articles on a given subject and make them fight it out until one is determined to be the "correct" version. The fact that he is openly courting the alt-right crowd to assist him in this venture does not inspire confidence in it's ability to find truth. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:33, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
It's also worth noting that WT:Social does not actually have that many users. It's pay-to-play or they put you on a waitlist and let you in when they feel like it... or something like that. So there's a bunch of people on a list, but only those who have paid up are actually using it. I can't imagine that charging for what all other platforms give away for free is a sustainable model that will take even a modest chink of the social media market. Competing with Facebook is something even Google failed at, and WikiTribune sure isn't Google. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:37, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
I think User:Beeblebrox you just need to invite someone else and you are let in. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:37, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
I agree - there's pretty extreme difference between Citizendium and Everipedia. This new encyclosphere things seems to be more towards the evripedia end but there were a couple of (slightly incongruous) mention of experts in his 18 min video. Sadly, I 'd expect the system he's proposing will be the equivalent of the echo chambers and bubbles that social media and online news have tended to enhance. The idea of basically being able to browse an encyclopedia where each article is chosen from a wide set in order to best match your ideology sounds pretty dire. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 04:11, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm not so sure about that. Larry has long had inclusionist tendencies, I don't have any diffs off-hand but if you go many years back into his edit history you'll see what I mean. Certainly if you read the comments in his announcement he sees no contradiction; there's a back and forth with Carrite among others. It seems what he wants is an encyclopedia about everything edited by experts. Since that is obviously not happening, he's hit upon a different solution of placing all internet encyclopedia articles together to be rated for quality side-by-side with the idea being that the best will eventually win out. YMMV on whether this is a good idea, I certainly have my doubts. 47.23.142.18 (talk) 00:48, 7 December 2019 (UTC)
  • @Peaceray, are the University of Washington edit-a-thon results logged somewhere? Didn't see in the WikiEdu dashboard. czar 00:34, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
@Czar: Editing as Activism, Edit-A-Thon to Correct Systemic Bias in Wikipedia — Programs & Events Dashboard: Articles Edited Peaceray (talk) 03:44, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
  • About the Jimmy Kimmel licensing thing: The ShareAlike doesn't work that way. The license permits stuff otherwise prohibited by copyright law on certain conditions. It doesn't automatically attach the same license to derivative works. Rather, someone releasing a derivative work that doesn't abide by the license terms is infringing copyright--just like nearly everything else on YouTube. Ntsimp (talk) 17:25, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
  • Baidu Baike's layout is a bit confusing compared to Mediawiki, even the ads are sometimes more prominent than the content itself. Can see why users prefer the zhwiki over Baike (along with the reasons mentioned in the article). Gotitbro (talk) 22:47, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

News and notes: How soon for the next million articles? (1,710 bytes · 💬)

  • Eek! CoI from orbit! The sky is falling! Jim.henderson (talk) 01:02, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
    • Yeah, the conflict of interest is so out there that I think everybody would realize it without a formal declaration. She did declare that she is an astronaut, however. Given that the working conditions are so dangerous (she had to talk to Trump during the spacewalk), I'm inclined to ignore the COI problem. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:12, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
  • From what I can see, its seems the sale of the Public Interest Registry has gone through. If so, is hope for having some sort of impact on the process regarding .ORG domains for the future lost? Also, what affects have occurred so far and what is expected to happen in the future? —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 15:30, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

On the bright side: What's making you happy this month? (826 bytes · 💬)

I am happy that I was able to contribute and expand African film articles this month. On the other hand just got into Discord and I am contented that I got a volunteer to contribute to WikiProject AfroCine/Months of African Cinema which was way behind the initial target of 500 articles landmark. I was also surprised to see one of the sources which I took from Pulse Nigeria had a screenshot of Wikipedia article List of highest-grossing Nigerian films. The other thing I am happy about this month is Wikipedia is nearing 6 million article milestone. Abishe (talk) 04:02, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Recent research: Bot census; discussions differ on Spanish and English Wikipedia; how nature's seasons affect pageviews (1,398 bytes · 💬)

@HaeB and Miriam (WMF): your "aggregated clickstream data" link for the Gildersleve and Yasseri "Inspiration..." paper is broken, and does not appear to be in the paper itself. EllenCT (talk) 00:49, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Good catch - it was meant to go to m:Research:Wikipedia clickstream; fixed now. (The paper/preprint linked to https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1305770.v22 instead, as the particular revision of the dataset that was used.) Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:30, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
  • The bot census paper is interesting! I like this bit "The Wikipedia bots of today are human delegates...we impute roles to the bots; these roles should be understood to be heavily tied to the roles human Wikipedia editors choose to play." As a bot operator, it's interesting to think of WugBot as my "delegate" and the ways its actions reflect me and my personality. though the authors describe it in terms of role theory, it reminds me a bit of the intermediary/mediator division in actor-network theory as well. Wug·a·po·des​ 01:35, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Special report: How many people edit in your favorite language? Where are they from? (4,357 bytes · 💬)

Well I am a Wikipedia editor from Sri Lanka and of course English is not a popular language though it is one of the official languages of the country. It is regarded as a link language in the country. Surprised to Portugese speaking Brazil in the top 15 list even ahead of South Africa for gaining popularity in English Wikipedia. Abishe (talk) 03:36, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

  • Fascinating. I'm surprised Nigeria did not make the list. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:04, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
This is all there is from the September file:

language . country quant. lower limit upper limit

  • arwiki Nigeria 5 to 99 1 10
  • enwiki Nigeria 100 or more 11 20
  • enwiki Nigeria 5 to 99 251 260
  • hawiki Nigeria 5 to 99 1 10
  • jawiki Nigeria 5 to 99 1 10
  • yowiki Nigeria 5 to 99 1 10

yowiki is prob. yorba (sp?) . Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:12, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

  • These are interesting figures, but they need to be viewed with caution, for a number of reasons, including the following. For a start, the records are of the assumed location, and not necessarily the nationality, of the contributor. So, eg, if a contributor is a foreign student in the USA, the UK or Australia, all of which have big foreign student populations, the records will not be a record of the nationality of the contributor. Secondly, the assumed location may not be correct. So, eg, if a contributor in the PRC is using a VPN that says that the contributor's location is the USA, then the record will show the USA, not the PRC, as the location, even though the true location is the PRC. Thirdly, the records are likely to be skewed not simply towards native speakers (as the article hypothesises), but also towards fluent non-native speakers. That would explain, eg, the high performance of the Netherlands and Germany (the latter of which has more fluent speakers of English than Australia), and possibly also Brazil, a country with a large population (about 2 1/2 times that of Germany) and mandatory learning of at least one foreign language for all 12 grades of compulsory schooling. Fourthly, one needs to be cautious about Canada, where only about 56% of the population speaks English as a mother tongue, and about 21% use French as their mother tongue. Fifthly, the figures indicate that some countries with smaller populations have disproportionately large numbers of contributors. So, eg, New Zealand and Ireland both have populations of about one fifth of that of Australia, but New Zealand has more than one fifth as many prolific contributors, and Ireland has more than one fifth as many small contributors. Similarly, the number of contributors from the UK (both prolific and small) is disproportionately large by comparison with the USA. Bahnfrend (talk) 09:46, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
    • @Bahnfrend: Thanks for this - all datasets have limits or quirks of course, and it's important for everybody to understand the limits. Also you're starting to get into some new hypotheses about the data (e.g. from foreign students, fluent non-native speakers, or VPNs), which is the start of really understanding the data. This dataset has some special quirks, designed right-in to hide identities, and even the most basic measure - what is an "edit"? - is pretty vague covering everything from changing a comma to a semi-colon, to adding in 1,000 words to an article. Beyond simple curiosity, I suppose my motivation has to do mostly with so-called "political bias". A lot of Americans seem to think WP has a liberal bias, but is that due to age, gender, or country of residence of editors? I do think that this dataset will be examined in detail, so getting out all the quirks, biases, and hypotheses now is a worthwhile exercise. Thanks. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:19, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Technology report: Reference things, sister things, stranger things (2,217 bytes · 💬)

Traffic report: The queen and the princess meet the king and the joker (3,287 bytes · 💬)

The dates and the pageviews make it ineligible for this page, but yes it is a very strange occurrence. I should say 1st that from reading a history of the NYC Medical Examiners Office (a year ago) that I have a great deal of respect for them. 2nd while the official version sounds bizarre to me, the other (conspiracy) versions sound even more bizarre. I suppose there is one more version (nobody else that I've seen is even suggesting this) that fellow inmates did it, somehow just on opportunity and the spur of the moment. That one seems impossible, but so do the conspiracy theories.
Since you are quite involved in the article, perhaps you can give some rational explanation of what the conspiracy theories say. I haven't seen this yet. The CTs as far as I understand them are A) the Clintons did it, B) Trump did it, C) the US intelligence services did it, D) somebody else whose name has been mentioned with Epstein's did it, D) British intelligence services did it. All of these seem impossible to me. Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:10, 30 November 2019 (UTC)
@Smallbones: I meant more in the way of reader statistics. I've probably never written an article that has had high amount of views. The meme is in the eye of the beholder. It might be a very political statement, but it's pretty nonpartisan since no one has to agree on the details. (edit conflict) –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 05:11, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Can't fucking believe the Epstein didn't kill himself thing got a wikipedia article -Gouleg (Talk • Contribs) 20:36, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

It's this generation JFK assassination conspiracy theory. I wouldn't be surprised if it has as long of a lifespan. (There are just as many possible individuals who could be involved.) -- llywrch (talk) 20:29, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
  • I've never like seeing the same article in multiple weeks. Would it be possible to show the top 25/30/or 40 in the past month instead of weekly lists? MB 01:19, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
  • It's tough to do because The Signpost is (now) on a monthly cadence, but the WP:TOP25 lists are prepared weekly. - Bri.public (talk) 19:56, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
  • Quite interesting how the top viewed articles are related or distinct in these reports. Gotitbro (talk) 22:51, 17 December 2019 (UTC)


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