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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-08-29/News and notes

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Enough time left to vote! IP ban

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By Bri, Ganesha811, Isaacl, and Smallbones

Trustees election delayed

You've got two more days – until 23:59 UTC August 31 – to cast your vote for the new community-elected Board of Trustee members. The start of the election period was delayed due to technical reasons for 14 days to August 18.

To vote, follow the link on meta:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2021/Voting. In the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system you need to rank the candidates. Rank your favorite candidate 1, your 2nd favorite 2, and so forth, up to your 19th favourite (as there are 20 candidates). You only have to rank as many candidates as you want; the rest are treated as being equally unpreferred by you. You can't rank a candidate more than once, and you can't skip a ranking – for instance, you can't specify a 2nd-preferred candidate and a 4th-preferred candidate, leaving your third preference blank.

You'll likely want to rank at least four candidates, since that's the number of open seats on the board. The STV method being used for this election is designed to consider your preferences in order from most-preferred to least. If your favourite candidate isn't seated, your vote is transferred to your next favourite. In addition, once a candidate you voted for has enough votes to guarantee finishing in the top four (that is, has reached quota), a percentage of your vote is transferred to your next preferred choice. (See Meek STV Explained for more details.) -S, I

Portuguese IP ban on track

Last October Portuguese-language Wikipedians voted to require that editors register before editing. "IP editing" was effectively banned with the goal of reducing vandalism and improving the editing experience. The Wikimedia Foundation has been following the impact of the ban closely and issued its report last month. They "found no significant negative impact" on the health of the community and several positive impacts.[1] [2]

New user account registrations and the number of active editors on ptWiki have increased. Vandalism is down as indicated by a decline in the number of reverts. Also administrator actions for page protections and blocks are down over 70%. User retention shows no trend.

The impact on the number of edits is unclear. The total number of edits has decreased but the decline is at least partially explained by decreases in reverts and bot edits. Without these edits being included in the data, year-on-year edits declined during the first six months of the study period, but increased during the final three months.

Editor comments were requested and indicated that 14 editors supported the ban, four opposed it, and one was neutral. The report recommends that ptWiki be allowed to continue the IP editing ban for now, along with continued data collection and study. Two more Wikipedia projects might be allowed to conduct "similar experiments" but "the experience of a single wiki should not be used as decisive evidence." -S

Committee members needed for movement charter!

Editors are invited to nominate themselves until September 14th for a spot on a drafting committee. As noted on the meta page, "the Movement Charter defines the roles and responsibilities for all in the Wikimedia Movement. It will be a shared framework for working together toward the Strategic Direction." In other words, if you want to shape Wikipedia's Future by using lots of Nouns that are capitalized in the Middle of Sentences, this is your chance! Polish up your word choice skills in a way that really matters, rather than wasting your inner bureaucrat on your actual job. Only a few more days to get your name in there, in all seriousness, so take a look and see if you can volunteer your time to help out the movement. – G

"The Wikimedia Foundation broke Russian Wikinews again"

A discussion was held at User talk:Jimbo Wales concerning the resolution to a back-end performance issue and its impact on Russian Wikinews (which is also available in the English language). According to WMF staff, dynamic page lists (DPL) had to be disabled to preserve several S3-hosted wikis. The related Phabricator ticket shows a list of hosts that does not include English Wikipedia but does include a number of related projects including English Wikinews, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks.

More technical details are available at wikitech:Incident documentation/2021-07-26 ruwikinews DynamicPageList. – B

Policy, or dead cat?

Is the English Wikipedia's paid-editing disclosure policy fully signed off by the community? One commenter at the talkpage (linked from WP:Village Pump (policy)) doesn't think so: I don't think the way forward is a Schrödinger's cat-like state where the page is a policy in minds of some, not in the minds of others, and enforced as a "Wikipedia policy with legal considerations" regardless due to the banner at the top. It's either a policy or it isn't. The Signpost notes that an RfC on new disclosure requirements for freelance paid editors was closed on November 19 as having resulted in consensus to add language about mandatory disclosure of paid editing accounts in advertising and in communications directly to clients. – B

A successful AfC backlog cleanup drive

The backlog at WP:Articles for creation went down from 4,156 to 0 during the July drive. – S

Graph from WP:AfC

Brief notes

Number of active administrators through 2019 – subtract 50 more for current count
  • A distinct lack of RfAs: Thus far this year there have been only eight requests for adminship, and only six have succeeded! At this rate, 2021 will certainly become the year with the fewest new admins and fewest candidacies, beating 2018 (10 for 18). Why? It's hard to say, but it may be that the RfA process has become known as a bit of a minefield. Still, with over 1000 admins and 471 active, we're not in danger of running out of sysops yet. Barkeep49 has initiated a review of the RfA process, with the first phase seeking views on what the broad issues with the process are.
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The nomination period for the Movement Charter Drafting Committee has been extended until the 14th. MER-C 19:52, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - changed it now. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:57, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's really difficult to try and analyse RfA by numbers. For example: Look at the most active admins this year, then look at the most active four years ago, in 2017. Most of these very active admins were elected a long time ago, and many of the same names appear in both lists. The admin corps (which, contrary to the bot metric, I'd imagine numbers less than 200 that actively make significant or large-volume admin actions) seems a rather steady figure. In fact, monthly admin actions have more or less been the same since 2009 (~100,000 monthly), which really casts doubt upon the graphs that show a supposed decline in active admin corps.
    But arguably actions by volume is a poor measure regardless. Some actions create a lot of log entries with little benefit, and others do the converse. Also, I think the the 15-25 admins annually churned out by post-2012 RfA is just statistically insignificant, given that much the currently active admin corps were elected prior. Finally, we have to consider the usage of bots and abuse filters. Disallow filters reduce the need for blocks. User:ST47ProxyBot, which has recently started blocking more types of proxies, has made almost one million blocks in under a month of operation. These blocks will probably decrease the number of blocks made by human admins.
    All this is to say, these methods to try and assess whether the current levels of RfA output is a problem have some methodological issues. As does analysis on the basis of File:Wp.en.admin-active-recent.svg, if that graph is being used to imply that enwiki is slowly becoming like Commons' Deletion Discussions with six month backlogs. I think we do have a problem at RfA, but the problem isn't that we're slowly moving towards losing our admin corps. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:42, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Are you saying we aren't slowly losing our admin corps? It's pretty clear to me that is exactly what is happening. If that curve doesn’t bend back up, what happens to enwp is as inevitable as death and taxes – it just isn’t a healthy, self sustaining org. Bots will just postpone the crash. Automated tools still need people, and people’s judgment is foundational for good stewardship and regulation of the project. ☆ Bri (talk) 21:14, 29 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • I just watched 2 people give up on the pipe-line to becoming contributing editors in an area they care about, because some deletionist felt their hobby of "delete don't fix" was legitimate. You've got a troll problem where it takes only 1 person with a desire to destroy other's work a day to destroy a hundred people's days of work. Fix that, the deletionist problem and you'll be fine; otherwise you'll cast people out before they even come close to entering the pipeline. 76.115.28.15 (talk) 07:54, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • It doesn't even take malice. At AFC, no-one who created an account just to submit a draft is hanging around for more than a week to reply to feedback unless they've got a COI. By having a queue length longer than a week, we put off many of the people who could become good editors. We wiped the backlog, great, but now it's up to several weeks again: we need people on a day-to-day basis wiping the "6 days old" category, backlog drive or no backlog drive. To be honest, it would only take a couple more regulars than AFC already has. It would also help if we could find a way to communicate just how hard it is to create an article as your first contribution, to reduce the amount of time wasted and make sure people's first edits give them a sense of reward. — Bilorv (talk) 09:41, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • If we aren't replacing old admins with new ones then, even if every old admin stays just as active (or even picks up more slack to account for people who do leave), the bus factor increases. We've seen at least two cases of this so far in 2021: someone is no longer able to contribute and it causes huge disruption as other editors have to quickly adjust to learning complex skills in time-sensitive processes that really affect our reputation. — Bilorv (talk) 09:41, 30 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Until about 18 months ago, I kept an extremely close eye on all things RfA for well over a decade. Nowadays I’m not concerned whether or not en.Wiki will end up with too few ‘’truly active’’ admins to accomplish all tasks for which the tools and responsibilities are needed. I will however repeat this comment of mine from exactly two years ago: There is 'badgering' (to harass or annoy persistently – Merriam Webster), and genuine expression of concern that a vote might not conform to our Wikisocial norms. Practicing questionably high criteria or posing trick or irrelevant questions are issues that could be perhaps better addressed on the voter's own talk page where the editor is made to look and feel a fool slightly less publicly. Purely disingenuous, disruptive, or false voting probably ought to be responded to directly on the RfA.
In any case, the number of mini threaded discussions being moved to the RfA's talk page is becoming very much more frequent. This is not due to more consistent clerking, but is a result of the steady degradation of the environment of the process, the doubling of participation since the December 2015 reforms, and the classical propensity at Internet forums for everyone to add their two pence.
Anyone who does not read this and follow all its links before running for adminship only has themself to blame if their RfA turned out to be a bad trip whether it passed or not.
The data is only held for 5 years but at nearly 20,000 views in that period alone would appear to demonstrate that most candidates have been reading it. Interestingly, a logarithmic graph would probably reveal that the page views are concomittant with a growing lack of interest in becoming an admin. Hardly surprising in today's climate. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:49, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's your Signpost. You can help us.
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