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Editor tools related to references & categories and more tech updates on the latest Tech News.
Outreachy (a paid, remote three-month internship to support underrepresented groups in tech) is open. Mentors should submit projects before September 11 at 16:00 UTC (more info).
The Campaign Events extension is now available on Meta-Wiki, Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested in other language wikis.
Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
Some next steps on a movement charter: A message from Wikimedia Foundation CEO, Maryana Iskander, Chair of Board of Trustees, Nataliia Tymkiv, and Chair of Governance Committee, Dariusz Jemielniak.
Elections for four community-and-affiliate elected seats on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will be held from September 3 to September 17. To learn more about the candidates, watch this short "Meet the Candidates" presentations.
A few minutes ago, shortly after midnight GMT, 3 September 2024, I saw a pop-up message saying that WMF Board of Trustees elections were open, and giving me a link to click. I right-clicked on the link to open a new page, and got a page saying that I was not eligible to vote because 300 edits were required, and I had 39 edits. I tried again, and got the same message. That page was on Meta:, and 39 is in fact my count of edits on Meta:. A few minutes later, that banner was no longer displayed at the top of my English Wikipedia pages. So I think I have at least four questions:
1. Where can I vote for WMF Trustees?
2. Is my analysis correct, that it was using the number of Meta: edits when it should have been using total edits?
Thank you. It now says that I am eligible to vote on English Wikipedia, although the number of edits that it says I have made is somewhat different from what CA shows, but still large. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:44, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
How does one get one of these invitations? From what's been said I'm sure I am eligible. Does one have to say nice things about the Foundation to be invited? DuncanHill (talk) 22:26, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
The problem was a bug in the setup; everyone eligible should now be able to vote and doesn't need an exemption. If you're not able to vote even now (and you are eligible please email the Elections Committee. Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 22:48, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
@User:JSutherland (WMF) but how does anyone KNOW they can vote if nobody has bothered to tell them there is an election for them to vote in? I only found out because I have this page watchlisted and saw Robert's question. DuncanHill (talk) 22:52, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
I found out about the vote via a large WP:CentralNotice banner. If there is a bug, it would be worthwhile investigating, but being condescending makes me less inclined to want to investigate with you. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:55, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
I've reported it here. This is the page to communicate with WMF. Monobook, Win 11, Edge. I do not feel safe on Meta after previous experiences there. I am sure I'm not the only editor not to have received notification. People on en-Wiki need to know. DuncanHill (talk) 23:08, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
@User:the wub I have them all ticked. And even if I didn't, I would rather have assumed that "Certain platform notices, such as those relating to site maintenance and special notices considered necessary to all users, will always be displayed" would cover WMF trustee elections as "special notices considered necessary to all users". DuncanHill (talk) 23:44, 3 September 2024 (UTC)
Are you saying that you think that who has ultimate control over the Wikipedia servers is really "considered necessary to all users"? Maybe you and we think so, but maybe some people think that is an abstraction, or maybe they think that the "movement" and the servers are only incidentally related. And I haven't seen statements or questions that seem directly relevant to our servers anyway. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:24, 5 September 2024 (UTC)
FYI I received an email just now about being eligible to vote and containing a link to vote. Looks like WMF is doing a massive email blast today to eligible voters. Hopefully this addresses concerns farther up in the thread about folks not being sufficiently informed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:50, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
88, do you allow tracking cookies from wikipedia.org in your browser? If not, the site won't remember that you've dismissed the banner already. Another option is to create an account (it's free and a single step; doesn't even require email confirmation), which will allow you to hide donation banners. Folly Mox (talk) 11:02, 11 September 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin September Issue 1
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation over the first half of September 2024. Please help Translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversationsTalking: 2024 continues
Join Wiki Loves Onam, a photo campaign dedicated to documenting the vibrant and colorful festival of Onam on Wikimedia Commons. The campaign runs until September 30.
The Alternative Text suggested edits feature has now been fully deployed to production on the iOS App for Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French Wikipedias! This feature, part of WE1.2, is designed to enhance how newcomers add alt text to images, aiming to improve accessibility and engagement. For more details, visit the project page and explore the new feature in the app!
Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualization can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help test the charts.
A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia’s APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.
See the new members of the U4C following the results of the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) special election, a new decision making group that will enforce the UCoC in specific circumstances.
The Language and Product Localisation team is hosting two office hours to discuss this year's plans and gather feedback from event organizers. The first session is October 5 at 16:00 UTC (Europe-Africa-Americas friendly), and the second is on October 6 at 03:00 UTC (Asia-Pacific friendly).
MediaWiki Product Insights: The latest edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
Hi @Horse Eye's Back, thanks for flagging this. To clarify, the way this tool works requires the user (must be logged in and autoconfirmed on English Wikipedia) to manually select a snippet of text in a source (in this case, a Reuters article) to check against Wikipedia. That text snipped itself is not modified in any wayby the tool (it's not even possible for the user to modify it once they've elected to look it up on Wikipedia via this tool). So I suspect what happened here is actually that the source itself (i.e., the Reuters article) was edited by Reuters after this user found the claim and sent it as a suggestion to the talk page via the tool. There appears to be an "updated a day ago" message at the top of the article, indicating that this may be the case. So I think the user of this tool unintentionally caught some possibly-fishy information that Reuters itself was putting out there and then walking back... Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 3 October 2024 (UTC)
Wiki for Human Rights is organizing a call for South Asia, East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific communities to discuss the Future of WikiForHumanRights on October 24 at 10 UTC.
Campaign Events tool: a call with the Indonesian communities will be hosted on October 25.
Tech News: In issue 2024/42, read about the removal of the Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow), work on making text searches easier, and more. In issue 2024/43, read about improvements to mobile app navigation, temporary accounts pilot details, the Content Discovery Experiments, and more updates.
MediaWiki: The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available and include updates on Wikimedia’s authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, and more.
CampaignEvents extension: The CampaignEvents extension provides tools to create, manage, and promote collaborative activities on the wikis, such as edit-a-thons, meetups, and more. You can visit the Deployment page to learn how to get the extension on your wiki.
New Content Translation feature: Translators using Content Translation on wikis with mobile support can now customize their article suggestions with 41 filtering options. This feature helps translators find relevant articles based on their interests for translation.
Temporary Accounts: Temporary accounts will begin rolling out on October 29 to production wikis with an aim to do a complete deployment by May 2025. You can see the deployment plan and timeline on the project page. As we rollout this change, it is likely that some tools (gadgets, user scripts, templates and bots) will be impacted by it. We have a developer FAQto help developers with making necessary changes to their maintained tool(s). Please let us know on our talk page if you have any tool in mind that may need updating or if you need help with updating your maintained tools.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Given that it's recent (May 2024) and it has suggestions directed at Wikimedia Foundation, I was just wondering if Wikimedia Foundation is aware of this article. And I am not asking with respect to editor conduct, but with respect to any potential initiatives (such as partnerships with potential volunteer experts to audit few articles). Bogazicili (talk) 19:12, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
In light of the fact that we now have an additional public court disclosure seeming to overwhelmingly indicate that the WMF will imminently be disclosing the personally identifying information of at least the three volunteers that ANI has identified as defendants in its suite, I am proposing we have as broad a community discussion as possible on what further response (up to and including large organized protest actions aimed to challenge the WMF's intended course of action) might be appropriate and feasible in the circumstances. Please see here, for further details. SnowRise let's rap16:13, 14 November 2024 (UTC)
Open letter about Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation over the first half of November 2024. Please help translate.
WikiCelebrate Mārtiņš Bruņenieks
Upcoming and current events and conversations Talking: 2024 continues
Commons Community Call: The first community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year will take place on November 21. The theme of this call will be about how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. The call will be hosted by Chief Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann.
Wikifunctions: The Abstract Wikipedia team is working toward a rewrite of our backend services in a different programming language, likely Rust. More status updates.
Temporary accounts: Logged-out editors on 12 wikis, including Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Danish, and Cantonese Wikipedia, receive temporary accounts now. This new account type enhances the privacy of logged-out editors and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. Read the new Diff post to learn more about temporary accounts.
Mobile apps: The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app’s navigation, now available in the latest App store version.
Admin Retention: A survey on Wikipedia Administrator Recruitment, Retention, and Attrition is open until November 11. As part of the Foundation's 2024-2025 Annual Plan, the research team and collaborators are studying recruitment, retention, and attrition patterns among long-tenured community members in official moderation and administration roles.
Knowledge is Human: The campaign web page, which educates visitors on Wikipedia’s model and why it’s trustworthy, has earned over 140,000 clicks. The campaign has increased pageviews on WikimediaFoundation.org by more than 50%.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki
WikiCelebrate: From making a minor maintenance edit in 2005 to being one of the most appreciated Wikimedians in the Central Eastern European (CEE) region: this month we celebrate Mārtiņš Bruņenieks.
Future of Language Incubation: As part of a new Future of Language Incubation initiative to support language onboarding, Wikipedia is now live for five languages: Pannonian Rusyn, Tai Nüa, Iban, Obolo, and Southern Ndebele.
Global Advocacy: Reflecting on the anniversary of the EU’s Digital Service Act (DSA), Wikimedians share successes and public policy priorities at digital rights Global Gathering event, and more global advocacy updates.
Fundraising Report: Our annual fundraising report for the 2023-2024 fiscal year is published. Last year, we had over 8 million donors giving an average donation of m:Fundraising/2023-24 Report0.58. We ran campaigns in 33 countries, 18 languages, and received donations from over 200 countries.
We would prefer not to deploy on English Wikipedia at that time, though. A knee jerk reaction would be requesting otherwise and have enwiki be onboard as early as possible. – robertsky (talk) 08:48, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
It makes sense to fine-tune implementation on smaller wikis before rolling out to larger ones, but I am a lot more comfortable about this implementation than I was with earlier reports, which merely talked of hiding IP addresses, with all the worries over how we then handle IP vandalism, and did not provide any benefits to the (logged-in) community of editors. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:57, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
Indeed, I was very pleased that the ability to look at IPs had been extended to patrollers. Is there somewhere better that we can highlight this useful update, which allayed many of my concerns as an administrator about the upcoming change, as I fear the WMF page is not much read? Espresso Addict (talk) 09:33, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
How will this change the WP:OUTING policy? For example can I include the IP address or cidr range of a temporary account in the suspected sock list? Would that be considered outing? Because anyone(logged out editors too) can see a SPI report.Ratnahastin (talk) 09:38, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
Most likely not, as you're required to agree to certain terms when opting in to view IPs (as you already are on this wiki when enabling IP info). It would be a violation of not only local policy but ToS. Nardog (talk) 11:51, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
I think there should not be a need to include the IP address or the CIDR range in SPI report. Just the list of temporary accounts will do. Any CU, clerks, or patrolling admins will to have updated their checking processes to account for temporary accounts. – robertsky (talk) 12:02, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
Has anyone seen an indication of how many buttons you have to click to see IP info? In the past, people might post half-a dozen IPs at ANI and someone else would point out that that was a /64 that should be blocked with no collateral damage. At least one template ({{blockcalc}}) can extract IPs from wikitext and show the ranges involved. We will have to see how much hassle will be involved with the new system. Johnuniq (talk) 02:02, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
@Johnuniq: I have the global version of edit filter helper, so I have access on the wikis where it's just been rolled out (plus testwiki). If I recall correctly, it's just one button agreeing to the IP information policy to reveal IPs, but there are more boxes in Special:Preferences that allow for things like revealing IPs in the edit filter and using IP information on contribution pages. There's also a global preference available to CU/OS and certain global groups (global rollback/sysop, and global abuse filter helper/maintainer) to enable IP information cross-wiki. EggRoll97(talk) 23:32, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
Temporary accounts can be changed if one clears cookies or uses a different browser, not the same case with a cidr IP range. This will certainly make it a bit of a hassle to list out every temporary account associated with the IP range, anyway let's see how this feature is implemented first. Ratnahastin (talk) 02:06, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
This has devolved completely from anything appropriate at VP. Please take discussion of US politics to some forum where it's appropriate. Valereee (talk) 14:27, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Do you mean the users or a part of the body of wikipedia itself? As in, could Trump take over the website or otherwise exert significant pressure that would otherwise be alleviated by relocation? If not, then I guess no action necessary.
Are the servers located in the United States? It's looking like the answer is no, and I'm sorry for being paranoid, it's just that he has done things in this country that we didn't anticipate because we didn't expect anyone to have the sort of character that it would be a problem in that position. 75.142.254.3 (talk) 20:01, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
The primary Wikimedia data centers are located in the U.S., with caching centers distributed around the globe. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a country with better legal protections for online free speech, but as you note, it shouldn't be taken for granted. Legoktm (talk) 20:13, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, the 1st amendment provides stronger protections than almost all countries have; even if Trump tried he'd be hard pressed to find a court that would agree with Wikipedia censorship (unlike in India...). Galobtter (talk) 04:34, 11 November 2024 (UTC)
You are correct about the strength of free speech protections in the US being more robust than just about anywhere else in the world, from a perspective of well-enshrined constitutional protections and the historical jurisprudence and respect from institutions. That said, if there were to be a concerted push by the incoming president and his allies to suppress certain information streams and target free speech that aligns against him, it would not be the first time that he sent shockwaves through the legal world by finding success in overturning long-established doctrines that were until recently thought iron-clad and inviolable, by appearing before a federal judiciary that is now showing the influence of decades of concerted efforts by the GOP and the Federalist Society to pack those courts to the gills with ideologically-aligned and personally loyal jurists. In short, nothing is certain in the current political and institutional landscape. I just don't think a whole-sale move of the organization and its technical infrastructure is either feasible or likely to substantially obviate the risks. The only answer is to take up the fight when and where it occurs. SnowRise let's rap20:19, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
I'd just like to add that the Federalist Society is not opposed to the First Amendment, and indeed has been staunchly supportive of what it is and what it means in terms of campaign finance. Unlike with Roe v Wade, where there was in fact a decades long campaign to overturn it, there's no similar movement to overturn key First Amendment precedents. Having said that, I do worry about Section 230's protections for user generated content, which is very important. Jimbo Wales (talk) 11:52, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
Well said Jimbo Wales, and yes, 230 is a concern. I'd request and suggest that you arrange a meeting with Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago to discuss how it would affect Wikipedia and other online projects. They both seem open to such meetings, and my guess is that it would be beneficial for the project in several ways. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:18, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
They both seem open to such meetings. They do? Are you sure it's that easy to get a meeting with the president-elect and the richest man in the world? –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:23, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
For Jimbo, pretty sure. Trump takes many meetings, both formal and informal, and I would hope that Musk would be interested in sitting in on their conversation(s). Many things happen in Trump's meetings, and I would assume that a Wales-Trump-Musk sit-down would veer into some interesting directions. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:08, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
I would not afford either of those an ounce of credibility in any statement they make. Both have shown a willingness to say one thing and do another to an extreme extent, and risking something like this to the whims of people like that is not something I'd personally advise. Though, Trump doesn't appear to be looking too good these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ir3ULEvRqBU
I'm speaking somewhat plainly, but trying to be appropriate. As for Musk, when he sent his submarine to go rescue some people from a cave somewhere... his response to some of the events was... notable (not for Wikipedia standards maybe though).
For Trump, there's too many examples (saying that he doesn't know anything about project 2025, and soo many others).
A discussion with him and Musk could be attempted, but whether it would deliver anything, and whether to believe him? I couldn't say. 75.142.254.3 (talk) 04:04, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, is based in the United States, and has to comply with US laws. Unless a relevant law is passed or legal action is taken, there isn't much Trump can do. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me!20:17, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
If Trump goes authoritarian, which at this point I'm not going to rule out, US Law could be changed on a whim. But, I'm going to try to not be paranoid as much on this and WMF may already have evaluated appropriate courses of action given how they've managed to handle a wide variety of different kinds of disruption already. 75.142.254.3 (talk) 20:20, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
The bottom line is, we just don't know. I'm sure the WMF has contingencies in place for if US law ever becomes prejudicial to the project. Until he actually becomes president, we don't know what will happen. We just have to wait and see. TheLegendofGanon (talk) 20:22, 10 November 2024 (UTC)
I might have agreed with you a month ago, but considering the current crisis over the ANI matter, I am not at all confident that the WMF does have a proper contingency plan for a concerted litigation campaign from a Trump presidential administration or aligned parties. And actually, in that case, I could forgive their not having one: in that case, it's hard to predict for once bedrock civil and constitutional principles flying out the window, or know the exact combination of legal angle of attack and political pressure which may lead to such outcomes. Unlike certain other recent scenarios where the manner in which things have played out was mostly predictable, there is a lot that could very much be up in the air. The Justice Department will certainly be headed by a political loyalist for the next four years, and SCOTUS and many of the other federal courts are incredibly friendly to right wing causes, but the MAGA movement as a whole has not tended to attract the sharpest of legal minds for advocates, and not withstanding the election results, there is a lot of cultural attachment remaining in the U.S. for robust free speech protections--which afterall, conservative politicians are typically as happy to invoke and benefit from as anyone. So it's very difficult to know how concerned to be or what angle to expect the erosion of expression rights to set in from, if it does occur. In this case, I would sympathize if the WMF felt as much ina holding pattern as the rest of us. SnowRise let's rap20:34, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
That argument only really applies to social media. We aren't a social media platform. Also, I definitely think you're overreacting. QuicoleJR (talk) 01:49, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Elon musk tweets higlight he sees wikipedia as a social media that should have it s said censorship legally fought. At that point, what matter isn t what things are but how they are perceived by the ruling party. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 03:24, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
We should not act like the Sigmund Freuds sister's who throught they could survive in 1939. I hope Wikimedia is seriously thinking about moving overseas several time if needed in order to gain some years rather than being turned into a Darwin Awards receipient. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 01:19, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
The Constitution of the United States provides protections that would be very hard for Trump or any other president to circumvent, and the consent of 2/3 of both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the states is required to amend it, so I'm not too worried yet. QuicoleJR (talk) 15:24, 11 November 2024 (UTC)
Thanks to a recent bill, the President may now strip the WMF of its non-profit status as long as it supports "terrorism". Aaron Liu (talk) 19:36, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Not quite yet. The House passed HR 9495 yesterday, but for it to actually become law there are a few more steps that would need to happen. Anomie⚔00:09, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
It probably won’t pass the Senate this session, and the democrats could also filibuster it when the GOP takes a very slim majority next time. And if it did pass, the main targets would be Palestinian rights groups, which the US already treats inexcusably because it shamelessly supports Israeli war crimes as part of the US-Israel-Iran proxy war. The long game that is international geopolitics makes both Wikipedia and the current office holder’s grievance politics look small. Dronebogus (talk) 10:42, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Strongly Disagree. He hired the guy that plan to enact laws allowing to crack down on mederation on Project. The Framework would give the power to the Fcc to prevent any kind of moderations by platforms as long as it s not death threats. Wikipedia Articles would be legally compelled to accept Breibart New or Infowars as a trusted source.2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:64A1:A0FD:CDDA:2E99 (talk) 18:05, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Nah cause someones gonna use for extreme left leaning content eventually and they will go back. Also I'm sure that it will be such a big screwup in countless of other ways that they will be forced to go back. Gaismagorm(talk)02:05, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Anyway, that wash your wishes of wikipedia not going in the right directions as the result of Trump. Moving legally is a lengthy operation that should be srudied in order to be ready when things become required. We can have the WMF as hardware user in the United States were the data is legammy managed from an the new country the WMF have moved to. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 02:32, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
As a basic precaution there should be a Wikipedia mirror with daily backups hosted on a server geolocated in a country with a higher democracy index and a higher internet freedom index than the US. I'd suggest Iceland, personally.—S MarshallT/C04:23, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
Honestly, it's unneeded. Look, I get worrying about this situation but I doubt the situation will get so bad where wikipedia needs to move overseas. As stsated above, wikimedia also likely already has a plan for if this happens. Gaismagorm(talk)11:40, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
In any event, I do believe the backups at least are already quite robust in that respect. I'm less certain about the current situation for the mirrors, but I'm sure that information is probably transparently located somewhere on-site or on Meta. SnowRise let's rap20:39, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
What’s so great about Iceland? I don’t like the idea of being subject to the whims of a country with the population of a small city that’s floated the idea of banning internet pornography at least once. The most obvious choice would be Switzerland. Dronebogus (talk) 01:04, 20 November 2024 (UTC)
Iceland's a fantastic place, and everyone needs to go on a night out in Reykjavik before they die, although some people might need to extend their mortgages to do it. It's true that pornography is technically illegal in Iceland, so in that scenario, if the worst should happen, some of your more worrisome drawings on Wikimedia Commons might be lost; but I understand that the antipornography laws are rarely enforced.—S MarshallT/C17:05, 20 November 2024 (UTC)
I have spent a night in Reykjavik (well, it was aboard ship, but we did stay overnight), but I will note that Iceland has no army or navy and only a small coast guard. I'm not sure how well the country could resist pressure from the US (or Russia, for that matter, if the US were looking the other way) to interfere with any entity operating there. I used to have hopes that the EU would get its collective defense act together, but even if it did, Iceland hasn't joined, yet. Donald Albury18:26, 20 November 2024 (UTC)
I really don't think we need to worry about the US or Russia invading iceland or something. Besides, they have allies that could protect them. Gaismagorm(talk)18:31, 20 November 2024 (UTC)
But since we’re pretending like this actually a viable idea Switzerland has a formidable military for the express purpose of defending its neutrality. Dronebogus (talk) 06:26, 21 November 2024 (UTC)
@S Marshall: I’m actually thinking of stuff like the Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia or Seedfeeder. Plus a country with a tiny, homogeneous population (even a very friendly one) is more likely and able to legally force its weird idiosyncratic opinions onto Wikimedia, especially if it thinks the biggest nonprofit website on Earth has done something to damage its reputation (because in this hypothetical scenario Wikimedia would quickly become synonymous with Iceland by virtue of being its biggest export besides maybe Bjork) Dronebogus (talk) 06:39, 21 November 2024 (UTC)
Socialists are expected to win the next Iceland elections this month, so we would have at least 5 years without worrying. Many organizations had to move in Paris then in London then in the United States in WWII. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 01:23, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
No. Latency would be tarrible and it wouldn t mean much than moving into the ocean as legally, everything would need to be attached to an earth nation. However by speaking about time, Elon, is planning 2 starship launches per week under Trump. If he moves to mars, in less than a decade, he ll be cut from Internet access. That s why gainning time is usefull. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 02:15, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Just a thought, but if the WMF does have or in the future creates contingency plans for moving operations in response to political developments, publicly revealing such plans in advance might make it harder to carry them out. It would be like a business announcing that they will build a factory in a given location without having at least an option to buy the land they will build on. Donald Albury16:11, 13 November 2024 (UTC)
Stop worrying to much, I doubt Trump is going to do anything against Wikipedia. Attacking and threatening to block Wikipedia will only infuriate the centrist voters, which I didn't think anyone would want to do. Some of the editors here are Trump supporters as well! What is concerning for Wikipedia today is the above case in India, where WMF HAD agreed to disclose the editor's information because of a defamation suit. ✠ SunDawn ✠(contact)06:01, 14 November 2024 (UTC)
This is also an important part of the analysis: we are hardly the most vulnerable collective entity in existence: for obvious reasons, we are meant to be apolitical, unaligned, and disinterested in directly influencing public perception of any matter (beyond the core mission of providing information, of course). But the one time this community was willing to flex its muscles to head off a legislative outcome that it felt was a danger to the fundamental viability of the project, the latent power of the project's reach, through the site/encyclopedia was made pretty obvious--and that strength was not trivial, utterly crushing legislation that had been sailing through congress. If pushed into a corner and forced to abandon its apolitical role, this movement is capable of coming back with potent counter-punches in terms of grassroots mobilization, and I think there is some perception of that fact out there now.
There's also the massive legal warchest of the WMF to contend with (which so many on this project have groused about over recent years, but which was well-advised to build up, for exactly this moment in time). Of course, the current ANI situation raises significant concerns about the ability of the WMF and the community to row together, which is one of the most concerning things about that situation. But the WMF will not have the same onerous sub judice principles giving it both legitimate and illegitimate reasons not to communicate clearly with us (at least nowhere near to the same degree) with regard to suits before U.S. courts. SnowRise let's rap20:51, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
Strongly Disagree. He is attempting to appoint the guy at the Fcc that plan to enact laws allowing to crack down on mederation as the part of Project2025 he did write. The Framework would give the power to the Fcc to prevent any kind of moderations by platforms as long as it s not death threats. Wikipedia Articles would be legally compelled to accept Breibart New or Infowars as a trusted source. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:64A1:A0FD:CDDA:2E99 (talk) 18:14, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Realistically, I doubt anything in particular will happen to Wikipedia. But if you want to prepare for the worst, as it were, and you have a machine with some extra disk space, consider periodically keeping an updated copy of the Wikipedia database dump. I get one periodically, just in case, since I've got plenty of spare space on this machine anyway. If worst ever came to worst, plenty of volunteers have the technical skill to get a DB dump up and working on a MediaWiki instance elsewhere, and run it at least while things are sorted out. I doubt it'll ever come to that, but if you want to be prepared just in case, well, the more widely copies of those are available, the better. Just remember that Wikipedia was completely run by volunteers once, from software development to sysadmins, and we could do it again if we had to. SeraphimbladeTalk to me06:12, 14 November 2024 (UTC)
The biggest problem would be providing sufficient server capacity to handle the traffic. Anybody can put up a static mirror of WP as it was on the download date (Lord knowns there are a lot of those on the Internet), but providing an editable version that would be used by a large proportion of current editors would be pretty expensive. And if there were more than one editable version out there, it would be very difficult to ever merge the changes back into a single database, with some clones becoming permanent forks, perhaps sponsored by governments and other large entities. Donald Albury18:19, 14 November 2024 (UTC)
I've thought of the technical feasibility of a forked encyclopedia more the last few weeks than I have in the last ten years. Not as a serious exercise in making any plans, but just as a consequences of thinking about the relationship between the project and the WMF and what actually keep volunteers invested in this particular, traditional and only mode of building the encyclopedia. Aside from the obvious organizational and cultural ties, there's the obvious cost of maintaining ongoing access and development that you talk about, but then there's also the liabilities and legal fees. If circumstances were drastic enough to take Wikipedia itself down, it would be hard to shield any project with a big enough profile to be able to afford the access and tools for readers and editors from whatever legal forces had compromised Wikipedia's viability in the first place. Even redundancy different jurisdictions wouldn't necessarily obviate the kinds of threats that would be sufficient to take the original Wikipedia out of the picture. SnowRise let's rap07:49, 18 November 2024 (UTC)
I hadn't thought about the legal side. Trying to fork Wikipedia may well cause more problems than it could ever solve. I think the best chance of preserving Wikipedia is anything like its current form is to let the foundation do its job. If the foundation cannot protect Wikipedia in the US, there is little hope of Wikipedia surviving somewhere else. Donald Albury15:08, 18 November 2024 (UTC)
Unless it s someone who own the hardware personally. No, as I looked, most of the traffic is static web pages loading numbers aren t that much important. The problem is to have proper physicall backups but this would let the WMF time to organize for moving overseas.
Fyi, the US House narrowly stopped a legislation that would give Trump the keys to revoke non-profit status of any non-profit organisation in US. [1], [2]. – robertsky (talk) 01:43, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
To be frank, I am greatly surprised by the faith you put in the US Constitution. Many of you seem unaware that the threats you are facing are unprecedented. Trump attempted a coup in 2020 and during his campaign he actually said he wants to be a dictator. Or how else are we to interpret such things as "If you vote for me, you don't have to vote at all in four years"? He didn't say all this back in 2016. Neither did he employ such rascals in his government as he is planning to do know. Therefore I find the argument that we lived through Trump's first presidency unharmed very unconvincing.
He and his loyal servants have expressed their contempt of science on numerous occasions, most recently J.D. Vance by saying "professors are the enemy". With both houses of the Congress and the Supreme Court in Republican hands, checks and balances aren't worth much, especially since the party has shown an unfaltering loyalty for its Great Leader over the past few years. A major Gleichschaltung operation is to be expected. What matters most in situations like this is not the law but the sentiment of the people. And that sentiment seems to be strongly in favour of an authoritarian dictatorship. Under such conditions, laws are easily explained the way that best fits the regime.
So for goodness' sake, move! Not just the servers, but also the WMF as a legal entity. I am well aware that no country on Earth is entirely safe of a populist threat, but the situation isn't as dire everywhere as it is in the US. Canada could be an option. Or Spain, one of the few European countries that still welcomes immigration of some sort. Do it, before it's too late! Don't let yourselves and our work be ground among the cogwheels of this vile, narcissistic despotism! Steinbach (talk) 10:56, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
Steinbach, you write that the sentiment of the people seems to be strongly in favour of an authoritarian dictatorship and yet the current popular vote count has Trump at 50.1% and dropping as California votes continue to be counted. So, the sentiment is not as strong as you portray it. I too am deeply concerned about the path that the United States is on, but we should not overstate public sentiment for dictatorship. Cullen328 (talk) 22:55, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
We should rather say enough peoples that want to go authoritharian so that it doesn t matters. Clearly, things like Dark Maga couldn t had been something elected several years ago. An ideological shift happnned. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 00:48, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Billions of people rely on Wikipedia. Trump won't be able to do anything without the world going against him. Tons of his very voters shame his fake news big lie narrative. Aaron Liu (talk) 17:20, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
In 2023, you could had said: Billions peoples relies on Twitter, Elon won t be able to trick it s algorithms to promote disinfo and gender hate speech since the platform rules disallow such thing (and in fact promoting gender discrimination is still among x.com terms of rules but of course the owner is now doing it all the day along and it s 206 millions followers props its content)
Yes, but it's important to note that the twitter changes were due to elon buying twitter, not due to new laws being formed. Elon Musk (no matter how much he wants to try) can't buy wikimedia. Gaismagorm(talk)02:08, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
The difference is one is just a poor business strategy, and the other is mostly unfeasable (at least to the level that some are wanting, or dreading). Besides, wikipedia isn't a social media site. It is a encyclopedia. Gaismagorm(talk)02:19, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Elon musk tweets claims highlights that he sees no difference between speech regulation on wikipedia and Youtube/Facebook. I might agree the biggest risk is gettting the fundation non profit status revoked. McCartysm shows how the constitution can little free speech protections. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 02:24, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
With the planning purschase of MSNBC by Elon, things will last like in Russia where richs mens that supports the executive using conflict of interests purschase and control the media. It Science evidences that won t last. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 10:32, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
What you are urging is not really feasible, at least not in the short term, and if the fight you fear is coming, it will go best for the movement on the ground that a U.S. base provides. If you think that moving to Spain and putting the project even further under the auspices of EU law will lead to greater free speech protections, I have bad news for you: a substantial portion of the content on this site would be much more amenable to exclusion and state interference under petition by private parties under GDPR principles than it would under U.S. jurisprudence. This is one area of civil and human rights where the EU is much more laissez-faire about suppression than is the U.S., especially when you consider "right to be forgotten" stances. SnowRise let's rap21:02, 17 November 2024 (UTC)
Exactly, but we don t have to do it on the short term. We have time before things changes. And that s why we must be prepared to move instead of realizing we have to move within 2 weeks.. We can move in Damage control. For example if we did choose Qatar, we would have to just remove all content that critisize the country. Otherwise they have a strong journalism and allow to critiise anything else, including saudi Arabia. Plus there s no elections there (so stable). There would be no such things as accepting climate changes and vaccine by Trumpers. The United States might had been the best place, but now it risks to become worst than Russia.2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:64A1:A0FD:CDDA:2E99 (talk) 18:21, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
This would take longer than two weeks since the WMF would have to legally establish themselves in a new country, and study their laws so they are in compliance with them. So years, not two weeks. Also Qatar would want to delete articles and media of human sexuality and possibly some other highly contentious topics, so that would appear to be a nonstarter for WMF. Abzeronow (talk) 23:47, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
I m noticing Telegram was allowed to let gender discussion happenning by being in Dubai in addition to outright advertising illegal drug trade. Otherwise, exactly! As passing laws through congress takes time' we do have time. That s why it has to be studied now, so when rather than if it become required everything would be ready. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 01:08, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Last I heard the WMF keeps both the main site and the backup site in the US. Now might be a good time to reevaluate this and move one of them to another country. The WMF is quite good at employing a diverse multinational workforce scattered across the planet, but it is very centralised when it comes to fundraising, a more distributed model where funds raised in particular countries were controlled by affiliate charities or chapters in those countries would in my view be stronger. At least it wouldn't have a single point of failure. ϢereSpielChequers15:02, 18 November 2024 (UTC)
I don't think the WMF has contingency plans for any potential authoritarian steps Trump may take, and as seen with the ANI case, may obey any legal demands the Trump Administration makes of them. WMF does have some flexibility not to do some things since they are not a publisher (that is they don't have editorial control over Wikipedia), and WMF does not want such control. I don't think the WMF would share their contingency plans if they have them though, and by the time Trump or his Administration took extreme authoritarian measures against WMF and its Board, it would probably be too late to do anything. Abzeronow (talk) 19:55, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
The point is to ask to etablish such moving overseas plans. They don t have to tell us which is the plan but if they have 1.
WMF moving its servers to Switzerland has its own tradeoffs (no PD-Art; possibly different fair use/fair dealing laws, some PD-US works would have to be deleted), and such a process would take years so it would not be helpful against a Trump Administration. Abzeronow (talk) 21:39, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
Moving servers isn t needed, just the legal entity. I m also noticing that by chosing Dubai Telegram was allowed to have no moderation at all to the point of outright being allowed to let opiods advertising posts. United States is clearly the best country, but things can become worst than in Russia and thus have to legally move to a place where things wouldn t be ideal but better thzn the upUnited States2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 00:16, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
What if we hosted some content in some countries and other content in others? I know, I know, that’s probably just the insane troll logic talking Dronebogus (talk) 10:48, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
As an alternative, would it be possible to have dumps of password hashes for each users? I know it s a little security threat but it would be a good thing in current times, As there s data dumps of everything else, this would allows anyone to resume operations (without physicallly separated backups though). In my case, I personally own what s required for 1/4th of the traffic. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 00:42, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Is this thread a good use of time? WMF will not be moving out of the United States, Elon Musk and Donald Trump will not be meeting with anyone from WMF (nor would it be wise for us to do anything to get on their radar), and WMF is not going to publicly release our password hashes. This thread is full of the most hypothetical of hypotheticals. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:35, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
It’s not. But it a) helps Wikimedians cope with the uncertainty of the present moment and b) leads to amusing tangents about relocating to Iceland/Switzerland/Spain/the Moon. Dronebogus (talk) 10:45, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
Passwords hashes says little about the underlying password as basically it s what things like Bitcoin s security is based on. I m suggesting it as an alternative of moving to a better place if the United States turns from the best place to the worst place in order to to let other peoples take back hosting in other countries. Personally, I created an account in 2013, and wouldn t mind having the password hash being released for thr greater good.
Ok. Guys Makes sure to not have debates https://x.com/DemocraticWins/status/1835668071773581413. But I m sure to bet something, and I can open a Polymarket about this: Within 11 months you d had lost all your trials by deseparately trying to stay in the United States at all costs, and all langagues of wikipedia would have turned to promoting consiparcies theories even in in maths or wikipedia.org will be shut down. Such passivity in the face of the obvious will be remembered in the history like the actions of the Sigmund Freuds Sisters thinking something like the Shoas won t happen. 2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2 (talk) 11:47, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
2A01:E0A:401:A7C0:7829:35FD:7F37:21A2, stop WP:BLUDGEONing the debate with your sensational doomerism. You have made fewer than 50 edits and they’re exclusively to this thread. This is WP:SPA behavior and it’s growing tedious. If you are WP:NOTHERE to build an encyclopedia then I see good reason to report you to an admin. Dronebogus (talk) 12:59, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin November Issue 2
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation from November 7 to November 21, 2024. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Talking: 2024 continues
Scholarships open for Wikimania 2025
Conversation with the trustees: Speak directly with the Wikimedia Foundation trustees about their work at the next Conversation with the Trustees on 27 November from 12:00 – 13:30 UTC.
Wikimedia Hackathon:Registration is now open for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon which will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, May 2–4, 2025.
Tech News: Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions; Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. Learn about the latest tech updates from tech news 45, 46, and 47.
Board Updates: The Board met in Katowice, Poland on August 5 and held its quarterly business meeting before Wikimania. Learn more about the outcomes of the meeting.
Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US starts next week
Dear all,
As mentioned previously, the WMF is running its annual banner fundraising campaign for non logged in users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US from the 2nd to the 31st of December 2024.
I am posting this here because it has very broad implications for the project and may require foundation help in the coming weeks. Wikipedia articles on energy and the environment and other many other subjects rely on data from US government web sites, which are generally regarded as authoritative. There is a significant likelihood that many or all of these sites will be taken offline after January 20, 2025 when the US administration changes over. Is the foundation participating in any organized effort to back this material up? Can we just rely on the Internet Archive? What happens if the new administration puts up conflicting data? Will editors be free to "correct" articles based on what newer Government websites say, regardless of scientific backing? We do not have a lot of time to think this through.--agr (talk) 19:02, 1 December 2024 (UTC)
I understand (and share) your concern, but deciding which sources are reliable is an editorial decision which the WMF does not get involved in. Sources that were once considered reliable can have their reputation reevaluated if conditions warrant, and even sources that are generally considered reliable should always be examined with a critical eye to ensure that any particular statement holds up to the general reputation.
As far as I know, whenever something is cited on Wikipedia, the Internet Archive automatically takes a snapshot of it. You can contact someone like GreenC to confirm this.
The rest of your post seems like it would be a good fit for WP:RSN. Reliable sources have become unreliable before, and RSN can handle reducing a source's ranking on the WP:RSPSOURCES list when that situation comes to pass. A note will even be added to the entry stating that it used to be reliable, and after what date it became unreliable. However, it might be jumping the gun to post about this before it actually happens. There's not really anything to do yet. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:27, 2 December 2024 (UTC)
Do you have a specific source for the allegations that many or all of these sites will be taken offline after January 20, 2025? Yes, the Dept. of Ed website's not going to be up anymore if that agency is axed, but this isn't the first post that I've seen here predicting that the administration change will be the end of America as we know it. Yes, if the energy/climate/public health sites go downhill we can/will revisit how we handle those sources. But all of this doom and gloom is overwrought, like when people I knew thought Obama was the antichrist or that Hillary was going to put Christians into death camps. This is Wikipedia, not Reddit. I thought we were a little more level-headed here. Hog FarmTalk02:01, 3 December 2024 (UTC)
We had a nice four years where the main agitators in AMPOL were right-wing nuts. These are pretty easy to take care of, since they have virtually zero social capital on Wikipedia. They can be overruled and the community is ready to ban them at the drop of a hat if they get frustrated and lash out. Now we can look forward to four years where the main agitators will be left-wing nuts and #Resistance. This is harder to deal with because these people do have social capital on Wikipedia and have wikifriends (including several established editors and admins) to come back them up in disputes or tilt consensus. I suspect we can also look forward to more Anti-American bigotry toward subjects and editors as well. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:43, 3 December 2024 (UTC)
Just a note, since the new administration can make changes, this should have implications to the past of US government web sites as sources. Cinadon3608:05, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
You see, the East German anthem doesn’t have an audio file because when I tried to upload it, it doesn’t work. It keeps telling it is unconstructive, but there is no other file. Same thing for the Chechen anthem, even thought the file doesn’t work on mobile. 197.167.245.218 (talk) 11:27, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our second November issue. This will be the final bulletin for 2024 and we'll be back in late January 2025 with the next issue. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Talking: 2024 continues
Celebrating Chabota and his contributions to the movement.
Tech News: Chart extension is now available on Commons and Testwiki; a new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature; Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. More updates from tech news 50, 49, and 48.
Wikipedia 2024 Year in Review:Wikipedia 2024 Year in Review launched, showcasing the collective impact of Wikipedia and Wikipedia contributors in the last calendar year. The iOS App also released a personalized Year in Review to Italy and Mexico, with insights based on reading, editing, and donation history.
Wikipedia Android App: The Android team has launched the Rabbit Holes feature in the final release of the year as part of Wiki Experiences 3.1. Currently being tested in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, this feature suggests a search term and a reading list based on the user's last two visited articles. For more details or to share feedback, visit the project page.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki
WikiCelebrate: From Challenges to Change-Making: We Wikicelebrate Chabota Isaac Kanguya, a passionate contributor from Zambia, whose journey through the Wikimedia movement embodies resilience, collaboration, and a commitment to representing underrepresented voices.
Conference: Announcing Central Asian WikiCon 2025 which will be hosted at Diplomat International School on April 19–20, 2025, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Taking stock of the new Community Wishlist process
Over on the Meta talk page of the new Community Wishlist process I've done a post taking stock of the changes so far. Followers of this page may be interested in that discussion. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:48, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue in December 2024. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Ideas for Wikipedia @ 25 needed
Conversation with the trustees: Speak directly with the Wikimedia Foundation trustees about their work at the next Conversation with the Trustees on January 30 at 14:30 UTC.
Community Resilience and Sustainability: Join the conversation hour which will discuss Trust and Safety, the Universal Code of Conduct, Committee Support, and Human Rights on January 30 at 20:00 UTC.
Wikipedia is turning 25: We just celebrated Wikipedia's 24th birthday, and are already planning for next year's big milestone! Share your thoughts on what you have in mind to mark the silver jubilee of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia App: iOS App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, providing insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia.
Tech News: The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management directly on-wiki; The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months; Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. More updates from tech news Dec 16, Jan 13, and Jan 21.
Resource Support Pilot: Join the discussion about shaping a pilot project on the English Wikipedia that would fund small resource requests (like books) to support editors in improving content.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
WMF annual planning: What information or tools could help you choose how you spend your time?
Hey everyone, I'm Sonja. I lead some of the teams at WMF that design and build tools for contributors. One of the things we're thinking about for next (fiscal) year is ways we can make it easier for volunteers to find meaningful tasks to focus on. What information or tools could help you choose how you spend your time? And how do you currently organize and prioritize your on-wiki activity? This is just one of many questions we look forward talking with you about. SPerry-WMF (talk) 22:14, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Hi @SPerry-WMF! One of the considerations I'd have in mind for finding meaningful work is how to prioritize the most important articles, since focusing attention on them will lead to more meaningful impacts for readers. This applies both to quasi-automated tasks (e.g. I feel like AWB's default sorting does a pretty good job of it, although I'm not sure what algorithm they use) and finding articles to improve manually. We have crude metrics like pageviews (that are easily influenced by recency/systemic/pop culture bias), as well as lists like Vital Articles, but there is room for improvement. Sdkbtalk23:55, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply, @Sdkb, good to hear from you! Some of the newcomer tools we've been investing in, such as Structured Tasks, are getting to what you're suggesting, and I think there is a big opportunity for us to expand that concept to recommend tasks to more experienced editors as well, for example by featuring things like vital articles that require updates. As you're suggesting, there are some tools for that out there already, but the burden to find them is on the volunteer, taking up precious time. If you had recommendations available like that, how or where would you like to receive them? SPerry-WMF (talk) 23:11, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
One thing to keep in mind is that different people have different definitions of "most important articles". Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital Articles is only one project among many, for instance. And I suspect most people consider "topics I want to write about" the most important. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:03, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
In most cases, within the task I'm already working on. So e.g. within structured tasks, the first suggested task. But it'd also be useful to have the ability to customize the list, similar to AWB filtering, so that I could easily make a query like "what are the most important articles that have X maintenance tag?" Sdkbtalk16:41, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
Thank you @Sdkb and @Jo-Jo Eumerus for weighing in here - I totally agree that customization is key for these types of recommendations. One way to do that is to enable customization for each volunteer individually, but I also see an opportunity for wikis to nudge their community in specific directions by making it possible to set some recommendation parameters for the entire community, for example by promoting projects or articles that could help close specific content gaps. Where do you think customization could be most impactful? SPerry-WMF (talk) 23:50, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
Different types of tasks, whether maintenance tags, adding a reference, grammar-improvement, adding wiki-links are one part. The other is...filtering the articles by content. Being able to filter not just by categories, but all nested children or union of said categories would allow for easier discovery both on individual level as well as WikiProject/hackathon level.
Imagine of school-teachers could assign this to their classroom for 5-approved topic areas and of specific tasks, (e.g adding scholarly references) ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:51, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Hi @SPerry-WMF, if you want to build these tools for helping volunteers find tasks en.wiki, the best thing you could spend time on by far is rethinking and rebuilding the infrastructure that developed around WikiProjects. WikiProjects are on average dead, but their technical existence is needed to track and monitor articles. A WikiProject is needed to enable the generation of Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index summaries of article number and quality, which could direct editors to pages they are interested in that need help. A WikiProject is needed for Wikipedia:Article alerts to allow people to be aware of significant discussions within its topic. A WikiProject is needed to generate maintenance categories of issues editors can look for within topics. These tools are all useful for helping editors find meaningful tasks to focus on, but keeping these tools around means leaving in place a system of ghost towns that serve mostly to mislead new editors. CMD (talk) 10:27, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
Thank you @Chipmunkdavis, that’s a very valid point. In fact, we recently completed some research on WikiProjects with really interesting findings that support what you’re highlighting. For example, we found strong validation that WikiProjects serve a variety of purposes, and especially English contributors reported getting value from backlog drives. However, we also learned that WikiProjects experience common challenges, particularly: finding participants, engaging newcomers, and keeping people continually engaged. We have recently developed some new features that can help people discover WikiProjects (the Collaboration List) and be invited to WikiProjects based on their edit history (Invitation List), through the CampaignEvents extension. We're currently exploring ways to potentially generalize tools like Event Registration, so that it's easier for WikiProjects to develop contests, events, and drives that are friendly to newcomers and that can be broadly promoted on the wikis. This makes me wonder: What do you think are the biggest challenges that prevent people from creating or sustaining WikiProjects? How do you think our current (or future) tools could help in these efforts, so WikiProjects can stop feeling like “ghost towns”? SPerry-WMF (talk) 23:38, 31 January 2025 (UTC)
The point I was making was that the best use of time would be to make the infrastructure available without needing a WikiProject. The challenges to Wikiprojects are social, although having tools already available would contribute to removing a technical barrier and perhaps a social barrier regarding momentum, if you want to look at it that way. CMD (talk) 01:10, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
Some engineering effort was spent a couple years ago on improving WikiProject software. Please see mw:Extension:CollaborationKit and https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?oldid=6590981. Sadly it was never deployed and interest in it seems like it was low. Perhaps the process of going from "we need to improve WikiProjects" to an actual concrete thing that improves WikiProjects that will actually be used and the community will be excited about is a bit harder than it appears. –Novem Linguae (talk) 04:02, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
I swear I saw that used for something related to WP:WOMRED. Regardless, my point was that "ways we can make it easier for volunteers to find meaningful tasks to focus on" should focus on creating infrastructure that does not need WikiProjects. It's concerning that the reply to this was to ask for ways to develop WikiProjects, which is perhaps the exact opposite point to take. More so if the previous attempt has been abandoned due to a lack of interest. CMD (talk) 03:23, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification above, @Chipmunkdavis, and thanks for the pointer, @Novem Linguae. I understand the point you make about infrastructure @Chipmunkdavis, and I agree that there are two distinct problems for us to tackle. With our work on the CampaignEvents extension we've made improvements towards better collaboration, which has largely been met with positive feedback so far and is different from the previous extension in that WikiProject X aimed to address “…the causes of WikiProject failure on the English Wikipedia.” We’re aiming to provide generalized tooling for collaborative activities on the wikis, including but not only for WikiProjects. Aside from that work, we’re trying to understand better how we can help volunteers with creating their backlogs, for example with things like recommendations, filters, or feeds, just to name a few avenues we could explore. So, as a follow-up question: If you could re-invent the system entirely, what tools would you wish for to build out your backlog? What are the most important building blocks for you? SPerry-WMF (talk) 22:22, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
That's a large question which I don't think I can answer well. I would say that in discussions of WikiProjects here on en.wiki, what people tend to have wanted, in MfDs discussing deleting projects and in proposals for new projects, is the tools. At its root, this comes down to two tasks: 1) creating a category system that is helpful 2) creating tools that interact with that category system. Both are tricky. The article category system doesn't work for these purposes, with its structure leading to loops and extending further out in the web than is helpful. WikiProjects created a manual way to effectively tag an article through the category system, which can be cross-referenced with other tags such as maintenance, RfCs, AfDs, etc. Should a proper tagging system be created? Could a tool cross-reference a plaintext list of articles with a tag/category? Lots of possibilities, but the building block is having that core ability to identify groups of articles. CMD (talk) 05:57, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
NPP tools for broader use cases. The NPP tooling (in large part thanks to Novem Linguae) has significantly improved. If we could derive similar flows for other activities, for example adding citations, rewording specific paragraphs and making complex tasks more bite-chunked and gamified we could help editors both find specific articles, but also explore specific types of tasks. I currently spend most of my time looking for articles either via my watchlist (feels really inefficient) or simply perusing articles I'm interested in anyways and editing as I read (not efficient, but at least very enjoyable). ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 23:46, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
@Novem Linguae, thank you for bringing up the Collaboration Kit! Like you mention, the "improving WikiProjects" space is hard, but there are lessons to be learned and things that we can build off of.
With the Collaboration Kit, one of the problems mentioned in the final report was that the project was under-resourced and under-funded. With the CampaignEvents extension, we have a dedicated, full-time product team (see Campaigns team) that is actively working on its tooling. We're hoping that this level of resourcing can help us chip away at some of the persistent problems related to collaboration on the wikis.
Also, our focus is different: WikiProject X focused on improving WikiProjects on English Wikipedia. We have decided to build tools to broadly help people collaborate, whether it's through WikiProjects, edit-a-thons, campaigns, meetups, or other forms of collaboration. Some wikis have many active WikiProjects (or at least many WikiProjects), while other wikis tend to focus on other forms of collaboration. For this reason, we want to provide solutions for all Wikipedias (not just English Wikipedia), which have varying collaboration methods and needs (see some of our research findings).
With our work on the CampaignEvents extension, we’re actually doing what@Chipmunkdavis shared we need to do: building infrastructure that does not rely on WikiProjects. The CampaignEvents extension has three tools for collaboration on the wikis (i.e., Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List), with new tools being planned for the future. These tools do not require that someone is a part of a WikiProject to use them, and the extension has been rolling out to progressively more wikis in the past year (see deployment status). Note that the extension is not currently on English Wikipedia, but a discussion was started by @Shushugah to enable it in August (but it has since been archived).
How do you feel about our approach—in other words, building generalized tools for supporting collaborative activities on the wikis? And are there any big problems related to collaboration that you think tooling or infrastructure could help address? IFried (WMF) (talk) 01:03, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Future Audiences: Watch the recording for lessons from the short video experiments. A new Discord bot experiment as a way to interact with Wikipedia, the Future Audiences Discord server and future plans for experiments around how to use gamification.
Tech News: Editors who use the “Special characters” editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki; The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to MediaWiki History dumps to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. More updates from tech news week 05 and 06.
Product & Tech Advisory Council: The council looked at data, needs and trends to make a recommendation for the Foundation's annual plan. They recommended that improving mobile contribution experiences has the greatest potential to bring in new and unheard voices onto Wikipedia and sister projects, and improve the experience of readers and contributors most widely. They are requesting feedback and discussion.
Structured Tasks: The "Add an Image" structured task is being tested on a representative sample of Wikipedias which allows users to add an image and an appropriate caption to a Wikipedia article.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
See here. I'm glad we took action on Heritage Foundation but it really does seem like Wikipedians are going to need to learn that the far-right doesn't care about our neutrality goals. Simonm223 (talk) 19:40, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
I'm glad to see another media outlet cover Wikipedia and for there to be a nice summary of the two meetings that happened recently available for all. There isn't, I don't think, anything new in there, but I am appreciative of people who are taking the threats to us seriously and covering them for wider audiences. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:34, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
In general I've noticed an up-tick in trollish far-right disruptive edits across a broad range of articles of late. We're going to be in for a rough four years I think. Simonm223 (talk) 13:47, 12 February 2025 (UTC)
I can vouch for this. I've been canvassed and harassed in order to force my cooperation on a couple of articles. It seems to have stopped for now, since I've disabled email contact. King Lobclaw (talk) 03:54, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
In the news once again
It appears that the WMF has received a police notice regarding "objectionable" content on Sambhaji. According to India Today, the notice states:
This misinformation is causing unrest among his followers and could potentially lead to a law and order situation. Given the gravity of the situation and its potential impact if not addressed in a timely manner, you are hereby directed, under the powers vested in this office by the relevant laws and regulations, to remove the objectionable content and prevent its re-uploading in the future.
The WMF has also faced threats of legal action if it does not comply. I just hope this doesn’t turn into ANI vs. WMF 1.1—WMF is already dealing with major legal issues in India. I find this concerning, as it could potentially lead to a ban on WMF projects in India, though that seems unlikely. Also, I don’t think the office has anything to say at this moment, as the situation is still developing but still I am adding this topic so that others could be aware. The AP (talk) 14:20, 19 February 2025 (UTC)
@Quiddity (WMF), @KStineRowe (WMF), it would be good to hear from the WMF asap on this issue, even at the minimum level of "we cannot comment about the ongoing legal issue but we are aware and working on it." Problems like this (alongside building wiki technology) are the fundamental reason for the WMF's existence. —Ganesha811 (talk) 16:54, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
What's booked mean in Indian English? In American English it is the process you go through when you first arrive at a jail, but I don't think that's what happened here. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:04, 22 February 2025 (UTC)
The Foundation supports community members facing legal action arising from their good-faith contributions to Wikimedia projects, in accordance with its Legal Fee Assistance Programs (see Legal fees assistance and defense of contributors). If any community member, regardless of their location, receives any correspondence regarding their contributions, please contact legal@wikimedia.org. For concerns about immediate individual safety, please contact emergency@wikimedia.org.
We stand by Wikipedia's model of community consensus constantly improving the quality of articles on Wikipedia; driven by the policies of verifiability, neutral point of view, and transparency that guide it. Wikipedia serves as a critical knowledge resource for millions of readers worldwide and we remain committed to protecting access to knowledge, while supporting the rights of volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia. We continue to encourage volunteers to continue to improve articles that may encounter controversy while practicing good digital safety. Our experience is that concerns regarding content on Wikipedia are best addressed through collaborative efforts of the Wikimedia Community to ensure that articles are well-written and accurately-sourced in light of the public critique. Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 3
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on 10 February. Please help translate.
Upcoming and current events and conversations Let's Talk continues
Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) Connect: The first edition of this regional community call for 2025 will be held on February 22.
Wikimedia Research Showcase: The next showcase will be about "Wikipedia Administrator Recruitment, Retention, and Attrition" and will take place on February 26 at 17:30 UTC.
Celebrate Women 2025: The Gender Organizing community in the Wikimedia Movement hosts an annual campaign every March called Celebrate Women. Conversation hours to learn about some exciting tools that can support your efforts at closing the gender gap will be held on February 25 at 14:00–16:00 UTC.
Outreachy: Wikimedia Foundation is participating in Round 30 of the Outreachy program that runs from June – August 2025. The deadline to submit projects is March 4 at 16:00 UTC .
Growth features: The new Community Updates module is a new feature to facilitate the connection between wiki editing initiatives and newcomers.
Simple article summaries: The Web team at the Wikimedia Foundation has introduced Simple Article Summaries project on select Wikipedias. It aims to display article summaries that would be easy to digest for readers.
Language and internationalization: Five new languages added to Wikipedia as part of the future of language incubation initiative. Read more on the latest edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
Tech News: Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. More updates from tech news week 07 and 08.
Community Insights: The Community Insights 2024 report captures new insights on newcomers (who are more likely to be younger), their motivations (97% liked that their contributions help others), and how for the first time, more than half of respondents (51%) agreed that the Wikimedia Foundation communicates well about its projects and initiatives.
Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Watch the recording of WikiLearn Essentials for Course Creators: Building Community Skills Online session 1.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign in Malaysia on English Wikipedia only
Dear all,
I would like to take the opportunity to inform you all about the upcoming annual Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign in Malaysia, on English Wikipedia.
The fundraising campaign will have two components.
We will send emails to people who have previously donated from Malaysia. The emails are scheduled to be sent in March 2025.
We will run banners for non-logged in users in Malaysia on English Wikipedia itself. The banners will run from the 2nd to the 30th of June 2025.
Prior to this, we are planning to run some tests, so you might see banners for 3-5 hours a couple of times before the campaign starts. This activity will ensure that our technical infrastructure works.
Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:
Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign in South Africa
Dear all,
I would like to take the opportunity to inform you all about the upcoming annual Wikimedia Foundation banner fundraising campaign in South Africa.
The fundraising campaign will have two components.
We will send emails to people who have previously donated from South Africa. The emails are scheduled to be sent between the 23rd-27th of June 2025.
We will run banners for non-logged in users in South Africa on English Wikipedia itself. The banners will run from the 2nd - 30th of June 2025.
Prior to this, we are planning to run some tests, so you might see banners for 3-5 hours a couple of times before the campaign starts. This activity will ensure that our technical infrastructure works.
I will soon be sharing the updated community collaboration page, where we outline more details around the campaign, share some banner examples, and give you space to engage with the fundraising campaign.
We will also be hosting a community call, details will be on the collaboration page, to which you can bring your questions and suggestions.
Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:
Global Trends 2025: As part of annual planning, we identify a list of global trends that will impact the Wikimedia movement, such as changes in how and where people search for and contribute information online, the rise of misinformation and disinformation in online spaces, and evolving regulation of online information providers.
Wikimania 2025: Apply now to speak at Wikimania 2025 whether to lead a workshop, host a panel, present a poster, or showcase a tool demonstration. Submit your session by March 31 anywhere on earth. If you're interested reviewing proposals for Wikimania 2025 and helping shape the program, you can fill out a short form to apply to be a program reviewer by 17 March.
WikiConference North America 2025: Scholarship applications are now open until April 4. This conference will take place in New York City from October 16–19, 2025, under the theme “Wiki’s World Fair".
Wikimedia Enterprise and Global Advocacy at SXSW 2025: Wikimedia Enterprise is coming together with Creative Commons on March 9 for a day of conversations and panel discussions at SXSW 2025 that tackles the challenges of AI and the preservation and ethical development of open data. Global Advocacy is participating on a panel on March 8, diving into conversations about the future of the internet.
WikiCauserie: The online bi-monthly meeting aimed at bringing together the French-speaking member communities of WikiFranca will be held next on March 21 at 18:00 UTC.
Tech News: The wikimedia.org portal has been updated – and is receiving some ongoing improvements – to modernize and improve the accessibility of our portal pages. It now has better support for mobile layouts, updated wording and links, and better language support. More updates from tech news week 09 and 10.
Wikifunctions: We deployed and tested one of our main milestones for this quarter: the ability to get the right Lexeme given a Wikidata Item, or, put simpler, to get the right word from a thing.
Women’s History Month: Wikimedia Foundation is running a campaign to spotlight some of the Wikimedians working to close the gender gap on Wikimedia projects. The campaign, Knowledge is human. Knowledge is her., is aimed at reaching external audiences in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Legal Victory: The Wikimedia Foundation has won a legal victory in Germany’s courts that sets a legal precedent defending the Wikimedia projects and volunteers against "forum shopping", choosing a court in a jurisdiction whose laws might be more favorable to them.
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees: The Board met virtually on 11 December to hold its quarterly business. See the most recent corporate actions taken on the Board Noticeboard.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
2020 US court case affecting Google's contributions to Wikipedia?
As I fear, whatever remedies or sentence of the US case (2020) against Google will be might affect Google's ability to contribute to Wikipedia, its sister projects, and the WMF (Wikimedia Foundation). I can stand corrected about this.
Well, as we know so far, the sentencing/remedial trial will occur next month, and the judge will decide in August this year.
Open call for US & Canada Regional Fund Committees members
Hi everyone. The Wikimedia Foundation Community Resources team is seeking new members for the US & Canada Regional Fund Committee, which supports funding needs in the General Support Fund program. The committee maintains responsibilities to review and make final funding decisions for proposals received for this program, as well as working together with applicants on preparing robust proposals that benefit Wikimedia projects and the communities that contribute to them and use them.
The Regional Fund Committees' work is guided by the principles of participatory decision-making and subsidiarity, and aims to support the needs of many communities in the Wikimedia movement, including those based on gender, ethnicity, age, and geography, amongst other characteristics.
To learn more about Regional Fund Committees in general, eligibility criteria for joining, roles and responsibilities, training information, and procedure for review and selection, please review our general open call information on Meta-wiki.
To apply as a candidate for the US & Canada Regional Fund Committee, please review our candidates page on Meta-wiki for more information. Applications may be submitted on Meta-wiki or sent directly to me (cschillingwikimedia.org). No deadline is set for applications for this open call, and will remain open until otherwise notified.
Please feel free to share this invitation and open call with any interested Wikimedians and other professionals who may be interested in committee participation. I'm also open to responding to any questions or needs for clarification here. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 12:56, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis: Thanks for your question. Yes, open calls for the Sub-Saharan Africa and CEE/Central Asia regions are also open for review, and so editors are welcome to apply there if interested. Information about Open Calls for those regions are available here on Meta-wiki:
WMF annual planning: How can we help more contributors connect and collaborate?
Hi all - the Wikimedia Foundation is kicking off our annual planning work to prepare for next fiscal year (July 2025-June 2026). We've published a list of questions to help with big-picture thinking, and I thought I'd share one of them here that you all might find interesting: We want to improve the experience of collaboration on the wikis, so it’s easier for contributors to find one another and work on projects together, whether it’s through backlog drives, edit-a-thons, WikiProjects, or even two editors working together. How do you think we could help more contributors find each other, connect, and work together?KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 20:27, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
I think opening up the article translation features to more people would be beneficial for collaboration between the various languages of wikipedia. I also think english wikipedia and simple english wikipedia should collaborate more, but I don't have any ideas for that specifically (other than maybe having a button to link users to a simple english version of a page if it exists) Mgjertson (talk) 16:06, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
I think WikiProjects could get more promotion with maybe a popup for new editors saying "talk with other editors active in this topic area here". ꧁Zanahary꧂22:51, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
To me it seems like WikiProjects are mostly handy to get assistance from other people interested in a topic area / get consensus for some widespread change, but they only really work if the talk pages aren't dead. So links might help, although every article in a WikiProject's talk page already links to the project, though. Mrfoogles (talk) 03:50, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
I concur with more support to WikiProjects. These projects are invaluable to content diversity and surely there should be an effort to link these projects with both direct funding from WMF as well as other Affiliates. The synergy is obvious. — Thuvack | talk00:18, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
What would the funding be used for, and who would receive it, though? It doesn't seem like most WikiProjects always have formal leaders or much monetary needs. Mrfoogles (talk) 20:04, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
@Zanahary, @Mrfoogles, @Thuvack, thanks for bringing up WikiProjects! I work on a team at WMF that focuses on how we can improve the experience of people collaborating together on the wikis, and we have developed some tools that can help WikiProjects, as part of the CampaignEvents extension. The extension is already enabled on English Wikipedia, as well as other wikis (see deployment status). The extension has 3 tools: 1) Event Registration (a way to register participants & run collaborative activities on the wikis), 2) Collaboration List (a way to discover events and WikiProjects to join - see example on English Wikipedia), and 3) Invitation Lists (a way to find people to invite to events or WikiProjects, by identifying editors who made significant contributions to articles).
We also have some current & upcoming work that can support WikiProjects, which is: 1) allowing event registration in alternative namespaces (T385341), so that it can be used in namespaces like Wikipedia or WikiProject, if wikis want to allow it, and 2) allowing an embeddable version of the Collaboration List (T385347), so a WikiProject could have an automated "calendar" of events, filtered by the wiki(s) and topical area(s) of its interest, that could be added to any of its pages. Finally, we are in the early stages of exploring some future potential project ideas, including: 1) adding a version of the Collaboration List to the Newcomer Homepage, so newcomers could learn about events and/or WikiProjects that may interest them (T387792) and 2) tracking collaborative contributions through Event Registration, so that the contributions that are a part of an activity/event/project can be easily tracked on the wikis (T378035).
We're continuing to develop the extension, so we're very interested in any suggestions of what to work on next and/or what could be most impactful. So, I'm wondering: Do you think the tools that are a part of the extension today could be helpful to WikiProjects? Do any of our upcoming/future project plans sound like good or bad ideas? What do you see as some of the biggest gaps related to tooling on WikiProjects, and how could we potentially help address these gaps? Thank you again for all of the ideas you already shared, and I look forward to any feedback! IFried (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
My experience is mostly with the unreferenced articles project, and their backlog drives. They could probably use a software-supported method for people to sign up for things and to invite people to things, etc., I think? Currently people just put themselves on the page with the list -- it's a bit hacked together, like a lot of things end up being.
All I can think of would be to say that it's probably best to make sure events don't keep getting automatically scheduled when a WikiProject is dead, as a lot of them become -- that would probably pollute the queue.
Do a lot of people actually use the Newcomer Homepage, so far? I've heard about it, but I didn't run into it when I got started editing. It would definitely be interesting if that could be used as a recruiting tool, and I think it would probably work well -- the whole point of backlog drives/etc. is to have good contained tasks -- but I didn't get the impression that the Newcomer Homepage was fully rolled out yet from the various pages. Mrfoogles (talk) 02:43, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
@Mrfoogles, thanks for the reply! Good to hear you think there's a chance that tools like Event Registration and Invitation Lists could be useful to WikiProjects. Yes, like you wrote, a lot of the current solutions are hacked together, so we're hoping to provide optional alternatives for all sorts of activities (such as edit-a-thons, WikiProjects, etc), which can provide a bit more structure and ease of use.
As for automatic scheduling of events: Fortunately, the Event Registration tool doesn't allow events to be automatically scheduled. An organizer needs to deliberately create an individual event page and then enable registration. Wiki admins have the powers to grant/revoke the event-organizer right (which enables users to enable event registration), if the privileges are being abused. Also, event pages are wiki pages, which can be handled in the same way as any other wiki page.
As for your question about the Newcomer Homepage, which was: Do a lot of people actually use the Newcomer Homepage, so far? Here's more context: The Homepage is enabled by default for all new accounts made on Wikipedia, so it is definitely used by newcomers. It is also available to all accounts (via Preferences). While most Homepage impressions come from users with very few edits (which is expected, given the audience), about a quarter of Homepage visits comes from users with more than 100 edits. On English Wikipedia, about 47% of active editors have the Homepage enabled. You can see some recent data about impressions in T382046#10560682.
So, it is good to hear that you think it could be interesting to use the Newcomer Homepage as a recruiting tool for events and/or WikiProjects. We're also really interested in exploring this idea. Thank you again for your feedback and ideas! IFried (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
I was recommended a short from what seems to be the WMFs official youtube channel. It was basically an AI narration of a wikipedia pages lead with relatedish images lifted from the commons. Is this actually the Wikimedia foundations youtube channel? I find it hard to believe we'd make AI generated voiceovers and link to articles via Linktree but the account also says it's from 2007. Is this an experiment or something? mgjertson (talk) (contribs) 15:38, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
@Mgjertson, can you provide a link to the short? I do know the Future Audiences team at the Foundation has been experimenting with some AI-generated short video versions of articles — the idea is to see if it's possible to make such auto-generated videos engaging, which could open up new audiences. Sdkbtalk16:04, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
Hi @Johan (WMF), m:Future Audiences/Generated Video raises the question "Is there a risk of damaging Wikipedia’s brand or enriching a non-free company’s brand by publishing content on TikTok?", and discusses this further at various points. However, it does not discuss the seemingly far more crucial question of considerations for the brand of directly associating it with AI-generated content. If you're trying to lead editors to Wikipedia, linking it to the suggestion it might be AI-generated is probably not a productive way towards that. If the trade-off does not lean that way that would be good to know, but it's surprising to see it just not even mentioned when there seems to be considerable effort made to manage concerns about TikTok. CMD (talk) 03:46, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
Chipmunkdavis: For clarity, I want to stress that the content isn't generated by an AI. The content is coming from Wikipedia articles. The AI usage here is as a packaging tool with human oversight. Damian, who is the PM for the Future Audiences experiments, will give a longer answer. Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:41, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
I feel like it's mostly fine as long as the actual text is not AI-generated -- text-to-speech is not the same thing as ChatGPT, really. Mrfoogles (talk) 02:44, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, AI stuff is currently the center of a very large amount of political contention, and moreover (not wholly unrelatedly) considered highly uncool by teens/etc. jp×g🗯️11:28, 14 March 2025 (UTC)
AI narration not necessarily (cf these AI-narrated Reddit threads someone showed me once), but it does feel a bit weird for WP's image. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:15, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
Hi @Mgjertson – Maryana from the WMF Future Audiences team here (h/t for the tag-in @Sdkb). As @Johan (WMF) mentioned, we're creating these short videos using Wikipedia content to see if we can reach new audiences that don't know about or visit Wikipedia today. We know from global surveys that today's 18-24-year olds are the least aware of or inclined to visit Wikipedia of all the age groups we survey, but they love learning on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. So if we want to introduce this generation to Wikipedia, we're going to have to do it on the platforms they spend a lot of time on.
The videos you're seeing are our first lightweight steps to seed the short video space and see which topics work and which don't. We've managed to get a few viral moments (interestingly, @Dumelow's DYKs have been some of our best performers! This is some DYK magic that we're studying and trying to replicate ), and have gotten millions of views and thousands of likes, comments, and new followers on our accounts since the start of this experiment last fall. In addition to learning and continuing to build up an audience on these channels, we want to invite Wikipedians and anyone who wants to make their own fun-fact/explainer video content to join us and participate in these channels. We'll have some videos made by communities appearing on these channels soon, so stay tuned!
Also, a little more detail on how this set of videos has been made to date: we start by handpicking either existing DYKs curated by the community or other topical/relevant-to-younger-audiences topics. We then use an AI-powered tool to summarize the text and images associated with the article into a short 30ish-second video and add an AI voiceover, and then get human review/editing on the text and images to make sure they're accurate. The AI tool and narration saves us some production time (which helps us learn more efficiently by allowing us to put out more content and understand how a broader range of topics perform), but it's still a pretty human/manual content creation process. It's true that AI has a certain stigma to it, which we're closely monitoring and collecting feedback on. Though we haven't seen a signal that AI is creating any major risk or pushback (e.g., we're growing followers on these channels, not losing them), our strong hunch is that once we start posting community videos that feature humans and are narrated by humans, they'll perform much better than this initial batch. But like I said, these AI-assisted videos were a way for us to get the ball rolling & start learning quickly/efficiently.
If you have any more questions, my colleague @DLin-WMF is happy to answer them! He has recently joined the Future Audiences team to lead this and other experiments, and he ran into some posting permissions issues because his WMF account is so new, so Johan & I jumped in here to help out in the meantime. Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 14:46, 15 March 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia is fairly ubiquitous (yay!). I don't think we need to be explicitly trying to "introduce" teens to Wikipedia, because the majority already know about and probably use it sometimes. Some of them even edit it. Cremastra (talk) 22:35, 15 March 2025 (UTC)
@Cremastra, here's a link to the survey data Maryana mentioned. It shows that most teens are aware of it, yes, but they're less aware of it and use it less than older groups, so there's a concerning trend. Also keep in mind that this is global data, and Wikipedia may not be as ubiquitous in other communities as it is in yours. Sdkbtalk04:25, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
Yes, and: awareness doesn't necessarily equate to positive sentiment or usage. 18-24-year-olds have also been reporting the lowest net promoter score of Wikipedia of any generation we survey (NPS measures "would you recommend Wikipedia to a friend?", which is a way to get a sense of people's sentiment towards a product or service). This indicates that some young people may be aware of Wikipedia because e.g. a teacher told them about it and told them not to use it (so they don't), or because they saw someone on social media talking about how terrible and biased it is (which unfortunately is also growing more common), etc. Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 14:25, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
Surely some of us on here with radio voices could pitch in to do voiceovers, if they are very short? jp×g🗯️09:15, 16 March 2025 (UTC)
"The videos you're seeing are our first lightweight steps to seed the short video space and see which topics work and which don't. We've managed to get a few viral moments (interestingly, @Dumelow's DYKs have been some of our best performers! This is some DYK magic that we're studying and trying to replicate ), and have gotten millions of views and thousands of likes, comments, and new followers on our accounts since the start of this experiment last fall." Where would this be? At the "official channel for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia products", when I rank the video's[4] by popularity^, all the popular ones are at least 5 years old. Looking at the latest, there are from the last 12 months 2 video's which barely make 1K views, the remainder is less popular. Or do you mean the "shorts"? [5] There is one with 2.8K views, 2 others which just get 1K views, and all others get less than that. So where can I find these video's created since "last fall" which have amassed these millions of views? Fram (talk) 14:57, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
They mirror the same content, and evidently nearly nobody in this thread uses TikTok, therefore Jertson discovered this content through YouTube (Shorts) instead. Aaron Liu (talk) 17:00, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
This page I assume? Clicking "Popular" doesn't actually sort by popularity, but at least for me it shows the flat roof pub video near the top with 234.4K views. CMD (talk) 02:33, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
"Did you know that most people in North Korea cannot afford pizza?" seems a bit heartless for a specifically made official video. CMD (talk) 02:35, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
DYK is a fast-moving process where most hooks only get seen by a few people. It has redundancies in place, but it isn't perfect and shouldn't be assumed to be. CMD (talk) 02:41, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
That a hook got viewed isn't relevant to my point about DYK. On the aside though, I don't have an issue with the Pizza in North Korea article, which has the relevant text in context. Nor is the DYK still on the mainpage (buried on the talkpage and in archives), whereas that TikTok was one of the first things I saw when looking at the Wikipedia (that's us!) TikTok account. If you think it is good for an official Wikipedia platform to prominently host "Did you know North Koreans are poor" as an interesting fact, please say that rather than discussing the foibles of DYK. CMD (talk) 02:52, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
How is it irrelevant? If the hook got 54k clicks from being on the main page, how is that only "seen by a few people"? Way more people got an impression of Wikipedia from this main page hook just during its that one day while only 4.4k got the impression from an AI-generated TikTok short.
If you think it is good for an official Wikipedia platform to prominently host "Did you know North Koreans are poor" as an interesting fact
As I said above, DYK isn't perfect, and so because DYK did something does not make it perfect. "Seen by a few people" referred to the DYK review process, where hooks are seen by 1) the nominator, 2) the initial reviewer, 3) the prepper, 4) the queuer. Likely it'll get seen by a handful more who aren't engaged directly with it, and then a few editors check things for ERRORS, but yes, it's a few people. I'm not asking for what people have done on DYK and TikTok, I am asking for you to state your views, because it is unclear why you have decided to extend this discussion without commenting on the core subject matter that I raised in a very brief note. CMD (talk) 14:26, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
I don't think it's a problem, and the handful of DYK people (way more than the one person that is you) did not find it a problem. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:07, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
I just don't see anything that heartless about it. It's not much more heartless than say when the Brighton Town Commissioners wanted to build Queen's Road through a slum district, they invited all the residents to a festival and demolished their houses while they were away? to me. You're not gonna get some sound logos out from me since this is pretty much all about subjective pathos. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:30, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
The sound logos stuff is red herring, I was seeking any actual opinion to explain the cause of this discussion, given all previous statements were about DYK. That said, your example doesn't seem similar at all, it's recounting an event rather than making a blanket statement about a group of people. Replace X in "Did you know most X can't afford pizza?" with other labels, saying group Y or Z are poor as a fun factoid is both not that interesting and easily coopted into harmful stereotypes. CMD (talk) 17:03, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
Oh well, let's be happy that they took their soundbites from DYK, which is often wrong or in poor taste, and not from "On this Day", were between 2012 and, er, two days ago[6] we proudly presented Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires, "a day when soldiers of the Latvian Legion, part of the Waffen-SS, are commemorated." as the bolded top item for that day. Would be a hit on TikTok I suppose. Fram (talk) 17:18, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
For short-form content that would fit our aesthetic, one could look at the NYT's grey-background stuff (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L1AYL6oxlU), except we'd have way less motion and mostly just grey-background guy talking with images Ken-Burns b'rolled to taste (plus ofc a short ident at the end, perhaps with the sound logo). Aaron Liu (talk) 01:05, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
The proposed WMF Annual Plan OKRs page has a section on Social video (they want 5,000,000 views etc) and some discussion. That wasn't the right place for my comment, but like the original poster here the concept was new to me.
It seems to me that many want an opportunity to work on this content: the "radio voices" comment; the series of alternate topic suggestions; and the Ken-Burns thing (I didn't really get that one Aaron Liu, but euwiki's video project has some presenters with backgrounds).
Wikitranslate, the free translator, uses information from the web and Wiktionary. Also Wikifilm, the free streaming service, mostly of public domain films. An editor from Mars (talk) 04:27, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
To be honest, I'm not sure that there's enough demand for public domain films a whole streaming service is needed; people can already watch them fairly well on Commons if they want to. And Google Translate already uses information from Wikipedia -- that's not a distinguishing feature. Mrfoogles (talk) 02:45, 20 March 2025 (UTC)
Yes, but this still seems to violate trademark rights. I believe the WMF holds the trademark to "Wikipedia". Anyway, if it violates copyright, the writers of the articles concerned would have to take action as the copyright holders. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:12, 24 March 2025 (UTC)
Yes, attribution requires the word "Wikipedia", but it certainly doesn't mean that the word has to be in the title of the book, which is the trademark issue. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:08, 24 March 2025 (UTC)
P&T Annual Planning: The Product & Technology department publishes its plans early in the annual planning process, which is on Meta-Wiki and open for feedback. These objectives and key results are not a list of projects, but instead, a set of directions for problems to solve and impacts to achieve over the course of the year. We look forward to engaging with the community on this plan.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
Kill switch to delete information on user IP and email addresses
WMF should have a kill switch to delete all information on the IP addresses and email addresses associated with all user accounts. If DOGE can just walk in and seize the US treasury, seize USAID, gain access to the federal payment system and potentially everyone's SSN's, etc., then there is no reason to think people couldn't just show up at the WMF some day and seize all of our user data. The WMF should have a protocol in place to rapidly delete user data should that occur. Photos of Japan (talk) 07:16, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
I think WMF would just say "No". DOGE is only able to do the stuff it does the federal government because it has the President, who can at least lie to people who work for him he has authority over this stuff. WMF would instead say something like "Do you have a warrant?" and suchlike. Mrfoogles (talk) 18:23, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Why would they care about the WMF saying "No."? They just show up to federal agencies with armed officers and waltz on in, who is going to stop them? Some office worker in the WMF, "Do you have a warrant?", bunch of armed people just walk right past them. Photos of Japan (talk) 18:31, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
Do you have any evidence of DOGE going in to any organisation that is not government owned? I'm no fan of Elon Musk, but I don't think he has any control over Wikipedia (much as he'd like to). Phil Bridger (talk) 18:51, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
They are too busy to care about something like Wikipedia right now. They are also in the process of flushing out the Department of Justice and mass firing FBI agents to replace them with their own people. They just released an EO declaring Trump determines the authoritative legal interpretation of the law for all employees of the executive branch, and has complete supervision and control over the executive. If Trump has thousands of FBI agents that do whatever he says, then one year from now there's no reason to assume the WMF won't be subjected to some illegal raid. You prepare for problems before they happen, you don't wait for them to occur and then react to them. Photos of Japan (talk) 19:16, 20 February 2025 (UTC)
I think that currently both the main and backup sites are in the USA, along with the WMF and the endowment. Maybe now would be a good time to move some or all of that to countries with a greater seperation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. Or at least change the fundraising model to a more decentralised one where the money raised in each country where we have a national charity is under the control of that charity. ϢereSpielChequers21:44, 21 February 2025 (UTC)
Yeah. Regardless of who's in charge, it's just a good idea to not keep everything in the same place. We should probably think about setting up a backup site in Europe Mgjertson (talk) 19:30, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
WP has "caching" data centers in Amsterdam and Marseille, as well as Singapore and Sao Paolo. What I don't know is how much would need to be done to move the "application" functions from the data centers in the US to one of those non-US facilities. I don't know how much protection that would provide, as the Foundation is a US registered corporation, and some European standards, such as the "right to disappear", clash with WP aims. Donald Albury21:22, 11 March 2025 (UTC)
Hey, I wanted to add my two cents. This is not really related to any recent events, but is about privacy and data we collect. The Trust and Safety Product team is working on Temporary Accounts, something which really strengthens the logged-out editors' privacy. The feature is live on 12 wikis already, and we are expecting it to be ready for deployment everywhere (yeah, on all our wikis) later this year. You are welcome to subscribe to the newsletter to keep track of our work, and to comment on the draft plan for the team's work in the next fiscal year. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
SGrabarczuk (WMF), this discussion was raised due to a potential concern about the privacy of logged-in users, whose accounts are not temporary. I see the draft plan includes some items on reducing abuse for logged-in users, but don't see any notes about data or privacy relating to logged-in accounts. CMD (talk) 01:25, 5 March 2025 (UTC)
I would suggest that you follow WP:NPOV and not demonize DOGE.
As for the Kill switch, I believe (as an amateur historian) that records are important, and I believe that i think if they are getting investigated for their crimes, we should not be hiding criminals. Thehistorianisaac (talk) 04:02, 21 March 2025 (UTC)
Agreed. I do suspect the CIA/FBI/NSA is monitoring recent changes. Often users part of the recent changes patrol (such as me) already are able to see what edits people make, I would be surprised if they don't monitor recent changes. Also see Template:National Intelligence Agencies for everyone who is watching us right now.(Hello my NSA Agent, how's life over there in Fort Meade?) Thehistorianisaac (talk) 05:39, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
I think the idea is to buy books that are requested at places like WP:RX but are not easy to obtain. I think this idea was first proposed on a talk page somewhere during a discussion about non-ideal ways the WMF was spending their money and what they should be spending it on instead. I'm actually quite happy to see that the WMF took the idea seriously and is trying to meet volunteers in the middle by listening to their ideas and turning them into an actionable program. Full credit to WMF for trying this out. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:11, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
Sounds like the first step towards creating a global NPOV policy.
In general and in my opinion, English Wikipedia doesn't really benefit from global policies much since we have our own mature policies, so I guess the idea is to provide an NPOV policy for smaller wikis? Reminds me a bit of the meta:UCOC.
As I sometimes see with initiatives on meta, the exact motivation for this has been stated very generally ("global trends", "how trust in information online is declining and a fragmentation of consensus about what information is true"), without giving many specifics about who is pushing for this and what specific incident(s) led to it getting on the radar. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:51, 27 March 2025 (UTC)
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
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), and have gotten millions of views and thousands of likes, comments, and new followers on our accounts since the start of this experiment last fall. In addition to learning and continuing to build up an audience on these channels, we want to invite Wikipedians and anyone who wants to make their own fun-fact/explainer video content to join us and participate in these channels. We'll have some videos made by communities appearing on these channels soon, so stay tuned!
