Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-01-30/News and notes

Feedback for Board of Trustees election: Plus, the incredible shrinking admin cadre.

News and notes

Feedback for Board of Trustees election

By Bri, EpicPupper and Smallbones

Shrinking admin cadre: a fascinating adventure into the unknown, indeed

Call for Feedback regarding the upcoming Board of Trustees election

A Call for Feedback on the upcoming Board of Trustees elections was launched by the Wikimedia Foundation and is open until 16 February 2022. Unlike previous Calls for Feedback, this discussion incorporates community feedback from 2021, replacing Board-suggested proposals with key questions from the Board of Trustees sourced from the feedback about the 2021 Board of Trustees election with the hope of inspiring collective conversation and collaborative proposal development. There are three questions regarding diverse representation, expectations for candidates, and affiliate participation. Interested editors can participate on Meta. – E

Administrator cadre continues to contract – more

The Signpost special report "Administrator cadre continues to contract" in 2019 noted that the number of active administrators had dropped below 500 for the first time. Since then, the numbers have continued falling and have not risen above 500 in the last six months. Another milestone was set in September 2021: the number of active administrators was under 450 for most of the month. By January 1 this year, the number had "recovered" to 469. – B

Whither WMC User Group?

When we last heard from the (non-recognized) Wikimedians of Mainland China User Group they were planning on creating a "hard fork" of zhwiki, the largest Chinese-language Wikipedia and a project of the WMF. The WMC hard fork encyclopedia was expected to copy current articles from zhwiki and then independently edit from there. Several zhwiki admins and other users had been blocked by the WMF, leading up to the fork. An anonymous source, claiming to be a spokesperson for WMCUG, has informed The Signpost that their encyclopedia has now copied 600,000 zhwiki articles and has about 50 regular editors. Editors must be approved by the managers of the project and their numbers are soon expected to rise to 75-100. A new large commercial partner is expected to join the project within days and will guarantee their minimal financial needs and community independence. New text will be freely licensed CC BY SA 4.0. None of this information could be independently verified. – S

Brief notes

• Universal Code of Conduct development: The last meeting of the Universal Code of Conduct development team was last week. The theme this time was procedure for enforcement of the policy, or policing violations. The Signpost expects to report on their final report after it is completed next month.
• Steward elections: The 2022 Steward elections will open for voting on 07 February 2022, 14:00 (UTC).
• Community Wishlist Survey: The Community Wishlist Survey voting phase is open until February 11. This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year.
• New Affiliations Committee members: The Affiliations Committee has officially appointed Camelia Boban as Chair, Jeffrey Keefer as Vice-Chair, Houcemeddine Turki as Secretary, and Suyash Dwivedi as Treasurer, for a one-year term.

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• Whither WMC User Group? Irrespective of the controversy over the blocks, it's disappointing to hear that the outcome may be a fork. Forks are one of the worst possible things for the Wikimedia Movement because of how they split contributors. There's already Baidu Baike to contend with in China, so I really hope there doesn't end up being a third major encyclopedia. My hunch, however, is that a WMC-controlled project may not end up being distinctive enough from Baidu Baike to gain a readership. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
  • I have gained access to the New Project, Qiuwen Baike, mentioned above. I've checked the statistics: as of today, there has been ~620,000 articles, including thousands of articles originally published there. The number is still growing. I am confident that the number of articles can surpass Wikipedia in the not-too-distant future.
  • We Chinese Wikipedia and Qiuwen Baike editors never consider Baidu Baike as a serious competitor. There is no doubt that Baidu Baike is an encyclopaedia of plagiarism, copyright violation and commercials, which is full of trash. In mainland China, there is rarely no big encyclopedia site using CC BY-SA license, or even other CC licenses. Other Chinese encyclopaedia with high quality in China, e.g., Encyclopedia of China, which is fully copyrighted, pay-walled and expert-led, has costed over 100 million dollars on its recent revision.
  • Due to the Internet censorship in China, few people reads Wikipedia. As far as I know, WMC felt difficult to recruit new editors massively from mainland china due to the blockade of Internet. I believe that A free (both in copyright and price), high-quality Wikipedia-based encyclopedia would gain much audience across China. — Listen, the wind blows… 12:58, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
    • @听风吹过的声音: I really hope the forking group managed to get some legally-binding protections/guarantees from their new hosts, hopefully including things like the usergroup holding any relevant trademarks and the right to leave and get another host.
      The amount of difficulty one can have with a commercial host that wants to take advantage of an associated volunteer community is immense. Incidents like what happened with Internet Brands, StackExchange, and others... Things can get absolutely awful for communities tied to such organizations without proper protections and procedures. --Yair rand (talk) 00:43, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
      • @Yair rand: Thanks. I believe that organizer(s) of the fork would appreciate your comments. --— Listen, the wind blows… 11:02, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

What is "the largest Chinese-language Wikipedia" meant to signify here? You mean the largest Sinitic-language Wikipedia? Well, since Mandarin is by far the most commonly spoken variety and Standard Chinese by far the most commonly written, and we only have one Wikipedia per language, it's no wonder it's the largest, is it? I don't think you meant what you said there. Nardog (talk) 06:04, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Nardog: Please see Chinese Wikipedia (the intro and several sections have good info on your question) but especially Chinese_Wikipedia#Wikipedia in other varieties of Chinese which has a table with 6 versions of Wikipedia in "Chinese" and discusses another. I'm not a linguist or a Chinese speaker (of any type - though I know a very few "words to avoid" in Cantonese). The key here, I believe is your assumption that "we only have one Wikipedia per language." In Chinese as I understand it - it has a lot to do with the writing system. I'm not exactly sure why we have 2 Norwegian language versions (maybe one is an older, more formal version?). I have a pretty good idea why we have Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, *and* Serbo-Croatian versions (hint:war and nationalism). I'm wondering whether we have both Romanian and Moldovan? So there are lots of exceptions to the very general rule of "one Wikipedia per language." Hope this helps. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Oh, so you do mean it. Then my point remains that it adds nothing. Mandarin is by far the most commonly spoken variety and even speakers of other varieties are often proficient in the standard written variety based on it as it is the primary administrative language in mainland China and Taiwan, so it goes without saying that the Wikipedia written in it is the biggest of its kind. It's just such a bizarre thing to say I thought you were trying to say something else. Nardog (talk) 10:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

In fact, the "largest Chinese-language encyclopedia" is an official catchphrase of Baidu Baike, written in its homepage, and persumably regarded as a sell point. In fact, it has roughly 5x articles than English Wikipedia here. I believe it qualifies as the largest single-language online encyclopedia of all time. (You can't just add up all ~300 Wikipedia sites altogether and compare it with Chinese-only Baidu Baike, right?) Milky·Defer >Please use ping 18:11, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

By the way, according to another independent source in Chinese, the "big-tech company" WMCUG refers to turns out to be ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. Although the reliability of the news is still not verified, it sounds plausible. Milky·Defer >Please use ping 18:16, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Admin decline. 2011 inactive admin rule was a really dumb idea

My 2 cents. The July 2011 inactive admin suspension rule was a really dumb (and possibly coercive) idea. Editors don't get suspended when they are inactive. Admins should not be suspended either.

See Widefox charts on admins: User:Widefox/editors.

Contrast the drop in admins with the steady number of 40,000 active editors (5 or more edits per month) on English Wikipedia for the last couple years:

• https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/active-editors/normal%7Cline%7C2-year%7C(page_type)~content*non-content%7Cmonthly

--Timeshifter (talk) 16:06, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I see the suspension rule as more of a security measure than anything else. Per the community discussion that created the policy, if an inactive admin returns to Wikipedia, they may be resysopped by a bureaucrat without further discussion. And plenty do just that. I hardly see this as grounds for losing admins who really want to return to engagement. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the community discussion link. I previously looked at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-07-31/Special report.

As someone else said, the 2011 rule was a solution in search of a problem. The security risks were small and infrequent.

But as someone who dabbles in this and that, it bugs me to no end when any bureaucracy gets in my way. So I understand why many previous admins would be bothered by this 2011 rule.

Having to figure out where to ask for reinstatement. Having to dig around old bookmarks to do that. Having to wait even a few minutes to get back my admin rights.

Why bother just to make a few admin edits. I operate on inspiration. Once started I can sometimes do an amazing amount of work. Any interruption takes a lot of the fun out of it. I work on multiple projects. So I go to a different project that I can work on right away without any bureaucracy. And without any coercion being applied to do a certain amount of work.

--Timeshifter (talk) 21:35, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

If "having to figure out where to ask for reinstatement" exceeds your interest in following processes, I personally am fine with you not being an administrator, looking at WP:ADMINACCT, WP:WHEEL, WP:AC/DS et cetera. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:50, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Having to figure out where to ask for reinstatement. Having to dig around old bookmarks to do that. Having to wait even a few minutes to get back my admin rights. Why bother just to make a few admin edits. Exactly. Working as intended. Levivich 22:55, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

It's hard to be interested in a process if it's a huge pain in the ass and you don't think it's a good idea for the process to exist. Surely, if using rollback required me to solve two sudokus and a Wordle, I'd be allowed to complain about it without people suggesting a revocation of the user right. jp×g 09:12, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Speaking generally, it's my experience that bureaucrats like bureaucracy. It gives them a sort of passive aggressive power. In the various discussions on this it is obvious that there are 2 camps on this. Those that get it, and those that don't. Fine. Let them feel powerful in their diminishing group of admins. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:05, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Comment. An automated process for reinstatement would solve the problem. Maybe require 2-factor authentication for returning admins. Reinstatement would be near instant. Inspiration would not be lost through delays and bureaucracy.

If admins provide an email address and one or two phone numbers to Wikipedia, then at least one of them will probably be working even after years of inactivity. Choice of text, email, or phone call. Just like my local bank when I sign in. The authentication would only be required to automatically re-enable the admin tools. Authentication not requested again for at least a year, regardless of admin-related edit count. Authentication not required for normal editing that non-admins do. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:07, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

By the way, here are the relevant pages on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons:

Wikipedia:Inactive administrators

commons:Commons:Administrators/De-adminship#Activity

--Timeshifter (talk) 22:05, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

The Signpost is looking for new talent.

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