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Racial bias in Wikipedia featured articles
Why always feature articles about West ? Why don't show things from Asia, Africa or South America as well ? Tired of seeing featured things about England, Europe and America. Bring some diversity. Don't be racial or western aligned biased . Does Wikipedia cater just to White people ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kiddo Learner (talk • contribs) 04:15, 11 July 2022 (UTC)
- There are many fewer editors & sources interested in these areas, so fewer FAs get written about them. It has little to do with racism per se, I think. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:11, 11 July 2022 (UTC)
- Also, not so much individual bias as the relative lack of accessible reliable sources about subjects outside the English-speaking world and of editors interested in finding such sources. Like many editors in the U.S., I am not fluent in any other language, and so rely on sources that are available in English. - Donald Albury 15:03, 11 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Kiddo Learner: how about you improve an article to FA standard. If someone complains something is missing, the answer is that they didn't put it there. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:07, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- This is a volunteer-run project, so has all the biases that exist among us self-appointed volunteers. It would be great for people to write featured articles about things from Asia, Africa or South America, but that takes work from the people who are interested in those subjects and are familiar with the reliable sources that write about them. If that describes you, then please get to work addressing our biases - the articles won't write themselves. If, however, you have any evidence that our procedure for promoting articles to featured status is at all racist then such evidence should be presented here and taken seriously. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:50, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- If you're interested in reading more about the state of bias on Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Systemic bias lays out various structural biases present in Wikipedia and how they manifest themselves, as well as efforts to reduce them. signed, Rosguill talk 17:06, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Kiddo Learner Make sure you check the TFAs for July 18 (Khalid ibn al-Walid) and July 28 (Thalassodromeus - from Brazil). Not everything is about England, Europe, and America. Although looking at the TFA queue for July, England Europe and America are certainly disproportionally represented.
- As others have pointed out, there is a big problem with systemic bias on Wikipedia. Part of it is due to the availability of sources, and part of it is because Wikipedia is written by volunteers in their spare time who tend to write about things they either know something about or want to learn more about and have ready access to sources about. TFA is intended to feature the best quality articles produced by this community, and such articles are invariably a labor of love. It seems kind of glib to respond to complaints such as yours by saying "if you want to see articles about X featured, write them!" but ultimately, that's what needs to happen. If articles about, say, fungus species in caves in south Asia, or the traditional beliefs of tribal societies in the Amazon, or major construction projects in Africa are to become featured, someone needs to care enough to take the time to 1. learn how to edit Wikipedia, 2. do the research, 3. write the article 4. submit the article to the featured article process 5. improve the article based on the feedback from the FA reviewers 6. continue to maintain the article after it has become a FA. If you care about these things and want to see them on the main page - write them. Be warned, the journey is difficult, but you will learn and grow along with the encyclopedia. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 17:29, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- I don't think that most people (even most editors) understand how an article becomes Wikipedia:Today's featured article. I suspect that they assume that the process is something like you would see in a newspaper or magazine:
- Alice decides that _____ would be a good topic for the front page.
- Alice assigns Bob to write a great article about _____.
- Alice and Carol review Bob's article, and if they decide that it's good enough, they put _____ on the front page.
- Alternatively, they might imagine something like this:
- There are so many great articles on Wikipedia already.
- Alice decides that it would be a good idea to have an article about food.
- Alice looks through the hundreds of great articles about food and picks out her favorite articles.
- Alice puts Gumbo on the front page.
- The actual process is more like this:
- Bob decides, of his own free will and without consulting anyone, to write a great article about his favorite subject (and actually has the knowledge, skills, time, images, sources, etc. to be successful at it).
- Bob has heard of this Wikipedia:Featured articles thing and chosen to make his article fit the Wikipedia:Featured article criteria.
- Bob submits his article to FAC and spends weeks talking to other people about it. He eventually convinces enough of them that it's a great article, and wins his FA star.
- Alice and Carol look over the (short and shrinking) list of pre-approved FAs, and say "Well, it's either Bob's hobby or another one on hurricanes, so we might as well run Bob's tomorrow and the hurricaine next week."
- Think about how surprising this process must be to people who are expecting a more normal, curated approach to a website. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- I think a part of the surprise is in the name. We say "featured" but mean "top quality", and there is no indication for outsiders that we only feature top quality articles on the Main Page instead of, say, interesting and diverse articles of decent quality. —Kusma (talk) 18:25, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Kusma I think I raised this point before (probably as a different IP) but I'll say it again - the entire Wikipedia content grading process is a confusing mess of jargon and is completely inaccessible and incomprehensible to people who are not active members of the editing community. Go ask some random person "which is better, a start class Wikipedia article or a stub class Wikipedia article?", it isn't obvious. Ditto for "Featured" vs "Good" articles, it isn't even obvious that "Featured" is a quality grade. Then you get into the whole mess of the alphabetical quality ratings, the confusing "A class is better than good article" setup despite it not having any kind of formal review process, different wikiprojects using different selections of grades etc. Really the whole system needs a rethink, but it's probably one of those things that is too ingrained into the site to change now. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 14:09, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
- "Today's Featured Article" looks like it means "the article featured on the Main Page today", not "today's selection from the list of articles that are classified as 'featured articles'". —Kusma (talk) 18:30, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- I think a part of the surprise is in the name. We say "featured" but mean "top quality", and there is no indication for outsiders that we only feature top quality articles on the Main Page instead of, say, interesting and diverse articles of decent quality. —Kusma (talk) 18:25, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- I don't think that most people (even most editors) understand how an article becomes Wikipedia:Today's featured article. I suspect that they assume that the process is something like you would see in a newspaper or magazine:
- Kiddo, if you think the lack of broad coverage is troubling, grab a computer and some books and join us in writing. Most of my FAs concern non-Western things, and I've only written 10 and it took me 6 years to get there. -Indy beetle (talk) 11:11, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
- As a TFA coordinator, I can say we are entirely dependent on what articles the community chooses to write as we do not have discretion to run non-featured articles. Perhaps the foundation could motivate the writing of FAs on the Global South through grants.--Wehwalt (talk) 12:07, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
- I'll never apologise for the amount of cue sports FAs there are to choose from. There are really three options available:
- Make TFA simply be a choice of a random page to feature. Perhaps "Today's Random Page", or similar. There is an argument for "Today's Good Article" if quality is the issue, it would make the pool larger.
- Promote articles on under represented topics
- Appreciate the work that has been put in by those creating FAs. Realise that people aren't writing about the topic you want, but rather the topic they want.
- I see this argument a lot, and then the FAs are never created in those areas, just a lot of complaining about those creating the FAs currently. I always welcome helping out those writing on other topics, just don't suggest the current work isn't suitable.Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 12:22, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
- As a TFA coordinator, I can say we are entirely dependent on what articles the community chooses to write as we do not have discretion to run non-featured articles. Perhaps the foundation could motivate the writing of FAs on the Global South through grants.--Wehwalt (talk) 12:07, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
- A different problem in getting some topics featured is the lack of qualified reviewers with non-English proficiency to be able to do an adequate source review. In the Spanish-language area-- and not only at FAC, but also at DYK and GA-- I am frequently shocked at what is slipping through when reviewers can't or don't read non-English-language sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:34, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
- I agree. I noticed a while ago few (now forgotten) EN living person articles that quoted ES sources, and didn't have an equivalent ES article. I don't spea Spanish, but the babelfish translations showed them as being non-notable. Wikipedia:Verifiability - Wikipedia states a preference for sourced vs EN speaker vs machine translation,
- So having a featured article from non EN sources, where the weighting of importance is made by non-native speakers could lead to embarassmentWakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 12:53, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- If the language involved is one frequently known by English Wikipedia editors (the major European languages and a few others) then the only obstacle is that it takes a bit longer to find someone who can look at the sources, but when the language is more obscure (to us, of course no language is obscure to the people brought up using it) the problem gets difficult, because more than one person should be involved in determining whether an article becomes featured. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:29, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
Formal proposal to add About link to TFA blurb
Please discuss at Talk:Main Page#Formal proposal to add "About" link to TFA blurb on main page. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:10, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
Reducing steps required to contribute
I've recently noticed a pattern in my own actions where for every extra step required to do something, I become roughly half as likely to complete the task, even if each individual step is simple. Unfortunately, many tasks essential to Wikipedia editing require multiple steps, often in a seemingly unnecessary manner. I'm thinking right now about the AFC process (from the perspective of new editors), uploading images to Commons, figuring out template parameters, etc., but those are just examples quickly coming to mind, and there are a lot more where that came from. What can we do to reduce the number of steps required to do basic actions, for both beginners and experienced editors? Yitz (talk) 20:51, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- These are necessary steps though, this is why WP:ACPERM was enacted. As far as commons, well, that's a matter to be dealt with there. PRAXIDICAE🌈 20:56, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Praxidicae I doidn't intend to imply that we should get rid of the AFC process; it's there for a reason! That being said, most of the steps within and leading to the AFC process are quite convoluted, and can be dramatically improved, imo. See my comment(s) below for more details. Yitz (talk) 05:48, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- I've been creating and editing articles for a long time, and I guess I'm just used to the requirments. I will admit that it can take me an hour to add a paragraph to an article, and several days to create a new article (I have been working on expanding one article for over a month, now, off-and-on, and am maybe half-way through). The problem I see is how would we streamline the process without short-cutting the requirements for verifiability, notability, reliable sources, proper formatting, etc?. - Donald Albury 21:04, 12 July 2022 (UTC)
- Both creating articles and uploading images involve some amount of specialist understanding of Wikipedia to do correctly; that there is some friction in the process for people who don't have that understanding is perhaps no bad thing. Making templates easier is possibly a more valuable thing to prioritize – I don't know if that's something which the visual editor could do more to help with for people who aren't comfortable with wikitext? Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 11:46, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
Both creating articles and uploading images involve some amount of specialist understanding of Wikipedia to do correctly...
- hi @Caeciliusinhorto-public! This is just a quick note to say: what you shared in the bit I've quoted above resonates with me! In fact, the issue I understand you to be naming about how difficult it can be for people who are new to understand, let alone become aware of, the policies/guidelines that ought to guide how they make a particular change is something the Editing Team is planning to work on in the coming months.
- Seeing this conversation (thank you, @Whatamidoing (WMF)) was the reminder I needed to prioritize publishing a project page on mediawiki.org about the work the Editing Team is planning to do so that insightful volunteers like you, @Donald Albury, @Praxidicae, and @Yitz can help us shape it.
- In the meantime, I've added what you said above to the ticket in Phabricator where we are starting this work: phab:T265163#8075893. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 18:48, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
- @PPelberg (WMF) Thanks for the great work you do! I look forward to seeing what comes of this... :) I'm going to try to go through the AFC process roleplaying as if I were a beginner, and will narrate that experience below; hopefully I'll be able to pick up on some specific trouble areas that way. Yitz (talk) 19:25, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
- Okay, so as a newcomer let's say I start at the main page, and I want to write an article about someone I know who's mildly famous (using this example because it's the most common topic non-wiki friends ask me about). I'll use my father (Rabbi Gershon Litt) for specifics, since he's on the edge of notability, I have a genuine conflict of interest there (both very common for topics beginners are attracted to), and I won't be throwing away a topic others are likely to create a page for.
- The first thing I do is probably click on the "Help" link, or maybe "Learn to edit," looking for a way to add an article.
- If I start with the latter, I'll almost certainly click on the big blue "Get Started" button, which leads to Help:Introduction to Wikipedia—which has no information on creating a new page, so I'll head back. Maybe instead I'll click on one of the two "Editing" buttons, which leads to Help:Introduction to editing with VisualEditor/1 or its markup editor equivalent. Both have a link to a page titled "Creating new articles"—now we're getting somewhere, four steps in! That page (finally) has a link to the Wikipedia Article Wizard, which seems pretty simple to work with, so I'll pause here for now.
- Let's say I start with the "Help" link instead. This is a lot better: there's the clearly-labeled section "Create a new article or upload media," which prominently links to Help:Your first article and the Wikipedia Article Wizard. Far fewer steps with no obvious decrease in readability!
- [My take here so far is that the "learn to edit" link should be taken off the left tab by default, as it seems to be an actively frustrating experience to navigate if you don't already know the material, and the "help" page links to the same stuff already. The redundency just gives me decision fatigue / analysis paralysis.]
- So we've finally stumbled upon the Wikipedia Article Wizard, after our difficult journey. What then? I go through the steps it presents me, answering as accurately as I can for the goal of writing about my father. I'm led to this page on disclosing COI editing, which tells me to "Edit your user page by clicking here." I click the link, and BOOM—I get a "Permission error"! I'm editing as an IP address, you see, because I'm a newcomer who was told on the main page that "anybody can edit" Wikipedia. And IP addresses can't make user pages. Okay, no problem, that's just a simple extra step (or steps) of creating an account for myself. I do all that, and return to the article creation Wizard (assuming I can find it again). I still need to disclose on my user page, but at this point I'm feeling lazy and I haven't written a single word yet, so I decide to skip that for now and hope nobody cares enough to call me out on it. I falsely press the "I have disclosed" button (while cackling like the supervillian I am), to be greeted with this page, which gives me three options:
- request the article be written by someone else.
- request another editor to make an edit on your behalf.
- press the "Next" button.
- If you haven't tried option 1 before, it's worth pointing out here that such article requests almost never get made, and even if they do, it can be a period of months or even years before anyone bothers to reply. This is pretty much a graveyard of unanswered requests for articles. For my father, who's a Rabbi, I found myself going to Wikipedia:Requested articles/Biography/By profession#Judaism, where I was told to instead head to Wikipedia:Requested articles/Biographies/Jewish figures#Jewish philosophers, rabbis, cantors, where I see a few dozen redlinked Rabbis, and a page where the revision history shows edits from 2014 on its first page. In short, a dead end.
- If I press the link on option 2, I'm directed towards Wikipedia:Edit requests, a page that's pretty impenetrable for an unexperienced editor. If I manage to make it all the way through that page, I find myself being directed to the Edit Request Wizard, which honestly looks pretty helpful! [why wasn't I linked directly to this from the other Wizard?] I go through the Wizard until I reach Wikipedia:Edit Request Wizard/COI, where I insert "Gershon Litt," the name of the page I want to see created, into one of the two input boxes given. No matter which one I use, the result is the same. I'm led to a talk page for a currently non-existent article, containing this helpful warning that the page will shortly be deleted by an administrator.
- (I need to leave for an event, will add more here later) Yitz (talk) 20:44, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
- Continuing where I left off...
- Clearly, requesting someone else to make a page about my beloved father isn't going to go anywhere. I go back to where I left off in the article creation Wizard, and press the "Next" button. I enter "Gershon Litt" into the textbox, and finally...I arrive at a blank draft page, with a few basic instructions on top. Nice!
- I may be [role-playing as] a beginner to Wikipedia editing, but I'm not stupid. I go try to find a Wikipedia page that looks similar to what I'm going to want mine to look like, to be able to reference the writing style and markup used there. I find a page on Rabbi Joshua Berman; looks close enough. Using the visual editor (which I got a pop-up asking if I wanted to use, though it was unclear what it was), I quickly add some info I think is relevant, and use the "cite" button to add citations. I also threw in a questionable citation to a website with an obvious COI (it's the first citation on the page), because I've never seen a beginner not make that mistake at least once. I admit I wasn't super careful to keep things to what I'd expect a beginner to write here, though I tried to be looser than I normally would, with some lightly promotional language (another common and usually honest mistake) at the end of the first paragraph. I decided to publish the draft page here to allow for reference, though I won't submit it to AFC and clog up the backlog unless others want me to do that for some reason. What I would expect to happen if I were to submit the draft for review is that I would be rejected for the flaws I included in the draft, even though those flaws are probably resolvable by future editors, and likely wouldn't get the page removed if it were already an article in Mainspace. Perhaps I'm wrong about that, but that is my intuition.
- I hope this role-play is helpful in illustrating some flaws of the current system, and I remain hopeful that with some effort we can make this process much easier and less stress-inducing than it currently is. All the best, Yitz (talk) 05:45, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- I agree the AFC process is awful for new editors. It's not succinct, and the help is not provided where needed, they aren't told that there is nearly no chance their article will survive. They spend a few hours creating a page, save it, an then it's reviewed by the NPP using automated tools (which the new editor does not have access to) and marked for deletion within 5 minutes.
- If a new editor does create a page that satisfies WP criteria then they are very suspect. Yes they right about their mum, but we should head them off. There was a WMF analysis that showed that most never edit agai after their article is deleted Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:16, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- Perhaps the default should be to move such articles to drafts (along with a friendly message giving access to further help) instead of deleting them..? It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it might help mitigate it somewhat. Yitz (talk) 03:15, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- Research also says the Draft: namespace is basically where articles go to die. (I assume – but am unaware of any research on this point – that the same effect is true for userifying the article.)
- If it's a notable subject and left in the mainspace, then other editors are more likely to edit the page. This editing can feel aggressive (e.g., blanking 90% of content, adding a stack of maintenance tags) but it might be better at editor retention than the available alternatives. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 18 July 2022 (UTC)
- Perhaps the default should be to move such articles to drafts (along with a friendly message giving access to further help) instead of deleting them..? It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it might help mitigate it somewhat. Yitz (talk) 03:15, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- @PPelberg (WMF) Thanks for the great work you do! I look forward to seeing what comes of this... :) I'm going to try to go through the AFC process roleplaying as if I were a beginner, and will narrate that experience below; hopefully I'll be able to pick up on some specific trouble areas that way. Yitz (talk) 19:25, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
Thoughts on feature request originally made on phabricator
- Moved from WP:VPR
What are your thoughts on this feature request? – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 19:55, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Ilovemydoodle: moved from VPR as this isn't a proposal for something that the English Wikipedia has anything specific to do about at this point. — xaosflux Talk 20:08, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- Good idea in theory, but it's an idealistic goal that was first requested in 2006 and will most likely never be implemented. * Pppery * it has begun... 20:10, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
- Well, if we get enough consensus here, they will probably add it. – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 11:04, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Ilovemydoodle there is nothing blocking this on community consensus right now. You can try to get traction for it in the next wishlist, drop a note at meta:Community Wishlist Survey/Sandbox. — xaosflux Talk 12:45, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Xaosflux: I know this is unrelated, but, do you know any importers? I really need one for a discussion. – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 12:51, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- If you need help with imports you can post at WT:RFPI. — xaosflux Talk 16:58, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- Importers, not imports. – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 11:43, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Xaosflux: I mean, who are the importers? (I am looking for technical information about import) – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 16:41, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- Special:ListUsers/import - we don't use this function extensively on this project. The best place to ask questions about how import is used here on the English Wikipedia is WT:RFPI; For general technical help with import you may want to start at mw:Help:Import. — xaosflux Talk 17:24, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Xaosflux: I mean, who are the importers? (I am looking for technical information about import) – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 16:41, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- Importers, not imports. – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 11:43, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- If you need help with imports you can post at WT:RFPI. — xaosflux Talk 16:58, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Xaosflux: I know this is unrelated, but, do you know any importers? I really need one for a discussion. – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 12:51, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Ilovemydoodle there is nothing blocking this on community consensus right now. You can try to get traction for it in the next wishlist, drop a note at meta:Community Wishlist Survey/Sandbox. — xaosflux Talk 12:45, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- Well, if we get enough consensus here, they will probably add it. – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 11:04, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Human Rights Impact Assessment
On 12 July, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the publication of its Human Rights Impact Assessment. (Production of the public version of this 2020 report was delayed by Covid.)
This is the document that has driven a number of recent developments over the past couple of years, like the UCoC, Human Rights Policy, etc. It also includes a number of other priority recommendations, the status of which is indicated on the Meta talk page. A number of them will require community input. Andreas JN466 18:56, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
When were the 5 WP pillars first stated?
The earliest verion is 2007 on WP. Is there an early history of WP? I am particulalry interested in who put in the word 'Meciless' Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 15:42, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- Special:Permalink/13207659 is a version of Wikipedia:Five pillars dated 2005-05-04 with the edit comment, "New simple policy page". -- RoySmith (talk) 15:48, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- Look like "mercilessly" was added a few weeks later in Special:Permalink/14525251 by Lethe. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:57, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
- The idea of content being edited "mercilessly" has a very long history here. It was in the first editable version of the copyright warning in December 2003 and was on the edit toolbar until September 2009. With the assistance of an old database dump I found out that the word "mercilessly" was on the "Be bold" page from March 2002 until September 2006. The earliest use of the word I can find in the context of discussion about Wikipedia from this search on the Nostalgia Wikipedia is a user essay from 2001 that is best read in its original form on that site. Graham87 04:24, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
- This is related to this idea lab discussion. Graham87 04:50, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
Movement Strategy and Governance News – Issue 7
Movement Strategy and Governance News
Issue 7, July–September 2022Read the full newsletter
Welcome to the 7th issue of Movement Strategy and Governance News! The newsletter distributes relevant news and events about the implementation of Wikimedia's Movement Strategy recommendations, other relevant topics regarding Movement governance, as well as different projects and activities supported by the Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The MSG Newsletter is delivered quarterly, while the more frequent Movement Strategy Weekly will be delivered weekly. Please remember to subscribe here if you would like to receive future issues of this newsletter.
- Movement sustainability: Wikimedia Foundation's annual sustainability report has been published. (continue reading)
- Improving user experience: recent improvements on the desktop interface for Wikimedia projects. (continue reading)
- Safety and inclusion: updates on the revision process of the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines. (continue reading)
- Equity in decisionmaking: reports from Hubs pilots conversations, recent progress from the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, and a new white paper for futures of participation in the Wikimedia movement. (continue reading)
- Stakeholders coordination: launch of a helpdesk for Affiliates and volunteer communities working on content partnership. (continue reading)
- Leadership development: updates on leadership projects by Wikimedia movement organizers in Brazil and Cape Verde. (continue reading)
- Internal knowledge management: launch of a new portal for technical documentation and community resources. (continue reading)
- Innovate in free knowledge: high-quality audiovisual resources for scientific experiments and a new toolkit to record oral transcripts. (continue reading)
- Evaluate, iterate, and adapt: results from the Equity Landscape project pilot (continue reading)
- Other news and updates: a new forum to discuss Movement Strategy implementation, upcoming Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election, a new podcast to discuss Movement Strategy, and change of personnel for the Foundation's Movement Strategy and Governance team. (continue reading)
Xeno (WMF) (talk) 00:27, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
Cross-wiki post
Could any help here? – Ilovemydoodle (talk) 08:56, 18 July 2022 (UTC)
Employment opportunities with Wikimedia Foundation as a Community Facilitator
Hello all,
As you may know, I've been working as a community facilitator: for the Universal Code of Conduct Project starting in January 2021, and for the Movement Strategy and Governance team since June 2021. I found these roles to be challenging and fulfilling, and have had wonderful collaborations and built great friendships within the movement during this time. I want to thank everyone who has engaged with the various projects for which I've facilitated over these past 19 months.
Today I am inviting qualified community members to consider applying for this position, as a fresh hiring process has just begun. Among other things, the work will involve engaging with English Wikimedia communities and affiliates, organizing community conversations, gathering feedback, and addressing community questions or requests (escalating feedback as needed).
If you are interested, here is a direct link to this particular role on Greenhouse. If you speak and write Japanese, there is also a role for a Japanese community facilitator. You can visit https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs/ to see other positions as well.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Xeno (WMF) (talk) 23:30, 18 July 2022 (UTC)
- Hint: Put your username in your cover letter and/or résumé. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
Announcing the six candidates for the 2022 Board of Trustees election
- You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.
Hi everyone,
The Affiliate voting process has concluded. Representatives from each Affiliate organization learned about the candidates by reading candidates’ statements, reviewing candidates’ answers to questions, and considering the candidates’ ratings provided by the Analysis Committee. The selected 2022 Board of Trustees candidates are:
- Tobechukwu Precious Friday (Tochiprecious)
- Farah Jack Mustaklem (Fjmustak)
- Shani Evenstein Sigalov (Esh77)
- Kunal Mehta (Legoktm)
- Michał Buczyński (Aegis Maelstrom)
- Mike Peel (Mike Peel)
You may see more information about the Results and Statistics of this Board election.
Please take a moment to appreciate the Affiliate Representatives and Analysis Committee members for taking part in this process and helping to grow the Board of Trustees in capacity and diversity. These hours of volunteer work connect us across understanding and perspective. Thank you for your participation.
Thank you to the community members who put themselves forward as candidates for the Board of Trustees. Considering joining the Board of Trustees is no small decision. The time and dedication candidates have shown to this point speaks to their commitment to this movement. Congratulations to those candidates who have been selected. A great amount of appreciation and gratitude for those candidates not selected. Please continue to share your leadership with Wikimedia.
Thank you to those who followed the Affiliate process for this Board election. You may review the results of the Affiliate selection process.
The next part of the Board election process is the community voting period. You may view the Board election timeline here. To prepare for the community voting period, there are several things community members can engage with in the following ways:
- Read candidates’ statements and read the candidates’ answers to the questions posed by the Affiliate Representatives.
- Propose and select the 6 questions for candidates to answer during their video Q&A.
- See the Analysis Committee’s ratings of candidates on each candidate’s statement.
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MNadzikiewicz (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
About archiving sources used in article
I am using the journals available at JSTOR in writing some articles. Usually, i see that Bihar related articles are in poor state on Wikipedia and nobody takes care of broken url and dead sources. Many articles also remain there without much sources and lot of grammar related issues. I have a habit of saving the Sources in Wayback Machine, while editing. I do this because, i know if in future that source becomes inaccessible for any reason, nobody is going to correct that. I just want to know that , do we need to use Wayback Machine in case of journals at JSTOR, as per my knowledge, they are there for always? We don't need to care about them (journal at JSTOR) becoming inaccessible to the reviewers in future? Admantine123 (talk) 15:37, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- There is no requirement ("need") to put any reference in to "Wayback Machine" to use it in an article here. — xaosflux Talk 15:44, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- If we're talking about the usual JSTOR situation where the link goes to the entry page for a journal article (i.e. an HTML page with an embedded preview), I don't think the Wayback Machine is going to add much value. Even if the journal article disappears from JSTOR for some reason, the archived page is only going to tell the reader "yes, there used to be a journal article by this name at this URL". That could be useful in some cases, but it still won't allow the reader to check the citation as they could with a Wayback Machine archive of a normal web page. So in general, while there's nothing wrong with archiving those pages, I think it's OK not to. (There would be a stronger case for archiving, I think, in the case of a publicly downloadable PDF hosted on JSTOR.) -- Visviva (talk) 16:13, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- This may be a bit of thread drift, but I was musing on how the real citation is to the paper publication, and, even if the article were no longer available on JSTOR, at least some libraries would have retained the paper issue of the journal, making it theoretically verifiable. Then it occurred to me, have any journals that we regard as reliable sources gone solely digital? - Donald Albury 17:02, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- I would imagine quite a few of those at Category:Online-only journals would qualify, but I'm not sure which if any of those are on JSTOR specifically. -- Visviva (talk) 18:27, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- This may become complicated and costly, and in general perhaps not worth the trouble. JSTOR is a repository, so what is proposed here is 2nd-level archiving, which I don't think exists in Wikipedia, at least formally. Repositories are considered stable archives, and even when repository metadata change (such as a JSTOR id) there may be background redirects to the edited data or the item may be found by searching other JSTOR fields (such as title). It would be very rare for JSTOR items to disappear for reasons other than legal, copyright or the item being given exclusive repository rights on another repository. At least according to their published retention guidelines [1], which partly use a proven digital preservation infrastructure (from Portico). Note the items may be available even if JSTOR ever ceases operations (contingent on funding-at-hand, I suppose). In contrast Wayback Machine/Internat Archive retention policies are unclear, and in rare cases items have been known to disappear without any explanation. JSTOR also includes vast swaths of subscription/registration-only information; preemptively archiving that material in an open access platform, if it can be done, could be a copyvio. 67.247.99.116 (talk) 23:07, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks to all of you, for giving your precious time here. I am satisfied with the explanation of ip. So, can i conclude that, JSTOR being a repository itself, items are not gonna disappear and i shouldn't care for archiving them. Untill recently, i have used those journal as citation, which have open access via login. Anyone of you, who is interested to check to give any other advice may look at 1970 Bhojpur uprising.Admantine123 (talk) 23:54, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- I note that you create fairly full citations, which is the best insurance against link rot (and you don't unnecessarily link to archive snapshots, which is good). Your full use of quotations is also a plus (you should know that there's a "quote" parameter for citation templates; you also don't need to quote journal article titles, as that is done automatically by the "cite journal" template). I see that you've heavily cited some names in the infobox, which is often considered part of the lead and thus doesn't need so much citing. More of that should be in the article body (note that Ram Naresh Ram and Ramnaresh Dusadh seem to be one and the same, but that isn't made clear). Dhtwiki (talk) 06:02, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks to all of you, for giving your precious time here. I am satisfied with the explanation of ip. So, can i conclude that, JSTOR being a repository itself, items are not gonna disappear and i shouldn't care for archiving them. Untill recently, i have used those journal as citation, which have open access via login. Anyone of you, who is interested to check to give any other advice may look at 1970 Bhojpur uprising.Admantine123 (talk) 23:54, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for your feedback Dhtwiki, i will create a seperate section on leaders of the uprising. This article will take time to expand, as i am busy in my real life too, and working on it in free time. In that section, i will describe that both are same. Also Ram Naresh Ram has a seperate article too, and as i say, it's a stub, nobody had tried to expand it. The guy is a three time Member of legislative assembly.Admantine123 (talk) 09:45, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
- At least some JSTOR entries have already been archived at the Internet Archive, such as this one. All that is archived is the index page, so there is no danger of a copyvio. In any case, an index page is useful only for confirming the citation. The information in the citation is what matters. - Donald Albury 00:48, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
- Can any one of you help me here with this journal
- Actually the last page of this journal has another article which is named as Class war in Bhojpur 1. But for citing it, when i clicked the citation link at JSTOR, it gave this title and author name. If anyone of you have time. Please edit the 1970 Bhojpur uprising (Source 14). I don't know whether the issue and volume also need to be changed in citation or not . Thanks in advance. The correct title should be class war in Bhojpur and author too is different.Admantine123 (talk) 13:22, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
- Are you trying to cite the "Class War at Bhojpur: I" article? It is JSTOR 4366262. 50.75.226.250 (talk) 18:22, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
- Yupp brother, btw i corrected it. Admantine123 (talk) 03:24, 22 July 2022 (UTC)
- Are you trying to cite the "Class War at Bhojpur: I" article? It is JSTOR 4366262. 50.75.226.250 (talk) 18:22, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
- At least some JSTOR entries have already been archived at the Internet Archive, such as this one. All that is archived is the index page, so there is no danger of a copyvio. In any case, an index page is useful only for confirming the citation. The information in the citation is what matters. - Donald Albury 00:48, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
Seeking recent editor stratification research
Does anybody know of recent work that updates the findings of m:Research:Editor classes or strategy:Editor Trends Study? I have poked around a bit but haven't found anything that works on the same issues; stats.wikimedia.org doesn't quite get into those issues AFAICT. Doesn't need to be formal research; I'd be interested in anything that people have found from just tooling around on toolserver or diving in the dumps. -- Visviva (talk) 18:06, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
Help needed
In article, which i will be expanding for month, i found a cite error at reference number 8. Someone pls fix it. See here Dalits in Bihar.Admantine123 (talk) 18:28, 23 July 2022 (UTC)
- I have fixed the error. Please check that I have done so correctly.
- The problem was that there were two separate uses of the ref name HRW ('<ref name="HRW">'). When someone enters '<ref name="HRW"/>', MediaWiki doesn't know which source they are trying to cite, so it generates the error message. The problem is, I also don't know which source was intended. But I have assumed that the refs before the second HRW ref are meant to refer to the first one, and the refs after the second HRW ref are meant to refer to that second ref (which I have renamed "HRW-pattern"). To avoid the problem in the future, I would recommend using more specific ref names. -- Visviva (talk) 21:28, 23 July 2022 (UTC)