Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-01-30/News and notes
Feedback for Board of Trustees election
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.
Discuss this story
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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:
--Timeshifter (talk) 16:06, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]