Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/News and notes

News and notes

Revised Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines up for vote, WMF counsel departs, generative models under discussion

By Bri, Andreas Kolbe, EpicPupper, and JPxG

Upcoming vote on the revised Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct

The WMF has announced another vote on the revised Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced, on the mailing list and on Meta, that there will shortly be another vote on the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct:

In mid-January 2023, the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct will undergo a second community-wide ratification vote. This follows the March 2022 vote, which resulted in a majority of voters supporting the Enforcement Guidelines. During the vote, participants helped highlight important community concerns. The Board’s Community Affairs Committee requested that these areas of concern be reviewed.
The volunteer-led Revisions Committee worked hard reviewing community input and making changes. They updated areas of concern, such as training and affirmation requirements, privacy and transparency in the process, and readability and translatability of the document itself.

The revised Enforcement Guidelines can be viewed here, and a comparison of changes can be found here.

Voting will open on 17 January. For information on how to vote, eligibility, and the like, see the detailed Voter information page on Meta. – AK

Amanda Keton, the outgoing WMF General Counsel

Amanda Keton to leave Wikimedia Foundation

Stephen LaPorte, the new WMF General Counsel as of 1 February, 2023

WMF General Counsel Amanda Keton has announced that she will move on to her "next adventure". She joined the Wikimedia Foundation in 2019, having previously served as head of the Tides Foundation and CEO of Tides Advocacy.

Amanda will be succeeded in her role as General Counsel by current Deputy General Counsel Stephen LaPorte (also known as User:Slaporte), who will take over on 1 February 2023.

The Signpost wishes Amanda and Stephen all the best. – AK

Large language models on Wikipedia: friends or foes?

Note: JPxG, who wrote some of this section, also wrote WP:LLM.

For the last few weeks, a discussion at the Village Pump has been ongoing about the potential use of text generated by large language models (like GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-J and ChatGPT) in Wikipedia; near the end of December, a thread on the wikimedia-l mailing list discussed the issue as well, going over the potential benefits, drawbacks and use cases for these models.

Recent coverage in Slate describes a series of discussions which took place at Talk:Artwork title concerning the article (Artwork title), whose initial draft consisted of prompted output from ChatGPT. Various demonstrations have been done of the use of these models to assist in writing, editing and formatting (User:JPxG/LLM demonstration and later User:Fuzheado/ChatGPT). Currently, a proposed set of guidelines for the use of these models is under discussion (and, frankly, could use some more eyes on it).

The August 2022 issue of The Signpost explored some of these issues as they concern this publication; see the From the editors page titled "Rise of the machines, or something" for an introduction. – J, B

Brief notes

The Wiki Project Med Foundation has published its annual report on MDWiki.org

The Viceroy's House in Vyborg now has a Russian Wikipedia article, written after a photowalk by the North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group.

2023 Steward Elections: The 2023 Steward Elections will be starting on 5 February. Eligible candidates and voters are encouraged to participate after reading the guidelines.
Community Wishlist Survey: Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023.
Wiki Project Med Foundation publishes annual report: Published on the Foundation's own wiki, MDWiki.org, the report presents highlights of the Wiki Project Med Foundation's work carried out in 2022.
Annual report from North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group: The North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group, too, has published its annual report for 2022, in both English and Russian, describing how the user group's work has been affected by the fraught situation in Russia.
WikiProject Organized Labour Edit-a-thon throughout February. Participate online if you are interested in improving coverage of worker organizations, strike actions and more! Stay tuned for the WikiProject Organized Labour report coming out in a future Signpost issue!
Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.
Request for adminship: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/MB was closed "no consensus" after a 'Crat chat 8–9 January, with 173 !votes in favor of adminship, 80 opposed, and 15 neutral.
Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: West Frisian, 50,000 articles. Hausa, 20,000 articles. Shona, 10,000 articles. Tswana, 1,000 articles.
Anniversary: Happy Wikipedia Day! Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001.
Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is kiddie ride, to be followed next week by brochure. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!