Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/News and notes
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Are you ready for admin elections?
Encouraging news from the RfA review, including admin elections being set to start trials in October
[edit]Note: Soni, the author of this lead story, was directly involved in the current review of the Requests for adminship process.
As part of WP:RFA2024, multiple RfA reform attempts have completed trials or are currently under review: you can read previous coverage on the matter by The Signpost in the May 16 issue.
There has already been consensus to add a reminder of RfA civility norms to WP:RFA, as well as limit suffrage to only extended-confirmed voters and formally require all nominees to also be extended-confirmed. All of these proposals were implemented in the last few months.
The "discussion-only period" trial has come to an end this month, having converted five different RfAs (non SNOW-closed) to have "discussion only" for the first two days out of the seven-day period. After this initial trial, Phase II discussions are ongoing to determine if this proposal will become permanent.
As per the outcome of the related Phase II discussion, admins can now designate themselves as monitors for RfAs, subject to minimum expectations for their conduct during the whole process. The full list can be found at WP:MONITOR. This proposal is intended to improve enforcement of civility guidelines during RfAs.
Phase II for the administrator recall proposal has also recently finished, having waited for a closer for several months. It will allow a community-initiated path to de-adminship by requiring certain admins to submit and pass their RfA again. Further discussion is ongoing on the next steps for this process.
Finally, the Admin Elections procedure is expected to start trials in October: it will be a one-time trial to allow an alternate path to adminship, parallel to RfAs. Candidates can sign up from October 8 to October 14, before entering a discussion period from October 22 to October 24, which will then be followed by a SecurePoll private voting session from October 25 to October 31. – S
U4C elections end with just one new member seated
[edit]The special elections for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) concluded earlier this month, with the election of just one candidate. With 613 votes cast between the 18 eligible candidates, only Ajraddatz (for the North America seat) achieved the 60% support-to-support+oppose ratio required. This gives the U4C just enough members (8 out of 16 seats) to establish their quorum, though it remains to be seen how they will handle inactive members.
The committee was set up primarily to deal with larger-scale disputes within smaller Wikis and to enforce the Universal Code of Conduct across the various projects; they are expected to begin hearing cases shortly. Further information can be found on the U4C announcements page.
The full results of the U4C elections can be viewed here. This cycle had already been covered in the July 22 issue of The Signpost. – S
The WMF releases two new bulletins for August and September
[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation published their bulletins for late August and early September. Among other news, they covered the new WMF Global Advocacy team, which was sworn in back in August, a public survey intended to better understand WikiProjects, the recent disbandment of the MCDC and the WMF Board of Trustees election, which is currently in its scrutiny phase.
It was also mentioned that the WMF will briefly switch the traffic between its data centers for maintenance purposes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. A banner will be displayed on all Wikis 30 minutes before the start of the operation, during which users will be able to read, but not edit the sites for up to an hour. More information on the server switch can be found here.
Editors may also be interested in testing for the Charts Extension and the Alt Text experiment on the iOS app, the codified new API policy, or the WMF's newest update on Movement Strategy Grants (Spoilers: it focuses on Hubs). – S, O
Brief notes
[edit]
- CEO of the WMF opens up on the outcome of the Movement Charter vote: Maryana Iskander, the current CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, recently published an e-mail, cosigned by BoT members Nataliia Tymkiv and Dariusz Jemielniak, responding to the outcomes of the discussion about the Movement Charter and thanking everyone who had been engaging with the WMF and the Trustees "with a spirit of generosity, openness, and collective problem-solving".
- Annual reports: Odia Wikimedians User Group, Hausa Wikimedians User Group, WikiClassics User Group.
- Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones in August and September 2024:
- Wikipedia articles
- 1,000 articles: Dusun Wikipedia
- 10,000 articles: Gilaki Wikipedia, Dagbani Wikipedia
- 50,000 articles: Ido Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia
- 2,000,000 articles: Russian Wikipedia
- Anniversaries
- 1 year: Talysh Wikipedia
- 5 years: N'Ko Wikipedia
- 15 years: Mirandese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia
- 20 years: Belarusian Classical Wikipedia
- Wikipedia articles
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Asilvering and Significa liberdade. The former's request for adminship passed on 6 September, with over 99% support, whereas the latter got promoted on 21 September, with roughly 79.5% support.
- But not enough?: Several new low points in the count of active administrators were reached, culminating with 419 on September 16, an amount that surpassed minima reported in The Signpost as recently as the prior issue. 2024 has only 9 admins elected by September, quite near the lowest yearly count since the inception of the project. Only 2021 performed definitively worse, with a total of 7 new admins by year-end.
- Global bans:
- Flamelai: This Hong Kong-based user was globally banned on September 11, after being found to be involved in "alleged acts of trolling, doxxing and intimidation" against Hong Kong journalists, whose trade union had released an official statement and filed reports to the Hong Kong Police Force. The same user had already been blocked by the English and Japanese Wikipedias back in 2023, following a sockpuppetry-related investigation. The person was also banned from Talk and Wikiedpia namespace in Chinese Wikipedia in December 2023.
- Anatoly Shariy
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Human geography. Please be bold in helping improve this article! Next week's Article for Improvement (beginning 30 September 2024) is Currency of Spain.
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