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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2020-08-30. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: A slow couple of months (1,184 bytes · 💬)

Featured content: Going for the goal (586 bytes · 💬)

  • "from August 22 through July 26" — Signpost, are you reversing the flow of normal spacetime again!??! #WEVETALKEDABOUTTHIS -- FeRDNYC (talk) 22:31, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I've fixed a typo in the signpost. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to do that, so I decided to post here to tell you guys about it. Ghinga7 (talk) 19:33, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

From the archives: Wikipedia for promotional purposes? (3,820 bytes · 💬)

If they'd known then how much effort would be involved in the next 15 years against it, it might have doomed the project! Nosebagbear (talk) 19:19, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Well, that's the way of most pioneering efforts that succeed against all odds, isn't it? When you look back at everything that went into it and consider how many times along the way it could've easily all fallen apart with the eyes of your modern-day self, the idea of choosing to face all of that would be understandably daunting. Fortunately for every one of those long-odds success stories, people on the starting line of such things rarely know just what they're getting into! -- FeRDNYC (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It's so weird to see this article use "the Wikipedia" in places. Like how Zuckerberg used to talk about "the Facebook", way back in the beginning. Glad we grew out of that! -- FeRDNYC (talk) 13:22, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I use the DuckDuckGo search engine and, if there is a Wikipedia article on whatever I'm searching for, it will appear in the upper right corner of the search results. To the casual user it gives the appearance of credibility no matter how questionably sourced that article may be. In the case of BLPs paid editors have clearly decided that promoting their clients on Wikipedia far outweighs the risk that other editors can change their client bios. The paid editors have all day to monitor their client's social media because that's what they do for a living. If another editor makes changes they can immediately revert or subtly make incremental daily edits to get it back to what they want it to be. From what I've seen in AfD discussions promotional editing seems to fall into one of two categories. The first are fans of a subject who genuinely like the performer and think they should be on Wikipedia. In good faith they write an article but don't understand WP:GNG or WP:RS. They think Youtube subscribers or Instagram followers count for notability. Add to this the services like authoritytitans who send promotional material to what appear to be legitimate news sites. The second group are paid editors who might, for example, vastly inflate a passing mention or single quote made by their client in the New York Times and imply that it was a full biographical profile. They have professional associates who can be called to the AfD page to counter and overwhelm any !Delete comments. And, unless there is overwhelming consensus for deletion, the default decision is to keep the article. Thus, promotional bios and product spam tends to stay. Blue Riband► 19:01, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
Quite sinister your description, Mr. Blue, of professional paid agents abusing Wikipedia just because they can without much risks. But I'd guess that's possible and real. Nevertheless I'd say in normal editing days I don't even think about that, I'm just not that paranoid. But OTOH the possibilities are still creepy. -- Just N. (talk) 16:08, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

In the media: Storytelling large and small (1,845 bytes · 💬)

  • Thanks for the summaries! I always rely on reading these Signpost articles to find out what's going on. Ganesha811 (talk) 18:10, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I like money but how come Elon has links to really important businesses and, not just tweet but believe in garbage like that? -Gouleg🛋️ (Talk • Contribs) 20:48, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Just a guess here - he really doesn't believe in half the stuff he tweets. Rather it may be, to get into his position you have to be very confident in what you are doing, what you think - and sometimes that extends into contempt of others' views or actions. So he might be making fun of others, i.e. trolling. If anybody thinks this guess is against wp:BLP, please remove it. But please also remember - it's just a guess. If it doesn't apply to Musk (and maybe only he knows why he tweets this stuff), it might very well apply to John Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Jobs, and a lot of other very successful DLPs, who if their biographers are to be believed had some very strange habits. Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:50, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Also a guess.. it used to be having a Wikipedia article was prestigious. Now less so being so prolific. So the way to gain prestige on Wikipedia is with manufactured controversy. I think he is joking but there is some truth to it. -- GreenC 03:54, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

News and notes: The high road and the low road (25,716 bytes · 💬)

About Scots Wikipedia

  • I'm really happy this article mentioned the terrible quality of the tabloid websites that have been reporting on this issue. Every time one of them said something along the lines of "Teenage brony moderator on the Scottish Wikipedia", I cringed a little. One outlet even called Meta-Wiki "Wikipedia's Supreme Court" which is just wrong on so many levels. They at least fixed it when I emailed them. --PuzzledvegetableIs it teatime already? 17:53, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Reading the story about the Scots Wikipedia makes me feel very sorry for the individual concerned. It sounds like he was acting in good faith, and I can't even imagine what it feels like to commit ten years of your life to a Wikipedia project, amassing 169,000 edits (way more than I have here at enwiki), thinking you're doing good work, only to find out that it's been counterproductive. And then be subjected to harassment and abuse by the online community to boot. I hope he is getting the support and help that he may need right now.  — Amakuru (talk) 17:56, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Thank you for mentioning this @Puzzledvegetable:. Every time I saw "Scottish Wikipedia" it was just a reminder that lots of people have no clue what's happening. As the editor-in-chief here, when this came out just a few days ago, I despaired of ever understanding the whole event, or of even finding a reporter who could handle it. @SnowFire: then volunteered and did a superb job. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:02, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • @Amakuru: Your support for my colleague is appreciated during these difficult times. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 18:56, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • So is this a Dunning-Kruger effect with the editor involved, or perhaps was that editor so eager to wrack up edits and be an admin somewhere that they perpetuated a fraud? From what I've read, the editor involved is only sorry they got caught. Fact is, Wikipedia and its sister projects don't exist to provide knowledge. They exist for the self-satisfaction of its editors and W?T figured out how to make money off that collective preoccupation. You can find proof of this in all the mis-guided efforts some editors have made to cheer up the fraudster because if they cared about knowledge, it'd be torches and pitchforks time. I hope that the public becomes more vocally unhappy with what's been going on with Wikimedia projects. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:30, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
      • You can find proof of this in all the mis-guided efforts some editors have made to cheer up the fraudster because if they cared about knowledge, it'd be torches and pitchforks time. is an immensely depressing line to read from an editor I generally respect. Torches and pitchforks wouldn't bring any more knowledge to Wikipedia, whereas a kinder community to GF mistakes might - even if your sole efforts were pragmatic. I would like to feel that endeavouring to be kind to someone who has been horrifically attacked (by some truly vile comments, statements, insinuations, and worse) on other platforms, is the sign of a positive community, not one existing for its own self-satisfaction. Nosebagbear (talk) 19:33, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
        • (edit conflict) I don't think making tens of thousands of fraudulent articles to be a "good faith mistake." I'm against the uninformed trying to pitch-in and clearly the editor responsible now is, too. While being kind might have its advantages, what was done here is a crime against knowledge on par with literal theft. Pat yourself on the back for being kind but don't claim a positive community is more important than being responsible stewards of knowledge. I imagine it's easy for fellow co-conspirators to identify with the fraudster, in over their head, as opposed to caring about the reader. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:59, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
          • The user fundamentally wasn't a fraudster. If you feel the need to insult them, call them a fool, an idiot, naive, whatever. They did something stupid. But there's absolutely no evidence that they did it from anything other than the best intentions. SnowFire (talk) 20:04, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
            • @SnowFire: what reasons are for you to say that? He looks like an obvious LTA troll. EllenCT (talk) 08:14, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
              • @EllenCT: - I, as well as others who share this belief, looked through this user's contribution history as well as other things they posted on the Internet. Doesn't fit the troll profile. You can find a post from this user on Reddit 2 years ago - long before the current hubbub started - very earnestly talking about how his hobby was reading Wikipedia articles and translating them into Scots, and he learned something new every day, it was very inspiring, etc. He never misused admin tools. Also, trolls tend to want to provoke a reaction. This was a lonely crusade - nobody was reading Scots Wikipedia, almost nobody was responding, especially compared to the insane amount of effort put in (creating, on average, 7-9 articles a day or so!). It much more matches a well-meaning editor with zero self-awareness who was never told by his parents / education basic guidelines of learning a language. SnowFire (talk) 15:49, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
                • @SnowFire: do you have a link to the Reddit post, please? I started to look though his scowiki talk page history, and it doesn't really support your description of him. From beginning to end, he threatened native speakers who told him he was screwing up, whether they were polite about it or confrontational, and he claims that some apparently off-wiki native speakers approved his work. Isn't that a bald faced lie? Doesn't it imply he knew what was going on and was being deliberately deceptive every step of the way? EllenCT (talk) 19:48, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
              • And as a more general thought - I remember an English WP editor who contributed some truly awfully-written game-guide like material back in 2007 or so. Material bad enough probably Fandom / Wikia wouldn't want it nowadays, written as if a child wrote it... which a child probably DID write it. Needless to say, it was AFD'd, despite the impressive amount of work that went into writing just these 3 game-guidey articles or so. I highly doubt that 2007 user was a troll, though, despite writing articles in the style of an extended text message. Scots Wikipedia is a bit of a what-if scenario of "what if an editor with poor language skills like that didn't have their articles AFD'd, and continued to produce crap for 7 years thinking it was helping?" SnowFire (talk) 16:15, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
      • Your statement is self-contradictory. Yes, this is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. However, that's precisely what makes it tragic and not torches and pitchforks: the user genuinely didn't know better. There's a difference between "someone vandalizes the garden and ruins the plants" and "someone ruins the plants because the water can they were using was actually filled with kerosene". I'm also baffled at your read on that diff: the user is obviously devastated that what they thought was helping wasn't. How is that "only sorry that they got caught?" They said before in other diffs that they're sorry they wasted 7 years of their life on something useless, which is a punishment far more terrifying than most of us will ever face in our lifetimes. SnowFire (talk) 19:47, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
        Personally I edit Wikipedia because I get satisfaction out of it, but I also fully expect that what I'm doing is in some small way useful for the world. The two are not mutually contradictory. I imagine the same would hold for the editor in question at sco.wiki, although to be honest part of the satisfaction for me is also in gaining recognition that you're doing the right sort of thing, e.g. through DYK/GAN/FAC, something that was presumably absent in the Scots case. For me the question isn't so much "how did he get away with it", or about beating up the one editor, but rather to ask whether these sparsely edited small-language Wikis are actually worth keeping around at all. As a strong proponent of WP:WORLDWIDE, and the promotion of African topics in particular, I can see the attraction of them. But if they lack the ability to self-regulate their content as enwiki does, then it might be that the entire Wiki does more harm than good... Food for thought, anyway.  — Amakuru (talk) 20:50, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • There were warning signs about the Scots Wiki as early as 2014. The damage was mostly one person's doing, but this is still a community failure. It exemplifies a serious problem we have with our small language wikis, and only makes me further question their usefulness. I think we need a paradigm shift on viewing how and why we create these small wikis. One of the key reasons large wikis like the English, German, and French are successful is because they are underpinned by large language communities (obviously) and are primary languages. That is, people are formally educated in these languages, books are written in them, newspapers are published in them, and they are used for global communication. How many school children are taught to read and write in Scots? How many scientific papers are written in Scots? What about historical books and newspapers? Yes, I'm discounting local poetry and novels. I imagine most Scots speakers are also in fact English speakers. Thus, when they turn to Wikipedia for information, they look at the English Wikipedia, much like they would probably read an English newspaper or watch an English news show. Wikipedia is a responsive institution, not meant to take the lead. Our website was not designed to be a cultural museum, and its popularity rests on its usefulness. We should not be sponsoring small language wikis as experiments to "revive" or preserve small language communities. They simply will not gain enough traction, unless the WMF throws a lot of money at translation experts and academia to help fix the problem, though that would be an admission that these are not self-sustaining like Wikipedia is supposed to be. Now, some less popular Wikis do still hold potential, such as Swahili, but only because its use as a language crosses national boundaries and in East Africa there still exists Swahili media and newspapers. In summary, we need to stop encouraging small language wikis because they may be "cool" or "exciting" experiments, and start focusing on the languages that will actually reach people. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I think the main lesson to learn from this incident is that it can be very risky to write content for Wikipedia in a language that is not your first language. Although I am reasonably fluent in German, I never contribute any significant content (other than links to images, and brief captions for the images) to German Wikipedia. On the other hand, I have translated a large amount of content from other languages into my first language, English. The translated content even includes material originally published in languages I can't speak, but can translate with the assistance of Google translate. There is obvious risk in publishing content that is partially machine translated, and I think that that risk is acceptable only if the destination language is the translator's first language. Bahnfrend (talk) 05:59, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Does anyone check if the articles of the pre-1933 orthography reform version of the Belarusian Wikipedia are actually written in pre-1933 orthography reform? Veverve (talk) 21:26, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Many small wikis are not going to be sustainable. I can't see that this particular one is a worthwhile long-term exercise. Just delete it. Nigej (talk) 06:45, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Someone should take a close look at the Surinamese Wikipedia [1]. Friends from Suriname told me the language used was ridiculous and could not have come from native speakers. Luvstalk (talk) 15:00, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
    • @Luvstalk: This is an important story. If there are numerous failures among the 300+ wikipedias in meeting even minimum standards for language fluency - then this is a major problem and would suggest that the community or the WMF should take some serious action. It is important also to recognize that The Signpost has serious difficulties in reporting these stories. None of our reporters speak Sranantongo as far as I know, and I'm sure we don't speak at least 250 of the languages represented with Wikipedia versions. That's the same problem that bureaucrats and the WMF have, as far as I can tell. We'd also need to be very careful *not* to go accusing anybody of this problem without having multiple good sources to nail down the facts. And we'd need to communicate with the admins or others who supposedly have the problem. In short we're dependent on native speakers coming forward and letting us know what's up. So let us know! Send me information including good contacts, the admins involved, etc. to Special:Emailuser/Smallbones and we'll do our best to get the story out - while still respecting the dignity of all participants. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:01, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

The person has resumed editing scowiki

51 edits so far today, including talk pages as if nothing is out of the ordinary. So he's gotten over it and everything is hunky-dory now? Do people still recommend that we not attempt to talk to him? EllenCT (talk) 20:16, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Why would we? As you can read above, the editor base seems to think this was just a childhood mistake and nothing more to say about it, which is just the sort of thing game players would conclude. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:22, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Now that he's under the scrutiny of native speakers (it looks like the editathon has resulted in almost 3,000 good edits so far) I'm sure this will all blow over in a gust of wikilove, but there still appear to be at least 17,000 articles which are not in Scots, the vast majority of them due to him. EllenCT (talk) 21:02, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
An important piece of context is that those 51 edits were largely moving pages to new titles which had been requested as a result of the editathon involving Scots speakers. That person was helping to clear things up with the community, rather than resuming as before. Richard Nevell (talk) 09:11, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
@Richard Nevell, EllenCT, and Chris troutman: That kind of thing will be the extent of his involvement in Scots Wikipedia as things currently stand. His articles are currently on track for deletion. I assure you; AG is taking this seriously. There are a contingent of Scots Speakers who reached out to him to try and get him to resume editing. No surprise, he followed their request. –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 06:23, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@EllenCT:,@Richard Nevell: Dear all, I changed the title of this section and the comment above to remove the username, presumably the person involved in the incident. The username of the person involved is not mentioned in the article. In addition, according to the reddit discussion that person has received harassment due to the incident. SYSS Mouse (talk) 18:24, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

@SYSS Mouse: Sensible move, thank you. Richard Nevell (talk) 19:09, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
  • I have often cleaned up or at least partially anglicized material on the English language Wikipedia that has been written by people whose English is far from perfect (some I'd rate as a 2 in their English skills). I'm more than happy to continue doing so, however I'm well aware that we have such content here that in some cases has been up for a while...... Possibly more such content than the not really Scottish content on Scots Wiki. But within the much much larger English wikipedia this is a tiny proportion and I suspect an even smaller proportion of the views as they tend to be low profile articles. Should we change things so that all new articles by people with imperfect English should start in draft and only move to mainspace when they have been fixed? I'd prefer not as I believe in crowd sourcing, I'm comfortable that some of my fellow Wikipedians have a secondary motivation of practicing and improving a language other than their native one. But it would be an easy story for some tabloid to lambast one or more of our contributors on this wiki in the way they have pilloried a Wikimedian for content they have been contributing since the age of 12. The wisdom of crowds is a great idea, but if you get the wrong crowd, and for Scots Wikipedia a crowd of enthusiastic Scottish Americans was certainly not the right crowd, you get the wrong form of wisdom. ϢereSpielChequers 16:51, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
I think the problem here is that one person systematically ruined a whole language encyclopedia (not that there was ever much of it to begin with). One person making poorly translated edits on en.wiki is not going to cause problems of such scale. -Indy beetle (talk) 18:53, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Scot Wikipedia will survive if the scot knows what happening to their language wikipedia and if they have secured and trusted editors. No language has ever challenged english due the native refuse to contribute to their own wikipedia. view,Tbiw (talk) 12:38, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

About Interim Trust & Safety Case Review Committee

One particular requirement was part of a major theme: anonymity. As well as keeping all case information to themselves under a currently non-published reinforced non-disclosure agreement (NDA) – above and beyond the standard non-public information agreement – candidates made anonymous applications and are to keep both others' and their own membership secret. A number of changes were made after applications closed due to "negotiation between committee finalists and Deputy GC", including further limiting CRC membership knowledge to only three Board members but giving retired CRC members the right to self-disclose after 6 months. Erm...what? No. This is not how we operate. We know who makes these decisions. Anonymity on the part of the decision-makers is utterly unacceptable. Even if all the details of why the decision was made can't be made public, the identity of the people who made the decision absolutely must be. Seraphimblade Talk to me 20:36, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

What are you talking about? Nearly everybody is here under a pseudonym, including yourself. We don't publish the real names of admins or ArbCom members, or even ordinary editors. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:21, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't think the conversation is about real names, but total anonymity. We, as a community, know who our elected admins and arbs are even if we know them by pseudonym. Not knowing at all who is on the committee could mean that there's nobody on the committee and we're assured we should trust the decisions handed down. Chris Troutman (talk) 22:36, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
One concern with this secrecy is recusal, or potentially the lack of it. With Arbcom if an Arb forgets past encounters with one of the parties to a dispute it is possible to remind them. But with an anonymous review committee any recusal operates almost entirely on the honour system. Even with T&S there is the potential for a party to a case to check with T&S that a particular staff member they have bad blood with is recused re their case. It is possible that a fellow committee member could know of a conflict of interest and remind someone of it. But if the committee is a diverse group of Wikimedians, or even a random group of them, there is a real risk that they don't know each other's pasts well enough to know of occasions where each other should recuse. ϢereSpielChequers 23:40, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Exactly as Chris Troutman said. I have no problem with pseudonymity. I do have a problem with anonymity. When I was on the ArbCom, when I cast a vote, I cast it under my username. Now, obviously, "Seraphimblade" is not my real, legal name—but it is my pseudonym on the project and what people know me by, and I signed that name to any such decision. Similarly, if I block someone, delete a page, whatever have you, my username appears in the log as having done so and I can therefore be held accountable for it. It is not done anonymously. Seraphimblade Talk to me 04:44, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
The Trust & Safety Case Review Committee are not accountable to us; they are accountable to WMF, who know their real, legal names. But if you want to initiate an RfC to abolish anonymity, I would definitely support that. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:31, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
If T&S is going to be taking actions regarding communities, but not be accountable to those same communities, that's a problem on a whole different scale. It's not WMF's place to be doing what the community of editors doesn't want done. Seraphimblade Talk to me 20:41, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

News from the WMF: Fourteen things we’ve learned by moving Polish Wikimedia conference online (2,202 bytes · 💬)

Examples:
There are doubtless more, but I thought I'd include these here. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 00:19, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

Obituaries: Marcus Sherman, Jerome West, and Pauline van Till (244 bytes · 💬)

Rest in peace. jp×g 13:18, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Op-Ed: The longest-running hoax (11,893 bytes · 💬)

  • It turns out that our article on work-life balance has 13 year old copyvios in it. I'm not surprised of this hoax lasting 14.5 years. MER-C 17:39, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Coppeboy continues on their merry way despite being a serial copy writer. Wikipeedia claims it isn't the place for "exhaustive logs of software updates," yet Windows 10 version history continues to be exactly that. And lets keep linking to World War Two in every single article in which it gets a passing mention (it's even better if you can link to the article multiple times!). But good luck finding those hoaxes. Oh, DrPizza! (talk) 12:00, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
  • "How can we better identify hoaxes?" - mercilessly delete unreferenced articles over 5 years old. Staszek Lem (talk) 18:51, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • That's an idea, especially to emphasize verifiability, but we probably need a bit more than that to snuff out more elegant hoax articles. Some hoax articles can have skillfully crafted fake references that won't be caught unless someone thoroughly examines them. ComplexRational (talk) 19:26, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
      • Yes, I found one of those fairly skillful hoaxes last year. The hoax had already passed through AfC using fabricated references that looked like offline books. The only reason the hoax got caught was because the editor pressed their luck a little too far by making this edit, also with a fabricated reference (though I wish someone would publish Sexual Relations of the Mammals of Bolivia and Peru!). Enwebb (talk) 19:55, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
        • Some hoaxes have been caught when an erroneous ISBN was supplied for a fake reference. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:59, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
    • Perhaps what we need is a WikiProject that systematically goes through all old articles and marks them off, similar to NPP, as meeting 2020 standards, or deals with them if they don't. It'd have to be done cautiously, though, since many of these pages won't have anyone around to defend them, so if a reviewer PRODs a notable topic because they were too lazy to check for sources, it could end up being deleted. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:06, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Actually quick google search shows "real" images of a Mustelodon. Can we replace it in the article? Staszek Lem (talk) 19:03, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    Please be joking. That other-wiki entry was created in 2015 as a near identical copy of the WP hoax article (translated into Spanish, or maybe just lifted from one of the Spanish-language Wikipedia versions), and never showed any meaningful differences other than the image used. But even there, similarities abound in that both are completely devoid of any documentation regarding authenticity / provenance that would lend them credibility. Two sites perpetrating the same hoax, even independently, does not make it any less a hoax. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 22:22, 30 August 2020 (UTC
    Of course I was joking, didin't you see the quotes around the word real? Not to say that every joke contains a grain of joke. In fact, the image from the copycat site with the caption "This is not..." would be helpful. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:22, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    I was trying to figure out where that picture came from and if we may already have it on Commons. It might be a miacid, probably Paroodectes, someone better at (extinct?) animal ID may be able to tell. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:34, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    Its Paroodectes feisti, see [2]. ----Jules (Mrjulesd) 22:33, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • At the ripe old age of 14 years, 9 months, this is longest-lived documented hoax on Wikipedia The "documented" qualifier is critical there, because it would be naive to imagine there aren't even more subtle/obscure hoaxes out there right now that still haven't been uncovered. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 22:29, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Breaking the record for oldest documented hoax twice in one month certainly indicates there there are plenty more where that came from. Enwebb (talk) 02:31, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
      • May I offer Molesworth Institute (now converted into an article about the hoax), which also lasted over 14 years and 5 months. In general though, we should also be aware that sourcing standards for new articles and edits to existing articles have become much stricter since 2005. It's more about actually applying them, i.e. editors should feel encouraged to liberally question and if necessary remove older unsourced (or poorly sourced) information. Regards, HaeB (talk) 02:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
        • Last year I found one about an alleged university secret society, supposedly formed in the nineteenth century, that had no evidence of existance beyond legend and heresay. It only takes one editor to write an article but it takes about a dozen to get one deleted. Blue Riband► 14:55, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • A long-running hoax with (say) 1 pageview per month isn't something that bothers me particularly (though, of course, the article should be removed). A badly written article with significant errors that gets (say) 100 pageviews per day - something like that would concern me a great deal more. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:59, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    I think this is absolutely right.—Brigade Piron (talk) 13:54, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
  • "Mustelodon remains on Wikidata, where its 'instance of' property was swapped from 'taxon' to 'fictional taxon.'"
When our robot overlords start slaughtering us, that's going to be one of the many similar reasons why they're furious at us. EllenCT (talk) 08:38, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
@EllenCT: #SRSLY. "Do you want to get a feral race of human stragglers eking out a meagre existence beneath the ruins of humanity's once thriving cities? Because that's how you get a feral race of human stragglers eking out a meagre existence beneath the ruins of humanity's once thriving cities!" -- FeRDNYC (talk) 13:13, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Depending on how you view this, the human element of verifying and copyediting is always essential. I'm not surprised as the traffic of creating Wikipedia articles peaked sometime around 2005-2007 before quieting down. There have been some articles I made back in 2005-2006 that I was surprised weren't really touched and actually made me go back and improve on–or altogether PROD/CSD them realizing they don't meet guidelines. Doesn't hurt to review your oldest articles. – The Grid (talk) 14:46, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It's so funny that we have an article that can now count as the "longest-running hoax" on Wikipedia! LOL! xD -iaspostb□x+ 21:02, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • ¿Qué tan bueno es tu español, OP? Interesting article nonetheless, wikihoaxes are a treat to read about -Gouleg🛋️ (Talk • Contribs) 21:05, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It's a great shame that the PROD mechanism is so fragile, and that when the big red "CANCEL" button is pressed - the work of a moment - there is nothing to flag up the action for review. Of course PRODs can be mistaken or even malicious, but a review by a patroller would not be troubled by that. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:21, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Worse are probably hoaxes inserted into, often multiple, genuine articles, such as the exploits of Emile Campbell-Browne that made it’s way into several West Country and zoological articles, complete with references to obscure or fictitious off-line sources. Backed up by a series of sock-puppets that contested deletions of the hoax material as vandalism! Murgatroyd49 (talk) 09:07, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
  • The more often a hoax gets read the, the more likely it will be that it is discovered as a hoax. So presumably the main reason for long lasting hoaxes is because hardly anyone reads them. In such a case, it hardly matters. Paul August ☎ 10:23, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
  • There are many times more hoaxalicious factoids placed in articles than there are hoax articles. Is it fair to just remove statements tagged as needing references a year ago, or are we expected to spend our time searching for a reference to back up someone else's assertion? Edison (talk)
  • Love the word hoaxalicious! The answer is, it depends, if I think something looks reasonable but unreferenced I might research it. If it is fairly obviously untrue I would delete it as unsourced. Murgatroyd49 (talk) 15:32, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
  • I think inclusionism, WP:NEXISTS, and WP:AGF are to blame. Abolish those and many problems will go away. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:12, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
    @Chris troutman: Well, aren't you a ray of sunshine? My view, personally, is that if those are "to blame", then the occasional hoax article is a small price to pay. Preventing hoaxes is not more important than preserving Wikipedia's core ideals. Your suggestion is the sort of thing that's always heard from draconian voices in society, the type who want to establish a police state to ensure there are no more jaywalkers. Overreaction much? Things like WP:AGF have gotten us this far, and it seems like it's mostly worked out alright. (I'm also going to go out on a limb and posit that there have likely been multiple occasions where you, too, have benefited from assumptions of good faith.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 00:59, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Recent research: Detecting spam, and pages to protect; non-anonymous editors signal their intelligence with high-quality articles (5,652 bytes · 💬)

  • I'm very dubious of the attempt to quantity someone's "intelligence". First we need to know what kind of intelligence and knowledge is important to contributing to Wikipedia. Well, I'd say the ideal first step is extremely specialised intelligence in a particular area, whether high culture or low culture—this makes it easiest to find a topic where you can substantially contribute. Note that a lot of people with specialised intelligence have worse than average general forms of intelligence. Next you need technical knowledge, otherwise learning our syntax, navigating the site and quickly writing references will be difficult. Third you need emotional intelligence, to respond well to people (sometimes lacking emotional intelligence themselves) sharply criticising your good-faith mistakes or to spring back after an article you wrote is deleted at AfD or the peanut gallery throw stones at you, or to collaborate with other editors. And fourth, probably some traits from the umbrella of critical thinking are useful for analysing sources, reviewing how content fits with our policies/guidelines/practices and learning from other editors. But a bunch of visual puzzle games in Raven's Progressive Matrices are supposed to be a sufficient stand-in for all of this? Why not just measure people's skull shape?
    Additionally, the researchers' question "[Who, when and why do] people share knowledge online, often without tangible compensation?" has a loaded premise. Do people choose hobbies because of "tangible compensation"? If you approach something from the angle of "finding the secret compensation that this person must have as a motivation" then you will of course conclude that, aha, it's because of the prestige your username gets you. I'm no scientist but I suggest that a more useful study would be to simply ask editors what their motivation is and then see if that accords with psychology or aligns with other collaborative forms of knowledge sharing. I'll give you my motivation for free: contributing to Wikipedia makes me feel like I am creating a resource which is useful to other people. (And hopefully I am.) — Bilorv (talk) 11:35, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
There exists an entire scholarly industry - going back more than a century - debating the concept of general intelligence, how or whether it can be quantified, what the biases of such tests might be etc. In the review, I linked to the articles about the journal and about g, as pathways for readers to learn more about the field's background.
That said, the experiment found actual evidence for a relation between intelligence as measured by these tests, and article quality as rated by readers unaware of the editors' scores. In other words, the researchers' result contradicts your conclusion that these scores are as unrelated to the article-writing task as "skull shapes". (And I guess they would not dispute that there could be other relevant dimensions, such as emotional intelligence - a concept and measure that of course has attracted its own share of criticism and validity concerns, or that their experiment setup did not simulate every possible aspect of editing Wikipedia, like AfD discussions.)
"I suggest that a more useful study would be to simply ask editors what their motivation is" - several such studies have been done, see the link in the review.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:10, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
I wasn't meaning to criticise your summary of the study, per se. I hope my comment is clear that I am no professional in this area but as a layperson with an interest, I am aware of the g factor and some of the other topics you mention. I think you have focused too specifically on the exact wording I used (including the mention of phrenology, which was hyperbole for comedic effect rather than a literal "conclusion") and less broadly on the idea that researchers' implicit preconceptions regarding intelligence and people acting out of self-interest influence results that are published (given such things as false positives and publication bias). I am aware of studies similar to that which I suggested but I believe, given the current replication crisis, another study in the same direction would be more useful than one that is quite far removed from the way Wikipedia works in practice. — Bilorv (talk) 19:13, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Technical abilities are not particularly sexually attractive, huh? I guess I never got the memo on that... jp×g 13:10, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Special report: Wikipedia's not so little sister is finding its own way (15,561 bytes · 💬)

  • OMG after multiple attempts to understand by reading their tutorial, now I finally understand what the heck Wikidata is trying to do. They should put this on their main page. Thank you! —valereee (talk) 17:49, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Great article! Wikidata isn't something that interests me personally but it adds a lot of value to what we do here! Ganesha811 (talk) 18:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It seems dishonest to survey Wikidata and its connections to Wikipedia in this purely promotional way, without mentioning the debate over Wikidata's weaker sourcing standards (especially for biographies of living people) and what appears to be a general consensus on en.Wikipedia that this difference in standards makes Wikidata content unacceptable for direct use in en.Wikipedia articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:54, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • @David Eppstein: No it is not dishonest, perhaps the author is not aware of the "general consensus" because she edits mainly on deWiki. To tell the truth I'm aware of some dissatisfaction with weaker sourcing standards (I have some of this myself) and several times I've been perplexed about "how can I remove this from the infobox." But I'm not aware of a "general consensus". If you can make the case for a "GC" feel free to submit a piece for The Signpost and we'll very likely publish it. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:25, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
      • @Smallbones: I believe there was a large kerfuffle at an RFC last year or so about this issue, where a large group of editors basically asserted enWP's right to keep Wikidata material from being transcluded here. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:15, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
        • You are referring to Wikipedia:Wikidata/2018 Infobox RfC? ☆ Bri (talk) 23:07, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
          • That's a difficult RFC to even skim, but I can't say I see a consensus. About 30% were dead set against any use of Wikidata as far as I can see. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:00, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
            • Perhaps I overstated the general sentiment. But if you find and read the close, you'll see "This was what the closers thought at first. ... there is a consensus on one point: if Wikipedia wants to use data from Wikidata, there needs to be clear assurances on the reliability of this data." —David Eppstein (talk) 01:20, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
              • One stuff has always been true : Wikidatans and Wikipedians are on the same boat on that matter. Wikidatans by alone cannot really make an enormous job on data and data quality item by item, statement by statement, without the Wikipedia communities. These « assurances on the reliability of this data » is actually the same as in Wikipedia : the communities and their involvement. So basically, if enwiki wants to use the data, they will get the same reliability as they have on their own project because this will be the same datas, actually. No border. Policies are fine, but without the people to enforce them or go beyond they are worthless. TomT0m (talk) 15:09, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
      • Sourcing standards probably vary on different language Wikipedias, so it would be hard for Wikidata to adopt them. Have you considered that maybe the English Wikipedia standards are overly strict, and reject at lot of perfectly good information just because it come from the wrong place? If somebody reveals their date of birth in a CV, perhaps Wikipedia would reject it because it's a primary source closely associated with that person. But when a journalist copies the date from the CV and it's published on a web article, it's now "blessed" and suitable for inclusion. Yet details like dates of birth for living people are sometimes poorly sourced in Wikipedia, added by an anonymous editor and no reference is ever added. Wikidata may end up with the same statement, marked as "imported from Wikipedia", but which can't be verified anywhere else. Remember also the instance where Donna Strickland had the first version of her article deleted, among other things because although she was the president of the Optical Society, the editor decided that the Optical Society's website wasn't an independent source to verify that information, because Strickland was its president? ghouston (talk) 23:47, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
        • Perhaps before writing argumentative comments you should inform yourself of the policies you discuss? WP:BLPSELFPUB allows a birthdate to be sourced from a cv. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:10, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
          • Point taken, that's a decent policy. ghouston (talk) 00:14, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
        • On en.Wikipedia itself there's no requirement to source claims and plenty of claims go uncited. However if there's a citation en.Wikipedia policy is that it's essentially a qualitative value judgement whether or not the citation is good enough to be included in en.Wikipedia. Given that this is currently a qualitative value judgement it's impossible to have an automated process that checks whether or not a given citation meets en.Wikipedia standards or doesn't.
Given the way the system is setup at the moment when importing claim it's possible to set the infobox to only import claims with citations that don't come from Wikimedia projects. If there would be more precise definitions of what makes a valid source that aren't depended on human value judgements we could have a more complex whitelisting or blacklisting system for what claims can be imported via the infobox.
As far as qualitative value judgements go, for biographies of living people Wikidata now has https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Living_people which allows deletion of claims qualitatively judged to be badly sourced. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • In addition to the above, I know this article wasn't written just for the English Wikipedia context, but ... we try to use local short descriptions here, not those from Wikidata, partially due to vandalism concerns. For example I recently discovered by accident that on Wikidata, macaroni and cheese was known in English as "Tu culo en vinagre" (Spanish for "your butt in vinegar") for more than two months. Graham87 06:57, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    • With the coming of the Wikidata bridge, problems like that might not be such an issue in the future, as it will allow direct Wikidata editing from the comfort of your local wiki. ~★ nmaia d 07:35, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
@NMaia: The Wikidata bridge doesn't help with any issue discussed above. It won't change labels of items. It doesn't deal with sourcing standards and even the fact that it should be able to enter source isn't build into the prototype that exists currently (but hopefully before the bridge get into contact with the bigger Wikis). ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Not in its first iteration, but technically there wouldn't be any hurdles for that to happen in the future. As for sourcing, neither I nor the person I was replying to were talking about that. But if you must, I think the sourcing point is moot since you can set up infoboxes to only fetch statements with references, and many language editions already do that. ~★ nmaia d 04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
To have an integrated system to add sources, we requires phab:T199197.--GZWDer (talk) 08:07, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
@Nmaia:, but presumably that would only tell us that something had been given as a source. That source might meet lower WD requirements but not en-wiki's (say, not a secondary source where one was needed) Nosebagbear (talk) 19:04, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
I think this is a shame and a big failure on the WMF developers' side because short descriptions would be the number two thing I would think Wikidata useful for on WMF projects, after inter-language links (which the article mentions and is quite correct about the utility of). It should not be this long after Wikidata was started that we neither have an option to view Wikidata item changes on our en.wiki watchlists (if we opt to) nor the option to watchlist one particular element of a Wikidata item (in this case, the English description). — Bilorv (talk) 08:31, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
I wonder if part of the problem is lack of information flow between the projects. For the short descriptions example, it'd be good to have the option to also be alerted in a WP (or cross-wiki) watchlist when just the description section of the associated WD item is edited, and to be able to edit the description section of a WD item from the visualeditor interface of a WP page. Similarly, a slight interface improvement for WD-powered infoboxes would be that when editing the WP page in VE, the relevant WD statements could be edited through the same template parameter editing box to allow editing of WD statements via the same interface as editing. Possible the same for the WD cite_Q template. The way we handle commons on WP is similarly odd sometimes, where the local page for File:xyz.png seems to usually be a redundant copy of its commons version. On commons it's then not possible to get a list of all the captions used for it from different pages. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 00:53, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
A short description is not (just) data, it is content. Consider that any given short description refers to the specific article in the specific Wikipedia in the language of that Wikipedia. The closest equivalent in another Wikipedia should describe the article in that Wikipedia in the language of that Wikipedia, which in the general case may be different. It makes plenty of sense to record the short descriptions from all Wikipedias in Wikidata, but not to source them from Wikidata, as they should be written by the people who write the articles, and who know what the articles are actually about, and preferably are sufficiently competent in the language used and sufficiently knowledgeable to write an adequate short description (not always easy, as some articles have a very poorly written lead section). The appropriate short description may change as the article changes, or as an editor of the article sees a better way to express it. It is also inherently sourced to the article itself as an editorial judgment by a Wikipedian. The labels on Wikidata are unsourced and their provenance is obscure. They may be fit for Wikidata purposes, but have been found unfit for English Wikipedia purposes. I do not presume to speak for other Wikipedias. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:36, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
I think we can tease out something very interesting from this comparison to Commons. When I take a Commons picture of an oboe and put it in the article Oboe with the caption "A 20th century oboe", where is the reliable source for that? When our internal search engine takes the short description from Wikidata and displays it underneath the article title, where is the reliable source for that? Are these two scenarios different in a key way, which could explain the different community response to them, or similar in a key way, such that the community response to them is based more in the context of Wikipedia's history (Commons is old and uncontroversial; Wikidata is new and unfamiliar) than it is the actual content? — Bilorv (talk) 19:21, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
I still think this is mostly an enwp issue, not a Wikidata one. If enwp had just decided to display short descriptions on desktop view, this whole issue could have been avoided. You can already watch changes to descriptions on the enwp watchlist, just turn on the display of Wikidata edits. Changing wikis to edit content shouldn't be a big deal nowadays (I'm constantly jumping between enwp/wikidata/commons + other language versions, it's not a big deal). Also, reminder that Commons uses around 3 million English short descriptions from Wikidata that are now out of sync with enwp's. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:30, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
(ec) I tried to bring this argument a couple of years ago, when Wikidata discussions were on their peak, but nobody was interested in listening. At best they would say that the Commons policies are more strict that those at the English Wikipedia, and we do not have to worry - which is completely irrelevant to the argument.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:32, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
Bilorv, they're different inasmuch as you can remove or change a Commons picture in a Wikipedia article without having to leave Wikipedia, whereas to change the short description you have to go to a different project (which has a relatively steep learning curve).
A Commons picture appears in a Wikipedia article by dint of Wikipedia mark-up editors here control. The short description, on the other hand, appears in Wikipedia because of content in another project that the editors of that project control.
Moreover, if someone changes the image you put in a Wikipedia article, you can see that in the edit history of the Wikipedia article, and if you have the Wikipedia article watchlisted, it will be flagged to you. This is not so with the short descriptions.
A Commons equivalent would be if someone were to replace image file "oboe.jpg" in Commons, showing an oboe, with an identically named image file showing a different oboe – or a trombone, for that matter. Now, that sort of thing rarely happens in Commons, but is an everyday occurrence with verbal descriptions in Wikidata. Those are some of the differences. --Andreas JN466 14:12, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Traffic report: Heart, soul, umbrellas, and politics (1,348 bytes · 💬)

  • "twote" is, as the kids these days say, a cursed conjugation or portmanteau (of "tweeted" and "wrote"). I'm not going to change it to "tweeted" because I find it hilarious. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 23:12, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
    • Thanks @Rotideypoc41352: I did notice this in the 1st round of copyediting, and asked about it at the Newsroom talk page and got no response. Copyediting this column can be a challenge, but I think the overall style works for everybody. We'll continue watching our "T's" and "W's". With the election closing in pretty fast, we've got to make sure not to take any cheap shots against any politicians. No BLP violations allowed. It's not what The Signpost is all about. But providing background, even humorously, is ok and commenting on anything they do on-Wiki is fair game. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:05, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
  • "'Tis a worthy jape," twoth he. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:28, 19 May 2021 (UTC)


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