Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-20/News and notes

Consultations that should lead to an updating of the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use will begin as early as this Tuesday, February 21 according to WMF Legal. The discussions will take place on Meta-Wiki.

The updates are necessary in order to:

• Help implement the Universal Code of Conduct
• Change the license for text to the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license and
• Make changes to comply with new laws, especially with the European Digital Services Act

Other possible changes include strengthening enforcement of the requirement that paid editors must declare their employers, clients, and affiliations. – S

Wikimedia Foundation Board Member Shani Evenstein announced the results of the vote on the Wikimedia-l mailing list on 13 February 2023:

3,097 voters from 146 Wikimedia communities participated. Statistics for the vote are available. A more detailed summary of comments submitted during the vote will be published soon.

Next, the results and comments collected during this vote will be submitted to the Board of Trustees for their review. It is expected that the Board of Trustees review process will complete in March 2023, at which time another update will be published. – AK

The Steward elections are underway. New candidates for Stewardship are:

• User:Klein Muçi
• User:Mykola7
• User:Superpes15
• User:Turkmen
• User:Xaosflux

The Steward confirmations – an annual performance evaluation by the community that determines whether or not existing Stewards will retain their status for another year – are also currently underway.

Voting for the election and confirmation processes will remain open until 26 February 2023, 21:00 (UTC). – AK

Now you see it, now you don't – Wikipedia had hardly been blocked by Pakistan before it was unblocked.

Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, stepped in and convened a committee composed of the Minister for Law and Justice, the Minister for Economic Affairs and Political Affairs and the Minister for Information and Broadcasting to examine the matter.

The committee took the view that –

The government subsequently barred the Pakistan Telecommunica­tion Authority (PTA) from blocking any website without first consulting the Minis­try of Information Tech­nology and Tele­communi­cation.

Wikimedia Foundation General Counsel Stephen LaPorte said on the Wikimedia-l mailing list:

– AK, R

For the media coverage of this event, see this issue's in the media.

Last issue, we reported on AI-generated articles on Wikipedia. It was a bit of fun. Find the AI-generated article! The impostor is sus!

If only it remained that way: English Wikipedia editor Rory Jaffe (rsjaffe) has found a number of them, including Draft:Cow Farts – not actual bull shit, but pretty close. Here's what he says about his discovery technique.

Articles or drafts tagged by Jaffe and reviewed by The Signpost were created as early as 17 December 2022 (Draft:Brisbane Lord Mayor YAC). The topics tagged by Jaffe and others range from the whimsical and neologism-ic (Draft:Twinkanic Awareness, Draft:Sharks should be saved from humans) to the plausibly- and obviously-promotional, and appear to be created by many editors, including single-purpose accounts that may be using them for promotion. Take Draft:Dachshund harness, "an essential accessory for owners of this unique breed of dog", which has a list of references at the end related to shopping for such a device. Given affiliate marketing exists, this could be promotional. Or it could be purely accidental. We don't know. Some of the rest may be deleted by the time you read this – a few examples are retained permanently at User:JPxG/LLM dungeon.

The Signpost asked Jaffe "Do you have a personal reaction to the quality of the AI generated articles? Briefly, are you for or against this method of creation?" He told us this:

More on Jaffe's experience and conclusions on this topic can be found at the Essay in this issue.

We asked ChatGPT for a commentary as well. It said:

– B, AC

Wikimedia Enterprise has published its first detailed financial report, complete with a summary of product updates.

Revenue in the 2022 calendar year (from subscription and professional services) totaled $3.12 million, vs. expenses of $3.18 million ($1.06 million in cost of services and $2.12 million in operating expenses), for a net loss of $60,000.

The Enterprise team points out that the present report for the 2022 calendar year should be considered a "beta" edition. The Wikimedia Foundation normally operates on a financial year starting in July and finishing the following June. But as January 1, 2022 marked the official start of commercial operation of the Enterprise project, this first report covers the 2022 calendar year. For future financial reports the Enterprise team intends to align with the normal financial reporting schedule of the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation. The next report will be published in late 2023.

The report adds that:

The Enterprise team says it is very happy with its first year in business and looks forward to growth and profitability this year:

No information has been released on how many paying and non-paying customers Wikimedia Enterprise has at the moment. Corresponding inquiries on Meta-Wiki have been answered as follows:

The Enterprise API features are designed with large commercial reusers in mind – primarily search engines and voice assistants, although education (question-and-answer modules), finance and the fast-growing AI sector represent additional market opportunities the team may explore.

But other kinds of reusers, including individual volunteer Wikimedians, can also benefit. There are several access methods to the datasets available at no cost/no registration, including a free Wikimedia Enterprise account via the project's homepage. Ongoing updates for the community can be found on the project's MediaWiki page.

The publication of the financial report was followed by a public Zoom meeting on 10 February, a recording of which is available. Click the picture on the right or go to the Wikimedia Enterprise talk page on Meta-Wiki, which also includes a list of questions discussed during the meeting and their approximate timecodes. The file description in Commons even includes an automated transcript. – AK

In response to multiple inquiries, the Wikimedia Foundation has posted a breakdown of how and when Tides Advocacy spent the $4.223 million Annual Plan Grant portion of the $8.723 million the organisation received from the WMF in the 2019–2020 financial year. – AK

• WIKIMOVE: The WIKIMOVE podcast project, hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland's Nicole Ebber and Nikki Zeuner, has published Episode 8 of its English-language podcast series. This episode's topic is "Movement Strategy" – how the strategy came about, what the envisioned future looks like, and how this relates to knowledge equity and global governance. Guests this time round are Sharon Naa Deedei Tagoe, a volunteer at the Open Foundation West Africa who joined the Wikimedia movement last year, Likambo Isaac Kangu, a South Sudanese refugee living in Uganda who is the diaspora coordinator for the User Group South Sudan in the refugee settlements in Uganda, and Ruby Damenshie-Brown, Senior Program Officer at the Open Foundation West Africa, who's been a Wikimedian since 2019. The episode is also available as a YouTube video with subtitles and as a transcript. A newsletter of the Open Foundation West Africa is available here. – AK
• This Month in GLAM: The January 2023 Newsletter is now available to read on Wikimedia Outreach.
• Ombuds Commission: The composition of the 10-member Ombuds Commission has been announced.
• AffCom liaison: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees' Community Affairs Committee elected Lorenzo Losa as an additional Affiliations Committee liaison for the Board.
• Speedy deletion criterion F10 removed: Following a Request for Comment, speedy deletion criterion F10 (Useless non-media files) was deprecated in favour of WP:PROD and marked obsolete.
• Global bans: One Japanese newbie account, after making legal threats on Japanese Wikipedia.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this fortnight: Ladin Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles, Inari Sami Wikipedia reached 5,000 articles, Luganda Wikipedia reached 2,000 articles, and Chichewa Wikipedia reached 1,000 articles.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Centrism. Please be bold in helping to improve this article! Next week's article (beginning 20 February 2023) will be Textbook.