Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-01-31/News and notes

As reported by Palestinian Wikimedian Farah Jack Mustaklem, on 19 January 2024 Osama Khalid, a Saudi pediatrician, blogger and Wikipedia volunteer, turned 30 years old while still being detained in al-Ha'ir Prison, together with fellow doctor and Wikipedian Ziyad Alsufyani.

As detailed in previous Signpost coverage, Osama and Ziyad had both been arrested in July 2020 and sentenced, respectively, to 5 and 8 years in prison, with the former’s sentence having been increased to 32 years on appeal in September 2022; however, reports about their incarceration first went public in January 2023. The two, whose arrest and detention are considered to be connected to the Saudi government’s recent crackdown on online dissent, had both served as administrators on the Arabic Wikipedia for several years, while being deeply involved within the Wiki Project Med Foundation and contributing to several articles about Saudi human rights activists, such as Loujain al-Hathloul.

Nine different civil rights organizations, including Access Now and Digital Citizenship, have co-signed an open letter dated 19 January 2024 asking for the immediate release of Osama, Ziyad and all of the other activists currently detained in Saudi Arabian prisons. – O and AK

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the publication of a Child Rights Impact Assessment, described as an independent report commissioned from consultancy Article One to "understand the impacts, risks, and opportunities posed to children who access and participate in Wikimedia projects":

– AK

An article (Google translation) in the German Wikipedia's Kurier notes that the Chinese Wikipedia (zh:WP) has decided –

• to introduce an ArbCom;
• to lower the RfA approval threshold from the previous 80% to about 70–75%;
• to trial probationary adminship for candidates getting at least 50% approval.

The Chinese Wikipedia has apparently been in administrative crisis ever since the 2021 WMF desysops (see previous coverage in the 26 September 2021 Signpost issue: 1, 2, 3). The above measures have been designed to mitigate the situation. – AK

• Unindexed: The Phabricator task "Google not indexing Wikisource properly for years" has received an update from Google, saying: "The web is really large and the search index can simply not include every single page. A page that otherwise has no problems may not be indexed for a myriad of complex reasons, for instance if the indexing process determines that the page is unlikely to be requested in search. This is in line with the Search Central documentation that states: 'Google doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if your page follows the Google Search Essentials.'" Right. For comparison, only a couple hundred of the several thousand Signpost articles accessible from signpost.news have been indexed since August. We can hope.
• Unreferenced: The WikiProject Unreferenced Articles is inviting signups for its February 2024 backlog drive, set to start on February 1st, to work on the currently over 112,000 articles without citations. At the time of writing, over 200 editors had already registered.
• Annual reports: North-West Russia Wiki-Historians User Group, Deoband Community Wikimedia, Gungbe Wikimedians User Group, Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova, Wiki Project Med.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Hunger strike (beginning 29 January). Please be bold in helping improve this article!