Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-11-06/News and notes

In what The Hindu called "the first instance of an English Wikipedia article being taken down by the foundation in the encyclopedia's history", the Wikimedia Foundation has deleted the Wikipedia article Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation pursuant to an order from the Delhi High Court. This article deletion is the third major conflict of concern to Wikipedia editors in this story; the first is Asian News International (ANI) suing the Wikimedia Foundation over defamation in the Wikipedia article about themselves, and the second is ANI's demand that the Wikimedia Foundation reveal the identity of certain editors to that article. The Signpost previously reported this story's development in October, September, and July.

Editors' discussions about the events, and their response, can be found at a wide variety of locations, including mailing lists and community-managed offsites like Discord and Telegram.

On October 21, Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees member and Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales wrote:

On October 31, the Foundation legal team gave an update that "We have not shared any user data".

This issue of The Signpost includes multiple columns of coverage. Here, we report Wikimedia community news updates. This issue's "Technology report" describes how Wikipedia editors and technology interact in the context of this case. "In focus" is a different telling of this story, formatted as the common questions and answers which commentators are exchanging. "From the editor" clarifies that The Signpost is a newspaper, and that newspapers in countries where many Signpost editors live, usually cover important court cases as a public service.

As always, The Signpost invites all Wikipedia editors to post in the comments section for any article, and to submit journalism and new perspectives to future issues. – BR, Sb

32 candidates stood through the entire administrator elections trial that began this month. Voting concluded as of 23:59 31 October (UTC), and after scrutineering to remove invalid, sockpuppet, or duplicate votes, we have the results posted at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2024/Results. The 11 new administrators are as follows, alphabetically:

• Ahecht
• DoubleGrazing
• Dr vulpes
• FOARP
• Peaceray
• Queen of Hearts
• Rsjaffe
• SD0001
• SilverLocust
• Sohom Datta
• ThadeusOfNazereth

With the 11 elected admins, this brings the total number of new admins in 2024 to 20, significantly more than recent years. The last year with more admins by end of year was 2019, with 22. This is a significant step forward in terms of reducing administrator attrition, though it's unclear if the long term trend will be reversed – the number of active administrators increased from 419 on 3 November to 429 the following day, when the new cadre was given the sysop bit, putting the count back to about what it was at the end of August. This topic was last covered by The Signpost in the 19 October issue, and broad discussion about reforming the process for granting administrator rights has been ongoing since 2007 as documented in Wikipedia:RFA reform.

As the community approved Administrator Elections as a one-time trial, it would need approval through an additional RFC to become permanent. There is ongoing discussion on a dedicated 'debrief' page about the next steps from here.

Community members who were officially part of the trial election process included monitors Theleekycauldron and Pickersgill-Cunliffe; and scrutineers Johannnes89, EPIC, and Yahya. This author (B) additionally notes the unofficial yet crucial involvement of Novem Linguae in moving the SecurePoll process forward, and other work that made the election possible. Some of these folks have already received barnstars, but The Signpost encourages readers to thank and acknowledge the organizers for their labor, ethical guidance, and dedication to this crucial aspect of Wikipedia volunteer community governance. – B, S

You may now submit your self-nomination for the Arbitration Committee election until 23:59, 12 November 2024 (UTC). Eight vacant ArbCom seats may be filled. Questions for candidates from the community can be submitted at any time during the election. Voting will be held over 14 days, from 00:00 UTC, 19 November 2024 to 23:59 UTC, 02 December 2024.

For complete information see WP:ACE2024. – Sb

The ability of the community to remove or "recall" administrator's privileges has been discussed for almost two decades. Some important way stations in the recent discussions are:

• Phase I - Proposal 16 and Proposal 16c
• Phase II - Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review/Phase II/Administrator recall
• a request for comments - RFC to confirm Phase II consensus
• WP:RECALL - Recall as a policy page

A new administrator recall policy, part of the 2024 RfA Reform, was adopted by separate RfC on October 26. The new policy follows unsuccessful attempts to formulate a recall procedure in 2006 and 2019. Until this point, only the Arbitration Committee could remove admin privileges without the cooperation of the administrator; now a community consensus can also result in removal of privileges (see prior Signpost coverage).

The first recall was initiated under the new policy soon after the RfC was marked as adopted (Special:Permalink/1253547916 / Special:Permalink/1253758891). As of our writing deadline, there is almost 100 kilobytes of text in the ongoing discussion (about the equivalent of 50 typewritten pages), which may reflect the participants hashing out process and procedure for this new venue. – B

In June 2024 the Wikimedia Foundation established the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin as a channel for staff of the Wikimedia Foundation to share project updates with the volunteer Wikimedia community of editors. The bulletin is a flood of information of interest to Wikipedia enthusiasts. The late October issue describes Temporary Accounts, which is a project intended to give new privacy options to Wikipedia editors, and which may be of interest to anyone exploring how privacy works in the Wikimedia platform. Temporary Accounts seems to be the new name for IP Masking, discussed previously in The Signpost here and here.

Other relevant posts include the removal of Flow on all projects (It'll be replaced with DiscussionTools), an ongoing research project on admin recruitment and attrition, and a publicity campaign to highlight Wikipedia in the United States. – B, BR, S

• Milestones: Congratulations to the Romanian language Wikipedia, which recently published its 500,000th article ro:Ulug Beg, who was a Timurid sultan.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Slow living. Next week's Article for Improvement (beginning 11 November 2024) is Stationery. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!