Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-03-22/News and notes

The Wikimedia Foundation's list of "notices received from search engines" was updated recently for the first time since June 2024. It contains

notices received by the Wikimedia Foundation when search engines [de facto only Google] intend to indefinitely remove links to Wikipedia articles and other online Wikimedia media content from their results. Google routinely sends these to owners of affected websites. The Foundation began publishing theirs (although not for other kinds of pages like talk pages or user pages) in 2014 "[a]s part of our commitment to transparency and our opposition to censorship". Their publication ceased in 2019 due toa glitch where [WMF's Legal department] stopped receiving the notices, but resumed last year.

Previously, almost all of these removals appear to have been about privacy concerns, in particular right to be forgotten (RTBF) cases (see also our 2014 coverage: "European Union's 'right to be forgotten'"). In contrast, the 11 notices published so far this month are all about Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, i.e. URLs that are being removed from Google Search due to alleged copyright infringement. Nine of them affect article pages on English Wikipedia, one is about a Wikidata item and one about a Commons image. Unlike some earlier notices, the newly published notices state the affected Wikipedia URL(s) again. Each also contains a link to a copy of the full DMCA takedown notice received by Google itself, as deposited in the Lumen database, which is operated by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and was formerly known as "Chilling Effects". (These are to be distinguished from the DMCA takedown notices sent directly to the Wikimedia Foundation. According to its most recent transparency report, WMF received a total of 10 takedown notices from January to June 2024. Two of these were about English Wikipedia pages, and the Foundation rejected both.)

The English Wikipedia articles affected by the newly published notices include various articles about not very prominent topics like TV series from bygone decades or a 1960s country song – but also e.g. the article massage[1].

One rather peculiar notice claims that Queen (band), Queen's Park F.C., All the Queen's Men (TV series), MyFreeCams and (the Queen song) Back Chat all infringe upon copyrighted content from the same web page at profiles.myfreewebcam.com, per the complaint received by Google. At least Wikipedia has some good company, being only one of no fewer than 188 different domains that the complaint alleges to have pirated content from that URL. While many of those domains are clearly of an adult nature, they also include www.walmart.com, www.newegg.com, www.austinchronicle.com, www.glassdoor.com, www.bestbuy.com, www.rollingstone.com and www.nationalgeographic.com. The complaint dates from about a year ago (March 16, 2024), and Google's removal fortunately does not seem to have had a big effect on e.g. the pageviews for Queen (band) – probably because the complaint only related to the jurisdiction of Romania.

Another notice though is about the US jurisdiction and may have had a larger impact, targeting the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mother%27s_day for alleged infringement of a pornographic movie. Mother's Day is a popular article with obvious seasonal peaks each year, which had surpassed 300,000 daily pageviews every single year since 2015 (the earliest available data in the pageviews tool), but not in 2024 after the DMCA issue was issued [2].

Fortunately though, a US-based Google search for "Mother's Day" instead turns up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_(United_States) as first result right now (while still mentioning that in response to the DMCA complaint,we have removed 1 result(s) from this page - but somewhat cheekily linking Mother's Day in the separate knowledge panel). Last May, after the DMCA notice, that article saw its highest ever spike since 2015 [3], so it appears that at least some US-based users were simply redirected from the global to the US-focused article.

In this case, too, Wikipedia is not the only alleged pirate website: The DMCA complaint also accuses e.g. nymag.com, www.goodhousekeeping.com, www.cosmopolitan.com, www.nbcnews.com,www.marthastewart.com, www.today.com, www.oprahdaily.com, www.elle.com, www.harpersbazaar.com and the website of Country Living of infringing upon the copyright of an "original adult pornographic film".

Wikipedians interested in more timely information about such removals can also try to search the Lumen database directly. This will return a lot of false positives (e.g. a notice alleging infringement from atari.com that links to Asteroids (video game), Atari Greatest Hits etc. merely to describe the allegedly infringed work). But it does also turn up recent DMCA notices complaining about copyright violations on Wikipedia itself. For example, this one from March 18, 2025, pertaining to the US jurisdiction, alleges "Copyright premium content stolen from my client's OnlyFans page without her consent". However, editors who would like to investigate and remedy this issue directly on Wikipedia will need to request access on Lumen to see the affected Wikipedia URL, or wait until the Wikimedia Foundation has received and published the corresponding notice from Google. – H

Selena Deckelmann, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Product and Technology Officer since 2022, recently sat down for an in-depth interview (71 minutes) on the 176th episode of "Between the Brackets", the MediaWiki-themed podcast of longtime MediaWiki developer Yaron Koren.

After discussing some personal background (including her previous position at the Mozilla Foundation), the interview turned to her role at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she is currently overseeing roughly 300 of the over 700 Wikimedia Foundation employees. Deckelmann took pains to stress that there are alsotens of thousands of volunteer developers contributing to keeping the site running – if one counts not only people contributing code to MediaWiki itself, but also those who e.g. work on on-wiki tools like user scripts or modules, or are using the Foundation's cloud services. Asked by the interviewer about the exact nature of the CPTO's decisionmaking power, Deckelmann first stressed that she does not control the outcome of the technical RfCs guiding the development of the MediaWiki software (e.g. about the adoption of the vue.js framework) . When probed further whether there was still a "king of England" type authority with "power to step in" on rare occasions, she added that

Deckelmann also shared that she was working on getting root access, still having some tasks to complete in the process that every developer has to go through for this.

Another question was about how WMF prioritizes work on the different Wikimedia projects, with the interviewer sharing the impression that "Wikipedia gets the focus over projects like Wikinews and so forth", and mentioning recent discussions where "certain people at Wikimedia Commons [argued] that that site is getting neglected". He highlighted a June 2024 comment Deckelmann made in these discusions:

In response, Deckelmann added thatthe Commons world, like the universe that all those contributors operate in, is not so different from the rest of the Wikimedia projects, and that the communities arenot super distinct after all, with a lot of overlap. Hence,

Koren followed up by pointing out thatfour of the Wikimedia sites are actually more like repositories than places people go to directly (well, three plus one that doesn't exist yet), which is Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikifunctions, and then Abstract Wikipedia. [...] and interestingly, three of those four were created by Denny Vrandečić. [...] It is still not clear to me what Wikifunctions is all about [despite having already conducted at least two lengthy interviews about it].

In response, Deckelmann mentioned some of the planned use cases of Wikifunctions, including generating multilingual text for Abstract Wikipedia from a central language-neutral source. Later, Koren somewhat provocatively pointed out the apparent "irony" thatat same time the Wikimedia Foundation is making this concerted effort to populate Wikipedia and make sure it stays up [in face of generative AI and other challenges], there is a project to replace Wikipedia, which is Abstract Wikipedia. Deckelmann called this adystopian view, arguing that whilesure, you can paint a future vision [where it] just replaces everybody's [Wikipedia editing] work,that is absolutely not the aim – Denny has been in this world for a very long time. Also, she stressed the long timelines of the project, calling itvery ambitious anda small part of the Foundation's work. She related it to the three horizons model by the consulting company McKinsey, which posits that organizations should split their investments between current needs, preparing for the medium term, and lastly a certain percentage for the far future (typically 70%/25%/5%):

However, it would remain up to individual Wikipedia communities whether to make use of such features. Also,There is so many challenges with this type of technology [used by Abstract Wikipedia] – it's slow. Lastly, she hinted that the entire project could be rendered largely obsolete by generative AI:– H

• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Giraffer (1 March) and its newest Bureaucrat, Barkeep49 (7 March). Both requests closed with 98% support or higher.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Cove (beginning 17 March 2025), followed by Ipomoea (beginning 24 March 2025). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!