Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-04-26

Jimmy Wales has given up all the remaining advanced permissions (administrator, checkuser and oversight) he has held on the English Wikipedia, after his conduct towards Bradv on the latter's talk page was declared to be an unfounded accusation. Wales requested his permissions be removed in the course of an arbitration case request brought against him by former arbitrator AmandaNP.

For the technically minded:

• Phabricator task
• Global Founder rights log
• English Wikipedia log

Wales retains the Founder flag as a courtesy; however, its permissions have been modified so he is no longer able to grant advanced permissions to himself or others.

What was the reason for the arbitration request? Wales had left the following message on the talk page of Bradv, a former arbitrator who had been inactive on Wikipedia for over half a year:

Over the next few hours, multiple checkusers, oversighters and stewards piled into Bradv's talk page telling Wales that he was out of order. Moreover, what seemed to Wales like a "credible report" on which to base such an egregious implication seemed to ArbCom nothing of the kind. Arbitrator GeneralNotability, for example, opined:

GeneralNotability later expanded on this in the case request:

For further coverage of this story, see this Signpost issue's Arbitration report and the Opinion piece by Smallbones. –AK

The Signpost has learned from tips, and confirmed with its own research, that over 7% of the WMF staff has separated since the beginning of the year. As of our writing deadline, the Foundation has made no official statement about the matter that we are aware of, other than a message from the Movement Communications Director in this issue's piece on the WMF's annual planning process, stating that planned expense reductions "for the coming few years ... have also included looking at vacant/unfilled roles and about a 5% reduction in occupied roles."

Tips informed us that this process was not always managed in a way that resulted in smooth handoff of duties from staff members who are no longer employed, and has resulted in some disruption to the community of Wikipedians. An off-wiki blog post by community member Legoktm has some more information on the process of discovery and the impacts from his perspective.

The Signpost staff have observed that WMF employees are routinely assigned accounts on Meta-Wiki when they onboard, and the accounts are globally locked when their employment terminates (voluntarily or otherwise)—though this is not a formal policy as far as we know. The locking is often accompanied in the global account log with a message like "no longer employed at WMF". The various public account data and logs can be inspected manually (or with semi-automated tools) to robustly infer information on WMF staffing. These inferences were made well in advance of any messaging from the Foundation. Every organisation experiences churn; however, since the beginning of 2023, The Signpost has noted the loss of several Senior Program Managers and Directors, which may be unusual.

For historical context, the WMF's headcount has grown significantly over the past two years. It stood at 472 at the end of June 2021, according to this Tuning Session slide. By end of March 2022, it had grown to 570 (with 240 new hires and 142 people leaving in that nine-month period). Since then, the Wikimedia Foundation has not published any quarterly Tuning Session slides with updated data. However, according to the recently published 2023–2024 draft Annual Plan, the WMF's total headcount on 31 December 2022 was 711, with almost half of all staff now based outside of the United States. It presents the following information:

The draft also takes the proactive step of disclosing two executives' salaries: CEO Maryana Iskander (US$453,000) and Chief Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann (US$420,000). Both figures represent base compensation. – B, AK

When Wikipedia was launched, each WikiProject was expected to assess the quality of articles independently. The assumption was that different projects would have different views on what an article ought to look like. However, over time most projects have converged on the overall quality guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment. Under these, an article is assessed in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing and so on, regardless of which WikiProject's purview it falls under.

Recently a proposal was approved (and has been implemented) to support general quality assessments that can be shared by all the projects that have adopted an article. {{WikiProject banner shell}} has a new |class= parameter, and {{WPBannerMeta}} lets project banners "inherit" this assessment for the purpose of assigning categories like Category: C-class Ruritania articles. Individual projects can still continue to assign their own quality ratings. WikiProject Highways is one example; it has opted out, and assigned its own "Future" quality rating.

The change will make it easier to update standard quality ratings and reflect the changes across all the projects that have adopted the article, apart from projects that still have unique approaches to assessing quality. – A

In late 2022 the federated social network Mastodon rose in popularity, following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. Numerous Twitter presences for Wikimedia entities also saw the establishment of Mastodon counterparts. (Including this little newspaper – follow https://wikis.world/@WikiSignpost for announcements of new Signpost issues.)

Not, however, the official @Wikipedia Twitter account, which is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Communications department. A November 2022 Phabricator ticket suggesting to mirror it on Mastodon went nowhere, with WMF staff stating on December 19 that "At this time, we have no plans to create an account for the Foundation or Wikipedia. This is mainly because our observations show us that Mastodon is not yet reaching a large audience." After some feedback on the Wikimedia-l mailing list, the Communications department modified this stance somewhat, explaining on January 5 that "We want to be thoughtful and thorough in how we approach these questions and that takes time. We’re exploring with Foundation teams and we also have an upcoming meeting with the Communications Committee – this is on the agenda. [...] We’ll update folks on the social media talk page [...]". However, a March 31 "Organic social media strategy update" on that page made no mention of Mastodon or the fediverse.

This situation changed on April 12, with the creation of the Mastodon account https://wikis.world/@wikipedia, which has since already gained around 9000 followers. According to a documentation page on Meta-wiki, it is community-run, with the goal "to promote Wikipedia and free content on the Fediverse in a bottom-up manner." It has already been verified as official via a code change on the wikipedia.org project portal website. Ironically, this happened just a few days before the @Wikipedia Twitter account lost its verification badge, among many other "legacy" verified accounts. On April 18, this new @Wikipedia account on Mastodon was also welcomed by the official Mastodon Twitter account, which at the same time expressed excitement "to see [Wikipedia and Wikimedia] begin building integration with the free Mastodon identity verification into the Wikimedia platform."

Two Wikimedians currently have access to the new account according to its Meta-wiki page: Legoktm and Annierau. The latter is known for her wildly successful Depths of Wikipedia social media feeds (whose Twitter version in fact has a higher follower count than the official Wikipedia Twitter account: 773.3K vs. 642.4K). The new account is hosted on "Wikis World", a "Mastodon social media server for wiki enthusiasts" launched half a year ago by Legoktm and Taavi. – H

The Graph extension is used widely on Wikipedia to display charts and graphs of all sorts, as well as on sister projects, and even on non-Wikimedia sites – it's included in MediaWiki, so there are about 884 public sites using it.

All of this should be said in the past tense. There are no graphs now.

The Graph extension is based on Vega, a quite capable framework that allows graphs to do all sorts of things normal wikitext markup can't, like JavaScript effects when you hover over something, the ability to highlight different datasets, draw complicated shapes, obtain data from external sites (like in {{Graph:PageViews}}) and indeed execute arbitrary XSS attacks. Wait, huh???

Yeah, that is not so great. Per T334940 on Phabricator, we have had this sitting around for quite some time and nobody noticed. But now we have. So the graphs are gone. The implications, aside from breaking our PageViews graph, have been felt across many projects. C-Kobold says on Phabricator that "in the German Wikipedia, ALL Wikipedia pages about the major German political parties (CDU, SPD, CSU, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, FDP, Die LINKE) have broken diagrams that were supposed to show the number of members over the years".

So far, the incident is being addressed on Phabricator and at the Village pump (technical). A snazzy error message (shown here) has been created in the interim, although it's anybody's guess how inter this particular im is going to be. TheDJ notes that this extension has been "thoroughly unmaintained for over 6 years"; CX Zoom points out that updates for Vega were requested at 2023's Community Wishlist Survey.

On April 21, Seddon (WMF) said in the VPT thread: "My hope is we can maybe restore some functionality in the next week or so". – J

• New Wikimedia affiliates: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of the latest Wikimedia movement affiliates – the Wiki Advocates Philippines User Group, the Wikimedia Community User Group Togo, the Wikimedians of Indiana User Group and the Tajik Wikimedians User Group.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Spicy, who was promoted on 8 April 2023 with 256 members of the community in favor of adminship, one opposed, and two neutral.
• Milestones: Wikinews Gungbe was approved on April 10. Gungbe is a language spoken by about 1.5 million people in Benin and Nigeria.
• Annual reports: Wikimedia Ghana User Group.
• Articles for Improvement: The weekly Article for Improvement is Sankebetsu brown bear incident (beginning 17 April). Please be bold in helping improve this article!
• ToU update discussion to close: Discussion on the Wikimedia Foundation's 2023 Terms of Use updates will close April 24 (see prior Signpost coverage).
• India fundraising campaign: The thread Upcoming WMF fundraising campaign in India was started by WMF staff at Village Pump.

The Wikimedia Foundation has received another two fines in Russia.

On 6 April, as reported by Reuters and others, the WMF was fined –

And on 13 April, as reported by Associated Press and others, the WMF was fined –

Russianlife.com, a site critical of Russia's government, says:

Pakistani news outlet UrduPoint quotes Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying:

Once such an alternative exists, Peskov said, it would make sense to talk about banning Wikipedia.

The idea of a single world encyclopedia that is available to read everywhere and universally accepted as a reasonable compromise between the world's competing truth claims has both attractive and unattractive sides. What is attractive about it is that it would break up information silos, where people on one side of the earth don't even know what news is reported to people on the other side, and how it is reported. However, there is also an obvious downside involved in having such a global reference source – over the years, it might easily become too monopolistic and monolithic.

But whatever one may think of the idea, it seems unlikely to be realised anytime soon. Not least because some governments are unwilling to accept anything less than complete suppression of some viewpoints. – AK

Stephen Harrison in Slate writes about the ongoing arbitration case on World War II and the history of Jews in Poland (see previous Signpost coverage: 1, 2). Commenting on the historical context, Harrison says:

Harrison notes that there are competing historical narratives. According to the one promoted by Poland's current right-wing government, World War II marked "a period when the nation achieved the peak of moral virtue", exemplified by its steadfast refusal to collaborate with the Germans. Scholars like Jan Grabowski – whose paper in The Journal of Holocaust Research, co-written with Shira Klein (User:Chapmansh), sparked the current arbitration case – would like to see greater acknowledgment of the fact that Poland saw some of the same antisemitism that existed elsewhere in Europe and that there were cases of Polish involvement in Jewish suffering.

Looking at how Wikipedia deals with this topic area, Harrison revisits the 2019 story of the "fake Nazi death camp" as one example of misinformation raised by Grabowski and Klein that lasted for more than a decade in Wikipedia before being corrected in 2019 (see previous Signpost coverage). He also explains that addressing such cases is made more difficult by the fact that Wikipedia's arbitration committee is not permitted to rule on content but can only decide conduct disputes.

Harrison argues that there is something "deeply unsatisfying" about this dichotomy, but he sees no easy solution. He quotes Chapmansh and Piotrus – both university teachers who have worked with Wikipedia in the classroom, though they are on opposite sides in this case – as saying that it would be good to have more academics contributing to Wikipedia. Harrison is sceptical, however:

Harrison reports that some issues in Wikipedia's coverage identified by Graboswki and Klein have since been addressed, due to an injection of new blood in the topic area, although he says this can be a hit-and-miss process given the prevalence of battleground behaviour and cases of entrenched editors being hostile to newcomers.

At the end of his article, Harrison notes that some of the editors at the centre of the controversy are vigorously defending their actions in the court of public opinion. He comments on how engaging with such emotive subject matter can be a risky affair, linking to a press report on how Grabowski himself was taken to court in Poland over some of his academic writing and noting that some of the editors with whom Grabowski and Klein disagree are reporting sustained off-wiki harassment.

– AK

Elon Musk has changed Twitter's name to X Corp. as well as the corporation's state of registration. Twitter, a Delaware corporation owned by Musk, was merged into X Corp, which is owned by a Nevada holding company X Holdings Corp., which is owned by Musk. Twitter is gone. Only X Corp. and X Holdings Corp. remain.

Twitter first revealed the move in a court document dated April 4, but the document was apparently not noticed by the media until Slate published the story on April 10 at 20:29 UTC (4:29 PM New York time). Slate reported that Twitter responded to a question about the deal, but only with a poop emoji. Wikipedia first published the news five-and-a-half hours after Slate at 2:01 UTC, April 11. A non-notable, unreliable crypto blog, CoinGape cited Wikipedia as one of their sources at about 5:00 UTC April 11. Musk's first mention of the news seems to have been a single letter Tweet at 7:03 UTC, April 11, "X". For further details see "not news". – S

A bogus version of the flag of Vatican City has appeared throughout the world according to Wikipedia had the wrong Vatican City flag for years. Now incorrect flags are everywhere from the Catholic News Agency. The CNA article says that a Wikipedian added a red disk at the base of the Papal tiara in 2017 which lasted as the main Wikipedia illustration of the flag through 2022. It quotes Father William Becker, of the St. Columbanus Parish in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, who wrote a book on Vatican flags. According to Becker, after the adoption of the current flag in 1929, it was used in diverging versions for years, and even today, due to what he gently criticizes as a failure by the Holy See to "make some design specifications more available" online (a gap that he created his own website to fill), "a flagmaker is likely to go to a source like Wikipedia, and it may vary in its accuracy." The official Vatican City website does give an illustration without a red disk, albeit as a somewhat grainy JPG image.

Father Becker and CNA credit a March 22 Reddit post for bringing the issue to their attention. It was also covered by Depths of Wikipedia, who put the issue in the context of past "citogenesis" incidents, while pointing out that Encyclopedia Britannica includes the red disk in their version of the flag, too. But @depthsofwiki should have scrolled down to Britannica's "Vatican City" article which has a white-disked flag – E.B. gives an unexplained split decision.

However, the Reddit discussion, which started this red hat-ring business, also uncovered that NASA had sent a red disk flag to the moon on Apollo 11 in 1969, which was put on display in the Vatican Museum. And a later reply to @depthsofwiki shows Pope John Paul II sitting next to a red disk flag on a 1998 state visit to Italy. So who's to blame? – S, H

An article in The Washington Examiner cites claims made by Michael Shellenberger on the Joe Rogan Experience that the Wikimedia Foundation and various newspapers and tech companies took part in a "tabletop exercise" conducted by the Aspen Institute in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections. The exercise, described as essentially a Zoom call, allegedly looked at how best to mitigate any upcoming, Russian-inspired controversy concerning Hunter Biden. The article says the exercise took place in June 2020, about four months before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in The New York Post, but about half a year after the FBI had taken possession of Biden's abandoned laptop.

Shellenberger characterizes this as the Aspen Institute "training, or brainwashing, all these journalists [...] to say if something is leaked, we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it." He views it as one of the ways parts of the U.S. government exercise undue influence on media and tech companies, including the Wikimedia Foundation – based on the fact that the Aspen Institute has received government funding, although the Examiner article points out that the non-profit is also "funded by donors such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Gates Foundation, [and] the Ford Foundation".

Despite the Examiner characterizing it as a "startling finding", the (apparently) same tabletop exercise had already been covered in an October 2020 Wired article (published about a week before the New York Post's laptop story broke). Its author Garrett Graff described himself as having co-organized the exercise together with Vivian Schiller, centering it around a fictitious leaks website releasing "doctored documents, appearing to allege that perhaps we don’t know the full truth about Hunter Biden’s role with the [Ukrainian energy] company" Burisma (motivated by concerns about how the media had handled the Podesta emails leak in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election).

Later in October 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation had published a post titled "How Wikipedia is preparing for the 2020 U.S. Election" which among other things mentioned how "specific members of [its 'Disinformation task force'] are regularly meeting with representatives from major technology companies and U.S. government agencies to share insights and discuss ways they are addressing potential disinformation issues in relation to the election." – AK, H

• Podcast on diversity in Wikipedia biographies: Economist and media personality Tyler Cowen hosts a podcast interview with scientist and Wikipedia personality Jess Wade.
• Five games about Wikipedia: As presented by Makeuseof.com.
• Who's "government-funded"? Ask Wikipedia: Elon Musk says Twitter is using a Wikipedia list to help decide which news organizations are labeled 'government-funded media' – Business Insider – according to the article, Category:Publicly funded broadcasters is used to guide decision-making at Twitter. But look away from the elephant in the room: NPR is on that list.
• Irish judges controversy continues: Irish High Court justice Richard Humphreys claims to have debunked last year's study that concluded Wikipedia was influencing Irish judges' reasoning and language use (see previous Signpost coverage). The original study's authors have reportedly rejected Humphreys' main criticisms while welcoming further discussion of their findings. The story is covered by RTE, Independent and Irish Legal News. Humphreys has published a summary article in the Irish Law Times and submitted the full paper by invitation to the Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence.

The case for World War II and the history of Jews in Poland, which you may remember from previous Signpost coverage (and current Signpost RfCs), was accepted 13 March. New parties were added to the case as recently as 24 March.

The relevant timeline for the case is:

• Evidence phase 1 closed 9 April 2023
• Evidence phase 2: 17 April 2023 – 27 April 2023 (target date according to clerks)
• Analysis closes 27 April 2023 (target date)
• Proposed decision to be posted by 11 May 2023 (target date)

Its scope is to be the conduct of named parties in the topic areas of World War II history of Poland, and the history of the Jews in Poland, broadly construed.

According to case clerk Dreamy Jazz when asked by The Signpost, a break between Evidence phase 1 and 2 was added because "the arbitrators wanted to have an opportunity to review submissions and then ask questions to get clarification or further details which would be provided in phase 2. The break was added for convenience, so that the evidence can be read and everyone can get up to speed before the questions are asked for phase 2."

Former administrator Dbachmann was de-sysoped by the Arbitration Committee on 5 April.

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests#Paid editing recruitment allegation was initiated on 11 April by former Committee member AmandaNP. Involved parties were another former Committee member, Bradv, and Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales. Wales voluntarily gave up his advanced permissions on English Wikipedia, and the case was rejected by the Arbitration Committee as resolved (see also "Jimmy Wales gives up his advanced permissions" in this issue's News and notes, and an Opinion piece).

Wikipedia has been criticized as being inherently unreliable, and we ourselves warn users not to rely uncritically on the information in Wikipedia; it is ironic to see it now used as an anchor of truth in a seething sea of disinformation. AI models are prone to hallucinating, that is, giving false answers with confidence and corroborative detail to things that simply are untrue. Can using Wikipedia help to at least spot these mistakes, and are the new search engine AIs using them in ways that will actually help prevent hallucination?

Following in the footsteps of Bing, the Internet search engine DuckDuckGo has rolled out DuckAssist, a new feature that generates natural language responses to search queries. When a user asks DuckDuckGo a question, DuckAssist can pop up and use neural networks to create an instant answer, a concise summary of answers found on the Web.

A problem plaguing large language model-based answerbots and other chatbots are so-called hallucinations, a term of art used by AI researchers for answers, confidently presented and full of corroborative detail giving seemingly authoritative verisimilitude to what otherwise might appear as an unconvincing answer – but that are, nevertheless, cut from whole cloth. Using another term of art, they are pure and unadulterated bullshit.

Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, explained in a company blog post how DuckAssist uses sourcing to Wikipedia and other sources to get around this problem.

The problem of keeping AI agents honest is far from solved. The somewhat glib reference to Wikipedia is not particularly reassuring. Experience has shown that even AI models trained on the so-called "Wizard of Wikipedia", a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia, are not immune to making things up. A more promising approach may be to train models to distinguish fact-based statements from plausible-sounding made-up statements. A system intended for deployment could then be made to include an "is that so?" component for monitoring generated statements, and insisting on revision until the result passes muster. Another potentially useful application of such a system could be to flag dubious claims in Wikipedia articles, whether introduced by an honest mistake or inserted as a hoax. (Editor's note: this has been attempted, with some success, here.)

Our last Special report on The Signpost itself appeared in 2020. In this article, we will look again at some statistics on The Signpost. More precisely: article statistics by year, TOP 20 categories of articles, TOP 20 article authors, and the home wikis of article authors.

The data is current as of 2023-01-16.

While number of issues went quite a bit down after 2016, the number of articles in each issue went up substantially, partially making up for this. We hit an average of 16.2 articles an issue in 2022, which does a lot to justify the move to biweekly this year.

The Signpost has a number of defined titles for regular features and irregular items, and a looser set of titles for special columns. Here are the top 20 article titles that have appeared.

Note that some of these are related. For example, if "Featured content" was combined with its predecessor, "Features and admins", it would be in first place. "In the news" and "In the media" are also arguably the same, and would jump to third (fourth if you boost "Featured content" as well) if combined.

These are the top 20 contributors mentioned in a byline.

The assignment of the user to the "home" Wikipedia was based on the indication in the "home wiki" (image flag) for users with unified login, then on the indicator of the "new account" (image flag), otherwise set to "UNDEFINED"; from the page Special:CentralAuth.

We didn't have a huge number of featured pictures this issue, but I think I found a clever and unique way to lay them out. Also, poetry again! Why? Because, while it does, by necessity, simplify subjects, that's actually a good thing when you have thirty-some featured articles and lists to summarise. It does have a risk of trivialising things, but being sensitive should help with that, and if I get articles on the Holocaust or the like, well, the "summarise it in poetry" thing isn't a death pact.

We've used basically the same format for these since the Signpost was weekly. It was intended for the short weekly issues with five to nine articles to summarise; but this issue has twenty featured articles and eighteen featured lists in this issue. Something has to change, and there's probably going to need to be some playing around until we get there.

Like many things on Wikipedia, as the website grew, the anarchic fun of the early days started to fade away. Hence, we are starting in 2011, when things were still fun and chaotic. To wit: in 2009 (not even during April Fools' Day, but on a random day in August), a "LOLKeats" was made to explain a poem by John Keats, added to the article, and nominated as a featured picture candidate, with the claim that the articles it's in are "Ode on Indolence – Limited time offer". This wasn't considered disruptive, or worthy of a block: it was all harmless fun. Nowadays, I can't imagine it going over so well as the reversion text being merely "I have to admit I laughed, but lolcat go byebye:)".

I do think Wikipedia has lost some of its fun. That's not a good thing, but it was inevitable. Those early days were collaborative and wild with a heady sense of purpose. We were building the encyclopedia. You could take a famous figure and make them a featured article from very little. I don't think we can ever get those days fully back, and that's the nature of success.

Also, afraid we're going to need a part three. On the upside, this series can be linked to for years to come.

By far the best joke this year was the choice for Today's Featured Article:

Fanny scratching in 18th-century London's Cock Lane was so notorious that interested bystanders often blocked the street. It became the focus of a religious controversy between Methodists and orthodox Anglicans, and was reported on by celebrities of the period such as Samuel Johnson. Charles Dickens referred to the phenomenon in several of his books, including Nicholas Nickleby and A Tale of Two Cities, and other Victorian authors also alluded to it in their work. One enterprising resident diverted the crowds that gathered in Cock Lane by allowing them to converse with a ghost he claimed was haunting his home, to which he charged an entrance fee. Fanny scratching eventually resulted in several prosecutions, and the pillorying of a father. (more...)

Recently featured: Sir Richard Williams – Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons – Battle of Towton

I don't think "Did you know?" was as on-fire as it usually was, but there were some good ones, including:

• ... that a typical Labia minor is chocolate brown, up to 7 mm long, and equipped with pincers?
• ... that recent quantum chemical calculations have established that arsoles are only moderately aromatic?
• ... that in 2010, three survivors of the Titanic were rescued by the USCGC Chincoteague?
• ... that a real Bastard commanded Africa in the nineteenth century?
• ... that a species of crab, Tumidotheres maculatus, has been found living on an asteroid?
• ... that ice cream grows in Florida?
• ... that Europe was ruled by a child during the American Revolutionary War?

After last year, even pigeon photography as today's featured article feels somewhat of a letdown, though the idea of using time-delayed cameras as a sort of early drone photography is fascinating.

In more random places, A request to write e. e. cummings' article entirely in lowercase is great literary humour. Our article on vandalism was nominated for deletion as obvious vandalism. Snow was was also nominated for deletion, but kept per WP:SNOW. There's also this... interesting choice of newspaper for Wikipedia:WikiProject Conservatism's newsfeed.

A few good "Did you know?" entries, including:

• ... that in 2009, the urinal known as "The Carousel of Love" (pictured), a well known place for gay cruising, was declared a Norwegian Cultural Heritage Site?
• ... that Frank Lloyd Wright designed a dog house—and even its roof leaks?
• ... that an Italian Protestant fathered The Virgin Mary in 1950?
• ... that T. vagina have eyes hidden behind their skin?
• ... that a fish in a fishbowl is in a fish?
• ... that the United States once fought 32 tons of shark fins, and the fins won?
• ... that a Baker went into outer space with sea urchin sperm, later receiving a rubber duck and many bananas for her efforts?
• ... that Nuns can fly at high altitudes?
• ... that red hot penises can be pickled, but it is recommended one not eat them?
• ... that people have cut off arms and legs because of Gigli?

The Signpost didn't get into the act that much: The WikiProject report opens thusly:

...but it then immediately drops the conceit. Honestly, the most interesting thing isn't even an intentional fool, it's the first article in the featured content report:

• George Went Hensley (nom) by Mark Arsten and Astynax. George Went Hensley (c. 1880 – 1955) was an American Pentecostal minister credited with popularizing the practice of snake handling in the Southeastern United States. A native of rural Appalachia, Hensley experienced a religious conversion around 1910: he came to believe that the New Testament commanded all Christians to handle venomous snakes. In 1955, he was bitten by a snake and became violently ill. Refusing to seek medical attention, he died the following day.

That's a quote from our coverage on how some people objected to their serious encyclopedia having any sense of fun to it. And I think it's a good response. We need fun, we need socialisation, we need rewards, or Wikipedia is just a job. 2013 was a pretty good year, despite the naysayers. The featured article for today, in particular, was one of the more unique main pages:

The Indonesian film named simply ? was nominated by Crisco 1492, and we actually have an interview with him about his work. Meanwhile, featured lists had the Foot in Mouth award, and we also got the usual fun at Did You Know; highlights below.

• ... that Polish girls (pictured) are getting wet and spanked today, but will have their revenge tomorrow?
• ... that Shitterton has been voted to be worse than Scratchy Bottom or Brokenwind?
• ... that Siemens is in Püssi?
• ... that the Aetherius Society believes that their sacred 1,375-foot (419 m) Brown Willy is full of holy energy?
• ... that Elvis' greatest shit was dropped in 1982?
• ... that a Lady twin produced a Bachelor's Double?
• ... that Wikipedia was discovered in 2008 between Mars and Jupiter?
• ... that a Norwegian organization established a women's fart team?
• ... that Chrisye performed a new song, "Eternal Ballad", five years after his death?
• ... that some schmuck tried to get the U.S. Supreme Court to let him off for mail fraud because all he did was roll back odometers?
• ... that the voice of blood is violet and makes no sound?

The picture of the day was a map used to hunt snark, and the featured article was Disco Demolition Night, an infamously ill-fated sports promotion at the end of the disco era.

The 2013 request for comment we quoted a bit of had a dampening effect in some ways. The list of pranks for 2014 is far shorter and tamer than previous years.

However, The Signpost meanwhile started to get into the spirit. I've recently started writing featured content reports in rhyme. This was inspired by the 2 April 2014 featured content, which, not only described everything in rhyme, but also invented stories based on the featured pictures:

• ... that 16th-century artillery master Franz Helm proposed using "rocket cats" (pictured) to attack castles?
• ... that Biden is believed to be an eccentric frozen pink dwarf?
• ... that small white breasts smell like aniseed?
• ... that Canada's new money has been criticized for featuring too much nudity and not enough women?
• ... that Batman once sued the Commissioner?
• ... that the Queen of Hell was Jamaican?
• ... that Amy Garnett is English rugby's most-capped female hooker?

• ... that in the late 19th century, those academics who used the letters "F.S.Sc." after their names had been duped by a "bogus literary society" (emblem pictured)?
• ... that a Little Cockup is smaller than a Great Cockup?
• ... that scientists observed an echo that lasted 65 years?
• ... that the idea of Santa Claus being shot can be "hilarious"?
• ... that it is illegal to wear armour in the British Parliament?
• ... that the novel Southern Cross does not contain any words?
• ... that William Wallace died inside the Rock of Gibraltar after falling off his bicycle?
• ... that Béla I of Hungary (bust pictured) was mortally wounded by his throne collapsing under him?

It's weird looking back at old featured content reports. The layouts before featured pictures became a gallery are odd. But there's a lot of interesting jokes in this one. Including pointing out the plagiarism within classical art.

News and notes, meanwhile, had a lot of fun with 'New edits-by-mail option will "revolutionize" Wikipedia and its editor base':

Today's featured article, invisible rail, for the first time in years, wasn't a joke, really, or, if it was, gave the joke away so instantaneously that it failed. In article space, Upside-down cake was flipped. Once again, Did you know ruled the main page's celebrations:

• ... that the front of Alex Chinneck's house (pictured) seems to have slipped?
• ... that you've just lost The Game?
• ... that the French paid their soldiers in playing cards?
• ... that Knightrider premièred in London in 1322?
• ... that James II lay on his back for a year amid grass and weeds after he was overthrown to make way for Edward VII?
• ... that Nick Clegg is sorry?
• ... that the existence of a sea monster in Scotland has finally been proven?
• ... that Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators were forcibly withdrawn after officials clamped down on them?
• ... that in April 2013, a giant alien landed on its head in central London?
• ... that feminist artists invented the WEB in 1971?
• ... that a half-naked fakir has taken up residence near Winston Churchill?
• ... that even balls of kryptonite are no protection from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission?
• ... that the Crown Prince of Thailand once owned Air Chief Marshal Fufu?
• ... that God is a billionaire property developer?
• ... that extraterrestrial spiders have only six legs?
• ... that during the 1960 Laotian coups, the anti-counter-coup to the counter-coup was defeated when the paratroopers' coup cooped up General Southone?
• ... that 220,000 people live in Nada?
• ... that there is only one major public church in Europe?
• ... that Osama bin Laden was at least 9 feet (2.7 m) tall?
• ... that Little Nescopeck Creek is smaller than Little Nescopeck Creek?

Wikivoyage, meanwhile, taught us the way to travel... through time. A sample:

And we'll finish this series next issue. I know: it'll be May by then. But... well, let's just say there's a lot going on in my life that would pull this column's mood down a lot if I went into it.

Allowed, considering:

• 0th: If you want it, better put a hat on it.
• 1st: Create two 256 disambiguation pages to offset every article created. Double that every two years.
• 2nd: Prevent your dab page going extinct with one well chosen hatnote as early as possible.
• 3rd: Don't panic.^{[disambiguation needed]}

More notes

The Disambiguation Singularity – a term used cautiously, as it is ambiguous – singularity may refer to:

• The article density where disambiguation becomes infinitely dense
• The infinitely massive job of disambiguation
• Rumours of 26 dimensions of disambiguation needed to have a disambiguation of everything
• or, The consequences of reaching the end of evolution, but without sources it isn't possible to write articles and safely put hatnotes on

The "Arts and entertainment" problem is disambiguation page section overloading – research on the scaling of dab pages is ongoing. Current assumptions are a solution to the NP-hard problem of popular culture overloading or "Arts and entertainment" disambiguation page section overloading, which may refer to:

• The Use of previously unambiguous terms for the titles of notable new popular culture, thereby overloading the previously unambiguous terms.
  • Remakes thereof, or remakes of remakes etc
• Some numerical solutions do not converge on the number of hatnotes required to successfully disambiguate those topics.
• A practical consideration is that due to the unfortunate coincidence of Arts and entertainment being listed at the top of dab pages, but with exponential growth, they must at some point expand at a rate faster than readers can scroll, thus preventing access to all but Arts and entertainment. As only primary topics would be accessible, disambiguation may attain The Disambiguation Singularity.

• Zawinski's law of software envelopment – "Every program attempts to expand until it can read [e]mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
• More's law – the law that inspires more laws
• Graham's number – once the largest number, now considered negligible
• Worth's law – is it worth reading more laws?
• Human evolution – coincidence we're wearing hats nowadays? (see image)
• Reductio ad absurdum – Latin, isn't it

• The Selfish Hatnote – a 2017 book on Wikipedia's evolution by Wikipedians.
• Wikipedia:Three Laws of Wikipedia

For the March 9 – April 9 period, per this this database report.