Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2022-04-24

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2022-04-24. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Essay: The problem with elegant variation (1,160 bytes · 💬)

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Alas, the trend toward personalizing pronouns is making them far less useful for avoiding elegant variation. English is in desperate need of a set of pronouns that does not include a gender value (which is generally an irrelevant data point), but does make clear whether the subject is singular or plural (making "they" a poor candidate).--~TPW 15:43, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Well yeah, we're certainly not trying to be flowery. On the other hand, beginning three sentences in a row with "Photosynthetic photophosphorylation is ..." might not be considered ideal by many editors. "It" and "The process" would seem to be acceptable variations in such a case, stopping well short of the "elongated middle-wavelength-coloured comestible" problem that your article so wittily highlights. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:57, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary (Part 2) (986 bytes · 💬)

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• Fascinating eyewitness report. Vulcan sends deepest condolences for your son.--Vulcan❯❯❯Sphere! 22:04, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
• I'm so sorry to hear about your son! :'-( Whoop whoop pull up ^{Bitching Betty ⚧️ Averted crashes} 15:54, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
• My condolences as well ...

  "All this was done by ordinary Russian soldiers, ordinary Russian people". Daniel Case (talk) 04:34, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

Featured content: Wikipedia's best content from March (2,888 bytes · 💬)

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• Yo, Everywhere at the End of Time ended up here. Nice :). Wetrorave please don't 24 April 2022 20:50, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

• I am pretty darn sure I didn't nominate 1994–95 Gillingham F.C. season. Things kinda slip these days, but surely I would have noticed? Or perhaps not. You may wish to consult ChrisTheDude over the nomineeship of it. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:30, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Thanks Gog the Mild, this is my first time writing for the Signpost so I was bound to make at least one mistake! I've corrected it. ––FormalDude talk 01:14, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
    • Wait, has Smallbones (at least I think that's his username) retired from the Signpost? Damn... Anyways, all the best for your stint in the Signpost! Tube·of·Light 03:11, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
• User:FormalDude I did not nominate Mount Melbourne although I did promote it. Now fixed to credit Jo-Jo Eumerus. (t · c) buidhe 04:22, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
• FormalDude, a good place to find a list of recently promoted articles and their nominators is here. Gog the Mild (talk) 08:39, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Thanks, I'll keep that in mind for the next issue! ––FormalDude talk 18:26, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
• I didn't know that Wikipedia had an article an the pronunciation of GIF, let alone a featured article! Minkai (boop that talk button!-contribs-ANI Hall of Fame) 15:21, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Gallery: A voyage around the world with WLM winners (980 bytes · 💬)

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• All stunning photographs, Vulcan's personal favourite is the fourth entry.--Vulcan❯❯❯Sphere! 22:15, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
• Wonderful photos; I hope they're all used in relevant articles! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:50, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
• Beautiful! WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 18:14, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Humour: Really huge message boxes (1,596 bytes · 💬)

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• LOL. That Shakespeare's plays navbox really is a disaster. And on many articles, it's preceded by this which don't help none:

{{William Shakespeare}}

(That navbox's failure to narrow itself properly for the comment-area width is just another #FAIL.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 21:09, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. Width narrowed as expected. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:29, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

That is indeed quite heinous. My go-to example is the "Awards for Meryl Streep" navbox. Not as deeply nested, but it's a little taller and has the added bonus of garish color-coding. Colin M (talk) 18:04, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Oh lordy! That's really something. Ganesha811 (talk) 18:05, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

• This one is an edit notice, I turned it up to 11 a little over a month ago, it has kinda sorta slowed down the stream of edit requests.

OH, my eyes!It burns!
PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING BEFORE REQUESTING A NAME BE ADDED TO THE LIST: All entries must already have a Wikipedia article about them and there must be a reliable source that justifies their inclusion on this list. Any requests for the addition of persons without both of these things will be denied.

Enjoy. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:31, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

In focus: Editing difficulties on Russian Wikipedia (1,360 bytes · 💬)

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• A really important update. It's fantastic to see the Russian community (mostly) resisting state censorship, whatever the consequences may be. Solidarity to the contributor who was not able to publish this under their username, to Bernstein and Pernikaŭ, and to all others whose Wikipedia contributions put them at risk. — Bilorv (talk) 09:35, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
  • I entirely agree. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 18:25, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

  Yes indeed, very important; please keep up the excellent reporting on Editing difficulties on Russian Wikipedia. Mathglot (talk) 21:05, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

• Russian translation is available: n:ru:Русская Википедия и военное время --ssr (talk) 04:54, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

  Thank you - this is quite important. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 14:51, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

In the media: The battlegrounds outside and inside Wikipedia (14,419 bytes · 💬)

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• (From Meta) Meta AI develops a novel dataset and model to help bring more representation to Wikipedia. Sorry, what? When did they ask the community whether we wanted their help and in what form? If we are to start using AI to generate baseline text to create WIR stubs from then I want it to be written by experienced Wikimedian volunteers, open source, and nothing to do with a for-profit company that engages in inordinate privacy violations and human rights abuses. (See also algorithmic bias.) — Bilorv (talk) 22:15, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

• The paper is here. They do mention WiR a few times, but it doesn't sound like they made any attempt to get in touch. Overall, it does not seem particularly impressive to me − generative language models are good for a lot of stuff, they're very interesting, and they have a lot of potential, but wrapping them up in a soup of "AI" buzzwords and glowing generalities about "we made an AI to write articles" doesn't really convey what is going on. Essentially, their model does web searches and retrieves a bunch of information, which it kind of half-assedly stitches together into text resembling a Wikipedia article. But a lot of the information is nonsensical or incorrect (see page 7: "Overall, 68% of the information in generated sections is not present in the reference text"). Of course, basically all generative language models do stuff like this, Facebook has not done anomalously badly in this respect. But it'd be a lot more impressive if they weren't trying to pass it off like this thing was creating usable articles that didn't need human review. A lot of this stuff reminds me of when ASIMO would fall on its ass. jp×g 23:33, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
  • I'm reminded of the "Quicksilver" project from 2018 that kind of faded away. XOR'easter (talk) 15:35, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Thanks for doing the deeper reading, JPxG. This is actually quite reassuring to me as it confirms that the Meta nonsense is just like their recent rename from "Facebook": a shallow facade of rebranding with no material substance behind it. They are simply exploring another avenue to piggyback off our labour at the expense of our reputation without any actual engagement in our movement—like the auto-generated Facebook pages they've had for many years that copy Wikipedia en masse with little or no attribution. Here it is wrapped in a laughable veneer of progressivism, with 32%-accurate articles made by an AI that is not actually available to Wikimedians, nor useful if made available, nor desirable even if improved based on better people that have tried and failed in this area. And this helps women how? — Bilorv (talk) 20:32, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
• As for the "Wikipedian" shooting up a school, I see no reason to avoid mentioning the notable Edmund Burke School, which was the target of the attack as reported by the attacker himself, and countless reliable sources. I would not have chosen to call the suicidal gunman a "Wikipedian" because, to me, that term (which I rarely use myself), describes a person committed to Wikipedia's basic principles. Although this person's edits have been rightfully suppressed, it seems clear that they were in no way and at no time a good faith contributor to this encyclopedia. I think that "recently registered Wikipedia editor" would have been a more accurate and neutral description of the gunman. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have edited the school article to add neutral content about the shootings, and I was contacted in advance about this Signpost article, which I appreciate. Cullen328 (talk) 06:02, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • I am also concerned with the heading. Is everyone who makes several edits to Wikipedia a "Wikipedian"? I think this term should be reserved for people who identify with the project goals and have done more than a few fly by edits (not to mention - are trolls and vandals "Wikipedians" too?). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:37, 29 April 2022 (UTC)
• Honest question: Are Larry Sanger's statements still newsworthy? At this point, it seems that he bashes Wikipedia in some outlet every three weeks, usually repeating the same arguments over and over. IMO, it looks like Sanger is only trying to stay relevant instead of making an honest effort in improving Wikipedia or the Internet at large (not to mention some of his more dubious projects). Applodion (talk) 08:56, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Larry Sanger walked away from the one reason anyone would ever care about his opinion and has been desperately grasping at relevance for twenty years now. XOR'easter (talk) 15:18, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Nope. He thinks that neutrality means ignoring reliable sources to come to a "neutral" conclusion that scientific and factual concepts (eg. allopathy and the fact that Islamophobia is a problem) and non-scientific and false concepts (eg. homeopathy and Hinduphobia) are equal. If he had his way, we'd probably have a lot of misinformation about COVID vaccines and magnets (web link to a Fox News affiliate). Tube·of·Light 03:08, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Per evidence above, literally yes. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:26, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Sanger's statements are notable, but he's become a bit of a broken record at this point, repeating the same talking points every few months, just in slightly different ways. X-Editor (talk) 20:34, 27 April 2022 (UTC)
  • I also don't understand why the Signpost wants to devote space to Sanger's endless trolling. Nosferattus (talk) 23:57, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

non-random break

• Ryan Kavanaugh's complaints as described don't match well with what he actually said due to lack of context. His proof for his "fantasy world" is "They carry alternative titles, such as “Most Perfect Tutnum” and “Grand High Togneme Vicarus,” - which everyone knows are just jokes, no one takes them seriously (and yes, I have one, just for the fun of it). He also claims falsely that "The coterie of editors who gain more and more access by the number of contributions they have made to Wikipedia and the length of time they have been on the site. They are ranked on multiple levels, from “Registered User” to “Admin User.”" The only limitation to access is of course our extended confirmed protection policy. And of course it leaves out the fact that he has a grudge against us because we insist on reliable sources which has caused him problems verifying his age and other issues. His comments about paid editors are about his article again. He's claiming undisclosed paid editors are paid to dislike him. I loved his claim " You must counter by paying a more senior editor to fix the damage." Signpost, this is disappointing. Doug Weller talk 14:13, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • I wish I could get paid to dislike people; the world gives me plenty of opportunities to practice, so I'm awfully good at it. XOR'easter (talk) 15:18, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
    • If I had been paid for my Wikipedia contributions every time somebody accused me of being motivated by personal dislike, I'd be quite rich. But "personal dislike" is rather by-the-by when all I'm doing is reading sources and collating what they say (which is very rarely what I think). — Bilorv (talk) 20:32, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • @Doug Weller: your complaint IMHO boils down to "a lack of context" which I partly consider justified, but mostly consider to be a misunderstanding of what the "In brief" section of this column is trying to do. We can't give all the facts complete with context for all the interesting stories we see in the press about Wikipedia. Why did I find this op-ed interesting? And why did I suspect many of our readers would find it interesting? Well - he nails down the accusations that many folks who try to get an article in WP the first time. Common accusations about Wikipedia are an "exclusive club" of arrogent admins and other editors who live in a 'fantasy realm they have created" along with paid editing (or possible bribery), and the high barrier to editing. He very accuratly *listed the usual accusations*. Now how accurate are the accusations? Well, a lot of it has to do with the people coming into Wikipedia for the first time. With their expectations being completely off, these are probably the best explanations they can come up with for what the see. They'll almost never come up with the "true reason" - that they are just not notable. A large portion of the blame for this type of common reaction to Wikipedia lies with ourselves and especially with WMF communications. We need to let these misguided folks know what to expect ahead of time. If we don't there will inevitably be a lot of folks who get pissed off about how they are treated here, There's another group. IMHO possibly typified by Kavanaugh who seem to know what to expect, but want to get a free personal advertisement As far as I can tell our admins dealt with him in the proper way. Now, if you as a reader. want to learn more about this phenomena you can't expect The Signpost to say all this in the one paragraph we have available. But you can click through to the original article, which looks pretty transparent to me. You might learn something. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:26, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

    As Offred says in The Handmaid’s Tale, “Context is all”. And of course I read the original article. Doug Weller talk 19:41, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

    I think part of what makes the general public so perplexed by our process is that "notable" to us has a narrowly defined, sometimes rigorously applied definition. Whereas to most people it means something rather different – maybe "accomplished in his/her/their field" for professionals, or "much talked about on social media" for popular subjects. Which definitely don't meet WP:GNG alone. In other words, our quasi-academic, textual-source-based and bureaucratic process is is alien and confusing to outsiders. The consensus-based stuff with distributed responsibility just adds another layer of confusion. ☆ Bri (talk) 03:25, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

    • All in favor of renaming Wikipedia as Encyclopedia Esoterica say "aye"! -Indy beetle (talk) 06:16, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

    The general public are almost wholly unaware that we have any limitation in scope: this is mostly flattering, as it indicates that readers really struggle to find a topic that we don't have information about. Unfortunately, this assumption that all information is welcome on Wikipedia leads to misplaced efforts by newcomers who think that any piece of information will be appreciated. In the nicest case, this is somebody doubling the length of a plot summary of a movie that was already too long. In the most confrontational, it's somebody adding a fact about a politician and then assuming that the removal must be politically motivated. — Bilorv (talk) 15:56, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

    Well, in fairness, we do tell them it's "The encyclopedia anyone can edit". ☆ Bri (talk) 16:54, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

    • To put a spin on an old Ratatouille quote: "Not anyone can be a great editor, but a great editor can come from anywhere." -Indy beetle (talk) 05:36, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

    When someone expresses a desire to be "in Wikipedia" my answer is, "Well, there are often difficulties and you appear to have one of the greater ones. Far as I can see you have, though no fault of your own, the misfortune of being a living person. For many purposes being a living person is a splendid thing, but for becoming the subject of a Wikipedia biography it's a handicap that most people cannot overcome." Two days ago, however, I found more effective the answer, "The most sure-fire ticket for becoming the subject of a Wikipedia article is an obituary in the New York Times. Not a paid death notice; a genuine obituary." Jim.henderson (talk) 16:10, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Interview: On a war and a map (651 bytes · 💬)

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• Open source, crowd-sourced intelligence at its finest! Map making was always beyond me, so it impresses me the work some our commons people do. -Indy beetle (talk) 23:45, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
• The animated version of the map would go well with the article, displaying the ongoing nature of the conflict and giving a sense of the work required to update the map. – robertsky (talk) 09:11, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

News and notes: Double trouble (4,080 bytes · 💬)

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New WMF Board selection process

• For more on the latest stage of what seems to me the progressive disenfranchisement of the volunteer community see the ongoing thread on Wikimedia-l. --Andreas JN466 21:45, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Backlog

• Could the problem with the page move backlog be a lack of motivated admins? We hit a new annual low of 449 earlier this month, by the way [1]. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:05, 24 April 2022 (UTC)
  • RMs are one of the many backlogs that don't need an admin to fix! Most of these moves don't even need page mover permissions to carry out. I used to work a lot in that area and maybe I need to get back to it. (t · c) buidhe 03:38, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

• The answer to the question "why has this backlog skyrocketed recently?" is usually "one extremely prolific volunteer burned out, has less free time or moved onto a different backlog". In the case of RM specifically, I would hazard a guess that it's multiple volunteers deciding to spend less time in the area because of how much energy it takes to make good closes in complex cases, and then deal with the fallout by somebody who is self-righteously furious (however you close it). — Bilorv (talk) 09:04, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

• Agree with Bilorv above. While buidhe is correct that non-admins can close RMs, doing so can be a pain without some kind of page mover permissions. Asking WP:RMT (technical move requests) for help on a couple of moves works—asking for more feels awkward. That said, shoutout to the attentive watchers of WP:RMT. You folks rock. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 14:07, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

• Speaking only for myself, I find the process at RM to be about as stimulating as an isolation tank. I don't know if there's a way to make it more engaging, but between the discussions being all over the place instead of an obvious location, the tedium of having to close the discussions (which isn't as technically easy as an AfD or similar), the utter triviality of even the most contentious ones, and the minefields it's all too easy to walk into (who knew that -, –, —, ~, and ^ could get people to foam at the mouth for years at a time?), I can't force myself to even try. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 16:01, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

  Does a requested-move-bot exist? Would that help make the process smoother for both nominators and closers? Ganesha811 (talk) 00:14, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

URFA/2020

Thanks for adding information about the working group's report. I have a correction to the Signpost's reporting: the article says, "In total 245 featured articles (FAs) were delisted during this period," However, the 245 delisted FAs are the number of articles delisted since the working group's creation. Thanks, Z1720 (talk) 13:36, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, corrected. 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 16:57, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

News from the WMF: How Smart is the SMART Copyright Act? (2,125 bytes · 💬)

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• I also wonder what implications there would be with regards to copyright fraud mills. Even Getty Images, a major player in photo distribution, takes photos in the public domain from the Library of Congress and sells "licensed" versions on their website. Even more good faith actors sometimes claim copyright on something that's debatable. How could tech tools distinguish this? -Indy beetle (talk) 23:54, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the officially recommended course of action for people negatively affected by things like this is "go to hell". There are lots of examples of, say, automatic DMCA warnings and terminations being given for musicians playing their own songs, people streaming video games that they have permission to stream (but which feature copyrighted music in some parts), and the greatest of all, literal silence. This does not seem to be a major obstacle to these systems being implemented, so I imagine it wouldn't be an obstacle if this were to be made law either. jp×g 03:35, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, as a friend of a couple people dealing with DMCA stuff, they're infuriating. For instance, one guy got a copyright claim for a video clip that didn't look anything like the video and (here's the best part) came out three months after his video! Like... come on, dude. XFalcon2004x (talk) 13:14, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

• If you want to do something dumb, label it "smart" and hope that it convinces people. See Smart motorway.   Maproom (talk) 20:40, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Recent research: Student edits as "civic engagement"; how Wikipedia readers interact with images (5,093 bytes · 💬)

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• It is disappointing that the researchers examining "quality" images on Commons chose to use Commons:Quality images as their benchmark of community consensus over what makes a high quality image. A simple query to the Commons community would have informed that that this was a useless measure of the quality of images as they appear as thumbnails in Wikipedia articles. The reasons are:
  • The Quality Image badge is only available for images generated by a user on Wikimedia Commons. The majority of images on Commons, and no doubt the majority used on Wikipedia, are not user generated. They may come from government sources, be old historical images, or otherwise scraped from another site like Flickr. Many images are also merely reproductions of an artwork.
  • The Quality Image criteria is not at all concerned with how great an image is from an artistic point of view. It need not have any "wow" at all. An straightforward view of some suburban railway station, with an overcast sky and a messy collection of commuters will get QI if accurately focused and exposed.
  • The technical requirements of QI are concerned with pixel-peeping the full-resolution image, not analysing the little thumbnail on Wikipedia. Many images that are somewhat out of focus or very noisy look fine in thumb.
  • There is a minimum resolution requirement for QI which is way above that necessary to produce a nice thumbnail.
  • Even for those images that are user-generated, it isn't like all of them have been judged, as only those who participate at QI tend to nominate their own images.
  • QI only requires the approval of a single judge (though there is scope to contest a vote). It is hard to say that a promotion represents community consensus vs the opinion of one random individual.

As a consequence, QI is more a forum to encourage Commons photographers to take and upload technically fine images taken with high quality equipment. It is in no way an attempt to categorise the body of images as being of high quality. -- Colin°^Talk 07:43, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

@Colin: Interesting points. Part of the justification of this approach in the paper includes the claim that "Only a few images make it to the “image quality” category: there is, therefore, a large consensus on the quality of the images in that category", which does seem to be a bit in tension with the process as you describe it. That said, your first bullet point might pose a bigger threat to the construct validity of the resulting image quality measure as used in the paper; at least I don't see an easy way to rule out the possibility that the underlying classifier overfits on, say, the image being a photo from a contemporary digital camera and other aspects that may be over-represented among images created by Commons users themselves.

CCing two of the paper's authors (those whose wiki accounts I was able to find via the research project page on Meta-wiki) in case they want to comment: @Miriam (WMF) and Daniram3:

Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:28, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

User:HaeB, I'm having difficulty processing your reply, working out which sentences you agree with me and which you don't or that you only partly agree. Could you rephrase it in more straightforward language and shorter sentences?

I clicked on Random Article a bunch of times and recorded the first 10 photographs that lead each article that had one. They are:

• File:191125 Taylor Swift at the 2019 American Music Awards (cropped).png Author: Cosmopolitan magazine. Taken from Youtube.
• File:Mikhail Darski.jpg Historical photo take from another website.
• File:PanoramicaStadioPinto.jpg User generated photo.
• File:Gerard van Velde portrait.JPG User generated photo.
• File:PeterJohannNepomukGeigerEroticWatercolor04.jpg (NSFW) Scan/photo of a historical artwork, taken from another website.
• File:Pictionary Party.jpg User generated photo.
• File:Alliance Films logo.JPG Corporate image. Non-free image not eligible to be hosted on Commons.
• File:Naturalis Biodiversity Center - RMNH.MAM.17371.b ven - lasiurus Ega Ega - skin.jpeg Donated photo from a museum.
• File:Throwing rocks (3843366278).jpg Photo scraped from Flickr.
• File:Murgoo2.png Historical photo take from another website.

Of the three user generated images, one is only 0.7MP so not valid for QI. Another is 2.08MP so barely valid. All three would not pass QI, even though all three serve a useful illustrative purpose as thumbnails in their articles. Mostly, being a useful illustration of the subject, and good-enough at thumb, is all that Wikipedia needs. The other seven images would not be valid at QI no matter how great they were. -- Colin°^Talk 18:41, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Serendipity: Wikipedia loves photographs, but hates photographers (7,329 bytes · 💬)

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• It's rather odd that an article about whether or not to modify MOS:CREDITS never links to that guideline. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:05, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
  • I wanted to await reactions, and propose a modification of MOS:CREDITS in the next edition of The Signpost, but I like the challenge here. The complete text on "Credits" in the Wikipedia Manual of Style is this: "Unless relevant to the subject, do not credit the image author or copyright holder in the article. It is assumed that this is not necessary to fulfill attribution requirements of the GFDL or Creative Commons licenses as long as the appropriate credit is on the image description page. If the artist or photographer is independently notable, though, then a wikilink to the artist's biography may be appropriate, but image credits in the infobox image are discouraged, even if the artist is notable, since the infobox should only contain key facts of the article's subject, per MOS:INFOBOX." Reactions welcome. I will give my reaction later. Vysotsky (talk) 11:37, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

    I think it can make sense in some situations, such as a famous portrait painter who made significant artistic decisions in how they depicted a subject. But I think you'd have a much harder time arguing that our coverage of e.g. a building is at all improved by adding text crediting in the caption the Wikipedian who took a photo of it. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:23, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

    • You might be right. But I found the photographs here within 5 minutes (and I don't want any Wikipedian photographer to be mentioned, just the ones having a Wikipedia entry. And for these photographers: not only when they have made "significant artistic decisons".) Vysotsky (talk) 20:34, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

• 
  Auction & Negro Sales (Atlanta 1856) (photo by George N. Barnard)
• 
  52nd Straat, New York (1948) (photo by William P. Gottlieb)
• 
  House in Lockland, Ohio (1944) (photo by Carl Mydans)
• 
  Plaza Islas Malvinas (Ushuaia, 2012) (photo by Christopher Michel)
• 
  Rijksmuseum A'dam (1945) (photo by Charles Breijer)

• As a photographer myself, it doesn't generally bother me too much to see one of my photos being used on a webpage or news article if my name is not immediately visible. So long as attribution is provided somewhere, even if it requires a click on the image to view, I'm fine with it. Some books credit the photographer of a photo in the caption; others save it for the appendix. I wouldn't say the latter approach is "hating" on the photographer, even though it does give the photographer less obvious recognition. I'm sure there are many other photographers that would think otherwise, though, and for perfectly valid reasons: in the age of the Internet, it's all too common to just swipe someone else's photo and use it without giving credit, or even recognizing that not all photos are free to use (and that choice should be respected). —k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 12:29, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
• Apropos "Many people assume that photos used in Wikipedia are “free to use”. They are ....", while the majority of images used in Wikipedia are licensed for reuse, it is worth mentioning there are some WP:NONFREE images in articles that are not, as identified on the file page for the image. The rationale for including a caption credit for these might be even stronger. 68.189.242.116 (talk) 15:46, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
• What brave person will design the WP:RfC to discuss this? Bluerasberry (talk) 21:46, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
• "The writers of the text of the Wikipedia articles aren’t mentioned either." ... "Photographers are artists, and artists deserve attribution." Writing good prose is an art form too and many Wikipedia editors devote hours to getting the wording of an article just right. Personally I'm all for giving clearer attribution to photographers (and other image creators - let's not forget the mapmakers, infographics creators etc.) but I'm finding it hard to come up with a good reason for limiting that attribution to images and not including the same requirement for text. WaggersTALK 10:08, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
  • Thanks for pointing out. I now tried to adapt my Dunglish a bit, and hope that's more to your taste. The reason for limiting attribution to images is clear: a photo is no teamwork -as text of Wiki articles is. Vysotsky (talk) 14:36, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
    • Vysotsky, A photo by itself is usually the work of one person, but to have it properly loaded on Commons, then Wikipedia, is teamwork (proper licence, a good description in many languages, proper use in articles, etc.). Wikipedia, Commons and all other wikis are like laboratories or factories : you need many persons to get the job done properly. Regards, Cantons-de-l'Est (talk) 18:45, 2 May 2022 (UTC)
• The comment about "the photographs by Mandelmann were at first even proposed for deletion!" is misleading. They weren't proposed for deletion because the nominator hated or neglected great photographers and wanted to strike a blow against ego or something. The nomination was that it wasn't clear that permission had really been granted. Now, it turned out that permission was there (if hiding somewhere not the image description page), but the substance of the nomination was fine: if the uploads really had been just ripping off a photographer who did not grant permission, then the pictures really should have been deleted. SnowFire (talk) 07:05, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

Special report: Ukrainian Wikimedians during the war (760 bytes · 💬)

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• Inspiring stories from Ukrainian Wikimedians, great report.--Vulcan❯❯❯Sphere! 21:52, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Good luck to the people featured. Clone commando sev (talk) 00:53, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

• This is fight for freedom! Thanks! ---Zemant (talk) 12:59, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Technology report: 8-year-old attribution issues in Media Viewer (5,603 bytes · 💬)

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SG attribution

From the use of the third person, I would never know unless I hovered over the abbreviated —SG signature that the Desktop Improvements project section was written by the WMF Desktop Improvements team's community relations specialist, not by a community member. It's far from ideal to have the team writing coverage of themselves rather than reporting on them independently, but it's understandable given the Signpost's perennial staff shortage. But when that happens, it's vital it be disclosed clearly and prominently. This was not. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 00:25, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

You're right, @Sdkb. For full disclosure, I contacted EpicPupper and had his acceptance for my direct contribution to the Signpost. It's... yeah, "sub-optimal", as they say, for me to write for the Signpost directly, as if it was a Diff blog post. I've added a clear "(WMF)" and I'm open to suggestions on how to further improve the situation in the future. (On a side note, hey, no bragging or anything, but I've been a community member since 2010, I just work for the WMF as well. :p ) Peace✌️ and see you at the office hours, I hope! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 01:41, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, SGrabarczuk (WMF). To be clear, I don't see anything warped in your write-up; my comment was directed at The Signpost based on the principle of it. For future instances, I think requiring that people writing about themselves use the first person and including footnote disclosures like here would be a reasonable approach for the publication to take. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:24, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

Media Viewer documentation

The release of the Media Viewer triggered one of the largest Wikimedia community protests in the history of the Wikimedia Movement. One side was Wikimedia community members with ethical and social concerns; paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation presented counter arguments to those concerns. I regret that in the end, the Wikimedia community did not set up documentation linking to its positions, and fear that the community's advocacy and organization will be forgotten in the future if it is not documented. If anyone were to set up an archive for discussing that activism, and perhaps connect the present request to that past activism, then I would join in talking, and I expect that others would also. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:53, 25 April 2022 (UTC)

This protests and concern of superprotect protection to force installing MediaViewer is imminent at that time. Thingofme (talk) 02:14, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Desktop Improvements

I'm opted in to see Desktop Improvements as soon as possible, and on the whole I think a very good job is being done. I've got quibbles, but I was no fan of the old display, which kept Wikipedia firmly in the year 2001. Doubtless the team will see more complaints than positive feedback, firstly because you only make the effort to contact them if you have a big complaint, and secondly because the community are really, really resistant to design changes. Reflecting on design changes to desktop is a good time to also think about how the mobile view looks: almost all editors work exclusively on desktop, but the mobile view of an article is at least as important as desktop. As editors, we have responsibility to think about how the articles we write look on mobile. — Bilorv (talk) 09:23, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Bilorv! You may be surprised to learn this (I would be) but honestly, we've been hearing a lot of pure enthusiasm (like "I only came here to say 'this rocks', bye") and constructive comments/requests. However, the more communities use our interface as default, the more likely any kind of negative feedback is. Some communities are also more challenging to talk to than others. So we have a nice mix of approaches and experiences. BTW, join our office hours if you'd like to talk more about the project! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:30, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

That's good to hear—the team definitely deserve the praise. I'm not generally the biggest fan of the WMF, but with the Desktop Improvements and the Growth Team features, there has been some fantastic stuff recently. — Bilorv (talk) 19:42, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Traffic report: Justice Jackson, the Smiths, and an invasion (678 bytes · 💬)

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The traffic report continues to show just how much of an impact major events have on our world, from the Oscars "Slap Heard 'Round the World" (seriously, this should have its own page with how much controversy it's caused!) to the War in Ukraine continuing to shape the way we look at politics and the world around us. Praying that soon we'll see the War in Ukraine at the top for an entirely different reason: the fact that it's over. XFalcon2004x (talk) 13:11, 2 May 2022 (UTC)