Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-02/News and notes



Working together on the problem of online harassment
As reported on the Wikimedia blog in a post titled "Working together on the problem of online harassment in Wikimedia communities", the Wikimedia Foundation is currently conducting the first community-wide harassment consultation, asking community members to contribute their ideas:

At the time of this writing, the page contains 22 proposals from community members.

The consultation follows last month's harassment survey conducted in 16 languages.

An online harassment resource guide focusing on scholarly literature and reports by organizations is available on Meta, offering a broad overview and starting point to scholars, advocates, and practitioners working to understand and respond to online harassment.

High voter turnout at ArbCom elections
This year's Arbitration Committee elections are seeing substantially higher voter turnout than in previous years, a reflection of the use of mass messaging to notify volunteers eligible to vote. SecurePoll's voters' list shows 2,778 votes cast at the time of this writing (including some repeat votes from users who changed their votes). Last year's ArbCom elections, by comparison, attracted just 593 valid votes.

The population of voters taking part also appears to shape up very differently from past years. According to an analysis by, herself a candidate in the election, the percentage of voters with relatively few contributions (150–5,000 edits) is markedly higher this year. However, early fears that the mass messaging would attract large numbers of voters who had not edited the English Wikipedia in years and were consequently out of touch with the project seem to have been disconfirmed. According to a post by Opabinia regalis on 1 December 2015, based on data available at the time, only 162 voters would have been filtered out by a "must have edited Wikipedia in the last three months before the election" eligibility criterion.

The elections are scheduled to close at 23:59 (UTC) on Sunday, December 6, 2015. 

Brief notes

 * Wikimania scholarships: Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2016 are being accepted 5 Dec 2015–9 Jan 2016. Please consider applying. To learn more about Wikimania 2016 scholarships, please visit: here. To apply for a scholarship, fill out the application form: here.
 * Community Wishlist Survey: Voting on the proposals in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey is ongoing and will continue until December 14.