Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-03-29/News and notes

Farkhad Fatkullin banned, unbanned, rebanned, re-unbanned on Tatar Wikipedia
2018 Wikipedian of the year Farkhad Fatkullin was banned on the Tatar Wikipedia for a post on Phabricator on August 21, 2019. As of March 29, discussions continue in Tatar, Russian, and English on this page. The Signpost has not been able to contact all parties involved, so this report should be considered preliminary.

In 2018, Jimmy Wales said, "Farkhad is energetically community organizing among Russia's minority languages communities, going far and wide beyond his native Tatar. He is also fluent in English, a fact that has established a bridge between those communities and the wider movement after years of isolation."

Fatkullin's views in September are expressed on his Tatar user page in both Russian and English. He recently told The Signpost that he is "quite busy around Wikimedia Language Diversity (Meta), Wiki-Smart Tatarstan (Wikimedia RU) & wider Wiki-Smart Region (Meta), so I don't at all have time to feel wiki-exclusion."

According to this log Fatkulin appears to have been rebanned and re-unbanned on March 29.

contributed to this article. —S

Brief notes

 * A pilot social media traffic report gives statistics on traffic referred to Wikipedia articles from the social media sites Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube. The pilot is expected to last 1–3 months, and may help to design a permanent database of such referrals. One hope is that having such a database may aid in patrolling damaging edits coming from disinformation campaigns on the social media sites. See meta:Research:Social media traffic report pilot for further information and Social media traffic report for the data from March 27.
 * Guy is back: The community was notified on March 8 by a family member of requests for adminship (RfA) candidate Guy Macon that the candidate had experienced a health incident on March 3, while the RfA was in progress. The RfA was marked "unsuccessful" on March 5. Guy returned from an editing hiatus on March 12 to that he was recovering and "As a general response to the oppose !votes, I will be studying them and seeing what I can learn ... don't expect any 2nd RfA any time soon."
 * WikiCred, a project started at the WikiConference North America 2019, bills itself as Wikimedians Strengthening Knowledge and News Credibility on the Internet. The Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, and Microsoft fund the project. WikiCred offers microgrants (from $250 to $10,000) for pilot projects to help support internet credibility using Wikimedia. The microgrants can be awarded to individuals or teams. The first deadline to apply is April 6, 2020.
 * New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this week's newest Wikimedia movement affiliates:
 * Wikigrannies User Group (Вики-бабушки "wiki-babushkas") – official language Bashkir
 * Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group – official languages Turkish and Turkic
 * Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group
 * Wikimedia Community User Group CEE [Central and Eastern Europe] Spring
 * Wikimedians for Sustainable Development
 * Myanmar Wikimedia Community User Group – official language Burmese
 * New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Cabayi and Lee Vilenski.
 * Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this month:
 * Ukrainian Wikipedia: 1 million articles on March 22 (details in Ukrainian, details in Russian)
 * Dutch Wikipedia: 2 million on March 8