Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-08-29/News and notes

Trustees election delayed
You've got two more days – until 23:59 UTC August 31 – to cast your vote for the new community-elected Board of Trustee members. The start of the election period was delayed due to technical reasons for 14 days to August 18.

To vote, follow the link on Wikimedia Foundation elections/2021/Voting. In the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system you need to rank the candidates. Rank your favorite candidate 1, your 2nd favorite 2, and so forth, up to your 19th favourite (as there are 20 candidates). You only have to rank as many candidates as you want; the rest are treated as being equally unpreferred by you. You can't rank a candidate more than once, and you can't skip a ranking – for instance, you can't specify a 2nd-preferred candidate and a 4th-preferred candidate, leaving your third preference blank.

You'll likely want to rank at least four candidates, since that's the number of open seats on the board. The STV method being used for this election is designed to consider your preferences in order from most-preferred to least. If your favourite candidate isn't seated, your vote is transferred to your next favourite. In addition, once a candidate you voted for has enough votes to guarantee finishing in the top four (that is, has reached quota), a percentage of your vote is transferred to your next preferred choice. (See Meek STV Explained for more details.) -S, I

Portuguese IP ban on track
Last October Portuguese-language Wikipedians voted to require that editors register before editing. "IP editing" was effectively banned with the goal of reducing vandalism and improving the editing experience. The Wikimedia Foundation has been following the impact of the ban closely and issued its report last month. They "found no significant negative impact" on the health of the community and several positive impacts.

New user account registrations and the number of active editors on ptWiki have increased. Vandalism is down as indicated by a decline in the number of reverts. Also administrator actions for page protections and blocks are down over 70%. User retention shows no trend.

The impact on the number of edits is unclear. The total number of edits has decreased but the decline is at least partially explained by decreases in reverts and bot edits. Without these edits being included in the data, year-on-year edits declined during the first six months of the study period, but increased during the final three months.

Editor comments were requested and indicated that 14 editors supported the ban, four opposed it, and one was neutral. The report recommends that ptWiki be allowed to continue the IP editing ban for now, along with continued data collection and study. Two more Wikipedia projects might be allowed to conduct "similar experiments" but "the experience of a single wiki should not be used as decisive evidence." -S

Committee members needed for movement charter!
Editors are invited to nominate themselves until September 14th for a spot on a drafting committee. As noted on the meta page, "the Movement Charter defines the roles and responsibilities for all in the Wikimedia Movement. It will be a shared framework for working together toward the Strategic Direction." In other words, if you want to shape Wikipedia's Future by using lots of Nouns that are capitalized in the Middle of Sentences, this is your chance! Polish up your word choice skills in a way that really matters, rather than wasting your inner bureaucrat on your actual job. Only a few more days to get your name in there, in all seriousness, so take a look and see if you can volunteer your time to help out the movement. – G

"The Wikimedia Foundation broke Russian Wikinews again"
A discussion was held at User talk:Jimbo Wales concerning the resolution to a back-end performance issue and its impact on Russian Wikinews (which is also available in the English language). According to WMF staff, dynamic page lists (DPL) had to be disabled to preserve several S3-hosted wikis. The related Phabricator ticket shows a list of hosts that does not include English Wikipedia but does include a number of related projects including English Wikinews, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks.

More technical details are available at Incident documentation/2021-07-26 ruwikinews DynamicPageList. – B

Policy, or dead cat?
Is the English Wikipedia's paid-editing disclosure policy fully signed off by the community? One commenter at the talkpage (linked from WP:Village Pump (policy)) doesn't think so: I don't think the way forward is a Schrödinger's cat-like state where the page is a policy in minds of some, not in the minds of others, and enforced as a "Wikipedia policy with legal considerations" regardless due to the banner at the top. It's either a policy or it isn't. The Signpost notes that an RfC on new disclosure requirements for freelance paid editors was closed on November 19 as having resulted in consensus to add language about mandatory disclosure of paid editing accounts in advertising and in communications directly to clients. – B

A successful AfC backlog cleanup drive
The backlog at WP:Articles for creation went down from 4,156 to 0 during the July drive. – S

Graph from WP:AfC

Brief notes

 * A distinct lack of RfAs: Thus far this year there have been only eight requests for adminship, and only six have succeeded! At this rate, 2021 will certainly become the year with the fewest new admins and fewest candidacies, beating 2018 (10 for 18). Why? It's hard to say, but it may be that the RfA process has become known as a bit of a minefield. Still, with over 1000 admins and 471 active, we're not in danger of running out of sysops yet. Barkeep49 has initiated a review of the RfA process, with the first phase seeking views on what the broad issues with the process are.