Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-01/From the archives

Five years ago: December 2017
WIKIPEDIANS IN SPACE!: Paolo Nespoli records himself aboard the International Space Station, the first creation of content specifically for Wikipedia to happen outside the Earth's atmosphere. The Women in Red WikiProject held a contest that blasted through their original plan to create 2,000 new articles and ended up with around 2,900 new articles on women who had been left off the project.

We also interviewed Charles J. Sharp, a prolific photographer here and on Commons. Here's a few samples, and the full interview is here Someone told me anyone could edit Wikipedia, so on 29 October 2006 I uploaded a few photos into articles. The one of my son skiing has remained the 'main' article image for nearly ten years. I started taking photos when I was very young, then took up wildlife photography more seriously when I retired and remarried. We both share a passion for wildlife (and travel). I set up galleries on my Commons User pages and started submitting images for Quality Image and Valued Image status. Then I learnt that someone had submitted one of the first photos I had taken with my new camera set up to be Picture of the Day in France in 2014 and English Wikipedia Featured Picture in 2015. I don't stake out animals and wait for hours for them to appear like many professionals. I'm more of a wildlife portrait photographer and just hope something interesting happens when my camera's ready. We were moving around a lake in Kenya in 2016 when we saw a giant kingfisher catch a fish and moved closer to the pole where it was perched. The sequence I took of the bird smashing the fish against the post to break its spine so it could swallow it was a nice bit of luck.

Ten years ago: December 2012
We already covered the history of the Toolserver saga in some detail back in October, but things were particularly bad this month: The same report that covered MediaWiki's update covered DaB. agreeing to stay and help out, but by Christmas Eve everything was in crisis again.

Visual Editor, the now-rather-good default functionality that allows you to edit without knowing Wikiformatting, launched ten years ago this month as an opt-in process. We'll cover the many problems of its launch as the window moves forwards, but long story short: It was pushed out too aggressively, too soon, too early in development, and that caused a lot of issues that overshadowed it being a really good idea.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened 14 December 2012. Back then we used to edit our articles to update them, so there's a bit of overlap, but we had an op-ed on the 17th and an update on the 31st. It seems madness today that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was repeatedly nominated for deletion, but how much and when Wikipedia should cover recent news, since encyclopædias traditionally couldn't do that, was still a matter of debate back then. Of course, that it would still be in the news ten years later thanks to the Alex Jones trials couldn't have been predicted back then, nor how normalised school shootings happening would become.

In a lighter vein, an interview with Brion Vibber, the Wikimedia Foundation's first employee. It documents Wikipedia's early development, and a film school graduate who got pulled into the world of tech through Wikipedia.

However, given the report in today's (New Year's Day 2023) issue about the mobile interface, that it focuses heavily on how well and how quickly the mobile interface was coming together is somewhat ironic.

Finally, we had a "From the Editor" which began: "You wouldn't recognise a fact if it bit you in the ass"; "eat your 'fucking' crow"; "[you are] an ignorant idiot"; "If you get testicle cancer or become a transsexual, then estrogen ... could enlarge and improve the mammary function of your breasts."; "are you a pedophile?"

"I'm sorry if that's considered a personal attack, but it's just true."

In the interests of clickbait, I shan't explain.

Fifteen years ago: December 2007
This... was a big month for Wikipedia. First off, in 2007, Jimbo was still in charge of basic things, and, in December, could be found appointing arbitrators and ruling, by himself, that inactivity was enough for an arbitrator to be removed from the position. Also around the start of the month Sue Gardner was appointed executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2007, a job she would keep until 2014, and The Signpost, naturally, had an interview with her. Well worth reading!

On the technical side, after Commons had began accepting Creative Commons licenses a few months before, the first seeds of Wikipedia switching to Creative Commons were sown, but it literally required an update to the GDFL license Wikipedia was licensed under for the switch to be able to happen, which it eventually did in June 2009. On the even-more-technical side, the number of uses of the #ifexist parser function on a single page had to be curtailed because it was creating such a heavy load on Wikipedia's servers and better options existed, which just goes to show that if you give people access to a really simple-to-use bit of code, you'd better expect them to abuse it. Also, Google Knol launched, which arguably was the first forays into what would eventually become those Wikipedia-based infoboxes Google puts on searches, albeit as an attempt to compete with Wikipedia that died five years later, in 2012.

Meanwhile, over on German Wikipedia, Wikipedia had a criminal complaint filed against it for using too many Nazi symbols while talking about Nazis, on the basis of German's law against using Nazi symbols except for educational purposes. Yeah. We don't seem to have updated on The Signpost, but it appears that " [a] fter a conversation with Wikimedia representatives, Schubert withdrew her complaint the next day".

And, finally, Antonio Santiago (User:Marine 69-71/Tony the Marine) was honoured by the Puerto Rican senate for his work documenting Puerto Ricans on Wikipedia.