Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/From the archives

The Signpost was founded in 2005, as the Wikipedia Signpost. Whether published weekly, monthly or bimonthly, it is worth looking back over the past five, ten, or fifteen years of Signpost publishing. The Signpost is, without doubt, the most independent and reliable publication available to date.

Five years ago: January 2018
There's an interesting report about a seemingly active attempt to edit Brigid Hughes out of the history of The Paris Review. However, our big story that month was an interview with Ser Amantio di Nicolao, who was (and remains) the top contributor to Wikipedia by edit count. At the time, he had over two million edits; he now has over five million, nearly double the edit count of BrownHairedGirl in second place. Here's a couple samples: How did you come to Wikipedia?

Oh, Lord...been so long I hardly remember. I was in college back when Wikipedia got started, and like a lot of us early adopters I can recall seeing it creeping up the ranks of the Google search results as I was doing research for class. I remember seeing the tagline, "the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit", and honestly rolling my eyes at it a bit – it all sounded too good to be true. But it kept seeming to get more popular, and somewhere in 2004 I started making a few IP edits. That was back when IPs could create articles, too, and I created one on Peter Francisco that June. (I probably shouldn't admit to this, but he's my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather...I still think he's notable, though. :-) ) I created a couple of others (Francisco's Fight, Francis Salvador) and sort of kept popping in and out over the next couple of years, creating a couple of accounts, making a handful of edits, forgetting passwords, etc. Finally, in January 2006 (my last semester of college) I created my current account (as AlbertHerring) and affixed to it a password that I was sure of remembering. I did a few more edits than usual, but with finals, graduation, and the job search I let it slide again. Looking back over my contributions, I find that I was reasonably active until the beginning of 2007, which is when I got my first job. I didn't really begin editing in earnest until late in the year, when they finally installed a computer at my desk and when I started having some downtime between phone calls (I was an office assistant for a tour company.) It was about that time that Dr. Blofeld was beginning his campaign of mass-adding the communes of France; I saw a way that I could do a fairly large level of useful work, and followed suit. Haven't looked back since. :-)

How has Wikipedia changed in your time here? I think it's become much less-welcoming to new members; I applaud efforts to change that, but I think we've got a lot of work to do yet. Bureaucracy has become more of a hassle than it used to be. More arcane, too – I think there are vast swaths of behind-the-scenes stuff that confuse even established editors, let alone new ones.

There has been a much more concerted attempt at addressing the variations of systemic bias...we still have a lot of work to do, but I think we've made incredible strides over the past few years.

The whole article is well worth reading, but the nice thing about a wiki is that you can dangle a taster and then hyperlink the rest.

Ten years ago: January 2013
We started the year with a Op-Ed, "Meta, where innovative ideas die", detailing the problems and benefits of that vitally important but very poorly attended sister site. We also predicted 2013 would be the year of "Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor", which was largely true, although given the disastrous launch of the Visual Editor later that year, one of those wouldn't be for the right reasons. I don't think we talk about Lua enough, though: Lua is a programming language that got added in to Wikipedia via MediaWiki and managed to replace a lot of complicated workarounds used by templates with more elegant code. I'm not even sure its full potential has appeared yet; for example: Could we use Lua to make filling out forms for our featured content candidates easier by, for example, letting people choose which category they want to file the featured content into from a list before starting the nomination? Wikivoyage launched 15 January, and we attempted reform of Requests for Adminship. However, the saddest story was the death of Aaron Swartz, who died by suicide after downloading content from JSTOR, not disseminating it, reaching an agreement to delete the files, and then being prosecuted for it anyway:

Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26.

Aaron wore many Internet hats during his life. At the age of just 14 he played a key role in the initial RSS specification. While still a teenager, he served on the RDF core working group at the World Wide Web Consortium, defined the RDF XML content type and founded Infogami, which quickly merged with the social news and entertainment website, Reddit. Around the same time, he was part of the team that started Creative Commons.

In 2006 he ran into controversy for downloading and posting the bibliographic metadata of every book in the Library of Congress, which was in the public domain but available only for a fee. A more serious controversy occurred in 2008 when he downloaded about 20% of the entire PACER database, which allows public access to public domain US federal court documents, although ironically this required users to pay a fee. By taking advantage of a pilot program offering free access at certain public libraries, Aaron was able to download nearly two million documents before his access was revoked. He posted these documents openly on the Internet, prompting an FBI investigation, but no charges were ever filed. In 2010, he co-founded the Internet activist organization Demand Progress, which played a central role in the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), alongside Aaron's separate, personal contributions to the debate.

In July 2011, Aaron was charged with four felonies, three stemming from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. At issue was his use of an automated program to download 4.8 million scholarly articles from JSTOR by deploying the network infrastructure of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (Signpost coverage). Ironically, Aaron did not disseminate any of the files, and after he handed over to JSTOR the copies he had made, the digital library settled "any civil claims [it] may have had".

These felony charges could have sent Aaron to prison for 35 years and have fined him more than $1 million. Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor overseeing the case, said "stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." In September, the government added nine charges, moving the total from four to thirteen felonies, which could have put Aaron behind bars for more than 50 years, with a fine of $4 million dollars.

On January 9, Ortiz's office rejected an arrangement that would have kept Aaron out of prison. Two days later, he was found dead in his New York apartment.

Tributes and a rather deeply felt comment section can be found here.

Fifteen years ago: January 2008
Kind of a quiet month. From a Signpost perspective, perhaps the most notable thing was WikiWorld, that long running comic series, starting to reach its end. On 28 January 2008 we announced, "WikiWorld has ceased its weekly schedule, but will continue to run occasional new comics, as well as 'classic' previously-published comics." In fact, new comics would come to an end by the end of the year. I'm sure CommonsComix will one day follow suit. Or be opened up to more creators.

In Wikipedia news, the big announcements were the "controversial" creation of rollback rights, which lets one instantly revert an edit with a click of a link, if you're trustworthy enough to be given the right. Rollback is now pretty uncontroversial, and a boon to vandal fighters.

Secondly, two articles detailed the new parser preprocessor, which, not remembering the 2007-era parser is kind of hard to fully grasp. It did give the new #iferror parserfunction, though, so that's something.

Finally, we interviewed User:John Broughton, who had just written  The Missing Manual. This would later be released under a free license and incorporated into the help pages of Wikipedia.