Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-09-16/News and notes

Global Council draft comes under fire from European Wikimedians
The Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) recently invited feedback on the latest draft chapters for the Movement Charter (which aims "to define roles and responsibilities for all the members and entities of the Wikimedia movement"):


 * The Global Council draft chapter was published on July 12, 2023;
 * The draft chapters for regional and thematic "hubs" (defined as "a type of support structure to enable a common space for coordinating activities and identifying and advocating for the needs of the communities and organizations they serve") and a Glossary were published on July 21, 2023; and
 * The Roles & Responsibilities draft chapter was published on August 8, 2023.

The discussion page for the Global Council draft saw the most participation. This included some strong criticism, especially from European Wikimedians. A key point of contention was that the Global Council, as envisaged in the draft, would only have advisory powers. Former WMF board member User:Jan-Bart, for example, said:

Wikimedia Sweden added:

A summary of German Wikipedia community discussions by User:Denis Barthel said:

Mysterious "external legal feedback"
Another key point of contention was an "external legal feedback" shared by the WMF, authored by an undisclosed law firm advising the drafting committee:

Wikimedia Germany suggested that alternative legal advice should be sought:

The use of unclear or meaningless buzzwords was another point of criticism. Overall, the feedback pages for Hubs and Roles & Responsibilities saw somewhat less participation. The Hubs draft also received some praise from community members. Even so, questions and concerns about fundraising and funds dissemination were recurring topics on both feedback pages. – AK

WMF reconsiders Africa approach
The Wikimedia Foundation is piloting a new approach to contributor growth in Africa (see presentation, pictured), noting that past approaches aimed at increasing coverage of African topics – and thus the amount of time African citizens spend online reading internet coverage of African affairs – have been hit and miss.

Recent projects have included contests such as Wiki Loves Africa 2023 and the Africa Day Campaign 2023, whose winners were announced at the end of August.

Some initiatives have caused controversy, such as the $20,000 project on Deforestation in Nigeria that was discussed at the WP:ANI noticeboard last month.

The WMF's of its efforts, and the opportunities and challenges involved in Africa (presented at last month's Wikimania conference), highlights the importance of intrinsic motivation:

Similar concerns about attracting mainly extrinsically motivated contributors go back to at least 2010, when Tanzania-based Wikipedian Muddyb expressed his deep frustrations about finding himself cleaning up the results of a Google-funded initiative that awarded prizes for adding content to Swahili Wikipedia. (See "In the news" from the July 26, 2010 issue of The Signpost.)

The Foundation's analysis also highlights that "Too much programmatic outreach work in the region is ineffectively carried out by volunteers who have insufficient familiarity" with the platform, the policies (e.g. on copyright and licensing) and the culture of Wikimedia projects. Accordingly, the pilot aims to test the hypothesis that audiovisual training materials on core policies along with live tutorials can achieve significantly higher retention.

The pilot is currently limited to the English Wikipedia and envisaged to run from September to December 2023. – AK, H

WMF publishes 2022–2023 Funding Report
The Wikimedia Foundation last month published its Funding Report for the last fiscal year:

Below are some key graphics from the report. First, an overview of grants and grant money by fund program:

Regional breakdown of funding administered by the Community Resources team, 2015–2023:

Overview of WMF-distributed funds not managed by the Community Resources team:

For further details see Meta-Wiki. – AK

Code of conduct committee draft charter ready for review
The U4C Building Committee has announced:

The committee's language use was mocked as "highly bureaucratic and unnecessarily hard to follow". Some commenters stated that the language stopped them from reading the draft in full. – AK

User enamored with ChatGPT gets indefinitely blocked
An editor was indeffed after extensive use of AI-generated text, including for using ChatGPT to request restoration of their article. In fact, their response in the related AN/I noticeboard discussion also appeared to be the product of ChatGPT.

This may be the first instance of an indefinite block stemming specifically from the use of the technology in talkpages. A commenter at ANI called their reply posting AI-generated waffle. On the other hand, an after-closure discussion started by the author of this article included this observation from another: there's no guideline or policy banning empty blather.

In June, another editor had been indeffed for using ChatGPT in articles alone, with paid editing as the underlying concern. Some investigation of the incident found a probable paying party and turned up the possibility that the whole episode was an elaborate hoax, based on their off-wiki writings; one participant in the discussion said they found a comment off-wiki stating I pay people to waste the time of volunteers who have innumerable things they'd rather be doing. Was the latest case a prank? We can't tell. – B

A fork in the Roads WikiProject
On September 7, the "AARoads Wiki" was launched, "a free online encyclopedia dedicated to roads", forming part of the existing aaroads.com website. According to an announcement post on the site's forum, "The team making up the core of the US Roads WikiProject on Wikipedia [ WikiProject U.S. Roads] has moved over to the new wiki". An FAQ for the new wiki states that "much of the content was forked from the English Wikipedia in mid-2023," and that "After several months of extended discussions and uneven enforcement of policies towards the road subject area, many felt that starting a new project with a new community solely focused on road transportation would be a more viable option. A sampling of such discussions can be found here and here." (The latter, an RfC titled "Using maps as sources", had concluded in May and resulted in the addition of a clarification that "Source information does not need to be in text form" to No_original_research. However, other proposals were rejected in the RfC.) In an emotional TikTok video (which has attracted 48k likes at the time of writing), one of the seceding editors explains the underlying concerns in more detail, arguing that "in the past couple of years, our little corner of the site [Wikipedia] has come under attack [... for] two reasons: sourcing and notability". An earlier FAQ by another longstanding member of the U.S. Roads WikiProject sheds further light on some longstanding tensions. – H

Brief notes

 * Annual reports: Les sans pagEs, Wikimedians for Offline Wikis User Group
 * Global bans:
 * Alex-h, since 8 August 2023
 * ParadaJulio, since 8 August 2023
 * Ypatch, since 8 August 2023
 * Idealigic, since 8 August 2023
 * Роман Беккер, since 23 August 2023
 * Belteshazzar, since 4 September 2023
 * Doxastic1000 / Researcher1000, since 5 September 2023
 * OvskMendov1, since 5 September 2023
 * Pokelova, since 5 September 2023
 * Drummyfish, since 5 September 2023
 * Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement (beginning 11 September) is Antebellum South. It will be followed the week after by Juice. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
 * Proposed changes to Arbcom election procedures: Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2023 will be open until 30 September