Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-06-08/News and notes

The New York Times, NPR and Reuters block Wikipedia editors from citing their articles

 * Re: citoid - how much traffic could Wikipedia editors adding citations possibly be generating? Or does it refer to people subsequently using those links to click through to the news/journal sites? Because that would seem to be a boon to them, not a burden. It's a bit odd either way! —Ganesha811 (talk) 12:50, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Important information would be how many requests is it actually making, and how many unique requests is it making (e.g. is citoid trying to load the same article over and over again, or something like that). Hard to know if the block is reasonable or not without this info. If its not going to change, maybe citoid could as a backup look at the internet archive version of articles. Bawolff (talk) 19:55, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not a techie, but the only thing I can think of to explain this would be something related to this Signpost story Could it be Valentine's Day? Smallbones( smalltalk ) 13:51, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, hold on. Where's the evidence of that 90 million hits per day? When did it happen? Is it an ongoing issue? More details please. Risker (talk) 15:12, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The Signpost link I gave above links to a Vice story (Feb. 21, 2021) that should answer much more than I could even attempt. It does quote Chris Albon, director of Machine Learning at Wikimedia, who seems to have been around recently. Smallbones( smalltalk ) 16:05, 13 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The flower image was being used by a company's mobile app to check for internet connectivity on launch, so it probably isn't directly relevant to this story. CAlbon (WMF) (talk) 15:08, 17 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I have not had any issues on those sites using WP:ProveIt, fwiw. Mach61 12:07, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

A WMF update:

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:53, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The headline The New York Times, NPR and Reuters block Wikipedia editors from citing their articles is seriously misleading because the problem is limited to editors using the visual editor and Citoid. I use the source editor and citation templates, and have no problem creating references to these publications. I may be wrong, but I believe that most highly productive editors use the source editor. Is there evidence to the contrary? Cullen328 (talk) 17:47, 10 June 2024 (UTC)


 * http://citer.toolforge.org/ is still working fine for NPR (t &#183; c)  buidhe  14:00, 12 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Hi, y'all – for people interested in understanding what the WMF is doing to ensure people can reliably use Citoid to generate citations, please see T362379. Specifically, the section within that task's description titled Strategy and State. If anything you see there brings questions/ideas to mind, we'd value knowing. Oh, and I'm Peter. I work as the product manager on the Editing_team; we're responsible for Citoid, the VisualEditor, DiscussionTools, and Edit check.PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

New administrators

 * The RfA for was closed as successful 16:37, 7 June 2024, after we finished writing this article and just a few hours before our actual publication. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:43, 10 June 2024 (UTC)