Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-10-19/News and notes

The 2024 election for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation is now complete. Preliminary results were announced earlier this week. 12 candidates ran for 4 Community- and Affiliate-selected Trustee seats in this election. The vote was conducted using a single transferable vote system, which transfers votes from eliminated candidates after each round to the voter's next preferred candidate.

The four candidates with the most votes were –

• Christel Steigenberger (User:Kritzolina, candidate statement)
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz (User:Nadzik, candidate statement)
• Victoria Doronina (User:Victoria, candidate statement)
• Lorenzo Losa (User:Laurentius, candidate statement)

These four winning candidates will need to pass a background check and have all other bylaw requirements confirmed before they can be officially appointed at the board's December meeting.

Two of them (Doronina and Losa) are already on the board and were re-elected. The election came not long after the board's controversial refusal to ratify the "Movement Charter" after it had been worked on over several years (Signpost coverage: "Wikimedia community ratifies Movement Charter, Wikimedia Foundation rejects ratification"). As one Wikimedian noted on the Foundation-l mailing list: "Victoria and Lorenzo, who were greatly associated with the Movement Chart BoT veto some months ago, were reelected by the community, despite many predictions that they would suffer a big backlash for making public their positions, and a number of people was quick to predict their certain removal from office, especially Victoria."

A visual representation of the vote is given by the Sankey diagram above. Incoming Board member Nadzik also analysed some voting statistics on this page on Meta.

Congratulations to the winners and our thanks to the other candidates who ran in the election: Bobby Shabangu, Deon Steyn, Erik Hanberg, Farah Jack Mustaklem, Lane Rasberry, Mohammed Awal Alhassan, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, and Tesleemah Abdulkareem. – Sb, H, S

After a year of fewer RFAs, a flood of candidates have signed up in the upcoming trial of Administrator elections. With the call for candidates having closed on 14 October, 35 candidates will be seeking to be elected (or re-elected) as administrator. The full list of candidates can be found on the respective AELECT subpage.

There were a total of 14 RFAs this year until October. Considering AELECT, this brings 2024 to 49, reversing a multi-year trend of fewer admin candidates in successive years. The latest year with more RFAs was 2015, with 53 candidates over the year.

However, it is not clear how many of said candidates will end up passing. It has been nearly a couple decades since the community last dealt with so many RFAs at once. The elections will also use private voting via SecurePoll, which may skew the results.

The discussion phase will be open for 72 hours, from 22 to 24 October. Anyone may ask questions at the election subpages, and candidates are "encouraged" to reply. Voting begins from 25 October and will continue till 31 October, closing at 23:59 UTC. After three days for discussion and questions, the candidate pages will be closed for discussion, and voting begins.

Admin elections and other RFA reform efforts were last covered by The Signpost in the 26 September issue. – S

Note: This section was prepared before the large number of applicants emerged for the administrator elections trial.

In prior Signpost coverage we discussed the declining number of active administrators:

• 2019-07-31 (first time under 500 active administrators)
• 2019-12-27 first time under 500 for a month
• 2023-01-01 first time under 500 for a year
• 2023-10-23 first time under 450
• 2023-12-04 more records in the 440s
• 2024-03-29 another new record: 441
• 2024-07-04 more records in the 430s
• 2024-07-22 another new record: 430
• 2024-09-04 another new record: 427
• 2024-09-26 another new record: 419

Now, on 7 October, Rick Bot has recorded 418 active administrators, another record low count. The monthly averages of data reported by the bot daily were:

2024

Period	daily average
January	465.7
February	473.3
March	448.2
April	438.3
May	438.3
June	434.6
July	435.4
August	432.5
September	425.4
October	421.0[a 1]

For comparison, using same methodology, the average number of active administrators in the past several years (also shown in a chart created earlier through mid 2019) was:

Other years

Period	daily average
2017	543.0
2018	528.6
2019	515.1
2020	508.3
2021	487.2[b 1]
2022	470.0
2023	464.1

A trend of declining numbers of active administrators is apparent in both the monthly and annual sets of data. If no more changes occurred after the 10 October data cutoff date, then 2024 would tally a loss of 43 over the 2023 average. The next greatest annual decline in this table was about half as many: -21.1 between 2020 and 2021. – B

On September 27, Brazilian Wikimedian João Alexandre Peschanski was revealed to be one of the over 150 international researchers who co-signed a collective op-ed that deemed disinformation to be "one of the biggest short-term threats to humanity", and called for more protection and easier access to online data for those who study it and its perceived impact on public opinion.

This is a notable bit of news, since Peschanski—also known on-wiki as Joalpe—currently serves as the executive director of the Wiki Movement Brazil User Group, an association founded in 2013 and regularly affiliated to the Wikimedia Foundation since 2019.

The op-ed is available in several languages, including Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese, and has been re-published by several media outlets. – O

The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) was appointed this week. This council was introduced as a one-year pilot program as part of Board of Trustees' three proposals in lieu of the Movement Charter.

Apart from WMF CPTO Selena Deckelmann and other WMF staff, the council includes:

• EPorto WMB and one more affliate member
• Eugene233
• Lahi
• Putnik
• Sohom Datta
• TheDJ
• GorillaWarfare
• FJMustak
• Benjamin Mako Hill

According to the initial proposal, the 8 volunteer members would include 5 at-large technical contributors and 3 Wikipedia volunteers, at least one of who would be from the English Wikipedia. While it's not clear which category each selection was for, 4 volunteers have English Wikipedia as their most edited project – Sohom Datta, TheDJ, GorillaWarfare (also admin and OS), Benjamin Mako Hill.

PTAC was last covered by The Signpost in the 14 August issue. – S

The WMF published two bulletins since our latest Signpost issue – one for late September and early October respectively.

Of note were The Power of the Commons, an event hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and other organizations as part of The Summit of the Future at the Headquarters of the United Nations and an new change to Wikidata Query Service.

Highlights from the October issue include a mail from the "Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee" and its mapping exercises (Spoilers: They'll collect feedback until January 2025).

More notably, nominations are currently open for positions on AffCom, Ombuds commission and the trust and safety Case Review Committee. AffCom plays an advisory role in official accession of new affiliates to the movement; the ombudsfolk are tasked with investigate complaints about infringements of the WMF privacy policy and related policies by CheckUsers, oversighters and others with access to sensitive user data, and the case review committee represents the community for appeals of certain trust and safety office actions. Applications for the Affiliations Committee close on November 18, 2024, and applications for the Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee close on December 2, 2024.

Wikimedia Foundation has filed an amicus brief in a Mexican case known as Richter v. Google – more information about the case here, it is compared to Section 230 in the United States. Although Mexico does not have statutory Section 230 protections, the Internet Society says that they are subject to similar content moderation restrictions and protections due to international treaties with the U.S. and Canada.

– B, S

The Wikimedia Foundation announced a new round of grants from its Knowledge Equity Fund (see previous Signpost coverage), awarding "13 organizations in 10 countries, supporting work to address knowledge gaps and create and share new knowledge" with $1.362 million in total.

It also published impact reports for some of the Round 2 grantees announced in August 2023, and noted some highlights from three such reports:

• Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara ("Alliance of the Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago", AMAN) – Indonesia ($200,000 USD): Final narrative report, Final financial report
  • "They organized three training sessions for indigenous and citizen journalists in North Sumatra, Riau, and Nusa Bunga. They report that 'in 2023, as many as 154 articles have been written by indigenous journalists (JMA) and published on their website. The traffic involved 3,728 users with 20,537 reactions on the website (clicks, shares, comments, etc).' [...]"
• Black Cultural Archives – United Kingdom ($290,000): Interim narrative report
• Criola – Brazil (a civil society organization dedicated to advocating for the rights of Black women in Brazilian society, $160,000): Final narrative report
• Data for Black Lives – United States ($100,000): Final narrative report
• Create Caribbean ("the first digital humanities center in the Caribbean", based in Dominica, $75,000): no reports posted yet
  • "They received 60 nominations to their public call for participants for their oral history project. The team has conducted virtual and onsite interviews with people in Antigua, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Dominica and St. Lucia to collect nontraditional sources of knowledge."
• Project Multatuli (Indonesia, $50,000): no reports posted yet
  • "with the grant, they have produced 16 stories, including two photojournalism essays, that touch on a wide range of issues in Indonesia, ranging from the role of indigenous women in society, public health, and culture to underprivileged youth, disability, and human rights. [....]"

Another round two grantee doesn't seem to have provided reports yet (but the Foundation "will share the rest of the final reports as we receive them"):

• Filipino American National Historical Society (United States, $70,000)

In the recent announcement, the Foundation notes that

Through multiple community conversations that we hosted in 2023, we heard feedback from volunteers about the goals and impact of the Knowledge Equity Fund which led us to make some key changes for our upcoming rounds of funding.

These changes include

• More consistent and clear communication about the Knowledge Equity Fund, its grants and impact
• Opportunities for movement groups to also receive grants for work they are doing to address knowledge equity
• Clearer measures of impact for Knowledge Equity Fund grants

The announcement also states that

With the conclusion of Round 3, the Fund now has $815,000 USD left [from the $4.5 million it was set up with in 2020]. The Equity Fund will run one last “round” in the next 4 months, where we will choose a handful of the most impactful grantees from the first rounds and provide them with a final “top up grant” to deepen their work with the movement and ensure that the content they create is present on the Wikimedia projects.

– AK, H

• Annual reports: Wikimedia Ukraine, Wikimedians for Offline Wikis User Group
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Longshore drift. Please be bold in helping improve this article! Next week's Article for Improvement (beginning 21 October 2024) is Image.