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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2025-07-18. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Comix: Divorce (864 bytes · 💬)

Cartoonist thought everybody got married divorced to get involved in an edit war. Think about virgin young editors.––kemel49(connect)(contri) 08:24, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Was there some drama between Commons and Wikipedia at ANI? Very hard to interpret this comix without context... —⁠andrybak (talk) 21:53, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

It's probably a parody on this meme. Ca talk to me! 09:00, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Community view: A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia (part 4): The Future Of Wikimedia and Conclusion (706 bytes · 💬)

  • Every year, the foundation devises and releases a plan for short-term goals, which is ratified by the community. I don't think this is correct. Unlike some other meta-level stuff like Board of Trustees elections, I don't think the community gets to ratify the Annual Plan. The AP is posted and the community can comment on it, but I think final approval for it ("ratification") lays elsewhere. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:56, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Discussion report: Six thousand noticeboard discussions in 2025 electrically winnowed down to a hundred (3,816 bytes · 💬)

This discussion report shows very interesting trends like the longest discussions often having few distinct users. However, this information seems better suited for year-end issues, rather than appearing in every issue like the Signpost's Traffic Report. Knowing article viewership helps identify which articles are high-profile enough to warrant greater editor attention. Knowing which discussions are highly disputed attracts even more input that may be counterproductive to resolving disagreement between parties with the relevant knowledge. After all, we already alert editors to which discussions need broad consensus through WP:centralized discussion. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 14:34, 18 July 2025 (UTC)


Total
number
of
myriabytes
1,000
2,000
3,000
4,000
0
.5
1
2
4
6
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12
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Size of bucket in myriabytes.
  • Here's the size of the buckets in the same units, which I've called myriabytes. Done in a rush so might need some tweaks. But the shorter buckets use more bytes. Note the first two buckets should be added together for better scaling. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 15:40, 18 July 2025 (UTC).
    In other words, reading all the short discussions is more text than reading all the long discussions, I'd say they are also more information dense, longer discussions tend to be repetitive. for context, eyeballing the top 100 table looks like about 14M, which is between 1-2,000 myriabytes. RF 12:22, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
  • "emojus" made me laugh. Thanks for this amusing etymological joke. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:43, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • This is a very interesting report. Somewhat related are the few users who dominate Wikipedia policy discussions. We think of it as emergent behavior by millions of editors, but really more like a village of a few number of hyper-active editors - the same power law curve will apply, with a fraction of users at the top the rest in the long tail. -- GreenC 16:00, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe 11,307 characters. "I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." -- GreenC 16:14, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Humour: New forum created for people who don't care about Wikipedia (699 bytes · 💬)

Shortly after publication, the forum reached mild consensus on its voter guide for the July 2025 admin elections... neutral for all! 🤣ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 14:46, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Reminds me of the Talkin' Seattle Blues.— Diannaa 🍁 (talk) 18:53, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

In focus: Wikimania 2025: Connecting Wikimedians across the world for 20 years (765 bytes · 💬)

  • As a minor accessibility item, the images in this article all seem expected to be viewed against a white background. If this is the case, could versions be used which have a white background instead of a transparent one? It was only when I saw that the Wikimania Nairobi logo was missing letters that I realised the first image was meant to be something other than abstract floating cloud-like shapes. CMD (talk) 08:13, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
     Fixed. Thanks for the note. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:02, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

In the media: How bad (or good) is Wikipedia? (3,678 bytes · 💬)

  • Nice coverage of an apparently well-done piece of Wikipedia journalism in German media. I'd be interested to see the experiment repeated on the English-language encyclopedia. It's certainly true that we have a long tail of little-edited, rarely updated articles on more obscure subjects which may nevertheless get a few thousand views a year and shape perception of the subject. —Ganesha811 (talk) 13:13, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
    As anecdotal evidence, I am still updating the articles which pertain to the Ukrainian administrative division reforms of 2020 and 2022, and this will take a few more years. Nobody is updating articles pertaining to Russian administrative divisions, though the reform there was pretty significant (though admittedly one can not update them without having some knowledge of the system).--Ymblanter (talk) 09:43, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
  • The Frankfurter Allgemeine work is a great demonstration of a workflow for identifying errors; keeping articles updated is a major challenge for the encyclopedia. This is the kind of work the WMF could usefully support, using AI in a helpful way along with human confirmation, and then notifying the editor community of things that need work without taking a stand on what the updated content should say. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 14:15, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • We could certainly use more input on where we can improve the quality of articles. Support from the WMF would be helpful, but in a biased limiting method. Of course the weakness in the FAZ method is that there is no comparison, who is giving better quality, multi-millions of encyclopedic articles. Not FAZ as far as I can tell. Almost anybody can identify articles that they think are low quality, but how to get a system that produces better articles? I don't think the Britannica model does this, certainly not for multi-millions of articles. It has to be an economically viable model as well. The one thing we can't do is just consult the absolute truth, instantaneously updated book "Truth". That book doesn't exist and never will. So we can get reasonable descriptions of where our articles may be weak and then take some steps, using things like the FAZ review. If we spend, maybe, $1-$5 million we could do much of it ourselves, but that might cover 1% of our articles per year. It's not a direct solution. Use it as an indication where we need to improve. That's likely the best we can do by ourselves. Quality control can be made job #1, but we need to understand our limits and those of the critics. Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:39, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • It seems reasonable for Techbook to warn that Wikipedia's inaccuracies spill over to LLMs. Last issue's research report notes that peS2o, CC Common Crawl, StackExchange, and Stack V2 received greater tokens in Common Pile training than Wikipedia, but Wikipedia still contains many facts not contained in those sources, such as summarization of copyrighted print-only works. Using this article's first example, it is quite possible that the only source available to an offline LLM on the number of Levi's stores would be the Wikipedia article. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 19:20, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

News and notes: Is no WikiNews good WikiNews? — Election season returns! (2,563 bytes · 💬)

  • Thanks to all! It is my first article! Thanks and Thanks again! Md Mobashir Hossain (talk) 07:59, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Board of Trustees elections

That shortlisting process for the Board of Trustee elections is getting ever more restrictive. Compare last year's meta:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2024/Shortlisting process:

  • The Elections Committee and Board of Trustees determined 12 candidates would be a reasonable number for voters to review. If there are more than 15 eligible candidates as determined by the Elections Committee, a shortlisting process will occur. The process will aim to shortlist 12 candidates, and these 12 candidates will be running in the community voting phase. If there are 15 or fewer candidates, there will be no shortlisting process.

It's true that last year there were four seats up for grabs rather than two but but with the affiliates eliminating all but six candidates this year it does feel like there is less and less meaningful choice. Andreas JN466 08:18, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

  • "The proposal currently implies content from Wikinews would be merged into respective Wikipedias," -> This is false. The 2024 Wikinews review PDF proposes closing Wikinews, not merging it to Wikipedia, albeit with the option of helping a new partner host it. meta:Public_consultation_about_Wikinews#Options mentions it as an option, yes, but also makes clear that this is simply one option mentioned, and it's an option that is almost assuredly not going to happen given lack of enthusiasm among both Wikipedians and the SPTF itself. I know that it's usually discouraged to edit articles after they're written, but this is kind of a big miss. SnowFire (talk) 15:39, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
    You are right. In lieu of making substantive changes, I edited it to say content from Wikinews could be merged instead. No comments on whether it will happen or not, the discussions have been long and messy, so it's unclear to me what happens from this point. Soni (talk) 16:29, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

News from the WMF: Form 990 released for the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year 2023-2024 (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/News from the WMF

Obituary: Pvmoutside, Atomicjohn, Rdmoore6, Jaknouse, Morven, Martin of Sheffield, MarnetteD, Herewhy, BabelStone (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/Obituary

Opinion: Women are somewhat under-represented on the English-language Wikipedia, and other observations from analysis (3,754 bytes · 💬)

  • "Even the clichéd white male pop culture enthusiast who prefers to edit the Wikipedia article on, say, Tom Cruise rather than on Juana Inés de la Cruz will presumably have no negative impact on these lists." Quite a presumption. Innisfree987 (talk) 08:39, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • I am curious what the gender gap would be if you exclude single sentence stub articles (such as those on some olympians or state legislators). Eddie891 Talk Work 11:37, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • Thanks for this write-up! While significantly more complicated to execute, I would love an analysis of how the percentage of female entries has shifted among Level 3 Vital Articles over time (chosen because it is significantly older than the other tiers). While the Level 3 list started from the slightly older m:list of articles every Wikipedia should have, the latter is less tailored to enwiki. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 15:12, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • Using Vital Articles as a whole is fine for a "rough cut" guess, but its power dramatically fades if sliced up into subsections, e.g. the suggested inquiry into matters like "how important is 15th century Italy". That'll tell you how many 15th century Italy fans were among the editors who filled out VA5 were, and that's about it - zoomed in to that level of detail, there's going to be way more randomness from the small group of editors maintaining an area.
  • The other elephant in the room for any gender gap studies is the old WP:NSPORTS before the 2022 reform + the activities of certain editors who basically dumped entire player statistic tables in to Wikipedia, which means a surprisingly large proportion of Wikipedia biographies are that of random 4th division football players. A dump of 10000 random articles I did in April 2025 had the 3 most common Wikiprojects being 3231 in Biography, 713 in United States, and 556 (!) in Football. While I'm sure there were a few non-biography articles in there on games / seasons / teams in those WP Football articles, I'm sure most were players. I should go finish writing up my fuller findings, but I suspect it might be interesting to do a gender gap analysis that excludes either very short articles (as likely being just stats-only "This guy played at the 2010 Winter Olympics") or just flat excludes all sports biographies, given how sports bios are hugely male-dominated on Wikipedia (but not "interestingly" so as many of these articles get like 2 views a day, and some wouldn't survive the stricter notability scrutiny applied after the 2022 change to sports notability guidelines). SnowFire (talk) 16:15, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
  • I am surprised the editor did not talk to participants at WP:Women in Red or even link to the project. Or, for that matter, talk to women who edit Wikipedia. We've been at this for, literally, 20 years now. The efforts to increase visibility of women are ongoing and this is just rehashing the same old stuff. It's a problem, it needs more input and participation, and the "notability" standard has long been criticized for systemic bias and a failure to assess actual notability as opposed to publicity or meaningless numerical metrics. Montanabw(talk) 20:54, 19 July 2025 (UTC)

Recent research: Knowledge manipulation on Russia's Wikipedia fork; Marxist critique of Wikidata license; call to analyze power relations of Wikipedia (3,875 bytes · 💬)

Good roundup/selective dive as usual, HaeB. I saw an early presentation of the realienation research at a conference a couple years ago (and might as well disclose I know the authors) and had an initial pragmatic-defensive reaction: Wikidata can't just switch to a different license -- it doesn't function without CC0, so what's the point? But the more I sat with it, the more I felt like there was a really important point here about alienation, wikis, wiki contributors, and licensing.
Contributors are more and more frequently separated from our work. No amount of reaffirmation of our definition of freedom changes the reality that many people in our community regularly express feelings ranging from annoyance to demotivation because they feel like their labor is exploited.
Back in 2018, for example, Bfpage wrote a Signpost article about the experience of hearing Alexa read something she wrote on Wikipedia, without attribution. The paper focuses on Wikidata, but the objection about Alexa, and one of the chief criticisms here and elsewhere about more recently relevant companies like OpenAI and Google, isn't simply that they use Wikipedia, but that they treat Wikipedia (and everything else) as if they're CC0.
Google and Wikipedia/the rest of the web have had a historically mutually beneficial relationship, but that undeniably began to erode with Knowledge Panels, which have now given way to AI Search.
It seems to me the distance created between contributors and readers, owing to companies treating our work as though it's CC0, regardless of whether it is, does take a toll worth examining. I think there are now several people/groups working to better understand just that, like the WMF's Future Audiences, but "realienation" seems like a natural frame through which to talk about it.
BTW: research or other concrete evidence about whether and how much information from Wikidata is being using in Google Search or in its knowledge panels - How much of this is available? My sense is that such information would be difficult to find, and that it is easily obscured for reasons that align with the authors' arguments, but I would be happy to be wrong about that. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 15:47, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

The Wikimedia sound logo was meant to eliminate the difference between Alexa announcing that it will use Spotify to play a requested song while lifting Wikipedia text without attribution, so it is dispiriting that two years later, there is no external adoption of this Wikimedia branding. As Barbara Page pondered in that 2018 article, perhaps the WMF has calculated that large donations from reliant tech companies are better than enforcement of Wikipedia's attribution requirement especially since they do not experience the alienation. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 04:22, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
  • Re the Wikidata license paper: It would be of far "deep[er] concern" if Wikidata/WMF was claiming to own simple DB connections, like who the painter of the Mona Lisa was. The author apparently acts like it's dispiriting to editors that such basic info is being shared, but it's the other way around. It would be dispiriting if the kind of stuff Wikidata does was being locked down further as they seem to advocate for. The CC0 license is a good fit for Wikidata. SnowFire (talk) 19:21, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Traffic report: God only knows (470 bytes · 💬)

Wow! ChatGPT was so high ranked! Rafael! (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 15:24, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

WikiProject report: WikiProject Medicine reaches milestone of zero unreferenced articles (2,918 bytes · 💬)


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