Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-08-30/News and notes

News and notes

Flying high; low practice from Wikipedia 'cleansing' agency; where do our donations go? RfA sees a new trend

By Kudpung

WMF hires a spam outfit

Katherine Maher,
Executive Director

Evoking Cambridge Analytica, Smallbones demands a statement from the very top, Katherine Maher, after Only in death brings the partnership up on Jimbo's talk page. As was mentioned in last month's issue of "In the media", however, Maher spends 200 days a year at 35,000 feet, so her business travel apparently leaves little time for her to keep an eye on what is happening in the company she is charged with managing. Jim Heaphy (Cullen328), lead host at the Teahouse and otherwise well-known for exercising extraordinary restraint even in the most contentious situations, concurs and beats around no bushes while Maher beats her daily way through frequent flyer lounges and crowded departure gates:

Template:Signpost quote While Maher may well be doing an excellent job as ambassador for the Wikimedia movement, the word 'executive' appears to be a misnomer in her job description. (executive – A person with senior managerial responsibility in a business. Oxford Dictionaries)

"[T]his is a gross misuse of donated money. Whoever hired or signed off on hiring a company who brags about performing such manipulation of information which is available to the public should immediately resign in shame or be fired. This is unforgiveable and inexcusable."

— Nocturnalnow

The story begins to unfold with a message on the Wikimedia mailing list from MZMcBride that states: "How is it appropriate for Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to work with a company that is, by its own admission, whitewashing Wikipedia?" Expressing his concerns further about a paid editing syndicate being hired by the Foundation and given privileged access to inside information, he continues: "Is it appropriate to give a company that sells whitewashing Wikipedia services access to private user data, as was done in <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T192893> and <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193052>? The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. legal department apparently approved this access, but I'm curious to know why, given the company's role in selling an 'Online Reputation Management' product. This looks bad to me."

"Go Fish Digital is a company that whitewashes Wikipedia" explains McBride. On its website at "Online Reputation Management" (July 22 edition via the Internet Archive), Go Fish claim:

The primary platforms that define your online reputation include:

• Google Search
• Google Autocomplete
• Wikipedia [Editor's note: "Wikipedia" since redacted]
• Yelp, Google Reviews, and other review websites

With Online Reputation Management, we work hard to make all of the positive information easy to find. At the same time, we use many different strategies and tactics to diminish the visibility of negative content, or in some cases, remove it from the web altogether. The end result is a positive online reputation because when people search your name or brand, they immediately find positive content.

The page continues, stating:

We have custom-built a number of tools to help us with very specific monitoring activities. We can see Wikipedia updates as they happen, track the smallest of changes in search results, and monitor online reviews in real-time. These capabilities allow us to quickly assess changes in your online reputation and adjust strategy as needed to triage any immediate problems.

[Editor's note: As of publication, this is still on their site.]

Smallbones saw through the poorly veiled college-taught marketing technique and helped Wales' talk page readers to understand: "GoFish has not said directly – in any of the quotes here – that they are available to edit 'your Wikipedia article' for pay, but their meaning is clear. It's not a case of being able to read between the lines, just of being able to translate AdSpeak to English."

Dan Garry (Deskana), Lead Product Manager for Editing and a Wikimedia employee since 2013, is responsible for "build[ing] and maintain[ing] the editing experiences on the Wikimedia wikis." He stated in a late-April Phabricator ticket titled "Access to Google Search Console for Go Fish Digital" that "[t]he Audiences department is currently engaging with Go Fish Digital to help us improve our understanding of search engine optimisation", clarifying that "[t]hey have signed a master service agreement which fully covers our privacy policy, data retention, and data security requirements, and the agreement received signoff from Jim Buatti (in Legal) and Toby (the Chief Product Officer) [Toby Negrin?], amongst others."

Gregory Varnbum,
Communications Strategist

Garry can probably be forgiven for being in the dark about Go Fish's actual commercial objectives. He concluded the ticket with a suggestion to "creat[e] an account for them with access to these tools, so that access can be easily revoked at a later date, but I'm happy to go with whatever the best practice is here." And who would be accessing them? "I don't know specifically who at Go Fish is going to access the console", replies Garry in early May, "I've spoken to probably around 10 people there, and any one of them might access the console."

Communications Strategist Gregory Varnum later denied that such a request had been made, stating that "they did not request or receive access to any Wikimedia user data." However, in the Phabricator ticket, Go Fish Digital were given access to the Google Search Console for the various encyclopedias' data (including the English Wikipedia's mobile version) over two months earlier, granted by Operations Engineer Rob Halsell. Admitting yet another gross Foundation blunder, Varnum replied with a press release–style letter:

Hello,

Thank you to everyone that has provided thoughtful and constructive input on this discussion, and to the volunteers who are investigating the possible policy violations. We have some additional information on this vendor relationship and on steps being taken that we believe will be helpful to this discussion.

The Wikimedia Foundation entered into a short-term contract with Go Fish Digital to conduct a search engine optimization (SEO) audit on Wikipedia. They were contracted to provide information needed by the Audiences department to improve how our sites communicate with search engines and services which provide data to devices like artificial intelligence (AI) assistants. Overall, SEO performance is a strength of our projects, but we were able to identify areas for improvement, and the audit was helpful for Audiences to more effectively focus their efforts. During discussions about Wikimedia values and activities that were held in selecting the vendor, they did not disclose anything which raised suspicion, and we failed to identify this specific concern and question them about it more.

The Foundation's Legal department received the proposal after it had been approved by Audiences and drafted a contract for this agreement following standard procedures. This included a privacy review, which resulted in the inclusion of extra privacy and security protections in the contract. Their activities did not involve reputation management services, and they did not request or receive access to any Wikimedia user data. The contract concluded last month.

As we are now aware of the vendor's possible violations and feel they should have shared this information with us during discussions, we will not be pursuing any future working relationship with Go Fish Digital and will be requesting that they honor our contractual agreement by not discussing their past relationship with us for promotional purposes. Additionally, we are reviewing the way that this vendor was selected in an effort to see if we can identify what led to this issue and better identify these types of concerns when identifying future vendors and executing agreements with them. Finally, as they regularly do, our Trust and Safety team in Community Engagement are working with the functionaries investigating the possible policy violations.

Again, we appreciate the attention provided to this by the functionaries and others who raised these concerns. We agree that the Foundation should avoid working with vendors who violate our policies, and hope the discussion around this will help reduce the chances of this happening in the future.

Thank you, -greg

Gregory Varnum,
Communications Strategist,
Wikimedia Foundation

On the Wales talk page thread, TonyBallioni – who, like Cullen328, is also known for his restraint – spoke out, evoking Orangemoody and the connection to the BurritoSlayer sock farm mentioned by MarioGom, who discovered that the article on 1776 (company) was created for a confirmed Go Fish client: Template:Signpost quote

Smallbones added: "We can also stop the noise about firing lower- and medium-level WMF employees. The problem IMHO lies near the top – senior managers need to get the word out that paid editing is a very serious business that is a very serious problem on Wikipedia. They need to take a look at the length of the sock puppet investigation and how much editor time was put into just the investigation."

The Signpost deputy Editor-in-Chief, Bri – currently on a wikibreak – joined the discussion, saying that "I added Go Fish Digital to the PAIDLIST on December 12, months before the Phabricator tickets were opened, giving the firm access to our logs. At that time the evidence of activities on-wiki in contravention of ToS [Terms of Service] was suspected, based on their own advertising. Now the connection to the BurritoSlayer sockring is known. And I agree that this should be treated with utmost seriousness, as a de facto data breach of PII [Personally Identifiable Information]. One that was preventable."

As of publication, neither Maher nor Wales have offered a comment – not even to decline giving one.

Wikimedia moves to WordPress

WMF's new WordPress website

The new Wikimedia Foundation website was announced on 1 August in another mailing list missive by Gregory Varnum. The Signpost editors came across the site by coincidence while researching early this month for the lead article above. Looking for the current staff list, they had to use Google to find it, and were unable to decide whether the large German text was an error or an embellishment.

Built on WordPress, a free and open-source CMS software which was initially developed for blogging, it took a team of 100 from two web design companies to come up with the concept and creation. The new website came under criticism from MZMcBride, who says that "[m]any people, including employees of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. and volunteers, repeatedly raised objections to this decision to move to WordPress and they were ignored. I think this type of behavior by the communications department is really inappropriate, unbecoming, and inconsistent with Wikimedia's values." From CEO Katherine Maher, there is again no comment, not even "no comment"; due to her travel commitments, she may have been unaware that it was being made.

In a step which combines the flexible creativity of web design beyond the constraints of MediaWiki with their move from their traditional software originally developed by Magnus Manske and deployed in 2002 to run the the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the WMF distances itself yet further from its volunteer communities, ensuring also that the WordPress site has no talk page and is only editable by its approved webmasters. Perhaps if the Foundation's communications department were to use that time and funding to give those encyclopedias a more modern look, the complaints would not be so loud, so many, and so critical.

Public is a San Francisco–based branding and design studio working in print, 3D, and digital media. In hackneyed AdSpeak, they claim: "The secrets of our successes are the creative, friendly, inspirational, productive, and respectful relationships we build with our clients, our vendors, and each other." They have not yet added the WMF to their list of clients, but it would be interesting to know how much they received in compensation for their work.

Zachary McCune,
Global Audiences

In contrast, Mangrove, an international web design team, heavily features the WMF as one of their major clients, citing a WMF testimonial:

"Thank you deeply for this work. We love this site. We are excited to share it with the world. You made it stunning and engaging and original. THANK YOU."

— Zachary McCune, Global Audiences, Wikimedia Foundation

Reception by The Signpost editorial team is mixed, ranging from "cool" and "very nice" to "bloody awful" and – of course – "How much did it cost?".

We're also not sure about Mangrove's claim of having contributed to over 5 billion articles on Wikipedia, given only 5.7 million currently exist on the English one (and only 45.6 million pages in total!). Indeed, if Special:Statistics is any indication, Mangrove has apparently contributed to 4.2 billion more articles than there are total contributions in the English Wikipedia's history (currently at just over 852 million edits) and just under 1.8 billion more than there are words in our entire encyclopedia (currently at 3.22 billion). For a team of 11, that is quite an impressive feat.

Graphic design is a job for a career specialist. At least the WMF is beginning to understand the importance of outsourcing some of its work to true professionals – MediaWiki, take note. The Signpost welcomes readers' views on the design. Perhaps these companies should be commissioned to redesign the look of Wikipedia, as well.

Wikipedia still has cancer – where does the money go?

In July, Guy Macon updated his user essay on the transparency of Foundation spending, "Wikipedia has Cancer", with the following:

WMF's financial development shows no clear sign of slowing down

Observations as of July of 2018:

• It is difficult to derive a trend from one year's data, but it appears that the rate of spending is beginning to level off. How much influence this page (and the previous posting of the same argument on various pages) had on this is an interesting question.
• We still have a marked lack of transparency on spending. For example, [1] has numbers for "Grants and awards" and "Professional service expenses" but there is no obvious way of finding out the details of those expenditures (please note that this information may very well be in one of the many, many documents the WMF publishes each year).
• All efforts to persuade the WMF to enact any spending cap, even "limit spending to no more than double last years spending" have failed.
• We appear to be building up our endowment, but it is unclear whether the WMF has structured the endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times get bad. Without this we have no protection from a sudden drop in revenue while the WMF maintains the current spending levels in the hope that revenue will recover. It is also unclear whether the endowment is legally protected against a large payout as a result of a lawsuit. The current management of the WMF appears to be committed to making immediate and drastic cuts to spending if revenue suddenly drops. Hopefully we will never have to find out.

This follows up on his original analysis, which The Signpost published in the "Op-ed" of its February 2017 issue.

Close calls at RfA – a new trend?

Apparently, our recent three-part series in The Signpost on adminship fell on stony ground (May, June, July). This month sees both Requests for Adminship (RfA) closed balancing on knife's edge.

In one of the most hotly debated runs for adminship in Wikipedia history with a total of 318 participants, it included opposers evoking antics on Wikipedia hate site Wikipediocracy and an old spat with an arbitrator who graciously and magnanimously supported the bid for the mop. Jbhunley, author of the user essay "Identifying nonsense at NPP", stoically awaited closure. After a belated closing freeze (~11 hours) with the final tally being 196/86/10 (69.5%), a Bureaucrat discussion reached a 7–3 verdict (1 recusal) of 'no consensus to promote'.

A week later, another new perennial topic thread was started on Jimbo's talk page titled "Term Limits for Admins", following a discussion at last month's "Op-ed". In the thread at Jimbo's talk page, the RfA was mentioned as yet another example of how RfA is broken. Jimbo chimed in, agreeing completely with Carrite's point earlier in the thread that a system which considers 70% support a "rejection" is broken.

The second RfA to close this month was Philafrenzy's, which ended with the request [INSERT RESULT HERE] at 69% after a total of 239 editors participated and 217 votes were cast.

Brief notes

• 40,000 biographies missing for academics:Template:Signpost quote
• New blocking tool: The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team is currently developing the ability for partial blocks to be possible on Wikipedia. According to the Foundation: "Sitewide blocks are not always the appropriate response to some situations. Smaller, more tactical blocks may defuse situations while retaining constructive contributors. The goal of this project is to give wiki administrators a more robust set of tools to be able to better respond to different user conflict situations." New wireframes have been posted for users to comment on and its development is currently being discussed on the talk page of the Community health initiative's documentation for "Per-user page, namespace, and upload blocking".
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee has announced (diff) that "[i]n the coming weeks an Affiliate Data survey will be launched to reach out to update key information about all affiliates."
• Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this week: At the time of going to press, none.

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• Remember when the biggest problem with the Signpost was when we put swears in a headline? Gamaliel (talk) 03:15, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
• Excellent coverage of the Wikimedia mire...certainly worth following. -Indy beetle (talk) 03:47, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
  • On further review, I must clarify that while the issue at hand is certainty worth this attention (and the voicing of concern and criticism), the smears about things like "CEO" are unbecoming of a News and notes article. -Indy beetle (talk) 04:08, 1 September 2018 (UTC)
• I think this article would be a little easier to follow if its start were reworked to tell us what it is we're sharpening our pitchforks for, before getting into the play-by-play of who's heating up which vat of tar. —Emufarmers^(T/C) 04:46, 1 September 2018 (UTC)
• The Go Fish diatribe needs to be rewritten. In jargon-free English and with some sort of attempt at clarity of expression. It is utter gibberish to me, sorry. - Sitush (talk) 00:12, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Hate site

• Calling Wikipediocracy a "Wikipedia hate site" is completely idiotic. Presumably those words were penned by the outgoing editor-in-chief, who in another part of this issue proudly declared that he never visits such nefarious realms. In actuality, WPO is a message board dedicated to Wikipedia criticism — of which there is no lack in this particular issue of the Signpost. Perhaps there is room in this world for such a place — a regular, daily venue — as opposed to an on-wiki "magazine" that comes out once a month sometimes. Carrite (talk) 03:58, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Calling Wikipediocracy a "message board dedicated to Wikipedia criticism" is like calling Stormfront a messageboard dedicated to race relations issues. Kaldari (talk) 04:48, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
    • @Kaldari: Yeah I trust your experience with hate sites, and I also suspect your hostility towards Wikipediocracy stems from them investigating said experience. --Pudeo (talk) 07:26, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
      • • Now, now, Pudeo - I'm sure any such involvement is long dead, and we don't want any unseemly dancing on graves here, or exploitation of things that have passed away, do we? Ms. Streisand would be ashamed of you. -- Begoon 23:32, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
      • Maybe we should call it "the Wikipedia criticism site that can't take criticism". Gamaliel (talk) 16:48, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
        • You've obviously never seen "Wikipedia Sucks! (And So Do Its Critics)." In actuality, there is a pretty close parallel between WPO and the discussionesque parts of WP such as Jimbotalk and the Signpost. Sorry you can't see it, but they do have special glasses to correct colorblindness these days, so perhaps there is hope. Carrite (talk) 21:50, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
          • Of course I've seen it, it has pictures of me, and you know how I like the attention. I'll grant you that there's a difference between the two sites, I'd certainly rank them differently on the Bristol stool scale. Gamaliel (talk) 21:56, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  @Carrite: What ever ended up being the deal with this? Did we come to a conclusion? jp×g🗯️ 06:50, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

• I've visited WPO a dozen times. Calling Wikipediocracy a "Wikipedia hate site" is completely appropriate. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:32, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Yes...it is...both...and somewhere in between. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:37, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
    • It's a message board at which a lot of different views are expressed, running the gamut of the rainbow. Carrite (talk) 21:53, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
• And Wikipedia is an "alternative medicine hate site". Disappointed that my correction of the editor's "typo" was reverted pre-publication. Look at all the unnecessary drama that stirred up. wbm1058 (talk) 19:06, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
  • I reverted you and the Editor in Chief ran with what he originally wrote. I don't think either one of us has any regrets, thanks. Discussion and debate isn't "unnecessary". ☆ Bri (talk) 23:55, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
    • Well, then, "News and notes" should be changed to "News, notes and opinion" since this section isn't a pure news piece. In most reliable and respected newspapers, editorials are typically published on a dedicated page, called the editorial page, but Signpost is now looking more like a blog. Wikipediocracy is a website for discussion and criticism of Wikipedia, per Wikipedia which references this Salon piece for the criticism site characterization. But, no worries because calling it a hate site is kind of like saying "fake news" – it's apparently led to an increase in traffic on that site. Yes, there's also important discussion and debate here in § Misogyny, which is helping to increase volunteer productivity and work through the maintenance backlogs at a more efficient pace, as well as increasing our balanced point-of-view of the sexes. Surely nobody's been blocked yet because of that "necessary" discussion? wbm1058 (talk) 19:31, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
      • You are arguing with the wrong guy. My job as deputy E in C is and has been to assist and advise, not to override. In well run organizations, the man or woman at the top takes responsibility for what is done by the org, not asking underlings to take the fall, nor claiming ignorance, nor just not showing up during a public controversy. This has been the relationship at The Signpost. Further, anyone with a reasonable amount of ability to work with the Newsroom team is welcome to join, help shoulder the burden, and make a pitch for changes. The Editor-in-Chief position is even vacant at the moment. Until then, these are suggestions we will take under advisement. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:40, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
      • While I can sympathize with your suggestion about this—or at least the relevant part—being published as an editorial, that currently is not one the features in The Signpost (permanent link) and the last one was in August 2016. The closest that presently exists to such a feature now is the occasional "Opinion" piece, which appears to be a new irregular feature this year (and which should be documented on the content guidance page). Maybe the "Editorial" feature should be revived, but without an Editor-in-Chief now, it is unclear who would be in the byline. Regardless, according to Content guidance § News and notes (permanent link):

        As a core report (along with "In the media"), "News and notes" attempts to cover all major internal news from the month (however briefly) without omission, even if this means forgoing other reports. Since this report is under significant pressure to be ruthlessly objective, all available viewpoints are considered. In particular, opinions adhering to or deviating from the "official line" of the Foundation are not denigrated merely because they do so.

        The "ruthlessly objective" part may be worth omitting, not least because the notion that a person can ever be "objective" is a problematic contention, but the fact that this feature involves opinion ought to be uncontroversial since it's a stated part of that feature. Likewise, although describing Wikipediocracy as a "hate site" may be at odds with the above content guidance, that is not because it's an opinion.
        As far as I'm concerned, there is no escape from "opinion" (which is part of why "objective" is such a problematic description), since the very process of writing and selecting the contents of the report inextricably involves editorial discretion. Similarly, from what I can tell, The Signpost being opinionated is nothing new. Thus, I think qualifying this feature with "and opinion" is something that can be applied to all features, which defeats the point. The only reason why a feature called "Opinion" even exists is so that The Signpost can provide a space for one-off contributions that has more lenient content restrictions and which allows the editorial board to distance itself from the content.
        Perhaps The Signpost should move away from describing itself (permanent link) as involving any degree of neutrality and objectivity, but so long as Wikipedia itself still clings to that myth, I'm not sure why its organ ought to be an exception. —Nøkkenbuer (talk • contribs) 21:39, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

• WPO is mostly a site where people gossip, often in petty and mean-spirited ways. It is also full of people grinding various wingnut or resentful axes. While there are occasional insightful posts there about what goes on here, it is both tedious and unpleasant to wade through the crazy and the filth to find them. The aspiration to be a "watchdog" is far from the reality; it is more a dog's breakfast of ranting and gossip.Jytdog (talk) 18:02, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

• I suppose I need to include some "person has a tiny dick" jokes in my next blog post on Wikipediocracy to measure up to the exalted standards of The Signpost. Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 01:14, 2 September 2018 (UTC)
  • When I go there (which is increasingly infrequent), it is generally to look for what you and a couple other people are saying. Jytdog (talk) 01:41, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Fishing in the console

• Despite MZMcBride's claims, I'm pretty sure there is no "private user data" in Google Search Console. It's just a bunch of aggregate data about how many hits you're getting from Google, what search queries people are using to get to your site (only the top 1000), what pages are most popular, and information about how well indexed your site is. It doesn't even break down device statistics more than "mobile", "desktop", and "tablet". There are no IP or user agent logs (that I'm aware of). I'm really curious what "private user data" MZMcBride is referring to. Kaldari (talk) 05:08, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  My reading of phab:T193052 was that it included user-agent data. Legoktm (talk) 06:02, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  Yeah, but only the user-agent data of the search engine bots, right? Kaldari (talk) 06:16, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  Yep, but it's still private user data. Legoktm (talk) 06:44, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  So the controversy is about WMF giving Go Fish Digital logs of which pages search engine bots visit? I can see how that could technically be called private user data (if you consider Googlebot a user), but it hardly warrants comparisons with Cambridge Analytica! Kaldari (talk) 07:04, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  I think the controversy is mostly about giving a company that wants to improve its customers SEO access (against our policies, etc.) to the private SEO information we have. My comments about private user data were just responding to your curiosity about what MZ was referring to. Legoktm (talk) 07:39, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  Ah, got it! The article could have done a better job explaining that. Kaldari (talk) 08:27, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  The controversy is also about WMF contracting anything with a company that performs undisclosed paid editing with a relatively big sockpuppet farm. That company even planned to use the fact that it was hired by Wikipedia as a means of advertising and to legitimize their undisclosed paid editing operation. At least the WMF legal team took measures to prevent that Go Fish Digital uses Wikipedia name to that end, but they did after the fact and once the controversy was hot. This should have never passed previous due dilligence. --MarioGom (talk) 08:02, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  See my comment below about this. Boilerplate about not using trademarks or advertising a relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation is a standard part of our contracts with vendors and is included up-front; no specific action by Legal or anyone else was required after the fact. --Deskana (WMF) (talk) 09:14, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  Awesome. Thanks for the clarification. --MarioGom (talk) 11:45, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

wikimediafoundation.org

• Excellent report, very well done.
  The issues with the new WMF site are quite alarming; the site is closed-source and is sending user data to a third party for advertising targeting purposes, among many other issues. --Yair rand (talk) 06:25, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
  • What third party are you talking about? Kaldari (talk) 06:35, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
  • Uh yeah, what Kaldari asked. I'm not aware of any user data being sent to a third party for advertising targeting purposes. Regarding the closed source issue, my understanding is that publishing the source is in progress, but it is all free software (GPLv2 or later) because that's what WordPress requires. Legoktm (talk) 06:44, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
    • @Kaldari and Legoktm: The site is sending user data to Automattic, Inc. via stats.wp.com. Unless I'm misunderstanding the privacy policy linked to from the bottom of the site, this data is used for advertising targeting purposes. Re closed-source: Sure, but it's not public now, despite the site being already operational. --Yair rand (talk) 07:10, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
      • Ack, I should have checked, I thought that issue was already resolved :( Bumped the phab ticket a bit. Legoktm (talk) 07:53, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
      • Automattic/wp.com is not a third party here (except in a purely technical sense like commons.wikimedia.org is for en.wikipedia.org), see my notes at phab:T201022#4544867. Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:39, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
        • They are a third party here insofar as they are not a Wikimedia organization, which is the relevant part. --Yair rand (talk) 00:13, 31 August 2018 (UTC)
          • Holy crap. This is just shameful behavior from the WMF. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 02:02, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Confusing

The article assumes the reader already knows about the topic. Wrong. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 05:26, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

• TL;DR: A SEO/PR firm, Go Fish Digital has a Wikipedia editing service. They have been doing undisclosed paid editing on Wikipedia for, at least, two years. They have multiple employees doing this, and they use a lot of sockpuppets. At some point, the WMF hired Go Fish Digital to perform a SEO audit on Wikipedia sites. There is off-wiki evidence that Go Fish Digital was planning to use this contract to advertise and legitimize its undisclosed paid editing operation. Once the WMF was made aware of the situation, the contract already had ended, although WMF legal team took steps to prevent Go Fish Digital from using Wikipedia name for advertising purposes. (see Deskana (WMF) comment) In my opinion, the Search Console and crawler logs stuff is a minor issue, since I do not think there was actually personal information there, and I'm sure Go Fish Digital objective was not obtaining private data, but to legitimize their shady Wikipedia service. I have been involved in the investigation about Go Fish Digital sockpuppets and I have followed this case very closely. So feel free to ask any question and I'll help clarifying. --MarioGom (talk) 08:10, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

  • There's a minor inaccuracy in your comment: it's a standard provision of our contracts with vendors that they are not allowed to use our trademarks or advertise that we contracted with them without permission, so no specific action needed to be taken by Legal or anyone else after the fact to prevent that from happening. Go Fish would not have been able to use the fact that they contracted with us to "legitimise" any of their services irrespective of what happened. I can't speak to the rest of the evidence about them using sockpuppets, because I don't know anything about it myself. My hope is that the Foundation can learn lessons from this, improve our contracts process to reduce the likelihood of anything like this happening again, but since I'm not involved in that process in general my role there would only be to advocate for improvements. --Deskana (WMF) (talk) 09:12, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
    • Thanks. As with my other comment, I've just put the error with strikethrough. With respect to Go Fish intention, it is clear that they intended to use Wikipedia name (see [2]). We cannot take for granted that Go Fish Digital will play by the rules, since they are in breach of our Terms of Use with respect to undisclosed paid editing. --MarioGom (talk) 11:50, 30 August 2018 (UTC)
    • @Deskana (WMF): That ... is a very good practice, to have that standard provision. Is it documented anywhere? I would be interested in learning more about this. --Yair rand (talk) 19:34, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Misogyny

I was under the impression that there were extenuating circumstances that resulted in Kudpung being misogynistic towards me and another editor, but when we talked offwiki I thought he was taking a break. I'm sad to see that he's continuing this campaign against Katherine Maher. I'm no stranger to criticizing (female) leadership in the Wikimedia movement, but I can at least say I save it for the folks who are doing a poor job. GorillaWarfare (talk) 07:59, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Discussion moved to User talk:GorillaWarfare#You are getting things consistently wrong. GorillaWarfare (talk) 08:53, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

A new low

This is possibly the worst Signpost article I've ever seen. Tony (talk) 10:08, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Can I ask why (Emphasising that I am not actually defending the article in any way, shape or form!) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:36, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

*Gets popcorn* Gamaliel (talk) 14:18, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

I want to echo this sentiment of a new low -- statements of fact are being wildly speculated on, to the point of a editorializing, throughout the article in ways that as User:GorillaWarfare, and others are beginning to point out, smells of prejudice beyond just criticism of the foundation. Sadads (talk) 14:32, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

It is unfortunate that we are in a vacuum of information that fosters speculation. If WMF would tackle this head-on and explain what, if any, user data was at risk, it wouldn't have had to be a feature story. My opinion is that either not reporting it, or playing down its potential seriousness, would have both been errors for The Signpost. Now I'd like to hear what's going on from WMF. The volunteers who don't necessarily know the intricacies of Google Analytics versus Google Search Console shouldn't have to figure it out for themselves. Although Mr. Varnum's letter speaks about "vendor's possible violations", it doesn't say what was at risk. We shouldn't be having this speculative conversation at all. It's like asking us to do our own E. coli testing on the hamburgers we get at McDonald's. Data protection, privacy, and competent server administration are their core competencies, not ours. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

I agree this and the "From the editor" article contain much speculation and what seems like intentional anti-WMF propaganda. Most appalling, I don't think it's fair to take such a deep stab at Katherine. Although The Signpost's reporting is based on facts, like all news media it does not promise to be entirely neutral in its content. Some of it is indeed tongue-in-cheek -- this is an understatement. These articles should be labeled as op-eds. From [3], No one suggested she was not qualified -- it certainly reads that way, to me. — MusikAnimal ^talk 16:19, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

The three stories, GoFish, use of WordPress and 200 days in the air are all ones I'm happy to see the Signpost take up. But I don't see why two of them have been linked to the CEO, travel yes but not GoFish or WordPress. The WMF is not a one person operation, it is entirely possible that those decisions were not even taken by Maher. I would have preferred an approach that explained more about why we think the WMF has called these wrong rather than one that focuses on the CEO. ϢereSpielChequers 09:30, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. Thought I was reading an opinion piece. There are certainly better words with which to convey this (very important) information. Airplaneman ✈ 15:12, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Since I think it's possible I am the person who inpsired this article, I'd like to respond to that judgment. Because I believe these three stories are closely related.

First we have the issue that the Foundation has contracted with a company that has a unit which offered sockpuppet services & engaged in undisclosed paid editing on Wikipedia. In short, hired one of the bad guys. While Deskana (WMF) above indicates there were some guidelines that prevented any real harm to Wikipedia, it still is one of those mistakes you'd expect the person in charge to notice ahead of time, ask some questions, & maybe prevent. Was any of this done? Nothing from the Foundation.

Then we have the issue that the Foundation overhauled their website & decided to use a proprietary product that is better associated with blogging than a static website. This is especially odd because (1) the same thing can be done & has been done with the Wikimedia software; & (2) part of the WMF mission statement involves advocating non-proprietary (aka Free) software. Maybe there is a good rationale for this choice, & if the person in charge had asked for the reasoning for this decision, it would be simple to share that with us.

However, the ED of the Foundation has been out of the office a surprising amount of time. Maybe there's a reason for her flying around the world; maybe she's talking to people whom someone at the Foundation needs to talk to. But the article where it's stated she spends 200 days a year travelling was published on 19 May, & she's had plenty of time to provide some kind of explanation why she travels so much.

Why is this all important? Very simple. There are hundreds of people who contribute work, time & resources to the various Wikimedia projects who get little if any acknowledgement from the Foundation for what they do, let alone any help from the Foundation. Yes, they provide the servers & maintain the software, & sponsor conferences around the world for Wikimedians -- but that's 75% of their budget. And as the essay mentioned above that Guy Macon wrote points out, the Foundation keeps raising even more money than they need. Someone is benefiting from all of this, & it isn't the average Wikipedian who not only donates their work but has to spend money on their research, & for all this receives nothing more than an impersonal blanket thanks. Apparently the Foundation believes their responsibility to the projects ends with providing servers & bandwidth & the volunteers ought to be content with that; everything volunteers have created -- an encyclopedia, a dictionary, collections of free media & books -- are the results of letting people scratch their itches. (It took the Foundation years to get around to starting the Wikipedia Library, which runs primarily on donated access to digital archives, which only came into being due to a volunteer's -- not a staffer's -- efforts.)

Despite what it might appear, I don't enjoy criticizing the Foundation. I'd rather spend my time working on articles & ignore all of this bullshit. But knowing this happens is a disincentive to do more than just scratching my itch, & I suspect I'm not alone. When all we volunteers are doing is only scratching our itches much will not get done. Maintenance duties get ignored, people decide not to take on duties such as seeking the Admin bit, & people find they have less time to contribute than they thought they had -- & leave.

But all of this would be easier to handle if the Foundation were to share information with the volunteers -- realize we are partners, not customers or clients -- & not be as secretive as Amazon with their latest marketing strategies. -- llywrch (talk) 22:48, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

• Response to Cas. It's hard to know where to start in criticising this weird excuse for journalism. If you're going to report publicly on these matters (and it's in the community's interest that the first two topics be explored), you're writing journalism. Journalism in this instance required polite, professional, no-nonsense questions to be emailed to senior spokespeople, specifying copy-deadline, asking for the briefest of responses on the record, and explicitly not guaranteeing to quote all or any part of the response.

  Not just any questions, but pointy questions that might get to the core of the issues you're going to deal with in the story—questions that might generate responses of interest to readers, and that might provide the scaffolding for the structure of the piece. Questions that make the respondent work hard to weedle out of. To a certain extent, it's a cat-and-mouse game. Always has been.

  Direct contact also enables you to satisfy an often-essential, usually desirable feature of journalism: giving those who are criticised the right of reply. So the story is a balanced product, with institutional politics and the interpersonal blended into a deeper, more engaging account than this tawdry attempt, which instead indulges in the expression of personal hunches way beyond what credible journalism would accept. And whoever wrote it has a very odd idea about narrative—especially how to induct us at the opening into the thematic environment you're going to explore. The first paragraph is as organised as an upturned garbage bin. Tony (talk) 09:34, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Yep - very valid points indeed Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:01, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Thoughts on undisclosed paid editing

I don't think this is an issue with any specific individual at the WMF, but I think it illustrates that the issue of undisclosed paid editing should receive more attention. The fact that a company can engage in undisclosed paid editing for high-profile clients for years and feel so safe about it that they even dare to get contract work from the WMF was really shocking for me. We need more community efforts and we need more support from the WMF on this field. And of course the WMF should learn from this and be more dilligent with companies they engage with. --MarioGom (talk) 15:08, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Extended content

@MarioGom: How is this a response to the conversation in this thread? Sadads (talk) 15:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC) @Sadads: Yeah, reading again, it was quite off-topic. That is what came to my mind when I saw that the way the article is written is leading the discussion mainly to unrelated tangets. --MarioGom (talk) 15:28, 30 August 2018 (UTC) @MarioGom: resectioned and collapsed the metathread, Sadads (talk) 15:38, 30 August 2018 (UTC) @Sadads: Makes sense. Thank you. --MarioGom (talk) 15:59, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Lack of communication

The Go Fish case just goes to show that there's a lack of communication between WP users and WMF staff. In Wikimedia projects, the WMF has a great repository of crowdsourced info it can consult, for example, WP:PAIDLIST and the editors who maintain it, yet obviously they didn't check it in their "privacy review" of Go Fish.

I'm also annoyed by the tone, e.g. the statement that "we ... feel [Go Fish] should have shared this information with us during discussions" -- seriously?? I don't share the general feeling here that identifiable information on WP users has been shared with Go Fish, but I still think the tone of the letter is inappropriately aloof: we had followed our policies, we still tripped, but we kept walking, and now move along everyone...

This WMF error didn't hurt Wikimedia's partners (in face of whose interests they've already ignored the users' privacy in one case last year), only its readers, who may now find themselves better deceived as a result of Go Fish's R&D that WMF just financed. This silly, avoidable mistake could've been acknowledged as such by at least someone from WMF by now without hurting anyone's financial & PR interests, but unfortunately legalese vagueness is what you get when dialog is so scarce. When you think of that, you've got to wonder what's next in store. Daß Wölf 04:10, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Not really. I'd say it shows that decisions are made without performing even the slightest research on the topic. Just like that time when a controversial WMF board of trustee member was appointed "because articles about the controversy were not in the first page of Google results for his name in the HR person's browser". --Nemo 14:01, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

I continue to insist that Wikipedia should revert to a service organization. The WMF in its present form should be dissolved. Obviously, the head office in San Francisco is looking for their own profits and we, the volunteers, are only too foolish in allowing them to succeed. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:22, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Organizational incompetence

I am only learning that this happened now. Thanks for describing what happened.

As an organization, the WMF's a) condemning black hat paid editing for years now; and b) paying GoFish for work and giving GoFish data, is a result of incompetence of the organization.

Criticism of the organization is appropriately directly at the top. The board should have been mentioned. The culture and structure of the WMF should have been mentioned. Jytdog (talk) 13:57, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

I'm curious if WMF has been known to respond to pieces published in The Signpost. This would be most interesting... --K.e.coffman (talk) 21:22, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Question about the data

One thing I am not clear on - did WMF get the data back from GoFish, or does GoFish get to keep it and use it internally? Whether the WMF could retrieve it, would depend on the contract. If WMF has the right to retrieve it and that GoFish destroy any copy it has, I hope that right was exercised. (I deal with contracts and data transfer agreements in the real world). Jytdog (talk) 13:57, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

SEO terms to watch for

Now that one SEO optimiser has obtained the data on the most effective terms to add to the articles about their clients, can we have a list of those terms so we can monitor for them and remove or rephrase where appropriate? ϢereSpielChequers 20:35, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

It is unlikely they are doing that kind of SEO on Wikipedia. Their Wikipedia editing service is part of their reputation management and PR services. This is consistent with the behavior of their sockpuppets, who create or edit articles about their clients to improve their image. None of their edits look like keyword-based SEO. --MarioGom (talk) 00:11, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

But just what SEO assistance did they provide the WMF? What aspect of their services has any positive relationship to anything that WP should be doing? The only two things I can imagine is that they provided information to assist in fundraising, where possibly some help is restraining the over-stridency of the appeals might have been beneficial, or that they were asked how to further decrease the influence on WP of the services they provide their other clients (which, however much of a gain for us, would seem a clear COI on their part). But I'm not an expert here, and there may be something I've missed. DGG ( talk ) 05:23, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, they provided basic SEO advice such as adding Sitemaps ([4]), ensuring that links from mobile version always go to mobile version pages ([5]), or adding metadata tags for interwiki ([6]). You can see a list of changes being implemented after Go Fish Digital audit ([7]). It is the kind of SEO audit you would do for the average joe, not for a high-traffic website for which Google has a custom crawler ([8]). Generally useless or not worth the money, as some other users already pointed out. But their SEO advice does not look shady, just lame. My hypothesis is that their big advantage, other than getting money from a basic SEO audit, was to later use Wikipedia name for advertising, both for their SEO branch as well as to legitimize their reputation management service. Even if the WMF contract was not supposed to allow that from the beginning (does WMF contract really forbid disclosure of WMF as a client?), it looks like Go Fish Digital intended to use Wikipedia as a major client example (see [9]). --MarioGom (talk) 07:27, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Need help updating image for Wikimedia financials

At User:Guy Macon/Wikipedia has Cancer the table of financial data has been updated for 2017-2018 but the image at commons:File:Wikimedia Foundation financial development multilanguage.svg (also used on this page) only goes to 2016-2017. Could someone with SVG editing skills please look at that table and update the image? --Guy Macon (talk) 22:51, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

UPDATE: I solved the problem on my page by replacing the image with a template. The other pages that use the image still need an updated version. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:02, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

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