Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-08-01

The city attorney of Durham, North Carolina, attempted to coax the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to reveal the identities of three editors and to prohibit the placement of certain verifiable and truthful content on Wikipedia pages of city officials, Indy Week and The News and Observer report.

A letter, dated June 29, outlined three complaints about content on Wikipedia. Two of the complaints pertained to coverage of a council member's alleged attempted extortion of a developer, while the third related to an image depicting the signature of the mayor of Durham. The letter requested that the Wikimedia foundation remove the image and bar users from uploading it on Wikimedia projects, and requested the names and identities of the various editors who added the text and/or image content to Wikipedia.

Recent months have been a tumultuous time for Durham's seven-member city council. In March, Elaine M. O'Neal, the mayor of Durham, publicly read an allegation that a Durham city council member (subsequently identified as Monique Holsey-Hyman) had extorted a developer for campaign contributions. The aftermath of the meeting was testy, with the public able to hear shouting between officials, despite them being out of public view. An eyewitness interviewed by Indy Week alleged that Durham council member DeDreana Freeman had attempted to strike Durham Mayor-pro tempore and council member Mark-Anthony Middleton during the shouting session, but instead struck O'Neal once and punched the head of fellow Durham council member Leonardo Williams twice before Williams subdued her. In the aftermath of these incidents, O'Neal announced that she would not seek re-election as Mayor, and a state investigation was opened into the extortion allegation (Holsey-Hyman denies the alleged extortion attempt and a separate allegation that she ordered city employees to perform campaign work on her behalf).

For making edits to the Wikipedia entries about certain figures implicated in this scandal, the letter requested the identities of Mako001 and Willthacheerleader18. The entries contained unflattering information about the public officials at the time of the letter's sending, but the entries were well-sourced; Indy Week reports that the entries' descriptions of the scandal were written "without any apparent factual error and with links to news articles as references".

Several figures have publicly expressed concerns about the sending of the letter. Barry Saunders, a member of the editorial board of The News and Observer, wrote that, "[u]nless the Wikipedia posts were egregiously wrong—and there's no evidence that they were—the three Durham officials should have taken a page, when it came to criticism, from the title of the 1970s hit by the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive: let it ride .... Few voters, though, will forgive attempts to silence critics".

Duke University law professor Stuart Benjamin was taken aback by the letter. He told The News and Observer, "I understand why public officials do not want unflattering information published about them, but it is deeply troubling that any public official tried to unmask someone who posted this accurate information."

David Larson, opinion editor of The Carolina Journal, concurred. "[T]his attempt to intimidate anonymous people online for daring to discuss real but unflattering details of your political service is the stuff of dysfunctional regimes", he wrote.

The WMF, for its part, told Indy Week that it is "strongly committed to protecting the privacy of editors and users on Wikimedia projects".

The letter, signed by city attorney Kimberly Rehberg, also states that she had removed the image of the signature from the Wikipedia article about Elaine M. O'Neal on June 28. This checks out; that article was edited on that day by a user named Kimlynn69, and Kimlynn69 wrote a message to Johnson524 that identified herself as "Kimberly M. Rehberg" and as the city attorney of Durham. As it had for the editors who touched content relating to the scandal of the March 23 meeting, the letter had also requested Johnson524's name and identity as well.

In response to Rehberg's message, Johnson524 explained that he had obtained the signature from Durham Performing Arts Center playbills. Indy Week reports that, following Johnson's reply to the message, Rehberg said in an email "there is little legal basis to demand that Wiki reveal the identity of the User or prohibit the upload of a photo of the signature to the Mayor's Wiki page".

The mayor, per an email obtained by Indy Week, was unsatisfied with Rehberg's reply. O'Neal told Rehberg that her request to send the letter to the WMF "still stands"; Rehberg said in an email sent later that day that the letter had been sent. Despite this, the letter may have never actually arrived at its intended destination. The WMF told Indy Week that they had not received the letter and that the letter that had been made public contained an incorrect postal address for the WMF's headquarters. Rehberg, meanwhile, told Indy Week that the letter had only been sent by physical mail.

The Signpost reached out to Johnson524 following the publication of Rehberg's letter. "I was so happy to see an outpouring of support from the Wikipedia community from editors who have been around longer than I have," he wrote: "I have always valued that Wikimedia has also never succumbed to external powers—and has continued to fight for a world of free information: whether that be not to take down/severely censor their project in Russia, to campaign for those jailed editors in Saudi Arabia, or even just go against unjust decisions by local governments here in the U.S."

He remained, however, displeased with the mayor's handling of the situation. "I would have even put it past the mayor Elaine O'Neal if she went back on her statement after I explained how I got the signature publicly, but since she doubled down on her attempt to try to 'unmask' me and two other editors after without really any prior contact, I am glad she will not be running for mayor again, because I don't think how this situation was handled was right at all", he wrote. – R

(For further coverage of this story see this issue's In the media.)

Vladimir Medeyko (User:Drbug), the former head of Wikimedia Russia and founder of the Russian government-approved Ruwiki fork, has been "banned indefinitely by the Wikimedia Foundation from editing all Wikimedia sites". Medeyko had previously been blocked indefinitely on the Russian Wikipedia, following a discussion at the Russian Wikipedia's Administrators' Noticeboard, as well as on Commons, where the reason given was –

Long-term abuse: creating a Wikipedia fork which includes stolen content from Commons as well

See also previous Signpost coverage here and here. – AK

Wikimedia Europe has published its European Policy Monitoring Report for July 2023. Among other current legal developments, it highlights that –

France is working on a tech bill to regulate the entire online environment [...,] the projet de loi visant à sécuriser et réguler l'espace numérique (SREN). There are several problematic articles and aspects in the proposal that would change how content moderation on [Wikimedia] projects works. Such examples are provisions aiming to keep links to 'banned' media off websites (think Russia Today) or an obligation to not allow banned users from re-registering (which would require some sort of background check on all new registrations).

The report also calls attention to "Italy['s] Crusade Against the Public Domain", referring the country's efforts "to restrict and get paid for re-use of public domain material" such as Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. – H

The Wikimedia Foundation has launched an instance on the federated social network Mastodon, at https://wikimedia.social/ (for technical reasons, it was not possible to use a wikimedia.org domain). According to a July 17 announcement on Wikimedia-l,

At the moment, sign-up is open for Wikimedia Foundation staff as we examine moderation and other areas. Product and technology staff will use it primarily for developer engagement. The goal is to create a space for people to connect and talk tech.

At the time of writing (July 30), the server lists 72 active users, although its directory of recently active local users shows only five who have posted. The Foundation's own @wikimediafoundation account leads, with 14 posts, and has already gained over 5,000 followers – undoubtedly helped by a Hacker News post that made it (close) to the top of that site's front page.

The announcement comes amid continuing concerns about Twitter (where the corresponding @wikimedia account remains active, although viewing a list of its recent tweets currently requires registration, due to recent changes by X née Twitter). In late 2022, suggestions that the Foundation should mirror the official Wikipedia Twitter account (run by its Communications department) on Mastodon had fallen flat. This later motivated the creation of a community-run Wikipedia account on the Wikis World Mastodon server in April 2023 (see our coverage: "Wikipedia gains an official presence on Mastodon ... without the Wikimedia Foundation's involvement" and "Who speaks for Wikipedia? Mastodon accreditation reverted"). At the time of writing, it continues to be active, with 16K followers and a verified checkmark, while requests by WMF staff "to change the name of the account [from @wikipedia] to 'Wikipedia movement', 'Wikipedia volunteers', 'Wikipedia worldwide', or something similar" remain unheeded. – H

• New administrator?: Pppery has opened a request for adminship, which remains open as of press time.
• Annual reports:
  • Wikimedia Chile (financial statements)
  • Kashmiri Wikimedians User Group
  • North Carolina Wikipedians
  • WikiClassics User Group
• Global bans: 86sedan ([1]), Drbug (see report above).
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement (beginning 31 July) is Man. It will be followed the week after by Goalkeeper. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
• Flickr Foundation seeks input for improving the Flickr2Commons tool: "Flickypedia" is a recently announced "project by the Flickr Foundation in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation to extend and endorse the Flickr2Commons software tool. Flickypedia will streamline the transmission of Flickr images into the Wikimedia Commons." The project just launched a survey to solicit user input on the design of the tool.

The New York Times says this is "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth" and asks: Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right – without destroying itself in the process? Starting with the 2021 essay, Death of Wikipedia by Barkeep49, the Times examines how Wikipedia and artificial intelligence will interact. Barkeep considers death-by-AI to be the most likely cause of Wikipedia's demise, followed by a fragmentation of the internet, and forks caused by WMF shenanigans. All these scenarios might seem wildly optimistic, but Barkeep does outline the strengths of Wikipedia: only a better encyclopedia will be able to replace us. But reaching that milestone will be very difficult for a new 'pedia, with a likely lack of agreement among Wiki editors on which 'pedia to move to, and the lack of the WMF's stash of cash. He elaborates why our encyclopedia won't likely succumb to any of these threats anytime soon. But he did admit that "AI's day of writing a high quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later." He told the Times reporter that "It wouldn’t surprise me if things are fine for the next three years, and then, all of a sudden, in year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff."

Academic researcher Nicholas Vincent worries, according to the Times that AI will cannibalize Wikipedia, mostly spouting information taken from the 'pedia. A chatbot need not be better than Wikipedia, but simply faster, or somewhat more up-to-date. Once a chatbot's Wiki-based output becomes more popular than the 'pedia itself, the quality of the 'pedia might fall, leaving the chatbot to cannibalize itself. This has lead one group of Wikipedians on a conference call to agree that "we want a world in which knowledge is created by humans".

The article continues at length and in depth. Other topics include the Wikimedia Foundations's recently announced Wikipedia plug-in for ChatGPT (see our previous coverage) and a reflection on Joseph Reagle's 2020 essay "The many (reported) deaths of Wikipedia". There's even a few paragraphs on the final death spiral. In sum, the Times article is encyclopedic: something that this author doubts a large language model could replicate. –S

Three news outlets covered a tempest in a teapot that resulted after Durham, North Carolina's City Attorney Kimberly Rehberg sent a request to the Wikimedia Foundation to identify editors who have been editing articles on Durham city politics (see our related coverage in this issue's News and notes column). Mayor Elaine O'Neal and City Council members DeDreana Freeman and Monique Holsey-Hyman also requested that some material in "their articles" be removed. O'Neal will not be seeking re-election this year, while Freeman will be running for mayor, and Holsey-Hyman who was appointed in 2022 is seeking election to the council.

Holsey-Hyman has been accused of attempting to solicit a bribe to vote for a rezoning proposal. There's no news on whether an investigation by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation is going anywhere. She was also accused of improperly using city employees for her election campaign. Freeman reportedly engaged in an aggressive shouting match with a political opponent. These facts seem to have been properly reported and documented in Wikipedia's articles about the two politicians.

Some people may be surprised when they see a Wikipedia article about themselves. The Signpost recommends that if you don't consider yourself notable or you have a strong desire for privacy that you identify yourself and request that the article be deleted, either on the article talk page or at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard. If you believe the article is inaccurate, rather than just unpleasant, you should also post on these pages. However, please do not attempt to doxx our editors, edit the article yourself or through paid editors, or make even vague legal threats. Everybody will be much happier if you follow these recommendations. –S

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), aka Michaelvlawler, was doxxed by the Daily Beast as none other than himself, after making 26 edits to the Mike Lawler article. It wasn't really a case of jumping to a conclusion − since User:Michaelvlawler had been warned about his apparent conflict of interest, ignored the warning and kept on editing about himself, and was ultimately blocked. His only other edit had been to include Mike Lawler as a well-known alumni at Manhattan College. He'd also added his middle name, Vincent, to his own article. Only after the Daily Beast article appeared did he contest the block, saying that he had been blocked because he did not confirm that he was the subject of the article, and that he would promise not to edit that article again. A kind-hearted admin — our own Tamzin — undid the block after the proper documentation was received at WP:VRT, but did emphasize the promise not to edit the Wikipedia article and recommended that he review WP:Conflict of interest. While we are not complaining about the forgiving spirit demonstrated here, we note that there are sometimes downsides to forgiveness. Lawler then disputed the Daily Beast article, extracting a correction saying that he was not banned by Wikipedia for editing the Wikipedia article about himself, but rather that he had been banned for not confirming that he was the subject of the article. Lawler is not a lawyer, but an accountant. Nevertheless, we are sure he would have made a very good Wikilawyer had he not already given himself away.

The Signpost strongly recommends, again, that politicians never edit articles about themselves, whether they do it personally or through staffers or other paid editors. Too many reporters now know the trick of checking a politician's articles for biased or conflict-of-interest edits. Those politicians who do such editing are almost certain to get into a spot of bother. We also recommend that publications not doxx these editors. Simply note the edits that seem most promotional, any whitewashing and warnings to the editor on the article or user talk pages. The Signpost will then be able to mention the problem in this column – provided we have the space. We have lots of space. –S

UnHerd criticizes Wikipedia for a communications project intended to update a number of articles related to climate change, run as part of the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 13; they call it "just the latest front in the UN’s ongoing online climate change narrative control war" and draw parallels to similar projects undertaken during the time of COVID-19.

The communications project in question is –

formally entitled "Phase 2 Communicating current SDG 13 knowledge through Wikipedia – a collaboration between Wikipedia editors and content experts at SEI, IPCC, UNFCCC and other organisations" and runs from mid 2022 to mid 2024.

The project selects relevant Wikipedia articles dealing with climate change topics that have significant daily pageviews and at the same time require updating and improvement in content and quality. The project team scores the quality of these Wikipedia articles at the start and at the end of the project using ten quality parameters. We also interact with published experts who advise us on necessary content edits. The core project team is made up of academics who have scientific and climate change expertise and also know how to edit Wikipedia.

On much the same topic, though from a different perspective, CNN reports that the United Arab Emirates, the country hosting this year's COP28 climate conference, has –

embarked on a major PR campaign to boost its green credentials ahead of the COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai later this year, prompting heavy criticism from climate groups and some politicians.

At the same time, researchers are raising red flags over allegations of more covert influence campaigns, as members of the COP28 team were found by the Centre for Climate Reporting and the Guardian to have been editing Wikipedia pages about the conference’s chief, and an army of fake social media accounts has appeared, promoting the country’s climate record.

The COP28 president's "greenwashing" of Wikipedia had previously been reported by the Centre for Climate Reporting in late May of this year. – S, AK, J

For further coverage see this issue's Disinformation report.

• Mazal tov to Wikipedia: The Jerusalem Post celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Hebrew Wikipedia by reporting from a meeting of 150 editors. They note that Wikipedia is increasing its support for a program for students writing in Arabic by 50%. The world is rapidly changing, and the editors of the Hebrew Wikipedia are changing with it. The role of artificial intelligence is one challenge being addressed, but the editors seem to agree that they will continue focusing on the quality of articles over mere quantity.
• Barbenheimer brouhaha: Kotaku believes that the Wikipedia article on Barbenheimer was contentious. If you agree, perhaps you should relax, sit down, and open a brew. Ha ha!
• Edit-a-thon of the month: The Santa Fe New Mexican covers an edit-a-thon at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum located (where else?) in Santa Fe, New Mexico and featuring well-known resident Georgia O'Keeffe. Given the intense focus of the meet-up and the length of the article, it appears to have been a very successful edit-a-thon.
• Swiss Wikipedia articles rescued for future generations: Swissinfo reports that the "Swiss National Library is building a digital collection of Wikipedia articles related to Switzerland. The articles are to be permanently archived for future generations and made freely available online." According to a press release by the Swiss Wikimedia chapter, Wikimedia CH, the collection contains articles from the Wikipedia editions in German, French, Italian, and Romansh (the four national languages of Switzerland), selected using the PetScan tool. Wikimedia CH notes that "Just because Wikipedia is online does not mean that this online encyclopedia is secured for all eternity. This can only be guaranteed by a memory institution with a corresponding mandate." Work on the project began in 2020, and culminated in the collection's launch in June 2023. Future generations will be able to find it at https://www.e-helvetica.nb.admin.ch/search?q=f%5Behs_collection%5D%5B0%5D=wikipedia .
• Is Wikipedia replacing Google?: Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz (known for her coverage of internet culture) reports that "Google search is being replaced by TikTok, Wikipedia and Reddit". The article offers ample anecdotes and expert quotes about the shortcomings of Google Search in general. The Signpost can indeed confirm that they changed it and now it sucks. However, its claim that "Wikipedia, whose homepage defaults to a search bar, is also an increasingly popular search tool" rests on only two pieces of evidence: first, a journalist from The Verge wrote last year that he personally prefers Wikipedia's mobile app over Google (see our coverage at the time), and second, Wikipedian Annie Rauwerda (of Depths of Wikipedia fame) told the reporter that "Wikipedia is constantly updated, there’s standards for the sources, so it’s very rare that you find low quality SEO farm websites cited." While both observations may be correct, the WaPo might have wanted to also consult the Wikimedia Foundation's traffic statistics and analyses. Oh well.
• WMF grant recipient seeks to preserve knowledge of Jewish languages: The Forward takes a look at the Jewish Language Project, a Wikimedia Foundation grant recipient seeking to preserve critically endangered Jewish languages and dialects through the creation of videos of their native speakers, as well as accompanying translations and transcriptions. The project is affiliated with Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion.

Yes, it's hot out there. Be careful – even the news is hot this month.

Two weeks ago, CNN took a new look at a two-month-old controversy involving Sultan Al Jaber – the presiding officer of this year's United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP28 – and COP28-related paid editing on Wikipedia. In fact, this coverage was just a warmed-over retelling of an outstanding article, Cop28 president's team accused of Wikipedia "greenwashing", jointly published by The Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting on May 30. The Signpost reported in brief on the joint article, though we really didn't have much to add to it. But as the weather keeps getting hotter, the story just seems to get hotter with it. This story, just like climate change itself, is unlikely to go away soon.

Sultan Al Jaber has several obvious conflicts of interest. As the presiding officer of the UN sponsored conference, Al Jaber sets the agenda for a possible agreement among governments on how to deal with climate change and he – like the representative of any government – can veto any agreement. He is also the CEO of a major oil producer, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and the chairman of ADNOC's alternative-energy company Masdar. Adding even more to his many responsibilities, he is the United Arab Emirates' minister of industry and advanced technology and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), which claims to be the world's first university specializing in artificial intelligence.

Green activists worry that Al Jaber, the oil executive, is not willing to set a cutoff date for burning fossil fuels – a step they think Al Jaber, the COP28 organizer, must take.

Like many people with a conflict of interest, Al Jaber seems to be addressing the problem more as communication difficulty than as a problem of split loyalties. The May 30 joint article identified three paid editors working for Al Jaber.

• CB at ADNOC declared his paid editing status on his user page with his first edit in March 2022, and began editing the talk page at Al Jaber's biography immediately, and later progressed to "uncontroversial" edits on the actual article.
• Junktuner, who was later confirmed by COP28 as being the head of COP28's marketing team, also declared his paid-editing status on his user page with his first edit in February 2023. He admitted that he had edited earlier as an anonymous editor, 94.203.112.201, where he'd made 17 edits, 16 of which were to the Al Jaber article. Nine of these edits were revision-deleted as copyright violations.
• Zkhan2023 declared that they were paid by Masdar on their first edit in January 2023, but made all their edits to the Al Jaber bio.

The Signpost can add that GreenDrake28 declared that they were paid by Masdar on their first edit in April 2023 and made only five more edits, all to the Masdar article or talk pages.

In short, it looks like COP28 is at least making an attempt to appear that they are trying to comply with Wikipedia rules. But do they actually understand and agree with our rules? We will see going forward.

There is one worrying report, that followed the jointly-published article by just a few days. The Climate Disinfo Project published a summary of a Twitter campaign that appeared to be coordinated in the UAE, and encouraged climate change policies in line with Al Jaber's priorities. Many of the accounts were "seemingly artificial or astroturfed". Check out the section on "The 'Five American Blondes'". Somebody is certainly pushing something there.

Jason Aldean has a hot hit song about small towns, but some folks might not think the joys of small town life necessarily involve brandishing guns or stomping on people who desecrate the American flag. There are many good songs about small towns that don't mention these things, for example John Mellencamp's Small Town [2] and John Prine's environmentalist view of Paradise [3]. Even Merle Haggard's conservative anthem Okie From Muskogee [4], famous for taking a dim view of hippies, doesn't suggest kicking their asses.

But the Try That in a Small Town video has gotten Aldean in hot water. It's not so much the guns in the video, but the focus on how cities are cesspits full of crime and protests; when the video does get back to a small town, it has the guy singing in front of a courthouse, which is the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. A hundred years ago, an 18-year-old Black man, Henry Choate, was lynched there, hanged to death out of one of its windows. Six years later, the lynching of Cordie Cheek occurred just outside of town. Cheek was castrated just before he was hanged to death. The town is also remembered for the Columbia race riot of 1946. Well, maybe he didn't know. Maybe he didn't care. Go figure.

Has Aldean been spreading his propaganda on Wikipedia? Unless somebody is trying to embarrass Aldean with a Joe job, it appears likely. Perhaps he hasn't been paying for his extensive exposure on Wikipedia, but simply has many fans who go to extremes in coordinated editing of the article about Aldean.

All told, there are at least 23 banned socks (including some given checkuser blocks) who have edited the Jason Aldean article. They almost all appear to promote Aldean's career. Most of the socks seem to edit this article solo, except for the Cherry Benji sockfarm. Cherry Benji, CHYTT, COUNTRYNOW and XxxMr.Cherryxxx were all blocked as part of this sockfarm, and all of them edited the Jason Aldean article. The reason this group of accounts was blocked is because they all concentrated on articles related to Aldean and created new, non-notable, low-quality articles related to him. Cherry Benji alone made 35 edits to the Jason Aldean article.

Considering the recent creation of the Try That in a Small Town article, you might not expect to already see blocked socks in its history. You'd be wrong: Red Slapper edited the page three days after the new article replaced a redirect. Their last edit (not including their talk page) was about requesting page protection for the article. The sockfarm that the account worked for was NoCal100, which started its long-term abuse way back in 2008, and was best known for spreading anti-Muslim hate.

Joe Lewis, age 86, is a businessman and owner of the London-based soccer team Tottenham Hotspur F.C.. His net worth is about $6.1 billion, according to Forbes. He made this money running pubs, speculating in currencies, and in private equity; at least until recently, he has served on many corporate boards of directors, both in the UK and the US. The SEC accused him this week of engaging in insider trading, a very lucrative form of fraud, based on information he learned about (and misappropriated) while serving as a corporate director. According to a statement by Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York:

My Office, the Southern District of New York, has indicted Joe Lewis, the British billionaire, for orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme and his co-conspirators and personal pilots, Patrick O'Connor and Bryan ‘Marty' Waugh. We allege that, for years, Joe Lewis abused his access to corporate boardrooms and repeatedly provided inside information to his romantic partners, his personal assistants, his friends, and his pilots. Those folks then traded on that inside information – and made millions of dollars in the stock market – because, thanks to Lewis, those bets were a sure thing... [A]s we allege, he used inside information as a way to compensate his employees or to shower gifts on his friends and lovers. That's classic corporate corruption. It's cheating. And it's against the law – laws that apply to everyone, no matter who you are.

According to the indictment, Lewis gave his two private aircraft pilots inside information on an unannounced drug trial – and two loans of $500,000 each. The pilots then traded on the stock, each profiting by more than $500,000. They also texted detailed information on the potential trade to their friends, citing Lewis as its source. Yowza!

The indictment does not specifically name the "romantic partners" or "lovers", but refers 20 times to at least one "girlfriend" or "ex-girlfriend" who made trades similar to those of the pilots. As the SEC has said, indictments are not convictions, and Lewis (and others mentioned in the indictments) should be considered innocent unless and until they are convicted in a court of law.

The Hotspurs motto in Latin is audere est facere ('to dare is to do'). Would Lewis dare to try to pull off such a series of crimes? And would he dare to violate Wikipedia's rules on paid editing?

With the usual caveat about possible Joe jobs, it appears that Lewis (or someone trying very hard to look like Lewis) has hired a series of sophisticated paid editors. At least 13 blocked socks (including checkuser blocks, and one editor blocked for undeclared paid editing) edited the Joe Lewis (British businessman) article. Several of these editors were part of farms that also edited articles on Russian oligarchs. These include users Alfaweiss and DeltaGr, from the Mikenew1953 sockfarm; users CoffeeStation95, Equity2019, Platanias25 and Softmusic16, from the Antony1821 sockfarm; as well as users Pharaoh's jaws bites, Poor billionaire, Shalom Shabat Woggly and Mohel's knife cuts, from the Pionier sockfarm.

ScepticalChymist, who did not edit articles on oligarchs, was blocked for UPE, for running a reputation management firm and editing the articles about his clients.

999bottles also edited the article, and was a member of a fairly new sockfarm, LucyAyoubFan, which includes at least 210 confirmed socks. The first blocks of this sockfarm occurred in 2022, and it was also very active on the Hebrew Wikipedia. Among its specialties was a focus on editing soccer club-related articles.

This week William S. Tidwell, a correctional counselor at the Federal Medical Center, Devens prison hospital, was charged with taking bribes and lying to a bank about a loan he received from a prisoner. Allegedly the bribes total up to $90,000, and the loan was for $50,000, coming from a "high-net-worth inmate" identified only as "Individual 1" in the charging document. Reuters reported that "a person familiar with the matter" identified Individual 1 as Raj Rajaratnam; his lawyer said that he was unfamiliar with the matter, but that his client "would cooperate appropriately" with prosecutors if asked.

Rajaratnam was a hedge fund manager born in Sri Lanka, who founded the now-defunct Galleon Group, and was convicted in 2011 having profited up to $63.8 million from insider trading. His combined fines from civil and criminal cases was $150 million. He served less than eight years of his eleven year sentence, having been released from FMC Devens to his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment.

Editors of the Raj Rajaratnam article included at least 9 later-blocked sockpuppets (including checkuser blocks and an undeclared paid editor). I did not examine the multiple other articles about Rajaratnam's trading, legal cases, or books.

One especially disturbing sock was Belomorkanal. This user name is Russian for "White Sea Canal" — which was Stalin's first major show project, dug by hand by prisoners from the Gulag. Belomorkanal was part of the Bobmack89x sock farm, which specialized in editing articles on crime, gangs, gangsters (especially Russian gangsters) and U.S. federal agencies. The total effect of his three edits at the article was to link then-President Barack Obama to Rajaratnam.

Two socks, Hillcountries and HudsonBreeze, were both from the Sudar123 sock farm which specialized in editing about Sri Lankans.

OnceaMetro was an undeclared paid editor who was blocked following a 2015 Signpost story detailing their edits for Sony, hedge fund managers and other financiers.

What do all of these dastardly schemes have in common? Not much — apart from that they were all foiled by diligent volunteers with nothing but computers and brains. And if you have both of those things (frankly, you can get by with just one) your help is appreciated in the fight against socks.

Doncram (Donald Peter Cram) was an American Wikipedian who created over 13,500 main-space articles, and many more pages in total. Many of these focused on U.S. National Register of Historic Places entries and U.S. National Historic Landmarks. He also worked on articles about NRHP-affiliated artists, architects, builders, and engineers. He participated in several WikiProjects over the years, was active at AfD, and created many excellent list articles. During his lifetime he worked as a cabbie in New York City, where he also worked as a budget analyst. He held faculty positions at MIT, Cal State Fullerton in California and at SUNY Oswego. Later, after moving to Montrose, Colorado, he was employed in airport operations. He died on July 9, 2023 in Montrose of natural causes. His obituary in the Montrose Press can be found here.

Dr. Peter McCawley, an economist from the Australian National University, spent a little over ten years on Wikipedia contributing in his area of expertise, writing articles about the economy and politics of Indonesia. Outside of Wikipedia, his career history included being the executive director of Asian Development Bank, dean of the Asian Development Bank Institute, and the deputy director general of AusAID; his work was indeed cited on Wikipedia. He died on July 18.

Eagleash, from South Croydon, London, began editing Wikipedia on 15 October 2012 and amassed nearly 109,000 edits on many subjects including his beloved Crystal Palace F.C. and Formula One. He often helped out new users at the help desk and in articles for creation. He edited every day for over eight years from 9 April 2015 until his last edit on 29 May 2023, achieving the fourth-longest such editing streak in all namespaces along with the same ranking (among non-bot editors) in the article namespace list. He died on 8 June 2023, aged 70, after a heart attack.

In the last edition of The Signpost, I covered three bots highly useful to WikiProjects. In this edition of Tips and Tricks, I'm going to focus on smaller, more personal tools, that let you focus on more specialized tasks – some user scripts, some gadgets, and some external tools. In particular, I'm going to try to do a brief summary of the main scripts/gadgets/tools related to citations.

Some of the text was taken from these tools' description pages, which I highly encourage you to read if any of them interest you.

A quick note on how to install user scripts, using my own WP:UPSD (which is hosted at User:Headbomb/unreliable.js) as an example. The other scripts can be installed in exactly the same way, replacing User:Headbomb/unreliable.js with User:Example/source.js accordingly. Some scripts may have additional customization options, detailed on their documentation page.

As a general caveat, for cybersecurity reasons, you should only install user scripts if you trust their author to not be secretly nefarious. Likewise for external sites from third parties. Gadgets can be directly enabled in your preferences, and their code has been community vetted, thus they represent a lesser security risk.

The Citation Expander is a gadget that lets you invoke Citation bot. I have already written an in-depth guide a year ago, so I'll summarize the main points and you can read that article if you want to know more. If you're new to tool-assisted editing, if you only install one tool today, this is very likely the one you want.

The key idea is that you can have citations like

• {{cite journal |jstor=20107388 }}
• {{cite journal |doi=10.1038/351624a0 }}
• {{cite book |isbn=978-0-9920012-2-3 }}

and have the bot automatically expand them to

• Keen, Suzanne (2006). "A Theory of Narrative Empathy". Narrative. 14 (3): 207–236. doi:10.1353/nar.2006.0015. JSTOR 20107388. S2CID 52228354.
• Wigley, Dale B.; Davies, Gideon J.; Dodson, Eleanor J.; Maxwell, Anthony; Dodson, Guy (1991). "Crystal structure of an N-terminal fragment of the DNA gyrase B protein". Nature. 351 (6328): 624–629. Bibcode:1991Natur.351..624W. doi:10.1038/351624a0. PMID 1646964. S2CID 4373125.
• Robichaud, Marc; Basque, Maurice (September 2013). Histoire de l'Université de Moncton. ISBN 978-0-9920012-2-3.

This can save you a huge amount of time and headaches, not having to format things yourself, not having to manually enter authors, etc. All you need is an identifier (URLs will often work too), and let the bot take over. Then all you have to do is review what the bot did (e.g. it missed the publisher of the book, which you could add yourself with |publisher=Institut d'Études Acadiennes).

You can also unleash the bot on existing citations so it can perform some cleanup and find other relevant bibliographic information.

OAbot is a tool designed to find and add links to open access publications and find suitable links to free versions of paywalled articles by searching several databases, author websites, and so on. In the case of open-access DOIs, it will append |doi-access=free to the citation to flag that the publication is indeed open access.

The bot will make edits on its own, but you can ask the bot to make edits on your behalf via ToolForge. Keep in mind that some database or website, like CiteSeerX or ResearchGate, might host papers in violation of copyright, even if most are not, so you ought to review that the uploader has the permission to upload the paper in the first place. If they aren't one of the authors of the paper, they likely do not have such permission.

Note: You'll need to use the manual install method (method 2) with the following code to use its custom options.

importScript('User:BrandonXLF/CitationStyleMarker.js'); // Backlink: [[User:BrandonXLF/CitationStyleMarker.js]]
window.CSMarkerMode = 'both';

BrandonXLF's Citation Style Markers is a very simple script that lets you know if there are clashes between Citation Style 1 (e.g. {{cite book}}), Citation Style 2 (i.e. {{citation}}), and others like {{vcite book}} or {{cite LSA}} in an article.

If you have two different citation styles, it will append a small CS1, CS2, CSVAN, or CSLSA at the end of the citation.

• {{cite book |title=Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists |publisher=Fake Publisher}}
• {{citation |title=Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists |publisher=Fake Publisher}}
• Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists. Fake Publisher. CS1
• Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists, Fake Publisher CS2

I personally choose to enable those warnings only when there's a clash. I can then search for 'CS1' and 'CS2' to see which is the dominant style and which citations are compromising consistency. It's often only a matter of changing one or two citations from a {{citation}} to a {{cite book}} or vice versa. Sometimes it's a matter of appending |mode=cs1 or |mode=cs2 to premade citations (like {{McCorduck 2004|mode=cs1}}) or specialized templates (like {{cite arXiv|...|mode=cs2}}), which will change the template style from CS1 to CS2 or vice versa.

Note that plain text citations, like <ref>Smith, J. (2010) "Random Book". Random Publisher. pp. 32–38 {{ISBN|978-0-123-45678-9}}</ref> will be completely ignored by the script, so you still have to keep an eye out for those.

You can choose if you want the markers always present, present by default, off by default, or only present when there is a clash by changing OPTION in window.CSMarkerMode = 'OPTION'; above. See the documentation for details.

Trappist the monk's HarvErrors is an evolution of the now-outdated Ucucha's HarvErrors. This script deals specifically with all sorts of issues unique to Harvard citation templates like {{harv}}, {{harvnb}}, {{sfn}}, etc. These Harvard templates are prone to problems with their automatically generated links (see this old version of the industrial espionage article for an example).

HarvErrors checks these links for validity and displays an error message for incorrect links. In addition, it checks for citations that are likely set up to receive links, but do not have any pointing to them.

If you don't want to deal with warnings, and only with confirmed errors, use Svick's original HarvErrors instead.

Reference Tooltips is a small gadget that simply shows you the citation upon hovering the reference link. You no longer need to click and go down to the reference section to see what the reference is. This is particularly helpful with articles that make use of {{rp}}.

Sadly, it will not work if the Navigation Popups gadget is enabled.

My own (i.e. Headbomb's) Unreliable/Predatory Source Detector, or UPSD for short, is a relatively famous script. The core idea is that the script looks for URLs and DOIs, and colour codes them according to reliability, summarized in the table below.

In general, the script is kept in sync with WP:CITEWATCH, WP:DEPRECATE, WP:NPPSG, WP:RSN discussions, WP:RSPSOURCES, WP:SPSLIST (not fully synced), WP:VSAFE/PSOURCES, {{Predatory open access source list}}, and common sense "duh" cases I come across (like a parody website) with some minor differences. Obvious issues should be reported on the script's talk page, but since I do not want my opinion to be king, I maintain a general policy that everything is appealable at WP:RSN.

The documentation contains several warnings and caveats, and I would highly recommend that you at the very least read the big warning box at the top of the documentation and the full summary table before making use of this script so you understand its limitations.

The script can be customized to an extent, and can even support supplemental lists for specialized tasks, like User:GeneralNotability/unreliable-rules.js which helps find many black hat SEO efforts.

SuperHamster's CiteUnseen analyses citations much like UPSD above, but focuses more on the origin and nature of sources. For example, it will mark citations as coming from advocacy groups, government-controlled outlets, opinion pieces, tabloids, etc. It will also add icons to reflect reliability based on WP:RSP, but you can configure which are displayed.

Like with any scripts dealing in citation analysis, it comes with heavy caveats, so you should read the documentation in detail to understand what it does.

Both CiteUnseen and UPSD will work together without issue, to provide fairly comprehensive analysis of both the reliability and nature of sources – and if one script misses a source, maybe the other will pick it up.

Novem Linguae's CiteHighlighter is another citation analyzer script. CiteHighlighter colour-codes things in the same way they are found on WP:RSP#Legend. Sources of data include WP:RSP, WP:NPPSG (which is based on WP:RSN discussions), and the source reliability pages of various WikiProjects. It recognizes around 1,800 sources.

Like with any scripts dealing in citation analysis, you should read the documentation in detail to understand what it does. In particular, it makes certain assumptions like The New York Times = reliable, without consideration to the type of article being published, or a reference with a PMID = reliable, despite the PubMed database including sources of various reliability.

CiteHighlighter works with either or both of UPSD and CiteUnseen, so feel free to mix and match as your heart desires.

The Earwig's Copyvios invokes Earwig's Copyvio Detector. Which, as you might suspect, searches the web for potential copyright violations. Like reFill below, it runs on ToolForge.

This tool is normally more useful to reviewers than to regular editors; if you don't know that copy-pasting/closely paraphrasing things from sources is bad, the intervention you need is education on the topic, not more tools. New Page Patrollers and AFC Reviewers in particular might want to install this, but anyone that is interested in copyright cleanup will be well served by this tool.

Dispenser's Checklinks is typically used to make sure external links are working (i.e. not dead). If they are not, you can use it to search for archived versions of these links. It runs on Dispenser's personal site.

reFill is a tool that specializes in dealing with bare URLs. Like Copyvios above, it runs on ToolForge, but you can use Zhaofeng Li's Reflinks script to invoke it directly from Wikipedia, or CiteGen to run it from your web browser. You can also run it directly from a Linux or Windows PC (see reFill's FAQ for details).

It adds information (page title, work/website, author and publication date, if metadata is included) to bare URL references, and does additional fixes as well (e.g. combining duplicated references). The tool is an open-source replacement of Dispenser's Reflinks.

It is not perfect, and you will often need to cleanup its output, like |last=Welle |first=Deustche for Deutsche Welle links. But it gets you at least 90% of the way there!

Kaniivel's Reference Organizer displays all an article's references in graphical user interface, where you can choose whether the references should be defined in the body of article or in the reference list template (see WP:LDRHOW). You can also use it to sort the references in various ways, and rename the references.

Nardog's RefRenamer is similar to Reference Organizer, but focuses specifically on renaming Visual Editor reference names, like <ref name=":0"/> or <ref name=":1"/>, to something more editor-friendly, like <ref name="Smith-2006"/>. It will automatically make suggestions, but you can always choose a different name in case it picks something silly like <ref name="Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz"/>.

Ohconfucius's Sources is a script that deals with common newspapers, magazines, and websites to ensure that their names are accurate per the frontpage of these publications, from including/omitting the leading The, to making use of and or &, to making sure they are properly italicized per MOS:ITALICTITLE, to making sure that magazines aren't in the |publisher= field of citation templates, etc.

Phew! That was a lot wasn't it? That's ok, you don't have to install all these scripts, or memorize all those details. Just pick the ones that seem useful to you.

That said, there are important caveats to using UPSD, CiteUnseen and CiteHighlighter. I know I've mentioned those before, but it bears repeating that these are not scripts to use mindlessly. They are, at least in part, based on the interpretation of discussions, many with limited participation. It's perfectly possible, and even likely, that some of these discussions did not reflect the entirety of the source, and that a closer look would change its classification from generally unreliable to marginally unreliable (or vice versa), or a source would be deemed unreliable in context X, but reliable in context Y.

Also remember that just because a source is considered generally unreliable, it doesn't mean that it cannot or shouldn't be used. Scripts cannot appreciate the full context in which a source is used. But you can. So don't be a meat popsicle, and use your brain.

Feel free to post your experiences (new or old) with any of these scripts in the comment section! Also feel free suggest other scripts that you feel might benefit your fellow Wikipedian!

Note: This article was updated on 5 August 2023 to mentioned Nardog's RefRenamer. The omission was due to a bug in WP:TOPSCRIPTS listings. The author apologizes for the oversight. Thanks to PamD for bringing this script to light in the comment section.

Tips and Tricks is a general editing advice column written by experienced editors. If you have suggestions for a topic, or want to submit your own advice, follow these links and let us know (or comment below)!