User talk:Jimbo Wales

The Wikimedia Foundation broke Russian Wikinews again

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T287362
Resolved

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T287380
Open

This is the current news now

The Wikimedia Foundation engineers have turned off the news feed on Russian Wikinews again. This is a key feature of any news project. And now it doesn't work again.

For example, the latest news list on the title page looks like the picture on the right. Latest news page about you looked like this and now so. All the recent news looked like this, now look so. There is one and a half million news in alphabetical order. But no one can find the latest news anythere.

The problem is that no one at the Wikimedia Foundation bothers nor solves it (see phab:T287380).

I have no idea what would have happened if the BBC or CNN had lost their news feed. I'm sure management and technical services would do just that. However, nobody at the Wikimedia Foundation does this. There is no news feed for three days. No one worries.

Moreover, the engineers openly stated that they would never return the news feed to Russian Wikinews. It is not right. Even if someone said or did something wrong, emotions should not harm our projects.

I don't want to blame anyone. Time will judge. I just want the Wikimedia project to work and develop again. This is not my project. This is a Wikimedia project. But it seems that I am the only one concerned about his fate.

Our very small team came to Russian Wikinews about ten years ago. Then it was a microscopic project that was between life and death every day. Now Russian Wikinews is one of the largest Wikimedia projects, ranking 16th in terms of the number of pages in the main space and fifth in terms of the total number of pages. Now Russian Wikinews is one of the largest open and free news archives. There is a continuous chronology of all events for each day since 2000. Now Russian Wikinews is one of the largest providers of current news. We publish about 600 news items a day. Now Russian Wikinews is a great place to publish original reports, exclusive interviews and photo reports. Our citizen journalists publish exclusive stories almost every day. Most of us live in countries where journalists are massively repressed right now and our work is very important for everyone. We know how to develop. We can become one of the best Wikimedia projects and one of the largest news agencies in the world. We are proud of our work.

But we cannot develop if we do not have basic support from the Wikimedia Foundation. When the servers are down, when the software is broken. When the management of the Wikimedia Foundation does nothing for wikis. We cannot develop when we are bullied and mocked by Foundation employees and contactors. When T&S openly threatens us with violence.

I have no one else to turn to. Therefore, I am writing to you. And I have one single question. Does the Wikimedia movement need wiki projects and does it need Russian Wikinews? If not, I thank you and everyone for the years here and I am ready to leave the Wikimedia movement at any time. If Russian Wikinews are needed, then please create for us at least minimal working conditions and protect us at least from harassment by employees and contractors.

Russian Wikinews is a very large project and it should be located on a dedicated infrastructure like other equally large projects. I don't understand why this has not been done until now. Even this alone would have helped to avoid many problems. This needs to be done urgently.

But most importantly and very urgent, please help launch a news feed on Russian Wikinews. If the engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation are unwilling to do this, you can announce a contest. I am sure that there are talented programmers in the world who can quickly solve this problem, and you can find and interest them. --sasha (krassotkin) 06:46, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the details but this has been discussed on-wiki—see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Overflow error (permalink) which leads to phab:T287362. It appears that developers responded to severe slow-downs of a large number of projects by disabling an extension called DPL (DynamicPageList). That was because DPL is not supported and was not designed to cope with large numbers of new pages (see July 2021 Signpost). DPL was previously temporarily disabled in September 2020 (archive) but has now been switched off indefinitely after this second incident. Johnuniq (talk) 07:24, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

• As you wrote above the developers have been knew of the DPL's problems throughout the year. They understood for sure that it would lead to collapse and they did absolutely nothing for a whole year. Now they just turned off this functionality, despite the fact that news projects cannot exist without it. But the reasons are not important. It is important now to urgently create the same extension that will not overload the servers. --sasha (krassotkin) 07:55, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

• Jc37, you added a link to the allegedly resolved task. I understand that this is not for you. But I have one rhetorical question. If the developers had disabled in the English Wikipedia search functionality and said that then everything worked. Would this also be a well-resolved task? --sasha (krassotkin) 08:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

  Hi krassotkin, as you seem to be aware, I am not one of the developers. So all I can do is read the threads that they were discussing this. From what I can tell, several people have tried to let you know that they will not be re-activating DPL on Russia Wikinews. And are currently in a discussion in a separate thread about whether it should be disabled wikimedia-wide.

  I understand that this is a functionality that you want. But they have apparently said no, because it potentially impacts all the other wikimedia wikis globally. It appears to be a simple risk vs. reward equation (see also Risk management).

  I am not one of the developers, but just to offer a suggestion - instead of proclaiming to the sky that you are being denied what you want, perhaps try engaging with the devs to see what is available and in what ways they might be willing to help.

  I hope everything works out for you. - jc37 08:32, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

• With all due respect to User:krassotkin, I want to present the pure facts as I see them, putting emotions aside. The newsfeed functionality is very important for wikinews projects. DPL extension is a piece of software, that implements it. Unfortunately it neirther scales well nor actually works on projects with categories containing more than 10⁵ pages. I believe it has to be rewritten from scratch and there are some ideas on phabricator of how it can be done. Unfortunately, deployment of rewritten DPL will require thorough performance testing and, probably, altering elasticsearch indexes. I do not believe that can be effectively done by community, WMF devs have to be involved here (probably User:GLederrey (WMF) team). I know their roadmap is booked for years ahead (particularly they are working on scalability of wd/wdqs that greatly interest me), but maybe we can shift priorities here or come up with more creative solution? Ghuron (talk) 10:02, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
• While seconding Sasha's message, as a person who essentially made headlines writing on this very page about Internet censorship in Russia eight years ago, I must note that Wikinews used to have a unique status of unblockable media due to basing on the same servers as Wikipedia, but a recent successful implementation of Full DPI block on Alexey Navalny's websites has shown that it's no more. Ain92 (talk) 13:02, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
• Sasha, you've been told numerous times now that the ones being harassed here are the volunteers trying to deal with the mess cause by the Russian Wikinews project. I'd suggest you stop spreading misinformation and casting aspersions, and instead work together with the devs to find a solution to your problem. Isabelle ^🔔 13:34, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
  • You're right. But what can I or, for example, you do in this particular situation? System administrators of Wikimedia Foundation should migrate big Wikimedia project to dedicated infrastructure. Programmers of Wikimedia Foundation should develop quality software (quality implementation news feeds extension). Managers of Wikimedia Foundation should organize and finance this work. What can you and I do about this? Nothing. But if you can do any of the above I will support you. I will certainly support anyone who does this. --sasha (krassotkin) 06:03, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
  • "The mess" was not "caused by the Russian Wikinews project". Russian Wikinews act consistently according to Wikimedia rules. The problem was well known and Russian Wikinews made everyone aware of it long ago. It's Wikimedia Foundation who spends resources on "renaming Wikimedia" instead of solving known problems with servers. --ssr (talk) 09:37, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
    • If you knew about the mess, but nonetheless proceeded recklessly, then you share at least some of the responsibility. Bawolff (talk) 09:30, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
      • Sometimes the situation looked very close to collapse, but then it was corrected. That's why we thought the Wikimedia Foundation was watching this and will warn us if something goes wrong. Now I understand that no one was watching this. And it looks terrible. --sasha (krassotkin) 06:21, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
      • On the other side. We have absolutely no feedback. For example, look now. No Wikimedia Foundation manager has posted here. Nobody named the time when the problem will be solved. I asked directly: Should we continue to develop Russian Wikinews or should we diverge? If the first when will the problem be solved? No answer. But now Russian Wikinews looks like a half-dead project (n:ru:). --sasha (krassotkin) 06:21, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
        • I don't work for WMF and cannot speak for it, but i think the timeline is pretty clear: There is no intention to ever re-enable DPL on ruwikinews. Improvements to DPL might be made, but they would be targeting smaller wikis which are using that extension. Even if the technical issues weren't present (which they very much are), I imagine the general attitude of pushing boundaries and then attempting to shift blame to everyone else when something goes wrong, makes ruwikinews seem very high risk. Of course, this is just my personal opinion, and I do not speak for WMF or any other developers. Bawolff (talk) 07:50, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
          • I understand. But all living and active Wikinews editions develop in a similar way. This is our independent cross-project consensus. Very soon they will all be as big as Russian Wikinews. It doesn't matter what the name of the program that will implement the news feed. But a news agency cannot exist without a news feed. If we are unable to implement news feed all news projects must be closed by WIkimedia Foundation. --sasha (krassotkin) 08:37, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
            • No, they must not. --ssr (talk) 09:12, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
      • We do share responsibility and we've always been in touch with Meta people and Phabricator people, as you are aware. We tried to obey everything that is needed, as was directed during year-ago incident with first DPL crash. As I see now at phabricator, an anonymous edit, sadly, triggered the current incident, not actions of Sasha. Yes I agree Sasha's behaviour is rude and I don' like it either. But simultaneously he doesn't break any rules as he has proper knowledge and even is an OTRS member. In the meantime, he made an appeal to Board of Trustees candidates to share their opinions on Wikinews. --ssr (talk) 08:19, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
        • Ultimately, the biggest issue is the performance concerns, not behaviour on ruwikinews. The end result would probably have been the same either way, just without some of the behaviour back on forth, the devs would have felt a lot more bad about permanently disabling DPL on ruwikinews. Nonetheless they probably still would have done it. The edit is the triggering event, but not the root cause. After all, a wiki that can be taken down by a single edit, is not an acceptable state for any wiki to be in. The actual cause of this specific issue seems to be a confluence of several factors (i.e. Unideal query plan by MariaDB, The concurrency patch discussed from last time around having bugs and not being enabled, size of categorylinks table at ruwikinews, job queue only throttling on replica lag and not general replica performance issues, among other things). The most root cause is size of wiki, because the bigger the wiki, the less headroom there is for when things go wrong. WMF hosts a lot of wikis. There will be performance bumps from time to time. They have a responsibility to make sure that none of the wikis are pushing up so close against performance limits that any bumps will take down other wikis. Bawolff (talk) 09:13, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

wikitech:Incident documentation/2021-07-26 ruwikinews DynamicPageList has been posted. The opening sentence is "Following the bot import of 200,000 pages to the Russian Wikinews in the span of 3 days, slow queries originating from ruwikinews's usage of the DynamicPageList extension (also known as "intersection") overloaded the s3 cluster of databases, causing php-fpm processes to hang/stall, eventually taking down all wikis with it." I don't see any formal documentation of the similar incident from last September, which resulted in disabling DynamicPageList before a general outage.

I remember seeing the bot's operator saying that he had previously estimated that if he had his bot import more than 15,000–25,000 pages per day, it could compromise the servers (it's not the importing per se, but the indexing of every page in the system used for news feeds that has the potential to strain the servers), but I can't find the link to his comment right now. However, it appears that his estimate was correct. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks for your research. You are referring to my comment where I talked about the API. Using a bot I monitor the responsiveness of the server so as not to overload it. I have experienced slow response speed before and slowed down the upload speed. During the discussed upload my bot hasn't captured this. Upload API worked perfectly and there were no problems. As you correctly write, the problems arose not at the stage of adding pages through the API, but on the web side when we form responses to user requests to the database. For non-specialists: these are completely different parts of our server software that do not affect each other directly. It should be borne in mind that from the side of bots, we cannot identify and prevent problem of client logic. And I agree with you that the overall size of the project was the reason for the crash. More specifically, the existing database structure and queries to it cannot solve the tasks necessary for such a large project. In short: DPL led to collapse and needs to be rewritten. And so sorry, but we all knew about it a year ago. Maybe it's time to do it? --sasha (krassotkin) 06:21, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
• I'm sorry but I would like to discuss another dangerous issue for our Wikimedia movement. We all knew about the DPL technical problem. We all knew that everything would collapse. I have questions to the Wikimedia Foundation why the problem has not been resolved within a year. But I have no questions for system administrators, who quickly identified the cause of the fall and eliminated it. They are great. And I would do the same. Therefore I was emotionless and tried to be ethical. But you write: "Harassment of sysadmins who were involved in incident response aftewards". And I know why this is happening. There is no universal ethics. We all have very different cultures on the big planet Earth. Words that sound ethical in one language and in one culture can be perceived as an insult in another. This is why there can be no Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). This is why we must eliminate the universal bureaucratic repression machine - Trust and Safety (T&S). Otherwise UCoC and T&S will necessarily lead our Wikimedia movement to collapse like the DPL. We are a multicultural movement and we have always been proud of it. And we have mechanisms to solve all problems in each separate project and language project groups (cultural environment). Our communities have talked about this many times. But the Wikimedia Foundation completely ignore the opinion of the communities. This is an offtopic that does not need to be discussed here. But this is extremely important. --sasha (krassotkin) 07:24, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

  Ignoring the fact that you're misleading everyone on how your bot works (intentionally disabling Pywikibot's rate limiting and concurrency controls, violating API:Etiquette, etc.), the harassment in question is explicitly NOT a case of people having different standards/cultures/ethics.

  In the years I've been a developer and sysadmin, both as a volunteer and paid staff, I've broken things accidentally, sometimes purposefully, fixed them immediately, maybe years later, or not at all. I'm sure I've unintentionally upset people in the process. Never did I ever imagine that an upset Wikimedian would write an "article" that's obviously POV-pushing with blatant falsehoods under the guise that it was "news", stick my photo on it, and put it on the homepage of their wiki. Your article conveniently forgot to mention that the author of said article is the person who's been doing all these mass imports. How does that meet basic journalistic conflict of interest guidelines? Or even more basic BLP policies of treating people with respect and dignity. So it's impossible to see that as anything but intimidation and harassment: "If you mess with Russian Wikinews, we're going to put you on blast".

  No sysadmin blames you or Russian Wikinews on taking down the sites, that's squarely our responsibility to keep the sites up and for 20 minutes we failed at that and are actively working to ensure it doesn't happen again. But it's becoming clear that ruwikinews leaders do not intend to follow sysadmin recommendations, nor work with us in a collegial manner, hence the current state of DPL being disabled with no obvious path forward. You're obviously technically competent, so I don't get the point in forum shopping and playing the blame game instead of well, working together to fix the problems. Legoktm (talk) 09:22, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

  • Please don’t have to attribute to me motives that I didn’t have. However all of our projects are created collectively. If you see that something is not in accordance with our principles you can discuss and fix it. The article is discussed here: n:ru:Обсуждение:Фонд Викимедиа сломал Русские Викиновости опять. --sasha (krassotkin) 09:43, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

It seems a lot of people here are hung up on the rate of import here - Its my belief that the total size of the wiki, not the rate of import, is what is relevant here. We've always known that DPL had scaling limitations. We've known since 2005. We didn't think any of the wikinews projects would grow to the size of ruwikinews. Certainly it wasn't expected that any of the DPL enabled projects would grow so suddenly. Sure it would be nice if DPL was better, but it is what it is, and its too risky to run on a wiki with 13 million pages. Bawolff (talk) 09:17, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

I am (among other wiki aktivitities) admin an at the moment rather inactive author in the German Wikinews version. I think we have three different issues here.

1. The DPL extension was written especially for Wikinews for creating a newsfeed with the latest articles on each news sector. Many if not all Wikinews language versions rely on the extension. Removing it would damage all of them, not the RUWN alone. As a Wikinewsian I cannot agree with the proposal to remove the externsion, I should write this in bold.
2. The mass upload of "free" articles (aka import) as such wasn't foreseen when Wikinews startet. We believed that a critical mass would producce enough material to call WN a news source but that never materialized. All WN language versions have this problem including the ENWN. 2014 at the Cologne WikiCon I said to then-board-member Florence Dontrememberhisname that there is no concept how to do Wikinews and therefore the Wikinews communities are on their own witt developping ideas to resolve the bad performance. For example then ENWN introduced a formal review process, ITWN at one point put all on sports articles. The SRWN came up with bot uploasing of CC-BY articles firstly, at the time obviously with the intention to make SRWN the largest WN language version. The RUWN seems to have followed similar intentions initially. But then, as I understood, things changed when Putin's fight against NewsRU accelerated. I don't know the details but it was agreed to change NesRU's licence an to ave their archive bei uploading all the articles to RUWN. Is this within der scope o Wikinews? Hell, yes. What otherwise would be the scope if not importing free news? (The community must still resolve an issue: patrol or those articles for neutrality, wikification, and so on, but such problems are no reason to suppress them, even not in Wikipedia.
3. And then we have a tech flaw wich never was expected because nobody expected hundred of thousands of articles within days. Actually none of the WN language versions is expected to have am million of artiles before the end of the century. We're all dead before the Russian issue becomes a problem in other language versions. Therefore is no reason to remove the extension per se.

So the solution has to be found ad hoc in or with the RUWN but we must not complicate Wikinewsians life by removing DPL in other language versions by default. What would be a backset to 2005 or so. --Matthiasb (talk) 18:28, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

• ✔Support DPL for GWN, Russian Wikinews are now seem to be "showing the way" for other Wikinews, what English Wikinews failed to do. We at RWN recently received requests from Vietnamese and Portuguese WN asking for advice. Remember, it was Serbian Wikinews who began to mass-upload free-licensed news stories from outside, and Russian Wikinews just followed their experience. The original model of "amateur news agency" where volunteer people make massive qualified work for no cost, turned out to be unreachable, as most of commentators conclude (and I agree). What is more reachable, is a model of so-called "wiki-magazine", not exaclty a "news-agency", but "news" can normally exist within a "magazine", and the overall resulting product can easily be called "Wikinews". Aside news, there may be (and are) "reports" of other kinds of (amateur/citizen) journalism—for example in English, open n:ru:en. I am a preofessional journalist, I know what I am talking about. It was not me who coined "wiki-magazine", it was user:Asaf (WMF). Literally, he said: "What does indeed work in Russian Wikinews is really a *magazine* rather than what would be considered "hard" news. I think it's *great* to have a wiki-magazine, and I think wiki-magazines *can* work. So to amend my comment above: Wikinews *as originally conceived, as it purports to be*, doesn't and cannot work anywhere. Wiki-magazines are a neat idea and can totally work everywhere! Whether WMF would be interested in hosting them is a separate question, but the answer may well be yes, so it's worth exploring, by those interested in creating wiki-magazines". And he was answering an opinion by user:Sillyfolkboy, who said earlier: "From what I can see from the Russian list you share, the focus is mainly on local stories. Among them I see public activism in coverage of resident's rights in Yekaterinburg, and culture coverage of small scale music festivals etc. I can definitely see the value of coverage like this and how it doesn't fit into another project's scope. This kind of work is contrary to much modern news in that it is very location-specific and its period of timeliness is quite long - i.e. publishing it a week after its occurrence has little impact on the article's value. These articles can stimulate the public to action in the local area, can cover stories that develop over long periods of time, and can act as a store of local history. How can the project encourage more work in that vein? en.Wikinews is the opposite, in that it is trying to cover major national or international stories with a limited window of time relevance. The Russians are very illuminating!" (source for both). --ssr (talk) 12:22, 6 August 2021 (UTC)
  • I would also now like to cite user:ProtoplasmaKid (candidate for Board of Trustees): "Is Wikinews necessary? In my opinion, today more than ever in a world of disinformation and fake news. " --ssr (talk) 19:05, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

I only can reiterate what I said in my presentation on Wikinews at IIRC the Dresden WikiCon and perhaps also in the discussion on Gestumblindi's close-em-all request on Meta: In a world of growing news censorship and pay per article models Wikinews is one the most important if not the most important WMF project but the WMF just don't get it. Instead it spends money and other resources on things like the UCoC, rebranding and so on. And, sadly, it's for longer than a decade. OTOH I never got a response on meta:TV5Monde cyberattack and consequences for Wikimedia projects what is related to Wikinews and even Wikipedia. --Matthiasb (talk) 10:43, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Totally and ultimately agree with "Wikinews is one the most important if not the most important WMF project but the WMF just don't get it. Instead it spends money and other resources on things like the UCoC, rebranding and so on". --ssr (talk) 17:51, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

• One of the largest Wikimedia projects has been deprived of its core functionality for two weeks. Every day we are losing a community that we have collected with great difficulty. But so far the Wikimedia Foundation has not appointed a manager who is responsible for resolving this issue. So far the Wikimedia Foundation has not set a deadline for resolving this problem. Maybe they don't know about the problem? Where and to whom can we report this? But if they know they should understand that this is not a technical but a managerial fail. I have worked as a director, member and chairman of the board of directors all my life. I have never seen such irresponsible work anywhere else. If the governance structure of the Wikimedia Foundation is so disrupted that it is unable to fulfill its primary function the Board of Trustees should urgently hire a crisis manager.
  Nataliia (NTymkiv (WMF), Antanana) you are acting chair of Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Appointment of top management and control over him is one of your main functions. We chose you for this. We have chosen you to represent the interests of the Wikimedia projects community. We believe that you can solve this problem. --sasha (krassotkin) 07:13, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

  They know, they aren't going to fix it. They have been saying that from the start. So if YOU want to write code to fix it, go right ahead it is open source after all. Alternatively, restructure ru Wikinews to not depend on this functionality. I appreciate you want to get heard, but solutions to problems don't just magically appear. Even in the best of cases, this would take weeks to solve, assuming it is solvable at all. But considering that there is no specific resourcing for Wikinews, and that all other resourcing is booked for years in the future you are making petitions here that simply are not realistically going to be answered. And you are of course always welcome to fork the project and run it entirely as you want it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:27, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Blocking Wikimedia projects in Iran

Hi, the Iranian parliament has passed a law according to which the general management of the Internet will be handed over to the armed forces and the situation of the Iranian Internet will become something between North Korea and China.[1] According to the plan, foreign platforms must either be officially active in Iran and comply with the requests of Iran's security agencies or will be blocked. I have no doubt that they will block Wikipedia and all other projects in order to get rid of all its political and sexual content and establish their own controlled encyclopedia. Transparency is needed, what is the foundation's plan for this? --IamMM (talk) 07:41, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I am still waiting for your reaction to this serious issue. @Ladsgroup: Did you try to inform the Foundation about this? I need to talk to Wikimedia officials about some important points about this restriction. IamMM (talk) 06:03, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

I'd say.. what do you want the foundation to do ? Because as pointed out, North Korea and China are already clear precedents and you know that the Foundation has done and does wrt those. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:51, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

My goal at first was to raise awareness, but now I expect the WMF to take a clear stand. This is a big thing, about one million pages and thousands of volunteers will be affected by this limitation. I do not mean that the Foundation necessarily has the ability to take any effective action in this regard, but prior knowledge of this limitation can be useful in considering technical (possible) coping options. Adapting to unrestricted communication methods such as Starlink satellite internet can be somewhat helpful, as can changing the way we deal with open proxies. Even if there is no way to circumvent the restriction, the issue of protecting current content from censorship and securing the accounts of users who are disconnected is of particular importance. --IamMM (talk) 15:17, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

I am also in agreement. This is a serious issue that should be attended by the WMF. I don't expect corporations to take a stand against Internet freedom, but I do expect the repository of human knowledge with non-paid editors around the world should at least, have a say on this matter. For instance, the policy for public proxies, especially for people from restricted countries, could be publicized more so editors from restricted countries could still edit anonymously. As most editors will only edit things that interests them or close to them, losing Iranian editors will be a serious blow to the project that WMF should take notice.SunDawntalk 05:10, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't WikiLeaks. What has Wikipedia to gain? Some edits. What would Iranian Wikipedians get if caught? Torture and prison. Not worth the risk. That would be a cynical game WMF plays with the lives and liberty of other people. tgeorgescu (talk) 16:47, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

The dual and immoral standard of the Wikimedia Foundation is not acceptable to Iranian volunteers. I vividly remember at one of the fawiki anniversaries how Katherine (WMF), who made a video call on behalf of the Foundation even praised the Safavid dynasty, which is notorious for its heinous crimes but did not show the slightest sympathy for the volunteers under censorship! I'm really curious to know if Saudi Arabia made such a decision, would WMF still be silent like this? Maybe Mr. Wales forgot how he advised Iranian users to consider the government's sensitivities about homosexuality? (Legitimacy to the censors) When you give a piece of bread to a hungry totalitarian monster, he does not thank you, only his appetite for eating your own meat. WMF behavior is shameful. --IamMM (talk) 12:48, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

"Maybe Mr. Wales forgot how he advised Iranian users to consider the government's sensitivities about homosexuality?" - this is false. I don't even know what you think I said that would even suggest that. I do think that all editors in all places around the world should be thoughtful about their *readers* even though Wikipedia is not censored simply because in order to educate - on any topic - you must start with the context of the learner. I have never said or suggested that we should in any way cooperate with censorship.

My standards are not "dual" in any way. I would say the same thing about censorship in Saudi Arabia as I would about censorship in Iran or in the UK or the United States.

Having said all that, I think it would be unwise and unhelpful for the WMF to engage proactively in cases where doing so is likely to be counterproductive. There are a great many places around the world where laws are in place which would permit governments to shut off access to Wikipedia - those laws are wrong - but in most of those places, the governments have made the pragmatic decision that Wikipedia is too useful and too popular to block. It is very hard to know the exact right move to make at specific moments in time - but principles are timeless. We stand against censorship and we try to fight it with wisdom and thoughtfulness rather than pointless bombast that may not actually work.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:28, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Jimbo Wales eat good food? "Hell yes" Jimbo Wales eat so good food. Iran people and Russia people eat bad food and Jimbo Wales in USA eat good food! While we eat bad food. Good taste Jimmy? Like? ssr (talk) 01:34, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Glad to hear. I would like to draw your attention to a few issues. The government of Iran is not Iranian and it does not care about the interests of the people of this country. They blamed a telegram channel for the 2017-18 protests, so the journalist in charge (Roohollah Zam) was tricked into dragging him from France to Iraq, then kidnapped him and executed him in Iran. All this did not change their decision to shut down the telegram, which they admitted was the source of income for 3 million poor and marginalized citizens. Do not expect a government that destroys the jobs of its three million citizens with one click to pay attention to your encyclopedia. They did not have the necessary technical infrastructure before so they tolerated Western platforms, but in recent years thanks to their Chinese communist friends, they have sought to build a native version of anything controlled from within Iran. Given the experience of the homosexuality debate (here), I expect you to no longer be lenient with the demands of authoritarian regimes, you may not have intended to censor, but this is exactly what happened after you said that.

I want to ask a question: how is it possible that the WMF considers itself an enemy of censorship and has kept among its stewards the staff of the institution that is providing the infrastructure to cut off the Internet in Iran? An employee of ArvandCloud (the company is currently building a local network that will replace the global Internet) is in the same position. It is painful that Iranian users loudly shouted their concerns, but the foundation refused to listen. Look at (Redacted), wearing a Wikipedia t-shirt while it is disconnecting 85 million ppl from the internet! Or (Redacted) next to the person in charge of the regime's soft (cyber) war. IMO, this is a scandal for the foundation, and if you listened to the cries of Iranian users, you would have noticed sooner. I would like to point out that the company cut off the global Internet for all Iranians for 5 days during the Bloody November 2019 massacres. Iran’s Hidden Slaughter: a video investigation by the France 24 Observers. It is time to stop obeying the demands of authoritarianism and take a pragmatic stance to have a real internet freedom. --IamMM (talk) 07:33, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

I am also glad to hear, thanks! Aside Iran, there is Ukraine (let me talk on my local themes, that bother me). WMF has totally "cut out" money from Russia. Russian Wikipedians work and receive no single cent from WMF. Simultaneously, WMF assigns "hundreds of thousand dollars" to Ukrainian WM, and Ukrainian WP is widely known for violations of BLP and NPOV. WMF has Ukrainian board member (abovementioned NTymkiv), and WMF sends thousands of dollars to UWM and no single cent to RWM and allows no donations within Russia for Russians. And Jimbo eats good food! Like? --ssr (talk) 08:08, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't understand what you are saying with "Jimbo eats good food" - it sounds like a humorous reference to something but I don't know what it means. In terms of the Russian government's policies which prevent the WMF from directly supporting the Russian chapter, I am disappointed in those policies and hope they will someday be changed. Trying to turn this into a criticism of the WMF as if we are biased against the Russian community is not correct.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:31, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

Do you like the food that you eat, Jimbo? I like the food that I eat, generally. Hospital food, not so much. Most of the time when I see things between quotes I simply take that to mean an inference by the individual making the statement unless I know they are specifically quoting someone else. I, like Jimbo, wish any government policy that would limit exposure of people to articles on Wikipedia would be changed. But I don't feel it is Wikipedia's place to free the world. If you want freedom then do you. We want everyone to be able to edit here and we want to expand and improve the encyclopedia. On a side note: I do wish that people making claims would include some sources for what they claim. It's like, what food does Jimmy eat? How do we know its good? We need credible independent sources here to confirm this. --ARoseWolf 20:19, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

A note about an edit I made to your userpage…

On 3:04 PM AEST, August 6, 2021, I made an edit with the summary:

(→‎You can edit this page!: Corrected as this userpage is currently not semi-protected from editing. Sorry if you don’t like it, Jimbo.)

I put this just to tell you that it’s OK to revert the edit I made if you probably want to actually write your own way or if you simply don’t like it…

Thanks, Rng0286 (talk) conts (extended confirmed, yay!) Homer Simpson: (check user rights) D'oh! 05:16, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

@Rng0286: I've reverted your edit as it is indeed semi-protected through edit filter 803. Graham87 08:01, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Happy Birthday!

Wishing Jimbo Wales a very happy birthday on behalf of the Birthday Committee! CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 06:02, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Happy Birthday Jimbo!

For a moment I was worried that we had somehow spawned two rival birthday committees. None of us would be surprised, right? WaggersTALK 14:25, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

With competing messages all vying for the attention of the subject and fellow editors? I can see that being the next (edit) war campaign (lol). Don't mind me, I'm over here chewing on my tongue and sitting on my hands. --ARoseWolf 16:30, 16 August 2021 (UTC)