A few days ago, a well known Russian politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Boris_Nemtsov near the Kremlin. This murder had a huge political resonance, and conspiracy theories flourished. Yet, one of the theories was due to Wikipedia's representation of time - anonymous users see change history in UTC. This confusion was so big, that several major publications, including Moskovkij Komsomolets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskovskij_Komsomolets, published articles http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/02/28/vikipediya-zaranee-otchitalas-ob-ubiystve-nemcova-zapis-poyavilas-v-2140.html (in Russian) claiming that the wiki page proclaimed him dead before the assassination. The MK article was later updated with the explanation, but the damage has been done: a number of threats were made against the editors.
In light of the above, I feel we need to #1 Show a clear message at the top of all history-related pages for anonymous users that the time is in UTC until #2 #2 JavaScript should fix time on the fly for all users
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks!
Well, not all users have JavaScript. But, on the core of the proposal:
What threats? What users? How many, how serious? Have they been reported to Legal and Community Advocacy? These are the questions we tend to ask about this sort of issue. "Do we need to insert technical features to prevent it?" tends to come after a series of occurrences, and I'm only aware of two in the last six years or so. We shouldn't let one-offs dictate our UI direction and bandwidth load.
But if we're going to implement something, why not just..have timezone be an element of the timestamps on history pages? It's UTC unless the user explicitly changes it, and if they explicitly change it that's known in the database (and already referenced to decide how to convert the UTC timestamp when the page is displayed). It's a perfectly sensible UI change that makes sense independent of this problem.
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 8:37 AM, Yuri Astrakhan yastrakhan@wikimedia.org wrote:
A few days ago, a well known Russian politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Boris_Nemtsov near the Kremlin. This murder had a huge political resonance, and conspiracy theories flourished. Yet, one of the theories was due to Wikipedia's representation of time - anonymous users see change history in UTC. This confusion was so big, that several major publications, including Moskovkij Komsomolets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskovskij_Komsomolets, published articles http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/02/28/vikipediya-zaranee-otchitalas-ob-ubiystve-nemcova-zapis-poyavilas-v-2140.html (in Russian) claiming that the wiki page proclaimed him dead before the assassination. The MK article was later updated with the explanation, but the damage has been done: a number of threats were made against the editors.
In light of the above, I feel we need to #1 Show a clear message at the top of all history-related pages for anonymous users that the time is in UTC until #2 #2 JavaScript should fix time on the fly for all users
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Threats: This page http://novorus.info/news/analytics/34163-vikipediya-soobschila-ob-ubiystve-nemcova-za-2-chasa-do-samogo-ubiystva.html (in Russian, very non-credible "source" of information, but has enough following to make it to MK.ru), discuss a well known wikipedian Dmitry Rozhkov. I saw these kinds of comments (in ru):
В любом случае данная страница появилась ОЧЕНЬ быстро! Только на ее написание ушел бы час. Поэтому автора надо "брать" и выворачивать наизнанку! (Translation: "in any case, this page appeared VERY quickly! It would have taken at least an hour to write. That's why we should "grab" the author and turn him inside out")
From MK.ru:
"Источник "МК" в сфере IT-индустрии уверяет, что время правок дается по московскому времени. "Можешь сейчас сам правку сделать и убедиться", - аргументировал собеседник." (Translation: The source in MK in IT industry confirms that the revision time is given according to Moscow. "You can make a change yourself and see for yourself" said the expert).
The problem is that this one case caused enough confusion that RU wiki admins are looking for a way to state this at the top of the page. Showing a short message at the top "all time is in UTC" seems to be easy and obvious enough, and I am surprised it has not been done yet. Phabricator task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91255
Re implementation in the long term: The current HTML shows <a href="..." title="..." class="mw-changeslist-date">23:52, 18 February 2015</a> (localized, UTC)
Instead, we could show
<a href="..." title="..." class="mw-changeslist-date"><time datetime="2015-02-18 23:52">23:52, 18 February 2015 UTC</time></a>, and let JS (if present) change it to the proper timezone.
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
Well, not all users have JavaScript. But, on the core of the proposal:
What threats? What users? How many, how serious? Have they been reported to Legal and Community Advocacy? These are the questions we tend to ask about this sort of issue. "Do we need to insert technical features to prevent it?" tends to come after a series of occurrences, and I'm only aware of two in the last six years or so. We shouldn't let one-offs dictate our UI direction and bandwidth load.
But if we're going to implement something, why not just..have timezone be an element of the timestamps on history pages? It's UTC unless the user explicitly changes it, and if they explicitly change it that's known in the database (and already referenced to decide how to convert the UTC timestamp when the page is displayed). It's a perfectly sensible UI change that makes sense independent of this problem.
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 8:37 AM, Yuri Astrakhan yastrakhan@wikimedia.org wrote:
A few days ago, a well known Russian politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Boris_Nemtsov
near
the Kremlin. This murder had a huge political resonance, and conspiracy theories flourished. Yet, one of the theories was due to Wikipedia's representation of time - anonymous users see change history in UTC. This confusion was so big, that several major publications, including
Moskovkij
Komsomolets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskovskij_Komsomolets, published articles <
http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/02/28/vikipediya-zaranee-otchitalas-ob-ubiyst...
(in Russian) claiming that the wiki page proclaimed him dead before the assassination. The MK article was later updated with the explanation, but the damage has been done: a number of threats were made against the
editors.
In light of the above, I feel we need to #1 Show a clear message at the top of all history-related pages for anonymous users that the time is in UTC until #2 #2 JavaScript should fix time on the fly for all users
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Speaking of changes to the timestamps and UTC... Whatever happened to this change that was announced in 2012? http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/06/wikipedia-revision-history-experiment/ Something like this now happens on the Mobile view, but I thought this experiment (as described in the WMF blog) looked quite successful and promising.
-Liam
wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata
On 2 March 2015 at 13:49, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
But if we're going to implement something, why not just..have timezone be an element of the timestamps on history pages? It's UTC unless the user explicitly changes it, and if they explicitly change it that's known in the database (and already referenced to decide how to convert the UTC timestamp when the page is displayed). It's a perfectly sensible UI change that makes sense independent of this problem.
This sounds like a good idea - in some ways, it's more robust than a notice at the top of the page. It's very easy for someone to not notice a general message, especially if they're looking at more than the first two entries in the history.
If we want to be clever, we could always get JS trickery to display something like "xx.xx UTC ($localtimezone +5.00)" rather than just "xx.xx UTC".
Andrew.
On 2 March 2015 at 13:49, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
But if we're going to implement something, why not just..have timezone be an element of the timestamps on history pages? It's UTC unless the user explicitly changes it, and if they explicitly change it that's known in the database (and already referenced to decide how to convert the UTC timestamp when the page is displayed). It's a perfectly sensible UI change that makes sense independent of this problem.
This sounds like a good idea - in some ways, it's more robust than a notice at the top of the page. It's very easy for someone to not notice a general message, especially if they're looking at more than the first two entries in the history.
If we want to be clever, we could always get JS trickery to display something like "xx.xx UTC ($localtimezone +5.00)" rather than just "xx.xx UTC".
Related point: if we adapt the way history timestamps are displayed, eg by adding 'UTC', we should be consistent and apply the same approach to the "old revisions" view of a page, and the "This page was last modified on..." footer. Signatures have (UTC) by default, so that's solved, at least.
Andrew.
This idea, I like it! And I think Yuri just volunteered to write the patches :P
On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 2 March 2015 at 13:49, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
But if we're going to implement something, why not just..have timezone be an element of the timestamps on history pages? It's UTC unless the user explicitly changes it, and if they explicitly change it that's known in the database (and already referenced to decide how to convert the UTC timestamp when the page is displayed). It's a perfectly sensible UI change that makes sense independent of this problem.
This sounds like a good idea - in some ways, it's more robust than a notice at the top of the page. It's very easy for someone to not notice a general message, especially if they're looking at more than the first two entries in the history.
If we want to be clever, we could always get JS trickery to display something like "xx.xx UTC ($localtimezone +5.00)" rather than just "xx.xx UTC".
Related point: if we adapt the way history timestamps are displayed, eg by adding 'UTC', we should be consistent and apply the same approach to the "old revisions" view of a page, and the "This page was last modified on..." footer. Signatures have (UTC) by default, so that's solved, at least.
Andrew.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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Hello,
FYI we had the same issue two years ago in Tunisia when a Tunisian politician was shot and an IP made the edit in UTC. See our response in (in French) http://www.wikimedia.tn/nouvelle-polemique-sur-wikipedia-en-tunisie/
Finally the Radio station who relayed this "scoop" wrote an apologize text.
Habib, from Wikimedia TN User Group Le 02/03/2015 14:37, Yuri Astrakhan a écrit :
A few days ago, a well known Russian politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Boris_Nemtsov near the Kremlin. This murder had a huge political resonance, and conspiracy theories flourished. Yet, one of the theories was due to Wikipedia's representation of time - anonymous users see change history in UTC. This confusion was so big, that several major publications, including Moskovkij Komsomolets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskovskij_Komsomolets, published articles http://www.mk.ru/politics/2015/02/28/vikipediya-zaranee-otchitalas-ob-ubiystve-nemcova-zapis-poyavilas-v-2140.html (in Russian) claiming that the wiki page proclaimed him dead before the assassination. The MK article was later updated with the explanation, but the damage has been done: a number of threats were made against the editors.
In light of the above, I feel we need to #1 Show a clear message at the top of all history-related pages for anonymous users that the time is in UTC until #2 #2 JavaScript should fix time on the fly for all users
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hi, a big thank you to Yuri for flagging this case of manipulation of public opinion.
Reading through the links provided - i can say WP edit time was mostly discussed among ”pro-state” media. One journalist even went as far as insinuating that assassination was planned in the ”west” and that WP was used to provide for media coverage (sic!)
I think that RU:WP should ask for apologies from the newspapers.
regards, /gheorghe
On 03/02/2015 03:55 PM, Habib M'henni wrote:
Hello,
FYI we had the same issue two years ago in Tunisia when a Tunisian politician was shot and an IP made the edit in UTC. See our response in (in French) http://www.wikimedia.tn/nouvelle-polemique-sur-wikipedia-en-tunisie/
Finally the Radio station who relayed this "scoop" wrote an apologize text.
Habib, from Wikimedia TN User Group Le 02/03/2015 14:37, Yuri Astrakhan a écrit :
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org