Wikipedia

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2017-01-17

< Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost | Single
The Signpost
Single-page Edition
WP:POST/1
17 January 2017

 

2017-01-17

Next steps for the Signpost

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Pete Forsyth
Please note the subscription/notification poll described at the end.

Since joining the Signpost team and assuming the role of editor in chief in August 2016, I've struggled with two competing thoughts. I'm honored to help continue the important work of this publication; but I'm concerned about our future, as a volunteer-produced work covering an increasingly complex network of projects and organizations.

On the one hand, the Signpost team, and our occasional contributors, continually impress and inspire with their work, whether it be relevant and carefully-researched stories or a badly needed technical fix. The opportunity to work alongside them, to help present their work to our readers, and to learn from them, is a source of great pride and satisfaction.

But on the other hand, the problems we face—and that all, or most, of my predecessors have faced—are stark, and the solutions are not readily apparent. Our core team is small and overtaxed; we miss publication deadlines; and we are not as diverse, by any number of measures, as we should be.

The value of the Signpost

The Signpost, since its inception in 2005, has built a strong and important legacy. While I, and my colleagues and predecessors, have made some mistakes and omissions, the publication has consistently played a central role in helping Wikipedians and Wikimedians understand our ever-expanding world, track important developments, and engage with various initiatives. Many of our stories—coverage of WikiLeaks in 2010, and of the Knowledge Engine in 2016, come to mind—have documented stories whose importance goes beyond the ranks of Wikimedians, and have filled gaps left by media entities that sometimes struggle to engage with the complexities of the Wikimedia world. I recently asked for perspectives on the Signpost's value on the website Quora, and have enjoyed reading through the answers; I hope to see more there, or in the comments here.

But much of our process and technology is "legacy" in the less agreeable sense. Inefficiencies tax the limited time and attention of our personnel, and impede our ability to present a superior news product. Our format, news offerings, publication schedule, and delivery mechanisms are not as consistent as we, or our readers, would like.

Recruitment and retention are key

Most of my discussions about these issues, whether with "Signpost insiders" or occasional readers, have pointed to "R&R"—recruitment and retention—as the key issues. I agree with this assessment—to a point.

But as we begin 2017, rather than focus entirely on R&R, we are going to focus on some of the issues we believe impact R&R.

When volunteers come forward to work with us, do we offer clear roles and assignments, so they can quickly contribute in satisfying ways? Do we give them the support they need to succeed? When writers or other contributors do leave the Signpost, can future employers in communications or research see the value of what they've done here? These are some of the questions demanding our attention.

What we can improve

We have already made some "under the hood" changes that will make things easier going forward. My predecessor Gamaliel had the foresight to bring in a team member with a professional background in human resources, Rosiestep, whose insights have helped us think more clearly about R&R. We adopted Slack to serve as our "newsroom"—a discussion platform that lets both regular and occasional contributors discuss and refine stories and longer-term planning. We have begun using the open platform Hypothes.is to support more sophisticated editing of stories submitted on-wiki.

Already this year, TheDJ updated the CSS for our pages, making us readable on mobile devices. And we have been exploring the Newsletter extension, currently under development by Qgil-WMF and others, which may allow us to offer more useful subscription options in the future. A team of volunteers has emerged to plan for a revamp of our publication bot, which will greatly simplify our work when complete.

As we move forward, we want to continue to expand our coverage to more thoroughly cover the international, multi-project, multi-language totality of the Wikimedia world. We hope to make our content more accessible via RSS, which should in turn improve our exposure outside Wikipedia, via services like Planet Wikimedia and Google News.

Did you know the Signpost's name is a pun? I only discovered this recently, when reading Michael Snow's initial announcement in 2005. A core feature of the publication, that distinguishes it from most wiki content, is that our posts are signed; attribution is a key feature. But is our approach to attribution sufficient to serve the needs of Wikipedians looking to build a resume for a career in journalism, communications, or research? Perhaps not. We will be looking to tweak the way we approach attribution in our pages, and to improve the visibility of the Signpost in places like LinkedIn, to help those who have substantially contributed to our work more effectively communicate their role to the wider world.

Could formal, clearly-defined roles help us build a team that's more consistent, or more inviting to (say) non-native English speakers? That's another angle we're exploring; we may even take steps to create a formal internship program.

Even as we experiment and make improvements, we will of course continue to publish regularly. Full disclosure, though: we might strain your expectations of "regularity." We explicitly changed from weekly to fortnightly publication in 2016, and we've found that even the new schedule is challenging to sustain. We are considering changing to a monthly publication schedule, partially in recognition of the various communication channels that have sprung up around the Signpost over the years. We're especially interested in your thoughts and wishes about our publication schedule.

What do you think?

Many past "from the editor" notes have broadly called for new contributors; and of course, we welcome those who want to pitch in. If you want details on how you can contribute, the framework offered in this October 2015 still applies. But for the moment, we're not actively pursuing contributors, beyond those who have a clear idea what they want to do, and are pretty capable of forging ahead with limited guidance. If that's you, please let us know; but if clear guidance is important to you, give us a little more time. We expect to put out a more comprehensive call in the near future, when we're better prepared to work with new volunteers to find the best fit.

We do want to stay in touch about our progress, and about our plans as they evolve. I plan to use the Signpost's main talk page for occasional updates on what we're working on; please keep an eye on it for the most up-to-date information. Please chime in there, or in the comment section below, if you have thoughts about our priorities and next steps.

How do you like to get your Signpost?

Would you like cream with that? How about some sugar?

We expect to have some new options available for subscribers in the coming months. Please fill in this poll to help inform our decisions. (It's based on a Google form; if you prefer not to use Google, just leave us a note below instead.)

Some background information, and the full poll questions, are available here.




Reader comments

2017-01-17

Surge in RFA promotions—a sign of lasting change?

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Go Phightins!, Tony1, and Pete Forsyth

Surge in RFA promotions: a sign of lasting change?

Eight administrators were promoted in the first 16 days of 2017, following four successful requests for adminship (RFAs) in December. This is more than any month since March 2011, which saw nine new admins. January has already seen half as many promotions as did the entirety of 2016.

From a large-scale research project in 2011 to several subsequent attempts at reform, the precipitous decline in admin promotions over the last several years has drawn the attention of the community. The Signpost investigated whether these reforms are working: whether this surge is the start of a trend, or just a temporary blip on the radar. We spoke with several recently promoted administrators, past candidates, nominators, and RFA observers to explore that question.

One common theme from their responses was acclaim for the optional RFA candidate poll (ORCP), a development championed by Anna Frodesiak that began in October 2015. It provides a forum for prospective administrators to put their names forward and receive appraisals from community members on their likelihood of passing. In 2016, of the sixteen successful RfAs, eleven (69%) had used the poll. Of 2016's twenty unsuccessful candidates, only two (10%) had first used the poll.

Montanabw, who ran unsuccessfully in September 2015, points to another improvement in the RfA process: watchlist notifications.

Generally, the sentiment that RFA has become less nasty shined through many recent candidates' reflections. NinjaRobotPirate, who passed overwhelmingly earlier this year, commented that "a lot of the nastiness has been purged" from the process. Nevertheless, he described putting himself forward as a challenge, given that "nobody likes the idea of putting their contributions on trial."

RFA's reputation as a nasty experience for well-meaning contributors has certainly not helped encourage editors to take the plunge. Sam Walton, an administrator himself who has recently begun a mini-campaign of nominations that has yielded several new administrators, offered his insight on RFA's perception problem.

He went on to say that when RFAs are rare and only one candidate runs at a time, it fosters an atmosphere of intense scrutiny on that candidate, which can lead people to look for more reasons to oppose. He has sought with his recent nominations to curb the notion that "no one runs because no one runs" and to address the recurring challenge of getting more people to run by simply asking and nominating qualified candidates. He believes his recruitment efforts are "doing a good job of spreading some goodwill and improving the negative perception of RfA."

Another recent change that may reduce the time-consuming nature of running for adminship is the limitation on questions to two per inquirer, which was imposed in 2015. In all, 11 proposals reached the request for comment stage of a 2015 reform effort, and four of those proposals passed. (The others were the tweaking of promotion discretionary range, watchlisting, and the notice on the Centralized discussion template; while the pre-RFA candidate poll happened at a similar time as the 2015 reform RFC, this was coincidental.)

Two editors at the forefront of RFA reform efforts in recent years have been WereSpielChequers and Kudpung. Kudpung was a coordinator of the massive research endeavor and reform effort of 2011, and WereSpielChequers has compiled statistics and has written about the issue for the Signpost (here, here, and here).

WereSpielChequers doubts that the reform efforts of late 2015—including the optional candidate poll and the lowering of promotion criteria from 70–80% support to 65–75%—explain the recent surge: "the slightly lower threshold for promotion has made almost no difference; Those who do pass usually do so with near unanimity or at least a strong consensus. I fear that ORCP has succeeded in persuading more to come forward, but then deterred them from actually running. It is too early to say whether the January surge is a welcome but temporary rally or a change.".

Kudpung also doubts that the recent spike in successful promotions is part of a longer-term trend. In a statement to the Signpost, he suggests that RFA remains an inherently broken process:

Although many deride RFA as a broken process, those who have recently experienced an RFA have differing opinions.

K6ka noted that "the drama (of reading old RFAs) was enough to keep me at bay" before he ran successfully earlier this year.

"I got very little sleep throughout the week. I'd stay up till midnight watching the !votes on my RFA fluctuate unsettlingly before getting eight hours of terrible quality sleep, waking up at roughly eight-thirty in the morning or so to scroll through my RFA page again on my phone in bed," he said.

However, both he and Ealdgyth, who recently passed with 250 supports and no opposes, described their RFAs as enjoyable, a sentiment not shared by Hawkeye7, a former administrator who ran for the tools again in early 2016:

"RfA remains a tough process. There was a vicious off-Wiki campaign against me. It deters people from running, and it deters people from contributing to Wikipedia. I was heartened, though, by the editors who supported my candidacy—a veritable Who's Who of Wikipedia."

Ad Orientem, whose successful candidacy in late December may have springboarded a wave in nominations, summarized RFA as it stands today:

"My RfA was contentious and for me personally, highly stressful. Twice during the RfA I seriously considered withdrawing but was talked out of it … The problem with those who complain about RfA is that there seems little consensus or even serious suggestions for an alternative. As long as we need Admins (and we do!) we are going to need some system for vetting candidates. Like many Wikipedians I have heard horror stories about RfA before the series of reforms that began a few years back and I would like to assure readers that abusive and trollish behavior is generally not tolerated anymore," he said. "Overall I think the process is fair if imperfect." GP

Brief notes

[[File:|center|300x300px]]

Prince's biography was one of our most-edited articles in 2016, covered in a WMF blog. Here the musician is remembered through a permanent work of graffiti in a Spanish public place.
  • WikiCup 2017 sign-ups open ... this year features a cash prize! Sign-ups for the WikiCup, an annual on-wiki competition to improve content on Wikipedia, have opened and will close on February 5. This year, winners will receive monetary prizes including $US200 for the first-place winner. The money for prizes was donated anonymously. Details on how it will be awarded can be found on the main WikiCup page. GP!
  • Death, politics, and Vincent van Gogh: 2016 as seen through the lens of Wikipedia: In one of the WMF's blog series, followed up by online newsletter Billboard, Ed Erhart and Samantha Lien asked what were the most-edited English Wikipedia articles in 2016. Four of the top five, they found, relate to the US election. The deaths of many notable people also featured strongly, among them that of Prince (pictured).
  • Another WMF board vacancy: Two WMF trustees' two year terms expired at the end of 2016. Alice Wiegand sought, and was granted, reappointment; Guy Kawasaki did not renew. Three of the organization's ten board seats are now vacant.
  • New restricted grant to fund structured data on Commons: The Sloan Foundation, one of the most substantial funders of the WMF over the years, granted US$3 million, targeted at improving the structure of metadata on Wikimedia Commons. More info in the announcement.
  • Strategic planning updates: WMF executive director Katherine Maher has posted several weekly updates on the upcoming strategic planning process (covered in the previous Signpost). The WMF board has approved up to US$2.5 million in spending, up from the $1 million spent on the 2010 plan. The firm Williamsworks will serve as the lead architect for the process. A discussion on the Wikimedia-L email list focused on the lack of a published long-term plan for the WMF's own future.
  • Birthdays: Wikipedia celebrated its 16th birthday on January 15. The Signpost's own 12th birthday came and went without much notice on January 10. We'll be OK.
  • Wikimania 2017 scholarship applications open: You may now apply for a scholarship to the annual conference, which will take place in Canada.
  • Eureka! The WMF has reported on the results of the Gender Gap Inspire Campaigns to date.
  • Wikimedia Developer Summit: The annual meeting on the evolution of MediaWiki and other Wikimedia-supporting technologies took place January 9 and 10. See the session notes and our Technology Report for details.
  • New administrators: Recent promotions have included Boson, Ad Orientem, and Ivanvector (December) and NinjaRobotPirate, Schwede66, K6ka, Ealdgyth, Ferret, Cyberpower678, Mz7, and Primefac (January). GP!
  • New members elected to Affiliations Committee: The committee announced three new members: Camelia.boban, Kirill Lokshin, and Satdeep Gill. See here for more information.



Reader comments

2017-01-17

What is it like to edit Wikipedia when you're blind?

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Tony1
Graham87 at the Dubai Museum in 2011

To say that Wikipedian Graham Pearce (Graham87) has never seen light wouldn't be quite true. On a number of occasions up to the age of nine, his doctor or his mother would shine a torch into his left eye, and the few retinal cells that had not died would pick up a strange flash of light. But since then his retinopathy of prematurity has made those fleeting experiences distant memories (and rather meaningless ones, he says).

Not only is Graham totally blind, but as a result of being born 15 weeks premature he has only 50% hearing in one ear—although his other ear is perfect. While some might regard this as a threadbare perceptual situation, that's not the way Graham sees the world or himself (to use a visual metaphor that blind people become inured to). To know him is to become acquainted with a rich internal landscape, where the linguistic, the spatial, and the proportional seem more sophisticated than for many sighted people. Ask him whether Tokyo is more northerly than Beijing and he'll tell you. Ask him what the cubed root of 97 is, and you'll know within a couple of seconds (if only to one decimal place).

Now 29, Graham has been a devoted Wikipedian for eleven years, and achieved adminship nine years ago with a 67–0–0 result. He spends an average of six to eight hours a day onwiki on tasks that keep the site operating smoothly, such as merging page histories, repairing vandalism, and blocking miscreants—all in addition to article writing and editing. From time to time he's been active in the offline Wikimedia movement: he attended Wikimania in Washington DC (2012) and in Hong Kong (2013), and he expects to be at Montreal this year.

He and I sat down to a Skype audio interview for the Signpost across the 3300 kilometres (2000 mi) between Australia's east and west coasts.

Before Wikipedia

Tracing Graham's history on Wikipedia, and further back to his early experiences with computers and the Internet, demonstrates what a profound difference information technology has made to the lives of many people who have an unusual perceptual profile. This is especially true for those who are visually impaired.

"My mother started teaching me braille when I was three. A year later I started typing braille with a Perkins Brailler, essentially a braille typewriter from the 1940s that's still in use today." He adds: "A lot of blind tech has always been a decade behind." At school, Graham used an automated machine that would translate from braille to print. In an unjust twist, the system excluded him from the "gifted and talented program" because of his blindness. But this is where we see the precursor to his involvement in Wikipedia: during “silent reading”, he'd indulge himself by reading the school's hard-copy encyclopedia and the Atlas for the Blind, while his fellow students chose children's fiction.

The first of two milestones came in 1997, when he experienced a full PC standard qwerty keyboard in touch-typing tutorials at Perth's Association for the Blind, "a pretty crude setup", he says. It was there that he learned how to use the Internet, and Microsoft Word and Excel. But still he had no proper facilities at home. "Although I'd had a desktop PC at home since 1998, it had no 'speaking voice', so it wasn't much use to me."

The second milestone was a grant he received to install a copy of JAWS on his home computer (JAWS is a computer screen reader with text-to-speech output). "That marked the start of my fast trajectory. I devoured the JAWS basic training tapes and achieved facility through self-training. It went way beyond what I’d learnt at what was then the Association. But still we had no Internet at home." Finally, in 2000, his family was able to access dial-up Internet at home, just before he started high school.

I ask him what his intellectual interests were at the time: "Internet, computers, maths, and music. I went to a specialist music high school. I got in on a voice scholarship, and I'd already learned to play the piano. That's aside from a disastrous attempt to play the recorder in year 2!" Graham also has absolute pitch, a coveted ability among musicians.

Becoming a Wikipedian

Fast-forward to the end of high school, just before he joined the English Wikipedia. What predisposed him to the kind of writing and editing required of a Wikipedian? He says: "I had some experience in writing and editing essays, and I'd occasionally heard about Wikipedia. In February 2005, I took the plunge and made my first edit. I took to it immediately using JAWS. From memory, my first activities were on a list of interesting and unusual place names.

"I didn't even think to tell people I was blind. It just didn't occur to me, even though there was nothing to stop me from telling people. I think I was mainly a lurker in the early stages, on forums like Featured Article Candidates. I gradually moved from lurker to editor over the first three or four months, and copyedited quite a few articles nominated for FAC. I remember getting into trouble with JAWS, which got a lot of homonyms wrong, as you can imagine. Someone accused me of vandalism at FAC because I'd changed "wear and tear" to "ware and tare". The accuser was the first person on Wikipedia I told that I'm blind. That night he announced it on his user page, and word soon spread. It was a turning point for me, I now realise: it improved my confidence."

In 2006 Graham started to advocate for accessibility on the site. He was using an older version of JAWS, and couldn't afford to upgrade; it didn’t read CSS properly, and HiddenStructure caused JAWS to display "weird things". He wrote messages on relevant talk pages. Sometimes people were receptive, and with the help of others he expanded into broader issues about accessibility. One example was main-page headings, which were chaotic. He got that fixed.

In those early days he wasn’t able to view diffs properly: "I discovered that by viewing the html source and looking for the CSS class diffchange, the diff changes could be accessed. But this method is problematic when people add/remove line breaks while making edits. In these cases I have to restore the line breaks to figure out what else the editor changed."

How is it different from vision-based editing?

Braille typewriter: modern technology makes it seem incredibly clunky.

I want to know more about the experience of editing as a blind person. The most obvious difference, he says, is that nothing is synoptic: "It's all presented to you in a very linear fashion, in the order the page is written in html. Buttons that appear to sighted people at the top—including the menus, the pull-downs, and the search box—are actually at the bottom when you use JAWS. Under them, right at the bottom, are the items you see on the left-side margin." I notice he uses a visual metaphor ("bottom", not "end") to express it in a way that's easier for sighted people. Graham adds: "Images, of course, are just part of the linear stream of syntax". He does the odd bit of maintenance and replacement on images, but understandably it's a minor part of his work.

Graham finds it easier to edit after copy-pasting from edit-mode onto a plain text file. He can switch back and forth between wiki and a text file because using JAWS he doesn't have to visually re-find the equivalent place in each. He has JAWS set to a default line-by-line display (in audio). "You can go word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, if you want, using the arrow keys as modifiers. And you can jump between section headings."

However, it's by no means a perfect system, and he's found the slow progress in JAWS' feature set frustrating over the years.

Astonishingly, his reading speed can be up to 500 words per minute—not skimming, he emphasises. "I haven't got any faster since 2003, and this speed is typical of blind computer users." I hear an example in the background of the conversation; it sounds like incredibly fast, garbled, unmodulated speech, stopping and starting at his whim. But what is an auditory muddle to me is a super-fast, clear stream of information to someone who's used it for years. This is Graham's bridge to the world. JAWS even signals that a word is initially capitalised by raising the pitch with which it speaks the word. The contour of yes–no questions (on talkpages) rises just as it does in speech. It's all in a US east coast accent by his choice ("the British accent sounds fake and awful for some reason", he says).

At the end of the interview I can't resist asking him about the sensory modes in which he dreams. He says: "I guess it's more strongly auditory and tactile than for a sighted person. And if it's spatial, it's not spatial in a visual way." Afterwards, he links me to an online article on the subject.



Reader comments

2017-01-17

Year-end roundups, Wikipedia's 16th birthday, and more

Contribute  —  
Share this
By TeeVeeed, Milowent, and Pete Forsyth



In brief

If the BLT's simplicity earns its inventor "hero" status, what of the villain who invented this monstrosity?
  • Seeking sandwich history: A Gizmodo advertorial for the Hormel meat company asked about the invention of the BLT: What Hero Invented the BLT? The author quoted the Wikipedia article and looked for further information about the history of the sandwich. Our BLT article was first created in September 2002. Despite the article's having achieved the good article status in 2011, no one has uncovered such a "heroic" inventor. Lucikly, Hormel has not attempted to claim inventorship to date. Though not mentioned by Gizmodo, there was a period of time where our article on S'mores claimed they were invented by "Loretta Scott Crew", a falsehood which still gets repeated from time to time. (December 16)
  • Students heard that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not: That's the message Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd heard in researching her book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. She wrote up the issue in Did Media Literacy Backfire?, a post for the Data & Society Points blog. (January 5)
  • Beyond the locker room: When a Miami Dolphins quarterback took a hard hit during a football game, editors got busy vandalizing the Matt Moore article to report him as "deceased". The edits and Twitter reaction were noted by sportswriters at all22.com and the Palm Beach Post. The Post article also noted a trend in such edits relating to sports events. (January 9)
  • Viewing stats make beautiful music: In a story about past "Best New Artist" Grammy winners, the Tucson Sun covered the entertainment data project PrettyFamous. Using Wikipedia article view statistics as part of an algorithm to assign a "Musician Score", the project determined artist popularity and interest. (January 13)





Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



Reader comments

2017-01-17

One year ends, and another begins

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Armbrust
Jackson is the largest municipality in Mississippi, by both land area and population.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 18 December to 14 January.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.
Jochen Rindt took the Lotus 72's maiden victory at the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix.
The first Belgium A-squad in 1901 featured four Englishmen.
The water pipit is evaluated as a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The cover art for the first edition of Astounding Stories of Super-Science was created by Hans Waldemar Wessolowski.
Tamannaah at the theatrical trailer launch of Baahubali: The Beginning
Bradley Cooper's breakthrough came with the role of a reckless teacher in The Hangover.
The blue-and-yellow macaw is a large South American parrot with blue top parts and yellow under parts.

Twelve featured articles were promoted.

  • Banksia aculeata (nominated by Casliber) is a species of plant of the family Proteaceae native to the Stirling Range in the southwest of Western Australia. A shrub up to 2 m (6.6 ft) tall, it has dense foliage and leaves with very prickly serrated margins. The unusual pinkish, pendent flower spikes, known as inflorescences, are generally hidden in the foliage and appear during the early summer. Although it was collected by the naturalist James Drummond in the 1840s, it was not formally described until 1981—by Alex George in his monograph of the genus.
  • Nominative determinism (nominated by Edwininlondon) is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their name. The term was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine's humorous Feedback column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon. These and other examples led to light-hearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work. Since the term appeared, nominative determinism has been an irregularly recurring topic in New Scientist, as readers continue to submit examples.
  • Tidus (nominated by Tintor2) is a fictional video game character in Square Enix's Final Fantasy series. He was introduced as the protagonist of the role-playing video game Final Fantasy X in 2001 as a 17-year-old expert of the fictional sport blitzball from the city of Zanarkand. He has appeared in other video games, including the Final Fantasy X sequel Final Fantasy X-2, the Kingdom Hearts series, and several Square Enix crossover games. Tidus is voiced primarily by Masakazu Morita in Japanese and James Arnold Taylor in English. Both actors enjoyed voicing the character, and Morita also performed the motion capture for him. The character has been generally well received by video game critics, his cheerful personality and heroic traits making him an appealing protagonist. His character development gives him the ability to overcome his hatred for his father, Jecht, and to become protective of Yuna when learning of her possible tragic fate. His romantic relationship with Yuna has been considered among the best in video games, although reviewers and fans were divided on Taylor's voicing of the character.
  • Jochen Rindt (nominated by Zwerg Nase) (1942–1970) was a German-born racing driver who represented Austria during his career. In 1970, he was killed during practice for the Italian Grand Prix and became the only driver to be posthumously awarded the Formula One World Drivers' Championship. Overall, he competed in 62 Grands Prix, winning six and achieving 13 podium finishes. He was also successful in sports car racing, winning the 1965 edition of 24 Hours of Le Mans paired with Masten Gregory in a Ferrari 250LM. Rindt was a popular figure in Austria and his success resulted in increased interest in motorsport and Formula One in particular. He hosted a monthly television show titled Motorama and set up a successful exhibition of racing cars in Vienna.
  • The Belgium national football team (nominated by Kareldorado) has officially represented Belgium in association football since their maiden match in 1904. The squad is under the global jurisdiction of FIFA and is governed in Europe by UEFA—both of which were co-founded by the Belgian team's supervising body, the Royal Belgian Football Association. It appeared in the end stages of twelve FIFA World Cups and five UEFA European Football Championships, and featured at three Olympic football tournaments, including the 1920 Olympic tournament, which they won. Most of Belgium's home games are played at the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels.
  • Cliff Clinkscales (nominated by TempleM) (born 1984) is an American professional basketball player for the Halifax Hurricanes of the National Basketball League of Canada. A point guard, Clinkscales has been playing professionally since 2008, appearing in the NBA Development League, the American Basketball League, and the National Basketball League of Canada. He was an NBL Canada All-Star in 2014, and subsequently won the league championship in 2016.
  • Operation Infinite Reach (nominated by GeneralizationsAreBad) was the codename for American cruise missile strikes in 1998 on al-Qaeda bases in Khost, Afghanistan, and the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan. The attacks, launched by the United States Navy, were ordered by President Bill Clinton in retaliation for al-Qaeda's August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people and injured over 4,000 others. Operation Infinite Reach was the first time the United States acknowledged a preemptive strike against a violent non-state actor. Operation Infinite Reach, described by historian Timothy Naftali as "the largest U.S. military response to a terrorist attack" since the 1986 bombing of Libya, was met with a mixed international response: American allies and most of the American public supported the strikes, but the targeted countries, Islamic militant groups, and other nations in the Middle East strongly opposed them.
  • Devon County War Memorial (nominated by HJ Mitchell) is a First World War memorial, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and situated on the cathedral green in Exeter, the county town of Devon. The memorial takes the form of a simple cross. Hewn from a single block of granite quarried from Haytor on Dartmoor, it stands just to the west of the cathedral, in alignment with the altar. The cross stands on a granite plinth, which itself sits on three steps. It was unveiled by Edward, Prince of Wales in 1921. The memorial is a grade II* listed building, part of a "national collection" of Lutyens' war memorials.
  • The 2014 Japanese Grand Prix (nominated by MWright96) was a Formula One motor race held on 5 October at the Suzuka Circuit in Suzuka, Mie. It was the fifteenth round of the 2014 Formula One season and the 30th Japanese Grand Prix held as part of the Formula One World Championship. The 44-lap race was won by Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton, who started from second position. His teammate, Nico Rosberg, finished second and Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel came in third. It was Hamilton's eighth victory of the season, his first at Suzuka and the 30th of his Formula One career.
  • The water pipit (nominated by Jimfbleak) (Anthus spinoletta) is a small passerine bird which breeds in the mountains of southern Europe and southern Asia eastwards to China. It is a short-distance migrant; many birds move to lower altitudes or wet open lowlands in winter. Water pipits construct a cup nest on the ground under vegetation or in cliff crevices and lay four to six speckled greyish white eggs, which hatch in about two weeks with a further 14–15 days to fledging. Although pipits occasionally catch insects in flight, they feed mainly on small invertebrates picked off the ground or vegetation, and also some plant material.
  • Analog Science Fiction and Fact (nominated by Mike Christie) is an American science-fiction magazine. The first issue, titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science', was dated January 1930, published by William Clayton, and edited by Harry Bates. Clayton went bankrupt in 1933 and the magazine was sold to Street & Smith. The new editor was F. Orlin Tremaine, who soon made it the leading magazine in the nascent pulp science fiction field. At the end of 1937, John W. Campbell took over editorial duties under Tremaine's supervision, and the following year Tremaine was let go, giving Campbell more independence. By 1950, the magazine was no longer regarded as the leader of the field, though it did continue to publish popular and influential stories. In 1960, Campbell changed the title of the magazine to Analog Science Fiction & Fact. At about the same time Street & Smith sold the magazine to Condé Nast. Ben Bova took over from 1972 to 1978, and the character of the magazine changed noticeably.
  • Paranthodon (nominated by IJReid) is a genus of extinct stegosaurian dinosaur that lived in South Africa during the Early Cretaceous period. Discovered in 1845, it was one of the first stegosaurians found. Its only remains, a partial skull and isolated teeth, were found in the Kirkwood Formation. British paleontologist Richard Owen initially identified the fragments as those of the pareiasaur Anthodon. After remaining untouched for years in the British Museum of Natural History, the partial skull was identified by South African paleontologist Robert Broom as belonging to a different genus; he named the specimen Palaeoscincus africanus. Several years later, Hungarian paleontologist Franz Nopcsa, unaware of Broom's new name, similarly concluded that it represented a new taxon, and named it Paranthodon owenii. Since Nopcsa's species name was assigned after Broom's, and Broom did not assign a new genus, both names are now synonyms of the current binomial, Paranthodon africanus.

Thirteen featured lists were promoted.

  • The Jnanpith Award (nominated by Dharmadhyaksha and Vivvt) is an Indian literary award presented annually by the Bharatiya Jnanpith to an author for their "outstanding contribution towards literature". Instituted in 1961, the award is bestowed only on Indian writers writing in Indian languages included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India and English, with no posthumous conferral. The award has been conferred upon fifty-seven writers including seven women authors.
  • Tamannaah (born 1989) is an Indian actress known for her work in Telugu and Tamil films. Her filmography (nominated by Pavanjandhyala) consists of fifty-two films, with Anbanavan Asaradhavan Adangadhavan under filming and Baahubali: The Conclusion in post-production stage.
  • The Latin Grammy Hall of Fame (nominated by Magiciandude) is a hall of fame established by the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences to recognize "early recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance that were released more than 25 years ago". The albums and songs are picked by a panel of recording-arts professionals, such as musicologists and historians, and selected from all major categories of Latin music. As of 2017, forty-one works have been inducted into the hall of fame.
  • Room is a 2015 Canadian-Irish drama film directed by Lenny Abrahamson. It is an adaptation of Emma Donoghue's eponymous novel, who also wrote the screenplay. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2015, with A24 later providing the film a wide release in 2016 at over 800 theaters in the United States and Canada. The film grossed a worldwide box office total of over $35 million on a production budget of $13 million. The film awards and nominations (nominated by Cowlibob) in a variety of categories with particular praise for its direction, screenplay and the performances of Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay. At the 88th Academy Awards, Room received four nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Abrahamson and Best Adapted Screenplay for Donoghue. Larson went on to win for Best Actress.
  • Bradley Cooper (born 1975) is an American actor and producer. During his career (nominated by Famous Hobo and FrB.TG) he appeared in forty films (including two voice roles and three television films) and over hundred television episodes. He also appeared in three theatre productions between 2006 and 2015.
  • Mississippi is a state located in the Southern United States. According to the 2010 United States Census, Mississippi is the 32nd most populous state with 2,968,103 inhabitants and the 31st largest by land area spanning 46,923.27 square miles (121,530.7 km2) of land. Mississippi is divided into 82 counties and contains 299 incorporated municipalities (nominated by Mattximus) consisting of cities, towns and villages. Municipalities in Mississippi are classified according to population size. At time of incorporation, municipalities with populations of more than 2,000 are classified as cities, municipalities containing between 301 and 2000 persons are considered towns, and municipalities between 100 and 300 persons are called villages.
  • The Voice is an American singing competition television series which premiered on NBC in 2011. Based on the original The Voice of Holland, the series features several stages of competition to search for new vocal talent contested by aspiring singers, age 15 or over, drawn from public auditions. It has been nominated for numerous awards (nominated by Mymis), including thirty-one Emmy Award nominations, winning six times, including three awards in the Outstanding Reality-Competition Program category and three awards for its lighting design. As of 2016, The Voice has won 32 awards from a total of 96 nominations.
  • Landon Donovan (born 1982) is a professional soccer player who played for the United States men's national soccer team from 2000 to 2014. In his 157 appearances for the United States, he scored 57 goals (nominated by SounderBruce), making him the country's all-time male top scorer.
  • The first season (nominated by Jclemens) of the fantasy drama television series Game of Thrones premiered on HBO in April 2011, and concluded in June 2011. The season consists of 10 episodes, each running approximately 55 minutes. The television series is based on A Game of Thrones, the first novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin and is adapted for television by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. The story takes place in a fictional world, primarily upon a continent called Westeros, with one storyline occurring on another continent to the east known as Essos. Like the novel, the season initially focuses on the family of nobleman Eddard Stark, as he is thrust into royal intrigue at the invitation of his king and longtime friend, Robert Baratheon. Critics praised the show's production values and cast, with specific accolades for Peter Dinklage's portrayal of Tyrion Lannister. The first season won two of the thirteen Emmy Awards for which it was nominated, for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series (Dinklage) and Outstanding Main Title Design; it also received a nomination for Outstanding Drama Series. U.S. viewership rose by approximately 33% over the course of the season, from 2.2 million to over 3 million by the season finale.
  • Tropical cyclones and subtropical cyclones are named (nominated by Jason Rees) by various warning centers to provide ease of communication between forecasters and the general public regarding forecasts, watches, and warnings. The names are intended to reduce confusion in the event of concurrent storms in the same basin. Generally once storms produce sustained wind speeds of more than 33 kn (61 km/h; 38 mph), names are assigned in order from predetermined lists depending on which basin they originate. However, standards vary from basin to basin: some tropical depressions are named in the Western Pacific, while tropical cyclones must have a significant amount of gale-force winds occurring around the centre before they are named in the Southern Hemisphere.
  • Shriya Saran (born in 1982) is an Indian actress and model who has acted mostly in Telugu, Tamil and Hindi language films. She has appeared (nominated by Vensatry) in sixty-seven films (including four bilingual productions), with Anbanavan Asaradhavan Adangadhavan and Tadka currently under filming.
  • Alyssa Milano (born 1972) is an American actress and singer. Her discography (nominated by Aoba47) includes four studio albums, one reissue, two compilation albums, two video albums, five music videos and thirteen singles.
  • Parrots (nominated by Dunkleosteus77), also known as psittacines, are the 402 species of birds that make up the order Psittaciformes, found in most tropical and subtropical regions, of which 387 are extant. The order is subdivided into three superfamilies: the Psittacoidea ("true" parrots), the Cacatuoidea (cockatoos), and the Strigopoidea (New Zealand parrots). Parrots have a generally pantropical distribution with several species inhabiting temperate regions in the Southern Hemisphere as well. The greatest diversity of parrots is in South America and Australasia.

Twelve featured pictures were promoted.



Reader comments

2017-01-17

Concluding 2016 and covering 2017's first two cases

Contribute  —  
Share this
By GamerPro64

Happy 2017, readers of the Arbitration report. For the first issue of the year we cover the remaining 2016 motions and the first two cases accepted by the Arbitration Committee in 2017.

War of the Pacific case

The first case accepted by the committee opened on 3 January. It involves an accusation by filing party Keysanger that MarshalN20 has made personal attacks. Previously, Marshal was topic-banned from all Latin American history articles in the Argentine History case. The topic ban was later suspended for a year by an 8–0 motion on 1 September 2015. The case was accepted in an 10–0 decision and is currently in the evidence stage.

The Magioladitis case

Also opened on 3 January, the Magioladitis case was filed by Ramaksoud2000, who has claimed that administrator Magioladitis refuses to follow the bot policy, specifically WP:COSMETICBOT. Magioladitis's bot Yobot has been blocked 19 times since March 2009. The case is also currently in the evidence stage.

In briefs
  • Motion regarding Darkfrog24: Darkfrog24 was again blocked on 5 December. In the committee's statement, they said "After review of the current appeal, we find that there is no evidence in favor of lifting or modifying the topic ban, and the disruptive behavior, in the form of repeated relitigation of the circumstances of the topic ban, has continued." Darkfrog can appeal the block in three months' time.
  • Motion regarding Fæ: Fæ's topic-ban "from editing BLPs relating to sexuality, broadly construed as well as topic banned from images relating to sexuality, broadly construed" has been suspended for six months. The decision was made on 12 December.
  • On 19 December FloNight had her checkuser and oversight permissions returned after resigning back in September 2016.
  • Arbitration motion regarding Austrian economics: Also on 19 December, a motion was made in the Austrian economics case, where discretionary sanctions were placed on pages related to the Austrian school of economics and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, broadly construed (remedy 1.1). These sanctions can be reinstated in the future.
  • Motion regarding North8000: On 21 December, the committee announced the unbanning of North8000. The editor had been site-banned as part of a remedy for the Gun control case in 2014. While unbanned, there are still restrictions placed on him, such as the topic bans on gun control, the Tea Party movement, and homophobia. The editor is restricted to using one account on Wikipedia.
  • Modifications in two of the Palestine–Israel articles: In 26 December, both the first and third Palestine–Israel articles cases were modified by the committee.
  • Arbitration motion regarding Captain Occam: On 1 January 2017, Captain Occam was unbanned after a vote from the committee. He had been site banned in 2012 after a review of the Race and intelligence case. With the site unbanning, Captain Occam's 2010 topic ban was modified from "race and intelligence related articles, broadly construed" to "the race and intelligence topic area, broadly construed". A two-way interaction ban between him and Mathsci has been imposed, and Captain Occam is reminded that he will be banned by an uninvolved administrator if he behaves disruptively in discussions.



Reader comments

2017-01-17

Out with the old, in with the new

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Milowent and Serendipodous

Your traffic reports of the ten most-viewed Wikipedia articles for the week of Dec. 11–17, 18–24, 25–31, and January 1–7, 2017. We've re-ordered things starting with this issue to put the most recent weekly report first. On the other hand, 2017 kicked off rather quietly compared to the last-minute rush of notable deaths as 2016 came to a close.

Week of January 1 to 7, 2017

A New Year: 2017 kicks off more sedately than the string of highly notable deaths last week. The chart is led by the popular Indian film Dangal with 1.18 million views. Mariah Carey follows on the strength, or lack thereof, of her New Year's Eve performance at Times Square.

For the full Top 25 this week, see Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/January 1 to 7, 2017.

For the week of January 1 to 7, 2017, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Dangal (film) Start class 1,182,405
Up from #7 last week, though with fewer views, but enough to reach one number after the flurry of last week's notable deaths. Aamir Khan (pictured) is without question the biggest star in Bollywood, a world where star power counts for a lot. So it's not surprising that his latest film is already breaking records, having made ₹1.07 billion ($15.78 million) in its first three days.
2 Mariah Carey Featured Article 1,177,898
The diva singer ended 2016 with a performance gone terribly wrong in New York's Times Square on live television. I saw it happen live – the music starts and she walks out and starts talking instead of singing, implying something was going wrong with her equipment, it was getting so painful I was surprised they didn't go to commercial. I immediately went to twitter to enjoy the first responders of humor. 2016 – good riddance!
3 Om Puri Start class 1,091,754
This Indian actor died on January 6.
4 Rogue One C-class 887,080
Felicity Jones (pictured) stars in this Star Wars universe movie, which is continuing a decent run on this chart.
5 Carrie Fisher B-Class 862,861
A drop from 9.2 million views and #1 last week. It's not enough that 2016 took so many beloved people from us; at times the year seemed to be sadistically toying with us. When we first heard that the onetime Princess Leia had suffered a heart attack on a plane, naturally we feared that 2016 was about to turn its murderous eye onto one of the icons of our childhood. And then she was reported to be in stable condition, and we breathed again. And then, out of the blue, George Michael died. And then she did as well. But, as she said, given enough time, everything becomes funny, so maybe she would have found the humour in this.
6 List of Sherlock episodes List 786,178
This hasn't been on the chart since January 2014, only because that was when the last series of Sherlock (#14) aired.
7 Deaths in 2017 List 758,898
A new year, a new Deaths article in the top 10.
8 Elizabeth II Featured Article 757,937
For yet another week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years in which she is played by Claire Foy.
9 Sandford Fleming Start class 705,516
A Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor who was honored with Google Doodle for his 190th birthday.
10 Jimmy Carter C-Class 696,567
The 39th President of the United States (1977–1981), his article was very popular on January 3 (620K views). Must be due to this reddit TIL thread titled "On his second day in office, President Jimmy Carter pardoned all evaders of the Vietnam War drafts." which has over 48,000 upvotes.

Week of December 24 to 31, 2016

Circle of Death: And so, 2016 ends as it began, with a flurry of unexpected and tragic deaths. The deaths of Carrie Fisher, George Michael and Debbie Reynolds in such close proximity sent a collective shock wave through our user base. Indeed, if this were any other year, this list might have seen record breaking numbers. Our viewers, bless their hearts, were driven to a quest to understand their idols' world. This was, as I am sure they learned, a monumental task in Carrie's case. In her stand up show Wishful Drinking, Carrie outlined her family story using the sort of blackboard one normally associates with TV murder investigations; to fully grasp every scandal, tragedy and shenanigan her family have witnessed would take an article of its own. But our users seem game; this list very much resembles Carrie's board. I've tried to give a vague outline of the connections below, but forgive me if I missed anything.

For the full Top 25 for this week see Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/December 25 to 31, 2016.

For the week of December 25 to 31, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Carrie Fisher B-Class 9,202,699
It's not enough that 2016 took so many beloved people from us; at times the year seemed to be sadistically toying with us. When we first heard that the onetime Princess Leia had suffered a heart attack on a plane, naturally we feared that 2016 was about to turn its murderous eye onto one of the icons of our childhood. And then she was reported to be in stable condition, and we breathed again. And then, out of the blue, George Michael died. And then she did as well. But, as she said, given enough time, everything becomes funny, so maybe she would have found the humour in this.
2 George Michael B-Class 7,744,516
Like many in the music business, George Michael spent much of his life under masks. A British singer of Greek descent, he changed his name from Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. Throughout the 80s, he adopted the swagger of a preening sex god whilst being secretly gay. After being forced out of the closet in the most humiliating circumstance imaginable, he decided to own his identity, and campaigned vociferously on gay rights issues. Perhaps the best outcome of his sudden death on Christmas Day has been the outpouring of stories by people whose lives were bettered by his quiet charity, news of which has quieted Britain's notoriously homophobic tabloid press.
3 Debbie Reynolds C-class 7,331,227
The mother of Carrie Fisher, who was a world-class movie star in her own right, having appeared in Singin' in the Rain, How The West Was Won and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, outlived her daughter by less than 48 hours. According to her son, her last words were, "I miss her so much; I want to be with Carrie."
4 Billie Lourd Start class 3,175,053
What must it be like to lose both your mother and your grandmother in the space of two days? The only child of Carrie Fisher, who, initially against her family's wishes, is also an actress, with a regular role in the horror/comedy TV series Scream Queens, had to face that horror just after Christmas. Thankfully, her family and fellow cast members have rallied around her.
5 Eddie Fisher (singer) B-Class 2,883,834
The father of Carrie Fisher was a mega-selling crooner in the days before rock and roll. His best known song is probably "Oh My Papa"; known to my generation most likely because Krusty the Clown sang it on The Simpsons. In her stage show, Wishful Drinking, Carrie explained how, having fathered her and her brother, he went to console his best friend's widow, Elizabeth Taylor, in the wake of his death. "My father flew to Elizabeth's side, gradually making his way slowly to her front". She would very quickly ditch him for Richard Burton. Carrie seemed to have forgiven him by his final years; she sent him strippers on his 81st birthday.
6 Todd Fisher B-Class 2,247,399 The brother of Carrie Fisher, whose eclectic career has flitted between the entertainment industry and architecture, appears to have assumed the role of holding his family together in the wake of his mother and sister's deaths.
7 Dangal (film) Start class 1,776,966
Aamir Khan (pictured) is without question the biggest star in Bollywood, a world where star power counts for a lot. So it's not surprising that his latest film is already breaking records, having made ₹1.07 billion ($15.78 million) in its first three days. And it's not stopping; viewing numbers have doubled since last week.
8 Rogue One C-class 2,239,147
Felicity Jones (pictured) stars in this Star Wars universe movie, which has grossed over $700 million. It probably won't dominate this chart as thoroughly as Star Wars: The Force Awakens did a year ago, but it will probably do quite well all the same.
9 Deaths in 2016 List 1,484,927
The deaths list had always acted as this list's lodestone; it was so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appeared was an indication of the weekly traffic levels. Not anymore. Notable deaths have been so freakishly frequent in 2016 that as the year nears its close, people are struggling to make sense of it, even to the point of personifying 2016 as a kind of sentient demon. In the wave of the new year, we've seen the list cross a million views, possibly for the first time since we started this project.
10 Bryan Lourd Start class 1,372,098 The onetime partner of Carrie Fisher and father to her only daughter, Billie Lourd, is notable not only for being one of the premier talent agents in Hollywood, but also for having left Carrie for a man.

December 18 to 24, 2016

Star Gabors: Hollywood history old and new collided this week as the huge success of Rogue One was overshadowed by the death of 50s star Zsa Zsa Gabor, which led Wikipedia users to search her and her extensive showbiz family. The Star Wars universe saw its own collision with history, as Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the film series, suffered a fatal heart attack. As per usual for Wikipedia, Christmas was hardly worth a mention, with only a Google Doodle drawing attention to it.

For the full Top 25 for this week, see Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/December 18 to 24, 2016.

For the week of December 18 to 24, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Zsa Zsa Gabor B-class 2,248,668
The heyday of Zsa Zsa Gabor, who died this week just 50 days short of her 100th birthday, was way before my time, and, from the looks of things, before the time of most Wikipedia users, since this list is peppered with the same pages I looked up to research her. Groomed for stardom from a young age and a professional celebrity before the term existed (she was married nine times to various society figures), she was also, briefly but appropriately, the great-grandmother of Paris Hilton.
2 Rogue One C-class 2,239,147
Numbers are up for this Star Wars universe movie, which saw just a 38% drop over its second weekend at the US box office. (It first appeared on this chart in April 2016.) Felicity Jones (pictured) stars in the film, which has already grossed over $550 million. It probably won't dominate this chart as thoroughly as Star Wars: The Force Awakens did a year ago, but it will probably do quite well all the same.
3 'Tis the Season disambig 1,543,670
For the third year in a row, a Google Doodle sent hundreds of thousands of people to a disambig page. You'd think they would have sorted this by now.
4 Carrie Fisher B-Class 1,233,129
It seems that, whatever your political persuasion, the general consensus is that 2016 has been a fairly terrible year. And the one reason we can all agree on is that the Grim Reaper has called open season on the celebrisphere. So when the actress so fondly remembered for her portrayal of Princess Leia in the Star Wars films suffered a heart attack on the day before Christmas Eve, everyone girded themselves for another loss. Although her condition initially stabilized, she died on December 27.
5 The OA N/A 905,746
This Netflix series, created by and starring Brit Marling (pictured), essentially explores ideas she first discussed in her film Sound of My Voice, about a woman who may or may not be supernaturally gifted forming a cult around herself. Released in its entirety on the 16th of December, it has become the latest Netflix watercooler topic, though less in a "you have to see it" kinda way than a "you really should just check it out" kinda way.
6 Darth Vader B-Class 854,652 The most iconic villain in modern history (I challenge you to disagree) made an appearance in the latest Star Wars spinoff, Rogue One. He's actually appeared on this list several times over the last few weeks, but his low mobile count suggested he was usurping the throne. This is the first time I feel his mobile count is high enough to warrant inclusion.
7 Star Wars Good Article 851,108
See above. And #2. And #4.
8 Steve Biko C-Class 848,967
The anti-Apartheid activist who was tortured to death by the South African police in 1977 got a Google Doodle for what should have been his 70th birthday on 18 December.
9 Deaths in 2016 List 841,579
The deaths list had always acted as this list's lodestone; it was so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appeared was an indication of the weekly traffic levels. Not anymore. Notable deaths have been so freakishly frequent in 2016 that as the year nears its close, people are struggling to make sense of it, even to the point of personifying 2016 as a kind of sentient demon.
10 Dangal (film) Start class 814,271
Aamir Khan (pictured) is without question the biggest star in Bollywood, a world where star power counts for a lot. So it's not surprising that his latest film is already breaking records, having made ₹1.07 billion ($15.78 million) in its first three days.

December 11 to 17, 2016

Two Leaders and One War: Two articles exceeded two million views this week, and no others even exceeded one million. The death of Canadian actor Alan Thicke (#1) leads the list; a successful actor but perhaps a surprisingly strong showing considering his heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s. And in second place, we have Rogue One, the new Star Wars (#9) franchise film entry, likely to remain with us for a few weeks. In more serious matters, the Battle of Aleppo (2012–16) hit #7, and two related articles (Aleppo at #11 and Syrian Civil War at #20) also made the Top 25.

For the Full Top 25 for this week, see Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/December 11 to 17, 2016.

For the week of December 11 to 17, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Alan Thicke C-class 2,734,867
The Canadian actor best known for his role as the dad on the American sitcom Growing Pains (1985–1992), he died of a heart attack at age 69 on December 13. He was also a songwriter who penned a number of popular TV show themes. Indeed, he had a rather successful life, though it seem a bit surprising that his death was such a solid #1 for the week.
2 Rogue One C-class 2,151,908
This Star Wars (#9) universe movie, but not part of the main series, was released on December 16, 2016. (It first appeared on this chart in April 2016.) Felicity Jones (#21) (pictured) stars in the film, which has already grossed over $320 million. It probably won't dominate this chart as thoroughly as Star Wars: The Force Awakens did a year ago, but it will probably do quite well all the same.
3 Rex Tillerson C-class 917,566
The CEO of ExxonMobil (pictured shaking hands with Vladimir Putin) is Donald Trump's pick to be America's next Secretary of State.
4 Deaths in 2016 List 780,226
The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. And it is quite high at #4 this week. That said, we may have to recalibrate our mathematics, since its numbers have been slowly going up over the last few weeks, and that continued again this week.
5 Westworld (TV series) C-Class 662,835
The season finale episode, The Bicameral Mind, aired on December 4. Views are down about 50% from last week, but that's still good enough to be #5 this week.
6 Battle of Dunkirk B-Class 643,547
Appearing due to the release of a new trailer for the upcoming July 2017 film Dunkirk (#23). A seven-minute trailer appeared at select IMAX showings of Rogue One (#2).
7 Battle of Aleppo (2012–16) 629,731
As Syrian government forces recently captured most the city of Aleppo (#11), the world is again paying a bit more attention to this terrible conflict. It is an odd irony that this article follows another battle on this list and which only appears due to an upcoming movie about it. Frankly, digesting the reality of war right in front of our eyes is harder than watching movies about a 75 year old battle.
8 Robin Thicke B-Class 609,246
The popular singer is the son of #1.
9 Star Wars Good Article 588,514
See #2.
10 Elizabeth II Featured Article 587,004
For yet another week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.




Reader comments

2017-01-17

Tech present, past, and future

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Evad37 and Legoktm

Data sets on Commons powering tables, maps, and interactive graphs

See or edit source data.


Data sets, consisting of either tabular or map data, can now be stored on Commons, and accessed from any wiki. The data can even be localised, with different labels for different languages. The interactive map above, showing GDP by US state, is generated from the data table at Data:Bea.gov/GDP_by_state.tab on Commons.

Raw data can be accessed using Lua, filtered, converted, mixed, and formatted. Lists, or other wikimarkup, can be generated from the data. For example, the same monthly climate data for New York can be shown as either a typical weather box...

Climate data for New York (Belvedere Castle, Central Park), 1981–2010 normals,[a] extremes 1869–present[b]
Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year
Record high °F (°C) 72.0
(22.2) 		78.1
(25.6) 		86
(30) 		96.1
(35.6) 		99.0
(37.2) 		100.9
(38.3) 		106.0
(41.1) 		104
(40) 		102.0
(38.9) 		93.9
(34.4) 		84.0
(28.9) 		75.0
(23.9) 		106.0
(41.1)
Mean maximum °F (°C) 57.0
(13.9) 		57.7
(14.3) 		68.0
(20.0) 		80.6
(27.0) 		87.6
(30.9) 		92.5
(33.6) 		95.4
(35.2) 		93.0
(33.9) 		89.2
(31.8) 		79.7
(26.5) 		69.6
(20.9) 		60.3
(15.7) 		95.4
(35.2)
Mean daily maximum °F (°C) 38.5
(3.6) 		39.7
(4.3) 		47.8
(8.8) 		59.5
(15.3) 		70.7
(21.5) 		79.5
(26.4) 		84.4
(29.1) 		82.4
(28.0) 		75.7
(24.3) 		64.6
(18.1) 		52.7
(11.5) 		42.1
(5.6) 		61.5
(16.4)
Mean daily minimum °F (°C) 25.9
(−3.4) 		26.2
(−3.2) 		33.3
(0.7) 		43.2
(6.2) 		53.4
(11.9) 		62.8
(17.1) 		68.4
(20.2) 		67.1
(19.5) 		60.4
(15.8) 		49.8
(9.9) 		39.9
(4.4) 		30.2
(−1.0) 		46.7
(8.2)
Mean minimum °F (°C) 8.2
(−13.2) 		9.0
(−12.8) 		17.6
(−8.0) 		30.7
(−0.7) 		42.3
(5.7) 		52.2
(11.2) 		59.7
(15.4) 		57.6
(14.2) 		47.5
(8.6) 		36.9
(2.7) 		25.3
(−3.7) 		13.3
(−10.4) 		8.2
(−13.2)
Record low °F (°C) −6.0
(−21.1) 		−15.0
(−26.1) 		3.0
(−16.1) 		12.0
(−11.1) 		32
(0) 		44.1
(6.7) 		52.0
(11.1) 		50
(10) 		39.0
(3.9) 		28.0
(−2.2) 		5
(−15) 		−13
(−25) 		−15.0
(−26.1)
Average precipitation inches (mm) 3.50
(88.9) 		3.32
(84.4) 		4.00
(101.6) 		3.74
(95.1) 		3.72
(94.6) 		3.63
(92.3) 		4.39
(111.6) 		4.45
(113.0) 		3.93
(99.7) 		3.72
(94.4) 		3.54
(89.8) 		3.69
(93.6) 		45.63
(1,159)
Average snowfall inches (mm) 7.74
(196.7) 		8.85
(224.8) 		4.82
(122.5) 		0.78
(19.8) 		0.0
(0.0) 		0.0
(0.0) 		0.0
(0.0) 		0.0
(0.0) 		0.0
(0.0) 		0.03
(0.8) 		0.72
(18.2) 		5.39
(137.0) 		28.33
(719.8)
Average precipitation days 11.0 9.7 11.3 10.8 11.1 10.3 10.5 9.8 8.4 8.5 9.2 10.5 121.1
Average snowy days 4.2 3.7 2.4 0.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.4 2.8 13.9
Source: edit data
NOAA (relative humidity and sun 1961–1990)[1][2][3]

See Geography of New York City for additional climate information from the outer boroughs.

Notes and references
  1. ^ Mean monthly maxima and minima (i.e. the expected highest and lowest temperature readings at any point during the year or given month) calculated based on data at said location from 1981 to 2010.
  2. ^ Official weather observations for Central Park were conducted at the Arsenal at Fifth Avenue and 64th Street from 1869 to 1919, and at Belvedere Castle since 1919.[4]
  1. ^ "NowData – NOAA Online Weather Data". National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
  2. ^ "Station Name: NY NEW YORK CNTRL PK TWR". National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Retrieved 2014-03-13.
  3. ^ "New York Central Park, NY Climate Normals 1961–1990". NOAA.
  4. ^ Belvedere Castle at NYC Parks

...or as an interactive graph:

See or edit raw graph data.


Map data, stored as GeoJSON, can be displayed over a map based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. This map of the endangered Jemez Mountains salamander habitat comes from the data at Data:ecos.fws.gov/Endangered habitat 58938/Plethodon neomexicanus.map on Commons. However, such data pages aren't needed for roads and other shapes already defined in OSM – for example, here's Interstate 696. And this is Alaska.

Data is stored as pages with a *.tab or *.map extension, in the Data: namespace on Commons. Pages are generally prefixed by their origin, such as commons:Data:Naturalearthdata.com/US states.map; sandboxes or test pages can be created with titles like Data:Sandbox/<user>.tab. The only licence currently allowed is the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. A thread on the Commons Village Pump, now archived, discussed whether more licences should be supported, and if database rights (which exits in some countries, but not the United States) should be respected.

Future plans include a spreadsheet-like editor for tabular data, tracking cross-wiki data usage through "What links here", data redirects, and supporting external data feeds. The original announcement was on the Wikitech-l mailing list. Documentation is available on MediaWiki.org for tabular data and map data. E

2017 Wikimedia Developer Summit

MediaWiki developers met in San Francisco earlier this week for the fourth annual Wikimedia Developer Summit. The first two days were filled with pre-planned sessions, and the third was a unconference-style “Get stuff done day” for hacking.

Ward Cunningham's keynote at the 2017 Wikimedia Developer Summit

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the first wiki, delivered the first day’s keynote, titled “Has our success made it hard to see your own contribution”. He used one slide for the entire keynote, aiming for 10 minutes of speaking and 50 minutes of questions, though he was ultimately unsuccessful in that timing. The second day featured a Q&A with newly hired CTO, Victoria Coleman, and the VP of Product, Wes Moran, with questions coming from an All Our Ideas survey as well as those asked in person. Notes from other sessions are available on mediawiki.org, and videos should be posted shortly. L

This is what we wished for

The Community Tech team's 2016 Community Wishlist Survey was held last month, and the results are in! There were 265 proposals for tools, bots, and the other features to help the Wikimedia projects and their core contributors. The proposals were discussed and voted on by 1132 contributors, and 5037 support votes were cast in total. The top ten proposals, which the Community Tech team will investigate and address, are:

#10 – User rights expiration
Currently, Stewards may grant temporary user rights, but these have to be manually removed when the approved time period has expired. The proposed solution is to add a new option to set a time how long rights will last when they are granted. (Phabricator task T12493)
#9 – Fix Mr.Z-bot's popular pages report
Mr.Z-bot used to automatically compile a list of the most popular pages for each WikiProject on a monthly basis – for example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Spiders/Popular pages. The bot, which stopped working in April 2016, was limited to desktop pageviews and the English Wikipedia. (Phabricator task T141154)
#8 – Automatic archive for new external links
External webpages may disappear, leaving behind dead links. Preventing link rot by using a web archiving service is additional work for editors, that could instead be completed by a bot. Whilst similar to a 2015 wish to migrate dead external links to archives, this proposal includes preemptive archiving of new external links, before they become dead. (Phabricator task T153354)
#7 – Warning on unsuccessful login attempts
Hackers may attack user accounts by testing popular passwords. This proposal is to alert users of unsuccessful login attempts through the Notifications system. (Phabricator task T11838)
#6 – Wikitext editor syntax highlighting
Syntax highlighting would make wikitext easier to edit. There are common use-cases for articles and templates, such as distinguising <ref></ref> tags and contents from surrounding text in a paragraph, or making sure the correct number of braces are present for code such as {{{a|{{{b|{{{c}}}}}}}}}. While syntax highlighting can be implemented through user scripts, this proposal is for integration into MediaWiki for faster loading and theme-friendly colours. (Phabricator task T101246)
#5 – Rewrite Xtools
Xtools (tools developed by User:X!) provide detailed information on users and articles. These include the Edit Counter (with detailed breakdowns of edits), Article Blamer (which shows who inserted specific text into an article), and several others. The Xtools are being completely written to provide stability and maintainability, which the current tools lack; this proposal is for assistance with rewriting and testing. (Phabricator task T153112)
#4 – Global settings
For users active on multiple wikis, the settings in Special:Preferences must be set on each wiki individually. This must be repeated each time new options are added, such as for compact interlanguage links, editor selection, and MediaViewer. (Phabricator task T16950)
#3 – Section heading URLs for non-Latin languages
Non-Latin section headings are handled poorly, in the display of the anchor portion of the url. For example, on the Russian Wikipedia, the section "Биология" on the article "Кошка" will display the url https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кошка#.D0.91.D0.B8.D0.BE.D0.BB.D0.BE.D0.B3.D0.B8.D1.8F , and cannot be reached from the url https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кошка#Биология . (Phabricator task T75092)
#2 – Edit summary length for non-Latin languages
Edit summaries in non-Latin-based language have fewer characters available than compared to English or other languages with a Latin alphabet – about half or even a third as many characters. This is because edit summaries are measured in bytes. While Latin characters take up one byte, non-latin characters require two or three. It is proposed that the edit summary length be measured in terms of characters rather than bytes. (Phabricator task T6715)
#1 – Global gadgets
Popular gadgets such as HotCat, wikEd, navigation popups, and WikiMiniAtlas, have to be maintained as separate forked scripts on each wiki they are available on. The proposed global gadgets would, from a single centralised copy, be available as gadgets on each WMF wiki. (Phabricator task T22153)

Some wishes that didn't make it into the top ten will also be worked on by the Community Tech team, to support smaller user groups without large voter numbers. Other wishes may be worked on by volunteer developers, the WMDE Technical Wishes team, or other Wikimedia Foundation product teams. E

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Newly approved bot tasks

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2016 #51 & 2017 #2. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

  • Recent changes
  • Problems
    • Some abuse filters for uploaded files have not worked as they should. We don't know exactly which filters didn't work yet. This means some files that filters should have prevented from being uploaded were uploaded to the wikis. MediaWiki.org and Testwiki have been affected since 13 October. Commons and Meta have been affected since 17 October. Other wikis have been affected since 17 November. (Phabricator task T153217)
    • Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. (Phabricator task T151770)

Installation code

Further information: Wikipedia:User scripts § How to install user scripts
  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lourdes/AfDclosing.js' ); // Backlink: User:Lourdes/AfDclosing.js
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js' ); // Backlink: User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lourdes/SpecialNewPages.js' ); // Backlink: User:Lourdes/SpecialNewPages.js
  4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lourdes/TFAhistorylink.js' ); // Backlink: User:Lourdes/TFAhistorylink.js



Reader comments

2017-01-17

Female Wikipedians aren't more likely to edit women biographies; Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Piotr Konieczny, Aaron Shaw, Reem Al-Kashif, and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Getting more female editors may not increase the ratio of articles about women

Reviewed by Reem Al-Kashif

A bachelor's degree thesis by Feli Nicolaes[1] finds that, contrary to the general perception, male and female editors do not tend to edit biographical articles on people of their own gender.

Previous research suggested that one solution to the lack of Wikipedia's biographies of women could be to increase the number of female editors. This was based on the assumption that women would prefer to edit women's biographies, and men would prefer to edit men's biographies. Nicolaes refers to this as homophily in her thesis, "Gender bias on Wikipedia: an analysis of the affiliation network". However, homophily has so far neither been formally investigated nor proved to exist in Wikipedia. Nicolaes analyzes this using datasets from her research group at the University of Amsterdam, of English Wikipedia editors and the pages they edit. She tracks the editing behavior of both self-identified male and female editors on Wikipedia. Contrary to the mainstream assumption, homophily was not found. In other words, female users' edits are not focused on female biography pages. In fact, Nicolaes finds “inverted homophily” when considering female users who edit a single biographical article more than 200 times: they are more likely to direct this amount of attention to biography articles about men than male editors are.

This brings to mind an initiative to increase content about women—be it biography articles or other content related to women—that has been live since December 2015 in the Arabic Wikipedia. The initiative is in a form of contest where male and female editors try to achieve as much as they can from their self-set goals. Over the four rounds of the contest, only one woman reached the top three in two rounds. So, if the goal is to add more content about women, bringing more women might not be useful. However, Nicolaes also argues that the study should be replicated on larger datasets to validate the results. It remains to be seen whether the same editor behaviour exists in other language editions. Another limitation of the study is its apparent reliance on the gender information that editors publicly state in their user preferences—a method that is widely used but may be susceptible to biases (discussed in more detail in this review).

Theorizing the foundations of the gender gap

Reviewed by Aaron Shaw

In a forthcoming paper, "'Anyone can edit' not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap"[2], Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman use some of the theoretical tools of feminist science and technology studies (STS) to describe underpinnings of the Wikipedia gender gap. The authors argue that three aspects of Wikipedia's infrastructure define it as a particularly masculine or male-dominated project:

(1) the epistemological foundations of what constitutes valid encyclopedic knowledge,
(2) Wikipedia's software infrastructure, and
(3) Wikipedia's policy infrastructure.

The authors argue that each of these arenas represents a space where male activity and masculine norms of truth, scientific fact, legitimacy, and freedom define boundaries of legitimate contribution and action. Accordingly, these boundaries of legitimate contribution and action systematically exclude or devalue perspectives and contributions that could overcome the lack of female participation or perspectives in the Wikipedia projects. The result, according to Ford and Wajcman, is that Wikipedia has created a novel and powerful form of knowledge-production expertise on a foundation that reproduces existing gender hierarchies and inequalities.

How old and new astronomy papers are being cited

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

The author analyzes[3] Wikipedia's citations to academic peer reviewed articles, finding that "older papers from before 2008 are increasingly less likely to be cited". The authors attempt to use Wikipedia citations as a proxy for public interest in astronomy, though the analysis makes no comparison to other research about public interest in sciences. The article notes that citations to articles from 2008 are most common, and it represents the peak of citations, with fewer and fewer citations for years since 2008. The analysis is also limited due to the cut-off date (1996), "because Scopus indexing of journals changes in this year". The author concludes that the observed citation pattern is likely "consistent with a moderate tendency towards obsolescence in public interest in research", as papers become obsolete and newer ones are more likely to be cited; older papers are cited for timeless, uncontroversial facts, and newer for newer findings. They also note that the late 2000s, i.e. the years around 2008, may represent when most of Wikipedia's content in astronomy was created, though this is not backed up by much besides speculation. Overall, it is an interesting question, but one that does not provide any surprising insights.

Wikipedia is not a suitable source for election predictions

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

The topic of this conference paper, "Election prediction based on Wikipedia pageviews",[4] is certainly timely. The authors look at which of Wikipedia's articles related to the US presidential election registered high popularity, and then ask whether elections can be predicted based "on the number of views the spiking pages have and on the correlation between these pages and the presidential nominees or their political program". They provide an online visualization showing some "Wikipedia topics that have spiked before, during or after [an] election event."

The authors limit themselves (reasonably) to the English and Spanish Wikipedias. They do a good job of presenting their methods, and outlining problems with gathering data on popularity of articles—something that would be much easier if Wikipedia articles and databases were more friendly when it comes to information about their popularity. Within the limitations described in the paper, the authors conclude that Wikipedia articles about politicians are used mostly after, not before or during debates or other events such as primaries or elections, which suggests that they are not used for fact checking but instead as an information source after the event. "Wikipedia is not, in fact, a reliable polling source", write the authors, based on (this could be clarified further) the fact that people check Wikipedia after the events, not before them, hence making Wikipedia's pageviews problematic for prediction.

"Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collaboration and collective memory around online social movements"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny
Protesters lying down over rail tracks with a "Black Lives Matter" banner.
Black Lives Matter die-in protesting alleged police brutality in 2015

In this paper,[5] the researchers look at the relation between the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement and its coverage in Wikipedia, asking the following research questions:

  1. "How has Wikipedia editing activity and the coverage of BLM movement events changed over time?"
  2. "How have Wikipedians collaborated across articles about events and the BLM movement?" and
  3. "How are events on Wikipedia re-appraised following new events?"

They aim to contribute to academic discourse on social movements and claim to describe "knowledge production and collective memory in a social computing system as the movement and related events are happening." They conclude that Wikipedia is a neutral platform, but does indirectly support (or hinder) the movement (or its opponents) by virtue of increased visibility, in the same vein as coverage by the media would. The quality of the movement's history and documentation on Wikipedia is judged to be of higher value, accessibility, and quality than snapshots on social media platforms like Twitter. Wikipedia also provides space for interested editors to work on articles indirectly related to BLM, further increasing the visibility of related topics, as interested editors move beyond direct BLM articles to other aspects. Examples include historical articles about events preceding BLM that would probably not be written/expanded on in Wikipedia if not for the rise of the BLM movement. The authors conclude that social movement activists can use Wikipedia to document their activities without compromising Wikipedia's neutrality or other policies: "Without breaking with community norms like NPOV, Wikipedia became a site of collective memory documenting mourning practices as well as tracing how memories were encoded and re-interpreted." This is a valuable argument that draws interesting connections between Wikipedia and social movements, particularly considering that some (like this reviewer) consider Wikipedia itself to be a social movement.

Briefly

Conferences and events

The third annual Wiki Workshop will take place on April 4 as part of the WWW2017 conference in Perth, Australia. The workshop serves as a platform for Wikimedia researchers to get together on an annual basis and share their research with each other (see also our overview of the papers from the 2016 edition). All Wikimedia researchers are encouraged to submit papers for the workshop and attend it. More details at the call for papers.

See the research events page on Meta-wiki for other upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

  • "Facilitating the use of Wikidata in Wikimedia projects with a user-centered design approach"[6] From the abstract: "In its current form, [data from Wikidata] is not used to its full potential [on other Wikimedia projects] for a multitude of reasons, as user acceptance is low and the process of data integration is unintuitive and complicated for users. This thesis aims to develop a concept using user-centered design to facilitate the editing of Wikidata data from Wikipedia. With the involvement of the Wikimedia community, a system is designed which integrates with pre-existing work flows."
  • "A corpus of Wikipedia discussions: over the years, with topic, power and gender labels"[7] From the abstract: "... we present a large corpus of Wikipedia Talk page discussions that are collected from a broad range of topics, containing discussions that happened over a period of 15 years. The dataset contains 166,322 discussion threads, across 1236 articles/topics that span 15 different topic categories or domains. The dataset also captures whether the post is made by an registered user or not, and whether he/she was an administrator at the time of making the post. It also captures the Wikipedia age of editors in terms of number of months spent as an editor, as well as their gender."
  • "Wikipedia and the politics of openness" Two reviews of the 2014 book with this title[supp 1], in the journal Information, Communication & Society[8] and in Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews[9], with the latter summarizing the book as follows: "Tkacz's text has three main empirical chapters. The first sorts out the 'politics of openness,' by which he means how collaboration emerges and forms in an open-ended context. The second empirical contribution is about the possibility that the framing of social interaction might, by itself, be enough to create order and encourage productivity in an environment like Wikipedia. ... The third empirical contribution is that project exit has an extremely important role in maintaining the stability of Wikipedia. As people develop projects, they create parallel, break-off versions of a project [forks]."
  • "Derivation of 'is a' taxonomy from Wikipedia category graph"[10]
  • "'En Wikipedia no se escribe jugando': Identidad y motivación en 10 wikipedistas regiomontanos."[11] From the English abstract: "This study qualitatively analyses the contributions in the talk pages of the Spanish Wikipedia by the ten most-active registered users in Monterrey, Mexico. Using virtual ethnography ... this research finds that these self-styled 'wikipedistas' assume the site's collective identity when interacting with anonymous users, and that their main motivations for ongoing participation are not related to the repository of knowledge in itself, but to their group dynamics and inter-personal relationships within the community."
  • "Schreiben in der Wikipedia" ("Writing in Wikipedia")[12] From the book (translated): "From the perspective of Wikipedia research, it can be observed that Wikipedia must not be regarded as a community medium ['gemeinschaftliches Medium'] per se, but that it reflects a conglomerate of individual and community writing processes, which in turn both influence the text genesis, with differing scopes. This chronological development is laid open here for the first time in case of some exemplary article texts, and subsequently, specific properties of each article topic are related to creation of the article that is based on it."
  • "Beyond the Book: linking books to Wikipedia"[13] From the abstract: "The book translation market is a topic of interest in literary studies, but the reasons why a book is selected for translation are not well understood. The Beyond the Book project investigates whether web resources like Wikipedia can be used to establish the level of cultural bias. This work describes the eScience tools used to estimate the cultural appeal of a book: semantic linking is used to identify key words in the text of the book, and afterwards the revision information from corresponding Wikipedia articles is examined to identify countries that generated a more than average amount of contributions to those articles. ... We assume a lack of contributions from a country may indicate a gap in the knowledge of readers from that country. We assume that a book dealing with that concept could be more exotic and therefore more appealing for certain readers ... An indication of the 'level of exoticness' thus could help a reader/publisher to decide to read/translate the book or not. Experimental results are presented for four selected books from a set of 564 books written in Dutch or translated into Dutch, assessing their potential appeal for a Canadian audience."
  • "A multilingual approach to discover cross-language links in Wikipedia"[14] From the abstract: "... given a Wikipedia article (the source) EurekaCL uses the multilingual and semantic features of BabelNet 2.0 in order to efficiently identify a set of candidate articles in a target language that are likely to cover the same topic as the source. The Wikipedia graph structure is then exploited both to prune and to rank the candidates. Our evaluation carried out on 42,000 pairs of articles in eight language versions of Wikipedia shows that our candidate selection and pruning procedures allow an effective selection of candidates which significantly helps the determination of the correct article in the target language version."
  • "Analyzing organizational routines in online knowledge collaborations: a case for sequence analysis in CSCW"[15] From the abstract: "Research into socio-technical systems like Wikipedia has overlooked important structural patterns in the coordination of distributed work. This paper argues for a conceptual reorientation towards sequences as a fundamental unit of analysis for understanding work routines in online knowledge collaboration. Using a data set of 37,515 revisions from 16,616 unique editors to 96 Wikipedia articles as a case study, we analyze the prevalence and significance of different sequences of editing patterns." See also slides and a separate review by Aaron Halfaker ("This is a weird paper. It isn't actually a study. It's more like a methods position paper.")
  • "Wikipedia: medium and model of collaborative public diplomacy"[16] From the abstract: "Taking a case-study approach, the article posits that Wikipedia holds a dual relevance for public diplomacy 2.0: first as a medium; and second, as a model for public diplomacy's evolving process. Exploring Wikipedia's folksonomy, crowd-sourced through intense and organic collaboration, provides insights into the potential of collective agency and symbolic advocacy."
  • "Enabling fine-grained RDF data completeness assessment"[17] From the abstract: "The idea of the paper is to have completeness information over RDF data sources and use it for checking query completeness. In particular, [for Wikidata,] an indexing technique was developed to allow to scale completeness reasoning to Wikidata-scale data sources. The applicability of the framework was verified using Wikidata and COOL-WD, a completeness tool for Wikidata, was developed. The tool is available at http://cool-wd.inf.unibz.it/ "
  • "Linked data quality of DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO"[18] From the abstract: "In recent years, several noteworthy large, cross-domain and openly available knowledge graphs (KGs) have been created. These include DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO. Although extensively in use, these KGs have not been subject to an in-depth comparison so far. In this survey, we provide data quality criteria according to which KGs can be analyzed and analyze and compare the above mentioned KGs." From the paper: "... Wikidata covers all relations of the gold standard, even though it contains considerably less relations [than Freebase] (1,874 vs. 70,802). The Wikidata methodology to let users propose new relations, to discuss about their coverage and reach, and finally to approve or disapprove the relations, seems to be appropriate."
    Mus musculus had all its genes imported into Wikidata
  • "Wikidata as a semantic framework for the Gene Wiki initiative"[19] From the abstract: "... we imported all human and mouse genes, and all human and mouse proteins into Wikidata. In total, 59 721 human genes and 73 355 mouse genes have been imported from NCBI and 27 306 human proteins and 16 728 mouse proteins have been imported from the Swissprot subset of UniProt. … The first use case for these data is to populate Wikipedia Gene Wiki infoboxes directly from Wikidata with the data integrated above. This enables immediate updates of the Gene Wiki infoboxes as soon as the data in Wikidata are modified. … Apart from the Gene Wiki infobox use case, a SPARQL endpoint and exporting functionality to several standard formats (e.g. JSON, XML) enable use of the data by scientists."
  • "Connecting every bit of knowledge: The structure of Wikipedia's First Link Network"[20] From the abstract: "By following the first link in each article, we algorithmically construct a directed network of all 4.7 million articles: Wikipedia's First Link Network. … By traversing every path, we measure the accumulation of first links, path lengths, groups of path-connected articles, and cycles. … we find scale-free distributions describe path length, accumulation, and influence. Far from dispersed, first links disproportionately accumulate at a few articles---flowing from specific to general and culminating around fundamental notions such as Community, State, and Science. Philosophy directs more paths than any other article by two orders of magnitude. We also observe a gravitation towards topical articles such as Health Care and Fossil Fuel." (See also media coverage: "All Wikipedia Roads Lead to Philosophy, but Some of Them Go Through Southeast Europe First" and Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy)


References

  1. ^ Nicolaes, Feli (2016-06-24). "Gender Bias on Wikipedia: An analysis of the affilliation network" (PDF). Faculty of Science, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: location (link)
  2. ^ Ford, Heather; Wajcman, Judy. "'Anyone can edit' not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap" (PDF). Social Studies of Science. ISSN 0306-3127.
  3. ^ Thelwall, Mike (2016-11-14). "Does astronomy research become too dated for the public? Wikipedia citations to astronomy and astrophysics journal articles 1996–2014". El Profesional de la Información. 25 (6): 893–900. doi:10.3145/epi.2016.nov.06. ISSN 1699-2407.
  4. ^ Ciocirdel, Georgiana Diana; Varga, Mihai (2016). Election prediction based on Wikipedia pageviews (PDF). p. 9.
  5. ^ Twyman, Marlon; Keegan, Brian C.; Shaw, Aaron (2016-11-03). "Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collaboration and collective memory around online social movements". CSCW '17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. p. 1400. arXiv:1611.01257. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998232. ISBN 978-1-4503-4335-0.
  6. ^ Kritschmar, Charlie (2016-03-03), Facilitating the use of Wikidata in Wikimedia projects with a user-centered design approach (PDF) Bachelor's thesis written at the HTW Berlin in Internationale Medieninformatik
  7. ^ Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar; Rambow, Owen (2016). "A corpus of Wikipedia discussions: over the years, with topic, power and gender labels": 5. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. ^ Gotkin, Kevin (2016-02-24). "Wikipedia and the politics of openness". Information, Communication & Society. 0: 1–3. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1151911. ISSN 1369-118X. Closed access icon
  9. ^ Rojas, Fabio (2016-03-01). "Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness". Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. 45 (2): 251–252. doi:10.1177/0094306116629410lll. ISSN 0094-3061.
  10. ^ Ben Aouicha, Mohamed; Hadj Taieb, Mohamed Ali; Ezzeddine, Malek (2016-04-01). "Derivation of "is a" taxonomy from Wikipedia category graph". Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. 50: 265–286. doi:10.1016/j.engappai.2016.01.033. ISSN 0952-1976. Closed access icon
  11. ^ Corona Reyes, Sergio; Reyes, Sergio Antonio Corona; Yáñez, Brenda Azucena Muñoz (2015-12-29). ""En Wikipedia no se escribe jugando": Identidad y motivación en 10 wikipedistas regiomontanos". Global Media Journal México. 12 (23).
  12. ^ Kallass, Dr Kerstin (2015). Schreiben in der Wikipedia. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. doi:10.1007/978-3-658-08265-9. ISBN 978-3-658-08265-9. Closed access icon (in German)
  13. ^ Martinez-Ortiz, C.; Koolen, M.; Buschenhenke, F.; Dalen-Oskam, K. v (2015-08-01). "Beyond the Book: linking books to Wikipedia". 2015 IEEE 11th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science). 2015 IEEE 11th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science). pp. 12–21. doi:10.1109/eScience.2015.12. Closed access icon
  14. ^ Bennacer, Nacéra; Vioulès, Mia Johnson; López, Maximiliano Ariel; Quercini, Gianluca (2015-11-01). "A multilingual approach to discover cross-language links in Wikipedia". In Jianyong Wang; Wojciech Cellary; Dingding Wang; Hua Wang; Shu-Ching Chen; Tao Li; Yanchun Zhang (eds.). Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing. pp. 539–553. ISBN 9783319261898. Closed access icon
  15. ^ Keegan, Brian C.; Lev, Shakked; Arazy, Ofer (2015-08-19). "Analyzing organizational routines in online knowledge collaborations: a case for sequence analysis in CSCW". arXiv:1508.04819 [cs.SI].
  16. ^ Byrne, Caitlin; Johnston, Jane (2015-10-23). "Wikipedia: medium and model of collaborative public diplomacy". The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. 10 (4): 396–419. doi:10.1163/1871191X-12341312. ISSN 1871-191X. Closed access icon
  17. ^ Darari, Fariz; Razniewski, Simon; Prasojo, Radityo Eko; Nutt, Werner (2016). "Enabling fine-grained RDF data completeness assessment". Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE '16). Lugano, Switzerland. 2016. Springer International Publishing. arXiv:1604.08377. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-38791-8_10. Closed access icon (preprint freely available online)
  18. ^ Färber, Michael; Ell, Basil; Menne, Carsten; Rettinger, Achim; Bartscherer, Frederic (2016). Linked data quality of DBpedia, Freebase, OpenCyc, Wikidata, and YAGO.
  19. ^ Burgstaller-Muehlbacher, Sebastian; Waagmeester, Andra; Mitraka, Elvira; Turner, Julia; Putman, Tim; Leong, Justin; Naik, Chinmay; Pavlidis, Paul; Schriml, Lynn; Good, Benjamin M.; Su, Andrew I. (2016-01-01). "Wikidata as a semantic framework for the Gene Wiki initiative". Database. 2016: 015. doi:10.1093/database/baw015. ISSN 1758-0463. PMC 4795929. PMID 26989148.
  20. ^ Ibrahim, Mark; Danforth, Christopher M.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan (2016-05-01). "Connecting every bit of knowledge: The structure of Wikipedia's First Link Network". arXiv:1605.00309 [cs.SI].
Supplementary references:
  1. ^ Tkacz, Nathaniel (2014-12-19). Wikipedia and the politics of openness. Chicago ; London: University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226192277.



Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.
Explore Wikipedia history by browsing The Signpost archives.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2017-01-17&oldid=1183873319"