This week's issue of The Signpost is the eleventh and final publication that I will have the pleasure of editing; I am soon to start at the University of Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, with its many new demands upon my time. It is therefore a useful juncture to update you, our readers, on how The Signpost has been evolving.
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Building on from the work of HaeB, The Signpost is looking to move beyond its core purpose as an informative news provider. I think we have largely cracked that nut – at least for news of interest to English Wikipedians – and I hope that you, our hundreds of readers, would agree with me on that. We cannot, however, rest on our laurels and during my short editorship I have been all too aware that we have no more readers now than we did two years ago.
My personal hypothesis is that while The Signpost is good at informing, it has struggled at times to entertain. For this reason I have used my editorship to support the reintroduction of the Opinion Desk, which I hope will provide a steady stream of interesting Op-Eds for you to enjoy (no opinion essay is included in this issue merely to keep the number of reports at a manageable level). If you feel strongly about an issue that you think deserves greater coverage, I invite you to contribute to that column. As for breaking it in, well, we've trialled a controversial narrative, a largely uncontroversial call-to-arms, and a humorous poem. All three I hope you will have found both entertaining and in some sense provocative.
Previous editors HaeB and Ragesoss commented on a need to remain independent and to "constructively criticise" the Foundation's actions where necessary. Although I have been unable to find a breakthrough in realising this vision more effectively, I have been able to start work on a common editorial policy that communicates this and the many other components of the broader Signpost vision to all new Signpost editors. In addition, I hope that it will also be able to describe current best practice when dealing with controversial areas, such as those where the Foundation and a local community are in conflict. I therefore welcome all your thoughts on what you think The Signpost does well, and what you think it could be doing better, in the comments section of this article. The plan is to agree on the content of the new document within the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that.
In the meantime, I'm passing the baton on to a combined editorship, comprising User:SMasters and User:Skomorokh. Each future issue will be managed and directed by one of these two volunteers, whom I wish all the best.
Thank you for your continued support,
User:Jarry1250 (outgoing editor-in-chief)
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Ushahidi, a non-profit information mapping software organization, has announced its intention to develop a wiki research tool built for Wikipedians editing breaking-news articles. The project was announced by the company and the Wikimedia Foundation on their respective blogs. In the past, Wikipedia has proved to be a valuable tool for disseminating breaking news (see this week's "Popular pages" report for specific examples); according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site helps consumers of news to "understand and filter the news by curating and summarizing it as quickly and as accurately as possible."
Ushahidi intends to analyze how Wikipedians gather and distill information and create a tool based on their existing data-gathering software, WikiSweeper (or simply Sweeper for short). Most Wikipedians have their own verification techniques, but the tool would present a stream and identify accurate and relevant information, even including non-English sources where applicable. The project was born from a meeting between the Wikimedia Foundation's Erik Möller and Jon Gosier, a former director of Ushahidi.
Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the first public announcement of Citizendium, the free volunteer-written online encyclopedia project founded by Larry Sanger (known for his role in starting Wikipedia until 2002). In his September 15, 2006 essay (corresponding to a talk at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin), Sanger emphasized that he had "always been an enormous fan of Wikipedia, and I still am", but then listed numerous "serious and endemic problems" of Wikipedia which had motivated a fork of the project's processes and articles (the latter plan was changed soon after the actual start of the Citizendium wiki in 2007). As evident from Sanger's remarks and the Signpost coverage at the time, Citizendium was intended as a project that "aims to rival Wikipedia", though its fortunes have been mixed. For example, a July 2007 analysis in The Signpost (2008 followup) already declared that Citizendium "has not reached a critical mass of participation" (a conclusion questioned in the same Signpost edition by a member of Citizendium's executive committee, which invited Wikipedians to join the project and stated that "we're ultimately on the same side: that of making more and better free content available to the world." Wikipedians too have taken non-competitive perspectives on Citizendium, e.g. porting some of its content to Wikipedia, analyzing the lessons it might offer for Wikipedia, or even arguing that the Wikimedia Foundation should support it when Citizendium found itself in financial troubles last year). Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most scathing criticism of the project comes not from egalitarian Wikipedians, but originates from the perspective of scientific scepticism, as evidenced by the extensive Article on Citizendium at RationalWiki (which is currently cited on Citizendium's article about itself).
Before founding Citizendium, Sanger had worked for the Digital Universe project, which had likewise required users to state their real names, and given a special role to authenticated experts. After the start of Citizendium, Sanger took up work for WatchKnowLearn.org, another freely accessible website with user-contributed content (a database of links to free educational videos), founded around 2006 and publicly launched (as WatchKnow) in 2008. (A Wikipedia article about the site has been started recently, and on its talk page, Sanger has posted corrections and supplied more information about the project's history.)
On the occasion of the five-year anniversary, regular Signpost writer Tom Morris (formerly an active author at Citizendium and a former member of Citizendium's editorial council) interviewed Daniel Mietchen, the managing editor of Citizendium. Daniel is also the Wikimedian in Residence for Open Science (Signpost coverage), and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Research Committee.
Five years on, what do you think Citizendium has achieved?
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about Citizendium?
Critics of Citizendium say that the bureaucracy got too heavy, too early. The effect of this has been to make the editing process more political, with otherwise active article writers becoming elected bureaucrats and a lot of political power games. Do you agree with this assessment?
Do you think Citizendium's financial woes are going to be resolved any time soon?
One thing we have both stressed is the importance of contextualization of knowledge. Citizendium did this by embracing subpages (with articles being just one part of an "article cluster"). Wikimedia seems to spread the potential contextualization between different projects with the 'Gallery' subpage being Commons, while the 'Related Articles' subpage being handled by 'Outline' pages and categories. Do you think Citizendium has a better model here?
I was talking to a PhD student the other day who told me they don't trust anything that is said in Wikipedia about academic topics, but they do frequently use the references and bibliography section. Both Citizendium and the fork of Citizendium, Knowino, have Bibliography subpages and Citizendium also has an External Links subpage, which allows editors to develop an annotated bibliography of both scholarly and web resources. English Wikipedia does have some bibliography pages (Bibliography of New York, Evelyn Waugh bibliography). Do you think developing bibliographic resources could be something Wikimedia could try or might this be something only specialist academic wikis end up doing?
What do you think Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects can learn from Citizendium's successes and failures?
If we were betting, would you put €50 on Citizendium being around in five years time?
In The Atlantic, historian Marshall Poe recounted his experiences in attempting to pitch, write and sell an overarching "book of ideas" with Wikipedia as its central focus. After stumbling across Wikipedia whilst pursuing an interest in reader-contributed informational resources, Poe was struck by a citation to his work on an obscure Austrian diplomat. He became fascinated by the sheer depth of the project, its radical transparency in providing page histories of each change to an article, and the emergent social order of its a-hierarchical community of contributors. In September 2005, his autobiographical article was nominated for deletion a week after he created it (as MarshallPoe). His curiosity piqued by these encounters, Poe writes that he delved further into the intricacies of the nascent website, and wrote for the editors of The Atlantic Monthly – for whom he had been working as a researcher – a vivid and short-form history of the founding of the project and its early leaders: "The Hive" (September 2006). This was followed – within a month – by two additional Wikipedia-centric articles for the magazine: "A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View (NPOV)", a case study of the encyclopaedia's handling of controversial content focusing on the Abortion entry, and "Common Knowledge", a personal history of the historian's experiences with the burgeoning project.
Around this time, Poe describes how Wikipedia had become a hot topic in the thinking press, and that he saw an opportunity to author the "book of ideas" he had long dreamt of. Poe recounts how, having found himself a literary agent who had read his piece with enthusiasm to score him a book deal, he was told he had the requisite stature (as an academic and contributor to a respected intellectual periodical) but needed a hook, a captivating and counterintuitive thesis that would serve as the book's "big idea" and catchy title, and thus, it was hoped, propel it and Poe into the bestselling ranks of instant classics such as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, and James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. Poe chose "Wikipedia changed everything". A New York publisher duly took the bait (and offered considerable remuneration). Given six months to capture Wikipedia right in the spotlights of the zeitgeist, Poe writes about how he began researching in earnest, but quickly ran into a stumbling block: Wikipedia did not change everything – the thesis did not hold. "The truth about Wikipedia", Poe recalls, "was messy", and his manuscript a "convoluted story involving evolution, human nature, media technologies, and their effects on human society and thought." Poe's historians' nous could not countenance Wikipedia-as-big-idea – instead finding it to be a phenomenon of "irreducible complexity" that defied any attempt at breezy reductionism. By the time he had reworked the manuscript into a difficult "book of ideas", Wikipedia's moment had deemed to have passed, and the publisher had lost interest, Poe writes. The modest impact of subsequent book-length studies of Wikipedia-style collaboration,[1] such as Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (2008), Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution (2009), and Joseph Reagle's Good Faith Collaboration (2010), may well bear Poe's insight out.
| “ | As far as I'm concerned, The Open Globe is a feeble attempt at oneupmanship started by a disenfranchised editor who didn't get his own way, and didn't like how things were run. What they do is their business now - I wish them no ill will, I just hope they realise that instead of forking they'd have been better helping us reform instead of going off in a huff. | ” |
| “ | To see OG fork from Wikinews is sad, we've lost some good editors who've gone, we've lost friends, and most of all, I can feel an air of resentment amongst the community the likes of which I've never seen before. It's a loss for both of us, I feel - there's no mutual support there now. | ” |
| “ | I would think that Wikinews has simply never produced enough critical mass of any one genre, sufficient to create and maintain a large readership that wants that genre. | ” |
| “ | TechEssentials is honored to have such a successful and wonderful project joining our family and we wish them the best of luck as they fulfill their goal: to create a free, open news source. | ” |
| “ | I, and many other Wikinewsies, don't bear any ill-will towards the forkers, and I firmly believe that Wikinews can learn a lot from the OpenGlobe project. I understand their motivations and wish them the best of luck, and I hope a mutually-beneficial arrangement between the two communities can be found in the future. | ” |
As reported briefly in last week's edition of The Signpost, several editors from the English Wikinews have forked the project and created a new site, OpenGlobe. Wikinews, a sister project to Wikipedia, was established in 2004 and is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. OpenGlobe, which launched last week, shares both Wikinews' format (a wiki) and like Wikinews focuses on creating freely licensed and neutral news collaboratively. It is not, however, under either the technical or administrative supervision of the WMF.
In order to achieve its operational independence, the OpenGlobe website will be hosted by wiki-based site group TechEssentials. Both OpenGlobe and Wikinews use the MediaWiki software and the format is very similar, although the OpenGlobe project plans on some major changes; its editors feel that it will find making such changes much easier now they can avoid the formalities of Wikimedia's own feature request system. Unlike Wikinews, OpenGlobe has only one language version (English), although this may change in the future. Both sites are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license; but whilst they could share stories, OpenGlobe and Wikinews are currently generating separate content and look set to do so for some time.
The English Wikinews had less than two dozen highly active users before the schism. Of these, OpenGlobe has attracted several long-time Wikinews contributors, who cite disputes with other editors and a lack of technical support as issues. According to the OpenGlobe founder, User:Tempodivalse, "at least nine users have pledged to support this fork". Both projects are inviting users to contribute to their content.
Several threads on foundation-l and other Wikimedia mailing lists discuss the fork. It has also raised issues regarding the technical support that the Wikimedia Foundation provides for its smaller projects. (Further discussion on this can be found in this week's "Technology report".)
The Signpost spoke with the OpenGlobe's founder, Tempodivalse.
Why did you start the OpenGlobe?
How did you gather support and set the project up?
What is the project's relationship with Wikinews?
What is different about OpenGlobe and Wikinews?
What will be happening with OpenGlobe in the future?
This week, we're hitting the books with WikiProject Schools. Started in February 2004, WikiProject Schools has built up a collection of 11 Featured Articles, 5 Featured Lists, and 27 Good Articles. School articles are frequent targets for vandals, requiring the watchful eyes and verification resources available at WikiProject Schools. The project maintains lists of articles that need emergency attention, infobox corrections, general cleanup, and merging. We interviewed CT Cooper and Kudpung.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Schools? Do you focus on a type of school, a geographic region, or only schools you have attended?
Nine schools are the subjects of featured articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some of the challenges of bringing a school-related article to featured status?
How does the project handle the notability of schools? Are there any clear cut-off points for primary and secondary schools?
Is neutral point of view an issue when writing school-related articles? In what ways does the project keep POV edits in check?
Does the project collaborate with any other projects? Is there any overlap between WikiProject Schools and WikiProject Universities?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Next week, we'll poke around the showroom before taking a test drive. Until then, polish your hubcaps and visit the archive.
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* Murasaki Shikibu (nom), a Japanese novelist, poet, and lady-in-waiting at the imperial court during the Heian period, at the end of the 10th and start of the 11th century. (Truthkeeper88) picture at right
* Sesame Street (nom), an American children's television series that combines the Muppets, animation, short films, and humour. The program was conceived in 1966 and premiered on PBS in 1969 to positive reviews, some controversy, and high ratings. (Christine)
* Fomitiporia ellipsoidea (nom), a species of polypore fungus first recorded in China in 2008; one specimen produced the largest fruit body ever recorded. (J Milburn)
* HMS Hood (nom), one of four Admiral-class battlecruisers ordered in mid-1916. HMS Hood symbolised the British Empire before World War II. Her sinking by the German battleship Bismarck in 1941 was a huge shock. (Sturmvogel 66)
* Flight Unlimited (nom), a 1995 aerobatic flight simulator video game that allows players to pilot reproductions of real-world aircraft and to perform aerobatic manoeuvres. Players may fly freely, race through floating rings against a timer or take lessons from a virtual flight instructor. (J Milburn)
Three featured articles were delisted:
* History of Miami (nom: referencing and prose)
* International Space Station (nom: referencing, prose, MOS compliance, and images)
* Blaise Pascal (nom: referencing, comprehensiveness and image compliance)
Twelve lists were promoted:
* 2002 Asian Games medal table (nom) (Bill william compton.) picture at right
* List of number-one albums from the 2000s (UK) (nom) (Nominated by A Thousand Doors.)
* List of 350cc Motorcycle World Champions (nom) (NapHit.)
* List of Manchester United F.C. players (25–99 appearances) (nom) (HonorTheKing and 03md.)
* Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (P–Q) (nom) (Killervogel5.)
* List of posthumous number-one singles (UK) (nom) (ChrisTheDude.)
* List of Arizona hurricanes (nom) (Titoxd.)
* Venues of the 1952 Winter Olympics (nom) (Arsenikk.)
* IBM Award (nom) (Purplebackpack89.)
* List of Major League Baseball players from Australia (nom) (Afaber012.)
* 300 save club (nom) (Staxringold.)
* List of accolades received by Sense and Sensibility (film) (nom) (Ruby2010)
One featured list was delisted:
* List of United States Navy ratings (nom: lead, referencing, style)
Eight images were promoted (click on "nom" to view medium-sized images):
* Mikumi Panorama (nom; related article), a national park in Mikumi, near Morogoro, Tanzania, east Africa. The park was established in 1964 and currently covers 3230 km²; nevertheless, it's only the fourth-largest in the country. Photographer Muhammad Mahdi Karim told The Signpost, "I've been to Mikumi quite a lot, as it's much closer to Tanzania's capital city, Dar es Salaam, than the other national parks. It's also less crowded with tourists than the other parks, since most don't know about it. Ideally, one would use a jeep to go through the park, but during the dry season even a bus or a van would do. I usually go with the family: we spot the animals, and I shoot the photographs. I took three of the four pictures featured last week—the panorama, the giraffe, and the elephant—from the vehicle, so there wasn't much setting up to do: often, timing and spontaneity are essential. The last time we were there, in June, I'd just acquired a new zoom lens, and asked everyone to be on the lookout for birds; we ended up seeing birds we'd never seen before." Of his images of birds, four are featured of a total of nine uploaded, and two to three more will be nominated. "I might get more in my next trip in a month or so", he says. Coordinates. picture at top
* Giraffe (nom; related article), again taken in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania, by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim. picture at right
* Elephant portrait (nom; related article), A female African bush elephant raises her trunk as a warning sign in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania (created by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim).
* Alstroemeria x hybrida (nom; related article), Alstroemeria x hybrida Peruvian Lily photographed in the Lalbagh Botanical gardens, Bangalore, India, by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim.
* Enoch Powell (nom; related article), British Conservative Party statesman, writer, academic, poet, and former soldier, and well-known for his controversial 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech. (created by English society-photographer Allan Warren (born 1948).
* Golden Whistler (nom; related article), which photographer User:JJ Harrison says is "a bird more often heard than seen in close quarters. My last good chance for a photo-op was in 2008, and I simply didn't have the equipment for it at that time. This photo shows all of the important plumage."
* Striated Pardalote (nom; related article), on a Silver Wattle in Tasmania, Australia (created by User:JJ Harrison).
* Semar kris redux (nom; related article), an asymmetrical dagger most strongly associated with the culture of Indonesia, but nowadays also indigenous to Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei. The kris is famous for its distinctive wavy blade, but many have straight blades as well. Both a weapon and spiritual object, kris are often considered to have magical powers, with some blades associated with good luck and others bad luck. User:Crisco 1492, who took the original image, told The Signpost that "the image is of a single gayaman-style kris—the blade is at bottom and the sheathe at the top. It features Semar on the handle, floral etching on the sheathe, and a dragon design on the blade. The sheathe is 40 cm (16 in) long through the middle; the guard is made of wood." (Semar is a character in Javanese mythology who frequently appears in shadow plays. He is one of the "clowns", but is in fact divine and very wise.)
"This particular kris is relatively new, although I don't know when exactly it was made. I bought it roughly a month ago for a Javanese-style ceremony in which men traditionally wear a kris. The craftsman was one of two who sells kris in Beringharjo Market in Yogyakarta. Kris used as weapons, as opposed to their ceremonial function, generally have less decorative and sharper blades. I didn't buy an older kris (some of which have distinctive markings and even sometimes a distinctive smell) because the Javanese believe that many are inhabited by powerful spirits. The blade is of iron with gold leaf, the sheathe is of bronze, and the wooden part appears to be of teak. I photographed it at my boarding house in Java, with ambient lighting. Thanks to JJ Harrison for his work turning this into this, which is more or less what is featured now." picture below
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Two cases are currently open:
There are pending requests for clarification for three cases: Transcendental meditation movement (since August 26), Digwuren (since August 24), and Ireland article names (since August 19). There is also one case with a pending request for amendment: Russavia-Biophys.
On 23 August, La goutte de pluie resigned her position as an administrator as the result of a community recall process. KuduIO requested arbitration regarding her editing some weeks ago, alleging that she had abused her position of trust. This week, the original request for arbitration was officially declined by the committee, 3 to 5. The main voice for the arbitrators moving to decline was PhilKnight, who argued that the community could (and was) handling the situation by itself and ArbCom did not need to intervene. The same day the request was archived, a new request was submitted by OpenInfoForAll, which was speedily declined with OpenInfoForAll's consent a day later.
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On September 16, WMF director of platform engineering Rob Lanphier announced the deployment schedule of the latest version of MediaWiki, version 1.18, approximately seven months after the deployment of version 1.17. Due to the completion of the heterogeneous deployment project, software engineers at the Foundation have the chance for the first time to deploy to some Wikimedia wikis before others; developers reason that a staged deployment, when combined with a smaller release, will avoid many of the difficulties experienced in previous deployments when millions of visitors experienced small defects that only came to light at deployment time. With this in mind, Lanphier outlined the schedule as:
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As of time of writing, only four revisions (out of many hundreds) still need to be reviewed before deployment can commence. Lanphier encouraged users to test the wikis immediately after deployment and report any issues through the #wikimedia-tech connect IRC channel. Theoretically, MediaWiki 1.18 introduces several major new features, including support for gender-specific user pages, better directionality support for RTL languages, and protocol-relative URLs. Although Wikimedia wikis already benefit from a selection of the most major new features (priority changes are rapidly merged into production code), a myriad of smaller changes not yet debuted will indeed go live in the forthcoming rolling program of deployments. A full list of these is also available.
After the deployments, there will be a lag before the software is marked as stable enough for external sites to use and MediaWiki 1.18 is officially released. For version 1.17, the lag was four months, but the absence of under-the-hood changes in 1.18 means that an official release is scheduled for "shortly after" the internal deployment is complete on October 4.
To say that only the English Wikipedia exclusively receives technical support is a misunderstanding. Instead, I would characterise the WMF's prioritisation as an "A rising tide lifts all boats" policy. Even if a first deployment is to Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as well.
Projects like Wikinews and Wiktionary almost certainly require more specialized product development and devotion in addition to the general development work that benefits all projects. However, it's my own view that this kind of specialized development is best served by ensuring that we give the global community great spaces to innovate and create new things. Recently we've been working on improved support for gadgets, and we're also working to create Wikimedia Labs, which we hope will make it possible to test and develop software under conditions that are very close to the WMF production environment. This means that, provided you're willing to invest sufficient resources, you should be able to get a project much closer to "WMF readiness" than you are today with far less WMF help.
The WMF's role for specialised improvements is chiefly in reviewing and deploying the code that volunteers have taken the time to write. Where we don't do so in a timely and reasonable fashion, we must strive to do better.Following the news on Monday that members of the English Wikinews community are to break away, a spotlight was cast on the Foundation's policy towards its smaller projects, particularly when it came to technical support. "They couldn't get essential components deployed for 2 years or so," opined Kim Bruning, whilst Jon explained the problems in the technical assistance the Wikinews project received in more detail. His words seem to conflict with those of OpenGlobe founder Tempodivalse, who did not cite conflict with the Foundation as among his motivations for starting the project:
| “ | I can't speak for the entire Wikinews community, but a lot of it was the lack of technical assistance. Wikinews really need[ed the GoogleNewsSitemap extension] to be even remotely useful and it was very difficult to get any help at all. Eventually the community wrote the extension themselves but couldn't get the dev's to review it appropriately. This was drawn out over several years [until] the Foundation really started to turn around and give much better support starting about 1 year ago. ... There is also a host of other backend and support style related issues ... Simply put, the Wikinews concept needs a much more specific set of assistance than the general "Here's a wiki, have fun". | ” |
WereSpielChequers, meanwhile, suggested an overhaul of the mechanism for deciding which projects should receive paid developer attention:
| “ | I think it would be great if we could ringfence some IT budget for bottom up initiatives ... What I'd like to see is a prioritisation page on Meta comparing the priority of multiple potential developments, - much like the way Wikimania chooses presentations. That way projects and editors could make a pitch for IT investments that their communities actually had consensus for - currently even the English Wikipedia can get consensus for change but not get IT resourced for it to happen. | ” |
Among the most damning public criticism of current Foundation policy was that from MZMcBride:
| “ | From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support. ... It's a great injustice to countless contributors that they receive support in name only ... I sincerely hope whoever administers your new site will treat you better than Wikimedia has. | ” |
Not all updates may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
With all page requests from those browsing Wikipedia on their handheld devices now being routed via the new MobileFrontend extension, administrators are being asked to update the HTML of the main pages of their home wikis to embed extra metadata. The metadata is then used to build up an improved mobile homepage.
{{REVISIONUSER}} to be "fixed": A commonly used magic word's functionality will change significantly as developers plan to fix a bug. The {{REVISIONUSER}} tag currently returns the username of the user who last edited the page, except when someone is editing that page, when it instead displays that editor's name. Developers plan to fix this soon (bug #19006), fundamentally changing the nature of the magic word. As a result, edit notices and templates used to preload or customise content that rely on the magic word will become non-functional; there are currently no firm plans to create another magic word with the existing functionality.
This is a special report for the Signpost, showing how many people look at the most popular articles. This report covers the last fourth months of 2010 and first eight months of 2011 on the English Wikipedia; if you want to see how many hits a specific page is getting, visit the counter at stats.grok.se, or, depending on your interface language, you may be able to click the "View history" tab of the page of interest, and then the "Page view statistics" link.
Statistics from Wikiroll.com. Statistics for other language variants of Wikipedia are available from the same site. Annotations are those of this report's author(s). This list is of articles only; other namespaces are omitted.
Following closely on are YouTube, United Kingdom, and Selena Gomez, with the list continuing for millions more entries—far too many to include here. You can find the full list at WikiRoll.com.
The top five results were as expected, with the Main page and Google and Facebook and such. After that the list changes to reflect recent events, with entries such as Deaths in 2011 and Glee, emphasising that Wikipedia is often used as a source of news and popular culture updates. The project itself, Wikipedia, is only just outside the top ten, and India crops up three entries before the United Kingdom, at 18.
In previous periods, the top articles have been pretty much the same, with the lower ones again changing to reflect current events. Last year, for instance, large numbers of people looked at the 2010 Copiapó mining accident; in 2009, people read about Michael Jackson and his death.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article, the newest in a series of half-yearly reports about Wikipedia's the top-viewed pages, to be brought to you every six months when Rcsprinter123 compiles a new list from WikiRoll. Expect the main page to be top again though! In the meantime, all sorts of other stats are available WP:Statistics for the English Wikipedia; many other projects have similar pages.
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