The Washington Post reported Tuesday on the most controversial articles on various language Wikipedias as determined by a cross-continental research group. The Post conveyed mild amusement at the large number of controversies surrounding football/soccer - fully half of the most controversial pages on Spanish Wikipedia and the most controversial on Romanian and Hebrew - and felt that the relatively small number of intractable discussions was a positive both for Wikipedia and for humankind. Of the more predictable disputes, reporter Max Ehrenfreund commented specifically on German Wikipedia's Croatia, and English's George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad. Ehrenfreund discussed the method the researchers used to determine the most controversial articles, which included checking for the frequency of reverts, controlling for vandalism, and examining the diversity of editors working on the article.
| “ | Articles on Jesus and homeopathy are in dispute in all four languages [English, French, Spanish, and German], while articles on anarchism, socialism, global warming and Mexico are controversial in at least three of the four. | ” |
Also mentioned was the previous paper published by the Yasseri group that showed that most content disputes trend towards a consensus, with a very small number remaining on a trajectory towards continued conflict.
The research was also covered in outlets including CNN, Digital Journal, the New York Post, CIO Today, News.com.au, the Washington Times, and NBC, among many others.
The Guardian published an overwhelmingly positive article on Jimmy Wales's comments in London on the future of Wikimedia. Wales was quoted lauding the Foundation's efforts with the media-celebrated and community-maligned VisualEditor and Flow. He also praised the Education Program as being part of the technological revolution of education, as well as the GLAM efforts. His remarks in London were also covered by the Independent, which included additional information on Wikipedia Zero and work by the developers' team. Other news stories on the topic were published by outlets including Business Insider and IT Pro Portal.
This week, the Signpost delved into the vast and complex areas of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that make up religion. WikiProject Religion has been around since 2005 and has a complex scope, in that it only takes articles that deal with religion in a non-sectarian sense (like God or theology), along with any articles that do not have a dedicated daughter project. There are 56 items of featured material under the project's scope, along with two A-class and 112 good articles. We interviewed Devin Murphy, John Carter, Sowlos, and Adjwilley.
Stay tuned for next week's article, which will deal with an entirely different-language Wikimedia project. Until then, find your favorite candidate in the archive.
Reader comments
This is mostly a list of Non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 24 July 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, and recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.
(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
Contributors to Wikivoyage, the sister project adopted by the Wikimedia Foundation last year, are celebrating their 10th anniversary this week.
The milestone comes as another entry in Wikivoyage's convoluted history. Wikitravel, as it was then known, was created by Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins on 24 July 2003. When they sold the site to Internet Brands in 2006, the German-language contributors decided to fork, creating the original Wikivoyage. Both sites continued unabated until 2012, when frustrated Wikitravel editors decided to fork the site again by rejoining Wikivoyage and moving under the WMF's umbrella.
These maneuvers set the stage for a dramatic climax when Internet Brands sued two prominent volunteers who were in favor of the move. When those matters were settled and the initial technical infrastructure was set in place, Wikivoyage was formally relaunched on 15 January 2013, with its sites covering nine languages.
The Wikitravel and Wikivoyage communities, then, are both celebrating the 10th anniversary of their foundings. Wikitravel currently has several main-page banners promoting the milestone, while Wikivoyage's reaction was more muted. A "garish" red banner was put up for about 10 minutes, but most contributors on the site's Travellers' pub were content to silently celebrate with additional content work. Others contended that it is not worth angering Wikitravel again. The site is planning a large public party for January 2014, when Wikivoyage will have been in its current WMF guise for one calendar year.
In my opinion, we need to put on the back burner things like adding images to articles and cajoling Wikipedia to continue adding interwiki links to us, and go full throttle in solving our Google problem ... All other concerns regarding boosting readership are, frankly, secondary. Failing a solution to our Google problem, we are going to end up the dead site, not Wikitravel.
AndreCarrotflower, "Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub", 25 July 2013.)
The anniversary appears to have sparked animated discussion on the English Wikivoyage as to the site's future. Wikitravel, despite its much reduced editorbase after the fork, is still ranked by Alexa as the 3,162nd most popular website in the world, which can be contrasted with Wikivoyage at 32,586th. Wikitravel's popularity can be attributed to its Google popularity, where over 36% of its traffic is referred from. Only 21% of Wikivoyage traffic, on the other hand, is from Google sites.
There appears to be considerable concern about the technical dimensions that might play into the popularity or otherwise of the site. JamesA has commented:
| “ | I contacted the WMF back in May urging them to provide Google Webmaster Tools as a priority, and was told it is usually handled by WMF staff, but that they would look into it and would also prod their Google contacts about the duplication issue. I've heard nothing since. ... the community really needs to take this issue much more seriously, as does the WMF, or things will just go more and more downhill. ... I doubt the purpose of the contributions we make to Wikivoyage when the dump that is [Wikitravel] continues to grow. I implore people to take an interest in this urgent issue. | ” |
The popularity of Wikivoyage varies considerably depending on the country. The commercial Wikitravel is far more popular than Wikivoyage in the US and the UK, showing that there is much room to grow in the English-language Wikivoyage. Unsurprisingly (given its lengthy history as a German-language site), Wikivoyage receives the greatest number of page views from Germany, 15.5%. Its Alexa rating in Germany is more than 4000 places below that of the commercial Wikitravel.
While there is cause for hope in the page views, which have risen on average after the expected large launch in January, Wikivoyage regulars recognize that their Google referrals will have to rise if they are to surpass their rival.
In other Wikivoyage news, the site is still going through the process of choosing a new logo. As we reported last month, the current logo was subject to a cease-and-desist letter from the World Trade Organization, forcing the WMF to call for a new design. Submissions have closed, and voting will begin on 26 July. Readers can view the gallery of entries, from the weird to the gender-exclusive to the promising. The entries are also displayed in a table on the talk page, with author information. The voting system will comprise two rounds: one to select the concept, and one to select the actual logo.
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced via press release that it has partnered with Aircel to provide free mobile access to Wikipedia.
The move makes Aircel, an Indian mobile network operator with over 60 million subscribers and a market share of 7.33%, the sixth company to join with the Foundation in its Wikipedia Zero program, which aims to provide mobile users in developing countries with free access to Wikipedia articles. The number of individuals using the service will now be increased to an estimated 470 million users, according to Kul Takanao Wadhwa (WMF Head of Mobile), though previous estimates have ranged from as low as 330 to 410 to 483 million, and the current estimate elsewhere is 517 million.
Providers can choose to allow free access to the regular mobile sites and/or zero.wikipedia.org, a text-only version of the regular mobile site to save on bandwidth costs. Aircel has chosen to do both, in English and all nineteen Indic-language Wikipedias.
Wikipedia Zero forms a large part of the Foundation's initiative to expand into the developing world. As Jimmy Wales stated on 22 July, "It is our mission to provide free access to everyone in the world. [Wikipedia Zero] is one of the most exciting things we are doing and we're only just getting started." Traditional personal computers can be scarce in these regions, and those that are present are extremely valuable. As Pgallert explained in the Wikimedia Blog earlier this month, on an unrelated topic:
| “ | The computer lab of Epukiro Post 3 Junior Secondary School in the Omaheke Region of Namibia is idle most of the time. School management is afraid that equipment might be stolen or the infrastructure be damaged, and the Ministry of Education ... did not offer any training on how to operate the computers, or what to use them for. As a result, there are typing classes a few times a week, and nothing else. During school breaks the lab is not used at all. / The computers occupy one entire classroom; their power consumption is a liability for the school. ... Yet Epukiro Post 3 JSS houses the only computer lab in the entire rural settlement cluster of Epukiro, an area accommodating several thousand people and covering thousands of square kilometers. | ” |
As mobile devices begin to outnumber traditional computers in the next few years, the Foundation expects that many of the next 500 million people to access Wikimedia projects will use mobile devices. The first iteration of this is the Wikipedia Zero initiative, which "make[s] free knowledge more accessible" through "help[ing] them discover it and ... reduc[ing] barriers to accessing it." Planned additions include enabling individuals without data-enabled phones, through receiving parts of Wikipedia articles through SMS or USSD.
Still, as Siska Doviana—the chair of Wikimedia Indonesia, which is located in one of the largest developing nation-states in the world today—pointed out to the Signpost via email, English-speaking people in these developing countries are typically in the upper class, which is not necessarily a demographic targeted by Wikipedia Zero. While this latest partnership also opens access to the nineteen Indic-language Wikipedias, nearly all have large gaps in their editorial coverage and few active editors. The Hindi Wikipedia has over 100,000 articles, but only 196 editing editors; by the same metric, the second-largest, Nepal Bhasa, has 70,000 but just ten active contributors. This would naturally lead one to wonder if the question should be about expanding content contributors rather than increasing access, but that was answered today by the Wikimedia Foundation's engineering team when they fully enabled editing from mobile.wikipedia.org.
More information on the Wikipedia Zero initiative can be found on the Wikimedia Foundation's official website, under "Wikipedia Zero" and "mobile partnerships".
Summary: Death hangs over the top 10 this week, as tragic deaths both past and present continued to cast their pall over an already troubled world. The death of Cory Monteith led to a spike in interest in the man himself, his girlfriend and co-star Lea Michele, and the show that made them both famous, Glee. Meanwhile, the tragic death of Trayvon Martin and its troubling implications for gun safety and race relations in the United States continued to be a talking point.
For the complete top 25 with analysis, see WP:TOP25
For the week of July 14 to 20, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cory Monteith | 
|
2,678,320 |  |
The death of the 31-year-old star of Glee from a combined overdose of alcohol and heroin was the defining pop-culture event of the week |
| 2 | Shooting of Trayvon Martin |
|
2,397,205 |  |
The debate over George Zimmerman's shooting of unarmed Trayvon Martin in February 2012, and its relevance to race relations in America and the validity of "stand your ground" laws, reached its climax on July 13 when a jury found Zimmerman not guilty of either murder or manslaughter. |
| 3 | Rembrandt | 
|
1,403,377 |  |
The greatest of the Dutch masters got a Google Doodle to celebrate his 407th birthday on July 15. |
| 4 | Pacific Rim (film) | 
|
928,640 | Guillermo del Toro's $190-million anime-inspired monsters vs. robots slugfest is not tracking well with the American mainstream, and now seems unlikely to crack $100 million domestically, but remains in its second week the biggest talking point among Wikipedian cineastes. | |
| 5 | Lea Michele |
|
794,606 |  |
The co-star and girlfriend of the late Cory Monteith got a great deal of interest from Wikipedians in the wake of Monteith's tragic death. |
| 6 | Milkha Singh | 
|
775,259 |  |
"The Flying Sikh", the record-breaking track and fielder who represented India in three Olympic Games, became a topic of interest after his biopic, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, was released on July 12. Singh sold the rights for ₹1 but insisted a share of the profits be given to a charitable trust. |
| 7 |
|
684,885 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article. | |
| 8 | Glee (TV series) |
|
595,960 |  |
The popular glee club TV show made its 2013 debut in the top 25 on the back of Cory Monteith's tragic death. |
| 9 | Bhaag Milkha Bhaag |
|
566,299 | Biopic of Indian athlete Milkha Singh (see #6 above) | |
| 10 | Stand-your-ground law |
|
495,954 |  |
The controversial US gun law that allows people the right of self-defense without the requirement of retreat has been flagged by the shooting of Trayvon Martin (see #2 above) |
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12 featured articles were promoted this week.
7 featured lists were promoted this week.
8 featured pictures were promoted this week.
The case Infoboxes was opened. The evidence phase continues in Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds. Voting on the proposed decision continues in the Tea Party movement case.
This case, brought by Ched, involves the issue of who should make the decision to include an infobox in an article and to determine its formatting (right margin, footer, both, etc) -- whether the preferences of the original author should be taken into consideration, if the decision should be made by various WikiProjects in order to promote uniformity between articles, or whether each article should be decided on a case-by-case basis after discussion. It also involves what is perceived by some to be an aggressive addition or reverting of infoboxes to articles without discussion by some editors, in areas where they do not normally edit. Areas that have seen disputes over infoboxes include opera, the Classical Music and Composers project, and Featured Articles. The evidence phase of the case closes 31 July, the workshop closes 7 August, and a proposed decision is scheduled to be posted 14 August 2013.
This case, brought by Mark Arsten, involves a dispute between Kiefer Wolfowitz and Ironholds, the original account of Wikimedia Foundation employee Oliver Keyes, that began on-wiki and escalated in off-wiki forums, ending with statements that could be interpreted as threats of violence. The evidence phase of the case closes 26 July, the workshop closes 2 August, and a proposed decision is scheduled to be posted 9 August 2013.
This case involving a US political group, brought by KillerChihuahua, is now unsuspended, after a moderated discussion failed to agree on the ground rules for such a discussion. Voting continues on the proposed decision.
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