Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/From the editors
The debt that Wikipedia owes sites like Reddit or Google often goes unacknowledged around here. If the purpose of Wikipedia is to bring knowledge to the world, then it is sites like these that are actually doing it. Whenever a great artist, scientist or humanitarian suddenly becomes an object of public interest, you can bet a Google Doodle was responsible; whenever an obscure event, individual or idea suddenly rises in public awareness, you can bet a thread on Reddit is the reason why. This week saw three such articles in the top 25 (and two in the top 10); the highest since the monitoring project was begun at the year's start. It might raise the issue of how we actually promote our content to our readers.
For a list of the top 25 articles, including exclusions, see: WP:TOP25
For the week of August 18 – 24, 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 | Lee Thompson Young | 
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709,809 | The tragic suicide of this young, up-and-coming actor (he was 29) and star of Friday Night Lights and The Famous Jett Jackson unsurprisingly became the prime talking point of the week. | |
| 2 | 
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675,478 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article | |
| 3 | Claude Debussy |
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619,684 |  |
With the possible exception of suicide, nothing guarantees a high Wikipedia view count like an interactive Google Doodle, and this French composer of "Oh yeah, that!" classical pieces like Clair de Lune got one for his 151st birthday on August 22. |
| 4 | Breaking Bad |
|
547,047 |  |
The final season of this acclaimed chemistry teacher-turned-Scarface TV series began on August 11. |
| 5 | Chennai Express |
|
531,746 | This Bollywood action-romance has broken records at the Indian box office, becoming the first film to make  1 billion ($16.3 million) in four days.
| |
| 6 | I Am Rich |
|
447,963 | A $1000 iPhone app that did nothing except remind its users that they could afford it stimulated a discussion on Reddit this week. | |
| 7 | Pseudofolliculitis barbae |
|
397,403 |  |
Another Reddit discussion was stimulated by this skin affliction, commonly referred to as "shave bumps", because Domino's Pizza was declared in violation of the 1991 Civil Rights Act when it demanded its male employees be clean-shaven, even though roughly a quarter of African Americans are unable to shave without incurring it. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2013 | List | 389,605 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
| 9 | List of Bollywood films of 2013 | List | 376,515 |  |
An established staple of the top 10. |
| 10 | The Conjuring (film) |
|
371,391 | James Wan's latest ghost story (reportedly based on true events, take that as you will) stormed the US, taking $70 million in its first week, and is now closing in on $200 million worldwide. |
Wikipedia's gender identity MOS section and its effect on Chelsea Manning was both praised and emulated in the media this week. The controversy over moving the article from her former name, Bradley Manning, came in the wake of the soldier's announcement of her gender identity after her trial had concluded. The acrimonious debate and move request at Talk:Chelsea Manning was covered. Slate praised Wikipedia's quick shift from the outdated male pronouns and name to her current pronouns and name. The story was also covered by El Comercio, the New Statesman, and TruthDig.
On 21 August 2013, the open access journal PLoS One published the article "Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data". The authors analyzed data about 312 movies that were released in the United States in 2010. They limited their sample to movies listed in Category:2009 films and Category:2010 films and used Box Office Mojo for information on the box office success of the films. They concluded that, even one month before a movie is released domestically, Wikipedia editing activity could accurately predict its success. The paper was covered in myriad news outlets, including The Australian, The Descrier, Gizmodo, The International Business Times, Livescience, Motherboard, the Oxford Mail, Discover Magazine's D-brief, and LifeHacker Australia. Similar research had been published in 2012, and was covered when Forbes expressed concern that the findings could encourage filmmakers to engage in astroturfing and edit articles for their movies in hopes of raising expectations.
Coverage of the distributed open collaborative course called "Storming Wikipedia" continued this week. Influenced by Jimmy Wales' speech at Wikimania 2013, where he showed that 87 percent of contributors to Wikipedia are men, the effort aims to increase women's participation and coverage on Wikipedia by engaging a network of feminist philosophy and women's studies classes. It is run by FemTechNet, which describes itself on its FAQ page as "an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology".
Researchers have found that Wikipedia's coverage of feminism and issues faced by women is abysmal and that there is a gender gap in both biographies and contributors. The course, run by FemTechNet, will run at 15 institutions and is designed to bridge the gender gap in several ways, including recruiting women to contribute, writing articles about women, and correcting systemic bias by writing about feminist viewpoints and scholarship. The story broke into major news outlets this week, receiving favorable attention for its goals. It was covered by the CBC, Bustle, the Huffington Post, Truthdig, Jezebel, MediaBistro, and Mother Jones.
Following from FemTechNet's idea, OCAD University introduced a new course for this fall called Dialogues on Feminism and Technology, as reported by the CBC. Described as "a first-of-its-kind collaborative digital course for credit in 16 universities all over the world", students will "collaboratively write feminist thinking" into Wikipedia, according to organizers.
Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the <gallery> markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.
,_full_restoration.jpg)
Now, the gallery markup has been enhanced with the addition of several new display modes. For example, changing <gallery> to <gallery mode=packed> produces a gallery with significantly less wasted space around each image, as shown below.
In addition, the heights parameter becomes very easy to use with the new gallery mode. For example. <gallery mode=packed heights=200px> gives
Five modes are available: "traditional", which reproduces the classic gallery format; "nolines", which behaves identically to "traditional" but removes the box overlays for each image; "packed"; "packed-hover", which is similar to "packed" but with captions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the image; and "packed-overlay", in which the captions are placed atop each image. Some examples of these modes can be seen below.
It is expected that the "packed" mode will eventually become the preferred layout for article-space galleries on Wikipedia. The "packed-hover" and "packed-overlay" modes are not expected to see significant use in articles, but will probably appear heavily in non-article spaces, such as user pages.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Opinion
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), Wikimedia's annual volunteer-driven and the world's largest photo contest, is gearing up to be conducted throughout September 2013. The event, originally developed in the Netherlands in 2010, has gone global with 34 countries taking part last and over 50 this year.
In 2012, India—participating for the first time—won the global competition with a new user's photo featuring the tomb of Safdarjung, a prominent 18th-century official of the Mughal Empire. 1,989 WLM files from 2012 have been recognized as "quality images" on Commons, with an additional 62 being "valued", and 57 "featured". In quantitative terms, Europeans were still leading the pack last round. Poland submitted more than 51,000 files, followed by Spain (39,500), Germany (34,000), and Ukraine (33,000). France, with 27,000 submissions, came in fifth place before the first non-European country, the US, with 27,000 files. Taken together, volunteers taking part in WLM 2012 uploaded more than 350,000 photos. Last years' goal to use WLM as a device promoting new user engagement mid term looks less strong. While participation peaked in September 2012 with 4,655 new users and 13,607 contributors with 5+ edits on Commons, numbers returned to normal the following months.
The most notable newcomer to this year's contest is Antarctica, on board thanks to organizational coordination by Wikimedia Argentina and supported by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, located in Buenos Aires. Other notable first-time participants include China, Cameroon, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom; 51 total countries will at this time be participating. Monica Mora, a member of the international coordination committee, told the Signpost the team has high expectations as the community has the opportunity to outdo the last two Guinness World Records recognitions of WLM with even more and better submissions, and the extensive technical infrastructure (including a mobile app, statistics tools, and a jury-judging tool) is complete and ready for use.
To participate in the contest, volunteers must upload their submissions, featuring a monument in a participating country, during September 2013. The six basic rules are listed on Commons. On October first, submissions start going through the national contests, each picking out up to 10 photos for the global round. An international jury of five will select the final winner.
2014 Wikimedia Conference—what is the impact?
23 April 2014
On the cusp of the Wikimedia Conference
2 April 2014
Wikimedia conferences—soul-searching about costs, attendance, and future
2 April 2014
Looking ahead to Wiki Loves Monuments
28 August 2013
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2014 Wikimedia Conference—what is the impact? |
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-08-28/Humour
