Summary: The top 10 encapsulates the history of human aviation; at #1, a Google Doodle celebrating the 216th anniversary of the first parachute jump; at #10, the enduringly popular scifi film Gravity, a paean to human spaceflight. It's odd to think it's taken us 200 years to travel about that many miles up.
For the full top 25 report, including analysis and exclusions, see: WP:TOP25.
For the week of October 20 - 26, 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 | Parachute | 
|
892,746 |  |
An interactive Google Doodle on the 216th anniversary of the first parachute jump led to interest both in the item itself and in its first user, André-Jacques Garnerin. |
| 2 | Halloween | 
|
613,331 |  |
'Tis the night before Hallows, and all through the house, not a creature is stirring... that you can see. |
| 3 |
|
543,309 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article | |
| 4 | World War II | 
|
391,047 |  |
Another perennially popular article. (The 16th most popular article from 2010 to 2012, in fact, see Table 2 here.) |
| 5 | Deaths in 2013 | List | 359,473 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
| 6 | Breaking Bad |
|
347,729 |  |
Despite ending for good two weeks ago, this 5-year televisual exploration of one man's descent into evil continues to drum up interest. |
| 7 | United States |
|
346,748 |  |
A rarity in the top 10, but the 3rd most popular Wikipedia article from 2010 to 2012, and a perpetual bubble-under-er. Not really surprising that the country with by far the most English speakers would be the most popular on the English Wikipedia. |
| 8 | List of Bollywood films of 2013 | List | 341,165 |  |
An established staple of the top 10. |
| 9 | André-Jacques Garnerin | 
|
331,768 |  |
The man who conducted the first ever parachute jump (in a basket!) in 1797 got some internet attention thanks to a Google Doodle (see #1 above). |
| 10 | Gravity (film) |
|
324,136 | Alfonso Cuarón's spaceborne action/art film is now the critical/commercial blockbuster of the year, combining a nearly $370 million, 24-day worldwide box office take with a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. |
During a speech on behalf of a gubernatorial candidate, Rand Paul advocated his pro-life position, comparing unrestricted abortions to the film Gattaca. He went on to use language and phraseology that were strikingly similar to the content of the Wikipedia page. Rachel Maddow on her namesake show was the first to report it; numerous media outlets quickly picked it up, including the Washington Post. The Post's article conceded that Wikipedia is a widely used source for trivial information, but mocked the fact that a politician would view it as a reliable source: "But who hasn't inadvertently hijacked a phrase or two from Wikipedia? Unpresidential, schmunpresidential. Wikipedia is reliable, according to a piece I hastily wrote using information I found on Wikipedia that was then cited as evidence for the same piece." The incident received other significant media coverage, with some going so far as to specifically and unequivocally state Paul or someone on his staff committed plagiarism.
The article Gattaca was initially created in 2002 by The Anome. Before the allegations surfaced, the article received anywhere from 1100 to 1500 views per day, but on 29 October, the day the allegations were initially aired, the page received 10,693 views. The Signpost reached out to Paul's office for comment, but did not receive a reply. Paul did, however, flatly deny the allegations in a statement, saying that Maddow had been spreading hate about him for the past three years.
The Signpost has frequently covered the Wikimedia Foundation's newest sister project, Wikivoyage. Among the coverage have been reports on the complicated and expensive migration of the site from the commercialised WikiTravel.org site and the non-profit German site that forked from it, which has given its name to the new WMF project. We have brought to you reports on the legal action taken by the corporate owners of WikiTravel.org, Internet Brands, against two editors (also covered in the mainstream press), and the Foundation's legal "victory" in the matter. Wikivoyage now has 15 language sites, although all but the English and German versions are small and only marginally active.
In January we raised several potentially troublesome issues for the Wikimedia movement in taking on Wikivoyage, including the apparent inadequacy of the English Wikivoyage sex-tourism policy, hurriedly strengthened against mention of child sex after our inquiries. However, both sex-tourism and illegal-activities policies remain equivocal about how the site should treat entries about sex tourism more generally, and drugs that are classed as illicit in almost every country. The Signpost has found it remarkably easy to locate material in Wikivoyage that violates both the spirit and the letter of these policies.
The sex-tourism policy states:
| “ | we prefer not to include information on purchased sexual services on Wikivoyage, including: locations or listings of brothels or bars that sell sexual services; pricing info for prostitution; tips for picking up prostitutes; "quality" information on prostitutes in different destinations.” This is followed by text that cannot help but send ambivalent messages: "Writers are welcome to describe other kinds of sex-related venues on Wikivoyage … such as: strip clubs, adult-oriented stores, pornographic cinemas, fetish clubs, LGBT venues ... Descriptions of locations or areas where prostitutes may be found—so-called "red light districts"—may be useful to non-sex tourists. ... This applies whether or not prostitution is legal in the destination. ... Do not use euphemisms for sex or prostitution ... in favour of direct language. ... [Reformatted here to save space] | ” |
Back in January, Wikivoyager Pashley told the Signpost that these policy areas are "tricky", that Evan Prodromou "was really uneasy about allowing this sort of material on the site at all" when he came up with the sex-tourism policy ten years ago. "There have been arguments for both a looser and a stricter policy." DerFussi, chairman of the German non-profit that hosted Wikivoyage until two years ago, told us: "The community has an eye on all edits."
The companion piece to Wikivoyage's sex-tourism policy is its illegal-activities policy:
| “ | articles should not give advice for: ... obtaining, transporting, providing or consuming alcohol, narcotics, medication or other substances in violation of local law. ... / ... "If travellers are likely to encounter illegal activity by others, and knowing about this would be useful to them, information should be provided on in the Understand or Stay safe section of the destination guide. Examples include: ... warnings about areas where travellers might encounter the illegal drug trade, and other illicit business. ... supply [such information] if it is likely to be useful to a traveller. ... a Wikivoyage article should discuss illegal activities where [they are] an important or integral part of the reason people visit the destination, such as destinations famed for their drug supply. | ” |
The policy concedes that the site "needs to tread a fine line about giving information. The test is that information should be provided for a traveller's safety, rather than solely to promote illegal activities. When writing about safety issues with illegal activities, Wikivoyage articles must always emphasise that that activity is a crime when mentioning safety issues. ... Wikivoyage articles should avoid giving information about illegal activities that is useful only to those seeking it and which is not motivated by safety concerns."
The policies themselves reflect the sometimes contradictory aims of the travel site to provide free, balanced information to people in a wide range of demographics who are engaged in a highly consumerist leisure pursuit. The ambiguity underlines the blurred interface between informing, warning, and encouraging on the site. Whether by design or accident, many edits appear to introduce information about prostitution and drugs with a formulaic "warning" added. Random examples of the mixed messages that result are:
It is an open question whether these warnings actually function to caution travellers' behaviour beyond providing eligibility for inclusion under the policies.
Another issue raised by the material is its potential to be perceived as treating women with a casual objectification, under an implicit assumption that readers are not women ("Classy little hostess bar ... A place for single men and loose ladies ... no pool table or food to distract you from the lovely ladies" ... "There are dozens of girlie bars ... Freelance girls are picked up at establishments like [several names provided]").
There is occasionally evidence that some contributors have taken offence, and that there has been an element of push and pull over the years about the inclusion of sexual content (e.g. "Sorry, but I thought the comment comparing Downtown Eastside prostitutes to cheap parking prices was a little offensive. I didn't realize this article was a guide for sex tourists"; and "Isn't there a Wikivoyage policy against including 'sex tourism' related topics on Wikivoyage? If so, why is there a section of this article titled, 'Prostitution'?").
However, on the other side, as one Wikivoyage administrator wrote in February: "Policing travelers' personal moral choices is not one of Wikivoyage's goals". The Signpost believes that there are only two or three female editors on the English Wikivoyage, not all of them active.
A number of articles link to external pages that deal explicitly with drugs such as cannabis. Among these are Utrecht where "mainly psychedelics, cannabis and energetic herbs" in the "Buy" section contains a link to a Dutch-language advertisement "Cooking with dope". Seattle gives good airtime to the annual two-day cannabis festival, with an external link that beckons readers to "become a member" and "party with hempfest all year!" Similarly, Ann Arbor provides an external link for its annual Hashbash that advertises ancillary products and asks for political donations.
Whether directly in breach of the site’s policies or just deserving of deep community discussion, some material on the English Wikivoyage suggests that—contrary to Fussi's claim—Wikivoyagers don't "have their eye on all edits". But does Wikivoyage have the editorial resources to police the input of sex- and drug-related information? And just as central to the site's use of the Wikimedia Foundation's trademark and brand reputation is its ability to monitor commercial spamming. Of 56 listed admins who migrated from WikiTravel at the start of the year, only 23 are active; the list includes seven bureaucrats, of whom only two are active. Edits to Wikivoyage have declined by almost a third since June, from more than 34,000 to just over 18,000 in October (the latter figure is the Signpost's estimate from sampling the "Recent changes" list. This compares with more than 25,000 for Wikitravel.
One editor, who spoke to the Signpost on condition of anonymity, said:
| “ | The readership is actually static with rolling hills and troughs. It's just that it should be topping Wikitravel—that will never happen unless and until they adopt proper search engine optimisation. ... At Wikitravel the automated spam attacks have reached truly appalling dimensions. The result is that WV is relatively free of spam bot attacks because our readership is so tiny compared to Wikitravel. | ” |
The Signpost has noted an upswing in the creation of increasingly strange articles at Wikitravel, still a heavily commercial site in which google advertisements appear as side-bars on every article. Recent examples of such articles, which display thematically related advertisements, are Hair dryer tips and tricks for problematic hair, Bridging loans and its advantages [sic], and Jailbreak iPhone and its benefits. There are virtually no active admins on WikiTravel. Despite the lack of proper administration and evidence of the fusing of editorial and commercial content, WikiTravel is now ranked 2417 globally, up from 3162 in late July. Wikivoyage is a disappointing 20,451, even though up from 32,586 in late July. Its page views have dropped 12% from the levels in January when the new site was launched. Yet given the poverty of the competition, there appear to be many opportunities for Wikivoyage to boost its presence in the crowded market for online travel advice.
This year's WikiCup competition has finished. Cwmhiraeth won for the second consecutive year. The top scorers were:
Cwmhiraeth (submissions)
Hawkeye7 (submissions)
Sasata (submissions)
Sturmvogel_66 (submissions)
Casliber (submissions)
Adam Cuerden (submissions)
Miyagawa (submissions)
Piotrus (submissions)
Ealdgyth (submissions)
Cwmhiraeth's 5th round submissions included contributions to the featured articles Sea and Atlantic Puffin, 13 good articles, 79 did you knows, and 2 good article reviews. Congratulations to all the finalists.
There were some controversies in this year's competition. Next year Miyagawa will be a third judge, joining J Milburn and The ed17. Next year's competition will begin on January 1.
Three featured articles were promoted this week.
Five featured lists were promoted this week.
Six featured pictures were promoted this week.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Laura Stein, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has concluded[1] that, based on her comparison of user policy documents (including the Terms of Service) of YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, Wikipedia offers the highest level of participation power overall. Using Arnstein's ladder of participation to begin a theoretical discussion on participation and power, Stein carefully proposed a typology of policy and participation (Table 1, p. 359), from the maximal power of "dominant control over site content and governance", "shared control", the minimal power of "consultation", "choice", and "informing", to the no power of "deceptive or inadequate information" and "nonparticipation". She applied this typology across the five policy areas: "permitted content and its use", "content ownership/copyrights", "user information/data", "modifying software" and "user policy formation & consent") for the three websites, and found that Wikipedia beats other websites in all areas. In the first and last policy areas of "permitted content and its use" and "user policy formation & consent", Wikipedia gives users the "dominant control" of participation power; for the remaining areas, Wikipedia gives user "shared control over site content and governance".
In contrast, YouTube and Facebook only provide the minimal power of "informing" in three policy areas: "permitted content and its use", "content ownership/copyrights", "modifying software" and provide slightly better minimal power of "choice" for the "user information/data area". Although Wikipedia is not widely agreed on to be a "social media" website, Stein nevertheless presented a simple typology for evaluating the levels of participation power given to users by platforms. Also, it would be useful to apply this topology in other policy areas including fund dissemination and organizational governance in the near future.
Anna Samoilenko and Taha Yasseri from the Oxford Internet Institute released an arXiv preprint titled: "The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics".[2] In this study the notability of academics in the English Wikipedia is examined. The ground truth is taken to be the citation records of the scholars under study and the h-index in particular, although the authors admit that the quantity of publications and citations are not the best proxies for evaluating the quality and scientific impact of researchers. Based on the results of the paper, scientists covered in Wikipedia (which are taken from a sample of 400 scientists in 4 different fields of physics, computer science, biology and psychology) do not appear to statistically have a higher impact than the average scientists of their respective field, as long as the citation records are considered. Wikipedia article metrics (such as number of edits to the articles, unique editors, article length, number of wikilinks to the article) are only very weakly correlated with scientometrics such as number of publications, number of citations, citations per publication, [h-index], number of co-authors.
In the second part of the article, the researchers investigate the Wikipedia coverage of "Highly Cited Researchers" based on the list published by Thomson Reuters in 2010. In all the four fields under study, the coverage of Wikipedia is well below 50%. This not only indicates that those scientists featured in Wikipedia are no more highly cited than the rest, but many scientists with a high citation-based impact are left out of Wikipedia. Finally, the authors compared the inclusiveness of each of the four categories by size in terms of number of articles; they reported that more populated categories do not necessarily have a better coverage. The authors submit that the growth of Wikipedia alone will not resolve the problem of its incompleteness at least in categories related to scientists bibliographies, and that new policies are required if Wikipedia is to be more balanced in featuring academics.
With Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and other gloomy celebrations this week, we're taking a look at Wikipedia's dead and dying. For some dead WikiProjects, the sole purpose of their life was simply to serve as a warning to others. Some of these projects may still be salvageable, but for most, a revival is unlikely. Here are some projects that never got off the ground and the lessons that can be gleaned from their follies:
WikiProject Contents had a simple goal when it was created: build a useful table of contents for a book that has no page numbers and is still being written. The project was spawned from comments in 2001 by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger and other editors calling for a way to organize Wikipedia's content from a top-down approach. Should articles be organized by topic or discipline? Should Wikipedia catalog material using the Dewey Decimal System, Library of Congress Classification, or Open Directory Project? Should content be navigable through category lists, topic maps, or an old-fashioned alphabetical list of every Wikipedia article? To be fair, Wikipedia had a much smaller collection of articles back then, so the idea of sifting through lists of articles didn't seem as absurd as it does today with the English Wikipedia sporting over 4 million articles. WikiProject Contents made for an interesting discussion board, but no plan of action or timetable for changes ever materialized.
As they talked, other projects sprouted and made their own decisions. Topic-specific WikiProjects categorized their own articles, created portals to serve as gateways to their unique fields, and introduced a variety of templates and metadata to make it all navigable. Meanwhile, the internet continued to evolve, leaving WikiProject Contents stuck in the past. Users simply searched for the information they needed rather than scrolling through long lists of articles. People discovered new things by following wikilinks rather than hunting through a complex classification system. An article's traffic was affected more by current events, social media posts, and Google Doodles than by people trying to read everything about Zoology by starting from the most general article and moving to specifics.
To stay relevant, WikiProject Contents tried to take up other pursuits like improving infoboxes and series templates, duplicating the efforts of other projects. It became unclear exactly what WikiProject Contents was intended for, leading one editor to mistakenly merge the project with Wikipedia's main page, resulting in the inactive WikiProject Contents becoming Wikipedia's most-watched project, an odd distinction that remains to this day.
At first glance, WikiProject Life on Mars appears to be way ahead of its time... since we have yet to discover life on Mars. But the project has nothing to do with the red planet. WikiProject Life on Mars was created to focus on a short-lived television series, its spinoff, and foreign adaptations. But can a scope this narrow support life at a full-fledged WikiProject? Apparently not.
This is where task forces come into play. Initially devised by WikiProject Military History as an organizational tool (hence the military term), task forces are now widespread and serve as subdivisions within WikiProjects that allow for editors to focus on a narrower topic while still tapping the resources and user-base of the larger WikiProject.
In the realm of television, there are dozens of dead projects covering programs past and present. The larger, more active projects tend to cover television programs and franchises that have been going for many years, if not multiple generations. Wikipedia does not need a WikiProject for every television show that has ever been aired, nor is it beneficial for dead projects to sit around giving the illusion that the articles under that project's scope are being watched and maintained. Collaborating at WikiProject Television or WikiProject British TV will get more attention and if Wikipedia really needs a space for your favorite television show, it should really be a task force.
Let's talk about WikiProject Nudity. The project's flesh-colored page was created in 2008 on April Fools Day. The first two editors listed on the project's membership page noted beside their names "no, it is not a joke! :)" and "this is the best april fools wikiproject ever." That's about as close as the project got to collaboration. The project's page has remained essentially unchanged since that first day.
Despite the lack of committed editors, WikiProject Nudity is actually a fairly well constructed project. The project's scope "aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of nudity and naturism related topics," with a respectable 219 articles tagged under the project's scope, including 2 Good Articles. The project's templates and categories remain functional. Clear connections were created between the project and Wikipedia's policy of rejecting censorship, meaning that the project had the potential to serve as a forum for discussion of Wikipedia policies rather than just a collection of articles about a single topic. Sadly, new editors have been posting questions on the project's talk page for years without any replies. Had WikiProject Nudity been created by a dedicated group of mature editors, it might have actually served a purpose. Ultimately, a WikiProject is not a page, nor is it a grouping of articles. A WikiProject is a community of editors working together to make Wikipedia better.
The history of Esperanza is best told by those who lived through that turbulent time in Wikipedia's past. But since few people want to talk about it today, editors unfamiliar with Esperanza should check out what remains of this project's page and the decent synopsis of the project's demise published by the Signpost in 2007. Esperanza's story is one of good intentions gone awry. A thriving community where members could interact and grow became embroiled in internal politics, incivility, and secretive associations. Called a clique and a cabal (among other things), Esperanza was torn apart to form a variety of independent initiatives, most of which have failed over the past few years.
As noted in the above discussion of WikiProject Nudity, a true WikiProject is a community of editors, just like Esperanza aspired to be. However, Wikipedians have expectations as to how a community conducts itself. Wikipedia's communities are dedicated to openness and transparency. Anyone can contribute and discussions are not hidden behind closed doors. If a project grows large enough to need elected leadership, it is important that these leaders serve as coordinators for their communities rather than rulers of a fiefdom. Additionally, the programs sponsored by a WikiProject should in some way benefit Wikipedia's efforts toward building an encyclopedia, rather than serving merely as chat rooms and miscellaneous diversions. This doesn't mean that all WikiProjects are devoid of fun and friendship, but those pursuits must not become a project's overriding purpose.
Articles should be articles. Essays should be essays. WikiProjects should be WikiProjects. When someone gets confused, you end up with something like WikiProject Common Sense.
The project began with the noble goal of bringing common sense to all the articles and talkpages of Wikipedia. That's before they defined exactly what they meant by "common sense." The project's goals reads more like an essay covering senseless bickering on talkpages, treating people with respect, and not claiming that one's side is the truth. Rather than spreading common sense, WikiProject Common Sense became an essay about dispute resolution. But that's as far as the project got.
It's fine for a project to describe their ideal world, but the project won't go anywhere if they don't have a plan to achieve it. Join WikiProjects to improve Wikipedia. If you just want to vent, consider jotting your ideas in user space and then share them with WikiProject Essays.
Next week's article should be accessible to all. Until then, navigate our extensive archive.
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