In the latest edition of the Babel Series (see sidebar at bottom right), the Signpost traveled to the French Wikipedia to interview members of Projet Tunisie (Tunisia WikiProject). Created in April 2006, the project has 24 featured articles in its scope. We interviewed Dyolf77, Moumou82, and Pradigue.
Next week, we'll have a special report. Until then, explore our previous reports in the archive.
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As regular readers of this page may have gleaned by now, I'm something of a cynic; I have little to no faith in humanity, a position not helped by the topics making frequent visitations to this list. Wikipedia offers all the knowledge of humanity to the world (at varying levels of accuracy); despite this, most people seem to want to use it either to keep track of celebrity scandals, as a free TV listings guide or, rather oddly, a noticeboard for the deaths of famous people.
Last week saw the deaths of both Paul Walker, an action star who outside of his signature Fast and Furious franchise had not had a major hit, and Nelson Mandela, a global hero and inspiration to millions of people—one in a car crash, the other peacefully in his sleep. When Walker's death generated 7.4 million hits over Mandela's 4.2 million, I initially concluded that the public had been drawn to the ghoulish nature of Walker's demise over the far more historically significant, if uneventful, passing of Mandela. And yet ... Mandela's death was relatively late in the week; Walker's had occurred right at the start. Maybe the stats were lying; after all, day-to-day, Mandela's death was generating twice the hits of Walker's. So I waited a week, and, well, Walker's death still generated more hits in its first week than Mandela's did. In its first ten days. So, OK. Apparently people are far more attached to the Fast and Furious series than I ever knew.
In other news, an animated Google Doodle for computer programmer and naval rear admiral Grace Hopper generated another record-breaking hit count for the year, though the count for the list overall was lower than for that of the previous holder.
See WP:TOP25 for the full top-25 report.
For the week of December 8–14, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages* were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Grace Hopper | 
|
9,412,775 | .jpg) |
Animated Google Doodles always bring in the numbers, but this record-breaking surge is not something you'd expect to see unless India's involved. Still, it's not hard to see what drew people to Grace Hopper; not only was she a woman in a still-male-dominated field, but a US Navy Rear Admiral to boot. She graduated first in her Naval class, despite being 15 pounds under stipulated minimum weight, and also popularized the word "debugging" to describe fixing computer glitches. |
| 2 | Nelson Mandela | 
|
2,549,220 | .jpg) |
The 95-year-old father of the new South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global inspiration finally succumbed to his long illness on December 5, triggering tributes from around the world. |
| 3 | Bonnie and Clyde |
|
1,338,252 |  |
The killing and robbing duo got a spike of interest this week when The History Channel launched a cross-channel event to promote a docudrama about them. Despite the venue, this film is not being hailed for historical accuracy; according to The Guardian's Erin McGann, "if you're a fan of the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, stay away. And if you have even a passing familiarity with the real-life story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker … stay far, far away." |
| 4 | Paul Walker | 
|
526,200 |  |
The tragic death on the road of this Hollywood star remains a major talking point. |
| 5 | United States |
|
484,089 |  |
The third most popular Wikipedia article between 2010 and 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. |
| 6 |
|
477,654 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article | |
| 7 | Apartheid in South Africa |
|
413,876 |  |
The death of Nelson Mandela led to renewed attention for the atrocious system he suffered to end. |
| 8 | Frozen (2013 film) |
|
390,297 | Disney's de facto sequel to Tangled has already outperformed its predecessor in its first two weeks, having grossed over $264 million worldwide. | |
| 9 | Deaths in 2013 | List | 388,959 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
| 10 | Bitcoin |
|
354,188 |  |
The digital currency is back in the news this week. Bankers have suggested it may prove a legitimate competitor to real money, even though they are best described as a store of value rather than a functional currency. An attempt to declare "Bitcoin Black Friday" to try to get people to actually spend them instead of hoarding them (Except that, from one point of view, hoarding them is exactly the right thing to do if their value continues to skyrocket as it has done) led to the purchase of a great deal of gold, swapping one store of value another. |
This is mostly a list of non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 15 December 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, 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)
A little more than six days after the close of voting, the results of the annual Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced and certified by four non-English-Wikipedia stewards who kindly stepped in to assist in verification: Vituzzu, Mathonius, Tegel, and Matanya.
Of the 22 candidates, 13 managed to gain more supports than opposes (the same as last year out of 21 candidates). The unusual ternary voting system requires voters to choose one of three options for each candidate: support, abstain, or oppose; the formula S/(S+O) (supports divided by supports-plus-opposes) determines the top eight who will take their place on 1 January for two-year terms, and the ninth-placed, who will serve a one-year term. The successful candidates, in order of these formulaic scores, are:
This year, 923 editors voted, up significantly from 824 last year; this continues a trend of increased participation after the record low two years ago (chart at the right). Only one of the 22 candidates, 28bytes, gained the support of more than half of the voters (chart at the top), compared with three candidates of 21 last year. For the first time ever, the S/(S+O) formula made a difference to the result that would have obtained through supports alone: LFaraone gained a seat at the expense of Guerillero, and a two- rather than one-year term at the expense of Beeblebrox, who was placed ninth under the formula (LFaraone was opposed by fewer voters than the other two).
If you were the "average" voter, you supported just over six candidates, abstained for almost ten, and opposed just over six (the percentages were 28.6%, 42.8%, and 28.6%, respectively). The chart at the bottom shows how the 42.8% average abstain vote has risen significantly. In other words, voting intensity (the proportion of non-abstaining votes) rose steadily between 2008 and 2011, from a low of 25% under the labour-intensive manual voting system in 2008, to 65% in 2011; it has dropped over the two elections since to the current level of 57%. Just why voting intensity should have consistently been the inverse shape of the relative numbers of voters year by year is difficult to explain.
Risker, along with three election commissioners (GiantSnowman, Happy-melon, and TParis), played an important role in the running of the event. She told the Signpost:
| “ | This was a successful election, as can be seen by its results: the wisdom of the crowd shone through. There were some procedural glitches that can be avoided in the future, especially if we as a community move now to update information and explain rationales. Many of the issues were due to outdated information, and the difficult and poorly documented SecurePoll interface. None of those glitches seem to have affected the outcome. | ” |
As a retiring arbitrator, Risker is working with the arbitrators-elect to help them move into their new roles. "Every one of them has already proven to be diligent, interested, and enthusiastic," she said.
Like last year, the results bear an uncanny resemblance to those predicted by averaging the recommendations of the 20 voter guides. Constructed by one of the election coordinators, Hahc21 (whose signature is ΛΧΣ), the table for 2013 guides got it wrong for only two candidates, both of them close to the success–failure boundary. The actual voter-guide recommendations are summarised here, and anyone who feels inclined can work out which voter guide came closest to the actual result.
We asked Hahc21 for his opinion of the success of the election, operational and otherwise. Specifically on the last phase of the election—the auditing and tallying—Hahc21 told us: "I'm quite sure that results were posted earlier thanks to Risker's and the stewards' hard work." He thinks that overall this year things ran considerably faster and more smoothly than last year, mostly because of the absence of "insane drama events", including the notorious 2012 email leakings scandal. He is pleased that 2013 is the second year in a row with an increase in the number of voters, but is concerned at the 43% of neutral votes: "This is a situation that is constantly increasing, and if we don't find a way to reduce the high proportion of neutral votes, we will have serious repercussions in the future. ... In my view, all elected users should range between 25% and 30% in abstain votes."
Hahc21 is a native speaker of Spanish, so the Signpost asked him whether he has experience of other Wikipedia ArbCom elections:
| “ | I've not run ArbCom elections on other wikis, but I've witnessed some. If I recall correctly, apart from Meta the English Wikipedia is the only one that uses SecurePoll. When the Spanish Wikipedia had an ArbCom, the elections were just like an RfA, but without a "neutral" option: you could only support, oppose or comment. The same thing currently happens at the German Wikipedia, but they have different terms from the English Wikipedia. Whereas we renew roughly half the committee each year at a single election, the German-speakers renew their entire committee each year in two staggered elections—half in May and half in November. They have a lower number of candidates: the November 2013 election had six, of whom two withdrew and the remaining four were elected. | ” |
A number of issues have recently been raised on the election talk page, such as the low number of female candidates and arbitrators (including this insight: "How would injecting Alpha females at the Arbcom level lead to "better" decisions?"), the composition of the committee, the possibility of analysing the demographics of voters, and of course the voting system.
Editors are welcome to leave their feedback on the election at the dedicated page.
Seven featured articles were promoted last week.
Three featured lists were promoted last week.
Eight featured pictures were promoted last week.
This week, the GLAMWikiToolset, or GWToolset, is being deployed to the Wikimedia Commons. It allows for GLAM organizations to batch upload content based on various metadata stored in an XML schema. In the past this has been done by various bots, but now it will be easier for GLAMs to do it directly. Users will need to be added to the 'gwtoolset' user group by an administrator before they can use the extension. For testing purposes, it is recommended that you use the Labs instance. Currently each domain must be whitelisted by a sysadmin before uploading can begin, to prevent any accidental denial-of-service attacks.
The project is being led by David Haskiya; Dan Entous and Maarten Zeinstra are the senior developers, and Kippelboy is the GLAMwiki facilitator. The entire extension has been documented on mediawiki.org, including the technical design, the implementation, and the architecture.
More information about future plans can be found on the project page.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
