To close out 2013, here is the first annual traffic report, showing the 25 articles which gained the most traffic over the entire year. Rather than annotating individual topics, I thought it would be best to strip the list down to the bare essentials and then discuss any overall trends that emerge. Broad themes are color-coded in the key below. For the top 25 topics for this week, see WP:TOP25.
| Rank | Article | Class | Views |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 
|
30,437,829 | |
| 2 | Deaths in 2013 | List | 21,032,962 |
| 3 | Breaking Bad |
|
17,184,556 |
| 4 | 
|
16,930,496 | |
| 5 | World War II |
|
16,632,652 |
| 6 | Youtube |
|
15,863,520 |
| 7 | List of Bollywood films of 2013 | List | 15,734,806 |
| 8 | United States |
|
15 324 117 |
| 9 | The Walking Dead (TV series) |
|
14,506,197 |
| 10 | Game of Thrones |
|
14 222 748 |
| 11 | Yahoo! | 
|
13,473,783 |
| 12 | Nelson Mandela |
|
13,239,155 |
| 13 | The Big Bang Theory |
|
12,843,248 |
| 14 | Arrow (TV series) |
|
12,285,242 |
| 15 | Wikipedia |
|
12,119,569 |
| 16 | India | 
|
11,799,639 |
| 17 | How I Met Your Mother |
|
11,744,355 |
| 18 | Jennifer Lawrence |
|
11,335,347 |
| 19 | Sex |
|
11,180,431 |
| 20 | Eminem |
|
11,113,512 |
| 21 | IPv6 |
|
10,547,448 |
| 22 | Macklemore |
|
10,376,268 |
| 23 | Abraham Lincoln |
|
10,103,779 |
| 24 | Doctor Who |
|
10,031,624 |
| 25 | 2013 in film | List | 9,945,953 |
| Key |
|---|
| Website |
| People |
| TV show |
| Film |
| Country |
| Other topic |
The first thing that should leap out is that this list is not a random hodge-podge of disparate topics. In fact, the majority are relatively evenly split between three themes: people of interest, television, and websites. The second obvious trend is that the quality of the articles on this list is noticeably higher than for those in the weekly roundup—articles with a sustained level of high traffic are more likely to attract dedicated editors.
Determining the popularity of website articles is somewhat problematic, as it is currently impossible to say with certainty whether such views are the result of honest interest, or users accidentally clicking the Wikipedia page on Google's search list instead of the website itself. Given that the articles' respective popularities are largely inline with their sites' Alexa rankings, the latter hypothesis does seem credible. Access to more detailed search information, such as bounce rate, might help resolve the issue.
As for one of the other overarching topics—television—it seems that, with access to all of human knowledge at their fingertips, what English-speakers truly wish to know is what's going to happen on their favourite shows. Whether it intended to or not, Wikipedia has arguably become the most popular TV listings guide on the planet. With the possible exception of literature, television is the deepest and most penetrative of all forms of pop-culture, and engenders the most fervent interest over long periods; this probably explains why TV, and not films or albums, is the dominant medium on this list. Having said that, this year was also marked by a sharp rise in the popularity of Bollywood, with the Bollywood list becoming a more-or-less permanent fixture in the "Traffic report"—a reflection of the growing importance of Indian users on the English Wikipedia.
What is most interesting is which shows are present and which are not. While American shows predictably dominate (the only non-American show, Doctor Who, owes a substantial portion of its popularity here to its golden jubilee), only The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother regularly appear in the US Nielsen top 25 ratings. The rest are either genre shows likely to appeal to an Internet-friendly audience (Arrow, Doctor Who) or cable shows that draw their audiences through new channels such as Netflix.
The third running theme is people. Despite the overshadowing of Nelson Mandela's death by the more dramatic demise of Paul Walker, Mandela's long illness ensured continuous interest throughout the year and ultimately gave him a leg up in the race to posterity. It's not really surprising who Wikipedia's most popular woman and actor is. The entire world fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence this year; between winning an Oscar (and tripping up endearingly on the podium), generating record-breaking box office for her signature franchise, The Hunger Games, and starring in critically lauded autumn hit American Hustle, there was no shortage of reasons for people to follow her.
While albums didn't make the chart, musicians certainly did. Eminem released an album this year, while Macklemore was the first person since Lisa Loeb in 1994 to release a #1 single without the help of a record label. A surprise visitor was Abraham Lincoln—buoyed, no doubt, by his Oscar-winning eponymous biopic and by the 150th anniversary of his most famous oration, the Gettysburg Address.
What is the most interesting country in the world? Turns out it's the one you, statistically speaking, likely live in. The relative popularity of countries over the year tracks with their number of English speakers likely to have a secure Internet connection. In other words, the more residents likely to access the English Wikipedia, the more popular the country. The only exception, oddly, is Canada, whose citizens are apparently too humble to look themselves up. Incidentally, the same pattern holds true for every other language Wikipedia.
Let me finish by offering a shout to those topics that have intrigued viewers pretty much since the start: Deaths in [insert year here], sex and World War II. These topics know no trend, they follow no pattern; they just are, and always have been. Sex is pretty easy to explain. Just as people have always used dictionaries to look up rude words, so people will always use Wikipedia to learn about verboten topics. As for the other two? The war is still a cultural touchstone in most of the Anglosphere, and certainly in the UK, where I live. And it must be said that besides sex, the one topic that people appear to obsess about the most is death.
Thanks again to readers for all of their support, and I sincerely wish all of you a very happy 2014.
During the 2013 term, the arbitration committee closed ten cases, nine amendment requests, and 26 clarification requests. The following cases are singled out for inclusion either for drawing a large number of participants, or for being noteworthy or unusual in some way.
The Arbitration Committee's most notable case of the year, hands down, was the Manning naming dispute. Manning was then in military custody, and had just been sentenced in connection with releasing classified documents to Wikileaks. The next day, in the course of a television program, Manning's attorney announced his client's decision to be known as Chelsea instead of Bradley. Before the program was finished, the Manning article had been moved to the new name. The story of the instantaneous renaming of Manning's Wikipedia article was covered In Slate, El Comercio, the New Statesman, and TruthDig.
While the ArbCom does not have remit to examine content issues, the committee voted to accept the case mainly to address the issue of discriminatory speech and the scope of policy on biographies of living persons.
The infobox dispute centered on music topics: classical music, opera, and composers. Some editors were perceived to be aggressively adding infoboxes in areas where they did not normally edit, or adding infoboxes to high profile articles, for instance adding an infobox to articles at the last moment before they were scheduled to run as featured articles on Wikipedia's landing page. A number of long-time music editors had left the subject area, unwilling to get involved in an unproductive and long-running controversy.
Arbitrators agreed unanimously that infoboxes are neither required nor discouraged, and that decisions regarding infoboxes should be made by consensus on an article-by-article basis. They also recommended a community-wide discussion on infoboxes.
Two weeks after the workshop phase was closed, members of one WikiProject complained that the proposed decision as written was too one-sided, and that music editors "deserve smacking". Since little or no evidence had been submitted against these editors, a request was made for more diffs, but since the evidence and workshop phases were already closed, there was no discussion of this new evidence. One music editor was subsequently accused, and added to the case. The accused editor offered to provide diffs if an arbitrator was willing to take them into consideration, but received no response. In a post-mortem on that case, concern was expressed that anything that might end up in the proposed decision be first presented at the workshop to give committee members a chance for their gut feelings to be reviewed by outside editors.
The Tea party movement case was filed in February, but wasn't closed until September. The case began over a conflict over civility at ANI, and concerns over the possibility of members of WikiProject Conservatism being canvassed to participate in parallel conflicts over U.S. politics, religion, and homosexuality. The case was briefly suspended as the ANI discussion resumed, then suspended again as one of the arbitrators engaged the participants in a moderated discussion.
There was little movement in the case over the summer, when there is no officially scheduled break for the committee, and by August only a handful of findings against users had been voted on. Early in August a proposal was put forward to ban 14 editors, and several names were added to the case after the evidence phase had closed. The Signpost asked the arbitration committee if there would be any Findings of Fact to support this motion; and if editors proposed for the page ban would be given a chance to participate in the case before being sanctioned, to have any evidence presented against them, and to answer to any implications of wrongdoing. In the meantime, one of the arbitrators who had drafted the case withdrew from voting and added his name to the case along with the other 14 names.
The committee was unable to reach an agreement on the mass banning motion, but by the end of August had posted a "more traditional decision including specific findings and remedies against specific editors," and eventually enough votes were garnered to pass the various finding of fact and topic ban proposals.
While the arbitration committee does not have remit over content of articles, it agreed to take this case in the interests of use of reliable sources and maintaining a neutral point of view.
The case asserted that Argentine history articles were being systematically skewed by the use of sources sympathetic to "Nacionalismos", a 1930s Argentine political movement equivalent to Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy and Spain, and Integralism in Brazil and Portugal. The result of the use of these sources while ignoring extensive historical evidence to the contrary was compared to claiming that the South had opposed slavery in the American Civil War, or to denial of the holocaust of World War II.
The case ended with topic bans for the individuals adding this material. There were five subsequent clarification/amendment requests to the committee regarding this case, several for exemptions to the topic ban, plus an interaction ban request from the editor who had initiated the case, and who claimed they were ganging up to bully him. During the fifth request, it was determined that the editor who originally filed the case was no longer allowed to comment on amendments to the case, due to the interaction ban he had previously been granted. A complaint was filed at Arbitration Enforcement against the original filer, who replied "For three years I tried to warn the community ...the community is unable and unwilling to do anything about it. You should lift the ban and let them do whatever they want. That's what's going to happen anyway." Twenty-nine minutes later he was blocked, and has not edited since.
Reader comments
On New Year's Day, an article by Tim Sampson published in The Daily Dot and republished shortly after on Mashable covered the currently ongoing medical disclaimer RfC. The RfC is designed to answer the question whether Wikipedia should provide a more prominent disclaimer template for medical and health-related content, drawing readers' attention to the fact that articles' content can be changed by anyone at any time.
| “ | We all know the shortcomings of Wikipedia. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit is a frequent victim to hoaxes and trolls who litter it with misinformation that can sometime last as long as a half-decade. Most of us use it anyway.
But what if you rely on Wikipedia for medical advice? As Wikipedia exerts a growing influence on our common knowledge of medicine, some Wikipedians are wondering if the site should do more to warn users about the quality of the advice they're receiving. |
” |
Sampson reviewed an earlier Boston Globe article by Nathaniel P. Morris, published in November of last year and titled "New operating system: Wikipedia's role in medical education brings awesome promise—and a few risks", which detailed just how widespread use of Wikipedia for medical information is among both the general public and medical students.
As a crowdsourced work, Wikipedia already has a medical disclaimer. However, this is very much hidden away: users wishing to read it first have to click on the "Disclaimers" link present in the small print at the bottom of each Wikipedia page, and then click on the "Medical disclaimer" link at the top of that page. As a result, the medical disclaimer is typically viewed less than 100 times a day.
Sampson quoted User:SandyGeorgia, who said,
| “ | I encounter people in real life who do not understand that Wikipedia articles are not necessarily 'vetted' in any way by experts, and medical content on Wikipedia may be written by JoeBloe your next-door neighbor. | ” |
The RfC offers four options for more visible disclaimers to be added to medical articles. While there is currently a slight majority in favour of adding such a disclaimer, other Wikipedians including James Heilman, an emergency room doctor, are opposed, fearing the disclaimer might drive away editors while having little effect on reader behaviour.
An RfC wishing to institute such a highly visible change in Wikipedia would need to end in fairly clear consensus and have the benefit of broad participation, something not many policy RfCs achieve. The Wikimedia Foundation acknowledged the debate via its spokesman Jay Walsh, but did not take a side: "The outcome may be no outcome, but the Foundation recognizes that the conversation is happening," Walsh said. Even so, Sampson noted,
| “ | ... supporters hope a change can be effected before a calamitous medical error is attributed to bad information originating from Wikipedia. As one user put it: "To those who say that no real harm has ever come to anyone as a result of Wikipedia, why should we wait for an incident to happen?" | ” |
Dariusz Jemielniak's Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia is the newest book about Wikipedia, published in Poland in 2013 and with an English edition forthcoming in 2014. The title of the Polish edition, Życie Wirtualnych Dzikich (lit. Life of the Virtual Savages), comes from one of the seminal works of ethnographical research, The Sexual Life of Savages by Bronisław Malinowski, and as the title implies, is a work of virtual ethnography. It is also a work in sociology of organizations, as this is the author's professional area of expertise, and as such, an extensive treatment of topics such as Wikipedia's governance and culture.
Jemielniak starts his work dispelling some myths about the collective intelligence, with an insightful critique of works such as Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur. It is here that we first see the author's dedication to the project; he is an experienced Wikipedian (User:Pundit), with quite a few hats, including the administrator and bureaucrat flags on the Polish Wikipedia. This is one of the main factors distinguishing this work from most of the existing treatments of Wikipedia. While most of the small group of authors who published books about Wikipedia are also Wikipedians, and some of them (such as John Broughton of Wikipedia – The Missing Manual or Andrew Dalby of The World and Wikipedia fame) sport a longer career with a higher edit count, Jemielniak is both the first administrator in that group, and the first writer to focus on more than just the English Wikipedia (a major theme of his work is a comparative analysis of the English and Polish Wikipedia). As such, this work offers a number of unique insights, and is a valuable companion to the existing literature on Wikipedia.
Following the brief introduction, the book covers Wikipedia history, culture, governance and policies, a chapter that is required for the general public, but will contain few revelations for readers of the Signpost or the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, who are likely quite familiar with issues such as the gender gap in Wikipedia, or incidents such as Roth's letter to Wikipedia, to name just two of the items in history of Wikipedia covered in this chapter. That said, a number of incidents related to Polish Wikipedia may be of interest, as Jemielniak's discussion of them may likely be the first time they are mentioned in an English language publication. In particular, an incident in which Jemielniak himself influenced the Polish Wikipedia's Manual of Style, by arranging to have an expert issue a language opinion, which was then used as a reliable source, is quite interesting. Sadly, although Jemielniak is usually very good with providing links to various pages, this particular incident, discussed on pages 43 and 44 of the Polish edition, is not supported by any source within the book.
Jemielniak, while clearly an invested member of the Wikipedia community supportive of the project's mission, is not beyond criticizing a number of Wikipedia's elements. His constructive if critical remarks begin in force with the book's second chapter, dedicated to hierarchy and roles. Early on, he points to the question of editors' equality, noting that Wikipedians are hardly equal, with the poor treatment of IP editors being most visible. The inequality does not end there, with the number of edits, awards, and electable roles determining the position and status of more advanced editors. In a dedicated subchapter he points to the inefficiency of the request for adminship procedure, which he discusses in the context of hierarchy and power: Wikipedia may have relatively low hierarchy of power, but editors are not equal, and the fissure between regular editors and nearly-irremovable, effectively elected-for-life admins is quite significant. He recalls a number of RfAs which were clearly a "free for all", noting that they become circuses where policies like civility or no personal attacks seem to be put on hold, as the discussion became a social ritual of "humiliate the candidate", becoming the last moment when the "regular editors" can express their dissatisfaction with the admin caste, otherwise seen as immune to their concerns or criticism. Recalling his own experience with the imperfect administrator recall procedure, he notes that "adminship is no big deal – up to the point one risks it being taken away" (p. 82), observing that despite the myth to the contrary, adminship is perceived in the community as a very, very big deal indeed. Declaring the notion of an administrative cabal laughable on the surface, he points out that there is a grain of truth to it – admins talk to one another, including privately, "secretly" and off wiki, and they act, more or less consciously, as a part of a group that holds power over regular editors. Jemielniak argues that the notion of editor equality is a subconscious, invisible and unrealistic pillar of Wikipedia, one that when confronted with the reality of editors not being equal leads to problems and growing divisions within the community. Thus the inequality between editors, which in the "ideal Wikipedia" would not exist, subconsciously annoys editors, and is significantly responsible for the problems with retention of editors, electing new administrators, and cohesion of the community, of whom a significant portion entertains some notions of the existence of a "real cabal". In this, his research fits into the wider paradigm of scholarly literature concerned with social inequality, and with its common conclusion that inequality is the major cause of the vast majority of problems in human society.
In a subsequent chapter, discussing the conflict resolution, Jemielniak notes that conflicts are at least as common as collaboration, and offers an insightful analysis of the "Gdanzig vote". Outside a number of observations about this particular, peculiar moment in Wikipedia history, he offers a number of broader observations, such as that despite Wikipedia:Consensus claim to the contrary, established consensus is nearly impossible to change. Organizations (and people in general) are inimical to change, and on Wikipedia experienced Wikipedians who have already discussed a topic once are rarely fond of returning to it, thus they are likely to torpedo any attempt to reignite a discussion. This in effect disfranchises new editors of the right to change the existing status quo, and ensures that Wikipedia's bureaucratic environment continues to fossilize in the current state. Another interesting critique of the Wikipedia dispute resolution mechanism is that reaching consensus through constructive discussions, influencing others and mediating a middle ground, is often a myth: conflicts are too often won not by the most eloquent editor with the best sources, but by the most stubborn users, who outlast any opposition; he terms this a "domination model of conflict resolution" (pp. 122, 123) (in which this reviewer is reminded of this interesting wiki essay); he also describes a "stalemate model", in which a simmering conflict continues for a long time, sapping editors' energy and producing nothing but mostly useless archives of talk page rants, going in circles. Jemielniak does not deny that friendly and constructive collaboration does occur, but he draws attention to the "hidden truth" of Wikipedia – that this ideal way is not the only way that disputes are solved around here.
Following that, Jemielniak makes an interesting observation of particular interest to researchers: that the entire topic of social control on Wikipedia is significantly under-researched. To address this, in a dedicated chapter Jemielniak discusses the topics of control on Wikipedia, comparing Wikipedia's transparency to a Panopticon, enhanced with the "end of forgetting" paradigm: a society where everyone can observe everyone else, one in which information almost never disappears, is easily findable again, and thus where mud sticks forever. This influences Wikipedians' behaviour in numerous ways, for example leading experienced editors to use a new form of speech, one which has to account for the fact that anything they say may one day be used against them in some wiki court of wikilaw. Other social norms concern topics such as when and where to reply to other editors, norms that interestingly have evolved differently on the Polish and English Wikipedias (although those particular standards may merge back over time with the spread of the new echo extension).
Later Jemielniak discusses the topics of privacy and the "anti-expert" attitude on Wikipedia, starting with a case study of the wiki-classic Essjay controversy. He notes that this attitude is required for Wikipedia to function as an open project; if editors arguments were given weight based on their real life achievements, this would alienate a vast majority who are not officially recognized as experts. An interesting point being made in this chapter is that editors trust not so much other editors as they trust the Wikipedia system and procedures (which through its Panopticon social control and other mechanisms is designed to keep the troublemakers at bay), and that the byproduct of the trust in the system is how we can assume good faith. In a more general context, Jemielniak makes a valuable observation that through Wikipedia, we are seeing a very interesting redefinition of the very essence of what it means to be an expert, and the related mode of knowledge production, at least in the open-source community.
The second to last chapter discusses the ever-favorite topic of Jimbo Wales, often called the benevolent dictator of Wikipedia. Jemielniak sees him as once having a potential to become a real dictator of the project, but who has forsaken this path, both through conscious decisions and through mistakes in exercising his power at the wrong time and fashion. Interestingly, Jemielniak notes that Wikipedia, despite officially claiming that it is not a democracy, has numerous democratic elements, often supported by Wales, and this vision of Wikipedia governance, incompatible with leadership of a dictator, constitutional monarch, or such, significantly contributed to the marginalization of Jimbo's official influence (not to deny his extensive charismatic authority).
The last chapter focuses on the interesting dynamics between the Wikimedia Foundation, local chapters and the community. Here, in discussing the extensive bureaucracy of this project in the final chapter, Jemielniak's work is yet another in a long chain of works which clearly points out the ridiculousness of Wikipedia's claim that it is "not a bureaucracy". Of course, as he admits, Wikipedia is far more than just a simple bureaucracy, as it has elements of anarchy, adhocracy and several other models; he himself calls it a heterarchy, which he defines as a "meritocratic adhocracy with a dispersed power structure" (p. 259). Besides the discussion of bureaucracy, this is perhaps the most innovative part of the book, and also one of most interest to a casual Wikipedian reader, as here Jemielniak touches upon a number of issues that have never before been discussed in detail, let alone in an academic, analytic fashion. Some of the most interesting observations concern the often problematic relations between the Foundation and the chapters, the professionalization of the Foundation and the chapters, the Foundation organizational and managing strategy, lasting communication problems between the Foundation and the community, and the rather negative perception of the Foundation, vocally expressed by at least some dissatisfied members of the community. In his concluding remarks for this chapter, Jemielniak also concludes that the most active members of the Wikipedia community can be seen as social movement activists, whose ideals are related both to those of the FLOSS and free culture movements, as well as Wikipedia itself.
The book closes with a more theoretical discussion of whether the Wikipedia model of organization is that of freedom and liberty, or social control, and a more developed analysis of how Wikipedia is transforming our governance and knowledge creation, with an interesting analysis of why certain traditional groups (such as experts) can feel endangered by the project, and perceive it as a threat to their continued existence.
In the end, this is an excellent ethnographical and organizational analysis of the Wikipedia project, and a valuable addition to the (still tiny) library of core texts on Wikipedia.
Reader comments
It is a difficult task to stand back and summarise what happened during a whole year for such a sprawling, complicated phenomenon as the Wikimedia movement. This was the year in which one journalist described the flagship site, Wikipedia, as "wickedly seductive". It was the year Wikipedia's replacement value was estimated at $6.6bn, its market value at "tens of billions of dollars", and its consumer benefit "hundreds of billions of dollars".
But it was also the year in which one commentator forecast the decline of Wikipedia—that the project and "its stated ambition to 'compile the sum of all human knowledge' are in trouble" from its shrinking volunteer workforce, skewed coverage, "crushing bureaucracy" and 90 percent male community (sure enough, the statistics for edits and editor numbers over the past year are looking queasy for most projects, although page views are holding up).
The Signpost explores one take on what 2013 was for the movement.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Zero scheme was a stand-out success. Wikipedia Zero provides free mobile access to Wikipedia in developing countries, and during the year expanded into India, Kenya, and Myanmar, and nine other countries. While the Foundation's official Q&A page has been only sparsely updated over the past months, by April the program had potential to reach 517 million people.
The Foundation's first individual engagement grants (IEGs) were offered in 2013, with rounds in April and December. The scheme was introduced in January 2013 to empower individuals or small teams of volunteers to tackle long-term on-wiki problems, as opposed to the chapter-focused Funds Dissemination Committee. The scheme favours innovation, long-lasting impact, and the efficient use of funds. Diverse projects have been funded during this first year. Some examples: an ambitious workshop for women aimed at creating a new model for bringing them into the Wikimedia movement; a project that will enable more than 6000 documents in Javanese, spoken by about 80 million people, to be digitised in their original script rather than transliterated into roman script for uploading and use in Wikimedia projects; and projects that will significantly enhance the utility of Wikidata and VisualEditor, and maps on WMF projects; and an international collaboration to create an e-learning centre in an African village.
Wikidata, the new WMF project launched in 2012 and largely developed by the German chapter, has been edited more than 100 million times and now has some 14 million pages (edging up fast to the English Wikipedia's 30 million). Growth during the year has seen the creation of more than a thousand "properties", the key structures that allow sets of data to be linked to each other. Thus far, the MediaWiki software has proved quite capable of this scaling up. The Signpost understands that performance and software stability are regarded as up to expectations for this stage, and that it is becoming possible to build projects on top of Wikidata.
GLAM-Wiki (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) had a remarkably successful year, moving forward on several fronts. In the US, a so-called "Boot Camp" was held at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC; the same institution has also announced plans to create a virtual internship for Wikipedians and uploaded thousands of images. The Swiss Federal Archives has partnered with the local Wikimedia chapter to publish source materials online, while Fundación Joaquín Díaz has hooked up with Wikimedia Spain. On-wiki, a major individual engagement grant was awarded for the Wikipedia Library, which has continued providing free accounts for websites like JSTOR that are stuck behind paywalls.
Wiki Loves Monuments successfully completed its fourth year, with 52 countries taking part—up from 35 last year. With support from Wikimedia Argentina, Antarctica was even able to take part. The winner portrayed an electric train crossing a viaduct in the snowy Switzerland Alps, but overall more than 370,000 files were uploaded by nearly 12,000 photographers, totalling nearly 1,300 Gb (1.3 terabytes). The success of WLM, now the world's largest photographic competition, appears to have been underpinned by dynamic volunteer leadership.
The Chapters Association folded during its meeting at the Hong Kong Wikimania. In the Association's year-long existence it was mired in controversy: the use of the trademarked term Wikimedia in its name was contested by the Foundation; there was dithering on proposals to recruit a so-called secretary-general and several other employees, and to incorporate the Association and set up a physical office in a European country; and its inaugural chair, Ashley van Haeften (Fæ), resigned. Decision-making and organisation appeared to elude the Association from the start; even the votes at Hong Kong to dissolve it and abolish its constitution failed.
On the English Wikipedia, flops less spectacular were nonetheless frustrating to many editors. The perennial issue of admin reform still hangs over us despite a well-meaning series of RfCs in January that became so convoluted that they seemed to disappear up their own navel. The lead of the German Wikipedia remains a distant mirage—they just went ahead and reformed their admin system in 2009 (helped by a consensus model that requires only majority community approval). A similar fate met yet another attempt to redesign the main page of the English Wikipedia, by now a tawdry reminder of the way the internet used to be. Again, the anglophone tendency to have a good squabble in every direction got in the way.
But this turned out to be a meek precursor to the storm that would erupt in October when an extensive network of clandestine sock-fuelled paid advocacy was uncovered. It appears that Wiki-PR had built a nice little earner through deceptive onwiki behaviour, and was boasting publicly about having 12,000 clients. Such is the potential of paid advocacy to affect Wikipedia's reputation for balance that the issue hit the talk pages like wildfire and was widely reported in the international press. The Signpost's own investigation turned up a tweeted bragging by one manager in which he named two major corporate clients whose custom he had just secured—a tweet that was disabled within an hour after our publication (we took a screenshot in anticipation). WMF executive director Sue Gardner released a press statement on the matter, followed in November by the WMF's cease-and-desist letter to Wiki-PR demanding that the company abide by our site policies.
April saw the extraordinary revelation that French volunteer editor Rémi Mathis had been summoned to the offices of the French interior intelligence service, DCRI, and threatened with criminal charges and fines if he did not delete an article on the French Wikipedia about a radio station used by the French military. This heavy-handed behaviour was all the stranger because the article apparently making cortisol flush through spooks' bloodstreams had remained largely the same for four years and contained similar information to a publicly available video showing a tour of the military base in question. Wikimedia France asked: "Has editing Wikipedia officially become risky behaviour in France?"
While Aaron Swartz was the highest-profile loss, each year sees the deaths of several Wikimedians whose contributions have had an impact on the movement. The sad loss of Jackson Peebles was a recent example. Jackson was a college student from Michigan who was a Teahouse host, an instructor in the Education Program, and the lead on a video tutorials project.
On a different level, sad was the fact that many national governments in the high-tech age are redoubling their efforts to block or restrict access to Wikipedia. This notably includes the Chinese block of the secure version of the project, and the passage of a new Russian law that allows the easy blacklisting of Wikipedia topics by government officials.
The most controversial topic on the English Wikipedia was the introduction and subsequent retreat of the VisualEditor. The tool, which allows users to edit Wikimedia sites without learning the complicated code of wikimarkup, was deployed as an opt-out beta in July. It almost immediately faced strong opposition from the established community, largely because at the time the tool was frequently breaking pages and lacked support for references, templates, and image captions. A later request for comment also went poorly, and the VisualEditor was rolled back to an opt-in basis in September. Having been prematurely launched as a beta, one of the most important innovations in the history of the movement remains a work in progress. It is already processing edits faster, overcoming an early complaint about its performance. The roll-out schedule for WMF projects is here.
Outsiders might be forgiven for wondering how one person's change of gender identity could provoke an editorial tempest of Hurricane Katrina proportions. Soon after US soldier Bradley Manning was sentenced for her role in the Wikileaks saga, she announced through her lawyer that she would henceforth assume a female identity as Chelsea Manning. With lightning speed, the Wikipedia article on Manning was renamed to reflect her new name, pronouns within switched accordingly. A rapid-fire edit war ensued: the article name moved back and forth between male and female versions, and there were multiple edits and reverts at the gender-identification section at the Manual of Style (MOS). The issue was ramped up towards scandal status with an arbitrator's blocking of multiple admins and fisticuffs about the whole scenario at ANI. Then the policy on editing through protection came under the spotlight when it appeared that the boundaries of acceptability had become rubbery. The furore ended up at ArbCom, which on closing the case was critical of "disparaging references to transgendered persons' life choices or anatomical changes [and] excessively generalized or blanket statements concerning motivations for wishing the page title to be 'Bradley Manning', [which] significantly degraded good-faith attempts to establish a consensus on the issue." The committee applied remedies against six individuals, including one for involved administrator actions. The case received considerable coverage in the outside media.
Sexism is a sensitive word in the Wikimedia movement given the gender skew of editors and coverage. An issue tagged humorously by some people as categorygate was started when American novelist Amanda Filipacchi wrote an op-ed for the New York Times expressing concern at a process of "moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the 'American novelists' category to the 'American women novelists' subcategory", noting that there is no category for "American men novelists". In a follow-up, she revealed that as soon as the op-ed had appeared, "unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules." Filipacchi subsequently argued that sexism is "a widespread problem" on Wikipedia. This controversy also received wide coverage in the press.
The usual types of drama occurred throughout the year with the inevitability of a ticking clock. From a wealth of pass-the-popcorn events we selected just a few to remind readers of our phylogenetic origins:
This is mostly a list of non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 31 December 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The last 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)
The year 2013 has come and gone, adding 50 new WikiProject Reports to our long list of projects we've had the privilege to meet. Last year saw the continuation of our Babel series, featuring WikiProjects from other languages of Wikipedia. We also expanded our selection of special reports, offering readers a growing collection of helpful tips and tools as they participate in WikiProjects. We plan to continue both of these features in the new year, but could use your help translating and interacting with Wikipedians at other language editions of Wikipedia. We also need your feedback to understand what new special reports you'll find most useful.
When I wrote my first "Where Are They Now?" feature in 2010, the WikiProject Report already had a small collection of previous interviews, but the Report appeared in the Signpost infrequently due to difficulties in finding editors with the spare time to conduct interviews and write the Report week after week. In 2010, I was part of a cadre of new writers joining the Signpost with high hopes for a renewal. We took turns writing the Report, resulting in weekly editions released with the greatest quality and consistency the column had seen up to that point. However, as real life took its toll on the time that other editors were able to commit, our weekly schedule was shouldered by fewer and fewer writers until only I remained. I have gladly held the torch for the past few years, but it was a huge relief when Buffbills7701 offered to carry some of the burden during the past five months. The Signpost could use many more writers like Buffbills7701, in this column and others. I welcome anyone willing to give it a try. Drop a note at the WikiProject desk and we'll find a spot for you in the schedule.
Following in the footsteps of our 2007—2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 retrospectives, today we're revisiting the projects we met in 2013. Where are they now?
Scholarly pursuits took center stage last year, ranging from the humanities to the physical and social sciences. WikiProject Linguistics introduced us to voiceless pharyngeal fricative sounds and the wide world of diaphoneme. WikiProject Heraldry and Vexillology showed us a variety of escutcheons and warned of the dangers of bucket shops. Meanwhile, WikiProject Psychology played on our darkest fears by calling out Wikipedia's articles about human intelligence as embarrassingly feeble minded.
Scientifically speaking, WikiProject Astronomy insisted that colorful pictures can't cover up the project's sourcing issues and typos galore. The experts at WikiProject Biophysics ran a contest and showed us how complicated an article can get. From Elements to Earthquakes, we had no shortage of sharp Wikipedians sharing their studies.
We turned to WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome for all the latest gossip on Nero. For their seventh consecutive year of WikiProject Report coverage, WikiProject Military History focused on their preparations for the 70th anniversary of D-Day coming this summer. The legal and philosophical musings of WikiProject Freedom of Speech opened our eyes to issues world-wide. In search of deeper meaning, we stumbled upon WikiProject Religion where editors touch upon a wide array of interrelated fields.
For a project bridging the realms of technology and entertainment, WikiProject Television Stations spent a surprisingly long time discussing legal matters. For a more dramatic interview, WikiProject Soap Operas brought us a topic in which the British are clearly more enthused than their American counterparts.
In the world of computing, WikiProject Computing may be the oldest, but WikiProject Apple Inc. is king. On a software level, nobody can contest the success of WikiProject Square Enix.
For athletic pursuits, WikiProject National Football League brought the gridiron to life while WikiProject Mixed Martial Arts fought for attention. Handling the most grueling competitive sport we explored in 2013, WikiProject Chess showed they had what it takes to make it through the endgame.
Our forays into music were twofold. WikiProject Composers reminded us how passionately Wikipedia's editors defend their most prized material while our second visit to WikiProject U2 showed us a project where enthusiasm continues to grow even as activity waxes and wanes.
For a fun ride, WikiProject Amusement Parks won't disappoint. The hobbyists at WikiProject Philately have certainly put their stamp on Wikipedia's international coverage. WikiProject Wine offered us a taste of their struggles keeping articles about emerging wine regions on par with the traditional wine countries. WikiProject Fashion confided in us that they actually do a better job covering historical fashion than contemporary trends. And then there were the pictures from WikiProject Dogs, which really need no introduction.
The WikiProject Report has a long history of traveling the world and 2013 added more destinations to the passport. From Norway to South Africa to Indonesia, we found Wikipedians hard at work. In the United States, the city of Pittsburgh and the state of Tennessee brought us local flavor while WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court Cases brought precedents with wide-reaching implications. In the Commonwealth, WikiProject Wales showed us an often overlooked side of the British Isles while WikiProject Australian Roads gave us an excuse to talk about roadsigns for kangaroo crossings. Tying all of our travels together was WikiProject Airlines, where the journey is as important as the destination.
We continued our Babel series, seeking out active WikiProjects at other language editions of Wikipedia. We played baseball with the Japanese and football (soccer) with Spanish-speaking parts of the world. We discussed politics in Turkey (but not exclusively Turkish politics) and mixed our nationalities with the French WikiProject Tunisia. We're on the lookout for other strong WikiProjects in other languages, so drop us a line if you know of one.
Each year, we find ourselves interviewing more and more WikiProjects that work behind the scenes, improving Wikipedia as a whole rather than focusing on a narrow subject matter. This year, six projects showed us how important these less-glamorous aspects of Wikipedia can be.
From the meta-data and usability standpoints, we learned plenty from WikiProject Infoboxes, WikiProject Geographical Coordinates, and WikiProject Accessibility. For infoboxes, the greatest concern was finding consensus regarding when and how infoboxes are used on articles, a concern that some editors feel very passionately about. With geographical coordinates, the big question is how to make the addition and correction of these useful bits of data more user friendly for the average Wikipedian. Meanwhile, the accessibility project shared their frustrations regarding the inconsistency of browsers and screen readers, but held hope for better standardization by organizations like W3 and WCAG as well as improvements to Wikipedia's interface.
WikiProject Good Articles gave us a detailed interview, highlighting the tireless work both by editors who write Good Articles and by those who review them. Today's Article for Improvement offered an interesting initiative to give greater attention to stub and start-class articles. WikiProject Editor Retention shared their efforts to make Wikipedia a more inviting place for editors to call home.
This year, we paid special attention to a variety of interesting topics. Our biggest splash was extensive coverage of what was then a little-known concept called WikiWork offering a way to measure a WikiProject's workload. Our coverage caught the attention of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, and now you'll find WikiWork statistics included by default at the bottom of article assessment tables for nearly every WikiProject.
We solicited questions from our readers for a Frequently Asked Questions feature in April and presented lessons gleaned from inactive and defunct WikiProjects in October. Our final Report of 2013 featured the return of a popular special we originally ran in 2011, showing great project logos designed by the creative Wikipedia community.
Next week, we'll interrupt your local programming for a project with broad appeal. Until then, rediscover our wide coverage of WikiProjects in the archive.
Reader comments
<br\> Over the past year 1181 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured picture candidates (FPC), which promoted an average of 46 pictures a month. This was followed by featured article candidates (FAC; 32.5 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 18 a month). Featured topic and featured portal candidates remained sluggish, each promoting fewer than 15 items. Although in February a proposal was made to revive featured sounds, ultimately nothing came but silence.
This year, the Signpost has counted sets promoted at FPC as multiple promotions, owing to a change in the counting method; so the total amount of featured content promoted this year is not directly comparable to that promoted last year. However, it seems to have been an increase no matter what: as covered last year, in 2012 a total of 963 pieces of featured content were promoted, whereas sets account for fewer than 100 additional pieces of featured content. The average number of promotions for FAC, FPC, and FTC has increased, while FPOC has remained constant and FLC has actually decreased.
At FAC, common topics continue to include male political and military figures, ships, television episodes, and songs, generally from the US, Britain, and Australia. FLC has remained dominated by discographies and sports figures, predominantly from the US, Britain, and India; an increasing number of filmographies have also been promoted, as well as some bibliographies. FPC, as with last year, remains dominated by animal species, works of art by European and American artists, and similar subjects.
| Month | Articles | Lists | Pictures | Topics | Portals | Total |
| January | 25 | 19 | 68 | 0 | 4 | 116 |
| February | 14 | 22 | 47 | 0 | 0 | 83 |
| March | 42 | 19 | 37 | 2 | 0 | 100 |
| April | 25 | 19 | 25 | 2 | 0 | 71 |
| May | 45 | 17 | 39 | 0 | 2 | 103 |
| June | 36 | 24 | 86 | 1 | 0 | 147 |
| July | 37 | 23 | 46 | 1 | 0 | 107 |
| August | 44 | 15 | 34 | 1 | 0 | 94 |
| September | 35 | 26 | 23 | 0 | 0 | 84 |
| October | 31 | 13 | 57 | 4 | 0 | 105 |
| November | 34 | 12 | 70 | 1 | 0 | 117 |
| December | 22 | 7 | 24 | 0 | 1 | 50 |
| Total | 390 | 216 | 556 | 12 | 7 | 1177 |
2013 saw a lot of changes to MediaWiki software and Wikimedia infrastructure. From Wikidata to the Score extension, nearly all areas of the site saw improvement. Over 5,900 commits were made to the core MediaWiki codebase by over 200 different authors. MediaWiki extensions deployed on Wikimedia sites saw over 27,000 commits, by over 250 different authors.
Major features deployed in 2013 included Wikidata data inclusion in articles, Lua modules for faster and more advanced templates, Notifications for users including thanks, opt-out deployment of the VisualEditor (eventually reversed), and much more. At the same time, some older features like the "orange bar of doom" and certain less-used skins were removed.
On the backend, the Redis job queue was deployed, and a new caching center in San Francisco started serving traffic to users in Oceania with an RFP for another one still pending. Users now login using HTTPS by default, and plans were made for future HTTPS improvements.
Hiccups and bugs were experienced along the way, with the most severe being private user data being leaked through Wikimedia Labs. Overall, 10,845 bugs were filed in 2013, and 5,760 were marked as fixed.
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.
