Almost as long as there has been speculative fiction there have been speculative fiction anthologies. This seems to be a particularly fruitful time for them, fueled by electronic publishing and sites like Kickstarter which can bring together a niche idea and its audience. Accordingly, the anthologies are getting more and more specialized, with recent examples like Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Queen Victoria's Book of Spells and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. In this vein is a particularly esoteric anthology of speculative fiction, filled with imaginary Wikipedia entries from, as the introduction puts it, "the many Wikipedias across the Multiverse."
The cover, which appears muddled and garish in .jpg form, is striking in hard-copy: pastel green and blue framing a distorted Unisphere, which of course resembles the Wikipedia logo. The book is edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, which at first I thought was an amusing pseudonym befitting a postmodern project like this one, but who is actually a real person, a veteran speculative fiction author and founder of the feminist science fiction publisher Aqueduct Press. Thankfully we have Wikipedia to clear up such matters.
The fictional encyclopedia is hardly foreign to speculative fiction. Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction series Foundation is punctuated with excerpts from entries from the future Encyclopedia Galactica. The device became so famous that Douglas Adams could easily parody it with his spacefarer's travel guide The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Wikipedia itself has also been creeping into fiction, such as the recent example of Matt Ruff's 2012 novel The Mirage, which features excerpts of entries from an alternate universe Wikipedia called the Library of Alexandria. Using Wikipedia entries themselves as the actual story is a new innovation, however. It's one of those delightful ideas that seems obvious in hindsight but inspires jealousy in those who didn't think of it first.
Using Wikipedia entries as a storytelling device is an idea full of possibilities and challenges. The dry, neutral tone of Wikipedia, often the butt of jokes and complaints, presents enormous difficulties to a writer, who must find a way to use that often emotionless tone to carry the emotional weight of the story. Most of the writers in the anthology are comfortable with the basic format of Wikipedia articles, and most of the stories feature well-placed and appropriately used tables of contents, citations both real and fictional, citation needed tags, and article warning banners. Some of them, however, mangle the format in ways that would make a veteran editor wince. Many of them have introductions that don't ring true as Wikipedia article introductions, with one article beginning by stating the subject of the article "is a figure of paradox" or another whose introduction refers to the subject only by her first name and omits her last. Others falter when they try to use citations and tags in unusual ways. One story ends with the sentence "Citation removed by unknown source", which instead of creating menace or mystery, seems laughable to those familiar with the workings of Wikipedia.
Both of these aspects of dealing with the Wikipedia form are well illustrated by the anthology's first story, "Mystery of the Missing Mothers" by Kristin King. At the heart of the story is an extraordinarily intriguing idea connecting the paucity of maternal figures in modern corporate fiction to Sumerian mythology, one that seems well suited to the format of an encyclopedia article. King is the only author to construct her tale as a series of articles instead of a single article to simulate the experience of a reader following links to each one in succession, a clever approach which allows her story more flexibility and a broader range. Aside from a few minor things, the articles are largely convincing as Wikipedia articles and real and fictional citations mingle comfortably. But her story, like a number of others in the anthology, is overly reliant on lengthy excerpts from fictional texts that would not appear in a real Wikipedia article to carry the story forward in ways the encyclopedic tone of Wikipedia cannot. And that tone fails in other ways, making menacing elements seem ridiculous or the intentionally black comic seem slapstick.
The majority of the stories in the anthology are metafictional texts which operate in the framework of another fictional text, the kind of story made famous by novels like Wide Sargasso Sea, Grendel, andThe Wind Done Gone. Editing the original story like it was a Wikipedia entry, they reimagine the story from the point of view of a secondary character like those three novels do or reinterpret the story through an entirely different frame of reference. Here we have a resistance movement to the fascist government of Flatland, Tolkien's Galadriel in a future world of cyborgs and artificial intelligences, "Bunnypedia" documenting the life of notorious reprobate and Planned Rabbithood founder Peter Rabbit, and a mash-up of Heart of Darkness and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Mark Rich's stories initially read like graduate term papers about Edgar Rice Burroughs' Dejah Thoris and Rudyard Kipling's The Light that Failed, but he quickly weaves fantastic reinterpretations of these ideas. There are so many of these metatexts that they are accompanied by a story that functions as a sort of parody of this mini-genre, Jeremy Sim's amusing "Thaddeus P. Reeder", which posits that the "Dear Reader" addressed by so many Victorian novelists was actually a real person who grew up with the Brontë sisters. Nick Tramdack's "The Gimmerton Theory", which has Heathcliff, during his absence from Wuthering Heights, on the Continent mingling with characters from the works of the Marquis de Sade, is among the best of these, though overly reliant on a lengthy but well-written text excerpt. And perhaps the best story in the entire volume is Alisa Alering's "Madeline Usher Usher", which casts the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a lovestruck stalker preying on Poe's wraith-like character, reimagined as both a victim and a creative force in her own right.
Fantasy is another popular genre in this anthology. One of the biggest highlights of this book is Mari Ness' trio of amusing tales set in a world where Wikipedia matter of factly documents the doings of fairies and other fantastical creatures. She also proves the most hilarious fictional citation in the book: I Cannot Take Any More of These Dying Birds and Mournful Songs: The Collected Correspondence of Marguerite-Amelie d'Seductrice-Levres, La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Catherine Krahe's "The Blacksmith" is remarkable in that it manages to wring a mysterious and haunting tone out of Wikipedia's normal emotionless prose. Nisi Shawl's "The Five Petals of Thought" is the most successful of these as a Wikipedia article, as it takes the perspective of an objective observer trying to interpret the history of a mysterious religious movement which might be something else entirely, with the book's most well-placed citation needed tags on a statements that might be vandalism or might hint at the more fantastical nature of this enigmatic group.
Disappointingly, few of the stories are overtly science fiction. Perhaps for these authors the nature of the anthology seemed more appropriate to rewriting the past than the original research of writing the future. Duchamp's own story "Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett" is the seemingly straightforward biography of a 25th-century author most famous for the 2407 "alien visitation fable" New Amazonia. Its closest analogy may be not from the world of science fiction, but the nonfiction work A View From the Year 3000 by Michael H. Hart, which places biographical articles about fictional people representing posited future trends alongside the biographies of the likes of Washington and Einstein. But the story is more complex than it appears, as Duchamp's Aqueduct Press is also republishing an 1889 utopian science fiction novel called New Amazonia by a 19th-century Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett. Corbett is an author so obscure I initially thought that New Amazonia and Corbett's Wikipedia article was part of an elaborate hoax, a postmodern art project that stretched beyond the bounds of this anthology. But what Duchamp has done was to, instead of reinterpreting a fictional text, reinterpret a real person's life in fictional terms, using the future setting to examine contemporary issues, just as Corbett and other utopian novelists did. Corbett's fictional biography, especially her conflicts with the Standards & Values Party, illustrates that future citizens will wrestle with many of the same issues that we do today, but also reminds us that progress has been made, as the real Corbett was a journalist who wrote under the name "Mrs. George Corbett" while the future Corbett wrote under her own name and was a Privy Councilor and Eve Fawcett Chair in Ethical Studies at New Cambridge College.
Jeremy Sim's "Sanyo TM-300 Home-Use Time Machine" is another of the few overtly science fiction stories in the anthology, and it is also one of the few stories to manipulate the format of Wikipedia itself to serve the story. It is a classic cautionary tale of technology gone awry and Sim's article changes in real time as the story progresses and the article is "vandalized". It is only marred by the insertion of lines like "edited by amorris, 09:59 5 September 2010", which wouldn't appear in any Wikipedia article and the story is effective enough that these crutches are unnecessary. Duchamp concludes the volume with two other stories that also dramatically subvert the encyclopedic format: Anna Tambour's "God", a satirical "biography" of a deity as juvenile delinquent, and Lucy Sussex's "La Cucaracha Rules", which begins with a flurry of warning banners and becomes a bizarre romp that quickly dispenses with the idea that it is any sort of encyclopedia entry.
Missing Links and Secret Histories is a fascinating experiment. While a number of the stories fail at what they set out to do, even in the worst cases the attempts are interesting to watch. The territory it explores leaves much terrain unmapped; science fiction and alternate history (Alex Dally MacFarlane's excellent "Gerayis (or Gedayis)" is the only story here that might be labeled alternate history under an expansive definition of the term.) are particularly promising genres for this format. I hope it is only the first anthology of its kind and not the last.
Philippe Beaudette's July 2013 application of pending changes level two (PC2) on the article Conventional PCI—an action taken under his job as the Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Community Advocacy and its rarely used office actions policy—has escalated to the Arbitration Committee after an editor upgraded it to full protection.
In this case, pending changes were applied after a DMCA takedown notice was issued to the Foundation. The notice forced the WMF to remove links to PCI's Local Bus Specifications revisions 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0, according to its official policy governing takedown notices:
| “ | In some cases, the Foundation may be required to remove content from a Wikimedia Project due to a DMCA take-down notice. ... to retain safe harbor status, the Foundation is required to comply with validly formulated notices even if they are spurious. ... As a matter of policy, the Wikimedia Foundation will terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of repeat infringers as provided under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 512). … In the event that material is removed due to a DMCA notice, the only recourse for restoring such material is to file a counter-notice with the Foundation. ... Please note that filing a counter-notice may lead to legal proceedings between you and the complaining party to determine ownership of the material. | ” |
English Wikipedia administrator Kww objected to the nature of the protection, since an extensive discussion determined that PC2—which requires review before edits from autoconfirmed and anonymous editors—"should not be used" on the English Wikipedia. While Kww will typically downgrade PC2-protected articles to PC1 or semi-protection, in this case he increased the level of protection (to "fully protected"—only admins can edit) to avoid PC2 from being active on an English Wikipedia article. Doing so put him into conflict with the Foundation for the second time in recent memory; in September, Kww implemented what the Foundation called "badly flawed" code blocking the VisualEditor.
In response, Beaudette wrote Kww that he "just spoke to the legal team about your actions and asked them what to do. ... We select the level of action very specifically and with a great deal of care. If you have a problem with it, you're invited to contact us prior to taking action. That's the minimum standard expected of any admin when overriding an action, much less an office action." Beaudette advised that "On any other wiki, I'd be removing your tools right now. However, on this wiki, because there is a functional Arbitration Committee, I'm going to, instead, refer this to them for them to determine what sanction to take."
As of publishing time, the Committee is voting 6–1 to admonish Kww for "for knowingly modifying a clearly designated Wikimedia Foundation Office action." The motion continues that Kww did so without "any emergency and without any form of consultation", and declines his request for a full case, as it would involve a review of an inviolable office action.
Fifteen featured articles were promoted in the last two weeks.
Nine featured lists were promoted in the last two weeks.
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Twenty featured pictures were promoted in the last two weeks.
One featured topic was promoted in the last two weeks.
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On 15 January, the English Wikipedia turned thirteen years old. In that time, this site has grown from a small site that was known to only a select few to one of the most popular websites on the internet. At the same time, recent data suggests that there is a power law among users, where the comparative few who are writing most of Wikipedia have most of the edits. The result of this is that there is going to be bias in what is created, and how we deal with it as Wikipedians is indicative of the future of the site. Furthermore, this brings up what we have to do in order to combat this bias, as there are many ideas, but the question is whether they will work or not.
Every Wednesday, various charts are updated that show trends in editing. These include lists on the top editors, top article creators, and overall bot edit counts, as well as what editors have made the most edits in the last thirty days, which is updated less than the others. Over the past few years, there have been periodic attempts at deciphering this information to figure out what it all means, although as far as I know, no one in the Wikimedia Foundation has published reports using this information. When I came across these lists in 2011 and decided to put these trends on a chart and see what it all meant, unsurprisingly, some interesting trends came up. Fast forward to two weeks ago, when I decided to update the charts for the first time since November of 2012, and I had no idea what I would discover.
One of the more interesting trends that I found during the many hours that I built the charts was how many edits a rather select few Wikipedians have when compared to the rest of the site's users. In terms of overall numbers, 45% of the edits on Wikipedia have been done by a combined ten thousand editors and the 850+ bots on the site. When charted onto a line graph, there is a distinct power law that rises sharply for both bots and editors. Interestingly, the top bot (Cydebot) has more than three times the top edits than Koavf, the editor with the highest edit count on the site. These high number of edits have helped to push the bots into a significant percentage of the overall edits on the site, totaling 12%. As of the publication of this article, there are 20,590,000+ users on the site, meaning that .052% of Wikipedian users (bots included) have a vast majority of the edits.
Even more surprising was the numbers on article creators. Most Wikipedians who are active on the site have written an article or two, some being as simple as a stub, or some that have been expanded to a Featured Article. Other times, users focus on expanding existing articles, due to knowledge on a specific subject area. Other users, myself included, have created hundreds or tens of thousands of articles. To find the time to even create an article thoroughly takes time and dedication, and it is likely that many of these articles were created as stubs. This is shown in the fact that the top 3,000 editors have written 55% of the articles on the entire site. Adding in the next 2,000 editors shows that they have only written 5% of the articles, but it shows that 60% of the articles on this site have been written by 5,000 users, which equates to .026% of the site's overall users. Of note are the numerous IP addresses that show up on these page creation lists, as before 2005 users were allowed to anonymously submit articles (a feature which was removed because of the Seigenthaler incident). On the list, the IP address 67.173.107.96 has 983 live article creations, a number which places it at 459th on the list.
One question that should be asked about the fact that so few editors are writing so many articles is why this is occurring. Wikipedia can often be harsh to new users, as the amount of rules both written and unwritten can scare off even the most dedicated of writers. Those who stay seem to be ones who want to contribute and write more for the site, but the data seems to show that these are an incredibly select few individuals when compared to the over twenty million usernames that have been registered over the years. Furthermore, with declining editor counts, this number is only going to become more of an issue over the years as the Wikipedians who are left will probably start expanding into more niche topics, ones that are not easily researchable to the average person with stable internet access.
One other question that this brings up are what are the costs of having so few editors who write so many articles. In theory, having fewer users write more articles brings standardization to the site, as there are fewer differences in prose and article quality. In reality though, having so few users means that there is going to be an implicit bias in what is written, to degrees which have already been shown through the work of the Wikimedia Foundation. With the already low numbers of females on the site, this means that there will be more coverage of male-oriented topics. If an article is not covered immediately, there is a good chance that it will be created in the coming years. Unfortunately, this means that whatever female-oriented topics are out there will probably get further neglected, as there is less of a chance that someone will even know that the subject exists, never mind it being notable enough for an article (when in doubt, go for it). The amount of these super page creators only exacerbates the problem, as it means that the users who are mass-creating pages are probably not doing neglected topics, and this tilts our coverage disproportionately towards male-oriented topics.
Finally, the last question that is brought up is why are the majority of editors only responsible for 60% of the articles. Most users are aware of the Article wizard, while fewer know about Articles for creation (side note, if you can, please volunteer there, as they have been flooded in the past couple of years by new articles and are in need of knowledgeable Wikipedians for reviews). Oftentimes, articles that are created in either of these two venues that are created by inexperienced users are deleted or shot down before the users have any idea what is going on. This can be a discouraging issue and dissuades users from helping out. Other times, they will come seeking help, but will get discouraged when the topic that they have been working on is deemed unnotable. Most likely, many more Wikipedians out there have attempted to create an article, but because it is deleted, the data skews slightly more in favor of pushing the number of edits towards experienced Wikipedians, who then go on to hold a slightly more majority of article creations as well.
The Teahouse has been a successful model of helping new editors along in the process. Through providing guidance to new editors, they have found great success in their endeavors. Additionally, mentoring editors and guiding them towards working on articles that they might not have originally thought of working on can also be a good way to direct their enthusiasm into something positive. Through the channeling of talent and encouraging and redirecting editors onto viable paths, it is possible to ensure that a greater amount of knowledge will be present on the site in the coming years. Finally, the Wikipedia Education Program and Wiki Education Foundation have also attempted to make inroads in the classroom, by encouraging students to become more involved with the community through their school work.
The final part of this is whether or not these attempts will work. A community that is dedicated to fixing and addressing the issues that exist on the site is a community that will succeed. In the past, many ideas at reform have been met with resistance from the community, often with mixed results. Other times, approaches to fix these issues run counter to what others want to do in the community, so some editors end up unintentionally (or intentionally, for that matter) sabotaging the intentions of reform-minded users, although this can also be expected in a large community where people have differing views.
In the end, it is up to us as a community to ensure that the site continues for another thirteen successful years, as we are part of one of the greatest social, intellectual, and academic experiments on the internet. Our success in the coming years will be based on how we choose to address these issues, so it is imperative that we attempt to correct these issues while there are still people interested in editing the site, in order to continue to strive to be the most important encyclopedia in the world.
This week we're interviewing Brion Vibber about the then-upcoming Architecture Summit. Brion is a long time Wikipedian, the first employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and currently the lead software architect working with the mobile team.
What do you hope to get out of the Architecture Summit?
Are there any requests for comment or topics you're especially looking forward to discussing and implementing?
What do you view your role as an architect as?
Recently, there have been discussions about Wikimedia's needs versus the needs of other MediaWiki users in terms of software development, and now the MediaWiki release process has been contracted out to a third-party. Do these differences affect your decisions as an architect?
You've said that a push is being made for a MediaWiki 2.0. Code aside, what do you think some of the biggest difficulties will be in working towards that goal?
Many Wikimedia communities felt that the Foundation was not receptive enough to feedback during the VisualEditor deployment. As a longtime community member and MediaWiki developer, what is your take on the situation?
It's been a little over a year since your last interview with the Signpost. Anything interesting and exciting that you've worked on since then that you'd like to share?
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. Content incorporated from Tech News.
An article in USA Today announced a European-funded project called RoboEarth that is designed to give robots a mechanism by which to access information to dispense. The project is backed by five technical universities in Europe who recently met in the Netherlands.
| “ | But RoboEarth is more than an encyclopedia. It has a system of networked computers that allow it to perform intensive computing tasks that smaller computers—or in this case simpler robots—may not be able to. It also allows individual robots to communicate between themselves, the so-called RoboCloud of networked computers, and the robot database. | ” |
Several articles this week noted that Wikipedia is now 13 years old. One, from Mashable.com, opined that Wikipedia has "reshaped the knowledge industry". The article noted that one of Wikipedia's de facto competitors, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has made changes due to Wikipedia, including a 2005 report from Nature that asserted Wikipedia is almost as reliable as Britannica in terms of accuracy despite the encyclopedias' different methods of publication—crowdsourcing for Wikipedia, and top scholars with rigorous review processes for Britannica. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), noted that, in the opinion of WMF, "In a nutshell, our biggest challenge in 2014, the 13th year of Wikipedia, is: How do we continue to grow that community of global editors?" He went on to say, "How do we sustain that growth, and how do we support the people who are editing Wikipedia today?" The article concluded by wondering what Wikipedia's future holds:
| “ | With more than 30 million articles in 285 languages, Wikipedia seems to be the awkward teenager, sometimes struggling to hide its growing pains. But as the site attempts to come of age, one can't help but wonder what it might turn into if it's around anywhere close to the nearly 250 years Britannica has endured. | ” |
While the 71st Golden Globe Awards, held on 12 January, had an impact on the top 25, their presence was largely absent from the Top 10. With the exception of Best Actor winner Leonardo DiCaprio, the only Golden Globe entrants in the Top 10 are films that would have been there anyway. The most prominent film on the list remains The Wolf of Wall Street, which didn't even win in the Best Drama category. It will be interesting to see if this disinterest carries over to the Oscars in March.
For the full top 25 of the week, including exclusions, see WP:TOP25.
For the week of 12–18 January, 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 | Dian Fossey | 
|
2,807,879 | The controversial gorilla conservationist whose life was dramatised in Gorillas in the Mist got a Google Doodle on what would have been her 83rd birthday if she hadn't been murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1985. | |
| 2 | Jordan Belfort | 
|
799,325 | Onetime stockbroker who spent 22 months in prison for running a penny stock boiler room, he went on to write the books that the film The Wolf of Wall Street is based on. | |
| 3 | Sherlock (TV series) | 
|
741,350 |  |
The contemporary-set revamp of the Sherlock Holmes mythos has become a surprise global hit (and turned its star, Benedict Cumberbatch into an international sex symbol) and is now watched in 200 countries and territories (out of 254), so it's not surprising that its much ballyhooed return from a two-year hiatus was met with feverish anticipation. |
| 4 |
|
735,322 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article | |
| 5 | The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 film) |
|
669,530 | Despite not winning a Golden Globe, Martin Scorsese's acclaimed account of one person's contribution to our general economic misery remains popular with the public; it opened to a respectable $34 million on Christmas Day, and has now made almost $125 million worldwide. | |
| 6 | American Hustle (2013 film) |
|
495,752 | David O. Russell's Golden Globe-winning, star-studded caper is getting strong reviews and decent box office, having grossed $108 million domestic in its first 38 days. | |
| 7 | Leonardo DiCaprio |
|
465,193 |  |
The superstar got a Golden Globe for his performance as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (see above). |
| 8 | Deaths in 2014 | List | 442,753 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
| 9 | Sunanda Pushkar | 
|
414,873 | The curious case of a minister's wife, who was found dead by her husband, Shashi Tharoor, after having received texts suggesting he had been having an affair with a journalist, has excited the Indian press after the coroner ruled her death unnatural. | |
| 10 | United States |
|
410,618 |  |
The 8th most popular article of 2013 and the 3rd most popular Wikipedia article between 2010 and 2012. Even when not on the list, this article is 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. |
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