Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/From the editors
The 2014 Winter Olympics had more of an impact on the Top 25 than the Top 10, which had to shoulder old stalwarts like the death list, Reddit threads, TV shows and the eternal presence of Facebook; still, with four slots, it's the most searched topic on the list. Other topics of interest for the English-speaking world this week include Facebook's purchase of the mobile messager WhatsApp and the new trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, which from the looks of things could spell another hit for Marvel Studios.
For the full top 25 report, including exclusions, see WP:TOP25
For the week of 16 to 22 February, 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 | 2014 Winter Olympics | 
|
819,448 |  |
The 2014 Winter Olympics drew to a close this week. Thanks to Russia's vicious anti-gay laws and roundly condemned political imprisonments, this has become, whether it wanted to or not, a lightning rod for modern civil rights protest. |
| 2 | House of Cards (U.S. TV series) |
|
768,302 | The second season of this political thriller series was released in its entirety on Netflix on 13 February. | |
| 3 | Curling | 
|
690,932 |  |
The first major event at the Olympics, competitive ice resurfacing (sorry, curling) remains one of the quaintest and most intriguing. |
| 4 |
|
652,803 | The mobile messaging service, which has a reputation as the site kids use to avoid their parents snooping on their Facebook pages, exploded into the public sphere when people wondered why on Earth Facebook would pay $19 billion for it. | ||
| 5 | True Detective (TV series) | 
|
544,945 | This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey. | |
| 6 |
|
511,120 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article | |
| 7 | Guardians of the Galaxy (film) |
|
507,948 | In the great Hollywood high-dive, Marvel Studios has no time for the safety cord. The phenomenal success of their current run of films was built on risk, and this is their riskiest project yet; a $100 million-plus space opera mega-epic about a bunch of guys you've never heard of, including a talking raccoon and a walking tree, directed by a guy who worked for Troma, and whose last film's lifetime theatre gross was exactly $327,716. Well, its first trailer was released on the 18th, so how did it do? Judging by its social media impact, spectacularly. Or at least better than Man of Steel. | |
| 8 | Ice hockey at the 2014 Winter Olympics – Men's tournament | 
|
502,792 |  |
A surprisingly specific article for the top 10, an indication of the event's popularity. Incidentally, Canada won gold; the US barely missed the podium. There will be some rowdy bars in Ottawa tonight. |
| 9 | Playboy Bunny |
|
487,854 |  |
Wearers of the first service uniform registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office became a topic on Reddit this week. |
| 10 | Deaths in 2014 | List | 454,253 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/In the media Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/Technology report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/Opinion
Following a trend started by Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Argentina has published an open letter challenging the recent deletion of hundreds of images from the Commons under its policy on URAA-restored copyrights, relating to the United States' 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act. In part, it reads:
Volunteers from Argentina have been among the most affected by the policy adopted by Wikimedia Commons administrators regarding images that could fall under URAA copyright provisions. Argentine copyright law provides that images enter the public domain “only” 25 years after their production and 20 after their first documented publication. This relatively generous criterion has enabled unaffiliated volunteers and we as Wikimedia Argentina to enrich Commons with hundreds of thousands of historical images that are absolutely free under Argentine law: images of the political and every day life of the country, of its culture, of its popular idols, of its joyful and dark days, of its customs and architecture.
However, over the last months certain Wikimedia Commons administrators have conducted massive deletions of these contents, in many cases involving entire categories. The burden of proof has been inverted: instead of having to justify the deletion of a certain file, things go that volunteers have to devote their time trying to justify the validity of their efforts. This has caused great damage, not only by way of our readers losing access to free educational contents, but also de-motivating many editors and volunteers by making them feel that their efforts are ultimately vain and that our goal of free knowledge for everyone is being replaced by a certain legal fetishism whose reason gets lost in processes and misses the outcome.
In an effort to comply with the Berne Convention, the URAA regranted copyright protection to some works that had been previously free to use. Unsurprisingly, it quickly faced vociferous legal challenges; the largest, Golan v. Holder, failed on the steps of the US Supreme Court in 2012. The conflict on Commons stems from the location of the Wikimedia Foundation's servers, which are used to host all of Commons' images and are in the US, making them subject to US laws. Compounding this are the several Wikipedias—including four of the top nine by article count—which outsource their local image hosting to Commons.
The issuing of the open letters prompted a response from the Foundation's Board of Trustees. Under "on content", the board's chair Jan-Bart de Vreede stated that "The WMF does not plan to remove any content unless it has actual knowledge of infringement or receives a valid DMCA takedown notice. To date, no such notice has been received under the URAA. We are not recommending that community members undertake mass deletion of existing content on URAA grounds, without such actual knowledge of infringement or takedown notices." An impromptu vote to restore all images deleted to comply with the URAA is currently underway, with a majority in support as of publishing time.
One oppose vote came from Lupo, who wrote that "The WMF has told us several times that all files hosted must be free in the U.S. And now we should ignore the URAA? A U.S. law, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court? Just because the WMF doesn't like it?" Odder, who also opposes the proposal, called back to Commons' core principles: "... files have to be released under a free licence or be in the public domain both in the country of origin and in the United States. Undeletion of files that are unfree in the US will be in direct contradiction to this core principle of ours." In supporting, ליאור wrote that "6.7 billion non-American people should not be affected by an extremist interpretation of an intra-American affair." Supporters have also suggested adding a URAA-specific disclaimer to affected images that would warn US content reusers that they could face legal action.
Discussion is continuing on Commons, and Wikimedia Israel's Spain's, and Venezuela's open letters are available on Meta.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-02-26/Humour
