There's nothing like a good old bit of Cold War nostalgia, combined with a suitably scary international incident, to focus our attention on the real world, and the rapidly unfolding, or toppling, situation in Ukraine clearly has tingled our collective nape, as people searched out the players and places involved in what could be the most destabilising event since the Yugoslav Wars. The Winter Olympics continued to haunt the list as well, no doubt buoyed by those same events. That said, nothing could stem our outpouring of affection for the beloved comedian Harold Ramis, whose death managed to top the week in the face of those international concerns.
For the full top 25 list, plus an explanation as to any exclusions, see WP:TOP25.
For the week of 23 February to 1 March, 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 | Harold Ramis | 
|
1,158,070 |  |
Nothing guarantees Wikipedia attention like a sudden and unexpected death, and Ramis's death at only 69 appeared to come out of the blue. People rocked in sudden recognition of the director who gave us such beloved comedies as Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation and Groundhog Day, though most probably mourned him as the guy who played huggable nerd Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters. |
| 2 | Ukraine | 
|
700,513 |  |
Things are moving fast in the country, from protest to revolution to armed hostility. It has now reached the point where anything I say will probably be obsolete by the time this is published. But it's fair to say things are getting pretty hairy; the last time Vladimir Putin asserted his manhood to his near neighbours, the conflict lasted a week. Here's hoping a similar outcome prevails now. |
| 3 | True Detective (TV series) |
|
633,432 | This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey | |
| 4 | Crimea |
|
606,887 |  |
The evil of a strategic position is to be the plaything of great powers, and, 160 years after inspiring the war that gave us the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Sevastopol,* the balaclava, and Florence Nightingale, the hapless peninsula has become so again.
*The first one, anyway |
| 5 | Internet |
|
506,413 |  |
I'm giving this the benefit of the doubt for now; there's no reason for people not to be interested in the thing off of which they are currently reading. However I suspect that it might follow IPv6 to the Exclusions list before too long. |
| 6 |
|
482,478 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article | |
| 7 | Deaths in 2014 | List | 460,121 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
| 8 | Joaquín Guzmán Loera |
|
441,481 | Some consider this head of the Sinaloa Cartel to be the most powerful drug lord of all time; even surpassing the infamous Pablo Escobar, so much so that Chicago police named him public enemy number one—the last person so named was Al Capone, and he lived in that city. His arrest on 22 February may be a harbinger of better things. Or not—the last time he was in prison, he just bribed the guards and walked out. | |
| 9 | House of Cards (U.S. TV series) |
|
441,280 | The second season of this political thriller series was released in its entirety on Netflix on 13 February | |
| 10 | 2014 Winter Olympics |
|
404,604 |  |
The 2014 Winter Olympics ended last week, but the impending Paralympics kept it in the public mind. Thanks to Russia's vicious anti-gay laws, roundly condemned political imprisonments, and questionable behaviour with his neighbours, the event has become, whether Russia wanted it to or not, a lightning rod for modern civil rights protest. |
This is mostly a list of non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 5 March 2014 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices (last two in bold). 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 includes active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections.)
This week, the Signpost caught up with the Wikipedia Library (TWL), which aims to connect reference resources with Wikipedia editors who can use them to improve articles. Funded through the Wikimedia Foundation's Individual Engagement Grants program,[A] TWL has several initiatives coming up (including "visiting scholars" and an Arabic Wikipedia microgrants program). It declares on its Wikipedia page that it has five "big goals" to accomplish:
The program relates to GLAM-Wiki—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums—by focusing on the libraries, which Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi), the overall coordinator of TWL, sees as the outlier in the original GLAM model (libraries are not cultural institutions with extensive collections): "It's totally complimentary and the lines are not well-defined. Where we get editors access to a university library's collections, they can improve articles, possibly in the area of that library's expertise". He continued:
| “ | It was GLAM Bootcamp that steeped me in the basic spiel, that cultural institutions and Wikipedians are seeking to fulfill the same mission of sharing knowledge with the same audience of the general public—so it makes sense to work together with those institutions as partners. The same case can be made for aggregators or databases of reliable sources, and with university libraries. It's another area where missions align and we can do good work together. GLAM-Wiki started all of this, and I'm just adding focus to a piece. | ” |
TWL's recent priorities were influenced in large part due to a December 2013 survey that was sent out to 1500 TWL recipients. Out of the 200 responses, Ocaasi told the Signpost that out of thirteen proposed areas for growth, an "overwhelming" amount asked for access to additional research—particularly the voluminous publications held behind JSTOR's paywalls. While TWL has a program in place with JSTOR, it only opened up 100 free accounts. This left around 200 still waiting on the list, with the potential for far more—TWL's Questia partnership had over 400 applicants, while HighBeam gave out about 1000 accounts. This has resulted in, as of publishing time, 7052 links to Questia and even more to HighBeam. Ocaasi remarked that "it's clear our pilot program has only whetted the appetites of editors for more", and "we are working very hard to expand that offering."
TWL is also in talks with the New York Times, EBSCO, Proquest, the Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Science, among others, to open up their archives to Wikipedians. They narrowly missed out with LexisNexis, even having a meeting with eight department executives, but they were unable to sort out a host of legal issues. This isn't unusual, as Ocaasi noted: "It's part of the process that we have hits and misses, both in arranging partners, and finding resources the community really wants and needs."
Beyond free accounts, what does the future look like for the Wikipedia Library? A new "visiting scholars" program affiliated with TWL offers a promising alternative: it is a pilot that will see Wikipedia editors paired with university libraries to gain access to their collections and reference resources. Ocaasi told the Signpost that such scholars would be unpaid but official staffers of the university, with remote access to the library's offerings.
| “ | Wikipedia Visiting Scholars is a mashup of two great traditions: one is our Wikipedian-in-Residence model, which places paid Wikipedians onsite at cultural institutions to help improve the visibility of their collections and improve articles around those areas of content; the second is the visiting scholar or ‘research affiliate' tradition in academia, where schools or departments within schools will grant generally unpaid but official research status to a qualified scholar so that they have a home to work on their research and publishing. ... It's both a way to crack the 'access' problem, and it's a neat model for building ties between Wikipedia and university libraries. That's the other piece of the puzzle that we want to connect, the full circle of research and dissemination, if you will, and it requires not only connecting editors to sources, and readers to sources, but also source experts (libraries) to editors. | ” |
TWL has already contacted 150 libraries, with 40 responses and 5–10 seriously interested in participating. The first visiting scholars position will be with George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
Additionally, TWL—which is, fundamentally, still an English-language pilot—is planning to expand into other languages. Its Meta timeline lists three upcoming launch dates for Wikipedia Libraries in other languages, including Arabic on 15 March. The largest amount of TWL-related criticism came from non-English-language Wikimedians, who asked why the program was concentrating only on English-language sources. Unfortunately, despite some cross-wiki participation, the program at the time "definitely lived on the English Wikipedia", said Ocaasi.
[The Arabic TWL] is a source access approach TWL hasn't tried before, in book purchases. It's also a true collaboration between a WMF-identified project and a community led program in TWL. WMF has a lot of knowledge about non-English community and helped translate and frame the consultation with Arabic Wikipedia. Now TWL gets to use its established 'account coordinator' model to expand programs into other communities.
—Jake Orlowitz ( Ocaasi)
To remedy this deficiency, TWL will be creating "satellites" on three other Wikipedias (Arabic, Spanish, German) that will be operated by the local communities. By partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation's Siko Bouterse, the organization's head of Individual Engagement Grants and Travel and Participation Support, TWL is supporting a pilot project that will award microgrants to Arabic-language Wikipedians who need funds to access sources for their article writing. Interestingly, despite a wide variety of grantmaking processes, microgrants are not something the Foundation has tried before. These grants, for a maximum of US$200 each and a total of $7000, will directly fund book purchases with minimal bureaucracy after-the-fact: editors will only have to write one sentence, including links to the article(s) improved, within three months.
TWL is founded by a WMF Individual Engagement Grant. While the original TWL grant, awarded in March 2013, was "experimental" (according to Ocaasi), the concept's success led to the grant's renewal in January for six more months for three times as much as the original US$7500. The extra funds allow for three paid contractors, including full-time coordinator Ocaasi, part-time coordinator Patrick Earley (The Interior), and technical consultant Nischay Nahata.
This year's WikiCup competition has completed the first round. Here is a summary from the WikiCup 2014 February newsletter by WikiCup judges J Milburn, The ed17 and Miyagawa.
"And so ends the most competitive first round we have ever seen, with 38 points required to qualify for round 2. Last year, 19 points secured a place; before that, 11 (2012) or 8 (2011) were enough. This is both a blessing and a curse. While it shows the vigourous good health of the competition, it also means that we have already lost many worthy competitors. Our top three scorers were:
Godot13 (submissions), a WikiCup newcomer whose high-quality scans of rare banknotes represent an unusual, interesting and valuable contribution to Wikipedia. Most of Godot's points this round have come from a large set of pictures used in Treasury Note (1890–91).
Adam Cuerden (submissions), a WikiCup veteran and a finalist last year, Adam is also a featured picture specialist, focusing on the restoration of historical images. This month's promotions have included a carefully restored set of artist William Russell Flint's work.
WikiRedactor (submissions), another WikiCup newcomer. WikiRedactor has claimed points for good article reviews and good articles relating to pop music, many of which were awarded bonus points. Articles include Sky Ferreira, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus and "Wrecking Ball" (Miley Cyrus song)."Other competitors of note include:
Hahc21 (submissions), who helped take Thirty Flights of Loving through good article candidates and featured article candidates, claiming the first featured article of the competition.
Prism (submissions), who claimed the first featured list of the competition with Natalia Kills discography.
Cwmhiraeth (submissions), who takes the title of the contributor awarded the highest bonus point multiplier (resulting in the highest scoring article) of the competition so far. Her high-importance salamander, now a good article, scored 108 points.Six articles were promoted to featured status last week.
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Three lists were promoted to featured status last week.
Ten pictures were promoted to features status on last week.
This week, we jumped into one of the most important WikiProjects of them all, the Article Rescue Squadron. The WikiProject has an uncountable number of articles that have been saved from AfD. This week, we spoke with Dream Focus and Green Cardamom to learn more about what they do and how they do it.
Next week, we'll read about bugs from a Russian WikiProject. Also, if you have any suggestions for good WikiProjects, give us a piece of your mind at the WikiProject desk. Until then, check out the archive!
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