Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/From the editors
With Game of Thrones over for another year, the World Cup dominated yet again. And that is pretty much that. This list isn't likely to be particularly eventful until the Cup is won.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of 15–21 June, the ten 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 FIFA World Cup | 
|
2,526,115 |  |
With former winners England, Spain, Italy and Uruguay now out, and old stalwart Mexico denied a place in the quarter finals thanks to a Dutch goal at the literal last minute, this World Cup has been nothing if not surprising. And with Costa Rica coming out of nowhere to the shock and awe of everyone, the surprises are sure to keep coming. |
| 2 | FIFA World Cup | 
|
935,760 | The broader article on the history of the competition may have been accessed by people looking for the long view, but in truth it was probably more to do with people looking for the more specific article above. | |
| 3 | Transformers: Age of Extinction | 
|
770,945 |  |
Usually, when a big-shot director is tired of a franchise, the studio will offer him a juicy pay packet to stay on; Paramount gave Michael Bay an entire movie so he would agree to continue to prop up their tent-pole series, which is all the more vital since Marvel and Indiana Jones are now at Disney. The movie's 17% RT rating (even lower than for the much-reviled entry, Revenge of the Fallen) shows just how much commitment Bay brought to the project; that said, its $300 million worldwide opening (of which $100 million was from the US and $90 million, thanks to some shameless in-movie pandering, was from China) shows audiences don't really care. |
| 4 | Cristiano Ronaldo | 
|
504,713 |  |
2013's Golden Ball winner is a prime contender for the "best player on the planet" title. His popularity is such that he is on this list despite the fact that Portugal were kicked out at the first round after losing 4–0 to Germany. |
| 5 | Amazon.com |
|
466,100 |  |
This article suddenly reappeared in the top 25 a few months ago after a long absence; it's always difficult to determine the reasons for the popularity of website articles (how many are simply misaimed clicks on the Google search list?) but there are at least two possibilities: first, it released its digital media player, Amazon Fire TV on April 2, and second, it is currently embroiled in a dispute with publisher Hachette that could decide whether book publishers even need to exist in the post-digital world. |
| 6 | Neymar |
|
453,305 |  |
The 22-year-old wunderkind has scored four goals in the four matches Brazil have played this tournament, including one of the penalties that moves them past Chile to the quarter final. |
| 7 | Luis Suárez |
|
449,362 | .jpg) |
The Liverpool forward had already earned the nickname "the vampire" for his peculiar habit of biting people during matches, but his latest bout of bloodthirst (against Italian defender Giorgio Chiellini) has proven particularly controversial, as the match ban he received for it was arguably responsible for Uruguay's exit from the World Cup. |
| 8 | 2010 FIFA World Cup |
|
427,400 |  |
The current World Cup has buoyed interest in the last one, with people doubtless looking for parallels, clues for upcoming matches, or omens. |
| 9 | Lionel Messi | 
|
425,487 |  |
The Argentine forward and captain of the national team is another contender for the title of "best footballer on the planet". FIFA certainly thinks so; he won the Golden Ball award three years in a row. He scored a goal in each of the games Argentina played in the group stage, making him a key element in the team's qualification for the knockout stage. |
| 10 | Marfan syndrome |
|
411,191 |  |
The genetic disorder thought by some to have afflicted figures as diverse as Abraham Lincoln and the Pharaoh Akhenaten got into the news this week when Isaiah Austin, a former basketball player for the Baylor Bears, received an honorary NBA draft pick after being forced to end his career due to a diagnosis. |
The Los Angeles Times highlighted a recent Wiki Education Foundation (WEF) course at Pomona College in their article "Wikipedia pops up in bibliographies, and even college curricula". We interviewed Char Booth, the campus ambassador for the course, for additional details.
The article discussed the changing attitudes among academia toward Wikipedia, characterizing academia's earlier sentiments of Wikipedia as "the bane of teachers ... amateurish, peppered with errors and too open to nasty online spats over content." The article cites Wikipedia's early anti-establishment user base for the initial rejection of degreed academics and quotes Kevin Gorman, himself a WEF Regional Ambassador and Wikipedian in Residence at University of California, Berkeley, speaking about the ongoing need to diversify beyond the "basically techno, libertarian, white dudes" so prevalent since the early years of Wikipedia.
The course, Poli3, came to Wikipedia through a working relationship between Booth, a WEF campus ambassador and librarian in the Claremont Colleges consortium (of which Pomona College is the founding member), with a fellow Claremont librarian, Sara Lowe. Booth, a self-described champion of "the pedagogical use of Wikipedia" needed an interested faculty member to host the program. Lowe introduced Booth to Professor Hollis-Brusky in the summer of 2011. After hours of conversations and many e-mails the course's first entrance to Wikipedia happened in the Spring of 2012 and has become an annual event since. The practice of sending students to create a new Wikipedia article or develop a stub for a grade rather than writing a traditional research paper is a cornerstone of the collaboration. The LA Times article quoted Professor Hollis-Brusky: "Even the best research papers get buried in a drawer somewhere... [t]hese make a real contribution to the public discourse."
The Times mentioned four of the articles assigned, namely First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Federalist No. 70, FairVote, and Clean Diamond Trade Act. Because the class was comprised of 28 students, articles were assigned as group projects. Each student group developed their collective work in stages from outlines to drafts in order to refine the scope of the project and eliminate redundancy. Although each student had registered their own Wikipedia account, much of the editing was performed in sandboxes by single-purpose accounts both to protect student privacy and to reflect each student group's consensus product. Booth says that the end results were some very student-focused articles and that the effort "has been successful beyond my wildest expectations." Not only does she expect the annual Poli3 course to continue its association with Wikipedia but she also expects another political science class and perhaps three others in the near future.
The LA Times posits, again quoting Kevin Gorman, that Wikipedia "has essentially become too large to ignore." The Times mentions recent initiatives from both the American Sociological Association and the Association for Psychological Science to bring academic editing into Wikipedia to ensure the reliability of what the general public reads. It also mentions the recent series of edit-a-thons in the LA-metro area organized by East of Borneo, a Cal-Arts sponsored online magazine, as proof that industry professionals are increasingly reaching out to contribute in a cooperative manner. The article further mentions that the Wiki Education Foundation coordinated with more than 150 different courses across the US and Canada in the Spring Semester of 2014, including classes at Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, San Francisco, and Boston College.
When asked about her role as a campus ambassador while also employed as a librarian, Booth replied that it's a "really natural relationship." She sees her role as a librarian as a function of developing student information literacy skills as well as bringing them to resources. She says that Wikipedia is a public resource and everyone who enjoys what she calls "information privilege" should consider their responsibilities toward informing that resource. Though she does not consider herself a Wikipedia editor she identifies as an "educator who uses Wikipedia" seeking to improve the public knowledge base.
A study published in the June 26, 2014 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine found that Wikipedia articles often fail to reflect the latest FDA guidance. As reported by CBS News, the study's authors:
| “ | [...] looked at 22 drug safety warnings regarding prescription medications that the FDA issued over a two-year period between 2011 and 2012. The warnings covered drugs used to treat conditions such as high blood pressure, hepatitis C and leukemia. Starting 60 days prior to each FDA warning and continuing until 60 days afterward, the study authors assessed the informational accuracy of Wikipedia entries related to each drug. [...] Overall, 41 percent of the relevant Wikipedia entries had been updated within two weeks following an FDA safety warning. Nearly a quarter (23 percent) took more than two weeks to update, while more than a third (36 percent) still didn't reference the FDA warning a year after it was issued, the study authors said. |
” |
The authors suggested that the FDA should take a more active role in Wikipedia curation, stating that "our findings also suggest that there may be a benefit to enabling the FDA to update or automatically feed new safety communications to Wikipedia pages, as it does with WebMD." The study attracted coverage from CNN, US News & World Report and more specialist publications such as Medical Marketing & Media.
On a closely related matter, The Wall Street Journal (June 17, 2014), The National Law Review (June 23, 2014) and others covered the recent publication of the FDA's draft social media guidance for companies producing prescription drugs and medical devices. The draft guidance suggests that companies should feel free to correct misinformation in sites such as Wikipedia themselves, or alternatively could contact an article's author to advise them of any errors. Comments on the FDA's draft guidance are invited before the finalized version will be released.
Also on June 23, the online news blog of the Cochrane Collaboration published a piece written by members of WikiProject Medicine, titled "Is Wikipedia’s medical content really 90% wrong?". The piece critiques a study published in May 2014 by The Journal of the American Osteopathy Association, which concluded that nine out of ten Wikipedia articles on the costliest medical conditions had factual errors, leading to numerous news headlines such as "9 out of 10 health entries on Wikipedia are inaccurate" (see previous Signpost coverage). Health IT Outcomes published a brief report on the same topic (June 30, 2014).
TIME (10 June 2014) and many other major news outlets reported that a number of major PR companies, including Ogilvy & Mather, Edelman and Porter Novelli, had published a statement indicating their commitment to respect Wikipedia's guidelines, policies and terms of use (see Signpost coverage).
| “ | Public relations firms and Wikipedia’s team of volunteer editors reached a truce Tuesday in their ongoing battle over who has the right to edit entries in the online encyclopedia. In a statement today, 11 large PR and advertising agencies vowed to abide by Wikipedia’s rules, which ban ad teams from editing articles for pay or trying to influence the tone of articles without disclosing their affiliation with a client. | ” |
The statement can be viewed on Wikipedia.
| “ | The most influential historical figure on Wikipedia, per a recent paper by researchers at several European universities, is none other than the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus—a.k.a., the guy who invented the system we use to classify plants and animals." | ” |
| “ | Jemielniak provides a wry, brave analysis of his adventures since November 2006, when he decided to infiltrate Wikipedia’s editor/administrator communities. Much of the time, he was a star, rising to become a steward (top dog) within the Polish Wikipedia community, and winning significant status in the English-speaking version of Wikipedia, too. But he also got in some nasty spats with other Wikipedians.
Jemielniak nods briefly to the standard portrayal of Wikipedia as a collaborative place where the tyranny of experts has been broken down. In this version, everything is in good hands, thanks to a giant, crowd-sourced dynamic that is gently self-correcting and incredibly productive. But as an insider, Jemielniak offers a spicier account of the site in action. [...] Overall, Jemielniak portrays himself as an optimistic critic—appreciative of Wikipedia’s strengths and hopeful that the flaws can be sorted out. He calls Wikipedia "an insanely ambitious project to compile all human knowledge," adding that its social organization is "fascinating, unique and inspiring." |
” |
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Wikimedia Germany's Toolserver project was switched off, marking the end of one of the Wikimedia movement's longest running Chapter-led projects. The Toolserver, which was in fact a collection of servers, first came online in 2005, hosting hundreds of webpages and scripts ("tools") made available for use by Wikimedia readers, editors and administrators.
The Toolserver is survived by its spiritual successor Wikimedia Tool Labs, part of the broader "Labs" project begun by the Wikimedia Foundation as far back as 2011 (see previous Signpost coverage). Tool Labs already holds some 800 tools, many of them migrated from the Toolserver and diverse in their nature. Particularly popular tools, many of them familiar to regular editors, include the Wikidata Game, CatScan (for finding articles in multiple categories) and GeoHack, a tool for placing article subjects onto maps. A full index is also available.
In contrast to the Toolserver, which operated a more relaxed policy, all tools hosted on Tool Labs must be open-source, allowing for a more obviously collaborative development environment. In exchange for access to the Wikimedia Foundation’s technical infrastructure, tools must be open-licensed, allowing them to be redistributed and remixed in a similar way to on-wiki contributions.
The Tools project is, however, just one part of Wikimedia Labs, which also incorporates a broad array of more than 150 other standalone software "projects" (collections of one or more virtual machines). The growing need for these other projects, which include test versions of Wikipedia and its sister projects, provided one motivation for a changeover which at times has been far from uncontroversial (see previous Signpost coverage).
Over recent weeks, the Toolserver continued to receive millions of hits per day and users are advised to keep an eye out for broken links and missing functionality as developers adjust to the new environment. In some cases, tools may need new owners to migrate and/or adopt them over the longer term. A page on MediaWiki.org records notable absences, and a table has been created to show replacements.
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. "In brief" incorporates text from Tech news, a global community-led publication prepared by tech ambassadors (subscribe or unsubscribe).
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/Opinion
Wikimedia Israel (WMIL) has won a Roaring Lion in the category of Internet and cellular for its public outreach during the tenth anniversary of the Hebrew Wikipedia in July 2013. The awards are given out annually by the Israel Public Relations Association and are modeled on the International Public Relations Association's Golden World Award.
Itzik Edri, the chairman of the board of the chapter, told us that they nominated themselves for the award after the smashing success of their planned celebrations, which included coverage in television, radio, Internet, and traditional print. About half of the coverage was pre-planned, with WMIL working with press organizations to provide accurate history and statistics: "To show the power of Wikipedia we collected a lot of numbers, such the most viewed articles of the last five years, numbers of edits, words and many others, [leading] to many items covering the history of [the Hebrew Wikipedia]", Edri said. Still, they wanted to go further.
To do so, they enlisted the help of Gideon Amichay, an Israeli advertising executive and professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Amichay went to Channel 2, one of Israel's most-watched channels, and proposed a partnership between the two. Channel 2 jumped on the opportunity, something that was unsurprising to Edri, who noted that it was a "collaborative project between the major channel news and the major knowledge website" which presented Channel 2 "as leaders—their senior staff were writing articles on Wikipedia and giving back to this huge project."
Amichay's idea manifested itself in five of Channel 2's senior reporters writing a Wikipedia article, after being trained to do so by Wikimedia Israel. The resulting five video segments, about a minute each, were broadcast over the span of a week. They received enough attention that they were shown again during the following week.
On 2 July, nearly a year after their efforts, representatives of WMIL traveled to the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv to receive their Roaring Lion. The award, which was first awarded in 2004, is given out for at least twelve categories and carries weight in the country; the Israel Public Relations Association, the organization behind the Lions, has 4000 members that represent a large majority of the PR professionals in business, the public service, and the voluntary sector. Previous winners have included the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2011, the Israeli government's Ministry of Tourism in 2012, Hassadah in 2013, and Israeli President Simon Peres' PR team in the same year.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-02/Humour
