Single-page edition for 2014-07-16

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16 July 2014

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World Cup dominates for another week

This week it's still more and more World Cup, with five entries out of the top ten (and 14 out of the Top 25). While tennis and pop culture make a few cameo appearances, the Indonesian presidential election is the only hard news subject to draw sufficient attention to make the list. Since this week's data goes through 13 July, the date of the World Cup final, next week should see a great shift to other topics of interest.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.

For the week of 7 to 13 July 2014, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Amazon.com	1,234,236	The Amazon.com article suddenly reappeared in the top 25 a few months ago after a long absence; then it was No. 5 two weeks ago (466,100 views), and dropped out again last week (247,821). It had a big jump again this past week, all the way up to No. 1. 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 another round of stories about Amazon and drones, as well as a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit complaining that Amazon is promoting in-app purchases by children may have contributed to this article's extreme popularity this week.
2	2014 FIFA World Cup	1,179,986	Down from 1,604,100 views last week, the tournament came to a close on 13 July with Germany defeating Argentina in the final match.
3	FIFA World Cup	1,049,265	The broader article on the history of the World Cup 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. Up from 758,356 views last week.
4	Indonesian presidential election, 2014	653,933	The presidential election in Indonesia was held on 9 July, though results are not due until July 20. The race pits Prabowo Subianto and Hatta Rajasa against Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla.
5	Laverne Cox	552,258	The American transgender actress became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy award in an acting category; she was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black.
6	Lionel Messi	470,138	The Argentine forward and captain of the national team is a contender for the title of "best footballer on the planet", though he was unable to lead his team to victory in the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final on July 13.
7	Neymar	465,282	Brazil's star footballer retained great readership interest despite being knocked out by an injury in their July 4 match against Colombia. His absence led to Brazil's crushing loss in its next match against Germany; Neymar reportedly turned off his television to play poker after Germany scored its seventh (and final) goal.
8	Brazil national football team	451,828	Despite the heartbreaking loss to Germany, Brazil's fans can take solace in the fact that they have won five World Cup championships, more than any other country (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002).
9	Novak Djokovic	445,169	Djokovic won the men's singles title at the 2014 Wimbledon Championships on July 6, which day saw the bulk of the week's views for this entry.
10	Transformers: Age of Extinction	444,905	This action film, the fourth in the live-action Transformer film series, is down from #2 last week.

2014-07-16

Bot-created Wikipedia articles covered in the Wall Street Journal, push Cebuano over one million articles

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By The ed17

The Swedish Wikipedia's prolific Lsjbot, which has created a significant proportion of the site's 1.7 million articles and has nearly single-handedly pushed it to being the fourth-largest Wikipedia, was covered in the Wall Street Journal this week.

In its front page article, the US newspaper reported that the bot has created 2.7 million articles, which is apparently a reference to the Waray-Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias (where Lsjbot is also active), and that "on a good day", it creates 10,000 articles.

The Wall Street Journal's article comes as the Cebuano Wikipedia is now the twelfth Wikipedia to cross the million article mark, almost entirely from the boost of these formulaic articles. Of these, over 40% (Swedish, Waray-Waray, Cebuano, Vietnamese, and Dutch) have received significant help from automated article creation scripts. The highest depth of these five is Vietnamese, with 18; Swedish follows with 11, and the others are all under ten. By comparison, the German Wikipedia has a depth of 90.

The process of bot-created articles has proved controversial among Wikimedians; by way of commenting, German Wikipedian Achim Raschka pointed the Signpost to an entry Denis Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie, titled "Aguaxima". Diderot lamented that all they knew about the Aguaxima was that it was a plant in Brazil, yet he still had to describe it: "If all the same I mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something stupid than to find no article at all."

Disagreement with these edits even led to a proposal last year that would have banned the overuse of bot-created articles on Wikimedia projects.

Still, they are not the first Wikipedias to utilize bots to augment human article creators: in 2007, Volapük and Lombard were expanded by over 100,000 bot articles each; Tagalog saw a similar rise. Lombard editors later placed a moratorium on new automated articles and deleted most of them; the Lombard Wikipedia currently has around 31,000 articles. Volapük is hovering around 120,000, and the Tagalog Wikipedia has close to 63,000.

Waray-Waray, Cebuano, and Tagalog are three of the largest languages of the Philippines. Volapük is a 19th-century constructed language from Germany, and Lombard is a Romance language from northern Italy. Vietnamese is primarily limited to Vietnam, while Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname.

In brief

Haifa students edit for credit: University students in Haifa, Israel, are writing Wikipedia articles for class credit, reports This Month in Education. The project stems from shortly after Wikimania 2011, when Wikimedia Israel and the University of Haifa launched a humanities project that would engage with Wikipedia. Since that time, 167 new articles have been added to the Hebrew Wikipedia, coming from students in classes on world history, archaeology, Hebrew literature, Middle Eastern history, Israeli history, and Jewish history.
Printed books to disappear: PediaPress, who published book versions of Wikipedia articles for a fee, has informed the WMF that they will no longer offer this service. According to the WMF's deputy director Erik Möller, "[t]hey've sold about 15K books over that time period, not enough to break even, and the support/maintenance burden for the service is no longer worth it for them." The ability to download Wikipedia articles in PDF form will remain.
New England Wikimedians: The relatively new usergroup has launched a new website.
Wiki Loves Earth—Brazil: The conclusion of the Brazilian Wiki Loves Earth has seen nearly 7000 eligible images uploaded. More surprisingly, the contest, which cost the movement R$23,000, induced 895 individuals to create an account. The winners will be exhibited in Rio de Janeiro at an international photography event, Paraty em Foco, and published in Fotografe Melhor, which event organizer Rodrigo Padula says is a photo magazine that has the highest circulation in its genre in Brazil.
Live tweeting politician's edits: There are two new Twitter accounts that automatically tweet the anonymous edits made from US Congressional and UK Parliamentary IP addresses: @congressedits and @parliamentedits. According to ArsTechnica, @congressedits has not caught any "scandalous" edits yet, but it did catch a staffer editing the Wikipedia page on horse head masks to include Barack Obama's handshake on 8 July.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Humour

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