Global Education—WMF's Perspective
13 August 2014
Leading universities educate with Wikipedia in Mexico
6 August 2014
Success in Egypt and the Arab world
30 July 2014
Education program gaining momentum in Israel
23 July 2014
Serbia takes the stage with Filip Maljkovic
16 July 2014
Exploring the United States and Canada with LiAnna Davis
9 July 2014
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Global Education—WMF's Perspective |
The Wikimedia Education Program currently spans 60 programs around the world. Students and instructors participate at almost every level of education. Subjects covered include law, medicine, arts, literature, information science, biology, history, psychology, and many others. This Signpost series presents a snapshot of the Wikimedia Global Education Program as it exists in 2014. We interviewed participants and facilitators from the United States and Canada, Serbia, Israel, the Arab World, and Mexico, in addition to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Based on discussions with Michal Lester, Executive Director of Wikimedia Israel
Last week I predicted that the World Cup dominance on the report would be over—but I was wrong. The World Cup Final fell on the 13th of July, which was actually the first day of the week covered by this report, not the last day of the last report. Hence, five of the Top 10 this week are again World Cup related-topics.
However, this week also focuses on much more serious news including the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine and the ongoing fighting in and around the Gaza Strip, which is the cause of increased viewership of a number of related articles in the Top 10 and Top 25. Although Gaza Strip was only #7 this week, in the Top 25 you'll find Israel at #14, Hamas at #17, and Israeli–Palestinian conflict at #25. And the crash in eastern Ukraine not only led to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 at #2 and Buk missile system at #3, but also caused renewed interest in the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (#19), and the 1988 shoot down of Iran Air Flight 655 at #22. Aside from football and these tragedies, the Top 10 is rounded out by the appearance of Nelson Mandela at #8 (July 18 was Mandela Day and celebrated by a Google doodle), and the recent science fiction film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes at #10, which just beat out "Weird Al" Yankovic for a place in the Top 10.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 13 to 19 July 2014, 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 | 
|
916,405 |  |
Down from 1,179,986 views last week, but still enough to lead the list. And since we've also determined that the views which Amazon.com has recently been getting (and put that article #1 last week) seem to be bot-influenced, it's been taken out of the running. |
| 2 | Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 | NA | 887,329 | .jpg) |
The tragic shooting down of this passenger aircraft over Eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 aboard, makes it to #2 on the list this week with only three days of views. While Russian-backed media is frantically trying to offer alternative and even absurd explanations for this event, it seems quite likely that Russian-backed insurgents, who had recently downed some Ukrainian planes in the same area, mistook the Boeing 777 for a Ukrainian military plane (though Ukraine would like to call it a "terrorist act" like U.S. President Ronald Reagan did regarding Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983). We can all agree it was a tragedy, however. A full investigation will need to take place, though that is being hampered by the lack of government authority and ongoing fighting in the region. |
| 3 | Buk missile system |
|
840,636 |  |
A missile fired from this Russian-developed surface to air missile system is the suspected cause of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. View counts of this article spiked very understandably on the 17th, and remain well above normal. Interesting, though the normal daily view counts for this article were in in 200s-300s range in the two months prior to the crash, they did rise to the 600-900 view range in the three days before the crash, likely as a result of reporting that the insurgents in eastern Ukraine had recently obtained and were using this weapon. |
| 4 | FIFA World Cup | 
|
831,347 |  |
The broader article on the history of the World Cup competition continued to be accessed by people looking for World Cup information. |
| 5 | Germany national football team | 
|
641,544 |  |
Germany has now won four World Cups (1954, 1974, 1990, and 2014). |
| 6 | Lionel Messi | 
|
587,197 |  |
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. Somewhat as a consolation, he was controversially given the Golden Ball award for being the best player of the tournament. |
| 7 | Gaza Strip |
|
505,588 |  |
The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, part of a very long and complicated history of conflict, is no doubt the cause of the popularity of this article this week. The military operation is dubbed Operation Protective Edge by Israel. Hamas probably has a different term, I expect; indeed the Arabic wikipedia version of the Operation Protective Edge article is called "The War on Gaza (2014)". |
| 8 | Nelson Mandela |
|
504,588 | .jpg) |
July 18 was Nelson Mandela International Day, which was also celebrated this year with a Google doodle. |
| 9 | Mario Götze |
|
500,377 |  |
This German footballer with the stylish neckbeard scored the championship-winning goal for the German national team at the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final on July 13. This was good enough to make the Top 10 this week. |
| 10 | Dawn of the Planet of the Apes |
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467,674 | This American science fiction film, the sequel to 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes, was released in Australia on July 9 and the United States on July 11, with largely positive reviews from critics. It is up from #13 last week. |
If you've read this far, here are some additional notes of interest from the raw WP:5000, which is updated every week and is the source data for the Top 10 and Top 25 lists: Though Iran Air Flight 655 (#22) was the only other past air tragedy to make the Top 25 as a result of the crash in Ukraine, many other flight incidents had increased views this week, including Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (#65), Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 (#190), TWA Flight 800 (#238), Pan Am Flight 103 (#1002), Korean Air Lines Flight 902 (#1480), and United Airlines Flight 232 (#3956). For whatever reasons, these appear to be the prior air disasters that readers were most motivated to read up on.
It took 467,674 views to make the Top 10 this week, and 271,026 views to make the Top 25. That's rarefied air among our 4.5 million articles, of course. 193 articles received over 100,000 views this week, with Masters of Sex (#193) the last to do so. Gotham (TV series) (#640) was the last to break 50,000 views; Backstreet Boys (#2277) last to hit 25,000 (no jump in views caused this position, apparently the Backstreet Boys are steadily around the 2277th most important thing in the world these days); and the 2013 film G.I. Joe: Retaliation (#5000) was last to make the WP:5000, with 16,603 views.
Reader comments
Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) today are facing fewer barriers to uploading their content onto Wikimedia projects now that the new GLAM-Wiki Toolset Project has been launched. The tool, which is the fruit of a collaboration between Europeana—the Internet portal providing access to millions of digitized files from all over Europe—and several Wikimedia chapters, relieves GLAMs from having to write their own automated scripts and gives them a standardized method of uploading large amounts of their digitized holdings.
Despite the large amount of work involved, Commons has a long history of partnering with outside institutions for media donations. The largest include the Dutch Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, the US National Archives, and the first mass image donation, Germany's Bundesarchiv.
In an email to the Signpost, Europeana's relatively new GLAM-Wiki coordinator Liam Wyatt noted that "the current system", which forces these GLAMs to write customized scripts or find a rare editor willing to do all of the work for them, "is not sustainable." The toolset, "for the first time", changes that dynamic, allowing "the reasonably-technically competent and motivated GLAM to share large amounts of multimedia to Commons ... this is a giant leap forward in giving GLAMs the ability to share with Commons on their own terms."
They will still need editors to donate their time to facilitate these partnerships, as someone needs to explain the value of Wikimedia projects and overcome objections. Still, as Wyatt says, both sides will no longer have to "spend considerable time managing the technical side of uploads ... all built by themselves by hand."
On the GLAM side, there is a fairly large amount of work that needs to be done prior to uploading any images, most of which revolves around the media's metadata. While a simple concept, it is exceedingly complex in practice; as a previous Signpost op-ed noted, "there will be no single unifying metadata 'standard' ... biosharing.org lists just under 200 metadata standards for experimental biosciences alone. ... any solution to handling digital objects must have a mechanism for handling a multiplicity of standards, and ideally within an individual object". Between that and the MediaWiki software, which does not natively come with simple methods of uploading metadata, much of the toolset's multiyear development was spent on this problem.
Wyatt told us that the tool's overall impact will be to make Commons more palatable to GLAM managers who are deciding between Commons and its chief competitors, Flickr and Google Art Project. "If you're a busy GLAM multimedia manager, both of those platforms are significantly more user friendly in their upload usability to a non-technical person", Wyatt says.
"We can talk about the value of free knowledge and the massive visibility that Wikipedia provides until the cows come home, but if we can't enable those GLAMs that do want to share their content with us to do it by themselves, with their own metadata, at their own pace... then we are placing ourselves at a significant disadvantage."
While still in its infancy, the toolset has already allowed Fæ, a London-based Wikimedian and former trustee of Wikimedia UK, to upload hundreds of thousands of images from the New York Public Library, Library of Congress, Rijksmuseum, and historical American Buildings Survey. The Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision), the first GLAM to use the tool, uploaded 500 videos of Dutch birds (cf. press release).
Four Wikimedia chapters (Netherlands, UK, France, and Switzerland) provided funding for the project, which Europeana has spent four years developing. It was first announced in 2011.
The toolset's software developer, Dan Entous, told us that the toolset:
| “ | ... uses a flat xml file, containing metadata related to all of the items you intend to upload to commons, and a step-by-step process of mapping that metadata to a mediawiki template on commons. The mediawiki template will display a thumbnail or medium size representation of the digital file and a table of mapped metadata. The initial step-by-step process walks you through setting up the batch upload process, and once you are satisfied with the results (after having tested the process on Commons beta), will run a background process on Commons that will upload all of the items listed in the metadata file.
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I'll start in a position contrary to my declaration: I think DYK is a great idea.
Now for the bad news. It's not working. I've been editing Wikipedia since May 2005 and only recently, having worked on WP:ERRORS for a while, have I become aware of the slow but inevitable heat death of a behemoth of the main page. DYK pre-dates my involvement with the grand project by a couple of months, but looking back, and comparing the rules then to now there's been little change.
One tale often related is that DYK is intended for "new users" to be encouraged to create new material and "be rewarded" by way of a main page mention. Indeed many disgruntled DYK regulars have informed me that they wouldn't be the Wikipedian they are today without DYK having encouraged them to start editing and "make a difference". It may have been true, but it's now a fallacy. A quick look at the edit count of the most recent sets of DYKs placed on the main page shows average contributions per editor exceeding 10,000. Moreover, we actively encourage DYKs to "score points" in Wikipedia contests such as WP:WIKICUP. The push is no longer to encourage and retain new users, it's to win an arbitrary Wikipedia contest.
But to get an item on the main page, what is required? Meet one of a complex plethora of criteria, which generally involves a quid pro quo review often shortened to QPQ. The QPQ system of review at DYK is used as a replacement for quality reviews from multiple editors without conflicts of interest. Therein lies one of the major flaws. QPQ can be read as follows: "review my article favourably, I'll do the same, we'll both get our main page moment of glory". Until lately, DYKs have been earning frequent flyer miles at WP:ERRORS and have even made the odd sojourn to WP:ANI for distasteful content.
An endemic problem: the "hook". The purpose of a Did you know... section ought to be to draw people's interest to something that wasn't obvious, that titilates, interests, grabs their attention. Instead, we have banal and uninteresting hooks, some of which are so contrived that they beggar belief. "Did you know that Footballer A played in Match B?" is a common version. Worse is the hook that conflates unrelated information in order to disguise itself as interesting "Did you know that Footballer A was born in B, but ate apples in C?" These kind of hooks are regular visitors to the main page.
Finally, DYK is plagued by curious technical issues. It's a template nightmare. To start a nomination, you need to add a template to a template. How is this encouraging our new users who find all parts of Wiki markup a jungle? Also, the QPQ system means that once one or more of the complex criteria are met, a main page appearance for a nomination is "guaranteed". The hook will feature, but for no longer than eight hours (if the process is "working") and that's that. The mad rush to update the hooks three times a day results in low quality content being placed on the main page. A common counter-argument is that it's all about getting new interest, but since most editors are using DYK for other purposes, that wears thin.
But I like the concept, the original idea, show me some genuinely interesting facts about genuinely new and half-decent quality articles, and I'll show you a section of the main page we can all be proud of. Right now, we have a broken and dysfunctional process which needs be properly overhauled. The renovation process must involve all comers—not just the DYK hierarchy, who appear to believe there's no problem.
Before I talk about if and how we should change DYK, there are two things that need to be addressed. The first is the widely held belief that Wikipedia does not need new articles (and, as such, DYK is no longer necessary). The second is the relationship between new editors and DYK.
The belief that Wikipedia doesn't need any new articles is, to put it quite frankly, rubbish. Systemic bias has given this encyclopedia a clear bias towards Anglosphere topics. Significant subjects from non-English areas are still lacking (for instance, classic Malay literature, a field with almost 200 years of scholarship, was still a redlink at the time this piece was published), as are hundreds of thousands of more minor topics that are still notable. My first DYK, Salah Asuhan back in April 2011, was on one of the most significant works of Indonesian literature, and since then I have brought almost 600 articles on Indonesia to DYK.
I've yet to run out of topics, and can easily name another 15 or 20 articles that we should have.
That's just one topic, in one country. What about the literature of Zimbabwe? Of Malaysia? What about the music of Argentina? And what about all of those important articles which are still stubs, and thus eligible for DYK through expansion? Plainly, there's still work to be done, and enough new content can feasibly be created to keep DYK running for years.
Some have questioned DYK's value in attracting and retaining new editors, in part because several established editors seem to responsible for much of the content. One must remember that even they were newbies once, confused over Wikipedia's labyrinthine policies and guidelines. My first article, Long Road to Heaven, was written in the 2002 Bali bombings article in 2007 before being moved to its own page; my second article was not until four years later. Because of the sense of pride I got in seeing Salah Asuhan on the main page, I kept writing and improving, branching out into new content, to the point that I have now created and/or been a major contributor to almost 100 pieces of featured content. Perhaps mine is not a typical story, but it is illustrative of DYK's contribution towards producing and retaining quality editors: it can give people the confidence (and the skills) necessary to write better articles and, in the end, contribute increasingly better work.
Now, back to the issue at hand: DYK. I don't know anyone who disagrees. DYK has room for improvement, and change is necessary. However, this change must begin from the beginning, then develop logically from there. We've already given DYK a clear mission statement, thanks in no small part to Prioryman. Next is consolidating and simplifying the rules so that they are both easier to understand for new editors and closer to the actual expectations of the Wikipedia community.
A minor example: for years now, the supplementary guidelines at DYK have used a rule of thumb of one citation per paragraph. This measure is now considered lacking by most of the Wikipedia community; it is not uncommon for verifiable information (i.e. information for which a reference could be found) to be removed simply because no reference is included yet. If all information being referenced is what the Wikipedia community expects, DYK rules should reflect that.
This is obviously a massive undertaking. Ten years of rule creep is a lot to clean out, and any substantial changes to the rules (such as the one I suggested above) would need input from the community. Not just the so-called 'DYK-ers'—a term I despise, because editors are individuals and not just part of a mindless 'them' repeating a single party line—but the Wikipedia community in general. Changes to DYK affect the main page, and changes to the main page affect everyone.
Working together in a collegial atmosphere, we should be able to hammer out a balance between quality and ease of accessibility for new editors, and then collaboratively work at enforcing these standards and helping editors fix their mistakes rather than discouraging them from further contributions. Let's not forget that, somewhere, there may be new editors able to write a thousand articles—if we just teach them how.
Ten featured articles were promoted this week.
Five featured lists were promoted this week.
Twenty-five featured pictures were promoted this week.
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