In July, Buzzfeed fired editor Benny Johnson after discovering more than 40 instances of plagiarism in his articles for the website, including many which took material from Wikipedia (see previous Signpost coverage). The plagiarism initially came to light due to two anonymous Twitter accounts – @blippoblappo and @crushingbort, and their WordPress blog, Our Bad Media. Now the anonymous duo has labeled a much bigger target as a plagiarist: the prominent American journalist and author Fareed Zakaria, whose résumé includes Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and CNN.
Back in 2012, a Zakaria article on gun control was found to have portions closely resembling a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore. Zakaria was briefly suspended and an examination of his work was conducted by Time, CNN, and the Post, none of which publicly identified any further instances of plagiarism. On August 18, 2014, the Twitter duo listed on their blog 12 instances of what they alleged to be plagiarism in Zakaria's work for those three employers from 2011 to 2012, all of which predated the gun control article and thus would have been included in the 2012 review of his work. The examples range from close paraphrasing to word for word matches of sources including the New York Times, The Nation, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Businessweek, a report from the Center for American Progress, and Wikipedia. In a 2011 Time article called "The Debt Deal’s Failure", Zakaria wrote about US President Ronald Reagan:
Spending under Reagan averaged 22.4% of GDP, well above the 1971 – 2009 average of 20.6% ... The national debt tripled, from $712 billion in 1980 to $2 trillion in 1988.
In 2011, the Wikipedia article Reaganomics stated:
Spending during Reagan's two terms (FY 1981–88) averaged 22.4% GDP, well above the 20.6% GDP average from 1971 to 2009...the public debt rose from $712 billion in 1980 to $2,052 billion in 1988, a roughly three-fold increase.
In an email to Dylan Byers of Politico, Zakaria disputed the new charges of plagiarism:
Two anonymous bloggers today have alleged that there are 11 cases in my writing where I have cited a statistic that also appeared somewhere else. These are all facts, not someone else's writing or opinions or expressions. For example, in one column, I note that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan. The bloggers point out that this is also in Wikipedia's Reagan entry. But it is also in hundreds of other articles, studies, and reports – just Google the phrase. Until today, I had never read the Wikipedia entry for Ronald Reagan. As it happens, it is incorrect. (There is a difference between "public debt" – Wikipedia's words – and national debt.)
Zakaria writes that many of these examples are statistics he learned of from sources other than those from which he is alleged to have plagiarized. The 12th instance is a quote from Richard Holbrook that Zakaria writes he drew directly from Holbrook himself.
Politico reported that CNN, Time, and the Washington Post expressed satisfaction with the previous 2012 review of Zakaria's work, though a Time spokesperson said "We will be reviewing these new allegations carefully." Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt defended Zakaria in statements to numerous news outlets, including Talking Points Memo, which quoted him as saying "I honestly think it is reckless even to suggest this is plagiarism." Byers noted that "The accusations against Zakaria ... don't seem to be gaining nearly as much steam as those that brought down BuzzFeed editor Benny Johnson."
On August 20, Our Bad Media responded to Zakaria and Hiatt. The anonymous duo wrote "Just because another journalist’s phrases happen to include statistics does not mean they are free game for cribbing without attribution." Highlighting the alleged plagiarism from Wikipedia, they wrote:
Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article had the idea to take the spending under Reagan and compare it to spending from 1971 to 2009, and next, take the public debt in 1980 and compare it to the public debt in 1988. In that order. Zakaria's article presents the exact same idea in a very similar presentation. That's subtle, but nevertheless textbook, plagiarism.
Two days later, they followed that up with further allegations that passages in Zakaria's 2011 book The Post-American World 2.0 were plagiarized from the work of Professor Fawaz Gerges and journalist Karl E. Meyer. Zakaria's book does not cite Gerges, though Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics, told Talking Points Memo that he has had a 13 year professional relationship with Zakaria and that "I feel delighted that he has borrowed heavily from my work."
The Washington Post was among the media outlets that reported on an August 18 Cato Institute panel in the Rayburn House Office Building called Transparency Time: Wikipedia Editing for Congress, including two members of Cato who are active Wikipedia editors, Jim Harper (User:JimHarperDC) and Michelle Newby (User:HistoricMN44), and Jim Hayes (User:Slowking4), from the Wikimedia DC Public Policy Committee. The panel urged Congressional staffers to create and edit Wikipedia articles on pending bills in the US Congress as a means to "deliver government transparency on a grand scale". Vice responded by pleading "Let's please not encourage congress to actively edit Wikipedia", pointing to previous incidents where Congressional staffers removed potentially scandalous information from Wikipedia articles.
While the Cato panel encouraged Congressional staffers to edit Wikipedia in a positive way, Wikipedia vandalism originating from the US House of Representatives made news again. User:143.231.249.138, an IP address assigned to the House, made headlines in July when a series of edits, mostly focused on conspiracy theories but also on more mundane topics like the Choco Taco, were noticed by the media after they were tweeted by the Twitter bot CongressEdits. The address was blocked for ten days for disruptive editing, leading to more headlines about the blocking (see previous Signpost coverage).
In August, more edits from that IP address prompted coverage in Mediaite, Ars Technica, Business Insider, The Hill and other media outlets. A series of transphobic edits and comments, including an edit to the article for the television show Orange is the New Black calling transgender actress Laverne Cox a "man pretending to be a woman", prompted a one-month block by User:Fran Rogers.
Outraged editors called for a permanent block on the IP address, while the IP editor shot back "Blocked because I disagreed with the trans-lobby? These days, If I complain about a man using the womyn's restroom then I'm cosidered [sic] transphobic...This has been happening a lot lately here in the halls of Congerss [sic] ... People need to understand that transgenderism is being promoted by the Patriarchy to diminish the experiences of real womyn." The Hill reports that the Human Rights Campaign has asked House Speaker John Boehner to investigate and identify the user responsible for the Wikipedia edits.
During an August 29 interview with Yahoo! TV, American actress Kristen Connolly (House of Cards, Houdini) complained about a long-standing, inaccurate, unsourced claim in her Wikipedia article that she was a former professional tennis player. She said: "I'm not even a good tennis player, let alone a former professional one. And I don't know how to take it off, because it's very hard to change a Wikipedia entry ... they won't let you change your own." The claim was inserted into the article in June 2012 in the first and only edit of a new account and it appears to have remained in the article until shortly after the publication of the interview. An editor added a citation needed tag in December 2012, but the tag was removed by an IP editor in February 2013.
Pitchfork and other music websites reported on an August 17 Tumblr post by the Canadian musician Claire Elise Boucher, who performs under the stage name Grimes. Grimes complained about a quote in her Wikipedia article taken from a 2012 interview with CMJ. Describing the creation of her 2012 album Visions, she told the interviewer "I blacked out the windows and did tons of amphetamines and stayed up for three weeks and didn't eat anything." The quote appears to have been first added to the article in October 2013, and has been removed and re-added by different editors several times since then.
Grimes objected to the inclusion of her quote because she has lost people to drugs and alcohol, and fears the statement conveys a pro-drug message. She wrote: "Editing a website that people take seriously and reference all the time so that it looks like i think amphetamines are cool is incredibly irresponsible, people might read that and think its a cool thing to emulate. I hope you know you are doing the world a disservice."
On August 15, the Washington City Paper suggested that User:Evansjack1 is Washington DC councilman Jack Evans. The user of the account, which has only edited the Evans article and various talk pages, has referred to himself as Evans, including an edit summary which complained "I have been on the city council for 23 years. I am the longest serving Council member in dc history. I have been a leader in revitalizing our city and have great accomplishment [sic], none of which are mentioned. Just a lot of inaccurate accusations." The account also posted Evans' real phone number in a comment to another editor and requested that editor call Evans.
However, according to Washington City Paper, Evans' spokesperson refuses to confirm or deny that the account belongs to Evans himself. The account is less than a month old and has already been blocked twice for edit warring while attempting to remove sections of the article unfavorable to Evans, including material about a 2013 Office of Campaign Finance probe, political action committee spending, conflicts with a journalist, and his vote against a censure of former DC mayor Marion Barry. The account continued to edit the article and its talk page after the publication of the story.
Channel 4 News reports (August 13) on an edit war from July 2013 at the Wikipedia article for Lynton Crosby, an Australian political strategist who has been called a "master of the dark political arts", "the Australian Karl Rove", and "one of the most powerful and influential figures in the nation". IP addresses belonging to the Crosby Textor Group, a consultancy firm co-founded by Crosby, removed material involving Crosby's political tactics, a political controversy involving cigarette packaging, and a call from an MP to sack Crosby. The edit war was continued by a number of accounts that were permanently blocked following a sockpuppet investigation.
On August 27, neuroscientist and author Daniel Levitin, a professor at McGill University, was interviewed about his 2014 book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload on WBEZ. Levitin was asked about an analogy in his book where he compared Wikipedia to a group of children attempting to build a plane via crowdsourcing. Levitin replied:
Well, to begin with, Wikipedia has done amazing things. It has become the de facto information source for most of us and it's changed the world dramatically for the better in that research that used to take anywhere from minutes to months and phone calls and trips to libraries or far-flung archives, all of that is now available in a second. The problem is that the Wikipedia model, as it was stated by its founders, is that they don't consider that expertise exists, effectively. Anybody can edit. And an expert has no greater standing on Wikipedia than a non-expert. So, the problem is for any given entry, an 11-year-old can go in and change it, and it could be about something really important, like aircraft design, or a particular medication. I know that formulas that some engineers use have been defaced and it took a couple of weeks for them to be fixed. Now Wikipedia says, "sooner or later, somebody will set it right," but that's not always true. The idea is the 11-year old, maybe not maliciously, but just because he or she has an imperfect understanding of something, they may change the article to reflect their non-expert understanding. Eventually, an expert might come along and fix it, but if the 11-year-old is relentless enough with the edit key, the 11-year-old is going to win the battle of attrition because the expert will just give up, the expert's got more important things to do. So, the problem with Wikipedia is that the information can be quite unreliable, and there's no way for the average user to know. You don't know by looking at it whether you're reading an entry from an expert or a non-expert.
Jimmy Wales responded to Levitin's comments on his user talk page "I will try to contact Prof. Levitin to correct his misunderstanding. It is simply not true that I believe that expertise does not exist. And it is obvious that in Wikipedia that the model he describes of the editing process is wrong."
The Wikimedia Foundation has withdrawn the temporary "superprotect" it had created and invoked on 10 August to prevent DaB., an administrator on the German Wikipedia, from continuing to wheel-war to disable the new software feature, Media Viewer. In her announcement, the Foundation's executive director, Lila Tretikov, made it clear that the WMF "needs to be able to make an ultimate determination after receiving community feedback regarding production changes that impact all users." The superprotect action has brought to a head a steadily rising drama on three WMF content sites: the German and English Wikipedias, and Commons (the last significantly driven by German-speakers).
The wording in the English Wikipedia article on Media Viewer belies the storm that has engulfed parts of the Wikimedia movement. It states simply that "this multimedia browser displays images in larger size when you click on their thumbnails, as an overlay on the current page. To reduce visual clutter, all information is shown below the image, and can be expanded at a click of a button." The commotion from the launching of this product on the last three projects—perhaps those with editors who feel the greatest investment in their now well-established workflows—has ricocheted around a confusing array of issues. On the surface, there are two flashpoints: one is the superprotect itself, and how it might have impacted on the relationship between the Foundation and the editing communities—especially the German-language community, which has a long-standing and justifiable pride in its achievements and an aversion to US-based centralisation. The other is the timing of the opt-out launching of Media Viewer, and whether the software should have been opt-in by default until editors' concerns about certain features were resolved. However, the drama reaches into yet more complicated and sensitive matters, with implications for the technical and social aspects of the Foundation's software development and release, and the status of local community RFCs in relation to software development.
Aside from the Foundation's history of less-than-ideal product launches, there are several important precursors to the current technical–social polemics. One occurred after the Foundation's launching of Visual Editor in mid-2013 (now generally conceded as premature, and still in development more than a year later). On 23 September, English Wikipedian Kww edited MediaWiki:Common.js to disable the newly rolled-out software. The action—which was at least consistent with the results of an RFC on the English Wikipedia—broke what had been an implicit taboo against community administrators injecting code into the MediaWiki namespace, unilaterally modifying the interface for all users of a project. This appeared to establish a precedent: in November 2013, DaB. edited the German Wikipedia's site-wide CSS to disable the link to the newly introduced Beta Features, a program that allows users to test new features on WMF sites. His intrusion, without RFC support, has only just been reversed.
DaB. is a longtime Wikimedia Germany functionary who gained wide respect for his almost single-handed technical stewardship of the chapter's Toolserver (2005–14); that suite of servers, physically located in Amsterdam, gave the whole WM movement access to a range of functionalities developed by the volunteer technical community. When the Foundation decided to displace Toolserver two years ago with the WMF-run WikiLabs, DaB. spearheaded an unsuccessful push to keep the existing infrastructure.
The putative justification for DaB.'s edit to MediaWiki code to disable Media Viewer was an RFC on the German Wikipedia that gained majority support for two actions: to switch off Media Viewer, and then to insert code that would make it opt-in rather than opt-out. There were entreaties to DaB. by several editors that he not execute just the first without the critical second of these RFC votes. After a Bugzilla request was closed as "wontfix" by the WMF, DaB. injected code into the JavaScript that not only disabled Media Viewer on the German Wikipedia, but according to one complaint broke the design of file description pages. While DaB contended that he was looking for a fix to make opt-in possible, the question arises why he had not prepared both actions in advance and performed them in quick succession. The change was reverted by a German Wikipedia administrator, Raymond, and further wheel-warring with the WMF led to the now hugely controversial superprotect.
What has probably caught most Wikimedians off-balance has been the emotional ferocity that now swirls around both the temporary superprotection and the Media Viewer release—sometimes in ways that make the intercultural and the technical hard to disentangle. DaB., for example, has written: "my action has shown how mendacious and power-mad the WMF is". Co-founder Jimmy Wales was sufficiently concerned that he wrote on his talkpage, inter alia:
| “ | MV is not going away. If it is "presently" a nuisance for editors, then the solution is to fix it, not to have some religious opposition to it for no reason. "Keeping face" is not a factor here at all—what is a factor is that modernizing what happens when you click on an image to provide a better experience for both readers and editors is going to happen. ... We have to move away from this model of panicky rights battles and mass petitions in a tone of adversary, and move to a position of remembering that we are all there for the same reason: to build something amazing. ... The Foundation under Lila's direction is committed to radically ramping up investment in engineering and product. So yes, I am confident that things in the future will be different from things in the past. | ” |
Among the first-day responses to Jimmy's call for "constructive dialogue" on addressing editorial concerns about Media Viewer were: "you are completly blind to the facts", "Your autocratic vision will destroy Wikipedia", "all the new garbage the foundation is introducing ... The foundation only gets more abusive as their software gets worse", "throwing dust in the eyes of the fools", and "ditch Möller [vice-president, Engineering and Products]". Despite the invective, Wales persisted in his attempts to persuade participants that dialogue between the engineering and editorial sides is the way to go—marred only by a less-than-diplomatic reference to "climbing the Reichstag".
Pete Forsyth—whom Erik Möller threatened to desysop when he tried to disable Media Viewer on the English Wikipedia—has authored and promoted an anti-superprotect petition (now the subject of an application for a banner advertisement). But in a clear separation of the superprotect and software-development issues, he wrote on Jimmy's page:
| “ | I would very much like to see something very similar to the Media Viewer deployed as the default option; and I know this to be true of many (but not all) of the other people who signed the letter. But it must be a mature product first. At present, I have misgivings about the processes the WMF has created and maintains for evaluating the maturity of the product. Permitting local communities to roll back the default state, at present, would be a practical and clear acknowledgment that the present state of the software may not be sufficient, even if WMF is not (yet) capable of fully grasping what is needed. | ” |
Notably, Jimmy doesn't support "superprotect as it is currently implemented (particularly not as a "staff-only" right—that kind of thing just introduces unnecessary divisiveness)". However, he endorses the principle: "that there is no reason to allow admins to disrupt Wikipedia to make a point by editing the sitewide javascript. I think there can be reasons for technically proficient admins to edit sitewide javascript but it is a major security risk and potential point of conflict and so in general I don't think there is any valid objection to shrinking the group who has that right."
He continued: "It makes no sense in the long run for us to have a situation where hundreds of wikis each have a completely different configuration based on local voting. That is not a viable process and we already have huge problems to the extent that it has happened. ... We need to be pushing hard for reunification of software features across the projects."
User:Pine told the Signpost that "the WMF is not the only big organisation that has products blow up on the launching pad: just look at Microsofts's Vista, Windows Me, and Office 2007 for Windows." Nevertheless, the Foundation and its new executive director, software expert Lila Tretikov, face a challenge to the cohesion of the international movement and the ongoing credibility of the WMF's software development program. There is now evidence of a flurry of activity among staff to consult with editors. Among this is the suddenly more obvious presence of the Community Engagement (Product) staff, who were assembled on a temporary basis to assist with the roll-out of Visual Editor in mid-2013. These staff now appear to have longer-term presence, and late last year were transferred to the "Product" part of Engineering and Products. Rachel diCerbo took up the senior position to run CE (P) in May, and if this group of staff succeeds in their mission, the Media Viewer dispute might be the last time matters get out of control. On 29 August, the staff set up a page specifically for Media Viewer consultation, although regrettably the talkpage seems to be dominated by broadsides; and a draft of a process ideas page for community–engineering discourse appeared to mark the arrival of the new senior staff member, "inviting users to brainstorm ideas to improve how software components get build [sic] and delivered to communities".
The Signpost will provide future coverage of how the WMF intends to revamp its software development process, including its liaison with editorial communities, and whether attempts at user requirement documentation such as the Media Viewer roundtable last year can be vastly improved. Among the issues that may become important are the WMF's unique situation as a technology organisation that has little control over "local innovation space" such as templates, which appear to be nothing short of an international mess; a proposal to create a WMF Board volunteer technical committee; and the ways in which engineering documentation and testing might serve to deliver products more smoothly to the movement, including an examination of the relationship of the WMF's software product engineering to models such as Agile and Waterfall.
Editorial note: The author interviewed Pine, a regular Signpost writer, along with three other Wikimedians, to gather background information for this article. Pine had no role in drafting the text.
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This was a week when an actual virus, Ebola, competed for attention with several viral social phenomena; most notably the Ice Bucket Challenge, a charitable dare that spread largely on social media, and a spontaneous online debate over the nature of rock music, sparked by Lorde's surprise win at the VMAs. This week also saw the return of that oldest of viral social phenomena, the riot, as tensions exploded over the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri. That most social media-savvy of all terror groups, the Islamic State, increased its notoriety by posting its execution of James Foley on Twitter. This was also a bumper week for that prime viral knowledge vector, Reddit, with four topics in the top 25.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of August 17 to 23, 2014, 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 | Ice Bucket Challenge | 
|
2,902,018 | .jpg) |
Surprisingly, this global viral phenomenon, in which celebrities, YouTubers and everyday members of the public pour icewater over their heads, post their ordeals online and then dare others to do the same in the name of raising awareness for motor neurone disease, was not launched by any particular charity, but seems to have grown on its own. While it certainly has achieved its goal of raising awareness of motor neurone disease (see below) many have criticised it as a frivolous wet T-shirt contest that has had no tangible effect except to waste water at at time when many areas of the planet are in drought. |
| 2 | Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis | 
|
1,856,817 |  |
The purpose of the Ice Bucket Challenge was to draw attention to the disease made famous by Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking, and it's hard to argue it didn't work – people flocked to the page to learn more about it, though you could argue that if it had truly succeeded, this page would be first, the Challenge second. |
| 3 | Robin Williams |
|
864,859 | .jpg) |
The unexpected death by suicide of this iconic comic on August 11 led to one of the highest spikes in views since this project began; this week's numbers may be down by more than 90 percent, but they're still impressive. |
| 4 | Ebola virus disease |
|
616,334 |  |
The 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, whose death toll has now passed 1400, continues to draw attention to this horrific disease. |
| 5 | Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant | 
|
607,641 |  |
Numbers are up for this almost absurdly brutal jihadist group, which proudly posts mass executions it carries out on Twitter and has been disowned even by al-Qaeda. The surge is likely due to the fallout from Barack Obama's decision to take US troops into Iraq (despite having campaigned on the promise of troop withdrawal from the country), including the execution of journalist James Foley. |
| 6 | Rock music | 
|
536,500 |  |
Disclaimer: with a topic this broad, there is no way to determine a precise reason for its popularity, and its view count is suspiciously even, so if it remains high next week it may be removed. That said, the surge did occur shortly before the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, which have sparked a minor controversy about the precise definition of rock music with the nomination, and subsequent win, for Lorde's video for "Royals", an electronic song better defined as art pop. Even Lorde's fans have been somewhat bewildered by this, as you'd think MTV would have a better grasp on what rock music is. |
| 7 | Mona Lisa |
|
494,140 |  |
Arguably the most famous painting in the world, and one of the few that the legendarily distractible Leonardo da Vinci completed himself, the Mona Lisa did, in fact, once possess eyelashes and eyebrows, but they have been worn away over the years by careless cleaning, according to a thread on Reddit this week. |
| 8 | SummerSlam (2014) | Unassessed | 384,478 | The WWE's latest pay-per-view pantomime was staged on 17 August. | |
| 9 | Deaths in 2014 | 
|
382,940 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. |
| 10 | Guardians of the Galaxy (film) |
|
380,140 |  |
Marvel Studio's cheerily bonkers space opera crowd pleaser has regained the top spot at the US box office in its fourth weekend and, to the sure delight of many, has overtaken Michael Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction as America's biggest movie of the summer, though it has done less well internationally, where audiences are apparently more trepidatious about this unknown and unashamedly odd property. |
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Sixteen featured articles were promoted this week.
Five featured lists were promoted this week.
Five featured pictures were promoted this week.
One featured topic was promoted this week.
