Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/From the editors
This could be the beginning of a new era for this list. Until now, decisions to remove suspicious content have been largely educated guesswork. This week though, we have a new collaborator who can shine a light on the origins and patterns, sorting once and for all the webwheat from the cyberchaff. Of course, it also means we will have to start including articles we would have once excluded, regardless of whether we can find a reason or not. So expect a lot more certainty and a lot more bewilderment. Bewilderment pretty much sums up the state of the world right now, as Britain recovers from its brief flirtation with non-existence, and ISIS continues to provoke the West.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.
For the week of September 14 to 20, 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 | Scottish independence referendum, 2014 | 
|
921,412 |  |
Well, the Nationalists' overnight surge that actually made the dismemberment of Britain seem plausible for a moment, and captured the romantic imaginings of the English-speaking world, turned out to be a ghost, as the Scots ultimately voted as they'd always said they would: a small but decent majority in favour of staying together. Now the only question is where to go from here. Thankfully, we have loads of international crises to distract us from that question. |
| 2 | Scotland | 
|
585,032 | .jpg) |
The land of Rabbie Burns and Walter Scott, whisky and haggis, Braveheart and Trainspotting became the focus of the Anglosphere's attention this week, thanks to the whiffs of freedom drifting from a few late polls. No doubt the fact that sizeable populations in Britain's many onetime overseas colonies can trace their ancestry back there played a role as well. |
| 3 | Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant |
|
548,101 |  |
Numbers are down a bit from last week, but since this week closed before Barack Obama's decision to bomb ISIS bases in Syria without Syria's permission, expect them to skyrocket in the next update. |
| 4 | Deaths in 2014 | 
|
414,034 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. |
| 5 | Ruin value | 
|
408,271 |  |
Ruin value, or ruinenwert, is a term employed by the Nazis, who believed that buildings should be designed so that their ruins would be aesthetically pleasing, as discussed on a Reddit thread this week. |
| 6 | United Kingdom | 
|
407,637 |  |
The nation in which I happen to live managed to escape dismemberment this week, but, like a man waking up with a hangover, we have many questions regarding what exactly just happened and where we go from here. |
| 7 |
|
396,115 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article. | |
| 8 | Theodore Roosevelt |
|
395,077 |  |
The first President Roosevelt was one of several members of his family to get noticed this week, thanks to the launch of the latest Ken Burns miniseries, The Roosevelts, on PBS on 14 September. |
| 9 |
|
355,244 |  |
Always a fairly popular article. | |
| 10 | Franklin D. Roosevelt |
|
343,715 |  |
The longest-serving American president got his dues for the same reason his fourth cousin once removed did (see #8). |
The Hindustan Times speculates (September 18) that politicians and their supporters are "sanitizing" their articles in advance of the 2014 Maharashtra State Assembly election. The October 15th election is for seats in the Legislative Assembly, the lower house of the bicameral legislature of Maharashtra, the second most populous state of India. The Times notes the absence of significant controversies in the articles of particular politicians and the presence of heavily promotional language. One politician is praised for his "commitment to social work", another for her "elegant dressing" and her "fashion sense", a third is identified as a "youth icon". The politicians specifically mentioned by the Times are:
It is not known who is responsible for these particular edits, but it is known that politicians in India have wanted such changes. The Times quoted a "social media consultant" from Pune, Maharashtra's second largest city, who said that politicians often sought "to sanitise their Wikipedia profiles. While some insist on weeding out inconvenient facts, others also insist on inserting words of praise." User:Tinucherian, a former boardmember of Wikimedia India, explained to the Times that Wikipedia editors and administrators don't always notice these sorts of changes to articles immediately. An examination of the edit histories of these articles shows that some of the edits in question were made well in advance of the current election. For example, all mention of the Disproportionate Assets investigation of Kripashankar Singh was removed from his article a year ago, in September 2013, by an IP address originating in Mumbai, the capital city of Maharashtra. What appears to be a pre-written promotional biography of Patangrao Kadam was added to the end of his article in July of this year by another Mumbai-based IP address.
The Daily Beast and Physics Today reported on the latest salvo in the conservative "war" on astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium and perhaps the most prominent scientist in the United States. Tyson is a popular science communicator, frequent public speaker and television guest, hosted the widely watched 2014 television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and has 2.4 million followers on Twitter. He is an outspoken critic of creationism, climate change denial, and anti-scientific stances taken by politicians.
There is even more outspoken criticism of Tyson on the right, where he is "widely despised", especially in the wake of the success of Cosmos. A month following the final episode of the series, the cover story of the conservative National Review, "Smarter Than Thou: Neil deGrasse Tyson and America's Nerd Problem", accused Tyson of being "the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up 'nerd' culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States." Some on the left have charged that Tyson "hatred" is the result of “anti-intellectual paranoia” or even a racist reaction against the success of a prominent African-American.
In September, Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, a year-old collective of conservative political opinion bloggers, launched a series of attacks on Tyson, later adding Wikipedia to his targets. Physics Today discusses the background of The Federalist, noting that the website's other co-founder and publisher was Ben Domenech, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank at the forefront of promoting climate change denial. Domenech also co-founded the conservative blog RedState and resigned from the Washington Post in 2006 following a plagiarism controversy.
Davis wrote a series of articles accusing Tyson of "fabricating" quotes and anecdotes in his public presentations, most notably claiming that US President George Bush never made the 2001 statement "Our God is the God who named the stars" attributed to him by Tyson, writing that Tyson "butchered" a 2003 statement by Bush in a different context, "The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. " Conservatives from Ann Coulter to Ross Douthat echoed Davis' claim that Tyson was a "serial fabulist", but a senior editor at The Federalist complained to The Daily Beast about the lack of a reaction to Davis' charges outside the right-wing, a reaction which Beast characterized as "overwhelmingly dismissive". Tyson later responded to a letter from Davis asking for comment, a request dated a week after Davis' initial article about the Bush quote, writing "I have explicit memory of those words being spoken by the President", but later conceding that "I transposed one disaster with another (both occurring within 18 months of one another) in my assigning his quote."
Davis took aim at Wikipedia when a short passage about the Bush statement was inserted and then removed from the Wikipedia article about Tyson. Among the insults leveled at Wikipedia editors by Davis were "cultists", "Pravda’s heirs", and "Tyson’s Truthers". Other conservative publications echoed Davis' take on Wikipedia. The Weekly Standard claimed that "Wikipedia editors have rigorously deleted anything less than flattering from Tyson’s bio," while the National Review asserted that "text-burning followers" of Tyson were engaged in the "willful suppression of information." None of the criticism discussed any of the policy-based reasons that editors used to advocate either for or against inclusion of the passage, even in Davis' Buzzfeed-like list of "9 Absurd Edit Justifications By Wikipedia’s Neil Tyson Truthers" (which included a comment by this author).
Davis' post "Why Is Wikipedia Deleting All References To Neil Tyson’s Fabrication?" seemed to provide its own answer to that question, which was the political orientation of Wikipedia editors. Davis largely focused on one editor, User:Zero Serenity, highlighting the content of his blog and userboxes. Zero Serenity told the Signpost that "It felt like politics was the only reason The Federalist article was written...it seemed like The Federalist attempted to use Wikipedia to promote the story instead of letting it grow organically. Wikipedia is not meant as a tool to promote politics." Other editors on the talk page echoed his assessment, with one suggesting that, after the phrase "no evidence exists that Bush ever said" the statement in question was removed from the article following claims of inadequate sourcing, Davis included the phrase in a follow-up blog post in order to provide a source so that phrase could be restored.
When the Wikipedia article on The Federalist was proposed for deletion on grounds of notability, Davis charged that it was a retaliatory act by the "science-loving censors at Wikipedia". One editor, User:Gaijin42, told the Signpost he contacted Davis and attempted to explain the kind of sources that Wikipedia articles require, but Davis gave him the "runaround" and accused him of being engaged in "cultish religious zealotry in defense of Neil Tyson", despite the fact that he is politically conservative like Davis. Davis' article went on to compare the proposed deletion to book burning and defended the significance of The Federalist, ending by invoking Obi-Wan Kenobi: "You can’t win. If you strike us down, we’ll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."
A Congressional vandal has struck again. User:143.231.249.138, an IP address assigned to the United States House of Representatives, was previously in the news for a series of what The Hill calls "controversial and juvenile edits" that were retweeted by the Twitter bot CongressEdits. (see previous Signpost coverage here and here) Some were legitimate but odd, while others were vandalism that earned the address a series of escalating blocks. Despite previous calls for an investigation, the identity of the person or persons responsible for these edits is unknown.
The Hill, USA Today, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Wonkette, The Week and New York were among the publications that reported on an example of the latest vandalism from that IP address after it was tweeted by CongressEdits. That edit, to the article for US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, read "McConnell is the first openly Otherkin member of Congress. His species identity is turtle." Comparing McConnell's facial features to a turtle, and more specifically the cartoon character Cecil the Turtle, is a long-running joke for many American comedians, especially Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, and websites, such as with the 2011 Daily Caller slideshow "Turtles that look like Mitch McConnell". In the 2014 Senate race in Texas, a Republican primary candidate even created a television ad which said McConnell "looks and fights like a turtle". The Cincinnati Enquirer noted, however, that "it was unclear whether [McConnell has] been called an otherkin before."
Buzzfeed reported that the same day the IP address also edited the article about the gaming website Kotaku. The edit accused the website of "being part of a vast conspiracy to promote Cultural Marxism through video games," citing the right-wing website Breitbart. Kotaku has been a target of the Gamergate controversy, a controversy that Buzzfeed calls a "movement of aggrieved and confused white nerds".
Following these and other edits, the IP address was blocked again, this time for three months.
| “ | In terms of sheer numbers, there are only a couple of users which have near as many as me but the actual edit count is not as important as the quality. In that sense, many users have surpassed me. There are plenty of edits I make that have low value individually but you add them up and it makes the encyclopedia better. Other users put forth significant effort on a few edits that are very valuable individually. The thing that makes this project function is everyone doing their part. I'm impressed by anyone who puts forth serious, scholarly effort and freely shares that knowledge with the world, such as my late friend Adrianne Wadewitz. I am also particularly grateful to the software developers who make the back end structure of MediaWiki possible because they have skills that I entirely lack. | ” |
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/Technology report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/Opinion Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/News and notes Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/In focus
Banning Policy finishes the workshop phase on 23 September. Parties have proposed findings of fact on the topics of the 3RR, the role of Jimbo Wales, and proxying for banned users. No non-parties have submitted any workshop proposals. The proposed decision is to be posted on 30 September.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/Humour
