Contributing to the Signpost can be one of the most rewarding things an editor can do. The genre is refreshingly different from that of Wikipedia articles, and can allow writers to use a different range of skills. Our circulation is above two thousand for some stories, and reaches far beyond the English Wikipedia, speaking to Wikimedians from many languages and WMF projects. Page view counts show that readers still visit some pages up to months after publication. The need for an independent, volunteer-run Signpost continues to grow, given the increasing complexity and financial expenditures of the global Wikimedia movement.
Writing for the Signpost does require a level of commitment. Although we have all become used to a weekly Signpost delivered on our talk pages, our total number of contributors has faced recent and long-term losses. When combined with the increasingly limited availability of our current writers, the Signpost is in need of additional contributors. Help is sorely needed for "Featured content", a rewarding area that asks editors to recognize content contributors by summarizing their recent featured material and, should they desire, interviewing individuals. The page is influential among the many editors who are involved in featured-content forums, and is particularly satisfying visually, given the rich opportunities for deploying images and other files.
Editors normally contribute to their section on a regular basis or arrange weekly rotations depending on their circumstances. People willing to do only small parts each week, such as adding "in brief" notes to "News and notes", are certainly welcome too.
Internally, the Signpost itself has undergone some recent changes. I will remain in my position as editor-in-chief, but now that I have entered graduate school, Pine, Tony1, Gamaliel, J Milburn, and Jarry1250 have agreed to take on roles as editorial delegates. Rcsprinter123 has ably taken over the WikiProject report, Guerillero is restarting the dormant arbitration report, and Serendipodous and Milowent are sharing the load of the traffic report.
Signpost editors typically find interaction on the job socially rewarding as a close-knit group of editors with a common purpose: to see what is widely regarded as an essential service continue to thrive. We all look forward to hearing from interested editors, either on my talk page or through email.
— The ed17, Signpost editor-in-chief
Reader comments
Plagiarism, as Wikipedia's article on the topic explains, "is the use or close imitation of the language and ideas of another author and representation of them as one's own original work." At best it is intellectual sloppiness and at worst outright theft.[1] As Robin Levin Penslar notes in Research Ethics: Cases and Materials, "The real penalty for plagiarism is the abhorrence of the community of scholars."[2] It can bring a community into disrepute. Wikipedia's editors should create their own articles, not adopt the work of others. But while this is an easy approach to recommend, plagiarism may not be as simple as it first seems—it is often committed inadvertently. The best way to prevent plagiarism is to understand clearly what it is, how to avoid it, and how to address it when it appears.
Wikipedia is not a primary source and contains no original research; therefore, everything that appears on Wikipedia should be rooted in a reliable source. The problem with plagiarism is not that it involves the use of other people's ideas, but rather that other people's words or ideas are misrepresented—specifically that they are presented as though they were "an editor's own original work". Even if contributors provide a citation for a sentence, it may still be plagiarism if they do not clearly indicate with quotation marks the duplication of the source's wording. Citations are universally understood as indicating a source for information, not as a license to copy the original wording.
There are three major ways to plagiarize:
Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement: material can be plagiarized from both copyrighted and public domain sources.[4] One report about a plagiarism scandal on Wikipedia claimed that "Wikipedia editors ... declared a handful [of the allegedly plagiarized articles] to be OK because copied passages came from the public domain."[5] If this was indeed the reaction of Wikipedia editors, they were mistaken. To clarify this, think of the famous opening line of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice (1813): "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."[6] The text of this novel, like the text of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, is in the public domain. However, these are Austen's words and even though no one owns the copyright to them any longer, we need to acknowledge that the wording is hers. By inserting this sentence without quotation marks into an article, Wikipedia editors would be plagiarizing Austen.[7] Apart from the ethical need to credit her for her words, Wikipedia has a scholarly duty to inform its readers of the source of such a sentence, including the page number where the sentence can be found in the source.
Wikipedia policies say much about copyright violation, but far less about plagiarism. The guideline on the topic was written in 2008. Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales took a clear stand on the issue in 2005: "Let me say quite firmly that for me, the legal issues [surrounding plagiarism] are important, but far far far more important are the moral issues. We want to be able, all of us, to point at Wikipedia and say: we made it ourselves, fair and square."[8]
Not every fact contained in a Wikipedia article requires attribution. When a fact is "common knowledge"—that is, generally known—it is not plagiarism to repeat it, even if contributors learned it from a specific reference. For example, it is commonly known that Emily Dickinson published very few poems during her lifetime.[9] Generally, if information is mentioned in many sources, especially general reference sources, and easily found, it is considered common knowledge. It is also acceptable to reproduce non-creative lists of basic information, such as an alphabetical directory of actors appearing in a film. While Wikipedia's verifiability policy encourages the citing of such information, a failure to do so is not plagiarism.
Although common knowledge and non-creative lists of basic facts do not "belong" to a source and do not require attribution to avoid plagiarism, less commonly known information, opinions and creative text do. Likewise, the creative presentation even of common knowledge, belongs to its original author. Contributors can safely re-use the fact, but not the language unless it is a title, as for a job or a creative work, or utterly devoid of creativity, such as a common phrase. From a copyright standpoint, the level of creativity required to claim ownership is minimal. The United States Supreme Court has indicated that under US copyright law, which governs copyright matters on Wikipedia, "[t]he vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, 'no matter how crude, humble or obvious' it might be."[10] Similarly, most text will be creative enough that its replication will be plagiarism. Accordingly, while text such as "Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830" can be copied without quotation marks, care must be taken not to rely too much on the presumption that text is not creative. Further, one cannot copy an entire source in this way, claiming that it is "common knowledge" or uncreative text. In such cases, it can come down to the length of a string of exactly copied words; good editors get a feel for where it's starting to be dishonest not to attribute.
Less commonly known facts or interpretations of facts must be cited to avoid plagiarism, and creative text must either be quoted or properly revised.
To construct articles that read smoothly while still remaining faithful to their sources, it is essential to learn how to properly use other people's ideas and words. Wikipedia contributors need to know when to give credit, how to adapt source material so that it can be used in an article, and when to use quotations.
When editors want to use verbatim excerpts of a source, there is one simple way to avoid plagiarism: use direct quotations. The words from the source should be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original, enclosed within quotation marks, and identified by an inline citation after the quotation. However, direct quotations should not be overused. They run the risk of copyright infringement if the sources used are not free. Wikipedia's non-free content guidelines offer some guidance on when to use direct quotations and remind us that the "[e]xtensive quotation of copyrighted text is prohibited." But even when free sources are used, the overuse of direct quotation produces articles that are simply collections of quotations. The risk is a fragmentary effect in which the broader context of the quoted material is unclear, and readers are left to piece together the information, which often involves shifts in writing style.
Quotations should generally be used in the following situations:
Source text is usually adapted using a combination of paraphrase and summary. These two styles generally differ in their level of detail. A summary is more likely to be used for longer expanses of text and to cover only the major points in a passage, omitting or touching lightly on examples or definitions; a summary is generally expected to be considerably shorter than the original source. By contrast, paraphrasing is more likely to be closer to the original and may be nearly as long as or even longer than the source.
Adapting source text, whether by paraphrasing or summarizing, is a valuable skill, and contributors to Wikipedia need to be alert to the potential for inadvertent plagiarism. Many editors believe that by changing a few words here or there—or even by changing a great number of the words found in the original source—they have avoided plagiarism. This is not necessarily the case. Nor does the mere rearrangement of clauses, sentences, or paragraphs avoid the problem.
In this example, Wikipedia's article text is an attempt at paraphrasing the source. However, almost all of the original word choice, word order and sentence structure is retained.
Analysis:
In terms of both plagiarism and copyright, the author of a text not only "owns" the precise, creative language he or she uses, but less tangible creative features of presentation, which may incorporate the structure of the piece and the choice of facts. In terms of plagiarism, but not copyright, the author also "owns" the facts or his or her interpretation of them, unless these are, as mentioned above, common knowledge. Revising to avoid plagiarism means completely restructuring a source in word choice and arrangement while giving due credit for the ideas and information taken from it.
In this paraphrase, the language and structure of the passage has been significantly altered, making it an original expression of the ideas. The ideas have, of course, been properly credited.
Source:
Paraphrase:
This adaptation, from the featured article about Thomas Eakins' The Swimming Hole, displays attribution of opinion and uses a combination of paraphrase and quotation:
Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule for how much revision is necessary to avoid plagiarizing. In evaluating copyright concerns, the United States courts adopt a "substantial similarity" test that compares the pattern and sequence of two works, finding such similarity where "the ordinary observer [reading two works], unless he set out to detect the disparities, would be disposed to overlook them, and regard their aesthetic appeal as the same."[17] Even if all of the language is revised, a court may find copyright infringement under the doctrine of "comprehensive non-literal similarity" if "the pattern or sequence of the two works is similar".[18] Likewise, plagiarism may exist if readers comparing the two works would come away with a sense that one is copied from or too heavily based on another.
Editors should always compare their final drafts with the sources they have used to make sure that they have not accidentally come too close in language and structure or failed to attribute when necessary.
One way editors can minimize the tendency to reuse text is to not copy and paste text into their working drafts. Instead, editors should assemble and organize their notes, excerpts, and other source materials by topic. This can be done either in hard copy or by using an electronic filing system. Editors should then read and absorb what the sources say and proceed to writing a draft version, in their own words, of each topic. These drafts can be assembled according to the editor's own organizational schema. There are a number of ways to organize material; editors should not slavishly follow a source's structure, either in overall organization, or in the composition and arrangement of sentences and paragraphs within each section. This method reduces the temptation (and makes it harder) to adopt verbatim language and organization from the sources.
At the same time, when taking notes from a source for their own use, editors may find it useful to take them verbatim, with quotation marks, if they will not have access to that source as they are writing their final draft. If a different language is used in note-taking, an editor may find him or herself accidentally restoring some of the author's original words when constructing a draft. Being able to see at a glance exactly how the source was written can help avoid this.
Use multiple sources, if possible. Editors may find it more difficult to avoid following that text too closely if they rely on only one source, as they will necessarily be limited to those details selected by the author of that original source. It is not impossible to revise and reorganize a single source sufficiently to avoid plagiarism or copyright infringement, but it is more difficult.
Editors should be careful not to add plagiarized material to Wikipedia, and can help to protect the integrity of the project by spotting plagiarism and helping to correct it. When large sections of a source are copied word-for-word into an article, it is often easy to spot and repair. The use of ideas or uncommon facts without credit, possibly the most common form of plagiarism, can be repaired by sourcing. Detecting and dealing with subtler forms of plagiarism may be more challenging, but is usually possible.
Red flags for plagiarism include:
If you suspect plagiarism, you may wish to start by checking the article's history. If the article has a multi-authored feel but appears to be largely single-authored, there could be reason for concern, as this may suggest a contributor has borrowed too heavily from the diction of multiple sources. It may be worth checking the contribution history of an editor across a number of articles, to see if there is a discernible authorial voice or if there is a pattern of such inconsistency. There may be a history of such issues on the editor's talk page.
Another good starting point is to review the article's sources. Particularly when plagiarism results from misunderstanding—rather than intent to deceive—a contributor may clearly identify the sources from which s/he has plagiarized, and even link to them. If the source is in another language, for instance, the contributor may be under the mistaken belief that the act of translation is a sufficient revision to eliminate concerns of plagiarism. On the contrary, whether or not the work is free, the obligation remains to give credit to authors of foreign language texts for their creative expression, information and ideas, and, if the work is unfree, direct translation is likely to be a copyright violation as well.[19][20] Concerned readers can also use search engines and automated plagiarism detection. When searching manually, it is helpful to isolate small sections of text from an article. However, some results found this way may be from mirrors and forks of Wikipedia itself, particularly if the article is not newly created.
There are templates such as {{Copypaste}} or {{Close paraphrase}} that are added to the top of a suspect section or article and may draw attention to the problem; concerns might be noted at an appropriate WikiProject or forum. Just as Wikipedia currently has no clear guideline or policy on plagiarism, it has no clear forum for addressing plagiarism concerns. However, Wikipedia:WikiProject Copyright Cleanup stands to assist where plagiarism may co-exist with copyright infringement, and, even where it doesn't, project members may be able to assist with plagiarism.
 | This article or section appears to have been copied and pasted from a source, possibly in violation of a copyright. Please edit this article to remove any non-free copyrighted content and attribute free content correctly. Follow the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. Remove this template after editing. |
If an article seems to follow the language and structure of another work too closely, first consider whether it is a matter of copyright infringement or plagiarism. If the source is not free and the text may represent a legal concern for Wikipedia, follow the procedures set out at Wikipedia's copyright violations policy. If the source is free, steps should be taken to remedy plagiarism. Wikipedia's proposed guideline on plagiarism suggests politely discussing concerns with the contributor. Further steps may need to be taken to address contributors who persist in plagiarism after being made aware of the problem, through Requests for comment or—if the contributor proves disruptive—through a report at the administrator's incidents noticeboard. The plagiarism will also need to be repaired as soon as possible. If it can be attributed, revised or turned into a usable quotation, it should be. If the editor who discovers the problem is unable to repair it or uncertain of how it should be addressed, it should be brought to the attention of other contributors.
As the main page says, Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Anyone can, and should, repair plagiarism.
To avoid charges of plagiarism, authors of scholarly works ... always give proper credit to the sources of their ideas and facts, as well as any words they borrow. This is so even if the work borrowed from is in the public domain.
A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.... Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:...(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work....
... large-scale cribbing of foreign-language texts might occur during the process of translation.... The practice persists even though the most flagrant violators are eventually accused and dismissed from their posts.
The argument on Wikipedia over the benefits of crowdsourcing versus the primacy of "expert" contributors stretches back to co-founder Larry Sanger's break with the project to start the alternative Citizendium. Sanger's hope was that the new site would gain a much higher level of credibility through the scholarly and scientific qualifications of its contributors. He has since been critical of Wikipedia's accuracy and has questioned its credibility due to the absence of a formal peer-review process. Nevertheless, Wikipedia seems to have flourished while Citizendium remains on the outer margins of internet history.
Despite or, perhaps, because of its "anyone can edit" approach, Wikipedia itself has always been subject to dynamic tension between amateur and expert, generalist and specialist, and those with and without formal credentials in the field in which they are editing. In the latest chapter of this dynamic flux, longtime medical editor James Heilman (Doc James) announced on 3 October that for the first time a Wikipedia article has been published by Open Medicine, a peer-reviewed academic journal. "Dengue fever: a Wikipedia clinical review" is essentially the Wikipedia article on that serious infectious tropical disease, with some aspects of formatting and structure adapted to comply with the journal's house style. The journal's formal peer-review appeared on the article's talkpage.
The article is bound to ruffle a few feathers in the medical and academic worlds, if for no other reason than it challenges the established conventions that have defined the cloistered world of research publishing for more than a century. Heilman told the Signpost that a key stumbling block was the notion of credentialled authorship—something that goes against a basic ethic on Wikipedia but which in the open research literature is central to gaining readers' trust in accuracy and balance. True to this, Heilman is listed as the primary author in the Open Medicine article (on the basis that his contributions were the largest), with Wikipedians Jacob de Wolff, Graham M Beards, and Brian J Basden as the other authors. All are credentialled experts in the health sciences and are listed with their institutions. The authors' roles for the English Wikipedia are then listed under the unintuitive title of "competing interests": Heilman, Badsen, and De Wolff are board members of the Wiki Project Med Foundation, De Wolff is the founder of the English Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine, and Beards is a featured article coordinator.
Heilman says the publication of the review article underlines the fact that most mature Wikipedia articles are indeed essentially literature reviews by the very design of site policy. Like Wikipedia articles, review articles in journals (a sought-after genre for career researchers because of high readerships and citations) typically contain little or no original research. But when it comes to medical practice as opposed to research, he says: "what doctors want and need in the rush of their everyday practice is review articles, not original research articles, which are usually too narrowly pitched for immediate applied purposes". Review articles are like information hubs that present summary context and a great number of direct references, and this publication highlights their similarity to Wikipedia articles and the utility of both sources to working health professionals. Heilman comments that it is little wonder that Wikipedia is the world's most consulted source of health-related information, which appears to cast it already as a popular way to access the traditional function of review articles.
However, the fact remains that the boundaries around research publishing are closely guarded, perhaps with some justification. In a provocatively titled editorial in the same publication—"Modern medicine comes online"—Open Medicine's associate editor, James Maskalyk, wrote that Wikipedia lacks three things that are very important to research journals. The first is the identification of a single, responsible author "who acts as guarantor of the integrity of the work". Then there is review by "a trained editorial team, attuned to publication ethics". This second point may surprise Wikipedians who know the rigours of community nitpicking, particularly in the ego-crushing featured article forum. They may also be surprised that the journal perceives matters of language and formatting to be such a cleft between Wikipedia's text and that of the open research literature:
| “ | A lack of a single, authorial voice in the Wiki process means not only that strong personal recommendations are unlikely, but also that the style can be inconsistent, and the sentences and transitions between them less smooth, resulting in a paper that might be challenging to read. Some “Wikipedians” have little traditional experience in publishing and the editorial process that accompanies it, which can lead to frustrations about content or format that might fit a journal’s preference. | ” |
The third issue raised by the journal is the absence for Wikipedia articles of "formal peer review by at least one, and often many, experts who point out conflicts, errors, redundancies, or gaps". There was a gentle warning that "should the example of the dengue article be copied, this may lead to a number of rejected submissions to formally peer-reviewed journals."
Heilman says that Wikipedia medical articles might indeed sacrifice a consistent narrative unless they are very well looked after, but that this is not uncommon for prominent topics. He drew an analogy with featured articles; while some do lose their shine over time, others keep both polish and reliability, and are continually updated, through the vigilance of proud editors. This, he says, shows one of the great advantages of Wikipedia: its ability to stay abreast of fast-moving medical topics. (In this respect, the journal has made arrangements for annual updates to be indexed with PubMed—a casual reader might be struck by how much the article has evolved since the "snapshot" was taken last year for Open Medicine's external peer-review.)
Wikipedia already has analogues of the traditional academic review article, he observes, with featured forums akin to peer-reviewing, and key contributors and featured nominators akin to primary authors. Most high-quality Wikipedia articles in the health sciences, he maintains, are written by only a small number of authors. In 2014, WikiProject Medicine conducted a survey of all editors with more than 250 edits in health-science articles on all language Wikipedias during 2013. This revealed that about 50% of these editors are medically qualified as healthcare professionals, of which the greater proportion are qualified physicians.
Heilman's hope is "that making people aware of the expertise in the Wikipedia communities and the close relationship of our articles with traditional academic genres will attract more professional researchers to join us as editors". The publication of Dengue fever in the academic literature may be an important step in achieving this.
Bruce Maiman wrote that Wikipedia has grown up on college campuses in his column in The Sacramento Bee (September 23). "Gradually and informally, educators who repeatedly warned students to avoid Wikipedia like the plague began making it part of their course curriculum, assigning students to contribute content, either by writing original Wikipedia articles or editing existing ones."
Maiman notes the incorporation of Wikipedia into coursework at Georgetown University, Rice University, California Maritime Academy, Pomona College, University of California at Berkeley, Davis, and San Francisco, and the Wikipedia education programs in the Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The column mentions the work of Kevin Gorman, the Wikipedian in Residence at UC Berkeley. He quotes students and faculty as well as LiAnna Davis, Director of Programs at the Wiki Education Foundation, about its efforts to transition collegiate involvement from those individual faculty who edit Wikipedia to more formal educational programs.
Maiman commented that "since the program’s launch in 2010, nearly 10,000 students in some 500 classes have contributed 44,000 printed pages of content, editing thousands of existing articles and creating 1,900 new ones, all of it overseen by academics while students get credit. Participating schools run the gamut from Ivy League to community college."
He also writes that students find themselves challenged by peer reviews and the norm of consensus among Wikipedians, as opposed to the usual academic model of having just one professor judging the students' work.
Subsequent to the column's publication in The Sacramento Bee, several diverse sources have rerun versions of the column online and in print, including the Athens-Banner Herald, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, eCampus News, Myrtle Beach Online, and the Savannah Morning News.
This week, the Signpost went down to the farm to have a look at the work of WikiProject Agriculture, which has been in existence since 2007 and has a scope covering crop production, livestock management, aquaculture, dairy farming and forest management. The project also covers related areas, including both governmental and NGO regulatory agencies, agribusiness, support agencies such as 4-H, agricultural products including fertilizers and herbicides, pest management, veterinary medicine and farming equipment and facilities. That's a lot of areas, much more broad than a lot of projects, and with around 50 members it certainly seems to be doing OK. We haven't spoken to them before, although an early report produced a profile back in 2007. This year, however, the members were definitely not reserved in having a chat to reveal the secrets of working with this outdoor project, and we spoke to Montanabw, SMcCandlish, Redddbaron and Jytdog.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Agriculture? Do you have life experience in this area? Have you contributed to any of the project's Good or Featured Articles?
Are there any significant gaps in the coverage of Agriculture on the English Wikipedia? Are some regions or methods better represented than others? What can be done to fill the gaps?
How difficult is it to obtain images for agriculture articles? Are there any specific pictures that the project is searching for?
There are 38 agriculture-related articles on Wikipedia's list of vital articles, yet around 70% of these are only Start or C class. Have there been any concerted efforts to improve these articles? Why do some vital articles receive greater attention than others?
How does your Project manage Portal:Agriculture and Agronomy?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll find a few minutes to talk to WikiProject Time. For the time being, why not spend a while in the archive?
Reader comments
Jews wished each other Shanah Tovah ("Good year") this week as Rosh Hashanah was our most popular article. It was also a week not dominated by heavy news and tragedies, so aside from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (#2, sixth week in the Top 10), our popular article list runs the gamut of current events including new television series Gotham (#3), the 2014 Asian Games (#4), and Reddit-fueled popularity for German director Uwe Boll (#7). In the greater Top 25, notable events included the Mars Orbiter Mission reaching Mars (#11) and the marriage of accomplished lawyer Amal Alamuddin (#21) to an American actor. There was also a great deal of bot activity in our exclusions list this week; while this is not usually something worth noting, an identical large spike of views hitting Scotland, England, and Marriage from 26–28 September is duly acknowledged with a chuckle.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.
For the week of 21 to 27 September 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 | Rosh Hashanah | 
|
581,893 |  |
That's the Jewish New Year to the rest of us. Jews the world over ushered in the year 5775. With just over 580,000 views, that's within 10,000 of the viewcounts on the chart last year, when the holiday had to settle for the #2 spot after Lil Wayne. |
| 2 | Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant | 
|
580,884 |  |
ISIL continues to remain in the Top 10 for a sixth consecutive week (and eighth in the Top 25), as military action against the brutal group by a large coalition of countries begins to take shape. |
| 3 | Gotham (TV series) |
|
577,423 |  |
This American TV series is yet another reboot of the Batman franchise, and debuted on 22 September 2014. |
| 4 | 2014 Asian Games |
|
503,064 |  |
The 2014 Asian Games, a pan-Asian sporting event held every four years, commenced its 2014 edition in Incheon, South Korea on 19 September; the event will run through 4 October. The 2014 Games have 28 Olympic sports, as well as eight non-Olympic sports including baseball and sepak takraw (kick volleyball). The 2014 Asian Games medal table currently shows China at the 2014 Asian Games with a runaway lead, followed by South Korea, Japan, and Kazakhstan. |
| 5 | Derek Jeter | 
|
457,031 |  |
This very accomplished baseball player for the New York Yankees completed his 20th and final season in Major League Baseball in the United States. In his last at-bat in his final game on 28 September, Jeter hit a single off Red Sox pitcher Clay Buchholz. After being replaced by a pinch runner, he received a rare ovation from Red Sox fans as he exited the field. |
| 6 | August 2014 celebrity photo leaks |
|
454,221 |  |
After dropping out of the Top 25 for a week, this tawdry story about the hack into dozens of personal files that celebrities (including Jennifer Lawrence, pictured) unwittingly stored on Apple's iCloud was back in the news with additional reports of leaked photos. And since these new leaks occurred in September, the article has been moved once again and now can be found at 2014 celebrity photo leaks. |
| 7 | Uwe Boll |
|
453,240 |  |
Boll is a German film director whose work has included many films adapted from video games, many of which are listed among the worst ever made. His article became popular this week due to a Reddit "Today I Learned" thread which noted that in attempting to get the rights to make a World of Warcraft film, Boll was told "We will not sell the movie rights, not to you…especially not to you." |
| 8 | 
|
427,481 |  |
Always a fairly popular article. | |
| 9 | Deaths in 2014 | 
|
412,368 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. Deaths noted this week include Frieda Szwillus on 21 September at age 112, the oldest living person in Germany; Russian mathematician Alexey Chervonenkis (22 September); former Afghan provincial governor Mullah Ghani, killed by unknown gunmen (23 September); Japanese butoh dancer Carlotta Ikeda, pictured at left (24 September); Estonian singer Jaak Joala (25 September), who also covered Western pop music in Estonian, (see this nifty 1981 cover of Billy Joel's All for Leyna (25 September); British actress Maggie Stables (26 September), and Hungarian architect Antti Lovag (27 September) |
| 10 |
|
408,018 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article, unlikely to be unseated anytime soon by Ello. |
Seven featured articles were promoted this week.
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Three featured lists were promoted this week.
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Thirteen featured pictures were promoted this week.
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