Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-10-22/From the editors
The first transmissions of the Ebola virus in the United States sent the numbers spiralling to near-record levels, but not even War (which just missed the list at #12) or Death (who re-entered the top 10) let alone Pestilence, could distract the human race from what really mattered: the fall TV and movie seasons. 4 of the top 10 (and 10 of the top 25) articles this week concerned currently running films or television shows, numbers that are sure to increase as the year draws to a close.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 12 to 17, 2014, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ebola virus disease | 
|
8,267,784 |  |
Thanks to the ongoing and unprecedented outbreak in West Africa, this notoriously fatal disease has topped the list for three weeks running. This week, however, the first two confirmed transmissions on US soil occurred within days of each other, causing numbers to nearly double.
Note: includes views from the Ebola redirect page. |
| 2 | The Walking Dead (TV series) | 
|
922,674 |  |
The show's fifth season premièred on 12 October. |
| 3 | Ebola virus | 
|
908,196 | |
See #1. |
| 4 |
|
864,835 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article. | |
| 5 | American Horror Story: Freak Show |
|
789,206 |  |
The fourth season of the American Horror Story series debuted on 8 October. |
| 6 | Gotham (TV series) | 
|
778,351 |  |
This televisual reboot of the Batman franchise debuted on 22 September 2014, and has remained in the top 10 for three out of the last four weeks. |
| 7 | Gone Girl (film) |
|
683,924 | .jpg) |
This 2014 American mystery film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (both pictured at left) and directed by David Fincher has been the lucky recipient of a dose of controversy, with many feminists decrying it for perpetuating myths about rape accusation. The filmmakers are pleading innocent all the way to the bank, with the movie earning $170 million worldwide in its first 15 days. |
| 8 | Elizabeth Peña |
|
664,389 |  |
This accomplished Cuban-American actress, best known for her films in the late 80s/early 90s such as *batteries not included, La Bamba and Jacob's Ladder, died this week at the age of 55. |
| 9 | Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa |
|
592,426 | |
The worst epidemic of this hideous virus in history has so far killed nearly 5000 people and infected nearly 10,000, and shows no signs of slowing. The world is belatedly waking to the implications, particularly since the disease has now spread to the US. |
| 10 | Deaths in 2014 | 
|
549,853 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. |
The Daily Beast (October 19) ran a long excerpt called "You Can Look It Up: The Wikipedia Story" from Walter Isaacson's new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Isaacson begins by describing how Apple's HyperCard inspired Ward Cunningham to create a visionary application for the Internet that he called the WikiWikiWeb, after Honolulu's Wiki Wiki airport shuttle. Cunningham had learned that wiki means quick in the Hawaiian language, and that wiki wiki thus means doubly quick. He released WikiWikiWeb as open-source software in early 1995, and it became familiar to software engineers over the next several years, although it was largely unknown to the public.
Next, Isaacson writes about the early life of Jimmy Wales, from his childhood fascination with the World Book Encyclopedia his mother had bought for him, to his post-graduate involvement with user-generated content such as Multi-User Dungeon games, electronic mailing lists, web directories, and web rings. In 1996, Wales and two partners founded a company, Bomis, to promote and make money from these ventures. In early 2000, Bomis underwrote Nupedia, a free, volunteer-written, online encyclopedia. Wales hired a philosophy graduate student, Larry Sanger, to help develop Nupedia, but the extensive peer-reviewed process that they devised proved to be "painfully slow" and "not a lot of fun." After the first year, Nupedia only had a dozen articles.
| “ | That was when Wales and Sanger discovered Ward Cunningham's wiki software. Like many digital-age innovations, the application of wiki software to Nupedia in order to create Wikipedia—combining two ideas to create an innovation—was a collaborative process involving thoughts that were already in the air. | ” |
After covering the disagreements over who brought what inspiration to the project, and the philosophical differences between Nupedia and Wikipedia, Isaacson then brings us to the main event: the launch of Wikipedia in early 2001.
| “ | One month after Wikipedia's launch, it had a thousand articles, approximately seventy times the number that Nupedia had after a full year. By September 2001, after eight months in existence, it had ten thousand articles. ... A year after that, the article total reached forty thousand, more than were in the World Book that Wales's mother had bought. | ” |
By then, Wales had let Sanger go. A year later, after Wikipedia had accumulated 100,000 articles and a critical mass of editors, Nupedia met its demise when Wikipedia subsumed it.
Having recounted Wikipedia's beginnings, Isaacson moves on to describe his own experience as a Wikipedia editor and being part of the crowdsourcing. He waxes enthusiastic about Wikipedia's mechanisms of collaboration and consensus as it applies to both the development of articles and the governance of the project. He particularly stresses the principle of neutral point of view in producing articles. He notes the tremendous growth ("Wikipedia was able to spread like kudzu") into hundreds of languages and tens of millions of articles.
He speculates on why editors contribute, and concludes it is more than giving people free access to knowledge, that most contribute out of the sheer joy of sharing what they know.
| “ | [There is] a rush of dopamine that seems to hit the brain's pleasure center when you make a smart edit and it appears instantly in a Wikipedia article. Until recently, being published was a pleasure afforded only to a select few. Most of us in that category can remember the thrill of seeing our words appear in public for the first time. Wikipedia, like blogs, made that treat available to anyone. You didn't have to be credentialed or anointed by the media elite. | ” |
On this last point, he gives a shout out to now-departed editor User:Lord Emsworth, whose moniker comes from the P. G. Wodehouse character. Lord Emsworth's "articles on the British aristocracy ... were so insightful about the intricacies of the peerage system that some were featured as the article of the day, and Lord Emsworth rose to become a Wikipedia administrator. It turned out that [he] was actually a 16-year-old schoolboy in South Brunswick, New Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody knows you're a commoner."
Wired highlights (October 8) the newest project of artist Evan Roth, called No Original Research, which was commissioned by the Alingsas Konsthallen as part of their exhibition Snel Hest. Roth took eleven animated GIF files from Wikipedia and combined them with unrelated Wikipedia audio files.
Roth writes:
| “ | No Original Research is a series of art websites, each created from a single animation and audio file found on wikipedia.org. The title originates from one of Wikipedia's core content policies, which states that all material must "cite reliable, published sources that directly support the material being presented". The URL of each composition serves as its title, describing the repeated animation and the background color. The use of these gifs and HTML color names are a celebration of content driven by function and necessity. Compositions are created by copying a found animated gif file dozens of times and embedding them into a single HTML page. When the browser tries (and fails) to load all of the files simultaneously they become out of synch, creating an animation cycle that visualizes the latencies specific to the viewer. Each viewing is a unique experience dictated by the speed of the network, the browser used and the speed of the computer. | ” |
Widely admired Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert was a Wikipedia editor who made 22 edits from 2004 to 2009 as User:Rebert. Though there is little in the way of direct evidence that he was User:Rebert, the quality of his edits and the frequent references and links to Ebert's work in those edits have led editors to conclude that the account belonged to Ebert. The account was also used to upload a picture of Ebert with director Russ Meyer which was released into the Creative Commons and verified by OTRS. Following Ebert's death in 2013, the account's user page became an impromptu shrine dedicated to Ebert's life and work.
The Atlantic features (October 9) the newest Wikipedia tribute to Ebert. Quenton Miller created an artist's book collecting all of Ebert's Wikipedia edits in a single volume, complete with the picture of Ebert with Meyer as the author's photo on the book jacket. Miller only created a single copy of the book and it is not currently for sale. Miller told The Atlantic:
| “ | There's a really interesting tension between Wikipedia being an encyclopedia and the different ways people write in it. It's kind of surprising, because he's this amazing writer, and some of the edits are quite well written or witty in places. In the end, they turned into encyclopedia entries. | ” |
The Liverpool Echo reports (October 20) that the UK has released updated employee rules for social media. The document, called "Social Media Guidance for Civil Servants", follows a controversy this summer that caused a government employee to be sacked for posting "slurs" on the Wikipedia article for the Hillsborough disaster and related pages. The new guidelines read
| “ | Care should be taken when editing collaboratively edited websites such as Wikipedia and engaging with chat forums and commentable articles – posts can be linked back to government IP addresses. Anyone found to be making inappropriate edits will be disciplined which could lead to dismissal. | ” |
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Three weeks ago, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have made headlines around the world, including on Wikipedia's own front page in ITN. A lot of attention has been given to the sheer significance of the showdown, likening it to David and Goliath[1] and worrying that neither side had an exit strategy.[2] However, amidst this binary portrayal of the protests as democrats versus the government, only the most sharp-eyed reports spotted that this "Umbrella Revolution" is actually a highly inhomogeneous movement with a social hierarchy that is similar to none other than our dear Wikipedia.
Benny Tai, leader of the Occupy Central movement, admitted to media that he had lost control of the protests.[3] This is an accurate description, except that Benny Tai himself had never wanted to take full control of the movement anyway. As the idea of Occupy Central brewed beneath the surface over the past year, Benny Tai stressed repeatedly that he advocated deliberative democracy within the movement,[4] and that he's merely serving as a figurehead for the movement.[5] Much like Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia, the protest leaders are influential figureheads in the movement, but to say they have control is both an overestimation of their power and a misrepresentation of the movement's nature.
This is examplified on the fearful night of 28 September when police first deployed tear gas canisters against the peaceful demonstrators and threatened the use of gunfire if the crowds didn't disperse. The protest leaders pleaded all demonstrators to leave in order to avoid bloodshed. Most left, but about 10,000 recongregated shortly after and endured 87 rounds of tear gas.[6] The next morning, a stronger movement emerged which isn't even afraid of tear gas anymore.
On Wikipedia, editors debate on decentralized talk pages associated with each article and organize themselves into WikiProjects to collaborate on particular topics. People volunteer as they see fit and there is no need for a central authority.
Same for Hong Kong. As the protests unfolded, they became an organic movement that organized itself. Communication was entirely decentralized, with messaging applications and social media widely used to spread the latest news and plan actions. Both physical and online noticeboards were used to advise supporters on what to bring to the protest site. With the threat of the police interrupting mobile communications, the crowds turned to FireChat to secure their information flow.[7] Teams of volunteers emerged spontaneously from the crowds, some to defend the barricades, some to transport food and equipment, some to update the rest of the world by social media, and even some to do the recycling.[8] They went on ad-hoc shifts so that some would keep the protest running smoothly while others can go back to their day jobs or go home and rest.
Wikipedia editors come from all walks of life. We disagree and fight over many things, but we are all united by one vision: to make knowledge freely available to all. We work together under a few common principles and regulate ourselves, occasionally exercising the tough love of banning those who don't follow the rules.
The demonstrators are also, surprisingly, a disparately inhomogeneous bunch. They come from the economic right and left. There are patriotic democrats who want to use Hong Kong to democratize China, and regionalists who simply want to seal off Hong Kong from Beijing. There are even some who joined the protests simply because they were enraged by the police's disproportionate use of force against the demonstrators.[10] But they are united by a common goal and a few common principles. They have all taken to the streets to demand genuine democracy in Hong Kong, and they all adhere staunchly to the principle of non-violence. When the police charged at them with shields, sticks, and pepper spray, they stood still and turned the other cheek, restraining each other from striking back.[11]
And this is why the Umbrella Revolution is so powerful: Because nobody is in control, the arrests of leaders such as Joshua Wong didn't curtail their efforts, instead provoking more people to take to the streets and join their cause. Because their collaboration was bottom-up and spontaneous, there wasn't a weakest link which could be exploited to bring the movement down. Because of their belief in non-violence in the face of a violent crackdown, the movement had caught the world's sympathy.
Nobody knows how long the protests will last and demonstrators are settling in for the long fight.[12] But what is certain is that the Umbrella Revolution has already revolutionized political activism in the same way Wikipedia revolutionized knowledge dissemination a decade ago.
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