Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-01-07/From the editors
We end 2014 and and start 2015 with the normal array of year-end activities, including movie watching with Bollywood film PK (#1) topping the list, followed by The Interview (2014 film) (#2), 2014 in film (#10), and five other films in the rest of the Top 25, plus a number of articles about the subjects of these films. We celebrated the New Year by singing "Auld Lang Syne" (#11), or perhaps watching Adam Lambert (#9) perform with Queen. But we could not avoid a final tragedy with the crash of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 (#4) on December 28.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.
For the week of December 28, 2014 to January 3, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PK (film) | 
|
1,007,428 |  |
About thirty thousand fewer views than last week, when it stood at #3, this Bollywood film, starring Aamir Khan and Anushka Sharma, tops the chart this week. Released on December 19, it has already become the highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, with a worldwide box office of over US$94 million. It is also the first Bollywood film to ever top this report. |
| 2 | The Interview (2014 film) | 
|
824,917 |  |
Down from 1.2 million views and #1 last week. See past reports for the whole sordid history of this film, which, as of January 4, 2015, had earned more than $31 million from online sales and rentals. |
| 3 | Chris Kyle | 
|
724,445 |  |
This American sniper, whose life was the subject of the appropriately named Clint Eastwood-directed film American Sniper, which went into wide release on Christmas Day, is considered the most lethal in US military history, with 160 confirmed kills. Unfortunately, he was murdered last year by a PTSD-afflicted veteran whom he had taken to a shooting range. Before he died, he had claimed that he had once punched former wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura in 2006 for badmouthing U.S. President Bush and the military. Ventura sued him for defamation, eventually getting a $1.8 million jury award. Last week, Ventura filed a new lawsuit directly against HarperCollins, who published Kyle's book, called, naturally, American Sniper. |
| 4 | Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 |
|
704,645 | .jpg) |
Unfortunately we could not end 2014 without yet another major passenger aircraft crash. On December 28, 2014, this flight crashed in bad weather while en route to Singapore, killing all 155 passengers and 7 crew on board. |
| 5 | Jim Harbaugh |
|
684,677 |  |
Jim Harbaugh is an American football coach. After serving as the head coach of the professional San Francisco 49ers from 2011-2014, he was named the new head coach of the University of Michigan. |
| 6 | AirAsia |
|
646,448 | |
See #4 |
| 7 | Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 |
|
619,770 | _9M-MRO_-_MSN_28420_404_(9272090094).jpg) |
The crash of Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 (#4) understandably caused readers to once again ask "did they ever find that other plane?" The answer is no. An "underwater search" that began in October is not scheduled to be completed until around May, so it could be quite some time. |
| 8 | Stephen Hawking |
|
598,974 |  |
The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon makes his ninth straight appearance in the Top 25 this week, thanks in large part to his biopic, The Theory of Everything, which opened in the United States on November 7. |
| 9 | Adam Lambert |
|
544,868 |  |
Lambert is an American singer who was the runner up in the eighth season of American Idol in 2009. He performed a New Year's Eve concert in London with Queen (see Queen & Adam Lambert Rock Big Ben Live), which proved quite popular. |
| 10 | 2014 in film | N/A | 539,382 |  |
No doubt this was popular among readers wishing to see what the most popular movies were of the year. Transformers: Age of Extinction starring Mark Wahlberg (pictured) was the highest-grossing film of the year, making over $1.08 billion, which puts it at number 10 on the all time list. |
The Al-Hayat Media Center, the propaganda arm of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, released its eighth propaganda video starring British photojournalist John Cantlie, who was abducted in Syria in 2012. (A transcript is available from the SITE Intelligence Group.) While the first six videos feature Cantlie in orange prison garb speaking behind a table, the two newest videos have him dressed in street clothes playing the role of a Western-style journalist exploring cities under ISIL control. In the latest video, Cantlie shows viewers parts of Mosul; he navigates the roadways in an automobile, visits a marketplace and a hospital, and even drives a police motorcycle. His narration counters reports in Western media about the difficulties of life in Mosul and the lack of goods and electricity. The video claims that Mosul is a safe and prosperous place, well-policed and low in crime, with the only ones suffering being children with "psychiatric problems" as the result of Western bombing raids. Cantlie quotes from the Wikipedia article on Mosul: "If you look in Wikipedia under the entry of Mosul, it says that on November 10, 2004, the policemen not killed in the fighting fled the city, leaving Mosul without any police force for about a month." By way of contrast, the video claims that ISIL's police force has a "firm presence" in Mosul despite having little to do due to the lack of crime.
Cantlie and American journalist James Foley were abducted outside an Internet cafe in Syria. Foley was repeatedly beaten and tortured in captivity before being beheaded on camera in a video uploaded to YouTube in August 2014. Last year ISIL also beheaded perhaps hundreds of other journalists, aid workers, enemy soldiers, and other humans.
The Independent complains (January 5) that Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 is not discussed more prominently in the articles for AirAsia and Indonesia AirAsia and that information about the crash and another incident is absent or being removed. Flight 8501 disappeared on December 28 and wreckage was found in the Karimata Strait two days later. On December 30, Indonesia AirAsia Flight 272 overshot the runway at Kalibo International Airport, forcing an evacuation of passengers via emergency slides. AirAsia owns 49 percent of Indonesia AirAsia and they share a logo, but a number of editors on the AirAsia article consider the two carriers to be entirely different airlines and have removed the information, noting that it does not comply in an unspecified way with Wikipedia:WikiProject Airlines. While Flight 8501 has its own article, the crash is only mentioned in a single sentence near the bottom of the Indonesia AirAsia article. The Independent notes "The page does feature flattering information on the airline's safety record — including the fact that it is commended by the Indonesia Civil Aviation Authority for its safety — and its domination of the local market."
Al Jazeera America reports (January 6) that the Wikipedia article United States congressional delegations from Kentucky incorrectly identified Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Rand Paul as belonging to the Democratic Party instead of the Republican Party in picture captions. The almost certainly inadvertent errors were introduced when an editor added a gallery of photographs to the top of the article on December 21 and remained until they were corrected following the publication of the Al Jazeera story. The story quoted a pair of digital campaign consultants, one of whom, Karl Frisch, placed the blame squarely on "the digital teams of McConnell and Paul" for not catching and correcting the mistakes, even after the Al Jazeera author sent a mocking Tweet on December 30 to the Senators' official Twitter accounts. Frisch said "If you don’t know how to get something corrected on Wikipedia for your boss and you're a digital campaign consultant in 2015, you might as well quit." Frisch said that he has brought sources to the attention of Wikipedia editors to get changes made, while another strategist, Vincent Harris, said that he has "accounts that we manage that are active in the [Wikipedia] community that we make changes with" frequently.
The Providence Journal discusses (January 2) the question of how the office of Governor of the US state of Rhode Island should be numbered. New governor Gina Raimondo, who was elected in November 2014 and assumed office on January 6, refers to herself the 75th Governor, following the example of the outgoing governor, Lincoln Chafee, who called himself the 74th Governor. The Journal asked Chafee's Communications Director, Faye Zuckerman, about the numbering and she referred the paper to the Wikipedia article List of Governors of Rhode Island.
The article lists 75 Governors beginning with Nicholas Cooke, who held office when Rhode Island declared independence in May 1776. Rhode Island was founded as the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1636 and was one of the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain which declared independence and went on to form the United States of America. The list does not include any governors prior to Cooke; they are listed separately at List of colonial governors of Rhode Island.
Tom Evans, State Librarian of Rhode Island, took issue with Wikipedia's numbering. Evans told the Journal that "They've counted two people who never adopted the title of governor." Henry Smith was President of the Rhode Island Senate in 1805 when he assumed the office following the deaths of Lieutenant Governor Paul Mumford and Governor Arthur Fenner. Isaac Wilbour was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1806, but because no gubernatorial candidate received a majority vote that year, Wilbour served as Governor instead. The list and the Wikipedia articles for Smith and Wilbour do not include inline citations related to this issue, but sources such as The Encyclopedia of Rhode Island refer to them as Acting Governors.
The list's numbering includes Governors who served more than one non-consecutive term as separate Governors, such as James Fenner, who is counted as the 7th, 11th, and 17th Governor. Evans objected to this as "confusing".
For his numbering, Evans used the two governing documents used by Rhode Island's government for most of its history. Eliminating Smith, Wilbour, and duplicate office holders, he counts 57 Governors starting from the 1842 Constitution of Rhode Island and 91 Governors starting from the 1663 Royal Charter.
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