Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-05-06/From the editors
Summary: Like colliding ocean liners, rousing entertainment and harsh reality merged ungainly in this week's top 10 list. The much heralded pay-per-view pummeling of Manny Pacquiao by Floyd Mayweather, Jr. dominated the list's top slots, giving this list one of its highest total view counts in months. Box office behemoth Avengers: Age of Ultron, which had ruled last week's list, was sent to number 4, despite the fact that its views had actually increased. However, just below, the death of Freddie Gray and the horrific earthquake in Nepal forced viewers' attentions back to the vagaries of human experience.
For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of April 26 to May 2, 2015, 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 | Floyd Mayweather, Jr. vs. Manny Pacquiao | 
|
2,631,206 |  |
Wikipedians love their combat sports, but this is the first time such an event has topped the list since it began in January 2013. This long-anticipated boxing match between Floyd Mayweather, Jr. (pictured) and Manny Pacquiao, and the latest fight to be dubbed the Fight of the Century (a somewhat presumptuous title, given that our century is currently 15 years old), was held on May 2 in Las Vegas. To say this fight has been highly anticipated is an understatement: this article was created in July 2013, and plans to get these two in the ring together date as far back as 2010. For all that hype, pay-per-view revenues are estimated to be as high as $400 million, fulfilling record-breaking predictions. |
| 2 | Manny Pacquiao | 
|
2,578,817 |  |
The current Filipino Congressman and boxing's only octuple champion suffered a fairly noble defeat to Floyd Mayweather, Jr. during the "fight of the century" on May 2. |
| 3 | Floyd Mayweather, Jr. |
|
2,507,300 | |
The quintuple champion upheld his undefeated record with his 48th straight win on May 2. |
| 4 | Avengers: Age of Ultron |
|
2,407,812 |  |
The latest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe premiered in Hollywood on April 13, and went on wide release on May 1. In any other year, the sequel to the billion-grossing Avengers would be the film to beat at the box office, but with the success of Furious 7, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens ahead, no one is taking bets on who will come out on top. The movie's $188 million opening weekend failed to live up to its predecessor's $207 million, but when the numbers are this big, you're splitting hairs. |
| 5 | Death of Freddie Gray |
|
2,093,596 |  |
America has seen a spate of young black men killed under suspicious circumstances by police in the last 12 months, and in the confusion and politicised debate, viewers turned to Wikipedia for clarity. The death of Eric Garner and the shooting of Michael Brown topped this list for a combined three weeks running, and in a more typical week, this latest death would top the list as well. The decision of state's attorney Marilyn Mosby to charge the police who killed Freddie Gray with homicide has meant that the city of Baltimore has been spared the worst excesses of the riots visited upon Ferguson, Missouri. |
| 6 | Bruce Jenner |
|
1,219,166 |  |
The former track and field Olympian and current honorary Kardashian remains the news this week, and views for his article have dropped just 25%. Jenner previously appeared on the Top 25 for two weeks in February, but his article would not include what the tabloids were reporting until Jenner said it himself, which he did in an April 24 interview on American television with Diane Saywer – that he is a trans woman. His gender transition will be the subject of an eight-part documentary series starting July 2015. |
| 7 | Nepal |
|
1,192,053 |  |
Before today, this Himalayan country sandwiched between India and China was probably best known as the home (with Tibet) of Mount Everest, and also of the Sherpa people, who guided the first Westerners to its summit. A onetime spot on the Hippie trail and home for disaffected westerners looking for an alternative way of life, it has seen tragedy, upheaval and civil war in recent years, but horror reached a climax this week with the hideous 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck its central region, including its capital, Kathmandu. |
| 8 | 2015 Nepal earthquake |
|
908,375 |  |
The grinding push of India into Asia that is slowly raising the Himalayas has meant that the Nepali people are no strangers to geological tragedy; even so, the horror they woke up to on 25 April was the worst they would have known in more than eighty years. A combination of size (7.8), depth (a relatively shallow 15 km) and duration (twenty seconds) made the quake particularly devastating; generating a death toll of 7,500, with hundreds still missing. Entire villages near the epicentre were wiped out. Temples that had stood for centuries were flattened. But perhaps the greatest tragedy is that the poor state of transport infrastructure in the country has meant that many of the more remote villages have still received no aid. |
| 9 | Vision (Marvel Comics) |
|
825,378 |  |
The sentient AI and foil for the villainous Ultron became the breakout star of The Avengers: Age of Ultron and allowed actor Paul Bettany (pictured) to finally step out of the voice-only shadows of his J.A.R.V.I.S. character into full acting. |
| 10 | Furious 7 |
|
660,138 |  |
After burning through the global box office like a brush fire for its first three weeks, this latest installment in the Fast and Furious franchise is apparently winding down, taking only $6 million in its latest weekend; however such was the overwhelming gravitational pull of Avengers: Age of Ultron that Furious 7's meagre gross still placed it at no. 2 in the charts. |
artnet and The Next Web report (May 6) that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is releasing a hundred images of works in its collection under Creative Commons licences in conjunction with a May 19 editathon. The donation includes works by Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Klee. Pharos, president of Wikimedia New York City and a speaker at the editathon, told the Signpost that the works should all be available in the Wikimedia Commons category commons:Category:Media contributed by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in time for the event. The images will be of works already in the public domain, but they will be higher resolution images than have been previously available, and will include both two-dimensional and three-dimensional works.
Advertising Age reports (May 4) that a campaign involving Wikipedia was honored at the 94th annual awards of the Art Directors Club, presented last week in Miami Beach. The campaign was created by the Costa Rican branch of Leo Burnett Worldwide for Fundación Paniamor, a Costa Rican non-profit organization dedicated to children's advocacy, for the 2014 presidential election last May. In October 2014, they edited the articles of the major candidates on the Spanish Wikipedia, including the eventual winner Luis Guillermo Solís, to insert a largely blank section asking what the candidates would do to address childhood protection issues. The edits were immediately reverted and the articles protected, but the campaign drew attention to the edits with the hashtag #IncompleteBios. The campaign received attention in the Spanish-language media and claims credit for the candidates all adopting childhood protection policies in their platforms.
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The Wikimedia Foundation this week announced the winning grantees in March's "Inspire" grant-making campaign. The campaign was organized as an invitation to the editing community for thoughts, ideas, and opinions on how to address Wikipedia gender gap. Ideas were presented and commented by and within the community via the collaborative IdeaLab, and to help attract contributors the Foundation ran a prominent CentralNotice banner in support of the campaign. The best ideas were to be matched to long-term advisers as well as up to US$250,000 of funding withdrawn from the Individual Engagement Grants and Project and Event Grants programs, which were on hold from February to April this year to free up program staff for the campaign. The campaign served as a pilot project for what the WMF hopes will prove to be a viable new option in community-oriented grant-making: further "Inspire grants" organized as all-at-once timely campaigns focused on issues deemed to be of particular importance to the movement.
With the campaign now complete director of community resources Siko Bouterse and Project and Event Grants Program Officer Alexandra Wang presented the winners in a post to the Wikimedia Blog. At the time of the campaign's organization the Foundation was hoping for 20 new grant-supported projects, which appears to have been more or less fulfilled: after "careful review by a committee of volunteer Wikimedians and gender-focused experts", 16 projects have received WMF funding. They are as follows:
In a post to the WMF-l mailing list, Wang wrote:
| “ | The projects are experimenting with a variety of strategies: organizing events and leveraging professional communities, institutions and partnerships to create quality content, researching gaps in both content and contributors, and testing approaches for training and mentorship to better support gender diversity on-wiki. Overall, we're particularly pleased to see projects looking at gender in multiple ways as they work to improve Wikipedia's gender diversity across various contexts, and to be supporting some returning grantees as well as many new project leaders who identify as women or allies for increasing gender diversity. | ” |
Further feedback from the Foundation's Inspire team focusing on their experiences in organizing the campaign, which has been in embryo since last December, will be forthcoming. Meanwhile staff and volunteer time has returned to the now-unfrozen PEG and IEG programs, and any further proposed contributions to the themes of gender gap are encouraged to seek any further feedback at these venues.
In related news, senior operations analyst Tilman Bayer published a post to the Foundation blog a day earlier, on March 30, summarizing the statistical work that has been done so far to quantify the scale of the gender gap. Addressing the gender gap emerged as a major strategic goal for the WMF in 2011, following external media coverage about the fact, blowing up what had by that time already become an internal concern for former executive director Sue Gardner and founder Jimmy Wales alike (Signpost coverage at the time was itself written by Bayer, at the time the Signpost's volunteer editor-in-chief). The assessment came with a long list of qualifiers and provided numbers ranging from 6 to 26 percent; as the blog post points out, in the "Inspire" campaign's own banners the number used by the Wikimedia Foundation is a well-hedged "less than 20%". Past articles in the Signpost and elsewhere have used a 10% meter stick. Likely the best assessments come from a trio of editor surveys carried out in support of the 2010-2015 strategic plan, which gave 9%, 9%, and 10% figures, respectively, in 2011-2012—subject to the biases introduced by the use of voluntary editor surveys.
All that said, Bayer does not specifically criticize the distinct lack of recent data. There has been no general survey of the Wikimedia userbase since 2012, making it difficult to get an accurate accounting of how the gender gap has changed in the last three years. While WMF is currently working on another survey, there is no indication of when it will be completed and sent out. R
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