I bet we got you to click with that title! Now that you're reading anyway, we want to take a moment to ask you to consider contributing to the Signpost. Before you click off the page deeming this another tedious call for contributors, there is one specific, non-time-consuming way you can help us with limited commitment: basically, we want to create a list of backup writers to whom we can turn if a regular writer is unavailable. You would never be under any obligation to contribute, but we just want a list of some people who have some basic knowledge of Wikipedia and are interested in potentially contributing once in a while. You can designate yourself for a certain section (we especially need people who can help with the arbitration report, news and notes, and in the media), or just as a generalist willing to serve as an occasional pinch hitter. Please see our informal sign-up sheet in the newsroom.
Wikimanía 2015 drew to a close in Mexico City, Mexico. An "annual conference celebrating Wikipedia and its sister free knowledge projects", Wikimania features remarks from some leading players from the Wikimedia Foundation as well as the free knowledge movement. Overall, most attendees "were really quite impressed with how smoothly the conference went", according to Andrew Lih, who added that in terms of food and venue it was much like a corporate conference.
WMF executive director Lila Tretikov gave a presentation entitled United in Knowledge in which she encouraged Wikimedians to "be bold, break your own rules", much to the chagrin of some attendees, who view that as a misinterpretation of WP:BOLD and WP:BRD. Lih said that although the speech was somewhat unrefined, it is difficult to communicate effectively with newbies and veterans simultaneously. "I do think Lila needs a few more of these before she gets her message calibrated and seasoned", he said. "Part of it is English as her second language, and part of it is that we have a real demanding community."
Additional reaction to the keynote speeches is in this week's Wikimanía report from Peaceray, a conference attendee.
Perhaps the biggest downside, according to Lih, was the lack of video recording; only keynote speeches were recorded, leaving attendees to do their best with limited equipment – many of them expressing outrage on the special Wikimania mailing list and Twitter at what they felt was an unconscionable oversight. Speaking to the value of video recording, Lih wrote,
| “ | When a Wikipedian in Residence can show their institution the video of their Wikimania presentation as evidence of impact and engagement, it can lead to renewal of their positions and more initiatives. When the video of a Wikimania panel on COI and PR editing can convince more multi-billion dollar PR firm to understand our guidelines and terms of use, that's a major outcome. When someone talks about Wiki Loves Earth, #100wikidays or other grassroots projects, video provides a unique window into the emotions and motivations you cannot capture in a mailing list or blog post. When in 10 years, we want to know the passions and personalities that led us to where the movement is, where will we look? If we're expecting Wikimania videos to rack up the same views as LOLcats, it ain't going to happen. It has always been a very small core community does a massive amount of the innovation and work that keeps the projects going, and the ability to talk to each other in deep, complex and accessible ways is vital. | ” |
Even WMF staffer Asaf Bartov expressed agreement that the lack of video recording was problematic. The issue was even raised in June, but received no reply, something Hydriz called "rather disappointing." Other posts focused on the perceived value of video when weighed against the cost. On Twitter, one tweet bemoaned, "I thought the idea of video recording sessions was that you dont [sic] have to (go) yourself."
Ultimately, some sessions were recorded in audio only, and others with smartphone video capabilities, and posted to YouTube. At this point, it is unknown who is at fault for the lack of video, but Lih says that Ivan Martinez, the event's local coordinator, told him that "hiring the hotel or local team to do it professionally would have been very expensive", so the plan was for the WMF to handle it. Unconfirmed reports are that the staffer who was supposed to be in charge of that aspect of the conference is no longer employed by WMF. The Signpost emailed Ellie Young, the WMF's conference coordinator, multiple times seeking comment on this and other aspects of the conference. We received no response.
However, on the mailing list, WMF storyteller Victor Grigas reported that based on his conversations with "the team doing video recordings", only certain talks would be recorded because last year it was expensive to record everything, something he emphasized was not his decision. More interestingly, he said, "All the footage that the video team is shooting will be owned (copyright) by Wikimedia Mexico per their contract, so if there are particular clips you want later, contact WMMX." WMF was unable to clarify the remarks due to multiple staff vacations. The Signpost will run a follow-up story next week.
The conference was also not without technical glitches. According to several attendees in contact with the Signpost, Internet service was down for upwards of 20 minutes at one point. "[T]here seemed to be a major hiccup each day ... but otherwise I'd say it was pretty solid. Compared to other Wikimanias, I'd rate it very good. But all you need is one 20 minute stretch, at a critical time, to ruin your day", Lih said. Other attendees complained that the Internet was slow; a Phabricator ticket indicates at least one problem was rectified.
Other conference highlights included Jimmy Wales' speech, which focused on issues of Internet freedom and noted that of 234 governmental requests to remove content from Wikipedia, none were granted. Wales also gave away the bride at a wedding of two Israeli Wikipedians at the conference, Darya and Avner Kantor, whose love story was featured on the WMF blog earlier this year.
As Wikimania 2015 draws to a close, attention turns to the 2016 iteration of the conference, slated to be held in Esino Lario, Italy. Although there are serious questions as to whether infrastructure available in the small Lombardy town is conducive to a large conference such as Wikimania (see previous Signpost coverage), at the site presentation in Mexico City, Iolanda Pensa (Iopensa), the lead organizer for the conference, answered the question "Why Esino Lario?" simply by saying "Because we can."
Even before it closed on July 17, the Arbitration case involving Lightbreather attracted widespread comment. Lightbreather herself posted a banner on her userpage on July 1 declaring "Retired due to sexual harassment", only returning two weeks later to make edits to the talk page of the proposed decision.
The language in one of the proposed principles attracted widespread comment. Regarding the inability of the community and the Committee to effectively address serious cases of harassment, the principle suggested that victims should consider "lowering their profile until the threat is past". This prompted objections on- and off-wiki. SlimVirgin wrote that the proposed decision supports the idea that "women who are being baited are expected to keep quiet or stop editing". A number of the Arbitrators agreed. One of them, Euryalus, wrote "I opposed the reference to people being advised to keep quiet and lower their profile of harassed, for precisely the reason you outline - it tells people to let the harassers win. What we should be telling people is to make a fuss about harassment through the right channels, and for those channels to work well enough that the harassment gets dealt with." The offending language was removed by Roger Davies on July 13 "in an endeavour to achieve consensus".
Despite this, the final decision, which included a site-ban for Lightbreather, was still controversial on-wiki and attracted comment offsite. Brianna Wu, a game developer who has been the victim of significant harassment herself, tweeted: "The whole case is shameful. She asked Wiki to take action against sexual harassers, they didn't. They ban her, no punishment for harassers." On User talk:Jimbo Wales, Robert McClenon placed the blame on the Wikimedia Foundation, not on the Arbitration Committee: "My opinion is that the WMF has not done enough. Off-wiki harassment of Wikipedia editors is an existential threat to the neutrality of Wikipedia...Off-wiki harassment is a threat both to the neutrality of Wikipedia and the editors of Wikipedia." CorporateM began an RFC asking whether or not Wikipedia should have "a sexual harassment policy or a part of the harassment policy focused on sexual harassment."
Coverage of the case itself will appear in next week's Arbitration Report.
The main conference of Wikimanía 2015 occurred from Friday through Sunday, the 17 to 19 July, at the Hotel Hilton Mexico City Reforma, across from the Alameda Central in the historic center of Mexico City. The education pre-conference and hackathon took place the two days before the main conference.
Iván Martínez, the Wikimanía 2015 coordinator, welcomed the attendees on Friday, then introduced WMF's executive director, Lila Tretikov, who gave the opening plenary address. First, she briefly listed her diverse meetings with WikiArabia, Wikimedia Israel, the Wikimedia Conference 2015, the Wikimedians of the Levant, and Wikimedia Polska, and teleconferencing with the Museo Soumaya editathon. Tretikov compared the growth of Wikimedia to that of cultivating grapes, evolving from seedlings to a cohesive and productive vineyard, in which “together, we are more than the sum of us”. She noted our current challenges: five billion people newly online in this next decade, fast-moving and technology-savvy users, the expanding role of artificial intelligence in knowledge creation, changing knowledge formats, and the opportunities presented by institutions eager to share their knowledge. Tretikov then outlined the strategy consultation that the WMF undertakes with editors across many countries, Wikimedia projects, and languages, and the WMF's desire to partner technology and our communities for innovation. She cited new tools such as editing and adding citations in Visual Editor, Revscore, content translation (including a recommendation algorithm to match translators with missing articles), and new mobile tools (e.g., collections). She noted that the 2015 election of three WMF board members was a team effort in process improvement and editor/voter outreach. Tretikov closed by recommending that we be bold, return to openness and collaboration, focus on what we love and let go of the rest, unite and integrate our work, and embrace diversity.
A pdf from Tretikov 's presentation is here.
Luis von Ahn, co-founder of ReCAPTCHA and duoLingo, spoke on Saturday. He explained that after initially developing this widely used version of the captcha, he grew to feel guilty about occupying users' time solely to distinguish between humans and bots, and that as a result of this ambivalence he had developed a means of presenting a second word in the captcha to aid in translating textual images from scanned books that are unreadable by computers. By pairing an unknown word image with a known one, the captcha server program would use the known word in the image pair to verify the user as human, and would record the response for the unknown word in the image pair until enough human responses were obtained to reliably identify its meaning.
After selling ReCAPTCHA to Google in 2009, he turned his attention to the educational needs of the underprivileged in countries like his birth place of Guatemala, where there is a great need for an inexpensive means to learn English for economic advancement. Thus, duoLingo was born, a free app and web application that required only a smart phone or a computer to use. Honed by applying lessons learned from usability statistics obtained by automated feedback, duoLingo has more than 100 million registered users, and has been extended to a dozen language pairs, although it is largely limited to those of Roman script.
Jimmy Wales delivered the closing remarks. He concentrated on the freedom-of-expression issues that some Wikipedia users and editors are experiencing. He listed two examples and a related philosophical conundrum:
Wales' announcement of Wikipedian of the year was made in pectore, meaning that he did not reveal the name at this time because doing so has the potential to bring reprisal or harm to the recipient. He also named two honorable mentions, Susanna Mkrtchyan, president of Wikimedia Armenia who has recently been instrumental in promoting the Western Armenian Wikipedia (see also the Signpost coverage), and Satdeep Gill for his contributions and promotion of the Punjabi Wikipedia.
The magazine New York reports that three novelists "have found a way to control the Wikipedia narrative" by using the annotation website Genius to annotate their own Wikipedia articles. They have supplied numerous thoughtful and introspective comments about their work, friends, and collaborators, which are sure to be mined for future Wikipedia edits. They have also made substantial comments about the effect their Wikipedia articles have had on them, an in-depth reflection that is rarely seen from the subject of an article—more common are angry complaints or passing comments in an interview. New York writes that these authors have used Genius "mostly as a way to play with the form but also as a way to correct, explain, and rewrite a story that someone else has written about them." (July 16)
Emily Gould (Friendship) wrote about her article:
| “ | I’ve always really hated my Wikipedia page—it’s so far away from how I think of myself and my career. It’s made me think of Wikipedia differently as a research tool—I take it with a massive, whopping, deer-lick-sized grain of salt. A lot of my page isn’t exactly inaccurate, it’s just from a bizarre standpoint. This is never what a human would sit down and write—even a human who really hated me. Who is Emily Gould, what does she do? What is an Emily Gould? This is like the accrual of all of the moments when the internet has been paying attention to me minus the ones that actually mattered. | ” |
One of those moments is the subject of the greater part of the text in her Wikipedia article, a "Criticism" section devoted to a 2007 panel discussion on the CNN show Larry King Live, where Gould, who was co-editor of Gawker at the time, was confronted about a Gawker feature by Jimmy Kimmel. She wrote:
| “ | This section feels disproportionate to the rest of my page. I get four sentences for “Career” and then “Criticism” is two paragraphs that end with a sad note about how I had to get therapy? That isn’t cool ... I’ve never looked at Jimmy Kimmel’s Wikipedia page but I’m sure it has a better “Criticism” to “Career” ratio. | ” |
Gould reflected on the classification of her occupation as "writer, editor, blogger":
| “ | I guess I’ve got to cut Wikipedia some slack because what do I do really? What would I call that? I would like to be known as an author—that seems like a thing that I am. I wrote some books. Author means “wrote books.” | ” |
Gould also noted that her birth year (cited to a 2014 print publication) was incorrect and wrote of her dislike of her infobox photo, taken by a Wikimedian in 2009:
| “ | This photo is so bad. I know Wikipedia basically has to use some stock photo that some random person took of you because they can’t use anything that anyone wants to claim the rights to. They can’t use for example my author photo or any photo of me that has ever been in a magazine or a newspaper. They can’t use a photo that was taken by a photographer. That’s why everyone’s Wikipedia photo is so terrible.
I can’t remember exactly what I was doing in the photo—I think I was moderating some panel. 2009 was the year I took yoga teacher training and I was the chubbiest I have ever been in my life. It’s also a bad angle and I’m also wearing this weird leather vest that’s kind of popping at the seams. It’s just the worst photo and I hate it so much. |
” |
The article for Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?) describes her as "a Canadian writer and editor". Heti wrote, "I don’t feel particularly connected to Canadian literature" and "I don’t know why it says, 'and editor' at the top. I always find that kind of weird." Of her inclusion in the category Category:Canadian women novelists, Heti concurred with Amanda Filipacchi's prominent criticism of Wikipedia's gender categories (see previous Signpost coverage) and wrote, "I think it would be better not to have this category at all." She was, however, pleased with her inclusion in Category:Living people, quipping "This is the best category to be in."
Like Gould, Heti objected to her infobox photo, which was also taken by a Wikimedian, this one in 2013. Unlike Gould, Heti removed it "because it was the worst photo that had ever been taken of me. It was a camera photo from a bad angle, blurry, and I felt I looked disgusting. I considered replacing it but I felt too cautious and left it blank."
Heti reflected on Wikipedia's ability to magnify and propagate minor comments and incidents. Included in her article is a comment from a 2007 interview in which she said, "Increasingly I'm less interested in writing about fictional people." Heti wrote:
| “ | I don’t know who put that in there. For a while, every person who interviewed me referenced it. It’s such a tell: you instantly know that someone has done basically no research and has only read your Wikipedia page. It’s been practically ten years since I said this—interests change. It’s funny how one thing you say can become so big when one person thinks to put it on your Wikipedia page. People think it’s more important than everything else because it’s on Wikipedia. | ” |
Chris Kraus (I Love Dick) discussed the creation of her article in August 2006:
| “ | This was originally put up by my friend Ariana Reines. There was a time when everyone was getting Wiki pages, which I guess was around the time of Ariana’s The Cow—that’s the way we’re dating it—which was 2006. Suddenly you had to have a Wikipedia page—it was the go-to thing. So everybody had to have one and that’s why I asked Ariana to do it, as part of a trade. She did me a favor, and I did her a favor. What did I do in exchange? I really don’t remember. Maybe I blurbed her book? But that seems like a lot to ask in exchange for writing a whole wiki page! I hope I did more than that. | ” |
Her current opinion of the article, however, is negative:
| “ | I’ve never read my Wikipedia page. It’s horrible, too embarrassing. My understanding is that anybody can go in and change it at any point. I looked at it once and it was just so awry and inaccurate. I realized there was no point fixing it or paying attention to it because it was out of my control, so I wasn’t going to think about it. | ” |
The People's Operator is a UK-based mobile virtual network operator and social networking service which allows its customers to direct 10% of what they spend to charities of their choice. TPO is coming to the United States, and TPO chairman Jimmy Wales is the public face of their rollout. Wales told Vanity Fair that he saw parallels between his work for TPO and Wikipedia: "I’ve discovered in my work that if you can give people the tools they're looking for, that allow them to accomplish the goals that they have for themselves, they can do amazing things. Here, if you want to raise money for your local hospital, we can give you the tools to do that." In a wide-ranging interview with HuffPost Live, Wales touched on a number of topics besides TPO. (July 21)
When asked about the Sunshine Sachs controversy (see previous Signpost coverage), Wales encouraged PR companies to be "transparent" and said of undisclosed paid editing:
| “ | I think it's a really bad idea for them to do this, because they get caught and it embarrasses their clients. There's better ways to deal with Wikipedia. You know, we're very open, people can email us and say 'we've got this correction, we've got this information' and sometimes unethical PR people—and there are lots and lots of ethical PR people—but the unethical ones think 'I'll just make up a fake ID and pretend to be someone' and so one and it embarrasses their client and so on. It's like, you could have just sent us an email, you could have just gone to the talk page and said 'hey, there's a problem here, here's some sources', you know. The community is very passionate about getting it right. | ” |
Wales spoke about Wikipedia's involvement in the NSA lawsuit (see previous Signpost coverage) and his reaction to British Prime Minister David Cameron's call to ban encryption:
| “ | I think it's just technological incompetence. One of the most important things we can do is improve the security of the internet. ... and that means end-to-end encryption everywhere. That's what he should be campaigning for. And just the idea that you can ban encryption, or ban end-to-end encryption, is just nonsense. It's impossible, it's math. You can't ban math. | ” |
Wales reflected on changing perceptions of the quality of Wikipedia over the years:
| “ | The community's always been passionate about quality. But of course, when you first start writing, and when you've first got a small group of people ... it's going to be incomplete, it's going to be weak in various ways, but because we've maintained a passion for doing something amazing for the world, for really getting it right, then over the years it just continues to improve. So we've earned a little bit of respect, but we've still got a long way to go. | ” |
One of those ways is the gender gap:
| “ | The gender balance in the community is not good, and this leads to certain kinds of biases in the content. When your typical Wikipedian is a technical person, tech geek, 26 year old male, no kids, there's a certain profile of a typical Wikipedia user, which means they're very, very interested in some topics and they know very little and not very interested in some topics. So we want to have people from very diverse backgrounds who'll have an interest in all kinds of different subjects, because then they can build quality work in the areas that we're currently neglecting. | ” |
In the wake of the volunteer moderator uprising on the social media website Reddit, Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post examines how and why people work for free on websites on the social web. As she bluntly puts it "A century ago, you might’ve dubbed it robber-barony or sharecropping — if not, you know, outright slavery. In 2015, though, we call it the social Web: a glorious dystopia where everybody works for likes — as in, “for free” — while a handful of tech tycoons profit." Dewey notes that the free labor of Wikipedia's volunteers "plays a large role in the $51 million in donations that Wikipedia scored last year — and also in the staggering $16.5 billion in revenue that Google reported in 2014", especially due to the inclusion of Wikipedia data in Google's Knowledge Graph.
Dewey spoke with Justin Knapp (Koavf), the most prolific of those volunteers who is at the top of the List of Wikipedians by number of edits. Dewey writes "With nearly 1.5 million contributions, the 33-year-old Wikipedian is more active on the site than literally anyone else — including members of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s paid staff." Dewey contrasts the billions taken in by tech companies with Knapp's life in Indianapolis, where he works three jobs and drives a fifteen-year-old car. She identifies Knapp's motivation with the sociological term "affective currency", which describes intangible motivations and benefits that such people get out of their work. Knapp says "I understand that some people want to be paid to do what they love. But when you put a number on the thing you love, it can't be priceless. If you don't put a number on it, you assign the value and the meaning to it, yourself — you don't negotiate that with the market."
Efforts to compensate such volunteer labor are still in their infancy. One idea mentioned by Dewey was offered by Wikipedian Dorothy Howard (Vaughn88) last year in an essay where she raised "the question of compensating certain classes of 'super-editors' for major contributions." She suggested following the model of YouTube's Partner Program by compensating those editors through donations to Wikipedia. She wrote "This type of project would allow for more fair digital labor practices and would compensate viewers for their major contributions to the site's legitimacy as a reliable source." (July 22)
On July 17, a pro-immigration reform Twitter account posted a picture of Julian Castro, the Democratic Party United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, along with a statement he made on MSNBC regarding the possibility of Latino voters favoring the Republican Party: "The GOP can kiss the Latino vote goodbye." Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa, tweeted in response "What does Julian Castro know? Does he know that I'm as Hispanic and Latino as he?"
The meaning of King's tweet is unclear. King, who is of Irish, Welsh, and German ancestry, is not Latino, as many critics on Twitter immediately pointed out. NBC News notes that "King is not listed among Hispanic members of the House in a list kept by the House Press Gallery." However, Castro was born in San Antonio, Texas and is of Mexican descent. NBC News and Politico speculated that the tweet was in reference to reports that Castro is not fluent in Spanish. (Many Americans of Latino descent do not speak Spanish.) Both news outlets reported that King's office did not respond to their requests for clarification.
A number of political news outlets and blogs, including Mediaite, Salon, and Raw Story, noted that King's Wikipedia article was quickly updated to reflect King's declaration. "Hispanic" was added to his Irish, Welsh, and German ancestry, cited to the tweet. His name was translated into Spanish from "Steven Arnold 'Steve' King" to "Esteban Arnoldo 'Steba' Rey". A comment was added claiming King admitted to being "the child or grandchild of illegal immigrants." All of these changes were quickly reverted. Unlike most cases of vandalism driven by off-site events, the vandalism quickly subsided and article protection was not required. Two days later, however, King's infobox picture was replaced with that of professional wrestler Rey Mysterio.
King has a history of offensive and racially-charged remarks about Latinos and immigrants. Most notoriously, in 2013 he said of the children of illegal immigrants: "For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."
Summary: When I was a kid, being a nerd meant wanting to go to Pluto. Well now we have gone to Pluto and all my fellow nerds want to talk about is Comic Con and the latest Marvel movie. It seems seeing a trailer for a movie they're all going to see anyway is more important than viewing landscapes as yet unseen by human eyes and unlikely to be seen again. And no, my peevishness has nothing to do with my being the chief editor of the Pluto article. Well, maybe a bit.
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 July 12 to 18, 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 | Suicide Squad | 
|
1,817,973 |  |
DC Comics' ramshackle crew of pressganged supervillains, forced to do the will of a shadowy organization or let their heads explode, are the stars of one of the most anticipated films in the upcoming DC Cinematic Universe. This week, at San Diego Comic Con, Warner Bros released the film's first trailer, which, from the Wikipedia views, seems to have gotten the fans more excited than the upcoming Batman vs. Superman movie. |
| 2 | Joaquín Guzmán Loera | 
|
1,671,857 | This ruthless narco-trafficker, boss of the Sinaloa cartel and reportedly the world's 14th richest man, became an enduring folk hero and the subject of a hundred "narcocorridos" (folk songs glorying the deeds of the great drug lords) after he escaped from a top-security prison in 2001. He was on the lam for 13 years before his recapture in 2014. And now, get ready to tune up your guitars mariachis, because he just did it again. On 11 July, he escaped his prison cell through a tunnel under the shower; by sheer coincidence the only blind spot for the surveillance cameras. If, at this point, you're having flashbacks to The Shawshank Redemption, ditch them: the tunnel was professionally constructed, contained electric lighting, was 1.7 metres tall and 1.5 km long, and included a motorcycle. And no one noticed it being built. Apparently. Oh, and despite being the world's most wanted fugitive, he apparently has an active Twitter account with half a million followers. Frustratingly (but appropriately) the views for this article are a bit dodgy, since they all appear to be for his longer name, which is a redirect. Still, the mobile count is good and the topic is valid, so I can't really argue. | |
| 3 | Suicide Squad (film) | 
|
1,608,426 | |
See #1. |
| 4 | Pluto | 
|
1,491,263 |  |
Does it ever astonish you how often things work? We had one, just one, chance to get this right, and after 11 years in political limbo, three years in development, and nine years in space, everything hinged on a series of pre-programmed actions performed over the course of just 22 hours by a computer 4.7 billion miles away. During that time, the probe was radio silent; we had no idea if it had survived or not. If we hadn't received its bleep of hello then the entire mission would have been for nothing, and it is doubtful I or any of you would have seen the results in our lifetime. Think on that. And then remember that this event was out-viewed by an escaped drug lord and the trailer for a comic book movie. |
| 5 | Satoru Iwata |
|
1,253,657 | .jpg) |
The famously ebullient CEO of Nintendo, who often incorporated bananas and caricature puppets into his presentations, winning him the admiration of gamers, died suddenly of cancer this week at the age of just 55. The first CEO of the company not related to the founding Yamauchi family in its 128-year history, he nonetheless strictly maintained its ethos that Nintendo products were for everyone, not just children or adults. In a moment that could have come from one of their games, a rainbow appeared over Nintendo's Kyoto HQ on the day his death was announced. |
| 6 | Novak Djokovic |
|
857,933 | _(14641439744).jpg) |
The Wimbledon Men's (sorry, Gentlemen's) singles final wasn't held until the 12th, which meant that Best Tennis Player of All TimeTM Roger Federer got all the attention last week, before his final defeat at the hands of this Serbian wunderkind, who appropriately now gets his due. And he should; he won last year too. |
| 7 | Baahubali (film) |
|
853,839 | .jpg) |
At $41 million, this sprawling, two-part historical epic is the most expensive film in Indian history (no, it isn't actually Bollywood, since it was made in South India, much to Bollywood's chagrin). Starring the Telugu actor Prabhas (pictured), the first part, subtitled "The Beginning", broke box office records upon its release on July 10, earning Rs 2.15 billion ($34 million) worldwide in just 5 days. |
| 8 | Ant-Man (film) |
|
846,555 | Personal editorial alert: As an avid fan of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz (I said I was a nerd), I was wary when writer/director Edgar Wright unceremoniously dumped the highest-profile project of his career because Marvel Studios refused to give him full creative control, particularly since Marvel kept this project alive for a decade mainly because he was interested in it. Afraid the damage caused by his departure would be irreparable, I began to speculate if there was a "Number 12 curse"; that no studio, no matter how beloved or respected, can go 12 movies without a critical bomb. Pixar's 12th was Cars 2; this was Marvel's. Well, they managed to avoid the critical mauling (the film's RT score is a decent 79%, though critics in my UK home have been crueller- no doubt in solidarity with Edgar), but the box office is somewhat iffy; while it opened at #1 (like every other Marvel Studios film to date), it had the lowest per-screen average of any film in the franchise. The film could still be buoyed by good word of mouth however. | |
| 9 | New Horizons |
|
839,290 |  |
The fastest spacecraft ever launched finally reached its destination after 9 years of traversing the interplanetary void. It may not be as cute as Sojourner but it is a stalwart little thing which, as several memes pointed out this week, cost less taxpayer money than several refurbished stadiums. And its mission isn't even over yet; the team hopes to redirect it to another Kuiper belt object before it leaves the Solar System's charted regions. |
| 10 | Roger Federer | 
|
791,565 | _2_new.jpg) |
The man widely regarded as the best tennis player of all time lost the Wimbledon title to Novak Djokovic in a titanic 7-6, 6-7, 6-4, 6-3 showdown. |
Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
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An active project which we haven't for some reason interviewed here before: WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom. Taking us through the polling booth and beyond are JRPG, This is Paul, and Cloptonson.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom? Are you active on the political scene, even held office, or just interested?
Have you contributed to any of the project's 46 featured articles, 6 featured lists, and 89 good articles? Are you currently working on promoting an article to FA or GA status?
How did the project manage when dealing with the recent general election in the UK? Was there any co-ordination in updating unfolding results and coverage?
Does WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom collaborate with any other WikiProjects, such as WP Law or the politics of another country? Has the project taken advantage of Wikipedia's sister projects, like Wikisource or the Commons?
Is it difficult to find images to illustrate political articles? What topics are most in need of diagrams and photography?
Which political party do you vote for, and why? Does that party usually win in your home constituency?
What are WikiProject Politics of the United Kingdom's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Three Featured articles were promoted this week.
Two Featured lists were promoted this week.
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Twenty-nine Featured pictures were promoted this week.
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Forty-six years ago this week, the Apollo 11 mission took three men into outer space and two of them, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, were the first humans to set foot on the surface of the Moon. It was a great achievement not just in American history, but in human history, marked by Armstrong's memorable phrase "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." The photographs of that mission remain among the most recognizable in recent history. Of the photograph of Aldrin taken by Armstrong on the lunar surface taken, Aldrin tweeted this week: "I have 3 words to describe why this photo Neil took of me is so iconic: Location, location, location." The final photograph is not as famous. It is a photo uploaded by a Wikimedian taken by his grandfather of his mother as a young girl during this historic moment, a great example of how ordinary Wikimedians can contribute to documenting their world and its history.
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