Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/From the editors
Yeah, we missed last week. No particular reason why, except that there are only two of us working on this and sometimes we have conflicting schedules. For an idea of what last week's list was like, however, see this week's list. And the week before's. The world appears to be in little mood to be interesting right now. The late-summer smash success of Straight Outta Compton remains the chief talking point of the English-speaking world, interrupted only by the welcome return of a Google Doodle, which topped the list for the first time since 10 May.
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 August 23 to 29, 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 | Duke Kahanamoku | 
|
1,445,269 |  |
Google Doodles don't lead to number 1 articles as often as they used to, so when they do, you can bet it will be someone special. This Olympic champion swimmer, who was born into the Kingdom of Hawaii but lived well into his homeland's statehood, is widely regarded as the St Paul of surfing, as his travels and swimming exhibitions during the 1910s are widely credited with evangelising the formerly uniquely Hawaiian sport across the globe. |
| 2 | SummerSlam (2015) |
|
950,916 | WWE's latest pay-per-view pantomime, which took place on August 23, 2015, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, has been hovering on this list's margins for weeks now, so it's not surprising to see it so high this week. | |
| 3 | Ashley Madison |
|
898,250 | .jpg) |
Well, they said they were going to do it, and they did. "The Impact Team", a group of hackers of definite if somewhat ill-conceived moral purpose, became so incensed with the cheating date site's misleading of their supposedly 33 million-strong clientèle (in fact, only 1 in 3000 of their female accounts are real) that they threatened to publish the details of said clientèle online and ruin their lives. Once again guys, your targets are decent but your methods need work. Anyway, the company didn't back down, and now those names are on the Internet for all to see. Result? Several broken marriages, at least two suicides, and the embarrassment of several high-profile individuals, including, in a delicious bit of irony, the CEO of Ashley Madison, who resigned from the company. The reported $750 million in threatened lawsuits couldn't have helped either. |
| 4 | Eazy-E | 
|
816,719 |  |
The founding member of N.W.A., whose death from AIDS at the age of just 31 forms the emotional climax of the film Straight Outta Compton, falls from #1 last week. |
| 5 | Until Dawn |
|
795,831 | The year's first "big" video game, this "interactive horror film" has been getting positive reactions from critics and the public; it seems the never-really-liked genre of interactive movies may finally have found a plotline that works. | |
| 6 | Donald Trump | 
|
728,358 |  |
Nothing can stop the Donald; he's even managed to test the power of traditional Republican kingmaker Fox News, as apparently earning their opprobrium over his treatment of their star face Megyn Kelly hasn't damaged him in the polls. What did he do this week? Well, not much, except starting a feud with Univision reporter Jorge Ramos, making fun of Asian "Engrish" speech patterns, slamming Jeb Bush by quoting his mother at him ("We've had enough Bushes", she apparently said), and, of course, posting a seemingly endless stream of insulting tweets, some at 3 in the morning. |
| 7 | Fear the Walking Dead |
|
724,778 |  |
AMC's spin-off to their hit series The Walking Dead premiered on 23 August. |
| 8 | Straight Outta Compton (2015 film) |
|
667,151 | The biopic of the short-lived but electrifying hip-hop group N.W.A. was released on August 14 to superb reviews and blockbuster business- its $56 million opening weekend gross was higher than those for Terminator Genisys and Pixels combined, and it has held the #1 slot at the US box office for three weeks to a total of $134 million. It's interesting to note that African Americans make up just 12% of the US population, and films aimed specifically at that market, like those of Tyler Perry, are considered hits if they reach $60 million after their entire runs. That shows the breadth of this the movie's appeal across racial lines. That the film's story chimed so well with recent events in America likely also played a role. | |
| 9 | Dr. Dre |
|
587,509 |  |
Far and away the most successful talent to emerge from N.W.A., Dr. Dre would go on to shepherd talents such as Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Xzibit, 50 Cent, and Kendrick Lamar, and ultimately become the richest man in hip hop, after Apple Inc.'s purchase of his company Beats Electronics earned him $620 million. He has wondered in the past if people have forgotten him; well, the release of Straight Outta Compton has put that fear to rest. The soundtrack for Straight Outta Compton is Dre's first album in 16 years, and opened at #2 at the US chart amid critical acclaim. But his co-producing credit on the Straight Outta Compton film has also drawn some negative attention to its apparent ignorance of Dre's abusive past with women, for which Dre has copiously mea culpa-ed this week, no doubt to clear the air with Apple. |
| 10 | Ice Cube |
|
575,126 |  |
While still very much a rapper, the onetime N.W.A. member is now arguably better known as an actor and a filmmaker. At the suggestion of John Singleton, he adapted his lyrical talents into screenwriting, and the result was the hit Friday film series, which introduced the world, for better or worse, to Chris Tucker. He also starred in a number of hit films including Are We There Yet? and Ride Along. And his son is carrying on the family business by playing him in Straight Outta Compton, but before you cry nepotism, the kid's getting good reviews. |
The Orangemoody paid-editing case, covered in detail in this week's Special Report, caused a predictable and still ongoing avalanche of media coverage. Recode.net was first off the mark, publishing the same day (August 31), followed on Tuesday and Wednesday by –
Many of these articles are largely summaries of the August 31 Wikimedia blog post that preceded them (co-authored by former Signpost editor-in-chief, The_ed17), demonstrating an advantage for the WMF in proactively publicising "things gone wrong": it retains a certain amount of control over the narrative.
The situation was very different when the Wiki-PR paid-editing story hit the news in 2013. Wide-ranging coverage sparked by Simon Owens' investigative piece in The Daily Dot (October 8, 2013) seemed to put the Foundation on the back foot. It took almost two weeks for then-executive director Sue Gardner to release a statement (eventually added to Owens' Daily Dot piece on October 21, 2013).
Of course, much has happened since 2013. The Foundation's terms of use now clearly forbid paid contributions without disclosure (a fact duly mentioned in the present media reports). Equally noteworthy is that Foundation staff took an active part in the Orangemoody investigation, unlike the 2013 Wiki-PR case. The Wiki-PR investigation had been proceeding for months before Owens' piece, and was merely "monitored" by the Foundation. By not getting more actively involved in the 2013 case – believing, perhaps, that the public would never learn of it – the Foundation could have been criticised for neglecting its responsibilities, failing to support its volunteers, and missing an opportunity to set the tone of the ensuing debate. (Indeed, Vice for example expressed surprise at the Foundation's lack of involvement.)
The difference between then and now is substantial, and on the whole encouraging: quite apart from the public-relations advantages, publicising the Orangemoody case might be seen to have been the right thing to do; being open about problems affecting a public good is what transparent organisations do.
One media outlet that did more than simply rework the Wikimedia blog post was The Independent, whose journalists contacted and interviewed several British article subjects affected – among them holiday company Quality Villas, online toy shop Little Citizens Boutique, stunt double Amanda Foster, Britain's Got Talent contestant Paul Manners, and jewellery designer Rachel Entwistle, whose spokesman told The Independent the scam had been "really disconcerting ... a whole world I’ve never heard of".
The article, titled "Wikipedia rocked by blackmail scandal", made the front page of The Independent's paper edition (September 2).
Later reports by UK mainstream media outlets have generally referenced the piece in The Independent. The BBC, like The Independent, spoke to Dan Thompson, Quality Villas' general manager. He told them that he had tried to create a page for his business in June:
| “ | Shortly afterwards, he received an email from someone claiming to be from Wikipedia, who offered to help get the firm's page online. Later, he was asked to pay $400 (£260) for the edits.
"I'd never written a post for Wikipedia before," he said. "For me it seemed like an easy solution." After he paid via PayPal, the page was deleted. He said with hindsight it was easy to see it had been a scam, but at the time it had appeared convincing. |
” |
The Golden Raspberry goes to the The Daily Express, which reported (archive link) that Wikipedia "employs 250,000 people to monitor its content, but it is still open to abuse." Apart from the fact that active editors in the English Wikipedia number only up to about 35,000 per month, one might have thought journalists at a national daily had by now become aware that Wikipedia's content is written and checked by volunteers – members of the general public – and that the Wikimedia Foundation has 277 employees, of whom not a single one is paid to monitor Wikipedia content.
The Orangemoody case is unlikely to be the last of its kind. AK
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [1][2]
The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [3]
ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [4]Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [5]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 3 (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 1 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
The Wikidata API will be updated with breaking changes. This will probably happen on September 9. [6]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/Opinion
The Wikimedia Foundation collaboration team announced this week, both on Wikipedia and on the WikiTech-l mailing list, that Flow will no longer be under active development.
This news will come as a bombshell for the experienced Wikimedians who have been watching the development cycle of this project. The chaotic and disorganized nature of talk page discussions on the English Wikipedia have long concerned Wikimedians and Foundation staff alike—in a Signpost editorial published just under two months ago I wrote:
| “ | [Talkpages] have been around from the very beginning, but having never really substantially improved in almost a decade and a half they are today often regarded as something of a technical black sheep. There's already been one failed initiative to replace them, LiquidThreads, and another effort, Flow, has now been underway for some time, with a small number of pages currently serving as testbeds on the English Wikipedia and elsewhere. Communication using talk-pages is conceptually easy, if often messy in execution. Yet few talkpages are widely watched, and therefore, read, and so despite efforts like feedback request service there remain only a couple of on-wiki discussion points with an audience wide enough to get a point across: the village pumps come to mind, as does Jimmy Wales' talk page.
The greatest advantage of the talk pages is the fact that, being the basic venue for inter-user communication, they are accessible to all Wikipedians. The greatest disadvantage is one of presentation: lengthy posts are quickly snowballed by other lengthy posts in response, some of which are insightful, many of which are not. The lack of a visual distinction between the original author of the post and replies thereof, the blowback of the community's antiquated discussion model, causes talk page discussions to quickly degenerate into unreadability. The first and last few replies in a comment chain are far and away the most important ones, no matter the weight of their actual content, for little reason more than that they are what is most immediately read. |
” |
| — Resident Mario, "So you want to get your message out. Where do you turn?" | ||
Flow has been a controversial endeavor by the Foundation to thoroughly rework talk page mechanics and formatting. Its roots lay in the earlier LiquidThreads, a technical effort by WMF developers that eventually fell flat through a combination of poor technical implementation and poor community reception. At the risk of raising the eyebrows of some of our readers, the best write-up of how LiquidThreads came and went and what its relationship to Flow has been comes from Wikipediocracy: "The dream that died: Erik Möller and the WMF’s decade-long struggle for the perfect discussion system".
According to (Fuzheado), the Flow team gave an upbeat presentation on Flow's development status (video) at Wikimania just six weeks ago (though there was "hard questioning by the audience about whether the community would accept it"). Reactions are a mix of frustration that yet another effort to fix such an entrenched problem has failed and of relief that the controversial project—in the eyes of many, one of the surviving technical white elephants of the pre-Lila Tretikov era—is now apparently finito.
Flow isn't actually officially dead, according to the careful wording of the announcement. Rather, it is now out of active development pending "changes in that long-term plan". What is sidelining it now is that "article and project talk pages are used for a number of important and complex processes that those tools aren't able to handle, making Flow unsuitable for deployment on those kinds of pages." As one user pointed out:
| “ | The problems they outline were pretty much exactly what everyone said to them when Flow was started—you need to be able to cut and paste slabs of wikitext (or, presumably, parsoid HTML5 or whatever VE actually copies to the clipboard) from the article to the talk page, and after VE's disastrous premature introduction this was the precise thing people worried about. | ” |
The rest of the announcement clarifies the situation:
| “ | To better address the needs of our core contributors, we're now focusing our strategy on the curation, collaboration, and admin processes that take place on a variety of pages. Many of these processes use complex workarounds—templates, categories, transclusions, and lots of instructions—that turn blank wikitext talk pages into structured workflows. There are gadgets and user scripts on the larger wikis to help with some of these workflows, but these tools aren't standardized or universally available.
As these workflows grow in complexity, they become more difficult for the next generation of editors to learn and use. This has increased the workload on the people who maintain those systems today. Complex workflows are also difficult to adapt to other languages, because a wiki with thousands of articles may not need the kind of complexity that comes with managing a wiki with millions of articles. We've talked about this kind of structured workflow support at Wikimania, in user research sessions, and on wikis. It's an important area that needs a lot of discussion, exploration, and work. Starting in October, Flow will not be in active development, as we shift the team's focus to these other priorities. We'll be helping core contributors reduce the stress of an ever-growing workload, and helping the next generation of contributors participate in those processes. Further development on these projects will be driven by the needs expressed by wiki communities. Flow will be maintained and supported, and communities that are excited about Flow discussions will be able to use it. There are places where the discussion features are working well, with communities that are enthusiastic about them: on user talk pages, help pages, and forum/village pump-style discussion spaces. By the end of September, we'll have an opt-in Beta feature available to communities that want it, allowing users to enable Flow on their own user talk pages. |
” |
| — Danny Horn, Collaboration team reprioritization | ||
In the opinions of some Wikimedians, the root problem of the Wikimedia projects isn't individual problems like talk pages or templates, but rather the technical debt of a decade and a half of disorganized organic growth; the Foundation's first round of attempts at comprehensive technical improvements fell flat not because they were poorly thought out per se, but because they failed to take into account the extraordinary complexity of the use cases to which Wikimedians have adopted wikicode. SUL finalization is now complete, but plenty of other core improvements, like interwiki transclusion (to centralize template complexity) and further development of Echo notifications (to unify notification streams), remain to complete. Such core improvements may eventually make more ambitious projects like Flow manageable.
_(5374308475).jpg)
In March, the WMF kicked off strategic planning consultation with the Wikimedia community. The first strategic plan was the Foundation's Goliath growth projection project, begun in 2009 and published in 2011 (Signpost coverage here, here, and elsewhere), yet it ultimately proved flat-footed at best. The Foundation began this process of self-definition anew this year (as part of a general shift towards an increasing focus on impact and impact metrics), starting with a large-scale community consultation. As we reported at the time, the WMF is trying to make the document into "what will become a discipline of ongoing strategic inquiry, assessment, and alignment. This more agile, adaptable process will directly inform and update our priorities and goals and help us maintain a strategic direction that is consistent with the Wikimedia vision, supports the Wikimedia projects, and is sensitive to the changing global environment."
The Foundation has finished digesting the outcomes of the consultation, and chief operating officer Terence Gilbey has published a blog post highlighting the findings. Part of this month's metrics meeting was dedicated to these findings, and a full deck of slides—119 pages of them—is is available on Commons.
The consultation was organized around two questions:
| “ | 1. What major trends would you identify in addition to mobile and the next billion users? 2. Based on the future trends that you think are important, what would thriving and healthy Wikimedia projects look like? |
” |
Gilbey highlights the following findings:
- Mobile and app: Mobile-related comments reveal an opportunity to improve our existing mobile offerings for both editors and readers and raise awareness about our native apps. Participants (mostly anonymous users) urged us to “make an app,” when one is already available for iOS and Android devices. We also saw comments that stressed the importance of mobile editing, formatting for smaller (mobile) screen sizes, article summaries for different usage patterns, and the value of “going mobile.”[3]
- Editing and collaboration: In this category, we find requests to make editing simpler, ideas for enhancing collaboration among editors, suggestions for editing tools, and proposals to build editor rating and qualification programs. This is one of the few categories in which logged-in comments, at 56%, outnumber comments from anonymous and new users. This category provides valuable insight for improvements in editor support including Wikipedia’s visual editor and future projects in the newly created Community tech team, as well as potential new editor support initiatives.
- Rich content: Participants requested more rich content on Wikimedia sites, suggesting more video, audio, and images. 80% of these comments were submitted by anonymous and new users. One US-based participant commented: “is there any major website in the world with less video?”
- Volunteer community: We saw a particular interest in improving “community climate” in this category, with a focus on interpersonal dynamics and culture. Participants identified a need to increase diversity (in particular, gender diversity), improve processes and workflows, and address bureaucracy-related challenges. This is another category in which logged-in comments, at 54%, outnumber comments provided by anonymous and new users.
- Wikimedia Foundation feedback: This category focused on the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the volunteer community and includes suggestions of how the Foundation might change its practices and priorities to align with the volunteer community. These comments are from mostly logged-in users (88%), most of them highly experienced users with an average edit count of more than 64,000 edits. Suggestions included providing better support to editors in a variety of ways and continuing to ask for feedback from core community members.
- Content quality (accuracy): These comments emphasized the importance of content accuracy, trustworthiness, and reliability. Comments focused on citation quality, the use of expert editors, and even restricting editing (so that “not everyone can edit”). Most (73%) of comments in this category were from anonymous and new users, signaling an opportunity to communicate to readers about the accuracy and trustworthiness of the content within Wikipedia and sister projects.
- Education and universities: These comments reflected both a concern about the perception of Wikipedia as a (non)credible source for academic inquiry, and also recognition of the growing opportunity for Wikimedia to extend its content, brand, and global presence into online education by developing courses, curricula, and partnering with other online educational resources. 76% of the comments in this category came from anonymous and new users, whereas only 24% originated from logged-in users.
- Translation and languages: We saw a collective interest in this category from logged-in, anonymous, and new users. Key suggestions included a focus increasing translation capabilities and tool, expanding into more languages, and developing the ability to easily translate across projects. These comments validate the need for the Content Translation tool, which is now available on 224 language-versions of Wikipedia as a beta feature.
In related news, the Foundation is now engaging in what it calls a community capacity development project. According to an an email to the mailing list posted by the WMF's senior program officer, emerging Wikimedia communities Asaf Bartov, the Foundation is allocating staff time to "deliberate capacity-development projects with interested communities in six capacity areas: community governance; conflict management; on-wiki technical skills; new contributor engagement and growth; partnerships; [and] communications". "Community capacity" is defined as "the ability of a community to achieve ... very diverse [goals that] span issues that affect one or all Wikimedia communities." It is, in effect, a trial of a more hands-on approach on the part of the Wikimedia Foundation in recruiting ideas from the community, following along the lines of earlier breakout efforts, most prominently this year's "Inspire" campaign.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/Serendipity
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/Op-ed
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/In focus
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/Arbitration report
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/Humour
