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In 2010, the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated to develop a five-year strategy for the movement. The final strategy focused on major priorities such as increasing the number and diversity of contributors to our movement, the amount and quality of knowledge in our projects, and the number of people we reached every month.
Last year, in anticipation of the end of those five years, the Foundation began reviewing our progress. In 2015 the movement reached a long-standing goal of stabilizing the overall number of highly active editors on the projects. In other areas, such as increasing Global South contributors and improving gender diversity, more progress is needed. Overall, the movement targets adopted by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees in 2010 have not been reached yet and are still applicable today.
Therefore this year, we decided to focus on the role of the Foundation in supporting our movement and our vision, which we see as conceptual triangle of reach, communities, and knowledge:
While these provide a framework for our overarching goals, the Foundation needs a practical plan that will:
To make our plan as effective as possible, we will limit the scope of this strategic planning to the Foundation as one global organization within the broader movement. We are inspired by the efforts of the communities and Wikimedia movement affiliates, which support overall movement goals through independent local strategies tailored to their own strengths, capacities, and operating environments.
Last week, we launched a community discussion about this planning, focused on the topics of reach, communities, and knowledge. Building on the outcomes of our spring 2015 consultation with readers and editors, we have identified a number of approaches that could guide the the Foundation’s future plan and actions. Today, we’re asking for your input and contributions. The community is the primary catalyst of the movement, and the success, health, and participation of contributors is central to any Wikimedia Foundation strategy. Your thoughts will be essential in informing how the Foundation can best contribute to the Wikimedia movement going forward.
The consultation will be open until February 15. We invite you to participate and look forward to your thoughts.
One of the two new members of the WMF's Board of Trustees has resigned. Arnnon Geshuri's appointment 22 days ago sparked controversy in the Wikimedia community. His selection and departure come amid growing concerns about not only the composition of the Board, but the direction of the Foundation itself.
In a message on Wednesday, January 27 to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, board members Patricio Lorente and Alice Wiegand wrote:
| “ | Earlier today, Arnnon decided to step down from the Board. To paraphrase his words, he doesn't want to be a distraction for the important discussions that the community and the Foundation need to face in the times to come. We want to thank Arnnon for his ongoing commitment and for helping us to move forward. | ” |
The surprise announcement came just a day after Geshuri had made his first public statement on his new role, with the Board expressing its intention to stand by Geshuri's appointment. But by that time, concerns about Geshuri's background and selection process, as well as worries regarding the links to Google and other Silicon Valley technology corporations on the Board, were growing in the Wikimedia community and were becoming news items in the mainstream press. A non-binding vote of no confidence in Geshuri has been reported in Ars Technica, BBC News and Le Monde, among others, which is likely to have been a factor in Geshuri's resignation (see this week's "In the media").
Only yesterday, Wiegand posted on Wikimedia-l that the Board would be standing by their choice. She wrote that while the Board was "listening to your worries" and "discussing the concerns" raised by the community, she concluded: "we want to be clear that the Board approved Arnnon unanimously and still believes he is a valuable member of the team." Geshuri had commented publicly for the first time on the same list about an hour before Wiegand's message:
| “ | It has been almost three weeks since my appointment to the Wikimedia Foundation Board and I have read the feedback and comments from representative members of the community. My first reaction was how amazing the community is in its vibrant culture – there is direct and honest dialog, celebration of diverse ideas, debate and counterpoints, and an overall genuine passion to ensure that the WMF sustains itself for another fifteen years and beyond. Witnessing firsthand the commitment and energy of the community is truly inspirational. Although I would have preferred the tone surrounding my appointment to be more positive and supportive, I deeply understand and respect the criticality of free expression, rallying around convictions, and open disagreement.
Regarding the concerns that have been raised, I have listened closely. That said, in my opinion, there are some misconceptions and there are mitigating considerations. As a general matter, I will say that, throughout my career, I have been charged with enforcing company policies as part of my role as a people manager. I have tried to do so thoughtfully and consistently. I have done so realizing company policies and practices evolve over time as circumstances change. As part of the current narrative, members of the community generated a running theme within the online conversations related to trust. Comments were expressed questioning their trust in the Wikimedia Foundation Board and asking if the community could accept me as a new Board Member. Wanting to understand the challenges ahead, I have spent the last few weeks speaking with current and former Board members and reaching out to folks in the community. I have more conversations in the coming days and appreciate those who have been generous with their time. Given the story line that has been shaped over the last couple weeks and based on the feedback from my conversations, I know I have a longer journey than most new Board members to prove to the community and WMF alumni that they can put their trust in me. I joined to make a positive difference and be a part of the important effort to grow the WMF for the next generation of editors, contributors, and users. As the community gets to know me, folks will see the way I work is with thoughtfulness, transparency, diversity, and a focus on doing what is right. I have key experiences in both my professional and non-profit careers which lend a distinctive perspective to the honorable work of a Trustee – especially the learnings gained over the last decade. I passionately believe in the core values of the WMF and trust that the community and even the most energetic community members come from a place of good intent. And as we all become closer and transition to debating the issues and not the people, the community will see I consistently speak from the heart, I am passionately committed to the movement with the best intent, and I am working hard to earn your trust. |
” |
While some praised Geshuri for speaking out at all, his paean to Wikipedia's community and culture did little to sway those who wanted him to address the issue of his participation in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation more directly. Among epithets used by community members to describe his message were "a public-relations exercise" and "unctuous". Votes on Meta in favor of Geshuri's removal grew to 291 before the RFC was closed following the announcement of Geshuri's departure. The supports included six current employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as a number of former WMF employees, including former senior designer Brandon Harris (Jorm) and Frank Schulenburg, currently executive director of the Wiki Education Foundation. Many of the support votes cited the comments of former Board of Trustee chairs Florence Devouard (Anthere) and Kat Walsh (Mindspillage), who had raised concerns about Geshuri's appointment in previous weeks. Another former trustee (and the Signpost founder), Michael Snow, raised his own concerns following Geshuri's message, making him the third former chair of the Board of Trustees to speak out regarding Geshuri's appointment. He wrote, in part:
| “ | The Board has indicated that you were appointed for your expertise in human resources. I agree that your career includes some impressive experience and you would be a highly qualified candidate in that sense. I can also appreciate why the Board might have felt a need for your kind of expertise. ... But under the circumstances, I struggle to see how your appointment would lead to a net benefit for the Foundation. Your skills and contacts might bring something that is lacking, but the problematic pieces of your background also reflect directly on the same area. Considerations such as staff morale have fluctuated over time, but I cannot imagine how having someone associated with these practices on the Board would be anything but a negative influence on it. Whether they would acknowledge it to you, the rest of the Board, their managers, or anyone at all really, I think this is an extremely serious problem. It seems like it would take an incredible amount of good work from you to overcome the damage your mere presence on the Board is likely to cause. | ” |
Discussion of the vetting and selection process is likely to continue following Geshuri's departure. On his talk page two days before Geshuri's resignation, Jimmy Wales conceded that he needed to shoulder some of the blame ("I feel remorse"). He wrote:
| “ | The subcommittee of the board tasked with finding good board candidates did not flag this issue to the rest of the board, and as far as I know, they were unaware of it. I'm not going to speak right now as to whether or not the board would have voted to approve him after a full investigation, and I'm certainly not going to speak about my opinion of whether we should have voted to approve given what we know now. My point is that the process of selection did not flag the issue and so we did not deliberate about it. That's obviously a failure of the process. (A plausible position is that it could have been flagged, investigated, and deemed to be fine. Another plausible position is that it could have been flagged, investigated, and deemed to be not fine. But it is not ok that it wasn't flagged at all.)
As to my own culpability here, I can say that I feel remorse. I googled his name, I saw that he had been at google and mentioned in connection to that story, and I didn't dig deeper. I should have and I'm sorry about that. My only reasoning is that I was just googling for the hell of it – I assumed (incorrectly) that the process was working and that there was nothing to be concerned about. |
” |
Also of concern to many is the fear that the selection of Geshuri, whose actions as director of human resources at Google were troubling to the community, may be symptomatic of a desire to instill a similar corporate culture in human resources at the Foundation itself. Adam Wight, a fundraising tech lead at the WMF, wrote:
| “ | As a current WMF staff member, and having received a formal scolding two weeks ago for expressing my professional and personal opinions on this list – that a hierarchical corporate structure is completely inappropriate and ineffectual for running the Foundation – I don't feel safe editorializing about what membership could mean for the future of the Wikimedia movement. | ” |
Earlier this month the Signpost covered employee discontent at the Wikimedia Foundation. Wight's message echoes similar complaints that other WMF staffers have made to the Signpost about a perceived cultural shift at the Foundation. One of them described it as "a culture of risk-management and fear", while another noted that they were "terrified" of speaking out in public for fear of retaliation. They are just two of several staffers who have privately expressed similar concerns to the Signpost. At least one speculated that the way recent employee departures from the WMF have been handled may be related to these changes.
The news media often does a poor job of covering or even understanding the internal workings of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia movement, and the Wikimedia Foundation. However, the recent appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the WMF Board of Trustees and the growing community complaints regarding his involvement in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation cases resulted in some substantial and accurate news coverage.
The first publications to cover the matter were ZDNet in France and Ars Technica in the United States. On January 25, Joe Mullin, Tech Policy Editor at Ars Technica, published "Wikipedia editors revolt, vote 'no confidence' in newest board member", in which he noted:
| “ | Nearly 200 Wikipedia editors have taken the unprecedented step of calling for a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors to be tossed out. | ” |
A flurry of similar stories in other news outlets followed – among them the BBC and Le Monde – in languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. Many of these linked to the no-confidence vote itself as well as to The Signpost's prior coverage; a number of them, including the BBC, Ars Technica, and Fortune, noted that Jimmy Wales, Arnnon Geshuri, and/or the Wikimedia Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
| “ | More than 200 Wikipedia editors have backed a vote of no confidence in a trustee of the site's governing body. Arnnon Geshuri, a former human resources manager at Google, was appointed to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation this month. —BBC | ” |
| “ | Members are calling for his termination after discovering that Geshuri had been involved in the collusion between Apple, Google, and other tech companies that resulted in a $415 million class action lawsuit. According to a Department of Justice investigation, the companies had illegally agreed to not poach each others' employees, depressing workers’ salaries and career mobility. Released e-mails from the case show Geshuri playing a key role in the collusion, at one point e-mailing Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt that a Google recruiter who had contacted an Apple employee would be "terminated within the hour." —Fortune | ” |
| “ | One editor unhappy about the appointment wrote: "I'm appalled: Why this kind of person, with this kind of background, at all?" Another added: "I have no more confidence for the whole board, especially also to name Mr Wales himself. The board presents itself in a tragic condition, all faith lost that it could work for the best of the projects." —BBC | ” |
| “ | Quite apart from the current controversy, one wonders what need the current nine-member Foundation board would have for such a high-calibre human resources manager. Although the Foundation's staff numbers have risen to around 300, it's still a small organisation compared to the IT companies of Silicon Valley. Furthermore, Wikipedia is currently suffering a more pressing need for volunteers. Geshuri's appointment is unlikely to help with that. —Golem | ” |
| “ | The "no-confidence vote" launched by Wikipedia editors is unprecedented, although it has no official status – the organisation's bylaws don't envisage this type of vote. —Le Monde | ” |
| “ | The fact that Geshuri's appointment to the Board is proving so controversial is mainly due to the fact that the Foundation has so far not made any response to the massive criticism from the community. Many of those who have signed the no-confidence vote are expressing a loss of faith in the organisation. —t3n | ” |
| “ | Three former chairs of the WMF Board of Trustees have expressed dismay at the appointment: Florence Devouard, Kat Walsh and Michael Snow. —The Register | ” |
| “ | The current conflict is part of a larger fight over the Wikipedia parent's strategic direction. Critics are accusing the foundation of acting increasingly like a Silicon Valley company and ignoring the community. —Heise | ” |
| “ | Wikipedians have deplored the influence of Google in the Board (5 out of 10 members have a present or past link to Google) after this appointment, as well as that of Tesla – which also has links to Google. —ZDNet (France) | ” |
| “ | James Heilman, meanwhile, who was removed from the Board in late 2015 for unspecified reasons, is accusing the Board of a general lack of transparency. —Heise | ” |
| “ | Jimmy Wales has since dismissed Heilman's claims as "utter fucking bullshit". —The Register | ” |
| “ | In February, Heilman intends to publish e-mails from his time on the Board, provided that the Board is unable to provide reasons justifying secrecy. —Heise | ” |
| “ | Today, Geshuri addressed the community that's up in arms against him. In a message posted to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, Geshuri began by saying it was "truly inspirational" to witness the "commitment and energy of the community." —Ars Technica | ” |
| “ | Tesla's controversial HR chief has pleaded with Wikipedians for their trust, in a style so unctuous it could make Dickens' Uriah Heep blush. —The Register | ” |
| “ | Geshuri's message was followed with a note to the same list from Alice Wiegand, who is presently the Vice-Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. She told editors that the board "has read your messages and is discussing the concerns you have raised about Arnnon Geshuri's appointment." She described Geshuri as an "excellent candidate" who had earned the board's support. "We understand this conversation will continue, and we will continue to monitor it," she wrote. "However, we want to be clear that the Board approved Arnnon unanimously and still believes he is a valuable member of the team." —Ars Technica | ” |
| “ | The newest addition to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Tesla VP of Human Resources Arnnon Geshuri, has stepped down just a few weeks after he was appointed. Geshuri's appointment was immediately controversial with editors of the site. The controversy grew this weekend when Ashley Van Haeften, who goes by the username Fae on Wikipedia, initiated a non-binding "vote of no confidence", in which Wikipedia's volunteer editors asked the board to remove Geshuri. The vote was ultimately 290-22 in favor of Geshuri's removal. —Ars Technica | ” |
| “ | The WMF is not a membership organisation, leading one supporter to ask if the removal of members from the organisation’s bylaws in 2006 was entirely legal. —The Register | ” |
G, AK
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Wikipedia pages are edited with varying levels of consistency: stubs may only have a dozen or fewer revisions and controversial topics might have more than 10,000 revisions. However, this editing activity is not evenly spaced out over time either: some revisions occur in very quick succession while other revisions might persist for weeks or months before another change is made. Many social and technical systems exhibit "bursty" qualities of intensive activity separated by long periods of inactivity. In a pre-print submitted to arXiv, a team of physicists at the Belgian Université de Namur and Portuguese University of Coimbra examine this phenomenon of "burstiness" in editing activity on the English Wikipedia.[1]
The authors use a database dump containing the revision history until January 2010 of 4.6 million English Wikipedia pages. Filtering out pages and editors with fewer than 2000 revisions, bots, and edits from unregistered accounts, the paper adopts some previously-defined measures of burstiness and cyclicality in these editing patterns. The measures of editors' revisions' burstiness and memory fall outside of the limits found in prior work about human dynamics, suggesting different mechanisms are at work on Wikipedia editing than in mobile phone communication, for example.
Using a fast Fourier transform, the paper finds the 100 most active editors have signals occurring at a 24-hour frequency (and associated harmonics) indicating they follow a circadian pattern of revising daily as well as differences by day of week and hour of day. However, the 100 most-revised pages lack a similar peak in the power spectrum: there is no characteristic hourly, daily, weekly, etc. revision pattern. Despite these circadian patterns, editors' revision histories still show bursty patterns with long-tailed inter-event times across different time windows.
The paper concludes by arguing, "before performing an action, we must overcome a “barrier”, acting as a cost, which depends, among many other things, on the time of day. However, once that “barrier” has been crossed, the time taken by that activity no longer depends on the time of day at which we decided to perform it. ... It could be related to some sort of queuing process, but we prefer to see it as due to resource allocation (attention, time, energy), which exhibits a broad distribution: shorter activities are more likely to be executed next than the longer ones."
Google Trends is widely used in academic research to model the relationship between information seeking and other social and behavioral phenomenon. However, Wikipedia pageview data can provide a superior – if underused – alternative that has attracted some attention for public health and economic modeling, but not to the same extent as Google Trends. The authors cite the relative openness of Wikipedia pageview data, the semantic disambiguation, and absolute counts of activity in contrast to Google Trends' closed API, semantic ambiguity of keywords, and relative query share data. However, Trends data (at a weekly level) does go back to 2004, while pageview data (at an hourly level) is only available from 2008.
In a peer-reviewed paper published by PLoS ONE, a team of physicists perform a variety of time series analyses to evaluate changes in attention around the "big data" topic of Hadoop.[2] Defining two key constructs of relevance and representation based on the interlanguage links as well as hyperlinks to/from other concepts, they examine changes in these features over time. In particular, changes in the articles' content and attention occurred in concert with the release of new versions and the adoption of the technology by new firms.
The time series analyses (and terms used to refer to them) will be difficult for non-statisticians to follow, but the paper makes several promising contributions. First, it provides a number of good critiques of research relying exclusive on Google Trends data (outlined above). Second, it provides some methods for incorporating behavioral data from strongly related topics and examining these changes over time in a principled manner. Third, the paper examines behavior across multiple languages editions rather than focusing solely on the English Wikipedia. The paper points to ways in which Wikipedia is an important information sources for tracking publication and recognition of new topics.
This paper[3] data mines Wikipedia's biographies, focusing on individuals' longevity, profession and cause of death. The authors are not the first to observe that the majority of Wikipedia biographies are about sportspeople (half of them soccer players), followed by artists and politicians. But they do make some interesting historical observations, such as that the sport rises only in the 20th century (particularly from the 1990s), that politics surpassed religion in the 13th century, until it was surpassed by sport, and so on. The authors divide the biographies into public (politicians, businessmen, religion) and private (artists and sportspeople) and note that it was only in the last few decades that the second group started to significantly outnumber the first; they conclude that this represents a major shift in societal values, which they refer to as "hidden revolution in human priorities". It is an interesting argument, though the paper is unfortunately completely missing the discussion of some important topics, such as the possible bias introduced by Wikipedia's notability policies.
This paper[4] looks into gender inequalities in Wikipedia articles, presenting a computational method for assessing gender bias in Wikipedia along several dimensions. It touches on a number of interesting questions, such as whether the same rules are used to determine whether women and men are notable; whether there is linguistic bias, and whether articles about men and women have similar structural properties (e. g., similar meta-data, and network properties in the hyperlink network).
They conclude that notability guidelines seem to be more strictly enforced for women than for men, that linguistic bias exists (ex. one of the four words most strongly associated with female biographies is "husband", whereas such family-oriented words are much less likely to be found in biographies of male subjects), and that as the majority of biographies are about men and men tend to link more to men than to women, this lowers visibility of female biographies (for example, in search engines like Google). The authors suggest that Wikipedia community should consider lowering notability requirements for women (controversial), and adding gender-neutral language requirements to the Manual of Style (a much more sensible proposal).
A survey[5] of 372 anesthesists and critical care providers in Austria and Australia found that "In order to get a fast overview about a medical problem, physicians would prefer Google (32%) over Wikipedia (19%), UpToDate (18%), or PubMed (17%). 39% would, at least sometimes, base their medical decisions on non peer-reviewed resources. Wikipedia is used often or sometimes by 77% of the interns, 74% of residents, and 65% of consultants to get a fast overview of a medical problem. Consulting Wikipedia or Google first in order to get more information about the pathophysiology, drug dosage, or diagnostic options in a rare medical condition was the choice of 66%, 10% or 34%, respectively." (A 2012 literature review found that "Wikipedia is widely used as a reference tool" among clinicians.)
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
, also as draft version on Wikimedia Commons
Notable deaths continue to draw high notice on Wikipedia for another week. And though Glenn Frey's (#1) passing didn't generate nearly as much attention as David Bowie (#1 last week, #4 this week), it is yet another high profile death leading the chart. And even the pop culture entries are serious, with convict Steven Avery (#3), the subject of the documentary Making a Murderer (#7), riding high for yet another week, and survival epic The Revenant at #2. Isn't it time for another vacuous chart topper we can simply get a laugh from, like twerking?
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.
For the week of January 17 to 23, 2016, 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 | Glenn Frey | 
|
1,861,483 |  |
The founding member of American rock band the Eagles (#8) died on January 18. Though only about 15% of the whopping 11.7 million views David Bowie got on last week's chart, Frey was a highly successful artist on a much more human scale. |
| 2 | The Revenant (2015 film) |
|
1,283,947 |  |
Alejandro González Iñárritu's Western survival epic starring Leonardo di Caprio (#23, pictured) continues to be popular. |
| 3 | Steven Avery | 
|
1,062,963 | Avery is an American prisoner who is the subject of the popular new Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer which was released on December 18. (Episode 1 is available free on YouTube.) Avery served 18 years in prison, from 1985 to 2003, after being framed by the local police for a sexual assault he plainly did not commit. During his subsequent civil lawsuit for compensation, during a period of explosive depositions, he was charged with the murder of a local photographer, and later convicted. The documentary is compelling to watch, and it causing a fair amount of controversy, and thus bringing continuing attention to this article. | |
| 4 | David Bowie | 
|
1,052,526 |  |
Contrary to popular belief, chameleons do not change colour to match their surroundings; they change colour to reflect their mood and their relationships with others. From the moment that David Robert Jones changed his name to David Bowie, he proved himself chameleonic in the true sense. His career was a kaleidoscope of reinventions; not just of music and appearance but of persona, profession and gender identity, each time anticipating the reactions of his audience, and usually forcing them to catch up with him. Fiercely intelligent and unafraid to show it, he also anticipated the effects of technological change, releasing Space Oddity five days before the launch of Apollo 11, and using the Internet to interact with fans years before the age of social media. His work as an actor also frequently ran leaps ahead of audiences, whether as an alien in Nicolas Roeg's initially ill-regarded but now lauded The Man Who Fell To Earth, or as Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson's Labyrinth, a critical bomb that would go on to become a fixture of children's video libraries, and earn him an entire new generation of fans. But his death earlier this month at the age of 69 may prove his greatest leap ahead yet; while ill with cancer for the preceding 18 months, he refused to publicise his condition and instead used his last time on Earth to compose Blackstar, one of his best reviewed albums in decades. Just as Bowie lived as art, he died as art, and the video for "Lazarus", the second single from Blackstar, which featured a suddenly aged Bowie blindfolded on a hospital bed, would become an epitaph to the world. Once again, we had to catch up with him, and the shock of his unexpected death shivered across his pan-generational fanbase, pushing Blackstar to #1 in the US album chart, astoundingly for the first time, and giving him not only the highest single-day tally of YouTube VEVO views ever recorded, but also, incidentally, the first ever eight-figure weekly Wikipedia viewcount, with over 11.7 million views on last week's chart. |
| 5 | Martin Luther King, Jr. | 
|
945,522 | 
|
The American holiday dedicated to him fell on January 18 this year. |
| 6 | Star Wars: The Force Awakens |
|
884,009 |  |
The reignition of the Star Wars remains in the Top 10 for another week. |
| 7 | Making a Murderer |
|
801,724 | See #3. | |
| 8 | Eagles (band) | 
|
782,648 | |
See #1. The Eagles of Death Metal were on the chart in November, and they got their name from this band, as a sarcastic reference. Do people in their 20s listen to the Eagles today? I have no idea. Though wildly popular in their time, their music is also clearly of their time, and did not pretend to be otherwise. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2016 | 
|
684,964 |  |
The annual list of deaths is usually fairly consistent in weekly views, but is up again for second week. |
| 10 | Suicide Squad (film) |
|
681,863 | A superhero film slated for release on August 5 in the United States. |
Six featured articles were promoted this week.
Three featured lists were promoted this week.
Seven featured pictures were promoted this week.
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