Following several days of closed-door meetings of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, executive director Lila Tretikov announced on February 25 that she would be stepping down, effective March 31. Despite rumors of tense negotiations with the Board, Tretikov's email announcement, titled "Thank you for our time together", was gracious and positive, stressing Foundation and community accomplishments. She wrote, in part:
| “ | Wikimedia occupies a special place in the world. It is a cultural and technological revolution. Change is necessary to keep it thriving. In bringing me in as the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation the Board tasked me with making changes ("Lila Tretikov's statement on why we've changed") to serve the next generation and ensure our impact in the future. Driving these changes has been challenging, and I have always appreciated the open and honest discourse we have had along the way. ... |
” |
Tretikov's resignation comes after months of public controversy, including the removal of Board member James Heilman (Doc James), the resignation of newly appointed Board member Arnnon Geshuri following a community outcry, and revelations about the mysterious Knowledge Engine project. It follows an even longer period of internal turmoil that has prompted a series of employee departures—events that have mostly remained out of the public eye until recently.
Among WMF staffers, the news of Tretikov's departure was greeted with a sense of relief rather than glee, at least publicly. The February metrics and activities meeting, held only 15 minutes after Tretikov's announcement, was almost jubilant—not about her departure, but as though the staff felt they could celebrate their work and accomplishments, especially those concerning Wikipedia's 15th anniversary, without the pall of recent months cast over them. Those events were not entirely absent, however. A photograph of Siko Bouterse, a widely respected WMF staffer whose departure was one of the flashpoints for other employees, received a standing ovation.
Still, even after the ED's announcement, employee exits from the WMF continue. On March 4, the WMF announced that Boryana Dineva, VP of human resources who went on leave on February 9, will depart.
WMF strategy consultant brings background in crisis reputation management; Team behind popular WMF software put "on pause"
6 February 2017
Board unanimously appoints Katherine Maher as new WMF executive director; Wikimedia lawsuits in France and Germany
4 July 2016
Clarifications on status and compensation of outgoing executive directors Sue Gardner and Lila Tretikov
15 June 2016
Lila Tretikov a Young Global Leader; Wikipediocracy blog post sparks indefinite blocks
23 March 2016
Podcast #119: The Foundation and the departure of Lila Tretikov
16 March 2016
Jimmy Wales announced he would be visiting San Francisco from February 27 to March 2 to personally meet with WMF staffers. Wales also quietly filled Tretikov's place on the schedule for an already planned March 13 event with Board member Guy Kawasaki at SXSW Interactive.
Speculation remains about who will work with WMF employees as interim executive director now that Wales has left San Francisco. Due to the exodus of employees, few high-level staffers remain to assume that role, with the most likely possibilities being chief communications officer Katherine Maher and general counsel Geoff Brigham. Finding an external candidate in the longer term may be difficult given the negative press coverage following the resignations of Geshuri and Tretikov, on top of the need to find someone with unusual combination of skills to lead an extremely complex organization. In a move that Andrew Lih (Fuzheado) describes as "rather astonishing", in a surprise announcement, Trustee Alice Wiegand posted to the Wikimedia mailing list that:
| “ | the Board is aiming for a quick decision about the interim ED. ... The Board is not best suited to make a decision about the interim which can quickly be established and accepted in this situation. // Therefore the board empowers the entire C-level-team to come up with a solution for the interim question. We leave it up to them ... . The C-level-team needs some time to deliberate and decide. They will present their result to the board which has to vote on it. We plan to finalize until the end of next week. | ” |
Opinions on the wisdom of this approach have been divided; critics have condemned it as an abdication of responsibility by the Board, while others have welcomed it as an effort by the Board to be more responsive to staff concerns and input.
Also unresolved is the composition of the Board itself. On February 27, Heilman announced his willingness to resume his seat on the Board and his intention to run again in the next community election. Wales, who described Heilman's account of Board conflicts as "utter fucking bullshit" in January, responded by writing that should Heilman win another election "then I will support his joining the board". Wales reiterated his disagreement with Heilman about how they perceived the circumstances of the dismissal, but the facts leading up to it remain unknown.
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Four featured articles were promoted this week.
One featured list was promoted this week.
Four featured pictures were promoted this week.
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One night in June 1852, while the Whig National Convention was going awry, American politician Alvan E. Bovay and newspaperman Horace Greeley dined at Lovejoy's Hotel in New York City, where Bovay first suggested the founding of what became the United States Republican Party. In 2016, with the improbable rise to frontrunner status of Donald Trump (#1 once again this week), its a safe bet that secret dinners are now being had by politicians foreseeing the end of that political party.
This week's Top 25 is dominated by political brawling, with Mr. Trump at the top, and physical brawling, with a number of wrestling-related entries down the chart starting with Fastlane (2016) at #7. Deadpool (film) (#2) rides high for another week as the most popular pop-culture entry.
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 February 21 to 27, 2016, 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 | Donald Trump | 
|
1,938,436 |  |
Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee in this year's United States presidential election, barring something crazy happening. He won the South Carolina primary on February 20, smashed his opponents in the February 23 Nevada primary, and won in 7 of 11 states on March 1's "Super Tuesday" primaries. |
| 2 | Deadpool (film) | 
|
1,340,113 |  |
Down from #1 and 2.8 million views last week. The Marvel Comics antihero film starring Ryan Reynolds (pictured) was released on February 12 to a stellar reception. Regarded as a risk by its makers 20th Century Fox, the film has earned over $600 million as of February 29. |
| 3 | O. J. Simpson |
|
980,872 |  |
As predicted by the co-author of this report (and not wished for by yours truly), the former football player, Leslie Nielsen costar and alleged murderer has become a fixture of this list, thanks to the first season of American Crime Story, the true-crime spinoff of American Horror Story, which focuses on his controversial trial. |
| 4 | Neerja Bhanot |
|
947,988 |  |
On September 5, 1986, just two days before her 23rd birthday, this Pan Am flight attendant was shot dead by terrorists affiliated with Abu Nidal as she spearheaded an escape from the hijacked Pan Am Flight 73 that ultimately saved over 300 lives. She was posthumously awarded India's highest peacetime bravery award, the Ashoka Chakra. Her life and death became the subject of a Bollywood biopic this week, Neerja, starring Sonam Kapoor (pictured) in the title role. Up from #10 and 800K views last week. |
| 5 | Deadpool |
|
797,094 | .jpg) |
Marvel may have disavowed their X-Men franchise until Fox gives it back to them, but their fourth wall-tickling, chimichanga-chomping, bullet-spraying loony toon obviously remains a potent force, whether they like it or not. Down from #3 and 1.7 million views last week. |
| 6 | Robert Kardashian | 
|
678,065 | The now-deceased patriarch of the mediavorous Kardashian clan was a close friend of O. J. Simpson (#3) and played a role in the controversial trial that engulfed American pop culture in the 1990s. Of course, the sudden resurgence of interest in the case following the premiere of American Crime Story had led the less scrupulous end of the media to dredge up colorful supposed links between it and the current generation. | |
| 7 | Fastlane (2016) |
|
664,591 |  |
Wrestler Roman Reigns prevailed in the main event at this professional wrestling event held in Cleveland, Ohio on February 21. |
| 8 | Fuller House (TV Series) |
|
659,077 |  |
This sequel series to the the 1987-95 American sitcom Full House debuted on Netflix February 26, 2016. Pictured is actress Candace Cameron Bure, one of the returning cast members. I hope historians of the future realize that the reason ridiculous TV shows could return after 20 years was because of the changing ways we watch TV, with on-demand, niche-driven options of channels like Netflix meeting needs no one could believe existed. To go back to a prior generation of silly TV, The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) milked all it could out of sequels and movies after its original run, but a complete sequel series after twenty years would not have been viable. |
| 9 | Melania Trump |
|
633,777 |  |
The Donald's wife has generally kept a lower profile on the campaign trail compared to Trump's children. But the recent growth of TV appearances and brief comments at podiums, feeding the apparently insatiable demand of the news-media for Trump news, puts Melania onto this chart for the first time. |
| 10 | Kesha | 
|
613,154 | .jpg) |
Interest in this singer's article started to rise on February 19, and remained popular through this week. This interest arises out of her recent loss of a sexual harassment lawsuit against music producer Dr. Luke (#25) seeking to void her contracts. |
Just missing the WP:TOP25: Love (TV series) (#26, new Netflix show); Ted Cruz (#27, if you can't make the Top 25, you're not going to be the nominee); Robert Shapiro (lawyer) (#28, more O.J.); The Walking Dead (season 6) (#29); and List of Bollywood films of 2016 (#30).
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
This article[1] discusses the links between paid efforts and voluntary efforts in the development of Wikipedia, focusing on the question of paid editing. It stresses the fact that Wikipedia is a mixed economy that results partly from paid labor (the technostructure and the people in charge of maintaining it, and those who defend the project in court, i.e. the paid employees of the WF).
The core of the article discusses, based on the debate about Wiki-PR (a company which was paid by firms to "edit" their EN-Wikipedia pages), and the impact it had on Wikipedia policy. It sheds light on the discussion between the Foundation, which expressed a more strict interpretation of the rules, and the contributors, especially from non-English Wikipedias, that took a more "pragmatic" approach. Paid editors provided help to the smaller projects in terms of creation of knowledge. The analysis, which views Wikipedia as a sort of communist organization, is less convincing, as is the fact that the authors did not compare this debate with what happens in FLOSS (free-libre open-source software) or in the non-digital world (the Foundation, or the local community groups), which are other example of the co-existence of voluntary and paid work.
This masters thesis[2] focuses on the Swedish Wikipedia and its gender gap. It quantifies data and provides information about why Swedish women are not contributing to the project. The author collected data through a questionnaire advertised in December 2014 on the Swedish Wikipedia through a project-wide banner (promotion that an average researcher can only dream about when it comes to English Wikipedia). The paper estimates the Swedish Wikipedia gender gap in the form of the percentage of female editors at between 13% to 19%, based on the self-reported data from Wikipedia account profiles and answers to the questionnaire. More interesting is the analysis of the activity of the accounts: the self-declared male accounts are several times more active then the female accounts, with the authors estimating that only about 5% of the site's content is written by women. Contrary to some prior research (most of which focused on the English Wikipedia), the Swedish Wikipedia's editors and readers do not perceive Wikipedia as a place where sexist comments are significant, though about a third agree that general conflicts between editors do take place. Nonetheless, women are less likely than men to think (1) that Wikipedia is welcoming to beginners; (2) that everyone gets treated equally, regardless of gender; (3) that editing means taking on conflicts. Women are more likely than men to acknowledge the existence of sexist comments. In the author's own words, "women have more concerns about the community being sexist and not welcoming, and do not expect conflict as part of editing to the same degree as men", though the author also notes that statistical tests suggest that "the differences in opinion between gender groups do not differ [sic] greatly".
The author concludes that there is no evidence that the Swedish Wikipedia's readers have any preconceived negative notions about the Wikipedia community (such as "it is sexist") that should inhibit potential women contributors from editing and thus contribute to the gender gap. He states: "Significant differences in perceived competence were found. Women report 'I’m not competent enough' as a strong contributing factor to them not editing more than twice as often as men." The author suggests that because women often perceive, whether correctly or not, that they have lower computer skills than men, and see Wikipedia as a website which requires above-average computer skills, this (rather than an unfriendly, sexist community) may be the most significant factor affecting their lack of contributions. (Cf. related coverage: "Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia'", "Does advertising the gender gap help or hurt Wikipedia?")
Four researchers from Dartmouth College have taken the requirement of "verifiability", one of Wikipedia's core content policies, literally. Their preprint[3] examines 295,800 citations from the 5000 most viewed articles on the English Wikipedia (out of a larger set of 23 million citations extracted from a July 2014 dump). These comprised both inline citations (footnotes) and "free citations" (those not related to any particular part of the article). The authors conclude that
Unsurprisingly, the study did not examine whether the cited documents actually match the information in the articles. Rather, it concerns the question whether the citation enables the reader to carry out this verification. The authors argue that
They divide these difficulties into two categories: "technical verifiability" and "practical verifiability."
Technical verifiability is defined as "the extent to which a reference provides supporting information that permits automated technical validation of the existence of the referenced material, based on existing technical standards or conventions," concretely ISBNs, DOIs and Google Books IDs. The study found that:
Practical verifiability is defined as "the extent to which referenced material is accessible to someone encountering the reference." In particular, the authors point out that information supported by a paywalled journal article "is practically unverifiable to someone without the additional means to access the supporting journal article. Similarly, if an ISBN is present but refers to a book that only has one extant copy in a library thousands of miles away, then the information it supports is practically unverifiable to someone without the additional means to access the supporting book." Apparently the authors found it difficult to translate these notions into criteria that would lend themselves to a large scale quantitative analysis, and settled for two rather narrowly defined but still interesting aspects:
The preprint also contains a literature overview about information quality on Wikipedia, which does the topic scant justice (e.g. of the only three mentioned systematic studies of article accuracy, one is the well-known but over a decade old Nature study, another is a 2014 article whose methodology and conclusions have been described as very questionable, see also below).
With some caveats, e.g. that the quality of the 5000 most-viewed English Wikipedia articles might differ from the quality of the average article, the authors conclude that "from the perspective of overall quality of references in Wikipedia, these findings might seem encouraging", but are concerned that many citations are not practically verifiable.
This short (two-page) paper[4] presents "preliminary results that characterize the research done on and using Wikipedia since 2002". It is based on a dataset of 3582 results of a Scopus search in November 2013 (for the term "Wikipedia" in title, abstract and keywords), largely relying on the abstracts of these publications. 641 of them were discarded as unrelated. Of the remaining 2968, the relevance for Wikipedia was judged as "major" for 2301 and as "minor" for 667.
Examining a dichotomy that is familiar to the editors of this newsletter too (which, for example, usually does not cover papers that merely rely on Wikipedia as a text corpus, even though these are numerous in fields such as computer linguistics), the authors write:
defining the latter as employing "Wikipedia either as a source/resource for other research or used Wikipedia to test the feasibility and applicability of tools or methods developed for purposes not directly related to Wikipedia". Those papers only began appearing in 2005, but overtook the "about" category in 2009 and have remained in the majority since." (See also coverage of a presentation at Wikimania 2013 that likewise traced publication numbers over the years – based on Google Scholar instead of Scopus – and dated the first appearance of "Wikipedia as a corpus" research to 2005, too: "Keynote on applicable Wikipedia research")
The researchers classified publications by their methodology, into "social/theoretical" (including "analyses and visualizations of Wikipedia") and "technological" (in the "about" category, this classification was reserved to "tools developed for improving Wikipedia"), and found that:
The authors extended their search beyond Scopus to Web of Science and the ACM Digital Library for an examination of how the overall volume of published Wikipedia research has developed over time. The resulting chart indicates that the fast growth of earlier years leveled off, with even some decrease in 2013, the last year examined.
Three letters to the editor of the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association adds to criticism of an article[supp 1] by Hasty et al. that had appeared in the same journal earlier, and was widely covered in the media with headline phrases such as "90% of [Wikipedia's] medical entries are inaccurate".
Like editors from WikiProject Medicine at the time, the writers of the first letter[5] lament that the paper's authors "have not made their dataset public, so it is impossible to confirm the veracity of their conclusions"; however, "they did share with us a small subset of their dataset on major depressive disorder. We closely examined two statements from Wikipedia that the researchers identified as inaccurate." After outlining that the peer-reviewed literature on these two issues is "rife with debate", and pointing out that some of it supports rather than contradicts the information on Wikipedia, they state that "It seems problematic to conclude that statements made in Wikipedia are wrong based on peer-reviewed literature", also quoting the editors of Nature observing that "peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality". (On another occasion, the lead author had revealed a third Wikipedia statement that according to the study contradicted the peer-reviewed literature and which he described as dangerously wrong; however, it was in agreement with the hypertension guidelines of the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).[supp 2])
The letter writers highlight the fact that the study relied on "third-year residents with no specific expertise [to] correctly ascertain the accuracy of claims made on Wikipedia" in this way. In a response[6], Hasty et al. acknowledged that the peer-reviewed literature contained diverging viewpoints on the topic, but held that "if Wikipedia articles are considered review articles, then it would be expected that major controversial points would be discussed rather than presented from one perspective."
The second letter[7] criticizes that "Because Hasty et al did not identify a specified number of assertions for each condition and did not measure whether Wikipedia and peer-reviewed literature were correct or not, respectively, their use of the McNemar test to compare Wikipedia vs peer-reviewed medical literature was inappropriate." A third letter also criticized the usage of this statistical test, adding that "I believe that the study here was incorrectly analyzed and inappropriately published through the same peer-review process that Hasty et al are holding to such high esteem. "[8] In their response[6] Hasty et al. defended their method, while acknowledging that "for greater clarity" some tables should have been labeled differently.
With such severe criticism from several independent sources, it is hard not to see this 2014 paper by Hasty et al. as discredited. Unfortunately, it continues to be occasionally cited in the literature (as mentioned in the review of the "verifiability" paper above) and in the media.
A paper[9] in Scientific Reports examined how the public attention to a news topic relates to the pageviews of the Wikipedia article about that topic, and the creation dates of related articles. As proxy for the general attention to the topic, the authors use traffic to pages "neighboring" the main article about the topic itself (i.e. linking to and linked from it), including the time before it was created. From the (CC BY licensed) paper:
This conference paper[10] states in its abstract an intent to broadly analyze and present all aspects of Wikipedia use in education. Unfortunately, it fails to do so. For the first four and half pages, the paper explains what Wikipedia is, with next to no discussion of the extensive literature on the use of Wikipedia in education or its perceptions in academia. There is a single paragraph of original research, based on the interview of three Swiss Wikipedians; there is little explanation of why those people where interviewed, nor are there any findings beyond description of their brief editing history. The paper ends with some general conclusions. Given the semi-formal style of the paper, this reviewer finds that it resembles an undergraduate student paper of some kind, and it unfortunately adds nothing substantial to the existing literature on Wikipedia, education and academia.
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.
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In November 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation's legal team received an email seeking control of an article on English Wikipedia about a dance group. The writers said that they were former members of the group, and argued that edits made by other dancers infringed their trademark. We explained that writing an article about a notable topic is not infringement, and suggested that they work with Wikipedia editors if they’d like to improve the article.
Every year, the Foundation receives hundreds of emails and phone calls requesting changes to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and the other Wikimedia projects. A politician may want a friendlier article, or an entertainer may want a more flattering one. Perhaps a business wants to control what is written about its product. In the past six months, the Foundation received 220 such requests—and we didn’t grant a single one, because we believe that our user community should determine the content within the projects.
Transparency and openness are important cornerstones of the Wikimedia movement. One expression of these values is our biannual transparency report, in which we provide information about the requests we receive to remove content from the projects or disclose user data. We published our first transparency report in August 2014; the most recent update covers July–December 2015.
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The report tracks five data-points:
Content alteration and takedown requests. None of 220 requests to alter or remove content was granted. Seven came from government entities. Compared with other major web properties, we receive few content removal requests, because the Wikimedia community works diligently to comply with project policies concerning accuracy and neutrality, and to address any potential concerns. The Foundation believes that the community should determine what content belongs on the projects, and we push back on alteration and takedown requests we do receive in order to ensure that the Wikimedia projects remain neutral, uncensored platforms for sharing free knowledge.
Copyright takedown requests. Between July and December, 2015, we received 20 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests, of which nine were granted. We receive very few DMCA notices, because Wikimedia users are careful to ensure copyright compliance. Our legal team evaluates the DMCA notices that we do receive very carefully, to investigate whether or not the content is infringing, and determine whether any legal exceptions (such as fair use) may apply.
Right to be forgotten. Wikimedia received four requests for content removal based upon the “right to be forgotten”. We did not grant any of these requests. Our concerns about the relevant European Court opinion, and its implications for free knowledge, have not lessened since we first expressed them in August 2014.
Requests for user data. Wikimedia is committed to protecting the privacy of our users. In the last six months, we received 25 requests—including informal requests by governments, informal non-government requests, court orders and civil and criminal subpoenas—to disclose nonpublic user data. Only one of these requests resulted in the disclosure of such information. When we receive such a request, we evaluate it very carefully to ensure that it complies with both the law and our stringent standards. Even when a request is valid and enforceable, we often do not have the information sought. We collect little nonpublic data from our users, and only retain it for a short time.
Voluntary disclosure. On extremely rare occasions, the Foundation becomes aware of concerning information via the projects, such as a suicide or bomb threat. In such cases, consistent with our Privacy Policy, we may voluntarily provide information to the proper authorities to resolve the issue and ensure safety. Between July and December 2015, we made 12 such disclosures.
Our newest report features not only updated numbers, but new and interesting stories from the past six months. We answer frequently asked questions about the report itself, and our commitment to transparency. The Foundation invites you read the full report here to learn more about our efforts to protect user privacy and keep the content on the Wikimedia projects accurate, neutral, and in the hands of the community.
