Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/From the editors
Your traffic reports for the weeks July 31 – August 6, and August 7–13, 2016
For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see top 25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see most edited. For the most popular articles that ORES models predict are low quality, see popular low quality.
Since the Olympic Opening Ceremony was on August 5 and this chart runs through August 6, the 2016 Summer Olympics only hit #2. It is very likely to top the chart next week. Olympic-related articles make up eight of the top 25. In the meantime, pop culture dominated the top of the chart, with the film Suicide Squad hitting #1, the new Harry Potter play at #3, and Netflix hit Stranger Things at #4.
In other, more technical news, the data in this week's report comes solely from TopViews. The data feed used to generate the WP:5000 since its creation has been deprecated by the WMF. For the time being, it will be slightly more cumbersome to make this chart, as we no longer have an easy source listing the rating class of each article and the mobile-desktop view percentages, though this information is still available to us.
For the week July 31 – August 6, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from Topviews Analysis were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Suicide Squad (film) | 
|
2,889,015 |  |
DC Comics' ramshackle crew of press-ganged 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 nascent DC Cinematic Universe, which was released on August 5 to generally negative reviews. Nonetheless, it grossed $267 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Star Margot Robbie also landed the #7 spot this week, and two characters in the film, Robbie's Harley Quinn and Enchanttress, also make the Top 25. |
| 2 | 2016 Summer Olympics |
|
1,421,144 |  |
Up from #15 last week as the games finally got underway. Opening rounds in some events began on August 3, and the opening ceremony (#22) was held on August 5. This Olympics will have over 11,000 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees (which includes all 193 members of the United Nations and additional special entities), competing in 28 sports. Two new sports this time include rugby sevens and golf. Golf is actually a returning sport, last featured at the 1904 games. Sadly, my favorite sport from the 1904, the plunge for distance, will not be returning. Michael Phelps (#9) is not quite that old, but he's back too. |
| 3 | Harry Potter and the Cursed Child | 
|
1,381,205 |  |
It seems like ever since J.K. Rowling published the last Harry Potter book in 2007 and vowed that the series was over, magical forces have eaten away at that pledge. And the biggest step away from that promise, if not a complete retreat, is the mounting of a London play which sets Harry twenty years in the future. The play script was released in book form on July 31, and bookstores tried to recreate the fervor of the prior book releases. And no doubt it will sell a ton of copies, but based on reviews, it does tarnish the legend a bit. |
| 4 | Stranger Things (TV series) |
|
1,200,720 |  |
90,000 views more than last week. This Netflix science-fiction series is basically an 8-hour homage to early 80s kid-centric flicks like E.T., The Goonies and Explorers, though aimed mostly at adults. I binge-watched the whole thing in a few days and found it very enjoyable. But its appeal to millions who were not alive in the early 1980s is fascinating. The movies which inspired the series have lived on to a much greater extent than movies even ten years older. A parent can show a kid E.T. in 1996, 2006, or 2016, and the kid is still going to laugh and cry at the same parts. So Stranger Things taps into a nostalgia that is not limited to 1983, but one that is part of a common experience of youth, at least in America. Also, since I'm already pontificating, let me note that setting the series in 1983 is very helpful in dealing with the troublesome issue of cellphones. It has been noted that mobile phones "must be one of the worst things ever to happen to horror movies", but in 1983, when a kid left the house, no one knew where the hell they were. No one can pull up Google Maps or post Instagram photos of monsters. Today, if the Yeti isn't on twitter, he does not exist. |
| 5 | Donald Trump | 
|
806,195 |  |
Donald Trump likely said something controversial during the week, just guessing. |
| 6 | Harry Potter | 
|
785,355 | |
See #3. Interestingly, a Harry Potter product has never appeared on the Top 25 until this week. The last film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, was released in July 2011, 18 months before the report began. Reviewing stats.grok.se data, for the week of July 17–23, 2011, that film had 891,856 views (non-mobile only), which was likely enough to be #1 for the week at that time, or close to it. |
| 7 | Margot Robbie |
|
636,032 |  |
Starring in #1. |
| 8 | List of Steven Universe episodes | 
|
610,304 | Up from #19 and 480K views last week. It's not often that kids' cartoons get on this list; My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic hasn't managed it in 5 years. But then, Steven Universe isn't exactly a kids' cartoon. In fact I'm not entirely sure I can explain what it is, but if you can imagine a magical girl anime remade in English with a gender-swapped lead, you can get some idea. The show has in the past been notorious for its patchy release schedule, and, as if in contrition, Cartoon Network are releasing new episodes of the show every day during the so-called "Summer of Steven". This has necessitated much checking of release times, hence the list's appearance here. | |
| 9 | Michael Phelps |
|
608,707 |  |
The most decorated Olympian of all time has returned for the 2016 Summer Olympics (#2). If you are in America, there is no way the television coverage misses a moment of anything Michael Phelps does. In fact, I understand that there are sports where America does not predominate in the Olympics, but that rarely makes it to American television. I went and looked at the medal table, and see, for example, that Kazakhstan has won 7 medals so far. This includes three in judo and three in weightlifting, which might have been covered somewhere on American television on an obscure cable network, but certainly nothing they've promoted. I bet weightlifting and judo are all over television in Kazakhstan. |
| 10 | Deaths in 2016 |
|
604,639 |  |
The views for the annual list of deaths are remarkably consistent on a day-to-day basis. It was consistently higher in the first half of 2016 with a string of highly notable deaths, but things seem to be calming down a bit. |
This week marked Wikipedia's hosting of the 2016 Summer Olympics; the first since this list was begun. With only Super Bowls and Oscar nights to compare it to, we didn't have much in the way of precedent. And, while not exactly staggering, the numbers are fairly eye-opening. Fully 17 slots in the top 25 were devoted to the Olympics, probably a list record for a single event, and the entry point was the highest since last December, which featured the return of another beloved cultural institution, Star Wars. The groundswell was so big it not only knocked Donald Trump off the list for the first time in months, but almost knocked the death list off, a virtually unprecedented occurrence. Personally, I know nothing about sports, and have no ties to any sports stars, so I have to say I'm a bit bemused by the tribalism this list reveals. en.wikipedia likes to think of itself as the English language Wikipedia, not the American Wikipedia, but there's no denying which country was the main focus of people's attention. Don't get me wrong; I don't blame Americans for this- I live in London and you can bet the popular press there are fawning over British winners exclusively. But I have to ask, whatever happened to "Well played!"?
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week August 7–13, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from Topviews Analysis were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michael Phelps |
|
5,428,201 | |
Numbers have increased ninefold for the most decorated Olympian of all time, who came out of retirement for the 2016 Summer Olympics and swept the pool, as it were, with five gold medals and one silver, before finally calling it quits for good. In a world currently short of sporting heroes, Phelps has proven an inspiration; after each of his prior Olympic meets, pool attendance in the United States increased by more than 10%, and the press have made much of a photo of him standing next to an awestruck then-9-year-old Katie Ledecky (#6), who dominated the women's pool. |
| 2 | 2016 Summer Olympics |
|
2,281,692 | |
As I said, I know next to nothing about sports, but I do know about Rio, the city where I lived for a time and for whom I have the kind of guarded love one reserves for that wayward family member who has never lived up to your expectations. When it won the right to host the games seven years ago, I was ecstatic. Finally, it seemed Brazil was ready to ditch its old habits and assert itself as a global power. How different things are now, or rather, how like they were. The news that everything had gone, well, Rio-y in the lead up to the games left me feeling deflated. The almost comical string of disasters that had thrown the world for such a loop were old hat to anyone who had sat through the city's numerous other attempts to host major world events. And yet ... I'm relieved. Relieved, because so far the only major scandal has been a discoloured diving pool. If that's all the press is concerned with, maybe this won't be a disaster after all. |
| 3 | Suicide Squad (film) |
|
2,150,660 | |
DC Comics' ramshackle crew of press-ganged 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 nascent DC Cinematic Universe, which was released on August 5 to generally negative reviews. Nonetheless, it grossed $267 worldwide in its opening weekend. Despite the overwhelming presence of the Olympics this week, star Margot Robbie also landed the #18 spot, just above her character, Harley Quinn. |
| 4 | Simone Biles |
|
1,832,829 | .jpg) |
The 19-year-old Olympic first-timer secured two gold medals in artistic gymnastics this week. |
| 5 | Aly Raisman |
|
1,400,901 |  |
It's hard to know what has placed the two-time captain of the US artistic gymnastics team farther up this list, her gold and silver medal wins, or the viral video of her mother's increasingly frantic head motions. It says something about the stresses of Olympic life that her performance is considered a comeback after "only" winning a gold and a bronze in London. |
| 6 | Katie Ledecky |
|
1,022,491 |  |
The only person Katie Ledecky ever races against is herself. No one races her. The 19-year-old swimmer secured four golds this week, breaking two world records in the process, both her own, in the 400 m and 800 m freestyle. In the 800m, she not only broke her own world record by nearly 2 seconds, but finished nearly 12 seconds ahead of the silver medallist, Britain's Jazz Carlin. 12 seconds. That's enough time to update her Wikipedia article on your cellphone. |
| 7 | Nicole Johnson (Miss California USA) | 
|
912,940 |  |
Surprisingly, her appearance on this list has nothing to do with Donald Trump, who owned the Miss USA pageant until last September, but simply that she happens to be the wife of Michael Phelps (see #1). |
| 8 | Stranger Things (TV series) |
|
855,038 | |
This Netflix science-fiction series is basically an 8-hour homage to early 80s kid-centric flicks like E.T., The Goonies and Explorers, though aimed mostly at adults. It has been a smash hit for Netflix, out-rating even its other big fantasy shows like Daredevil and Jessica Jones, both of which have topped this list in the past. |
| 9 | No Man's Sky |
|
819,437 |  |
Let's be honest here; this game was never going to live up to the hype. Made by a small indie developer under intense time and budget constraints, No Man's Sky has had players slavering for over four years with its promise of 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets crammed with procedurally generated alien life that you could travel to and from seamlessly in your procedurally generated starship. The question of what you would be expected to do with all that freedom to explore has always been at the front of players' minds, and something the developers have been remarkably coy about. Now that the game has finally been released, it turns out it's basically a cross between Elite Dangerous and Minecraft. To some, that's fine; to most, it's a disappointment. |
| 10 | Olympic Games | 
|
892,180 | |
People are probably looking for this Olympic Games, rather than seeking knowledge of the event's venerable history, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong. |
Backchannel takes on the issue of mental and emotional well-being among Wikipedians, noting that during a seven-year span, Wikimedia Foundation staff "responded to almost 500 threats of suicide and other imminent harm to people and property." The piece explores the general issue through the story of one Wikipedian's troubling experiences, and delves into the efforts of the WMF's Support and Safety team. (Aug. 16)
Journalist Tom Mendelsohn of Ars Technica recounts how his "joy turned to disappointment" after learning that a brief biography of him had been published on Wikipedia, and then realizing that it had been written "to attack [him] as an unhinged left-wing agitator." He describes his successful, if frustrating, efforts to get the article removed. (Aug. 15)
As mentioned in the previous Signpost "Technology report", registered users can install user scripts to significantly customise their Wikipedia experience, beyond the options already provided at Special:Preferences. This report concludes the prior report's list of scripts published in 2016, through the end of July. See Wikipedia:User scripts for more scripts and further information, including instructions. In the Installation code section below, you will find the code needed to install each script.
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Thespaceface/MetricFirst.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Fred_Gandt/subdueLinks.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:P999/Toggle VF.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Ugog Nizdast/FloatingTOC.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Evad37/Custom GeoHack replacement.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Ugog Nizdast/displayNumberOfTags.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Bility/copySectionLink.js}}
mw.loader.load('//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Perhelion/signing.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
{{subst:iusc|1=User:APerson/sync-template-sandbox.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Music1201/MyCSD.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Evad37/WikidataWatchlistLabels.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Evad37/ToDoLister.js}}
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Fred_Gandt/confirmLogout.js}}
New gadgets
Newly approved bot tasks
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from August 16. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from August 17. It will be on all wikis from August 18 (calendar).Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/Opinion
The second WikiConference India, held August 5–7 in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, drew hundreds of new and experienced members from 20 language communities of various Wikimedia projects from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This event was more thematic than the first WikiConference India (held in 2011), with numerous presentations, panel discussions and workshops on the gender gap, Wikipedia in education, Mediawiki, and state of the movement in India. The event was organized by the Community of Wikimedians in India, supported by Wikimedia India and the Centre for Internet and Society, and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. The newly formed user group Punjabi Wikimedians hosted the event. WikiConference India's main goal was to build community and increase participation among Wikimedians in India. Interest in the event was strong: 452 Wikimedians from more than six countries applied for ~100 scholarships. Wikipedia's well known gender gap was evident: only 55 scholarship applicants were women, but a strong focus on diversity resulted in ~25% of scholarship recipients going to women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. In all, about 250 people attended the conference. Several Foundation staff spoke at the event, including executive director Katherine Maher, Asaf Bartov, and Tighe Flanagan.
A highlight of the conference was the hackathon track, which spanned all three days of the conference. It proved highly productive, yielding seven apps that are expected to help Wikimedians in a variety of ways. I spoke with Santosh Shingare (Cherishsantosh), the Bangalore-based Wikimedian who organized the hackathon. Santosh had previously served as an organizer of the 2011 WikiConference, and has run hackathons annually since then. Santosh's primary motivation for holding such events is learning; he spoke of limited opportunities to learn about new areas of technology beyond his core skills in WebRTC and Android. He enjoys collaborating with other Wikimedians and sharing technical skills. This event was his first with an international draw, and he looks forward to opportunities to collaborate beyond India's borders in the future.
As Santosh outlined in a message to the Wikimania email list, the hackathon's 35 participants made substantial progress with the following projects:
Santosh highlights that the projects grew out of advance communication. To identify problems and generate ideas, the hackathon organizing team posted a survey ahead of the event. Requests from various language communities, including Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, and Malayalam, drove several of the projects. The software is all freely licensed, and there are no plans to generate revenue.
Santosh is not a prolific Wikipedia writer or editor, but rather sees value in his ability to communicate among Wikimedians who seek features from various language communities, including his native Marathi and other Indic languages in which he has varying degrees of fluency.
He plans to update the Wikimedia community shortly with further details on each of the seven projects. He is already planning the next of India's annual hackathons. Hackathon organizers worldwide might be interested in learning more about Indian Wikimedians' efforts, and Wikimedians around the world can expect to benefit from their projects.
The conference generated a number of media reports. PF
Last week brought a rare piece of good news in the world's uncertain progress towards the widespread free licensing of information on the Internet. Ravidreams announced on the Wikimedia India mailing list that the government of one of India's largest and most populous states—Tamil Nadu—has issued an instruction to Tamil University and "all other government departments and institutions to release all their publications, archives and collections under Creative Commons by Share-Alike license".
The move comes one year after the collaboration between the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community and the Tamil Virtual Academy, an independent institution set up by the state government in 2001 to provide online resources for Tamil-language communities around the world. TVA and the Tamil-language Wikimedia community collaborated to persuade the government to make the order. Wikimedia India (one of three Creative Commons affiliates in the country) served as an institutional partner, signing the initial agreement on behalf of the Indian Wikimedia community, and funding a Wikimedian in Residence at TVA.
Ravi, who also serves on the TVA committee for outreach, told the Signpost that the TVA is very keen to share its collection of encyclopedic resources with Tamil Wikimedia projects. The community contributed strategic knowledge of free-content licensing, providing precedents for free content release by other governments in India and other countries, and helped in the drafting of the actual order. "But it takes a lot of time, effort, high-profile connections to change how government institutions work", he said.
| “ | Almost 99% of the time it's about the right officer/minister who cares for our mission being in charge of the right department at the right time. It's very hard to bring change through a bottom-up approach. These precedents help when someone at the top gets interested in changing things. So, any community that expects to influence public policy should be prepared to do a lot of groundwork. | ” |
Tamil-language Wikipedian Thamizhpparithi Maari serves as Assistant Director, TVA and state coordinator of its computing outreach unit, which the government is funding to encourage students in the state to use open-source media and software; this program includes the development of mobile apps and the running of contests to enhance students' computing skills. He described to the Signpost the elaborate process of finally gaining legal and administrative approval for the CC-by-SA release order. Thamizhpparithi has already started a process of digitising books from the universities to share with the Tamil wiki community, involving between 400,000 and 500,000 pages in some 200 books, using Google optical character recognition (OCR).
"This is just the beginning; we expect millions of pages to be uploaded to Tamil Wikisource", Ravi said. Most of the content that will become available for uploading is in Tamil, although some will be in English and other Indian languages; this will present significant opportunities for the Tamil Wikimedia community.
There are about 70 million native speakers of Tamil, and another eight million second-language speakers. It is an official language in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka (with which the state shares a maritime border), and Singapore, and is also used in Malaysia and the African island of Mauritius. The language, written in a distinctive curvilinear script, has a rich literature of poetry reaching back thousands of years, and of novels over the past few centuries; this is attested by a related category on the English Wikipedia that is already of impressive size.
The Open Policy Network, a project of Creative Commons, published an overview of the value of this kind of work in 2014; the Network advocates for governments around the world to adopt free content licenses. T
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/Serendipity
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/Op-ed
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/In focus
In this issue of the Arbitration report: A new case has been opened, and the arbitration committee has issued a reminder to administrators not to issue blocks based on private information.
Michael Hardy, a longtime administrator, started an article on ancestral health on 4 August. Its publication was met with some resistance from MjolnirPants, who twice moved for its deletion, by PROD and Speedy Deletion. Debate ensued, rapidly leading to the filing of an ArbCom case.
As of this writing, nine of the 14 arbitrators – a clear majority – have moved to accept the case. While only two have opposed taking on the case, one has strongly urged declining the case: "This request has moved faster than anything else we've done all year," observes Opabinia regalis. "There's no doubt there are some issues here, but they are not that urgent and it is not clear that a full case would be the best way to resolve them." Opabinia goes on to explore the merits of taking the case in some detail, and to reconsider their own position in light of nine colleagues' disagreement; but ultimately stands by the preference to handle the conflict through less formal channels. Accepting the case, though, does not imply a specific outcome; as arbitrator GorillaWarfare says, "... acceptance of a case is not an assertion that some wrongdoing has taken place."
The case is currently in its Evidence stage. The ancestral health article meanwhile has currently been merged into the Paleolithic lifestyle article.
If a user needs to be blocked based on information that will not be made available to all administrators, that information should be sent to the Arbitration Committee or a Checkuser or oversighter for action. These editors are qualified to handle non-public evidence, and they operate under strict controls. The community has rejected the idea of individual administrators acting on evidence that cannot be peer-reviewed.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-08-18/Humour
