The Wikimedia Foundation has hired Victoria Coleman to serve as its chief technology officer (CTO). (blog post; press release; email list announcement). The CTO role, widely seen as vital to an organization for which technology has always been the central focus, has been vacant since Danese Cooper left the organization in July 2011. Several former and current WMF staff, however, noted that various others have played the role of CTO in the interim, to some degree, without adopting the formal title. According to the announcement, Coleman "will be responsible for setting the vision and strategy for technology and operations behind the Wikimedia projects, in cooperation with the global communities of volunteer contributors, users, and researchers."
Coleman’s resume includes roles with Technicolor, Harman, Yahoo, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Intel, and SRI International. She also worked on security-related projects, including authoring a report on creation of a legal framework for the safety of programmable electronic systems procurement in the UK, and the establishment of a cybersecurity research center in the US.
Executive director Katherine Maher said in the announcement: "Victoria brings the right combination of deep technical knowledge, operational expertise, and the steady hand that is needed in this unique role."
One message from an email list participant, inquiring into Coleman’s perspective on a user privacy issue that may intersect with her past work, prompted an extended response from Maher. Maher emphasized the importance of having a diversity of backgrounds represented among staff, and the value of Coleman’s security experience in the government IT sector.
Coleman will take up the role on November 7. PF
Foundation trustee Kelly Battles announced that she has taken a position as chief financial officer (CFO) for Quora. The announcement, which addresses the possibility of a legal conflict of interest arising from the new position, appears to be Battles' first public communication since her brief introductory statement on joining the Board of Trustees in January 2016. Battles was Bracket Computing’s CFO when she assumed the unpaid WMF Board position.
Quora, a for-profit company, runs a question-and-answer website that has drawn frequent comparisons to Wikipedia since its launch in 2010 (past Signpost coverage). Quora co-founder Adam D'Angelo noted the influence of Wikipedia on the site's design in a TechCrunch article, and computer scientist Seb Paquet addressed the connection in the popular article "Why Quora is not Wikipedia" for Quora Review, both in 2011. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales describes himself as “an advisor to and (very small) investor in Quora,” and has answered some 864 questions on the site. Quora itself features many questions and answers related to the connections between the two sites.
Some discussion about the potential for COI in Battles’ new role ensued on the email list.PF
The WMF seeks input on whether to update the Wikimedia Terms of Use to specify version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC BY-SA) (an upgrade from version 3.0 of the same license); the consultation runs to November 8. The change would be the first since the WMF's move in 2009 from the old GNU FDL that had been in use since Wikipedia launched. The 2009 change was spearheaded by deputy director Erik Möller and trustee Kat Walsh. At the time, some European Wikimedians objected to the legal interaction with their own copyright codes; this may be prompting some expressions of caution about the current proposal.
For the 4.0 version, released in 2013, Creative Commons prioritized creating a “more global license,” consulting with hundreds of volunteers around the world to improve the fit with various legal jurisdictions, and to simplify and translate the legal code and the simpler “deeds,” or summaries for non-lawyers, into many languages. In addition, the 4.0 version for the first time presents a unified CC BY-SA license for various legal jurisdictions, rather than separate “ported” versions designed specifically for each country’s laws.
License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing
15 June 2009
Licensing vote results announced, resolution passed
25 May 2009
Licensing vote begins
13 April 2009
Community weighs license update
30 March 2009
License update, Commons cartoons, films milestone, and more
16 March 2009
News and notes: Elections, licensing update, and more
8 February 2009
GFDL 1.3 released, will allow Wikimedia migration to Creative Commons license
17 November 2008
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License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing |
Two changes noted in the discussions to date are database rights and the process whereby reusers who violate the license can correct their actions within a 30-day window. Database rights have been assuming ever-greater online importance, with significant implications for the way societies deal with the ongoing explosion in structured information. While most jurisdictions still lack database copyright law—in which compiling a database apparently confers copyright, whether online or in hard copy—uploaders in jurisdictions that do have database copyright law must satisfy both the local law and the provisions of the Creative Commons license. For this reason, the WMF's adoption of the new version is planned to present a waiver of potential database rights, which, according to that link target on Meta Wiki, gives permission to use material that is ineligible for copyright protection, but is eligible for protection as part of a database. The proposal intends "that the rights in Wikimedia content are internationally consistent and consistent with Wikipedia's past rights in contributions under version 3.0 of the license." Wikidata, however, will not be transitioning to a new license under the proposal; it has used, and will continue to use, the CC0 public domain dedication rather than CC BY-SA. T
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The Washington Post, the most widely circulated newspaper in the U.S. capital, published several insightful pieces about Wikipedia in the space of a few days.
Robert Gebelhoff's "Science shows Wikipedia is the best part of the Internet" glows about a "first-of-its-kind" study from Harvard Business School, which found that Wikipedia "reduces ideological segregation and is remarkably good at finding neutrality, even on the most contentious topics".
Gebelhoff acknowledged that Wikipedia does suffer at times from the "mean-spiritedness seen in the darker corners of the Internet" (like Facebook and Twitter), but focused on the benefits that can accrue when ideologically opposed Wikipedia editors talk through their differences as they construct articles. He observed that while Wikipedia does not strive to be an "experiment in democracy", it has an "essentially democratic" characteristic. (Oct. 19)
Jeff Guo covered the same study for the Post's Wonkblog: "Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet’s biggest flaws" (Oct. 25)
Chris Alcantara dove into the particulars in yet another piece, "The most challenging job of the 2016 race: Editing the candidates’ Wikipedia pages." Describing Wikipedia as producing what amounts to an "election guide", Alcantara summarized Wikipedia editors' efforts to choose the most appropriate photos to illustrate articles on U.S. presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and presented graphics summarizing the frequency of edits to a number of presidential candidates' Wikipedia biographies, in several election cycles. The article featured interviews with several Wikipedia editors.
These stories from the Post add to the paper's wide variety of Wikipedia-related coverage in the last year. In December 2015, reporter Caitlin Dewey published "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?", which was followed up by stories in Germany, England, Italy, and elsewhere. The next month, it ran Wikipedia historian Andrew Lih's op-ed for Wikipedia's 15th birthday, "Wikipedia just turned 15 years old. Will it survive 15 more?" And, as we reported in last week's In the media, columnist Gene Weingarten recently wrote about his frustrations in trying to update the photo on his own Wikipedia biography. (Oct. 27) PF
The ten-month-long run of the tenth WikiCup competition is finally over, and the winners have been announced. Having taken place annually since 2007, the WikiCup encourages editors to improve Wikipedia and engage in the various featured content processes (and the lesser ones such as good articles and In the News) through friendly competition and encouragement.
The top three finalists were:
Cas Liber (submissions)
MPJ-DK (submissions)
Adam Cuerden (submissions)In addition to recognizing the achievements of the top contestants and everyone who worked hard to make it to the final round, we also want to acknowledge participants who were most productive in each of the WikiCup scoring categories:
Calvin999 (submissions) produced 2 FLs in R2
SSTflyer (submissions) produced the only FPO of the Cup in R2.
Cyclonebiskit (submissions) and Calvin were each responsible for one FT in R3 and R2, respectively.
Dharmadhyaksha (submissions) and 
Muboshgu (submissions), each with 5 ITN, both in R4.Over the course of the 2016 WikiCup the following content was added to Wikipedia (only reporting on fixed value categories): 17 featured articles, 183 good articles, 8 featured lists, 87 featured pictures, 40 in the news items, and 321 good article reviews. Thank you to all the competitors for your hard work and what you have done to improve Wikipedia.
Each finalist produced some excellent work. We've included a representative sample.
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Cas Liber (submissions) had two featured articles in the last round, and nine over the course of the competition – an impressive feat. The one shown is Cortinarius violaceus
MPJ-DK (submissions) had a varied final round – a featured article, a featured list, a couple good articles, and a nine-article "good topic" on Los Espantos – but, given we're only allowed to use freely licensed material in The Signpost, I've chosen Shocker (wrestler), one of his good articles, as the representative image for his work.
Adam Cuerden (submissions) in the last round, and one of 71 featured pictures he restored over the course of the competition. 
J Milburn (submissions) created a good topic on political theorist and animal rights activist Alasdair Cochrane..svg)
The C of E (submissions) had three good articles and 21 "Did you know ...?" entries in the final round, an impressive amount of article creation and improvement. Pictured is the flag of Hong Kong between 1959 and 1997, the article for which he raised to good article status. 
12george1 (submissions) is one of our "weather guys", working hard to keep major weather events well-covered on Wikipedia. Pictured is 2016's Tropical Storm Colin, which only happened in June, but is already a good article. Keep up the great work! 
Worm That Turned (submissions): The King William Ale House in Bristol, England.
Wugapodes (submissions) wasn't actually able to contribute in the last round, but they did excellent work earlier in the competition – hence why they were in the last round. Pictured is the city of Paterson, New Jersey, defendant in the United States Supreme Court case Heffernan v. City of Paterson, which they raised to good article status.
The Wikimedia Foundation established the Community Tech team in 2015 as a product team devoted to building features and making changes that active Wikimedia contributors need the most. Rather than those of us on the team coming up with our own ideas and proposing them to the community, the team decided to let the community tell us what to work on. To do this, we invited the community to participate in a cross-project survey to set our agenda for the year. This consisted of two weeks for contributors to propose ideas, followed by two weeks of support voting. On November 7, we’ll be starting the process all over again, and we want you to participate in the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey.
The 2015 Wishlist Survey engaged more than 600 Wikimedians, and produced a ranked list of 107 ideas. Community Tech committed to investigating and addressing the top 10 wishes—designing and building new tools ourselves, or collaborating with other teams and volunteers who were working in those areas. For the two wishes where we could not offer help, we investigated the issues and explained why those wishes weren’t feasible for us to tackle.
Our first year is coming to a close, and here’s what happened with 2015's top 10:
We've completed our work on five wishes:
We're currently working on one wish:
Other WMF teams are currently working on two wishes:
We declined two wishes:
There's more information about each of these, and the full list of 107 wishes, in our latest status report.
The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey will start November 7, and we’re changing parts of the process to reflect what we learned in the first one. This year, the focus of the initial two-week proposal period is for the community to collaboratively craft each proposal, to present the idea in a way that's most likely to succeed in the voting phase. When a proposal is submitted, everyone is invited to comment on that proposal, and help to make it better—asking questions, and suggesting changes. Duplicate proposals can be combined; very broad proposals should be split up into more specific ideas. The goal is to create the best possible proposal for the voting phase.
In the two-week voting phase that follows, contributors vote to support the proposals that they think are worthwhile, and the ideas are ranked by the number of support votes. This process gives us a way to measure the community’s enthusiasm for each idea.
The Community Tech team will work on the top ten wishes in 2017, as we did with last year’s survey, but we also want to make sure that we can help affiliates, admins, campaign leaders, and people who work on smaller projects. To accomplish this, we’ll also pick a number of proposals to work on that didn’t make it into the top 10, but are potentially of significant impact for smaller projects or user groups.
So we’re inviting all of you smart, passionate, and opinionated Wikimedians to come and help us figure out which problems need our attention the most. Join us to submit and discuss proposals (November 7–20), and then for the voting phase (November 28–December 12). We’ll see you there!
The English Wikipedia has used pending changes protection since 2010, deferring non-autoconfirmed users' edits to administrators and those granted the pending changes reviewers right. One feature of the pending changes extension remains unused: the feature, referred to as PC2 (pending changes level 2), defers all edits by all editors except those able to review pending changes. In 2014, consensus was formally established for the use of pending changes. The community has left the criteria for the feature's use unaddressed, until the introduction of extended confirmed protection galvanized discussion on protection levels.
A new RfC proposes the use of PC2 as an alternative to extended confirmed protection, which bars editing from users with less than 500 edits and 30 days of editing history. The RfC seems to be gaining traction, potentially putting an end to the years of discussion on PC2.
A long discussion has recently been closed on whether the articles from "1" to "100" (specifically the natural numbers from 1 to 100, or for math geeks) should be used for the numbers themselves rather than the year in the Gregorian calendar.
Consensus has emerged that the years should find new homes as the numbers themselves move in to take the place as the primary topic (for example, the natural number 1 will be covered in 1 instead of the year 1). The debate now lies on whether to use AD or CE to describe the calendar era with increasing years, and whether to place the qualifier before or after the year.
A Technical Collaboration Guideline (TCG) has been drafted by the Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Collaboration team, led by Keegan Peterzell. The TCG documents best practices for involving the Wikimedia communities in technical developments and deployments. It focuses on communication and collaboration, rather than software creation processes, as development plans, goals, and expectations can vary between projects. The draft TCG has sections on software development principles, prioritisation, private planning, milestone communication, translation, and community decisions.
The initial TCG draft was based on discussions with the WMF's Community Liaisons and Product managers, reflecting on how to encourage collaboration, and past communication success and failures. Over the past few years, there have been multiple controversial product deployments, such as the VisualEditor (see previous Signpost coverage) and Media Viewer (see previous Signpost coverage).
The community is invited to review the proposed guideline and leave feedback. Discussion to date has focused on managing the translation load. E
Citation templates form an integral part of Wikipedia and are intimately linked to our policies on verifiability through reliable sources. Citation templates are currently used on more than 3,000,000 articles on the English Wikipedia. They are used to quickly format references and benefit from advanced logic that provides additional functionality; they facilitate both error-checking and bot-assistance maintenance, and integrate themselves with tools that allow for the automated filling of these templates based on external bibliographic databases such as CrossRef. For instance,
![{\displaystyle [1,100]\cap \mathbb {N} }](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/f99184901e3bd9a2ddbddc7275b9931da313074a)
*{{cite journal |last1=Luallen |first1=R. J. |display-authors=etal |year=2016 |title=Discovery of a Natural Microsporidian Pathogen with a Broad Tissue Tropism in ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' |journal=PLOS Pathogens |volume=12 |issue=6 |pages=e1005724 |doi=10.1371/journal.ppat.1005724}}
will display the following fully formatted, machine-readable reference:
Tens of thousands of freely available sources flagged
4 December 2023
Top scholarly citers, lack of open access references, predicting editor departures
27 March 2022
The Wikipedia SourceWatch
31 March 2019
New guideline for technical collaboration
4 November 2016
Wikimedia Foundation adopts open-access research policy
25 March 2015
Wikipedia predicts flu more accurately than Google; 43% of academics have edited Wikipedia
30 April 2014
Licensed for reuse? Citing open-access sources in Wikipedia articles
15 January 2014
Loss of an Internet genius
14 January 2013
Wikimedia Foundation endorses open-access petition to the White House; pending changes RfC ends
28 May 2012
Wikimedia and the "seismic shift" towards open-access research publication
14 May 2012
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Tens of thousands of freely available sources flagged |
Over the past few months, Trappist the monk, Pintoch, Headbomb, and many commenters have toiled on citation templates to facilitate the flagging of freely accessible content, in line with Wikipedia's commitment to promoting free culture and open access where possible. As part of the overhaul, access icons have been designed to be displayed for various levels of access:
– for a full version of a source that is freely accessible, with no conditions
– for a full version of a source that is freely accessible, with some conditions (e.g. free registration is required, only the first 5 reads are free, etc.)
– for a full version of a source that is not freely accessible (e.g. paid subscription is required).The appearance of these icons is currently under debate, and should not yet be considered final or set in stone. The access icons are supported by both Citation Style 1 (like {{cite book}} and {{cite journal}}) and Citation Style 2 ({{citation}}) templates. Identifier templates like {{arxiv}}, {{bibcode}}, and {{doi}} will be updated to match the behaviour of the citation templates so that manually formatted references can benefit from the new locks. The exact behaviour of the citation templates as to when those locks should be displayed is also currently under debate. What is presented below is the as-of-writing behaviour of the template, after the first round of updates, and should not yet be considered final.
Because links from |url= are normally freely available, non-free links (given in |url=) can now be flagged as restricted/non-free via |url-access=
|url-access=free – unsupported, per the convention that unflagged URLs should be free. If it does become supported, it will display a green open lock, for when full versions are freely accessible to everyone|url-access=registration – will display a yellow dashed lock, for when a free registration is required to access the full version of an article|url-access=limited – will display a yellow dashed lock, for when free access is provided on a limited basis, for example if only the first few views of an article are free|url-access=subscription – will display a red closed lock, for when payment is required to access the source.The |registration=yes and |subscription=yes options are now discouraged, and should be replaced with |url-access=registration and |url-access=subscription, respectively. This will resolve the ambiguity of the message in a case like:
where it is unclear which link requires registration; whereas the new style will make it clear:
Whether the templates should support |url-access=free to display green locks after the primary link is currently under debate. The full deprecation of |registration=yes and |subscription=yes will depend on the outcome of the RFC.
Several identifiers, namely:
|arxiv= – for arXiv preprints like arXiv:1001.1234,|biorxiv= (new!) – for bioRxiv preprints bioRxiv 047720,|citeseerx= (new!) – for papers available on CiteSeerX like CiteSeerx: 10.1.1.220.7880,|pmc= – for papers available on PubMed Central like PMC 50050,|rfc= – for Request for Comments like RFC 125,|ssrn= – for papers available on the Social Science Research Network like SSRN 871210,will always link to freely available sources, and will automatically display the green open lock.
Identifiers that link to sometimes freely available full versions can now be flagged with |<id>-access=free, where <id> stands for the associated identifier parameter. That is:
|bibcode-access=free – to flag a free |bibcode= like Bibcode:1974AJ.....79..819H,|doi-access=free – to flag a free |doi= like doi:10.4204/EPTCS.172.23,|hdl-access=free – to flag a free |hdl= like hdl:1808/3638,|jstor-access=free – to flag a free |jstor= like JSTOR 10.1086/673276,|ol-access=free – to flag a free |ol= like OL 25894862M,|osti-access=free – to flag a free |osti= like OSTI 4435330.Whether the templates should support |<id>-access=limited/registration/subscription to display yellow and red locks after these identifiers is currently under debate.
Non-free identifier, or identifiers that never link to full versions of the reference, remain plain. These include:
|asin= – e.g. ASIN B00086U61Y,|isbn= – e.g. ISBN 0-7475-3269-9,|ismn= – e.g. ISMN 979-0-2600-0043-8,|issn= – e.g. ISSN 0028-0836,|jfm= – e.g. JFM 54.0271.04,|lccn= – e.g. LCCN 89-456,|mr= – e.g. MR0123456,|oclc= – e.g. OCLC 632791477,|pmid= – e.g. PMID 123456,|zbl= – e.g. Zbl 06626752.Whether the templates should support |<id>-access=limited/registration/subscription to display yellow and red locks after these identifiers is currently under debate.
Flagging free-to-read identifiers (or articles that are not free-to-read) is optional: no one is required to make use of the new features of the citation templates. However, those who like to go the extra mile should easily be able to adapt to the new system.
If you cite freely accessible sources with a template like {{cite web|url=http://www.example.com|title=...}}, or offline sources through templates like {{cite book}}, there is (as of now) no need to change how you do things. However, if you cite registration- or subscription-based online mainstream publications, it is best to add |url-access=registration or |url-access=subscription. These replace the current |registration=yes and |subscription=yes (which are now discouraged and will likely be phased out over the next few months), or alternatively, the need to append {{registration required}} and {{subscription required}} templates after citations.
If you cite scientific journals with a template like {{cite journal|doi=10.1234/123456|title=...}}, it can be tricky to determine whether the source is freely accessible, especially if you work in academia or are a college/university student. Academic institutions will often have subscriptions, and all internet traffic going through the institution's servers will be granted access. For those reasons, it is best if you verify whether a source is free to read when you are at home before adding |doi-access=free, unless you know the journal has an open-access policy. (The same applies for the other identifiers, like |jstor= and |jstor-access=free.)
New bots like User:OAbot will be developed to make use of the new parameters (subject to trial and community consensus), while existing bots like User:Citation bot and User:Bibcode Bot can be updated to make use of them.
If you don't use citation templates, then this shouldn't affect you. However, if you do make use of identifier templates like {{arxiv}}, {{bibcode}}, and {{doi}}, those will be updated to match the behaviour of the citation templates. If they end up supporting only |doi-access=free, so will {{doi}}. But if they end up supporting |doi-access=free/limited/registration/subscription, then so too will {{doi}}.
Readers interested in improving the flagging of free-to-read sources can coordinate efforts at WP:SIGNAL, a subsection of WikiProject Open Access. If you have an idea for a new bot but lack the technical skill or time to make one, you can make request for one at WP:BOTREQ. If you know of additional identifiers (especially free ones) that should be supported by citation templates, make a request at Help:CS1. H
New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience
Newly approved bot tasks
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2016 #42, #43, & #44. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
importScript( 'User:PerfektesChaos/js/listPageOptions/r.js' ); // Backlink: User:PerfektesChaos/js/listPageOptions/r.js
importScript( 'User:NQ/WatchlistResetConfirm.js' ); // Backlink: User:NQ/WatchlistResetConfirm.js
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Fourteen featured articles were promoted.
Six featured lists were promoted.
Fourteen featured pictures were promoted.
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Your Traffic Reports for the weeks of October 9-15, 15-22, and 23-29, 2016.
The U.S. presidential election dominated the charts for another week, keyed off of the rather distasteful second presidential debate held on October 9. Is it over yet? NO! Not until November 8.
For the full top-25 lists (and archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most-edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED.
For the week of October 9–15, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Donald Trump | 
|
1,951,789 |  |
The second U.S. presidential debate occurred on October 9 and it was a rather nasty one by American standards. |
| 2 | Billy Bush | 
|
1,451,164 |  |
It's been an interesting time for the cousin of Jeb and Dubya. First he was blasted for failing to catch Ryan Lochte out on his preschool lying, and then the tape of his 2005 talk with Donald Trump came out. |
| 3 | Hillary Clinton | 
|
1,009,711 | |
That Billy Bush got more views than Clinton tells you the 2005 Trump videotape was a huge story of interest. |
| 4 | Bhumibol Adulyadej |
|
921,863 |  |
The King of Thailand died on October 13, after 70 years on the throne. Think about that for a minute. During his reign, David Bowie was born, lived his whole life, and died of old age. His subjects revered him (he is already being called "the Great") but his son, the crown prince Vajiralongkorn (see #12), is generally seen in unflattering terms, though thanks to Thailand's merciless Lèse-majesté laws, which ban public criticism of the Royal Family, such opinions are not expressed openly. Thailand has been in a state of semi-permanent political crisis for more than a decade, and is currently under the control of a military junta. Much now depends on how the Thai people react to the succession, though given the myriad pressures involved, no one can guess what the outcome will be. |
| 5 | Bob Dylan |
|
915,438 |  |
The famed singer-songwriter won the Nobel Prize for Literature. A rather unusual pick, the first musician in the history of the award, and thus is getting a fair amount of attention. |
| 6 | Westworld (TV series) |
|
910,820 |  |
To be clear: this is not based on a novel by Michael Crichton: Crichton was a filmmaker as well as a novelist, and Westworld was a film he both wrote and directed back in the 1970s. But whereas that was a straightforward "monsters on the loose" movie, about a Western-themed amusement park staffed by hyperrealistic robots who go insane and start murdering the guests (sound familiar?), this series looks like it will be taking a more thoughtful, hard scifi approach, with the robots' gradual evolution from programming to quasi-consciousness forming the main plot thread. With a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ratings of just under 2 million (roughly what Game of Thrones received when it began), it's off to a solid start, though whether it will be the show to carry HBO past Game of Thrones's end remains to be seen. |
| 7 | MS The World |
|
681,608 | .JPG) |
Courtesy of Reddit: [1] |
| 8 | Seat belt |
|
648,726 |  |
As learned in a Reddit thread this week, Volvo invented the seat belt, but gave the patent away because they believed lives were more important than profit. And yet, we still buy other cars. |
| 9 | Bill Clinton |
|
638,332 |  |
Bill Clinton's and Donald Trump's relationships with women have been the stuff of gossip columns for some time. Not going to say anything more to feed the internet troll machines. |
| 10 | Luke Cage |
|
629,293 |  |
Down from #1 last week. Marvel's Blaxploitation-themed superhero (a.k.a. Power Man) has been a cult favourite for decades (Nicolas Cage named himself after him), but has never seen mainstream success, until now; as played by Mike Colter, pictured, he stars as the hero of his own eponymous series on Netflix. |
As the U.S presidential election approaches, Donald Trump is again number one in our Halloween edition rankings. His refusal at the last debate to say whether he will accept the election result if he loses raised much concern in the press. In other news, Reddit cracked the 5-topic barrier again. I wonder if this is the new normal or just an artifact from the end of summer?
For the week of October 16–22, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Donald Trump |
|
2,140,830 | |
The second U.S. presidential debate was nasty; the final one was scary. Trump's statement that he would "keep us in suspense" regarding whether or not he would accept the election result (an election he has already repeatedly described as "rigged") may have engendered more suspense than he intended (or not. Who knows?). |
| 2 | Witch window |
|
831,274 |  |
I'd need to check but this could be the highest-charting Reddit thread since we started the project. These diagonal windows, found almost exclusively in 19th-century farmhouses in Vermont, were intended to ward off witches, since they couldn't fly their broomsticks through them. OK, so what about all the other windows? The thread's popularity is likely due to the approach of Halloween, a holiday that usually has little impact on this list. |
| 3 | 2004 Harvard–Yale prank |
|
739,821 |  |
Another Reddit thread, this one concerning a practical joke at the annual Harvard–Yale football game in which Yale supporters handed out cards for the Harvard supporters to flash, and when used together spelled out "WE SUCK". You gotta hand it to whoever came up with that, and even more for pulling it off. |
| 4 | Westworld (TV series) |
|
729,784 | |
To be clear: this is not based on a novel by Michael Crichton: Crichton was a filmmaker as well as a novelist, and Westworld was a film he both wrote and directed back in the 1970s. But whereas that was a straightforward "monsters on the loose" movie, about a Western-themed amusement park staffed by hyperrealistic robots who go insane and start murdering the guests (sound familiar?), this series looks like it will be taking a more thoughtful, hard scifi approach, with the robots' gradual evolution from programming to quasi-consciousness forming the main plot thread. With a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ratings of just under 2 million (roughly what Game of Thrones received when it began), it's off to a solid start, though whether it will be the show to carry HBO past Game of Thrones's end remains to be seen. |
| 5 | Logan (film) |
|
669,776 |  |
The next film in the X-Men film series will feature the final outings of both Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Hugh Jackman as Logan, a.k.a Wolverine. The surprisingly touching trailer launched this week, and generated a great deal of positive buzz. |
| 6 | Hillary Clinton |
|
650,343 | |
Clinton continues to be less interesting to our readers than "what will he do next?" Trump, despite public opinion appearing to agree that she won all three debates. |
| 7 | Michel'le |
|
646,377 |  |
The R&B singer and former girlfriend of both Dr Dre and Suge Knight, both of whom she claims beat her repeatedly, was the subject of a hit docudrama on Lifetime this week, Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel'le. |
| 8 | Melania Trump |
|
631,945 | .jpg) |
Spouse of #1. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2016 | 
|
606,553 |  |
The views for the annual list of deaths are remarkably consistent on a day to day basis. It is consistently higher in the first half of 2016 with a string of highly notable deaths, but things seem to be calming down a bit. Where the article appears in this chart is entirely dependent on how many subjects in a week happened to exceed this bellwether in views. |
| 10 | Dr. Dre | 
|
486,086 |  |
The billionaire music producer and ex-boyfriend of Michel'le (see above) filed a cease and desist order against the premiere of the docudrama Surviving Compton, claiming that he never beat her, as the program alleges. He also threatened to sue Michel'le for defamation of character. |
In a week where no article could break one million views, a Google Doodle celebrating Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who discovered bacteria, tops the chart. Replacing the dominance of U.S. politics with an article about the human search for knowledge is heartening. Beyond that, Wikipedia readers filled their brains with The Walking Dead television show, filling up three slots in the Top 10, and six in the Top 25.
For the week of October 23 to 29, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | 
|
970,522 | ._Natuurkundige_te_Delft_Rijksmuseum_SK-A-957.jpeg) |
For the first time this year, the top article of the week received under one million views. (The last time was when Donald Trump led with 914K views for December 6-12, 2015.) Yet, the top honors still go to the Dutch scientist, whose birthday was celebrated by a Google Doodle on October 24 which celebrated his discovery of "little animals", or animalcules, now known as bacteria. |
| 2 | The Walking Dead (TV series) |
|
967,104 |  |
Season 7 (#8) of the popular television show, a mainstay of this chart when it is airing, debuted on October 23. |
| 3 | Donald Trump |
|
898,740 | |
No matter what you do, Donald Trump is always near the top of your Internet. Pageviews show his views were steady this week, in the general range of 110-150K per day, except for Saturday Oct 29 when it received only 81,915 views. |
| 4 | Pete Burns |
|
771,654 |  |
The leader of the band Dead or Alive, best known for the 1985 hit You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), died on October 23 at age 57 of cardiac arrest. You Spin Me Round was a fairly eccentric song to became a hit in the United States. In later years, Burns received attention in British media when he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother 4 in 2006. |
| 5 | Chicago Cubs |
|
764,703 |  |
The American baseball team has not won a World Series since 1908, but made it to the 2016 World Series, playing against the Cleveland Indians. |
| 6 | Negan |
|
742,226 | |
The Walking Dead character first appeared in the last season's finale. |
| 7 | Halloween |
|
728,419 |  |
Views were up in anticipation of the October 31 holiday. |
| 8 | The Walking Dead (season 7) |
|
719,418 | |
See #2. |
| 9 | List of Black Mirror episodes |
|
711,183 |  |
Series 3 of the British show Black Mirror (#14) created by Charlie Brooker (pictured) debuted on October 21. |
| 10 | Doctor Strange (film) |
|
684,854 |  |
The Marvel superhero film based on the character of Doctor Strange had its Hollywood premiere on October 20, and in the UK and some other markets on October 25. It will debut in the United States on November 4. Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the title role. |
This edition of the Arbitration Report covers the month of October 2016.
On 1 October, the Michael Hardy case closed. ArbCom issued remedies, reminders were given to Michael Hardy and MjolnirPants, and ArbCom reminded itself to exercise care about scope creep when taking up future cases.
The Rambling Man case closed on 13 October. The Rambling Man resigned his administrator role and is "prohibited from insulting and/or belittling other editors." Other remedies include The Rambling Man and George Ho having an interaction ban and George Ho being restricted from selecting main page content. ArbCom also encouraged the Wikipedia community "to review the selection process for the Did you know and In the news sections of the main page."
On 5 October, a CheckUser on Ricky81682, a ten-year administrator with more than 100,000 Wikipedia edits, revealed that they had used multiple accounts from 13 July to 7 August 2016. Activities included articles for deletion; the user did not account for the sock puppetry. The Committee removed Ricky's administration rights and banned them indefinitely. In the event the ban is lifted, the user will be eligible for a new request for adminship.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
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|
| Asteroids are among the categories with the most overrepresentation of male editors, and figure skating among those with most female overrepresentation | |
|---|---|
This bachelor thesis[1] looks for gender imbalance among editors for specific categories in the English Wikipedia. The analysis is based on the edits of users who publicly disclosed their gender (about 176 thousand) to more than 3.7 million articles in 470 categories (derived from DBpedia's ontology, rather than Wikipedia's inbuilt category system). The thesis first establishes the distribution of editors by gender (roughly 85% males and 15% females). The number of edits by each group is statistically compared to that baseline distribution. For each category, if it varies from the baseline, it is considered to represent a gender gap, i.e. that editors from that gender are overrepresented in that category.
The results show that despite the huge imbalance in the two groups, pages in some categories receive more edits from users belonging to one gender, while other categories are dominated by the other one. As the "Top five categories where male editors are most overrepresented", the author lists "YearInSpaceflight", "Asteroid", "BaseballSeason", "MotorsportSeason", and "FormulaOneTeam". He observes sports as recurring theme "throughout all significant 'male categories'. Besides sports other recurring subjects are transport and politics." On the other hand, "the categories with a female overrepresentation show somewhat less obvious recurring themes. Many of these categories are more or less culture related however." The five categories with the most female overrepresentation are "FigureSkater", "Skater", "Garden", "GaelicGamesPlayer", and "Mollusca".
While highlighting some information on such unbalanced distribution, the underlying hypothesis could be further explored by using the quantity of text changed in each edit and other patterns mentioned by the author.
(See related Signpost coverage from 2011: "New tool analyzes article contributors' gender and location")
While much is known about the quality of Wikipedia articles, less is known about how the different language editions assess article importance. The English Wikipedia's article about waffles is for instance labelled "top-importance" by WikiProject Breakfast, the highest category possible, but at the same time labelled "high importance" by WikiProject Food and Drink (you can find both of these labels on waffle’s talk page). A paper at the International Conference on Information and Software Technologies studies titled "Quality and Importance of Wikipedia Articles in Different Languages"[2] studies the connection between importance and quality. The paper's three research questions look at whether importance affects quality, what parameters are useful for applying machine learning to automatically assess importance, and if there are differences between how language editions model importance.
The English edition offers the most data on article importance, and the paper therefore uses a dataset of English articles to test if importance affects quality. Using a random forest classifier and a model with 85 parameters, a modest increase in classifier performance is found when importance is added as a parameter, indicating that importance affects quality. The same dataset and model is then trained to predict article importance, finding that about two-thirds of top- and low-importance articles can be correctly identified. Lastly the paper compares the importance of model features between different language editions, finding many differences, although these are not described in more detail.
Research on aspects of article quality across different language editions is an area that has not received a lot of attention, making this paper a welcome addition to the literature. It is also great to see article importance being studied. At the same time, this paper could have made a much stronger contribution through comparisons against a sensible baseline (this reviewer notes that the paper cites an in-press paper by the same authors[supp 1], although that paper's results do not appear to be available in English) because the classifier performance appears to be similar to for instance ORES although ORES uses a model with a lot fewer parameters. A deeper investigation into article importance would also be worthwhile, for example because importance differs between topic areas, as exemplified by the article on waffle described earlier.
Researchers have attempted to quantify Wikipedia's gender gap and its impact on content type and quality, and to understand the reasons for the gender gap. A new journal article[3] attempts to experimentally evaluate several hypotheses for why women tend to edit Wikipedia less than men do.
The researchers asked 192 male and female college students to contribute a draft essay about school bullying. The version of the draft that participants were asked to work on had already been edited by four other users (secretly, the researchers themselves), identified by pseudonyms. Two of the pseudonyms were obviously gendered ("Ms Trouble", "Mr Football"), and two were gender neutral ("Cheerios4Life", "AnonymousOne"). Since most people are not familiar with the mechanics of wiki editing, the researchers used a Microsoft Word document with "track changes" enabled as a platform for the editing task, to simulate the versioning and commenting capabilities of MediaWiki pages. The researchers also surveyed the students to gather relevant demographic and psychometric data, and compared their survey responses with their editing behaviors.
Findings from this study include that while women edited more than men overall (contributed more words to the draft), they were less likely to edit under the conditions designed to approximate the social environment of Wikipedia. Specifically, women edited less where there were few or no female-identified collaborators present, and where feedback from the pseudonymous collaborators was neutral (vs. constructive). Interestingly, female participants also tended to assume that one of the non-gendered pseudonyms ("AnonymousOne") was male, and also evaluate feedback from that editor as more critical than male participants who received the same feedback. Based on these findings, the researchers suggest that increasing the visibility of female editors and encouraging constructive feedback may encourage more women to edit Wikipedia.
This research[4] aims to explore the relationship between Wikipedia page view statistics and electoral results during the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament elections in regards to overall voter turnout and individual party results. The article suggests two reasons why voters might seek information: to research new parties which are beyond the voter's familiarity, and to research alternative party options if a voter is unhappy with the party they previously supported (thus becoming swing voters).
The first dataset used in this research is Wikipedia page views data on the general election page in 14 different languages (those which are the primary languages of the voting countries). The second dataset includes political parties which had at least 5% vote share in the 2009 and/or 2014 elections in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. The researchers gathered additional data points such as number of views to the political party's Wikipedia page the week before the election, the final percentage of vote share each party received, whether a party was new, whether a party was incumbent, and the number of times each party was mentioned in print media during the week before the election.
Comparing the relative change in page views to the EU Parliament elections article and total voter turnout in the 2009 and 2014 elections indicates that interest in election events is proportional to levels of readership on Wikipedia. This research suggests that often the party garnering the most page views does not win the election, rather, it may be a smaller party which interested swing voters. Figure 1(a) shows a high correlation between print media mentions and overall voter share for parties. Figure 1(b) shows Wikipedia page views may predict a new party's success, while news outlet mentions are better at predicting an established party's success.
The research tests the theory that an increase in Wikipedia page views may suggest an increase to votes for a party using three linear ordinary least squares regression models. The first model is a baseline of past voting results. The second model is also a baseline model which includes past voting results, along with all other non-Wikipedia related data collected. These baseline models serve as a comparison to the third model, which includes all the previously modeled data, along with two Wikipedia-related parameters. The models show that Wikipedia can be considered a predictor of voter outcome, but it only marginally improves upon the baseline models. Wikipedia's predictive power lies in predicting the amount a party's vote share may increase or decrease from the previous election cycle.
As noted by the researchers, one limitation of this article is that the data is at an aggregated level, while all theories are at the micro level. Also, it is unclear what number of Wikipedia page views reflect voters versus other groups, such as journalists or those those affiliated with the parties.
(See also our 2014 coverage of some related blog posts by the same authors: "Wikipedia use driven by news media or replacing news media?")
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
Author's copy (free account required)
Author's copy
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