Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/From the editors
Despite facing what could very well be the most important election since the civil rights era, Americans seem to want to think about anything but politics. Obviously the 2016 election is on people's minds, but not as much as macabre holidays, improbable wins by oft-ridiculed baseball teams, comic book sorcerers and, most tellingly of all perhaps, a melodrama about royalty. Given the responsibility they're about to take on, it's not surprising that democracy isn't a priority for readers at the moment. Still, get in gear guys. It's not like we're not all watching you or anything.
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.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 30 to November 5, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Day of the Dead | 
|
1,889,902 |  |
Mexico's carnival of the cadaverous, the living dream of any kid who ever wished Halloween could last three days, is the beneficiary of Wikipedia's incurable interest in those holidays not routinely celebrated in the US. It's the same reason Boxing Day always charts higher than Christmas on this list. Despite the list covering both these holidays' dates, and despite Halloween being boosted by that greatest of Wikipedia flypapers, an interactive Google Doodle, the Day of the Dead's grim fandango still beat latter's monster mash. It only just loses even if we had added in Halloween's numbers from last week to that holiday's total. |
| 2 | Halloween |
|
1,558,776 |  |
Whatever happened to the Transylvania Twist? |
| 3 | Doctor Strange (film) | 
|
1,077,855 |  |
Marvel Studios continue their roll. Their attempt to bring their unashamedly psychedelic superhero into the earthier realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has apparently paid off, with a 90% RT rating and an $84 million opening, no doubt aided by the international star power of a certain Benedict Cumberbatch (pictured). |
| 4 | Chicago Cubs |
|
1,030,619 |  |
The American baseball team has not won a World Series since 1908, but managed it this year, beating the Cleveland Indians 8–7. Turns out Back to the Future II was only off by a year. |
| 5 | Huma Abedin |
|
1,021,942 | .jpg) |
A top adviser to Hillary Clinton, views started to rise on October 28, and remained high for most of the week. This probably is related to Clinton-related emails allegedly being found on the laptop of her estranged husband Anthony Weiner; a subject of much sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing. |
| 6 | Ae Dil Hai Mushkil | 
|
994,767 |  |
This Indian romantic film whose cast includes Aishwarya Rai (pictured) had its debut on October 28 (Diwali weekend). |
| 7 | Donald Trump |
|
949,709 |  |
For someone in imminent danger of becoming the next President of the United States, you'd think numbers would be higher. But they're not significantly up from last week, and significantly DOWN from two weeks ago. Is this a sign? I don't know. |
| 8 | Curse of the Billy Goat |
|
949,092 |  |
Apparently, legend has it that in 1945 the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern was asked to leave Wrigley Field because his pet goat's smell was bothering fans, and proclaimed that "Them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more." And that's why the Cubs didn't win a World Series until this week. The moral of the story, children, is that people will make up any piece of boondoggle to rationalise a bad situation. |
| 9 | Meghan Markle |
|
864,425 |  |
The fact that this American mixed-race actress may be dating the fifth in line to the British throne has raised some fairly awkward questions in the British press, like whether the situation would be the same if she'd dated Prince William. Keep in mind this is the same Royal Family that nearly collapsed because the heir to the throne wanted to marry an American divorcee. Personally, I think the whole lot's an outdated anachronism anyway, so I couldn't care less. |
| 10 | Elizabeth II | 
|
822,254 |  |
The longest-reigning British monarch in history is bound to draw attention whenever the British Royal Family becomes a topic of interest, but this week she gets an additional boost from her portrayal in The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy. |
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In the early morning of November 9, news reports announced that Donald Trump (#1) had won election as the 45th President of the United States, in one of the most oddball political victories of all time. And of course, he leads the chart this week with 12.3 million views, compared to only 2.64 million for his opponent, Hillary Clinton (#6). Trump's numbers are second-highest seen since we started the Top 25 in 2013 (the record was set in April 2016 when Prince died).
Clearly this is a momentous event in United States politics, at least in the Age of Wikipedia. In comparison, when Barack Obama was first elected in November 2008, his article received only 4.99 million views on the week of the election, compared to 1.08 million to his opponent John McCain. (Although mobile viewcounts were not captured then, mobile views were not a very large portion of traffic in 2008.) This 5-1 view ratio is similar to the Trump-Hillary ratio we see in this week's report. See also User:Andrew Gray/Election statistics for an in-depth analysis of 2008 statistics done shortly after that election. In 2012 (when mobile viewcounts were a larger portion of traffic than in 2008 but still not captured by stats.grok.se), Obama beat Mitt Romney in election week views by 2.04 million to 1.78 million.
Nine of the top 10 slots this week are election-related, with only Queen Elizabeth II (#8) breaking the run, based on the great success of The Crown television series. The Crown also propelled other British royal figures into the Top 25 with impressive view numbers. But nineteen of the Top 25 articles are election-related, a new record for single-topic related articles in a week.
The most notable death, which would have probably been #1 in any other week, was that of cult songwriter Leonard Cohen (#13). This week's chart is also astounding because every article in the Top 25 exceeded one million views -- we have never even come close to that level of traffic before among the top viewed articles. Usually a few of the top articles in a given week get to that level. And for the first time since we began this report in January 2013, Deaths in (Year) was knocked out of the Top 25, placing at #34. So we've provided an extended list for #26-35 this week at the bottom of the chart, many of which are also election-related.
Please note that this report refrains from making any strong editorial comments about Donald Trump; no conclusions should be drawn from that decision. The press in the United States and around the world is reporting heavily on the meaning and effect of Trump's election. Just don't get your news and commentary from fake news sites posted to Facebook.
Also, please see our SPECIAL REPORT on the U.S. Presidential election — tracking the popularity of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's articles for the whole campaign cycle, from June 2015 to November 2016. As detailed there, attention and enthusiasm for Donald Trump far exceeded that of Clinton across the board. Perhaps this was an overlooked indicator of Trump's chances of success.
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.
As prepared by Milowent, for the week of November 6 to 12, 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 |
|
12,331,880 | |
Trump won the November 8 election to become President-Elect of the United States, and his article got the second-most views ever for this chart. 6.1 million of these views were on November 9. As our daily data from the WP:5000 is based on UTC hours, no doubt views increased in the early hours of November 9 as it became clear that Trump could, and then would, win the election. |
| 2 | United States presidential election, 2016 |
|
5,414,267 | .svg) |
Views peaked at 2.36 million on November 9. |
| 3 | Electoral College (United States) |
|
4,496,355 | |
In the United States, the president is not elected by the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won, but by the "electoral college," which consists of 538 votes spread out over the 50 states and District of Columbia, and where the winner of the popular vote in each state (with the exception of two states which distribute electors by Congressional district) receives all the electoral votes for that state. This is the fifth time that the winner of the popular vote lost the election, the last being in 2000. When the counts are final, it is clear that the popular vote count between Clinton and Trump will be largest gap ever in this situation. Trump threaded the needle by winning in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan even though losing the popular vote by a large margin in populous states like California and New York. |
| 4 | Melania Trump |
|
4,198,183 | .jpg) |
Mrs. Trump will be the first foreign-born First Lady of the United States since Louisa Adams in the 1820s. Louisa was born in Britain to an American father and a British mother, so Melania will be the first non-native speaker of English to hold the title, which is a bit bizarre considering Trump's rhetoric on immigration. Though her English is accented, she does speak six languages, which is very uncommon for Americans. |
| 5 | United States presidential election, 2012 |
|
2,854,744 | |
No doubt this article was popular as readers tried to figure out how Obama won so handily in 2012 over Mitt Romney, and what changed. One thing that changed is that Donald Trump did not run a campaign that resembled that of prior Republican candidates. |
| 6 | Hillary Clinton |
|
2,644,676 |  |
Throughout the campaign, Clinton's article was less popular than Trump's. See our SPECIAL REPORT. Often we ascribed this to Trump's tendency to say outrageous things and dominate media coverage, but maybe this was also evidence of more enthusiasm among Americans for Trump than for Clinton. |
| 7 | Ivanka Trump |
|
2,163,529 | .jpg) |
No doubt the most liked Trump outside core Trump-fandom. Her views regularly exceeded those of her siblings. In the report for the July 2016 week of the Republican National Convention, Ivanka placed #4, ahead of her three adult siblings. (Trump's youngest child, Barron Trump, is only 10 years old and should not yet have his own article here, if the precedent set for Malia and Sasha Obama is applied.) |
| 8 | Elizabeth II |
|
2,053,702 | |
The longest-reigning British monarch in history is bound to draw attention whenever the British Royal Family becomes a topic of interest. For the second consecutive week she gets an additional boost from her appearance in The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy. |
| 9 | Barack Obama |
|
2,014,336 |  |
The outgoing president campaigned hard in favor of Hillary Clinton (#6) in the closing weeks of the campaign. Now he has to turn over power to the person who championed the awful lie of birtherism. There really is no way to sugarcoat this. |
| 10 | List of Presidents of the United States |
|
1,868,016 | |
Trump will be the first U.S. president not to hold a previous governmental office or military command. |
Beyond the Wikipedia bubble, Donald Trump’s “shocking upset” in the U.S. presidential election prompted many news outlets to examine the widespread inaccuracy of expert predictions about the race, and to explore several themes of interest to Wikimedians.
The day before the election, Creative Commons published a guide to freely licensed and public domain election resources and related media.
The News Literacy Project, an organization focused on media literacy in U.S. secondary and pre-secondary education, observed in an election day missive that "a bitterly divided nation seemed incapable of agreeing on facts — let alone solutions — for the country’s myriad challenges", and that "it is more vital than ever that the next generation be taught how to discern credible, verified information from raw information, spin, misinformation and propaganda."
There has been much discussion about the role of "fake news websites", and their distribution through social media sites like Facebook and promotion via online advertising platforms. As calls for the social media titan to evaluate news stories mounted, journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that: "People are (rightly) skeptical of the state censoring "bad" viewpoints but (dangerously) eager for unaccountable tech billionaires to do it.”
In “Facebook Doesn’t Need One Editor, It Needs 1,000 of Them”, Mathew Ingram of Fortune advised Facebook to look to Wikipedia for a solution. Ingram cited Wikimedia adviser Craig Newmark’s June 2016 blog post about Wikipedia’s role in journalism. The Harvard Business School paper (discussed in our previous edition’s In the media section, and noted below) might have offered an additional dimension to Ingram’s analysis.
A Wall Street Journal story, Most students don’t know when news is fake, Stanford study finds, pointed to media literacy as a key skill-set in countering fake news.
Melissa Zimdars, a communications professor at Merrimack College, published (under a free license) a list of questionable websites, annotated with suggestions for how to evaluate their contents. The list itself was widely shared, and was covered by a number of news outlets. Zimdars then penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, noting, “with some concern, that the same techniques that get people to click on fake or overhyped stories are also being used to get people to read about my own list.” She said: “I’m not convinced that a majority of people who shared my list actually read my list, much as I’m not convinced that many people who share or comment on news articles posted to Facebook have actually read those articles”, and concluded that “while we think about fake news, we need to start thinking about how to make our actual news better, too.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which advocates for individual rights, was highly critical of Trump on election day, and highlighted threats it felt he might pose to the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, among others.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which advocates for digital rights, “wrote that 'the results of the U.S. presidential election have put the tech industry in a risky position”, urging technology companies to address several issues before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Issues raised include permitting pseudonymous access, curtailing behavioral analysis, keeping minimal logs of user behavior, and encrypting data. The Wikimedia Foundation, and standard Wikipedia practices, already perform better than most tech companies on all these issues; in the EFF's 2015 "Who Has Your Back" report, which evaluates tech companies on their data and privacy practices, Wikimedia earned a perfect five out of five stars. A related EFF post highlighted relevant grassroots efforts, while another urged President Obama to "boost transparency [and] accountability" in his final days in office. PF
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/Technology report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/Opinion
The annual elections for the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee opened Monday 21 November and will last for two weeks until 23:59 UTC Sunday 4 December. ArbCom is the peak body for imposing binding solutions to the site's editor-conduct disputes, and is itself governed by the arbitration policy. Arbitration is generally the last avenue of dispute resolution, and over the years the administrators' noticeboard has tended to shoulder more of the work that might previously have ended up with the committee.
The election follows a self-nomination period from 6 to 15 November that yielded 11 candidates for the seven vacant positions, which will run two-year terms (1 January 2017 – 31 December 2018). Candidate statements range from a pithy three words to the maximum 400 words permitted. Q&As for each candidate have revealed one or two interesting snippets.
Of the six current arbitrators whose terms are about to finish, three are standing at this election for another term, and three are not contesting their seats:
Eight editors not currently arbitrators are standing, of whom three have previously served on the committee, four have stood unsuccessfully in previous years, and two are new to the process:
The terms of eight of the 15 arbitrators do not expire until the end of 2017, and they will not be involved in the election:
The Signpost spoke briefly with veteran arbitrator Casliber—now halfway through his third term since 2008—about the challenges and trends of work on the Committee. He says he's generally pleased that each year brings "a quorum of suitable candidates" for election. Arbitrators' workload has become more moderate (in the early days he remembers "getting up and facing 60 or 70 emails a day before breakfast"). However, some of the work has become more complex and ethically challenging as Wikipedia's credibility and authority as a source of information have grown; he says that view-pushing and paid editing—often hidden and sometimes on an industrial scale—have complicated aspects of arbitrators' forensic work and decision-making. Interestingly, Cas has observed a consistent pattern over the years in which new arbitrators soon become more sensitive to the need for a delicate balance between community openness and the protection of individuals' privacy. Like a number of current and previous arbitrators, he would be happy to see the Wikimedia Foundation play an enhanced role in dealing with some of the most difficult issues individual-related case that the Committee encounters—but he feels that this is unlikely to happen in the short term.
The election is being managed by Guy Macon, Mike V, and Mdann52. Candidates are competing through a formula that has been used for many years: the number of supports divided by the sum of supports and opposes for each candidate. There is a neutral option, although voters who wish to strategically give maximum advantage to their supports should avoid neutral votes. Through this formula, the minimum score (support per (support+oppose)) required for election is 0.5 (not itself a percentage, since it does not incorporate undervotes); if not enough candidates achieve this score, fewer than seven seats will be filled.
An official guide to candidates provides basic information about the candidates' positions. Private voting guides listed in the election template are by: Elonka, Biblioworm, SSTflyer, RegentsPark, Guerillero, Collect, Reyk, Carrite, QEDK, BU Rob13, and Tryptofish.
Immediately following the voting period, a small team of stewards whose main wikis are not the English Wikipedia will check the votes for duplicate, missing, and ineligible votes, and compile a tally of the results. At the time of publication, the link to the instructions for scrutineers that is provided on the election page is dead. The announcement of the successful candidates is usually posted on the election page within a week after the end of voting.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/Serendipity
Fundraising season is coming up for the Wikimedia Foundation! If you live in an English-speaking country, you will probably be asked to donate the price of a rather expensive cup of coffee to keep our servers running. Fundraising has been successful for many years, making use of the goodwill and appreciation of Wikipedia's readership. And that’s a good thing.
At the same time, a greater effort could (and should) be made by the fundraising department to support volunteers throughout the movement, by improving communication and sharing more country-level data and information. This could help to avoid conflicts between the Foundation and volunteers, and instead could facilitate them in their public-facing and outreach activities.
It's generally accepted that Wikipedia stands or falls through the involvement of its volunteers. Volunteers write articles, improve them, categorize them, make them look good, correct spelling mistakes and improve grammar, and do all of the editing that goes into creating an encyclopedia. Similarly, volunteers make up the bulk of the ecosystem that supports the Wikimedia movement as a whole.
This volunteer capacity is a great opportunity in many ways. With a movement of 80,000 volunteers, we can tap into local expertise–through the affiliated organizations and editing communities. Until a few years ago, the fundraising efforts made effective use of this expertise.[1] Nowadays, volunteer involvement seems to be limited to translating banner messages and description pages, if that.
This is a pity, because I strongly believe that fundraising could more effectively benefit from volunteer involvement: volunteers could help by coming up with alternatives for this cup-of-coffee metaphor that may work much better in their own country, could point out effective payment methods, or identify missing information on the fundraising pages.[2] They could improve the cultural connection of the fundraising messaging.
But this is not all. For volunteers across the Wikimedia ecosystem to operate optimally, they need tools and information. In this piece, I focus specifically on two ways in which the organization of fundraising could be improved, to facilitate volunteers throughout the movement better.
Apart from the occasional announcement, we don’t know for a fact when and in which country the Foundation plans to show banners asking for donations. Apparently it is a challenge to the Foundation to communicate the fundraising schedule well ahead of time. Let alone that the fundraising schedule is coordinated with the main (outreach) activities of editing communities, user groups, thematic organizations, and chapters. However, both fundraising and outreach activities make use of the same resource: the CentralNotice (the banner you see on top of each page). This lack of communication and coordination makes clashes of schedule unavoidable.
The solution seems obvious: communicate and coordinate schedules to reduce overlap as much as possible. There has been some initial alignment this year around Wiki Loves Monuments after a major clash last year in Italy, where fundraising was scheduled at the same time as the main activity of the local chapter. The Foundation did reach out this year to a number of major chapters a few months before the fundraising effort in their country. Some improvement is ongoing, but a scalable and much more timely approach is needed and would benefit both fundraising and outreach activities. Let’s do an annual inquiry among all affiliated organizations to identify optimal and problematic periods for fundraising activity in their country, and schedule together for the year in advance. With relatively little effort, we can avoid painful last-minute discussions and collisions.
While the recently published Fundraising Report for the year ending June 2016 (previous Signpost coverage) was very useful on sharing high-level trends and decisions, and explaining some of the WMF's research results, this seems a good moment to take a step back and look at how to inform and involve the community more actively.
A higher standard of transparency is required to enable volunteers to work effectively to support fundraising and execute other activities. One of the types of data that have been repeatedly requested by volunteers is the country-level statistics pertaining to donations. While the Foundation did publish statistics broken down by country until 2012, it has not since: volunteers have to be satisfied with continent-level statistics. The argument made by the Foundation is vaguely defined: “There are a few different reasons why the team may not be able to publish data from a country, including privacy and security and other legal reasons”. [3]
Whatever these legal reasons may be, I believe they need to be balanced against the benefits of releasing country-level data and/or statistics; this is not just a theoretical discussion for the sake of transparency.
This kind of data could help volunteers to help the fundraising team in their countries. Local volunteers can combine an understanding of trends and the available data with a better understanding of local situations and changes, and be able to explain the data better. But for that local expertise to be applied, they need to understand the fundraising efforts in their own country. Country-level data could help volunteers in their other activities for the Wikimedia movement. They could use it in their media and outreach strategy, and can use it to provide context to journalists who are trying to understand how the citizens contribute to Wikipedia. This is a recurring question in interviews and by new contributors. It is plainly embarrassing for volunteers, advocating for transparent and openly licensed information flows, to say they don’t even know remotely how much their movement collects in contributions from their own country. When applying for external funding for their activities, or while advocating to governments on Wikimedia’s behalf on values we all share (here, for example, promoting improved legislation around copyright and access to information), they could use this data to demonstrate local active support and appreciation for Wikipedia/Wikimedia. With this data, they could demonstrate the extent to which readers from their country are willing to support the movement financially – and that the wide appreciation of readers goes beyond just words.
If the data were detailed enough, especially outside the main fundraising banner season, it could potentially even help affiliates to demonstrate and understand how their activities impact fundraising success, and to learn from it and focus their outreach around it.
Let's make optimal use of the expertise that our range of volunteers has to offer in our movement for fundraising optimization, and provide our volunteer base with the tools to help our mission in the best way possible! I hope the fundraising and legal departments will work together to see how we can take these improvements, implement them, and help volunteers do what they’re best at.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/In focus
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/Arbitration report
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/Humour
