Dear Readers,
It is hard to believe it has been over three months since the last issue. We apologize for the hiatus in Signposting. We love publishing it, but are missing a few regular contributors. As a result some regular articles cover only part of recent months, and we can't yet say when the next issue will come out.
Help us return to a regular schedule! We are looking for editors, news submissions, and ways to simplify and publish. If you can help, or at least lob puns from the sidelines, please join us.
There are 125 million English speakers in India. And when there's something big there, it can get really big. Top of the list for the week of April 30 - May 6, 2017, is the new film Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (#1), and this list also contains the previous film in the series. (#8). And the lead actor (#7). And the lead actress (#16). And the director (#23). With all this interest, no surprise to see that Baahubali 2: The Conclusion is also top of the list of highest-grossing Indian films of all times. A list which is also on this list. (#3).
Of course, American culture can also get on the list. There's a new Marvel Cinematic Universe film at #4 and the still popular The Fate of the Furious at #24. On the smaller screen (or maybe not? Some people have really big TVs) 13 Reasons Why (#5) remains huge; a new adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale has brought people to the book (#12); a series on Albert Einstein has brought people to the physicist (#22); and the new series of American Gods has brought people to articles on both the original book and the adapted series. (#17 & #19).
In sport, both fighters in last week's big fight at Wembley keep the interest (Joshua: #6; Klitschko: #11); another WWE event pulls in the viewers (#13); and basketball star Isaiah Thomas made a points-scoring return to the courts following the death of his sister (#25). There were the standard start of May commemorations - of Cinco de Mayo (#2) and of May Day (#9). Reddit has been learning about red pandas, the Vietnam War and John Clem (#14, #18, #20). Last, but by no means least, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (#15) announced his impending retirement, which also brought interest to the Queen herself. (#21)
For the week of April 30 to May 6, 2017, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Baahubali 2: The Conclusion | 
|
3,087,414 |  |
The Telugu / Tamil language (versions were made in the two languages simultaneously) historical fiction film opened on April 28th and, in just seven days, has become the highest grossing Indian film of all time. The film, a follow up to 2015's Baahubali: The Beginning (#8), was directed by S. S. Rajamouli (pictured, also #23), and stars Prabhas (#8), Anushka Shetty (#16) and Rana Daggubati. |
| 2 | Cinco de Mayo | 
|
2,348,709 |  |
The commemoration of the Mexican Army's victory over the French on 5 May 1862, at the Battle of Puebla makes its standard return to the chart. The date is now associated with celebrations of Mexican-American culture. Compared to last year, the article holds onto second place and is up about 200k views. |
| 3 | List of highest-grossing Indian films | 
|
1,575,865 | |
After one week on release, Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (#1), has become the highest-grossing Indian film of all time. At time of writing, our article gives a value of ₹1,227 crore for the film, which is about 190 million dollars or 175 million euro. |
| 4 | Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 |
|
1,224,608 |  |
This is the fifteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and your writer has seen all of them, except for the minute the woman in front of me at Doctor Strange took to sit down. The James Gunn (pictured) directed superhero / sci-fi comedy is topping most charts worldwide, with its star cast including the likes of Vin Diesel and Kurt Russell. Worldwide, the film is currently on $430 million, which is about 390 million euro or ₹2,768 crore. |
| 5 | 13 Reasons Why |
|
1,116,202 | _(cropped).jpg) |
Continued popularity for Netflix's hit drama series, starring Dylan Minnette (pictured) and Katherine Langford. A second season of the drama has been commissioned, which is not surprising from a business point of view but may be slightly from an artistic view; there being, as yet, no second book to base the second season on. |
| 6 | Anthony Joshua |
|
1,043,010 |  |
Joshua claimed the WBA and IBO heavyweight boxing championships, in addition to retaining his IBF title; following his 19th straight knockout victory since becoming a professional boxer on his 29 April fight with Wladimir Klitschko (#11) at Wembley Stadium - a fight held in front of a post-war record crowd of 90,000 and setting a British record for PPV buys. |
| 7 | Prabhas |
|
879,302 | Unsurprisingly high interest for the star of Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (#1), who also appeared in the previous film in the series, Baahubali: The Beginning. Speaking of which... | |
| 8 | Baahubali: The Beginning |
|
858,506 | |
The first film in the series which was followed this week by Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (#1). The film is currently the fourth highest-grossing Indian film of all time, but its takings have already been almost doubled by the continuation. |
| 9 | May Day | 
|
679,361 |  |
You might think that this, like Cinco de Mayo, would be an annual recurrence. But it failed to chart last year, and both it and the concurrent International Workers' Day have seen a roughly 2.5x increase in views. The May 1 spring festival has many ancient traditions associated with it, like the crowning of a May Queen, dancing round a maypole, and luring Edward Woodward to a Scottish island before burning him to death in a wicker man. All good, clean, pagan fun. |
| 10 | Deaths in 2017 |
|
678,371 |  |
The near-ever-present list of the deceased rises two places this week despite falling about 3000 views in total. |
Wikipedia readers this week focused on one thing above all others: the land of undersized seats and over priced popcorn! A combination of the 89th Academy Awards and interest in current box office hits results in 19 out of 25 coming from the world of film; led by the sad death of actor Bill Paxton. All four acting award winners are represented here, as are 5 of the 9 Best Picture nominees.
Away from the world of film, rapper Remy Ma attracted interest for her new diss track and Ash Wednesday began the Christian fasting period of Lent. Before the fast begun, however, Reddit discovered an interesting fact about Rice. Also, Donald Trump (#16) continues.--OZOO
For full Top 25 this week, see Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/February 26 to March 4, 2017
For the week of February 26 to March 4, 2017, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bill Paxton |
|
4,823,745 |  |
The American actor, known for his roles in films such as Aliens, Titanic and Twister, died this week at the age of 61. |
| 2 | Moonlight (2016 film) |
|
3,098,888 | .jpg) |
Winner of three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The first all-black Best Picture and the first LGBT Best Picture; the win was unfortunately overshadowed by an envelope mixup, resulting in La La Land holding the award for about five minutes. Director Barry Jenkins pictured. |
| 3 | 89th Academy Awards |
|
1,982,265 |  |
The main page for the week's big award show (pictured: host Jimmy Kimmel) was unsurprisingly popular, with readers likely trying to catch up on the list of winners or the envelope mixup. |
| 4 | Logan (film) |
|
1,862,573 |  |
The 10th movie associated with the X-Men and the final appearence for Hugh Jackman (pictured) as Wolverine; Logan opened this week to near-unanimously positive reviews and almost $250m worldwide gross. |
| 5 | Casey Affleck |
|
1,574,510 | _(cropped).jpg) |
The American actor won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Manchester By the Sea. |
| 6 | Get Out (film) |
|
1,400,249 | .jpg) |
Jordan Peele's directorial debut, the satirical horror movie has received, if anything, even more unanimous positivity from reviewers than Logan; and sits second in the US box office. |
| 7 | La La Land (film) |
|
1,253,551 | .jpg) |
The other half of the envelope mixup (see #2); the incident did rather overshadow the rest of the night, which saw the musical pick up six Awards, including Best Director for Damien Chazelle. (pictured) |
| 8 | Mahershala Ali | 
|
1,217,057 | .jpg) |
Won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Moonlight (#2); Ali is the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar. |
| 9 | Emma Stone | 
|
1,119,576 |  |
Another Academy Award winner, this time for Best Actress. It is interesting to note that Wikipedia readers seem more interested in the actors than the actresses, isn't it?. |
| 10 | Manchester by the Sea (film) |
|
874,133 |  |
Rounding off our cinematic top 10, Kenneth Lonergan's drama won two awards from six nominations, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor. |
In other news:
In one of the more silly Wikipedia editing disputes of all time, an "edit war" over whether the comic strip character Garfield is really male received major press coverage. As evidenced at Garfield's talk page, a semi-well known internet troll found a 2014 interview with Garfield's creator Jim Davis, that said "Garfield is very universal. By virtue of being a cat, really, he’s not really male or female or any particular race or nationality, young or old." This springboarded a war over whether Garfield's gender in his infobox should be "none." The whole thing was chronicled in a number of lighthearted press stories, including this one in the Washington Post (which I am partial to because it ends with a dumb quote from me). The faux edit-war was put to a complete end, however, when Davis told the Post: "Garfield is male." (Heat Street (February 27); Washington Post (March 1); Mashable (March 1); New York Magazine (March 1); New York Daily News (March 2); Zet Chilli (March 3, in Polish); NTDTV (March 3, in Chinese); Helsingborgs Dagblad (March 5, in Swedish); Süddeutsche Zeitung (March 9, in German); El Nuevo Diario (March 13, in Spanish); and many more)
Tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #9–#23. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
Hide categorization of pages in your watchlist preferences. You can turn off Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent in your watchlist preferences. You can remove problematic categories from Special:EditWatchlist/raw. (Phabricator task T164059)<chem> to write chemical formulas in the visual editor. Previously this only worked in the wikitext editor. (Phabricator task T153365)Ctrl+Shift+X on PCs or Cmd+Shift+X on Macs. (Phabricator task T153356)
Tidy is going to be replaced with an HTML5 parsing algorithm. Bad HTML in wikitext would cause problems on a number of wikis. There is now a ParserMigration extension on all wikis that you can use to help clean this up. You can read more about how you can use it. (Phabricator task T141586)Save page button now says Publish page or Publish changes on most Wikipedias, and on other Wikimedia wikis except for Wikinewses. The point is to make it more clear that the edit will change the page immediately. Publish page is when you save a new page and Publish changes when you edit an existing page. Information on Meta-Wiki)Visual editing and Source editing instead of Switch to visual editing and Switch to code editing. This is because it was confusing when the menu said you could switch to the editor you were already using. (Phabricator task T162864) String comparisons in Scribunto modules are now always done case-insensitively by byte order. Before they were sometimes in a case-sensitive US-English collation order. This could break some modules. (Phabricator task T107128)Page information in the sidebar. Developers can also get monthly page views through the API. (Phabricator task T125917)?safemode=1 to the end of the URL on Wikimedia wikis to disable your personal CSS and JavaScript. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature?safemode=1. This means you can test if a problem is because of your user scripts or gadgets without uninstalling them. (Phabricator task T152169) Scripts using very old deprecated wikibits functions show errors. These functions have not worked since 2013. You should fix or disable broken scripts. You can see examples of how to upgrade scripts. You need to add mw.loader.using( 'mediawiki.util' ) block for your scripts also, or add mediawiki.util dependency in gadget ResourceLoader section in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. (Wikitech mailing list,Phabricator task T122755) There will be a <div> tag around HTML from the MediaWiki wikitext parser. Gadgets with code that does not follow recommendations could have problems with this. You can report new problems you think are related to this. (Phabricator task T37247)<references /> tags in more than one column on your wiki. This is the list of footnotes for the sources in the article. How many columns you see will depend on how big your screen is. On some wikis, some templates already do this. Templates that use <references /> tags will need to be updated, and then later the change can happen for all reference lists. This feature will be deployed turned off by default. It can be turned on at a local wiki by requesting a configuration change. (Phabricator task T33597, MediaWiki.org project) The Wikiversity and Wikinews logos are now shown directly from the configuration and not from [[File:Wiki.png]]. If you want to change logo or have an anniversary logo, see how to request a configuration change. This is how it already works for other projects. They can request logo changes the same way. (Phabricator task T161980) The MediaWiki-Vagrant portable development environment has been updated to use Debian Jessie. This means local development and testing will be more like on the majority of Wikimedia production servers. (Wikitech mailing list)__NOGLOBAL__ to your Meta user page to stop this. (Phabricator task T90849, MediaWiki.org documentation) The Architecture Committee will change and get a new name. You can read and comment on the draft that describes the new committee. CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. (Q&A, discussion on MediaWiki.org)Publish changes, Show preview and Show changes buttons will look slightly different. This is to fit with the OOUI look. Users can test scripts, gadgets and so on to see if they work with the new interface by adding &ooui=1 to the URL. (Phabricator task T162849) Markup that looks like code for language variants might need to be fixed. If -{ is used in transclusions or web addresses it has to be escaped appropriately. You can use -<nowiki/>{ for transclusions and %2D{ in web addresses. A transclusion could for example be when you use -{ in a template: {{1x| sad :-{ face }}. This is because of some code fixes to the preprocessor and affects all wikis. (Wikimedia code review, MediaWiki.org documentation)New tools
New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience
Newly approved bot tasks
http:// to https:// for certain domains.Wikipedia:Wikipedia: links in bluelinks.|$N= from Module:Unsubst.importScript( 'User:Caorongjin/wordcount.js' ); // Backlink: User:Caorongjin/wordcount.js
importScript( 'User:WikiMasterGhibif/capitalize.js' ); // Backlink: User:WikiMasterGhibif/capitalize.js
importScript( 'User:Kangaroopower/rawtab.js' ); // Backlink: User:Kangaroopower/rawtab.js
importScript( 'User:Erutuon/footnoteCleanup.js' ); // Backlink: User:Erutuon/footnoteCleanup.js
importScript( 'User:Erutuon/scripts/imageSize.js' ); // Backlink: User:Erutuon/scripts/imageSize.js
importScript( 'User:Evad37/XFDcloser.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/XFDcloser.js
importScript( 'User:Uglemat/RefMan.js' ); // Backlink: User:Uglemat/RefMan.js
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-06-09/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-06-09/Opinion
Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation held its biannual election for the community-elected seats on its board. Nine candidates participated, with somewhat less on-wiki discussion than in previous years. The results of the election were announced on May 20: 5120 community members voted to elect María Sefidari, Dariusz Jemielniak, and James Heilman, each a current or former WMF Trustee, and each receiving roughly 80% support.
The annual election for members of the Funds Dissemination Committee, which determines funding allocations for annual plan grants to the largest Wikimedia affiliates, began this week. Eleven candidates with a wide range of experience, from all six continents, are standing in the election. Along with their candidate statements, they have answered a few questions on the wiki.
Voting is open this week: it runs from June 3rd–11th.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-06-09/Serendipity
In the 9th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, editor Thomas Spencer Baynes introduced the convention of including a person's birth and death year after their name in all biographical articles:
CAMPBELL, John, LL.D. (1708–1775), a miscellaneous author, was born at Edinburgh, March 8, 1708.
This allowed a reader to more easily distinguish between the 100+ notable people named John Campbell (only one of whom was actually lucky enough to get an article in the 9th edition). Although this convention was a bit awkward and redundant, it served a useful purpose (in the absence of disambiguation pages), and was kept in all subsequent editions.
When Wikipedia was created in 2001, it sought to emulate the successful model of the Encyclopædia Britannica and many editors adopted the convention of including birth and death years in the lead sentence.[1] Here is the lead sentence for Christopher Columbus as it appeared on June 13, 2001:
Christopher Columbus (1451?–1506) was a probably Genovian sailor who crossed the Atlantic in service of Spain.
Little did Thomas Spencer Baynes realize, Wikipedia editors would eventually expand on his convention, including not only birth and death years, but entire birth and death dates, birth and death dates in alternate calendars, birth and death locations, alternate names, maiden names, foreign names, pronunciations, foreign pronunciations, and transliterations. Fifteen years later, here's what Christoper Columbus's lead sentence had become:
Christopher Columbus (/kəˈlʌmbəs/; Ligurian: Cristoffa Combo; Italian: Cristoforo Colombo; Spanish: Cristóbal Colón; Portuguese: Cristóvão Colombo; Latin: Christophorus Columbus; born between 31 October 1450 and 30 October 1451 in Genoa – died on 20 May 1506 in Valladolid) was an Italian explorer, navigator, colonizer, and citizen of the Republic of Genoa.
What began as a concise, encyclopedic sentence had slowly grown into a sprawling mess of multiplying metadata—a sentence so complicatingly packed as to render it unreadable.[2] This isn't just a subjective opinion, either. If you chart the Flesch Reading Ease score of the sentence over the years, you'll see an almost continuous decline since 2002. This is by no means an isolated example, either. The metadata virus has spread from biographical articles to other subjects as well, like geography:
Israel (/ˈɪzreɪəl/; Hebrew: יִשְׂרָאֵל Yisrā'el; Arabic: إِسْرَائِيل Isrāʼīl), officially the State of Israel (Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל ⓘ [mediˈnat jisʁaˈʔel]; Arabic: دَوْلَة إِسْرَائِيل Dawlat Isrāʼīl [dawlat ʔisraːˈʔiːl]), is a country in the Middle East, on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the northern shore of the Red Sea.
The problem has become so noticeable that many reusers of Wikipedia content (including the WMF itself) have started stripping out parenthetical phrases from the lead sentence in certain contexts. If you search for "Christopher Columbus" on Google, you'll see a much more digestible description, both in the Knowledge Graph and under the Wikipedia search result. If you turn on the Page Previews beta feature in your preferences and hover over Christopher Columbus, you'll also see a much shorter version. The Wikipedia apps even experimented with removing parenthetical phrases from the lead sentences in the articles themselves. This has led to heated debates about whether or not we are potentially removing important information (as some parenthetical phrases consist of content other than metadata). Without a clear way to identify which parenthetical phrases are useful and which are detrimental, I'm sure these issues will remain unresolved. What's really needed is a vigorous debate by the Wikipedia community about how to bring this problem under control and make our articles readable again.
If we don't take significant steps to address this problem, the metadata disease is only going to keep multiplying and spreading. If left unchecked, I fear this is what our future will look like:
[Excerpt from the Americapedia article about Wikipedia, copyright 2034, used with permission.]
...Like frogs in a pot of boiling water, the proliferation of lead sentence metadata happened so slowly that no one noticed until 2021 when John Seigenthaler's son published a devastating video on ClickNews in which he read aloud the lead sentence of his Wikipedia article, and then wept for 3 minutes.
John Michael Seigenthaler (English pronunciation: /ˈdʒɑn ˈmaɪkəl ˈsiːɡənθɔːlər/ ⓘ; German pronunciation: [ˈjuːˈan ˈmaɪkəl ˈziːkənθɔːlər] ⓘ; born December 21, 1955 in Nashville, Tennessee, current resident of Weston, Connecticut (as of 2008), not yet deceased), also known as John Seigenthaler Jr. (English pronunciation: /ˈdʒɑn ˈsiːɡənθɔːlər ˈdʒunjəɹ/ ⓘ; German: John Seigenthaler jünger, pronounced [ˈjuːˈan ˈziːkənθɔːlər ˈdʒunjəɹ] ⓘ), is an American news anchor, most recently working for ClickNews.
Seigenthaler's video caught the attention of the recently re-elected Donald Trump, who only weeks before had dissolved The New York Times and Washington Post by executive order. Trump immediately posted a flurry of tweets eviscerating the venerable online encyclopedia. By the next day, Wikipedia was no more.
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Let's avoid this sorry fate and make Wikipedia great again!
, Činggis Qaɣan; Chinese: 成吉思汗; pinyin: Chéng Jí Sī Hán; probably May 31, 1162[3] – August 25, 1227), born Temujin (English pronunciation: /təˈmuːdʒɪn/; Mongolian: Тэмүжин, Temüjin IPA: [tʰemutʃiŋ] ⓘ; Middle Mongolian: Temüjin;[4] traditional Chinese: 鐵木真; simplified Chinese: 铁木真; pinyin: Tiě mù zhēn) and also known by the temple name Taizu (Chinese: 元太祖; pinyin: Yuán Tàizǔ; Wade–Giles: T'ai-Tsu), was the founder and Great Khan (emperor) of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-06-09/In focus
This arbitration case has been closed and the final decision is available at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-06-09/Humour
