The Signpost
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9 June 2017

From the editorsSignpost status: On reserve power, help wanted!
News and notes
Global Elections
Arbitration report
Cases closed in the Pacific and with Magioladitis
Op-ed
Wikipedia's lead sentence problem
Featured content
Three months in the land of the featured
In the media
Did Wikipedia just assume Garfield's gender?
Recent research
Wikipedia bot wars capture the imagination of the popular press
Technology report
Tech news catch-up
Traffic report
Film on Top: Sampling the weekly top 10
 

2017-06-09

Signpost status: On reserve power, help wanted

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By Sj and Evad37
That tectonic meeting of crust and cloud.


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.




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2017-06-09

WMF Board results released, FDC election runs through June 11

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By Sj, Spring Roll Conan, and Evad37
A public stand.

Global elections: WMF Board results, FDC voting ends soon

Results of the WMF Board election

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.

FDC election begins

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.


Brief notes



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2017-06-09

From March: Cases closed in the Pacific and with Magioladitis

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By GamerPro64

War of the Pacific case closed

  1. Keysanger (talk · contribs) and MarshalN20 (talk · contribs) are indefinitely prohibited from interacting with, or commenting on, each other anywhere on Wikipedia (subject to the ordinary exceptions).
  2. Keysanger (talk · contribs) is warned not to cast aspersions on other editors, or to unnecessarily perpetuate on-wiki battles.
  3. Where the dispute relates specifically to the interpretation of individual military history sources, the Committee recommends that these disputes in this topic area be formally raised at the Military History Wikiproject talkpage to ensure a wider audience and further expert input. Evident manipulation of sources, or disregard of a MILHIST consensus, should be considered disruptive editing and addressed via regular administrative action where appropriate.
  4. Where any content dispute involves both Keysanger (talk · contribs) and MarshalN20 (talk · contribs), those editors must seek wider input by raising the matter at any one of: the Military History Wikiproject talkpage, WP:3O, or WP:RFC. Both editors must abide by any subsequent consensus that arises from this process. Disregard of consensus should be considered disruptive editing and addressed via regular administrative action where appropriate. Nothing in this remedy restricts the editing of the disputed topic area by other editors.

Magioladitis case closed

This arbitration case has been closed and the final decision is available at the link above. The following remedies have been enacted:

  1. The community is encouraged to carefully review the lists of items in AWB's "general fixes" and the Checkwiki project's list of errors to determine whether these items are truly uncontroversial maintenance changes. A suggested approach would be classifying existing fixes as cosmetic or non-cosmetic and thereby identifying fixes that should be ineligible to be applied alone. The groups who currently invest their efforts in maintaining these lists are encouraged to improve their change management practices by soliciting broader community input into the value of adding proposed new items to the lists, and specifically to make their proposals accessible to members of the community who are not bot operators or whose interests are non-technical.
  2. The community is encouraged to hold an RfC to clarify the nature of "cosmetic" edits and to reevaluate community consensus about the utility and scope of restrictions on such edits. The committee notes that an RfC on this topic is currently under development.
  3. While the Arbitration Committee has no direct authority over the volunteer developers of open-source tools, we encourage the AWB developers to carefully consider feedback gathered in this case in order to use technical means to avoid problematic edits more effectively.
  4. The Bot Approvals Group is encouraged to carefully review the proposed scope of any new bot request for approval to ensure that the scope and tasks are clearly defined and will resist scope creep.
  5. Magioladitis is restricted from making any semi-automated edits which do not affect the rendered visual output of a page. This restriction does not apply to edits which address issues related to accessibility guidelines. Further, Magioladitis may seek consensus to perform a specific type of semi-automated edit that would normally fall under this restriction at the administrators' noticeboard. Any uninvolved administrator may close such a discussion with consensus to perform a specific type of semi-automated edit. All discussions should be logged on the case page, regardless of outcome.
  6. Magioladitis is reminded that performing the same or similar series of edits in an automated fashion using a bot and in a semi-automated fashion on his main account is acceptable only as long as the edits are not contentious. Should Yobot be stopped or blocked for a series of edits, Magioladitis may not perform the same pattern of edits via semi-automated tools from his main account where this might reasonably be perceived as evading the block. In this circumstance, Magioladitis (like any other editor) should await discussion and consensus as to whether or not the edits are permissible and useful, and resume making such edits through any account only if and when the consensus is favorable.
  7. Magioladitis is restricted from unblocking their own bot when it has been blocked by another administrator. After discussion with the blocking administrator and/or on the bot owners' noticeboard, the blocking administrator or an uninvolved administrator may unblock the bot.



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2017-06-09

Wikipedia's lead sentence problem

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By Kaldari
Thomas Spencer Baynes, genius or pedant?

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.

Flesch Reading Ease scores for the lead sentence of Christopher Columbus from 2002 to 2016

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 (/ˈɪzrəl/; Hebrew: יִשְׂרָאֵל Yisrā'el; Arabic: إِسْرَائِيل Isrāʼīl), officially the State of Israel (Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל Medīnat Yisrā'el [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 SeigenthalerQ1701714 on Wikidata (English pronunciation: /ˈdʒɑn ˈmaɪkəl ˈsiːɡənθɔːlər/ ; German pronunciation: [ˈjuːˈan ˈmaɪkəl ˈziːkənθɔːlər] ; born December 21, 1955 in Nashville, TennesseeQ23197 on Wikidata, current resident of Weston, ConnecticutQ662537 on Wikidata (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.

Let's avoid this sorry fate and make Wikipedia great again!

  1. ^ German Wikipedia also adopted the convention of preceding all death dates with a dagger (called a "Kreuz" in German), which has led to endless debates about whether or not the symbol is Christian and thus inappropriate to use for non-Christian biographies. Luckily, such a convention doesn't seem to exist in English encyclopedias!
  2. ^ Another famous example:
    Genghis Khan (English pronunciation:/ˈɡɛŋɡɪs ˈkɑːn/ or /ˈɛŋɡɪs ˈkɑːn/;[1][2]; Cyrillic: Чингис Хаан, Chingis Khaan, IPA: [tʃiŋɡɪs xaːŋ] ; Mongol script: , Činggis Qaɣan; Chinese: 成吉思汗; pinyin: Chéng Jí Sī Hán; probably May 31, 1162[3] – August 25, 1227), born Temujin (English pronunciation: /təˈmɪn/; 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.



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2017-06-09

Three months in the land of the featured

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By Armbrust
Halifax is Nova Scotia's capital and largest municipality by population and land area.

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 19 February to 20 May.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Double statue portraying Nyuserre Ini as both a young and an old man.
Restoration of a nesting Nemegtomaia barsboldi
Jun'yō moored at Sasebo, Japan in 1945
The yellow-faced honeyeater takes both its common and scientific name from the distinctive yellow stripes on the sides of its head.
The North Eastern Railway War Memorial viewed from Station Road with the city walls in the background; the memorial was originally to abut the wall but the design had to be modified after it proved controversial.
The Pilgrim Tercentenary half dollar was designed by Cyrus E. Dallin.
Courtney Love in a publicity headshot for Straight to Hell
The cover for the first issue of Other Worlds was created by Malcolm Smith.
Male red-headed myzomela perched on a mangrove branch.
Hrithik Roshan at a promotional event for Mohenjo Daro
Kona Lanes roadside sign in 2002
Richard Mansfield commissioned and starred in the 1887 adaptation of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Two sheep on the shoreline of North Ronaldsay
The nominate subspecies of the golden swallow, T. e. euchrysea, is likely extinct.
The York City War Memorial was unveiled by Prince Albert, the Duke of York.
HMS Lion was the lead ship of her class.
Alan Shepard poses next to the American flag on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission.
SMS Kaiser Friedrich III entered active service in 1899, and became the flagship of Prince Heinrich in the I Squadron of the German Heimatflotte.
A pair of Cape sparrows at the Walter Sisulu National Botanical Garden in Johannesburg
Junko Takeuchi is Naruto Uzumaki's voice actress.
Donkey Kong 64 was the first game to require the Nintendo 64's Expansion Pak, a memory upgrade.
HMS St Vincent at the Coronation Review in 1911
William Stukeley's 1724 illustration of Nine Stones
Workers in the X-10 Graphite Reactor use a rod to push fresh uranium slugs into the reactor's concrete loading face.
Two of John R. Sinnock's sketches for the reverse of the Roosevelt dime
Banded stilt illustration from The Birds of Australia by Gracius Broinowski
Miller's Chapel exhibits some of the Oregon Caves's largest formations.
Joseph S. Clark Jr. was elected mayor of Philadelphia during the municipal election of 1951.
Copley Fielding's 1818 drawing of Monnow Bridge
Inside page from the Broadway program for The Demi-Virgin
The development of Wipeout 2048 influenced the design of the PlayStation Vita console.
David Warner made his Test debut against New Zealand in December 2011, and scored his first century in the second match of the series when he made 123 not out.
Private Practice was created to focus on Kate Walsh's character.
Hurricane Michelle was one of the two most significant storms of the 2001 Atlantic hurricane season.
Will Smith at the premiere of The Karate Kid in 2010
The last 11 episodes of Naruto in English aired in Canada on YTV from October to December 2009.
Oh Land performing at Roskilde Festival 2011 in Roskilde, Denmark.
Little Paxton Pits is the largest Local Nature Reserve in Cambridgeshire at sixty hectares.
Sharon Stone at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival in 2007
Dalmacija was the only light cruiser of the Royal Yugoslav Navy.
Cyclone Gonu was the strongest and most damaging tropical cyclone to affect the Arabian Peninsula.
Ellen Ripley, the primary protagonist of the main Alien series, was portrayed by Sigourney Weaver.
Whitechapel Road is currently the cheapest London Monopoly location.
The 2014 Tour de France race included 21 stages, starting in Leeds, United Kingdom, and finishing on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Ted Williams was the last player to achieve a .400 batting average in a Major League Baseball season.
Delph Bridge Drain is the smallest Site of Special Scientific Interest in Cambridgeshire.
Garfield-Arthur poster for the United States presidential election of 1880

Eighty-eight featured articles were promoted.

Forty-three featured lists were promoted.

Five featured topics were promoted.

Twenty-two featured pictures were promoted.



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2017-06-09

Did Wikipedia just assume Garfield's gender?

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By Milowent

This Signpost "In the media" report covers media primarily from 19 February to 17 March.

Is Garfield male? Only the Creator knows. A silly edit war erupts.

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)

In brief

Editathons all over
The Daily Mail's answer to whether it has been treated unfairly by Wikipedia.



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



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2017-06-09

Wikipedia bots fight – or do they?; personality and attitudes to Wikipedia; large expert review experiment

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By Aaron Halfaker, Piotr Konieczny and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Reviewed by Aaron Halfaker (Aaron Halfaker)

A paper titled "Even Good Bots Fight: The case of Wikipedia"[1] describes a quantitative analysis of the reverting behavior of bots across different wikis. The paper has been popular in the tech media, with interviews from Dr. Yasseri (last author) appearing in Wired[supp 1], Sputnik[supp 2] and the BBC,[supp 3] among other media outlets. Regretfully, the authors failed to consider nature of "conflict" and whether it was actually conflict they were measuring, and it's too late to get the story right in the popular press.

Through their analysis, the authors report that bots often get into "conflict": "[...] bots on English Wikipedia reverted another bot on average 105 times, which is significantly larger than the average of 3 times for humans". The authors assume that all revert actions represent "conflict" and conclude that the large number of reverts they discover imply "continuous disagreement" and that the activities are "inefficient as a waste of resources [...]". They observe the raw number of reverts that bots do to each other across wikis and conclude that the bots fight more in German Wikipedia than in Portuguese Wikipedia. Dr. Yasseri is quoted telling reporters for Sputnik news that "There are no normal editors looking after the work being done by these bots and this is one of the reasons of the conflict we see going on between different bots. The main reason for conflicts is lack of central supervision of bots." This assertion, however, is dubious.

It's too bad that Dr. Yasseri doesn't appear to have looked into the Bot Approvals Group that oversees bot activities on English Wikipedia and the many similar groups on other wikis (e.g. the Wikipédia:Robôs/Grupo de aprovação in Portuguese Wikipedia). It would be interesting if these centralized governance strategies were ineffective at preventing bots from getting into conflict.

While reverts between human editors often do represent conflict over which content should appear in an article, the authors do not check that this assumption holds with bots. The paper contains no content analysis that might describe what these "contentious disagreements" look like, beyond a brief statement that much of the reverts happen between bots that were fixing inter-wiki links and are likely no longer a problem since the introduction of Wikidata in 2013. A cursory review of their open-licensed data release suggests that many of these bot-reverts take place years after the original bot edit – and in response to human actions like the renaming of an article (for example, when human user Nightstallion moved Mohammad Beheshti to Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti and RussBot came to fix a redirect from Dr. Mohammad Beheshti in 2006 and then 2 years later, Mohsenkazempur moved it back and Addbot came back to fix the redirect again, that looks like a bot revert). If the authors had explored what was happening in these reverts and the mechanisms by which wiki communities observe and govern bot behaviors, they might have drawn different conclusions and not referred to this activity as a "fight" or "conflict". While it's certainly true that bot fights do sometimes happen, the authors don't seem to have discovered or described any real phenomena of bot vs. bot "conflict". If they had, they might have told a different story of how rare such fights are and how quickly they are resolved by human editors. Regretfully, it's too late to get the story right with the popular press. "Robot wars in Wikipedia" has proven too juicy of a story to pass up.

(See also our review of a previous paper coauthored by Dr. Yasseri that likewise focused heavily on conflicts and received a large amount of media attention: "The most controversial topics in Wikipedia: a multilingual and geographical analysis")

"Relationship between personality and attitudes to Wikipedia"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

This conference paper[2] touches upon a very interesting yet understudied question: psychological dimensions of why people contribute to Wikipedia. The topic of motivations of Wikipedia contributors has been tackled before, but not much research has focused on said psychological aspects, which promise to teach us more about differences between individuals who have potential to become volunteer contributors. The study, based on a sample of Polish students (206 University of Gdańsk students in their early 20s, over half from the pedagogics field, over 80% female), looked at six personality traits (extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and cynical hostility – the first four are also a part of the Big Five personality traits). One of the authors' goals was to test whether cynical hostility would be negatively correlated to editing Wikipedia, and to one's opinion of it. Besides attitudes towards Wikipedia, the study also measured the students' attitude towards traditional encyclopedias, radio, press and TV.

The authors found that conscientiousness was negatively, but weakly, related to editing Wikipedia and to positive opinions about Wikipedia. Cynical hostility was not related to any specific attitude towards Wikipedia. Extraversion and openness to experience were positively, but weakly, related to positive opinions about Wikipedia. The authors suggest that the lack of relation between cynical hostility (distrust of other people) and Wikipedia may exist partially because many students do not associate Wikipedia with the work of other individuals. They noted their findings are not consistent with prior studies; citing a study which suggested that knowledge sharing is related to openness to experience, conscientiousness and agreeableness – though noting that that study was based on sharing knowledge inside a company, an environment that is somewhat different from doing so in the public, volunteer setting of Wikipedia. At the same time, this reviewer notes that the study does not demonstrate any statistically significant Wikipedia-related correlations. Overall, it seems like an interesting study, but with statistically insignificant, inconclusive findings. Whether the studied population was too small, or too biased, is hard to say, but this reviewer hopes future studies will pursue this paper's central question. The psychological dimension of why people contribute, like, or dislike and not contribute to Wikipedia is a very interesting issue. Even with no conclusive findings, this study shows the potential of this topic.

"ExpertIdeas: Incentivizing Domain Experts to Contribute to Wikipedia"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

It is generally known that while many experts (professors, etc.) use Wikipedia, they rarely contribute to it (which, generally, is not that different from how non-experts use but don't contribute to it). This preprint[3] presents the results of a randomized field experiment, inspired by social loafing theory, investigating how different incentives could motivate experts to contribute. In the authors' own words: "We investigate incentives that Wikipedia can provide for scholars to motivate them to contribute". The authors (including User:I.yeckehzaare) are familiar enough with the Wikipedia community to be able to create and operate a bot (User:ExpertIdeasBot, approved by the community in 2014); additional resources about this study are available at Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/ExpertIdeas. The authors sent a number of invitations to 3,974 researchers (from the field of economics). The bot has been operating roughly from August 2014 to December 2016. An example edit can be seen here. The paper discusses the design of the experiment, and the result, in detail, and also contains a supporting statistical analysis showing a number of significant results. The researchers expect the paper to be published in finalized form next year, and are still doing work on assessing the quality of the expert comments.

The authors conclude that experts are more likely to contribute if they receive a personalized email clearly mentioning their recent studies and areas of expertise. Another helpful aspect is if this invitation comes from an expert in the same field (rather than a random other person, including a random Wikipedia volunteer or WMF staff member). It is also helpful to appeal not only to the self-less argument that "We should contribute to Wikipedia because it is a public good, etc.", but also to more selfish motives, such as that one can add citations to one's own work to Wikipedia which can improve the likelihood of their publications being cited. Experts would also like for contributions to be more easily identifiable and attributable, and it is suggested that Wikipedia should make it easier for experts to receive recognition, for example through listing their contributions and names on a related WikiProject page.

Overall, this is a very interesting study, and it is commendable the authors did it in a way that is highly transparent to the community. The code for the bot is available on GitHub, though I was unable to find any indication that it is freely licensed, which sadly suggests that if the Wikipedia community would like to reuse it, it may not be able to do so (we will correct this statement as soon as any clarification/license link is found and available). Hopefully, the Wikipedia community and WMF will be able to capitalize on the findings from this study, developing it into a larger outreach program to academics.

Other recent publications

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.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

References

  1. ^ Tsvetkova, Milena; García-Gavilanes, Ruth; Floridi, Luciano; Yasseri, Taha (2017-02-23). "Even Good Bots Fight: The case of Wikipedia". PLOS ONE. 12 (2): e0171774. arXiv:1609.04285. Bibcode:2017PLoSO..1271774T. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171774. PMC 5322977. PMID 28231323.Open access icon
  2. ^ Atroszko, Bartosz; Bereznowski, Piotr; Wróbel, Wiktor Kornel; Atroszko, Paweł (2016-08-08). "Relationship between personality and attitudes to Wikipedia". The 5th Electronic International Interdisciplinary Conference. p. 6. ISBN 978-80-554-1248-1.
  3. ^ Yan Chen, Rosta Farzan, Robert Kraut, Iman YeckehZaare and Ark Fangzhou Zhang: Incentivizing Domain Experts to Contribute to Wikipedia. January 30, 2017
  4. ^ Lee, Jung; Seo, DongBack (2016). "Crowdsourcing not all sourced by the crowd: An observation on the behavior of Wikipedia participants". Technovation. 55–56: 14–21. doi:10.1016/j.technovation.2016.05.002. ISSN 0166-4972. Closed access icon
  5. ^ Zhang, Haisu; Zhang, Sheng; Wu, Zhaolin; Huang, Liwei; Ma, Yutao (2016-07-01). "A Method for Predicting Wikipedia Editors' Editing Interest: Based on a Factor Graph Model". International Journal of Web Services Research (IJWSR). 13 (3): 1–25. doi:10.4018/IJWSR.2016070101. ISSN 1545-7362.Closed access icon
  6. ^ Launonen, Pentti; Tiilikainen, Sanna; Kern, K.c. (2016-01-01). "Social patterns and dynamics of creativity in Wikipedia". International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering. 4 (1–2): 137–152. doi:10.1504/IJODE.2016.080170. ISSN 1758-9797. Closed access icon
  7. ^ Dezaiacomo, Simone (2014-07-21). Fidarsi di Wikipedia. Attacchi vandalici e resilienza dei contenuti: un modello di analisi ed alcune evidenze empiriche (Tesi di laurea).
  8. ^ Hinnosaar, Marit; Hinnosaar, Toomas; Kummer, Michael; Slivko, Olga (2015). Does Wikipedia matter? The effect of Wikipedia on tourist choices. ZEW Discussion Papers.
  9. ^ Lu, Chun; Laublet, Philippe; Stankovic, Milan (2016-11-19). "Travel Attractions Recommendation with Knowledge Graphs". In Eva Blomqvist; Paolo Ciancarini; Francesco Poggi; Fabio Vitali (eds.). Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 10024. Springer International Publishing. pp. 416–431. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49004-5_27. ISBN 9783319490038. Closed access icon
  10. ^ Färber, Michael; Rettinger, Achim; Asmar, Boulos El (2016-11-19). "On Emerging Entity Detection". In Eva Blomqvist; Paolo Ciancarini; Francesco Poggi; Fabio Vitali (eds.). Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 10024. Springer International Publishing. pp. 223–238. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49004-5_15. ISBN 9783319490038. S2CID 12366992. Closed access icon Supplementary materials: http://people.aifb.kit.edu/he9318/emerging-entity-detection/
  11. ^ Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar; Rambow, Owen (2016). "A Corpus of Wikipedia Discussions: Over the Years, with Topic, Power and Gender Labels": 5. S2CID 5937491. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  12. ^ Kang, Jaeyong; Lee, Hyunju (April 2017). "Modeling user interest in social media using news media and wikipedia". Information Systems. 65: 52–64. doi:10.1016/j.is.2016.11.003. ISSN 0306-4379. Closed access icon
  13. ^ Klang, Marcus; Nugues, Pierre (2016). Docforia: A Multilayer Document Model (PDF). Department of computer science Lund University, Lund. p. 4.
  14. ^ Hellmann, Sebastian; Brekle, Jonas; Auer, Sören (2012-12-02). "Leveraging the Crowdsourcing of Lexical Resources for Bootstrapping a Linguistic Data Cloud". In Hideaki Takeda; Yuzhong Qu; Riichiro Mizoguchi; Yoshinobu Kitamura (eds.). Semantic Technology. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 7774. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 191–206. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.352.3741. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-37996-3_13. ISBN 978-3-642-37995-6. Closed access icon
  15. ^ Mohamed, Emad (2016-12-29). "Jewish, Christian and Islamic in the English Wikipedia". Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet. 11. doi:10.17885/heiup.rel.2016.0.23630.
Supplementary references:



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2017-06-09

Tech news catch-up

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By Evad37

Tech news: February to June 2017

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.

In brief

New tools

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Newly approved bot tasks

Installation code

  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Caorongjin/wordcount.js' ); // Backlink: User:Caorongjin/wordcount.js
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:WikiMasterGhibif/capitalize.js' ); // Backlink: User:WikiMasterGhibif/capitalize.js
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Kangaroopower/rawtab.js' ); // Backlink: User:Kangaroopower/rawtab.js
  4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Erutuon/footnoteCleanup.js' ); // Backlink: User:Erutuon/footnoteCleanup.js
  5. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Erutuon/scripts/imageSize.js' ); // Backlink: User:Erutuon/scripts/imageSize.js
  6. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Evad37/XFDcloser.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/XFDcloser.js
  7. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Uglemat/RefMan.js' ); // Backlink: User:Uglemat/RefMan.js



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2017-06-09

Film on Top: Sampling the weekly Top 10 from recent months

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By OZOO
The Wikipedia:Top 25 Report summarizes the most popular articles each week, drawing from Andrew West's Top 5000 list. We often republish the top 10. Here are two interesting weeks from recent months.

Indian film dominance, May holidays (April 30 to May 6, 2017)

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 start Class 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 c Class 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 list 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 c Class 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 start Class 1,116,202
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 c Class 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 start Class 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 c Class 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 b Class 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 list 678,371
The near-ever-present list of the deceased rises two places this week despite falling about 3000 views in total.


An Evening at the Pictures (February 26 to March 4, 2017)

Where is Steve Harvey's cameo?

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 Start Class 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) C Class 3,098,888
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 List 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) C class 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 C class 1,574,510
The American actor won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Manchester By the Sea.
6 Get Out (film) Start class 1,400,249
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) C class 1,253,551
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 Stub 1,217,057

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 Featured Article 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) C-class 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.

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