Lame duck US President Donald Trump created more puzzlement on Wednesday with his veto of the United States defense appropriations act, which had passed Congress with a "veto-proof majority". His stated reasons were the inclusion in the bill of a process that could be used to rename military bases that are named for Confederate military leaders, and the lack of a repeal of Section 230 in the bill. His veto message states that "Section 230 facilitates the spread of foreign disinformation online".
Voting on a veto override is expected to take place on Monday, December 28, a day after publication of this issue of The Signpost. If successful, it would be the first veto override of his presidency.
Section 230 provides immunity to the Wikimedia Foundation, and social media sites in general, from lawsuits arising from most user generated content. In 2017 the WMF said "The Wikipedia we know today simply would not exist without Section 230." On December 15, WMF announced that "to ensure that laws support vibrant online communities such as Wikipedia", it had joined Internet.Works, a newly formed coalition aiming to defend Section 230. Members include Automattic, eBay, Reddit, Pinterest, Medium and other internet platforms (but none of the Big Tech companies).
A simple repeal of the section, which would have to be written into a new bill, and then passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president, would likely be very difficult. Failure to override the veto would delay $740 billion in defense appropriations, so would also be very difficult.
While Trump's current challenge to Section 230 may seem unlikely to succeed, two other legal year-end surprises are set to become law that will affect Internet users and platforms. On December 21, Congress approved the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which combines $900 billion in COVID-19 stimulus aid with a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill for the 2021 fiscal year. At 5,593 pages, it is the longest bill ever passed by Congress. Besides details on the actual appropriations, it contains around "3,000 pages [of] totally unrelated bills that Congress couldn't pass through the rest of the year" (as summarized by Techdirt). These include two controversial copyright bills which were only publicly confirmed to be part of the act on the day of the vote:
Ironically, during the last few days the remaining obstacle for both provisions to become law was the threat of another Trump veto to the entire Consolidated Appropriations Act (over his objections to the $600 relief amount). However, as we go to press on Sunday, December 27, The New York Times has reported that Trump just signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act into law. – S & H
On December 15, the European Commission unveiled its long awaited proposals for the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA). In a special edition of its monthly "EU Policy Monitoring Report", the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU reacted with "very rough first notes", expressing appreciation that the DSA reflects "the idea of safeguarding fundamental rights and freedom of speech even within online services", but warning that "Communities/community-driven moderation and platforms are not really thought of anywhere, which leads to a few risks." (The group consists of European Wikimedia chapters and community members, and is also known as the EU Policy group.) The Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy team followed up a few days later with "early impressions" on the DSA. The two groups highlighted different aspects within the same two areas of concern in the proposal text.
Firstly, Article 12-2 requires online services to "act in a diligent, objective and proportionate manner in applying and enforcing the restrictions" of their terms and conditions, "with due regard to the rights and legitimate interests of all parties involved, including the applicable fundamental rights of the recipients of the service". The EU Policy group is concerned "that people claiming rights in bad faith might try to alter Wikipedia articles by going over a legal process supposed to force platform operators to defend fundamental rights." The Foundation said:
[We worry] that 'diligent, objective and proportionate' can mean very different things depending on who you ask, and that community-governed platforms would be hurt by unclear standards and a lack of discretion. Terms of use (like the Foundation’s Terms, or even the Universal Code of Conduct) frequently include provisions prohibiting clearly harmful but often hard-to-define and even platform-specific things like harassment, disruptive behavior, or trolling. At what point would a regulator or a litigious user think that a certain volume of trolling meant that a service wasn't being 'diligent' in enforcing its 'don’t troll other users' rule? Or what happens when someone whose posts are moderated, or who thinks someone else's behavior should be moderated, decides that the moderators aren’t being 'objective?'
— Wikimedia Foundation Public Policy Team via Medium
Secondly, the EU Policy group argues that "in Articles 14-19 (basically the content moderation systems) we need stronger safeguards and rights for communities and individual users ('counter-notices' within the Notice & Action system being one basic example)." The Wikimedia Foundation is worried that it will become subject to undue burden caused by a vague wording in Article 14:
[The article] says that an online provider will be presumed to know about illegal content — and thus be liable for it — once it gets a notice from anyone that that illegal content exists. There’s a number of different ways that ambiguities in this section can create problems [...]. For example, if the Foundation got a notice from someone alleging they had been defamed on one article, what would the Foundation be responsible for, if the alleged defamation was referenced in or spread across multiple articles, or talk pages, that the user may not have specified?
— Wikimedia Foundation Public Policy Team via Medium
On the other hand, the Foundation's Public Policy team applauded "that the DSA preserves [the intermediary liability provisions] of the e-Commerce Directive, which ensure that the Foundation can continue hosting the knowledge of countless editors and contributors" (similar to Section 230 in the United States, see also above).
In its monthly report, the EU Policy group clarifies that the other big new proposal unveiled by the EU Commission on December 15, for the Digital Markets Act, should not affect Wikimedia projects and organizations: "This basically is a list of 'dos and don’t' for very large platforms that have a so-called gatekeeper position on the internal market. To be part of that club you need to have a turnover of over 6.5 billion euro, so Wikimedia is out."
But the report notes relevant recent developments on several other ongoing EU regulation efforts:
On January 1, 2021, works first published in 1925 in the US will enter the public domain, according to the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at the Duke University School of Law. The books affected include:
Films affected include:
Some musical compositions are also affected, but not necessarily the performances of those works. Compositions affected include Sweet Georgia Brown and some works written by Lovie Austin, Amy Beach, Sidney Bechet, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George and Ira Gershwin, W.C. Handy, Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, Fletcher Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Sippie Wallace, and Fats Waller. -S
The billionth edit to English Wikipedia made in the current Wikipedia database software will be made soon – according to analysis by The Signpost staff, likely between 12 January and 16 January, just before or after Wikipedia's 20th birthday on 15 January. The current Wikipedia database was initiated on January 25–26, 2002, when Wikipedia used phase II software. Before that date, UseModWiki was used to edit and edit counts are murky - perhaps there were a few hundred thousand edits using UseModWiki, some but not all of which have since been recovered and reloaded into the system as part of the thousand million edits. Some purists might wish to include the number of edits transferred from Nupedia to Wikipedia as well. While the "billionth edit" may be inexact, it does symbolize a remarkable achievement – an encyclopedia of over 6,215,569 articles built by at least 1,000,000,000 edits. Even if a hundred million or more of those were vandalism or spam. – B & S & W and – G
The Signpost noted exactly one year ago that "the tally of active administrators...does not appear likely to rise above 500 again, unless there is a major change in trend." Well, we are ending the month (as of time of publication) with 504 active admin accounts on the list, and it was over 520 earlier this year. At first blush, this looks like good news going forward?
However, with only 243 new admins in the last ten years and only 17 new administrators this year, the long-term trend is still unsustainable: The average new admin would need to be active for thirty years for a supply of 17 new admins a year to maintain a cadre of 500 active admins. It isn't just that a large majority of our active admins were appointed over a decade ago. Only 50 of our current administrators first created their accounts in the last ten years. We are not recruiting enough admins from among members of the community who joined us between 2011 and 2019. – B & W
Wikimedia Foundation announced on December 7 that it had reached a fundraising milestone allowing it in turn to fund the planting of 400,000 trees. It is working with the Plant Your Change initiative which aims to plant 100 million trees in the next decade, as part of the foundation's carbon footprint reduction strategy. -B
"Wikipedia page for Biden's new Covid czar scrubbed of politically damaging material" states Politico. The article reports how an account linked to consulting firm Saguaro Strategies removed potentially politically compromising details from Jeff Zients's Wikipedia page. US President-elect Joe Biden plans to put Zients in charge of his administration's response to COVID-19. The account – which initially operated under the username Saguarostrat, was renamed, then was indefinitely blocked for undisclosed paid editing in violation of the WMF Terms of Use – removed information related to Zients's corporate career, made him appear less "Republican" and added that he left his role on the board of Facebook "over differences with company leadership over governance and its policies around political discourse" though Zients has never claimed such publicly. The article discusses how the online images of both Democrats and Republicans have been a common cause of scandal in recent years and attempts to clean them up have become a normalized part of American political life, with an inside source suggesting that while the law firms which specialize in helping candidates for senior positions through their confirmation processes generally focus on other issues such as removing social media posts, editing Wikipedia is more likely done by consultants. Another Wikipedia-related scenario mentioned was the period prior to Kamala Harris' nomination as Biden's VP candidate: her Wikipedia page "was edited far more than the other contenders for vice president and the majority of the edits were by a single person".
However, America's politicians certainly aren't the only ones not always playing above board in the Wiki world. Staffers in the Canadian and Australian governments got into hot water for Wikipedia editing in 2014 and 2016 respectively, while analysis from 2012 suggested that British MPs and their staff were responsible for nearly 10,000 changes to the site. – L
"Harnessing Wikipedia's superpowers for journalism" by Wikipedian Monika Sengul-Jones on DataJournalism.com gives a great introduction to Wikipedia in 4,000 words – with many charts, tables and illustrations. It would be worth every word even if you only wanted an academically-oriented introduction to the encyclopedia, but it spends most of those words on how journalists can use Wikipedia – a skill that many general reporters could use – and then describes how the data provided to the public as well as to reporters can be even more useful. This reporter, who has spent a couple of years writing for The Signpost, picked up a few pointers. Those Wikipedians who wish to become reporters for this newspaper are highly encouraged to read and re-read Sengul-Jones's article.
Her first example shows how a Twitter bot, which monitors Wikipedia's data feeds, revealed that an anonymous editor with an IP address from the Executive Office of the President in the White House removed the following from the article on Adam S. Boehler: "During college, Boehler was a summer roommate of his future Trump administration boss Jared Kushner." Then Sengul-Jones adds "but there's evidence the bots can be manipulated". After discussing some of the limits of Wikipedia data she quotes Benjamin Mako Hill: "The reality for journalists working on the internet is fraught [...] Most internet data sets are controlled by commercial companies. That means there's never going to be a full data set and what's available has been – or is being –manipulated. Wikipedia is different. It's free, it's accessible, and it's from a public service organization."
In just the first half of the article pageviews are covered in detail, as are the Wikipedia organizational structure, editing model, and Section 230 with quotes from Noam Cohen, Brian Keegan, Jackie Koerner and WMF CEO Katherine Maher along the way. The second half is just as packed with information. -S
Michael Perry claims that he types for a living. He writes a weekly column in the Wisconsin State Journal and formerly kept a passel of five pigs. While he might return to his porcine pursuits, he doubts that it will be possible, so he wanted to correct "his" Wikipedia article. With that premise and some quirky humor he cranked out a 500 word column. He's got this writing business down to an art.
I wasn't quite convinced, so I emailed him and asked – what was that column all about? Yep, he just wanted the Wikipedia article about him to be correct. It was corrected on the same morning the column was published. It looks like Perry has solved one of the most ancient mysteries of the internet – how to get a Wikipedia article corrected. You just need to publish an article in a reliable source. Of course not everybody can write a newspaper article about themself, but thinking along the same line, article subjects might make a YouTube video of themselves, or even just write a press release to get noticed. Not that a press release would always work, but it's got to be better than writing on the article talkpage: "I'm not a pig farmer, I'm a writer, I'm a former pig farmer, a reformed swineherd, a redundant hog handler, please believe me, please ...".
Perry has written ten books, including a New York Times bestseller, Visiting Tom. He is a musician, radio show host, comedian, and nurse. He grew up on a dairy farm where he had "a childhood spent slinging manure – the metaphorical basis for a writing career." – S
| External videos | |
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 Hound Dog, Elvis Presley | |
| Blue Christmas, Elvis Presley |
Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020 voting ended on December 7, followed immediately by scrutineering of the results, and an announcement of the outcome on December 21. The seven newly elected or re-elected members of the Arbitration Committee will be:
The new members' terms will begin on January 1.
Functionary team changes announced: Anarchyte was appointed as an Oversighter, while EdJohnston, Oshwah, and Yamla were appointed as CheckUsers.
Horn of Africa case was resolved by motion on December 9:
Standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes) for a trial period of three months and until further decision of this Committee. After March 1, 2021 (or sooner if there is good reason), any editor may ask that this request be reopened for the purpose of evaluating whether the discretionary sanctions have been effective and should be made permanent or if a full case should be accepted to consider different or additional remedies.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Flyer22 and WanderingWanda was opened 5 December by WanderingWanda and accepted by the committee 16 December; evidence is due 30 December. At issue are alleged gender (transgender) motivated aspersions involving on-wiki and off-wiki writing.
Flyer22 Frozen, one of the involved parties and an active editor since 2007, retired after the case was opened.
Textiles are the most important export sector of Bangladesh's economy. Trousers, hoodies, t-shirts and so on are produced by Bangladeshi firms and then exported to Europe or America, where they are sold by some of the world's most important brands at steep mark-ups. The textile sector is also plagued by safety problems and labor issues, but more on that later.
One large group of companies in this sector is Dragon Group. From the eponymous Dragon Tower in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the group exports sweaters and socks to international customers, which have included Walmart and Lidl. In fact, the group "is the pioneer of Bangladesh's sweater industry" and "directly responsible for the establishment of the sweater industry in Bangladesh"; it "is among the world's largest sweater suppliers and is the largest sweater industry in south and southeast Asia."
At least according to the first version of its article, created in October 2009 by editor Mqsobhan.
Over the years, some of these sentences were cut from the article. It was also marked as missing references. An article for Dragon Sweater, one of Dragon Group's subsidiaries, was changed into a redirect – Mqsobhan had posted it with the same contents as the Dragon Group article. In December 2015, Mqsobhan returned, adding that the machinery of Dragon Group "produces most supple and excellent yarns and the quality is among the best in South and South East Asia", and that the Group's chairman, father of Mostafa Quamrus Sobhan, was "widely known as the Father of Bangladesh's sweater industry".
Just over a year later, some of this promotional material was again cut from the article. It was then nominated for deletion in 2018 – "Only negative sources", according to the nominator. (The nominator, Farooqahmadbhat, was later blocked as a sockpuppet in an unrelated case). But other editors involved in that discussion argued that there were enough sources to show notability and that negative coverage was not a reason for deletion. In the end, the article was kept. By September of this year, the tectonic-plate-paced push-and-pull had resulted in an article a few lines long, still lacking references and structure.
That was the state of the article when I first read it. I proceeded to add headers for organisation and history, added about twenty links to sources (which were published in Bangladesh's most noteworthy newspapers and therefore indeed not very hard to find) and, most importantly from the aesthetic point of view, added an infobox. That infobox included a list of Dragon Group subsidiaries and some of the key people, again including the chairman and his son, the managing director Mostafa Quamrus Sobhan. I also filed a conflict of interest notice regarding Mqsobhan, noting the suspiciously similar name and editing behaviour.
However, since the editor at that point hadn't edited in four years and didn't reply to my notification, no action was taken. But Mqsobhan was not gone for good. On December 3, an anonymous editor with an IP address from Dhaka, Bangladesh deleted most of the article, but was immediately reverted. A new account, Mqs2020, was then created and deleted the same parts of the article, three times, only to be reverted three times. And then, after about three and a half hours of edit warring, the Mqsobhan account returned from its four-year slumber and deleted the same parts of the article, again. The reason: "False information in the history section which are travestry of facts" that had been "edited by a miscreant who is trying to ransom money from the editor by posting and editing false claims." The account also proceeded to add some new links to the article in what an edit note described as "quakity news".
When the new Mqs2020 account was asked on its talk page whether there were any relations to the Mqsobhan account or to Dragon Group, the answer came from Mqsobhan: "Sorry no connection with mqs2020 or this company." Both accounts were indefinitely blocked as confirmed sockpuppets a few hours later.
The sockpuppeting block was not the end of the story. Five days afterwards, two new anonymous editors, both with IP addresses from Dhaka, again edited the article. One of the IP accounts modified a citation in the last paragraph of the history section, where a link to news website "bdnews24.com" was changed to "bdnew.24com", making it unusable. The linked source dealt with the firing of around 500 Dragon Group workers earlier this year. The Group says they were laid off due to COVID-19; the workers say they were fired for organising to demand unpaid wages.
The Mqsobhan account had already remarked on the linked article during its edits on December 3: "The article also falsely claims that there r disputes with workers but Dragon Group and Dragon sweater are not related entities." In a later reply to an email from The Signpost, the person behind both the Mqsobhan and Mqs2020 accounts said that the issues with Dragon Sweater workers had been resolved. They also said that Dragon Group was not a company, that it did not own Dragon Sweater, and demanded anonymity. The websites of Dragon Sweater and Dragon Sweater and Spinning clearly state that both are a part of Dragon Group.
"It is reprehensible that the owners of Dragon Group have engaged in such biased propaganda mongering against the workers movement on such a widely read and circulated platform as Wikipedia", a spokesperson for the Bangladesh Garment Workers Trade Union Centre (GWTUC), the union representing the fired workers, told The Signpost. "Once again Dragon Group has engaged in a campaign of misinformation against the ongoing labor struggles. The deletion of information must be seen in the context of pulling of local news articles related to the movement, and propaganda against international solidarity movements."
The other of the two IP accounts that edited the Dragon Group article concentrated on another part of the article: A mention of a 2015 inspection that had found "cables directly laid on floors without proper safety, insufficient exit capacity through exit doors and the absence of sprinklers" at Dragon Sweater was changed into one that had found "cables directly laid on floors without proper safety, sufficient exit capacity through exit doors and the installation of sprinklers" – without changing the source.
There is a history of major fires in Bangladesh's garment factories. The most notable was in 2012, when a Dhaka factory burned down, killing at least 117. The suspected cause were exposed wires, compounded by a lack of emergency exits. The inspection that found the exposed cables and others was done by the Bangladesh Accord, an eponymous organization formed by an agreement signed by Bangladeshi trade unions and international companies following the 2013 Rana Plaza garment factory collapse, in which 1,134 people lost their lives. And the 2015 inspection was not the only time they reported structural flaws in Dragon Group factories.
In September 2018, an Accord inspection found cracks on a Dragon Sweater factory ground floor column. One year later, the column had only been retrofitted up to the third of the required seven floors. Since then, Dragon Group has asked seven times for an extension to complete the work. While the Accord has refused each time to delay the deadline, verification that the required repairs have been completed is still reported as pending in December 2020. According to Accord reports, sprinkler systems have also not been fully installed and there are still issues with unprotected wiring. Dragon Group's deletion of the Accord inspection was in line with a repeated lack of enthusiasm on matters of working conditions and labor rights, the GWTUC spokesperson told The Signpost. "Labor violations are abundant over the years in the factories, and the pandemic has brought to the fore numerous health and social violations too."
The whole case was not surprising to Christie Miedema, who works with the Clean Clothes Campaign. According to her, the garment market is competitive, and brands and retailers hold the power to dictate terms to factories. Therefore, it would make sense for factories to try to influence the opinions of these international companies, for example through Wikipedia. "We have noticed in other instances, for example our own reporting, that some factory owners are very much on top of the information circulating about their factories and that they care a lot about their image", she told The Signpost.
The Dragon Group article has now been semi-protected until January 14. In the end, our response to the manipulated article looks pretty good. The first time around, it took more than a year until some of Mqsobhan's claims were marked as unsourced. By the same time in 2015/16, most of the added promotional material was already deleted; and in 2020, Mqsobhan et al were blocked after just a few hours. The article is still incomplete, especially for such a noteworthy company – but then again, it is a company in Bangladesh, one of the areas suffering most from a systemic lack of attention on the English Wikipedia.
The story also shows the potential relevance of our articles for real people, though. Miedema said she did not know on what information international companies based their decisions, but that having fewer controversies available through Google was of course in favor of a factory. But these "controversies" are not immaterial: exposed wires, lacking sprinklers and cracked columns have the potential to do real harm to many people. The deletion of these issues from a company's article in order to allow that company to act as if these issues did not exist can not be permitted.
That leads me to one thing that could probably be improved: The only version of the article in another language is in Bengali, which looks to be a translation of a 2018 version of the English article. That version still has much of the promotional material inserted by Mqsobhan in it. Since Dragon Group is comprised of Bangladeshi companies, it would probably be good for it to have an extensive Bengali article.
* ...And by "newest" we mean that it was promoted over a month before this article was published, but there's conventions for how you phrase things in these sorts of articles.
As the title implies, besides the article of that name being promoted, Christmas things had kept your humble editor away from the Signpost for very nearly too long, so most of this article was finished the day of publication. Next month, hopefully, this will be done a lot sooner.
Moving on, there's a certain oddity with having someone who does image restoration write the featured content report: You might recognise two images from last month's featured content – the featured article "French battleship Suffren", and the portrait of Keke Rosberg from the featured article "1982 Formula One World Championship" – have reappeared in the featured picture section this month.
Whilst this might lead to a certain repetitiveness of images, I can't quite bring myself to apologise.
That said, this month's report had a genuine challenge: Antisemitism is, obviously, wrong, but when the antisemitism is coming from Hitler, it can be important to understanding and contextualizing the Holocaust. As such, this issue features a lengthy quote by Hitler, and I hope that the section of the article quoted alongside it is enough to put it in its proper context. Comments below if you think there's anything we can do better, because I'm sure with the historians and scholars we have on Wikipedia, this won't be the first time the Signpost reports on such things.
In any case, I hope everyone had or will have had a wonderful holiday (whichever one you celebrate), and if you don't celebrate or don't have one in December, well, I hope you had a good month. 2021 approaches, and we can all hope that the vaccines coming through the pipeline bring an end as soon as possible to the pandemic that has made this year so awful. Until then, keep safe.
27 featured articles were promoted this period.
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If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
14 featured pictures were promoted this period.
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One featured topic was promoted this period, due to the percentage of featured articles within it increasing to the required number. It was originally promoted as a Good Topic through a nomination by Peacemaker67 in 2017.
12 featured lists were promoted this period.
In the last report of the year that went up in flames (next one is a 2020 recap!), there's still fallout of the election and Netflix's shows on queens (both British and chess), though every top article is an unrelated subject. And no pandemic in sight, as that vaccine can't come soon enough!
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Diego Maradona | 
|
5,362,266 | 
|
2020 already had the death of the father of the greatest Argentinian woman, and now the country's greatest sports hero is gone too. "El Pibe de Oro" was an idol for Boca Juniors, FC Barcelona and S.S.C. Napoli, and also single-handedly helped Argentina win the 1986 FIFA World Cup (the "handedly" part being true of one of those goals, which "Dieguito" claimed to have scored with "my head and the hand of God"), making him the second best footballer ever, enough to have his own religion! His death at the age of 60 certainly owed to decades of substance abuse, particularly cocaine. |
| 2 | Donald Trump |
|
2,732,729 | 
|
Ugh. Come on. Again?
I mean, what more is there to say? The guy lost. You all know who he is. The one light at the end of the tunnel of Trump's big mouth that we saw this week was that his administration finally agreed to let Biden begin transitioning into his role as POTUS, but other than that, same old stuff. |
| 3 | Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon |
|
2,006,553 | 
|
Few shows inspire people to research its subjects like the Netflix show The Crown. And we start off with four women, with only the protagonist herself, HM The Queen, not being dead in 2020. And most views actually came for her late sister (died in 2002 of a stroke), though Elizabeth surpassed her famed daughter-in-law (expect in the next seasons that fatal 1997 car crash – even if showrunner Peter Morgan already made a movie about it) and the UK's first female Prime Minister (also a stroke, in 2013). |
| 4 | Elizabeth II | 
|
1,940,571 | 
| |
| 5 | Diana, Princess of Wales |
|
1,726,210 | 
| |
| 6 | Margaret Thatcher | 
|
1,617,267 | 
| |
| 7 | The Queen's Gambit (miniseries) |
|
1,355,752 | .jpg)
|
It's also on Netflix and has a royal title, but has no aristocrats, only chess! |
| 8 | Charles, Prince of Wales |
|
1,350,155 | 
|
Back to The Crown, only this time with men, #4's first born (played by Josh O'Connor), and her husband (Tobias Menzies). |
| 9 | Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh |
|
1,126,458 | 
| |
| 10 | Tony Blinken | 
|
994,625 | 
|
After serving in the position directly under the Secretary of State from 2015 to 2017, Mr. Blinken has risen exactly one rank to become the United States Secretary of State under 46. Yippee!
Oddly enough, this page is actually a redirect to the main page for the next United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, which shows up all the way down at number 338 on the list this week. Must be pretty popular for so many people to personally know him as Tony. Maybe the Tonez knows so many people because of his musical alter ego, ABlinken... no, seriously, that's not a joke! |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elliot Page |
|
5,205,375 | 
|
The Academy Award for Best Actress nomination earned by Juno is now held by an actor, Elliot (né Ellen) Page, who has announced that he is transgender. Just hope this also doesn't change the gender of Vanya/Number 7, because The Umbrella Academy is complicated enough as is. |
| 2 | Donald Trump |
|
1,374,135 | .jpg)
|
Trump hasn't had a personal history with #1, unlike his biggest fan, who most of Brazil if not the world hopes will also be defeated in an election, so his high views are probably still propelled by how he's not helping the presidential transition. |
| 3 | Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon |
|
1,360,816 | _(cropped).jpg)
|
In the exact same spot as last week, two royal siblings showcased in The Crown. |
| 4 | Elizabeth II |
|
1,349,683 | ||
| 5 | The Undoing (miniseries) | 
|
1,185,175 | _(cropped).jpg)
|
HBO finished off this mystery miniseries starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. |
| 6 | Jake Paul |
|
1,162,541 | 
|
Boxing might have taken a backseat to MMA in recent years, but still has big events that bring in views every now and then. Weirdly enough, one such moment was this YouTuber beating up an athlete of another sport as the opening card for two old champions duking it out. |
| 7 | Emma Portner |
|
1,130,091 | .jpg)
|
#1's wife, a dancer and choreographer who has supported the Ellen-to-Elliot announcement. |
| 8 | The Queen's Gambit (miniseries) |
|
1,114,652 |
|
After weeks seeing this Netflix show high on the report, this here writer finally gave it a shot, and was highly enthralled by the story of a weird girl who becomes addicted to chess – which is filmed in a way that seems a high-octane sport instead of two people moving wooden pieces in a board – and also tranquilizers, booze and a few other recreative substances. |
| 9 | Diego Maradona |
|
1,096,747 | 
|
To mourn this football legend, some have used this song, which even had the adequacy that some people mistook Maradona for Madonna: Don't Cry for Me, Argentina The truth is I never left you All through my wild days My mad existence I kept my promise Don't keep your distance |
| 10 | Diana, Princess of Wales |
|
937,653 | 
|
The ever-popular "People's Princess" appears in The Crown, which doesn't hide some of her hardships, such as eating disorders and knowing Prince Charles wasn't entirely over his ex. |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cyberpunk 2077 |
|
1,596,154 | _(cropped).jpg) |
TRIPLE A GAME was released this week, and it was the topic on everyone's mind. While there was plenty of hype – partially based on HOLLYWOOD ACTOR's (pictured) appearance – players found that the game didn't reach their expectations. There've been plenty of reports of DEVELOPER forcing its workers "crunch", which might've caused a few bugs to make their way through.
|
| 2 | Selena |
|
1,230,925 | 
|
Netflix, powering through the pandemic, made a biopic of this iconic Texicana singer. It hasn't been received well, but at least the family think actress Christian Serratos (she played the quirky friend that wasn't Anna Kendrick in Twilight) did a good job. |
| 3 | Tom Lister Jr. |
|
1,225,322 | .jpg)
|
"Tiny" Lister, an actor (Friday, The Fifth Element) and wrestler ("Zeus," "Z-Gangsta") passed away on December 10. He'd recovered from a bout of COVID-19 earlier in the year, but he may have contracted it a second time. |
| 4 | Elizabeth II |
|
1,137,458 | 
|
She had a lovely phone conversation with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern this week. Hey, one Commonwealth leader is competent. There's also The Crown. |
| 5 | Donald Trump |
|
1,089,816 | .jpg)
|
Donald Trump did a very good job as president of the United States – such a good job that he lost re-election a month ago. While the Electoral College is set to vote on December 14, Republicans had a plan: just get Texas to sue Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan, invalidating their electoral votes. Texas v. Pennsylvania was rejected for lack of standing, but Trump still refuses to concede. |
| 6 | Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon |
|
1,014,231 | _5.jpg)
|
Seeing Helena Bonham Carter portray #4's late sister in The Crown is still a reason to bring viewers to her page. |
| 7 | The Queen's Gambit (miniseries) |
|
884,099 | 
|
Unfortunately not a ploy to replace Johnson. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2020 | 
|
828,311 | .jpg) |
To compensate a lack of Diana in this week's Top 10:[a] "Now you belong to heaven And the stars spell out your name" |
| 9 | Barbara Windsor |
|
751,841 | .JPG)
|
One of the preeminent stage actresses of the 1960s, she won a Tony in her only U.S. role. Despite having the name Windsor she's not part of the Royal Family, and is best known for her roles as an East End girl. Gritty social realism plays by Joan Littlewood and television soap EastEnders were her stomping ground for many years, split apart by a long-running gig in the classic British comedy Carry On films and affairs with two of the Krays before she knew they were running the London mafia. She died on December 10, shortly after being moved to a care home. Go on, Babs, wot a life. |
| 10 | Chuck Yeager |
|
734,641 | .jpg)
|
Thanks to The Right Stuff, I know he's first man to break the speed of sound. And 73 years after that flight, Yeager died at the age of 97. |
.png)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Mandalorian |
|
978,727 | 
|
The Baby Yoda show premiered its season finale on December 18. A trio of sibling series were announced on December 10: The Acolyte, Ahsoka, and Rangers of the New Republic – which will culminate in some sort of "climactic story event." |
| 2 | Cyberpunk 2077 |
|
958,425 | 
|
Cyberpunk 2077 has been pulled from the PlayStation Store, and Sony is issuing refunds. Last-gen console versions of the game were not sent out to reviewers prior to release, and it turned out there was a simple reason for it: they weren't done. |
| 3 | Deaths in 2020 |
|
829,478 | 
|
On my deathbed, I will pray to the gods and the angels Like a pagan, to anyone who will take me to heaven... |
| 4 | Elizabeth II |
|
784,571 | 
|
Season four of The Crown premiered over a month ago, but its characters continue to chart. Next week, she'll have another reason to be on here – the Royal Christmas Message. |
| 5 | Timothée Chalamet |
|
781,296 | 
|
Chalamet hosted Saturday Night Live on December 12. He and Pete Davidson appeared in a sketch as white rappers singing a song called "Yeet," which has apparently gone viral on TikTok. |
| 6 | The Queen's Gambit (miniseries) |
|
721,020 | 
|
It's sort of like a sports biopic, except the sport is moving pieces on a board and the subject never existed. This one actually premiered two months ago and is still in the top 10, which is especially impressive when compared to the dozen or so original series that premiered in that time period. |
| 7 | Peter Sutcliffe |
|
712,482 | 
|
The Yorkshire Ripper passed away from COVID-19 complications on November 13, but it seems like most of the readers came from a Netflix docuseries released this month. |
| 8 | Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon |
|
690,541 | 
|
Elizabeth II's late sister is still getting that Crown bump. |
| 9 | Richard Jewell |
|
683,943 | 
|
Manhunt: Deadly Games made its way onto Netflix this past week, telling the story of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. Jewell was a security guard at the park, alerted authorities about the bomb, and was soon labelled as the FBI's top suspect – despite the bombings actually being carried out by Rudolph. |
| 10 | Eric Rudolph |
|
660,290 |
Election Day in the United States was a critical moment for the country, with impacts that will extend well beyond one election cycle. For many Americans, it was an anxiety-inducing event. While voters waited – and waited – for the results to come in, Wikipedia editors across the globe stood ready.
As one of the world’s most trusted resources for knowledge, it's essential that Wikipedia provide its users with reliable information. In 2020, a high-stakes election and a deadly pandemic were just two of the many reasons that made that mission more important than ever.
That's why the Wikimedia Foundation took significant steps to protect Wikipedia from election-related disinformation. For the first time, a disinformation task force worked closely with Wikipedia's volunteer editors to identify potential information attacks targeting the integrity of the election before they could spread.
Wikipedia’s biggest worry wasn't vandalism – insults or pranks directed at candidates or biased campaign editing, as those types of changes are typically caught and reverted quickly. We were more concerned about the sort of activity that would disrupt the elections – voter suppression tactics affecting information about polling station locations or other topics that could undermine confidence in the facts.
In the end, Wikipedia dealt with only a small number of events relating to election influence activities; neither the Foundation's task force members or Wikipedia's admins saw evidence of large-scale state-sponsored disinformation.
Wikipedia's editorial standards played a major role in keeping the platform free of disinformation during the U.S. elections. Editors draw from accurate and verifiable sources – not the latest breaking news, or statements on social media. And they collaborate so that information on Wikipedia reflects multiple editors' areas of expertise.
For instance, the community kept a close eye on the Wikipedia entry for Benford's law, a statistical theory that was used to drive false allegations of voter fraud. Wikipedia’s community of mathematicians coordinated with political editors to make sure the Benford's Law article wasn't used to drive disinformation that would have undermined confidence in the election results.
This sort of interdisciplinary collaboration is possible because of Wikipedia's uniquely collective nature. Users see only the latest versions of articles, and they can investigate how pages have changed over time. That transparency and consistency makes Wikipedia special – there are no different timelines or feeds here. Ads and algorithms don't influence what users see, either.
The U.S. elections may be over, but the work doesn't end here. In the coming weeks, our task force will conduct a deeper analysis with community editors to learn more about what worked well and what didn't, to inform practices for similar events in the future.
The solutions are not simple – they'll require an approach that considers the entire ecosystem of knowledge – from education, to journalistic practice, to platform response. We're committed to doing our part to protect the integrity of information on the Wikimedia projects, and to support communities everywhere who want to share in the sum of all knowledge.
To help meet this goal, we hope to invest in resources that we can share with international Wikipedia communities that will help mitigate future disinformation risks on the sites. We're also looking to bring together administrators from different language Wikipedias for a global forum on disinformation. Together, we aim to build more tools to support our volunteer editors, and to combat disinformation.
As always, convening and supporting the global Wikimedia movement will be at the heart of how we work. Together with editing communities, we'll be looking to develop and refine data-driven tools to support the identification and response to disinformation.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
A conference paper titled "Modeling Deliberative Argumentation Strategies on Wikipedia"[1] presents the result of analyzing "the entire set of about six million discussions from all English Wikipedia talk pages".
The authors parsed each thread "to identify its structural components, such as turns [i.e. individual comments], users, and time stamps." The six million talk page sections are found to contain 20 million turns. Each turn is labeled with "four types of metadata [...]: the user tag, a shortcut, an in-line template, and links." The result has been published as the "Webis-WikiDiscussions-18" corpus. Interestingly, only "half of the turns are written by registered users" (i.e. anonymous users have contributed the other half of talk page comments).
With "user tag", the authors refer to a bolded word that many comments start with (but by no means all - tags were found in only 100,000 of the 20 million turns), say "Disagree", "Support", or "Conclusion". They are found to fall into 32 clusters, which "can be grouped into six categories that we see as ‘discourse acts’": Socializing, Providing evidence, Enhancing the understanding, Recommending an act, Asking a question, and Finalizing the discussion.
Separately, the authors "identified three further categories based on the user tags, which we see as relevant to ‘argumentation theory’. Each represents a relation between the turn and the topic of discussion or between the turn and another turn." These are Support, attack (e.g. a comment that starts with a bolded "Disagree ...") and neutral. It is not entirely clear to this reviewer whether the study tries to use indentation levels to identify the turn that is being responded to (adjacency pairs). A previous study had found that wrongly indented comments are very common on Wikipedia talk pages.
"Shortcut" means a shortened link to e.g. a policy or guideline (say WP:V for Wikipedia:Verifiability). Around 7000 different shortcuts were found in the around 400,000 (of 20 million) instances that used them. The authors derive four categories from them, which they relate to framing theory: Writing quality, Verifiability and factual accuracy, Neutral point of view, and Dialogue management.
The paper explains these categories with several real-life examples (Figure 1, several of them adapted from this discussion on whether to merge the two articles Natural language processing and Computational Linguistics). E.g. the comment "Thanks for your answer" is classified as a Socializing act, with a Neutral relation, and in the Dialogue management frame.
The researchers proceed to generate a corpus of around 200,000 turns with corresponding categories (published as the "Webis-WikiDebate-18" corpus). They use it to train classifiers that try to predict a comment's categories based on its text (via commonly used text features such as word or n-gram frequencies, or "the number of characters, syllables, tokens, phrases, and sentences in a turn").
As "the ultimate goal of our research", the authors envisage a "tool [that] recommend[s] the best possible moves according to an effective strategy". They note that this will require further work to "study how to distinguish effective from ineffective discussions based on our model as well as how to learn from the strategies used in successful discussions, in order to predict the best next deliberative move in an ongoing discussion."
The authors argue that previous models of Wikipedia talk page discussions (by Ferschke et al. - cf. our previous coverage: "Understanding collaboration-related dialog in Simple English Wikipedia" - and Viegas et al.) "obtain low coverage and/or are over-abstracted". Still, "the three classifiers [constructed in the present paper] achieved results that are comparable to the results of previous methods".
The paper also provides data on the frequency of categories as labeled in their corpus, which presumably is indicative (if not perfectly representative) of their prevalence in the entire six million Wikipedia discussions. For example, the most widely used frame is about verifiability and factual accuracy, followed by Neutral point of view and dialogue management, with writing quality being the least frequent one. (However, the precision of the labeling - as evaluated by an expert - varied, e.g. reaching only 0.51 for the "writing quality" category but 0.89 for "Verifiability and factual accuracy".)
| Dimension | Category | Turns |
|---|---|---|
| Discourse act | Socializing | 83 |
| Providing evidence | 781 | |
| Enhancing the understanding | 671 | |
| Recommending an act | 137 | |
| Asking a question | 106 | |
| Finalizing the discussion | 622 | |
| Argumentative relation | Support | 2895 |
| Neutral | 1937 | |
| Attack | 2605 | |
| Frame | Writing quality | 19893 |
| Verifiability and factual ac. | 72049 | |
| Neutral point of view | 60007 | |
| Dialogue management | 30372 |
(excerpt from Table 3 in the paper)
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
From the abstract:[2]
"past [efforts to use website traffic data to predict elections] have often overlooked the interaction between conventional election variables and information-seeking behaviour patterns. In this work, we aim to unify traditional and novel methodology by considering how information retrieval differs between incumbent and challenger campaigns, as well as the effect of perceived candidate viability and media coverage on Wikipedia pageviews predictive ability. In order to test our hypotheses, we use election data from United States Congressional (Senate and House) elections between 2016 and 2018. We demonstrate that Wikipedia data, as a proxy for information-seeking behaviour patterns, is particularly useful for predicting the success of well-funded challengers who are relatively less covered in the media."
In an accompanying blog post, published on the day of the 2020 United States Senate elections, the authors use their model to forecast these elections: "Of the 35 seats up for re-election, we predict 16 Democrats and 19 Republican candidates to win".
From the abstract:[3]
"... because traditional poll-based predictions are inherently undermined by self-reporting biases and the intention-behavior disconnect, we can expect that information-seeking trends on widely used social media [... can help correct for some of this error and explain unique, additional variance in election results. [... We use] Wikipedia pageviews along with polling data in a synthesized model based on the results of the 2008, 2010, and 2012 US Senate general elections. Results show that Wikipedia pageviews data significantly add to the ability of poll- and fundamentals-based projections to predict election results up to 28 weeks prior to Election Day, and benefit predictions most at those early points, when poll-based predictions are weakest."
From the abstract:[4]
"This chapter aims to determine if social media, Internet traffic [including Wikipedia pageviews], and traditional media data can be used to predict elections by searching for patterns between the data and poll numbers for 2016 US Republican and Democratic primaries. The results suggest that machine learning models with linear regression can produce quite accurate predictions ..."
"Tables in Wikipedia articles contain a wealth of knowledge that would be useful for many applications if it were structured in a more coherent, queryable form. An important problem is that many of such tables contain the same type of knowledge, but have different layouts and/or schemata. Moreover, some tables refer to entities that we can link to Knowledge Bases (KBs), while others do not. Finally, some tables express entity-attribute relations, while others [e.g. the chart positions table at Commodores_(album)#Singles] contain more complex n-ary relations. We propose a novel knowledge extraction technique that tackles these problems. [...] Our experiments over 1.5M Wikipedia tables show that our clustering can group many semantically similar tables. This leads to the extraction of many novel n-ary relations."
The authors have published the code of their "takco" system, and note that "you can use it to extend Wikidata with information from Wikipedia tables."
From the abstract of this short conference paper[6] (which shares its title with the lead author's master's thesis[7]):
"Knowledge Graph Augmentation is the task of adding missing facts to an incomplete knowledge graph to improve its effectiveness in applications such as web search and question answering. State-of-the-art methods rely on information extraction from running text, leaving rich sources of facts such as tables behind. We help close this gap with a neural method that uses contextual information surrounding a table in a Wikipedia article to extract relations between entities appearing in the same row of a table or between the entity of said article and entities appearing in the table."
Related blog post by one of the authors: "Neural Relation Extraction on Wikipedia Tables"
From the abstract[8] of this preprint by four researchers from IBM Research's AI division:
"what makes a term worthy of entering this edifice of knowledge, and having a page of its own in Wikipedia? To what extent is this a natural product of on-going human discourse and discussion rather than an idiosyncratic choice of Wikipedia editors? Specifically, we aim to identify such 'wiki-worthy' terms in a massive news corpus, and see if this can be done with no, or minimal, dependency on actual Wikipedia entries. We suggest a five-step pipeline for doing so, providing baseline results for all five, and the relevant datasets for benchmarking them."
From the abstract[9] (see also a related non-paywalled preprint[10]):
"... we design a mobile system that can automatically recognise sites of interest and project relevant information to a user that navigates the city [somewhat similar to Google Lens]. We build a collection of notable sites using Wikipedia and then exploit online services such as Google Images and Flickr to collect large collections of crowd-sourced imagery describing those sites. These images are then used to train minimal deep learning architectures that can be effectively deployed to dedicated applications on mobile devices. [...] We show how curating the training data through the application of a class-specific image de-noising method and the incorporation of information such as user location, orientation and attention patterns can allow for significant improvement in classification accuracy."
The authors have published an iOS implementation of their app ("Aurama") on GitHub; sadly without releasing the code under a free license.
From the abstract:[11]
"The image CropTool allows users to crop images present on Wikimedia Commons without leaving the Wikimedia family of sites within a web environment. We implemented the same workflow for videos with the VideoCutTool. [...] This paper talks about the features of VideoCutTool and its implementation."
See also a Google Summer of Code report about the same project.
From this paper[12] about a 2013 course project that involved e.g. the creation of the article Trace DeMeyer:
"Wikipedia changes to reflect not only changing facts, like shifting national borders; it has the potential, at least, to reflect shifting intellectual paradigms. In this respect, wikis are not unlike oral traditions, which in Native communities still carry enormous weight, even—interestingly—when it comes to preserving and transmitting literary history. There are writers who are revered within their tribes and beyond [...] and yet they have yet to attract attention from university-based scholars or mainstream publishers. Wikipedia offers one space in which writers with the skills, access and time can mediate between Native authors and powerful editors to improve the representation of Native culture and history. When I call this an exercise in student 'accountability,' [...] I mean our accountability to indigenous people’s own ideas of 'notability' and value: that we vet projects with them beforehand, that we consult actively with them as we try to represent their point of view, and perhaps even [...] that we decline to publish if the work doesn’t meet with their approval."
Author's copy, code and data
 | This page in a nutshell: Some subjects may seem notable because they are perceived as being important. But without meeting Wikipedia's inclusion criteria, they are not notable. |
Subjective importance is when a subject is perceived as being notable by seeming important or appearing to stand out to a person or group of people. A common misconception about notability is that importance or uniqueness equals notability. But some things that are assumed to be important lack sources that are required by Wikipedia in order to meet the general notability guidelines or other inclusion criteria. Therefore, they are not included.
A subject may be the biggest, the best, or the most well-known of something. It may be possible on this basis to argue that it should obviously be included. But without a single reliable source to verify its existence or accuracy, there is no way it can be included.
For example, a high school basketball player may be the best on their team. A pizza shop may serve the most popular pizza in town. A church may be the oldest place of worship in the region. These facts may be well known to those most familiar with these subjects. But there may be nothing published about any of this that can be used as sources for the basis of an article.
Also, certain factors that are viewed as respectable by society are likewise not automatic grounds for notability. The world has many physicians who have studied hard and save lives. But most of these physicians are relatively unheard of in published sources and are not worthy of articles. Likewise, the principal of a school or the founder of a club do not get automatic articles for their achievements.
There are many reasons why one may believe something is notable when they are not. In many cases, these have been used in arguments to keep an article proposed for deletion, and they sometimes have worked.
Just because it's old, that doesn't mean it's notable.
Age is just a number, and numbers are not used to judge notability on Wikipedia. Everything and everyone has an age, and with each passing day, that age is increased by one day. That age will continue to increase as long as the person is alive, or the object still exists. At what time will that person or object be ready for an article?
If a structure that is still standing is thousands of years old, and there is a name put to it, it is likely that there will be multiple independent reliable sources ("MIRS"), about it, though these must be provided in order for the article to be written. The same goes if it has been verified to be the oldest example in existence. But there cannot possibly be an article about every living tortoise or tree on planet earth.
The older something is, the more difficult published sources can be to locate. Sources for subjects that existed before the days of the internet are more likely to be offline. While there is no requirement that sources be available online, they must be verifiable. The more clearly you cite an offline source, the less likely it is to be challenged. Remember, the burden is on the editor adding the material to provide sufficient sources.
There are many things that have reached the status of one of the above examples, yet they have never been covered in any published source, and they are nothing more than word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is not only insufficient for Wikipedia notability, but it may also be original research.
There are sites, such as Urban Dictionary, that more readily accept entries without proof, taking the word of the submitter as enough to make it plausible. This, in theory, can allow anyone to pass off their own creation as something long in existence. The main point of the notability guideline is to provide objective criteria for inclusion rather than subjective criteria such as importance which depend on an individual's perspective on the subject.
There are many levels of fame. These include:
But notability is not temporary. What this means is that once a topic has been the subject of "significant coverage" in accordance with the general notability guideline, it does not need to have ongoing coverage, but brief coverage that ceases quickly may not render a subject notable. The one event guideline in particular discourages standalone articles for those who only received this brief coverage.
Regardless of the degree of fame, a living person or even a deceased person may only have an article about themselves if they meet notability guidelines for biographies. Brief public exposure or word-of-mouth only fame does not make one notable.
It is nice to have such talent. But all too often, one's talent or greatness is a matter of personal taste. Even when measured by statistics (such as the number of home runs one has hit) and recorded, it means nothing in the way of notability unless it gets published. Furthermore, every single person in any occupation at all could always simply claim to have talent, whether they've actually achieved anything encyclopedically noteworthy or not — however, Wikipedia's inclusion standards are not based on what's been claimed about a person or group, but on what can be reliably sourced as true about a person or group.
And even if a statistic is measurable by numbers, being a great feat is still a point-of-view issue. A high school sports star may not be able to score once at a professional level. A child prodigy may not grow up to be very successful. This is just another reason why sources must continue to rule over so-called "talent."
You see how ridiculous this may sound. Believe it or not, arguments similar to these have been made in AfD debates, sometimes by a majority of participants, favoring keeping the article, and in many cases, resulting in the articles being kept. But that does not make the topic encyclopedic.
Notability is not about being the biggest, the best, or the only of something. Likewise, not fitting this description does not make something not notable. Notability is about having published, non-trivial information (i.e., more than a mere mention) in multiple sources independent of the subject, and the article itself not being the first place to provide the information. No matter what, you can combine all the variables you would like, and then find something unique about every person, every business, every idea.
Certain positions and titles in front of a person's name are a sign of having really accomplished something. Being known as "Dr. John Doe" or "The Reverend John Doe" or "John Doe, Attorney at Law" sounds a lot nicer than simply being called "John Doe." It is quite deserving too. Yet, there are plenty of people out there in these positions who have never received the coverage needed to be given a Wikipedia article. In fact, a very small percentage of those in such positions have accomplished just that.
It may seem strange that at the same time, so many people who have not come close to the above achievements qualify for having articles. Some people have articles for writing one short book, acting in one film, or publishing one song. Some people have articles for playing briefly on a professional sports team. Some people have earned themselves articles just for being victims of crime, or even stranger when you come to think of it, committing the crimes themselves.
While this may seem so unfair, this does not mean a person who has achieved a high academic credential in their field is unimportant, insignificant, or is being dishonored. It is just that getting a Wikipedia article–meeting WP:N–is based on information that has been published in reliable sources, and some fields tend to be better covered by reliable sources than others. Entire books will be written on relatively minor film actors or TV actresses, while professors or lawyers who have had significant careers may only merit a few articles in local newspapers.
It is a given. Wikipedia is not an advertising service. If you've reached this page, you probably know this by now. But the absence of seeking profit is not a free pass to having an article.
For starters, in case you have not noticed, Wikipedia does allow articles about for-profit companies, provided that they meet notability guidelines. Wikipedia has thousands of articles on for-profit companies, ranging from international corporations that are household vocabulary (e.g. Wal-Mart), to some local businesses operating a single location known mostly to those in the region (such as the Hersheypark).
Likewise, an entity that is not out there to make a profit, and is funded by taxes or private donations, or does not operate using money at all, can be excluded if it fails to meet Wikipedia's general notability guidelines.
One thing to be aware of is that many services operated by a national, state/provincial, or municipal government are not 100% tax-funded and do indeed solicit income via advertising, just like a for-profit corporation. For example, the United States Postal Service, as well as selling its stamps, uses televised advertising to make their offerings known. Many government-operated lotteries are run more like businesses. And political candidates are looking for donations for their campaigns, not to mention, votes. This does not exclude them from having articles, but still, all inclusion and citation guidelines must be carefully met.
You also cannot forget that the purpose of many non-profit organizations is to support some partisan, often controversial cause (e.g. NARAL Pro-Choice America, PETA). This does not rule out their ability to have articles, as many such organizations are indeed worthy of them. But it requires that any such article that is written must be based on neutral, factual information, and does not promote or oppose the cause.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary. There are many subjects that are commonplace in our lives. But the most that can be said about them is a simple definition, nothing more, no matter how hard you search. In such a case, rather than creating an article, it is preferable to link from articles that give important mention on the subect with the following: [[wikt:subject name]]. If the subject is the title of a disambiguation page, a link to the wiktionary entry can be obtained by adding {{wiktionary|subjectname}} to the top. If there is only one other use, this can be accomplished through a hatnote of {{see wiktionary|subjectname}}.
For example, the title "nice" is used for the French city Nice. On the page Nice (disambiguation), there is such a link to the word "nice," which includes the English adjective.
Entry of What goes around comes around leads to the album by Waylon Jennings. At the top, using {{see wiktionary}}, is a hatnote that says For a definition of the phrase "what goes around comes around", see the Wiktionary entry {{wikt:what goes around comes around}}.
If one more piece of sourceable information besides the very basic definition can be included, even if the article is still a stub, it is worthy of inclusion.
2020 was a year of torturous tragedy, seemingly drawn out in order to inflict the most pain. It was also a year of potential triumph. But for Wikipedia, much of it was a story of overcoming adversity. This article draws from stories in The Signpost, the mainstream press, and from Wikipedia itself to describe Wikipedia's experience of 2020.
The year began in triumph as the English-language Wikipedia celebrated its 6 millionth article on January 23. While it's impossible to determine exactly which article was the 6 millionth, Maria Elise Turner Lauder, created by Rosiestep, was chosen by consensus to symbolize the achievement. Rosie's status as an internet icon was confirmed and extended. The article, already a hefty 483 words by the end of the 23rd, has now almost doubled in size to 845 words. The English Wikipedia continues to grow and now has 6,216,138 articles.
Just eight days before the six millionth article, Wikipedia celebrated its 19th birthday. Nineteen days from now, we'll be celebrating our 20th birthday.
But in early January the painful future had already appeared. The article on the Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign was created in February 2017 and Black Lives Matter had been created in 2015. The COVID-19 pandemic, then known as the 2019-2020 China pneumonia outbreak, was created on January 5, 2020.
By the week of January 26 to February 1 the article on the coronavirus was already the second most-viewed article on the English Wikipedia, and 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, as the COVID-19 pandemic article was known by then, was the fourth most viewed.
The March 1 issue of The Signpost marks the end of the pre-pandemic days, as the World Health Organization issued its statement that the outbreak was a pandemic on March 11. Perhaps the most joyful story in the issue was the announcement by the Smithsonian Institution that they were releasing 2.8 million high quality photographs into the public domain. Yet in the same "In the media" article, we reviewed Omer Benjakob's amazingly prescient February 9 article on how "On Wikipedia, a fight is raging over coronavirus disinformation". Newer press articles on the quality and importance of Wikipedia's coverage of the pandemic were repeated dozens of times over the next several months. It still bears repeating however – thank you to all those Wikipedia editors who contributed to dozens of articles in many languages about the pandemic.
By our March 29 issue, the pandemic was essentially The only thing that matters in the world. Seven stories in that issue covered the pandemic. In the "News from the WMF" column WMF CEO Katherine Maher explained that Amid COVID-19, Wikimedia Foundation offers full pay for reduced hours, mobilizes all staff to work remote, and waives sick time.
Only five COVID-19 stories appeared in the April issue, and there was even space for Denny Vrandečić to propose a new Wikipedia project, a wiki for functions then known as Wikilambda, which has now been approved by the Board of Trustees and recently renamed "Wikifunctions".
By May politics had started to heat up. Atsme opined in an Op-ed that mainstream news media were leading our editors astray, away from our bedrock position of sticking with a neutral point of view, but by late November Newslinger was opining that Wikipedians were simply following what reliable sources were saying, and rejecting non-reliable sources.
The article on the killing of George Floyd was created on May 26, the day after the killing and the first mention of it in The Signpost was five days later. Like many people, we were caught unaware of the depth of the problem of violence by the police against minorities.
By June the WMF had issued a statement of principle We stand for racial justice. WikiProject Black Lives Matter had been organized and interviewed by The Signpost and we also published a photo essay about the following protests, After the killing of George Floyd.
Problems with a couple of the smaller Wikipedia projects showed up in August with the Scots Wikipedia and in September with the Malagasy Wiktionary. The main administrator on the Scots Wikipedia turns out to have very limited knowledge of the Scots language. A clean-up project was started almost immediately. The Malagasy Wiktionary had 6,103,961 entries, mostly automatically translated by a bot. The cleanup there has now reduced the number of entries to less than 2,000,000.
Early November's issue brought political news, including disinformation from the Trump campaign that said Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was promoting an assassination plot against President Trump. Wikipedia's efforts to stop disinformation were examined in Noam Cohen’s Wired article. Other press stories wondered why it took so long for Theresa Greenfield, the Democratic candidate for Iowa's senate seat to have an article on Wikipedia.
By late November The Signpost reviewed the election news. Voters and COVID-19 scientists had been faithfully served by Wikipedia articles. There have been lots of challenges this year, but Wikipedians should be proud at how well we've met them.
 |
|
A man walks down the street |
During Christmastide you can see them, coming through the mail slot with their cards, waiting patiently on the tops of trees, helping to sell knick-knacks in advertisements. You might even see them on a can of vegetables, "Peas on Earth, Goodwill to All".
But wait a few weeks and you'll see them in their normal abodes. Peek through the windows of a church, look up at the roof, check out the weathervane. They're in cemeteries, on bridges, helping children. Angels in the architecture. They're everywhere.
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George Bailey: Look, I think maybe you better not mention |
May the better angels of our nature always appear when we need them. Happy holidays to all!
'Twas the night before Wikimas, when all through the Teahouse
Not an editor was stirring, not even a mouse.
The references had been inserted by users with care,
In hopes that St. Jimbo[who?] soon would be there.
Most editors were nestled all snug by their beds,
While visions of new articles danced in their heads.
When out from a keyboard there arose such a clatter
I sprang to my screen to see what was the matter.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
but a question on sources and how to use them well here.
More rapid than eagles these questioners came,
And the hosts from the Teahouse welcomed each one by name.
"Now, em Dasher! Now, Images!
Now, Actrial! Now, Patrolled!
On, Users! On, IPs!
On, Young and on, Old!
To the top of each article, be it long, short or tall,
Now, type away, type away, type away all!"[This quote needs a citation]
As dry words that before an old dictionary fly,
when they meet with a synonym, mount to the sky,[citation needed]
So, onto these articles the edits they flew,
With a sleigh full of facts, and citations, too.
And then in a twinkling, I saw on the page
Our wiki-creator: a man of great age.
As I checked it on Commons and was turning around,
Down my router St. Jimbo came in with a bound.
Over 6 million articles he had flung on his back,
And he looked like most users with the editing knack.
His eyes – how they twinkled! slightly square – but how merry!
Too much editing, folks, had turned his nose red like a cherry![medical citation needed]
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.[citation needed]
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his editing,
And filled bare urls; did sourcing and crediting
And confirming notability with a tap on his nose,
And pressing "Publish changes", back up my modem he rose.
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew, leaving me to my epistle.[anachronism]
But I heard him exclaim, 'ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Editing to all, and to all users a good night!"
With grudging acknowledgement to Clement C. Moore, 1823.
