You've got two more days – until 23:59 UTC August 31 – to cast your vote for the new community-elected Board of Trustee members. The start of the election period was delayed due to technical reasons for 14 days to August 18.
To vote, follow the link on meta:Wikimedia Foundation elections/2021/Voting. In the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system you need to rank the candidates. Rank your favorite candidate 1, your 2nd favorite 2, and so forth, up to your 19th favourite (as there are 20 candidates). You only have to rank as many candidates as you want; the rest are treated as being equally unpreferred by you. You can't rank a candidate more than once, and you can't skip a ranking – for instance, you can't specify a 2nd-preferred candidate and a 4th-preferred candidate, leaving your third preference blank.
You'll likely want to rank at least four candidates, since that's the number of open seats on the board. The STV method being used for this election is designed to consider your preferences in order from most-preferred to least. If your favourite candidate isn't seated, your vote is transferred to your next favourite. In addition, once a candidate you voted for has enough votes to guarantee finishing in the top four (that is, has reached quota), a percentage of your vote is transferred to your next preferred choice. (See Meek STV Explained for more details.) -S, I
Last October Portuguese-language Wikipedians voted to require that editors register before editing. "IP editing" was effectively banned with the goal of reducing vandalism and improving the editing experience. The Wikimedia Foundation has been following the impact of the ban closely and issued its report last month. They "found no significant negative impact" on the health of the community and several positive impacts.[1] [2]
New user account registrations and the number of active editors on ptWiki have increased. Vandalism is down as indicated by a decline in the number of reverts. Also administrator actions for page protections and blocks are down over 70%. User retention shows no trend.
The impact on the number of edits is unclear. The total number of edits has decreased but the decline is at least partially explained by decreases in reverts and bot edits. Without these edits being included in the data, year-on-year edits declined during the first six months of the study period, but increased during the final three months.
Editor comments were requested and indicated that 14 editors supported the ban, four opposed it, and one was neutral. The report recommends that ptWiki be allowed to continue the IP editing ban for now, along with continued data collection and study. Two more Wikipedia projects might be allowed to conduct "similar experiments" but "the experience of a single wiki should not be used as decisive evidence." -S
Editors are invited to nominate themselves until September 14th for a spot on a drafting committee. As noted on the meta page, "the Movement Charter defines the roles and responsibilities for all in the Wikimedia Movement. It will be a shared framework for working together toward the Strategic Direction." In other words, if you want to shape Wikipedia's Future by using lots of Nouns that are capitalized in the Middle of Sentences, this is your chance! Polish up your word choice skills in a way that really matters, rather than wasting your inner bureaucrat on your actual job. Only a few more days to get your name in there, in all seriousness, so take a look and see if you can volunteer your time to help out the movement. – G
A discussion was held at User talk:Jimbo Wales concerning the resolution to a back-end performance issue and its impact on Russian Wikinews (which is also available in the English language). According to WMF staff, dynamic page lists (DPL) had to be disabled to preserve several S3-hosted wikis. The related Phabricator ticket shows a list of hosts that does not include English Wikipedia but does include a number of related projects including English Wikinews, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks.
More technical details are available at wikitech:Incident documentation/2021-07-26 ruwikinews DynamicPageList. – B
Is the English Wikipedia's paid-editing disclosure policy fully signed off by the community? One commenter at the talkpage (linked from WP:Village Pump (policy)) doesn't think so: I don't think the way forward is a Schrödinger's cat-like state where the page is a policy in minds of some, not in the minds of others, and enforced as a "Wikipedia policy with legal considerations" regardless due to the banner at the top. It's either a policy or it isn't.
The Signpost notes that an RfC on new disclosure requirements for freelance paid editors was closed on November 19 as having resulted in consensus to add language about mandatory disclosure of paid editing accounts in advertising and in communications directly to clients. – B
The backlog at WP:Articles for creation went down from 4,156 to 0 during the July drive. – S
 | Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. |
Graph from WP:AfC
We hope Father Will forgives us, but we just couldn't keep this column concise this month. Even the stories in the "in brief" section are not brief. Despite all the horrific general news stories lately, stories related to Wikipedia have mostly been interesting and different. No, we couldn't totally ignore some of the usual, more somber, stories. So pick and choose your stories and enjoy the difference!
Jimmy Wales in Al Jazeera reminds us how the internet used to be. According to Jimmy there was little or no disinformation in healthcare or elections, and people could generally agree on the facts. Despite this double dose of nostalgia, Jimmy has a point and a program to make things better. The disinformation situation has gotten much worse. The program looks like Wikipedia, "the cornerstone of the free web.... It is the blueprint for restoring public trust in the web again."
Wales draws three conclusions from the success of Wikipedia:
Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? We've got one request however. Jimmy, next time, please let corporations and their paid editors know that we don't want their disinformation, AKA hidden advertisements in our encyclopedia. And please let them know that our minimum requirement is that they must declare each paid edit, along with the names of the client, employer, and other affiliated parties. If we can't see these hidden adverts, we can't correct them. If you or the Wikimedia Foundation won't let people know about these requirements, who will? – S
How to Use Wikipedia When You're Watching the Olympics, Stephen Harrison of Slate set the stage for the Olympics by describing how to use Wikipedia as your second screen while watching the Tokyo games. The most popular athletes score high on Wikipedia pageviews, Google Knowledge panels and Alexa report the information from Wikipedia. You can even read about the oddities that only Wikipedia ever covers such as List of Olympic medalists in art competitions.
Editors at WikiProject Olympics report that good photos of the Olympians are hard to get because broadcasters and national sports federations control the copyrights. Are the articles biased? Inclusion of articles about athletes should not be biased against women because of easy notability requirements for all Olympic athletes, but the article coverage may be less for athletes from some countries. A gymnastics writer says that there are no obvious misstatements in Wikipedia articles about the gymnasts she covers, but that controversies are sometimes avoided.
Why Basketball 3×3 Star Stefanie Dolson, Others Fact Check Their Wiki Pages NBC Channel 4 New York asked five USA Olympians to review the Wikipedia articles about themselves on video and suggest any needed corrections. Four of the five loved the articles.
There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia: The Guardian covers the work of one dedicated Wikipedian, who has been filling in the blank spaces in our coverage of the 2020 games. See Community view for further coverage. – S
Père Guillaume Conquer ran what must be the most unusual version of Wikimania this year, perhaps ever, in the Coconut Club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as he documented in a local paper. With 15 participants, including a dozen Cambodians, young and old, a Korean businessman, and an Australian cultural-events organizer, the event was almost as large as the congregation of Conquer's church in the tiny village of Chom Lak. Father Will, as he's usually called, has been a Roman Catholic missionary in Cambodia for two years for the Missions Etrangères de Paris. It's his first assignment since being ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Monaco. He told AsiaNews "Wikipedia is not the right tool for proselytising. Its success lies in its neutral point of view. It's a space for knowledge, not preaching."
Father Will bought the first drink for Wikipedia editors registered before the event. He's been a Wikipedian since 2008 making 3,432 edits across all projects. His goal for the Khmer Wikipedia is to double its 8,000 articles over the next year. Thanks for all you do, Father. And keep the faith. – S
Wikipedia Has a Language Problem. Here’s How To Fix It by Yumiko Sato in Undark Magazine (reprinted in Fast Company). Following an earlier article in Slate where she explains in detail how the Japanese Wikipedia has whitewashed much of Japan's World War II history, Sato notes that the Croatian Wikipedia has had similar problems for almost a decade. (See prior coverage in The Signpost Disinformation report (2021) and Opinion (2019).) Al Jazeera piles on the Croatian editors with Are Croat nationalists pushing a political agenda on Wikipedia? on how Croat nationalists affected the Croatian Wikipedia, but concentrates on how they affect the Bosnian Wikipedia.
Wikipedia certainly has had language versions that produce seriously biased articles resulting from poor governance. While Sato recognizes that there will be technical difficulties, she proposes that there be a single language version of Wikipedia (presumably English) so that poor governance on a smaller version doesn't affect article quality. Political problems would prevent the implementation of this solution, even more so than technical problems. Different cultures want to be able to determine their own "truths" in their own languages.
But could a single "All-Wikipedia" article even be possible for even one of the most controversial articles? Likely, that would involve a set of about five translations from a single main article. Edits to the translations would have to be translated to the other versions. Debate on talk pages might need several translations as well. The thought of a multi-language edit war boggles the mind. It's an interesting idea, but it's unlikely to be implemented any time soon. – S
Francesca Tripodi's recent paper, Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia continues to make news this month. Dr. Tripodi, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, reports that biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies.
– B
At Wikimania 2021 seven editors were presented with Wikimedian of the year awards by Jimmy Wales. While there have been multiple winners before, this is the first year more than three awards were presented. As originally presented on a 24 minute video, Wales surprises the award-winners on ZOOM calls to tell them the news. We include the edited individual videos below. They may be less fun but are easier to follow.
Alaa Najjar is active on the Arabic Wikipedia and in many other wiki projects, having made over 473,000 edits total. He works as a general practitioner and contributes to WikiProject Medicine, especially to the COVID-19 project on the Arabic encyclopedia, providing access to life-saving information. He works to combat medical misinformation. On Arabic Wikipedia he is a steward, bureaucrat, sysop, checkuser and interface-admin. On Wikidata he's a sysop and checkuser. He is also a sysop on 5 other projects and a VRT volunteer. Shortly after receiving the award, an article about him was created. Don't worry, though, the AfD was quickly closed as "KEEP".[1]
One of the founders of Wiki Loves Monuments, Lodewijk Gelauff helped lead the WLM International Organizing Committee over the next 10 years. Over that time 1.7 million photos of 1.5 million cultural monuments and landmarks have been uploaded from over 70 countries as part of the world's largest photo contest. Many new editors have joined Wikipedia as a result, and many chapters have organized to join WLM. A truly remarkable achievement. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Management Science and Engineering in the U.S.[1]
Netha Hussain is a physician and researcher who earned a PhD in clinical neuroscience from the University of Gothenburg. She has worked extensively on COVID-19 related articles on Wikipedia and worked against pandemic-related misinformation. In eleven years on Wikipedia she's made 183,500 edits total on over ten projects.[1][2]
Carmen Alcázar has been a member of the Board of Wikimedia Mexico since 2012 and president of that organization 2018-2020. She helped organize Wikimania in Mexico City in 2015. She's a political scientist and Feminism activist. One of her priorities has been to close the gender gap in articles. She's helped close this gender gap on Spanish Wikipedia by over seven percent in five years.[1]
Jay Prakash, the founder of Indic-TechCom, was named Wikimedian of the Year Tech Innovator. He "is known for providing technical support to Indic communities, fixing bugs, building new tools, and spearheading technical outreach."[2][1]
Anaya Mondal founded the Wiki Loves Butterfly project in 2016 and has run the campaign four times resulting in 2,600 images being uploaded to Commons. She started the project after seeing there was no article on butterfly on her native Bengali Wikipedia.[1][2]
Carma Citrawati is a university lecturer, author and literary activist in Bali who began editing in 2019. She digitizes and translates ancient texts contained on palm-leaf manuscripts.[1]
How Wikipedia editors compare demographically to the world's population? What proportion of our editors are women? Who are the people who are harassed or feel unsafe on-Wiki? How many users are dissatisfied with WMF software? What could be more interesting to the Wikipedia community than knowing who is part of our community?
The WMF took a survey during the second half of last year that gathered statistics on these and other questions and published the Community Insights 2021 Report in May. It's probably a very good report, but I just couldn't get all the way through it. Too many words. Too much fine print. Boring!
Let's let the graphs speak for themselves.
The vision of the Wikimedia movement is to collect and freely share the sum of all human knowledge. All human knowledge, however, requires representation from a wide cross section of all humans, and in this area, we in the Wikimedia movement have work to do. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other projects, releases periodic Community Insights Reports, which include demographic data on Wikipedia’s editing community.
You’ve probably heard of the Wikipedia gender gap — that far more people who identify as men edit Wikipedia than those who identify as women or other gender identities. The 2021 Community Insights Report, released recently, shows the progress that’s been made on that front recently: Globally, women made up 15% of contributors, but in Northern America, where Wiki Education’s programs operate, that number is 22%. In contrast, self-reported survey data from our program participants shows:
Wiki Education’s programs are clearly making a difference in diversifying the gender identity of contributors. The gender identity of our program participants has remained fairly steady throughout the 11-year history of our program; we know we’re helping tackle Wikipedia’s gender gap, and — with nearly 15,000 new contributors every year, representing 19% of all new active editors to English Wikipedia — we’re doing it at scale.
What’s new this year is data on race and ethnicity, which the Community Insights survey asked about for contributors from the United States for the first time. The report concludes that "in the United States, both Black and Hispanic or Latino/a/x people were severely underrepresented in our communities, while white and Asian American editors were overrepresented.” While we always expected our student population was more diverse than the general editing population, we now have data to back up our belief. Note that the Wikimedia Foundation survey allowed respondents to select multiple racial or ethnic categories, while Wiki Education’s survey instead included a more general “biracial/multiracial/other” category, so the numbers don’t perfectly align. Nevertheless, they give us a good idea of the differences.
While we have room to improve to reach parity with the U.S. population demographics, our program is clearly helping address the underrepresentation issue identified by the Wikimedia Foundation’s survey. With 8% of our participants identifying as Black or African American and 12% identifying as Hispanic or Latino/a/x, we’re bringing significantly more diverse contributors to Wikipedia than the existing editing population.
Diverse contributors are important because we need to share diverse knowledge on Wikipedia. When the people writing the content don’t accurately reflect the population at large, topics, perspectives, and sources are missing. Programs like Wiki Education’s, and those of colleagues in our movement actively working to bring more diverse contributors to the English Wikipedia, especially in the United States, are a key part of enacting knowledge equity. Freely sharing in the sum of all human knowledge, after all, requires involvement from all humans.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Wikipedia is unusual among user-generated content websites in that it allows contributions – even changes to widely read existing content – without creating an account, in exchange to contributors agreeing to have their IP address published alongside their edit. This has been a core feature since the project's beginnings, but has come to be questioned from several angles in recent years. In "The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Peer Production"[1], well-known Wikipedia researchers Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw provide some insights on what might happen if IP editing were to be disabled on Wikimedia wikis. As they summarize in the abstract:
"We conduct an empirical test using longitudinal data from 136 natural experiments where would-be contributors to wikis were suddenly required to log in to contribute. Requiring accounts leads to a small increase in account creation, but reduces both high- and low-quality contributions from registered and unregistered participants. Although the change deters a large portion of low-quality participation, the vast majority of deterred contributions are of higher quality."
These 136 wikis are drawn from a larger dataset from Wikia (today known as Fandom, a commercial wiki hoster co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales), consisting of wikis where local administrators had requested for IP editing to be disabled.
According to the paper's literature review (of general research on peer production),
"One body of prior studies argue that stable identifiers work as catalysts of cooperation by facilitating accountability, group identification, boundaries, and commitment that lead to higher quality participation. Others contend that requiring accounts imposes costly obstacles that deter participation. A related set of studies suggests that unregistered contributions may introduce diverse perspectives and stimulate activity among experienced community members ..."
Based on this, the authors come up with four hypotheses for the effects of requiring account registration:
In their analysis, the authors find "substantial discontinuous shifts in each of our dependent variables when wikis began requiring accounts", supporting all four hypotheses.
The authors first presented such results at Wikimania 2015 and published them in peer-reviewed form last year. Just a few months afterwards, a large Wikimedia wiki enacted such a change for the first time (see e.g. the Signpost's coverage: Portuguese Wikipedia bans IP editing). A recent evaluation of its impact by the Wikimedia Foundation does not quite match the results from the Wikia wikis, finding "no significant negative impact in the analysis conducted thus far" (see also the more detailed summary in this issue's "News and notes" section: "Portuguese IP ban on track"). The statistical techniques used in that analysis appear to be somewhat simpler (e.g. only considering year-over-year changes in monthly counts of active editors, in contrast to Hill's and Shaw's analysis of weekly data using a regression discontinuity design in the paper). On the other hand, the WMF analysis also considered additional metrics designed to measure "Impacts on administration", namely the number of user blocks, page protections, and Checkuser checks, finding (somewhat unsurprisingly) "a significant reduction in administration actions".
There are other reasons to question how much the Wikia results would generalize to Wikipedias or other Wikimedia wikis. For example, in recent years the Wikimedia Foundation has invested significantly in technical measures to improve the experience of newcomers. But IP editors do not benefit from such improvements ("newcomers" meaning newly created accounts), so requiring them to register might have the added benefit that every contributor to a wiki will have been reached by such newbie-supporting measures as they start to edit.
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]
"Since early in the development of the project, Wikipedia editors have been concerned with overcoming “systemic biases” in coverage of the world’s knowledge, especially those rooted in forms of social marginalization. [...] However, many Wikipedia editors and observers have argued that the systemic biases of Wikipedia are inherent to current global distribution of knowledge production, and can only be overcome by changing the encyclopedia’s standards of inclusion. This article reframes this debate by comparing the project of “countering systemic bias” on Wikipedia with the effort within Western/Northern academia to decolonize and diversify scholarship. Since this project began at least fifty years ago, it has led to abundant peer-reviewed scholarship, all of which qualifies as “reliable sources” for Wikipedia articles. [...] The article proposes that critical scholarship, historical maps, and maps in contemporary scholarship can all contribute to addressing Wikipedia’s systemic biases."
From the abstract:[3]
"... Focussing on a social psychological concept of “empathy plasticity”, the critical developmental window in which humans begin to formulate attitudes and dispositions on phenomena around them, this commentary explores how a re-organization of online spaces, such as Wikipedia and social media, can be used to more holistically present knowledge on topics in the realm of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Such a technocratic shift is one means of content democratization and dialectical gatekeeping to ensure our contemporary epistemology acquires and maintains methodological, ideological and ethical merit."
From the paper:[4]
"Wikiproject Tropical Cyclones delivers the highest quality content of all Wikiprojects on English Wikipedia. We also find that both readership and editing of the articles on tropical cyclones are highly correlated with cyclones’ occurrences, which indicates that Wikipedia is a go-to source for many people [...] For the purpose of identifying the most successful Wikiprojects, we have ranked all projects based on the total number of FA and GA articles that are within their scope [...] Since projects vary in size, and the sheer number of articles can impact the relative number of quality articles, we normalized the totals by the square root of the number of articles that a project curates."
From the abstract:[5]
"... we investigate the patterns of production, consumption, and spatial and temporal distributions of Wikipedia pages for World Heritage cultural sites. We find that Wikipedia provides a distinctive context for investigating how people experience and relate to the past in the present. The agency of participants is highly constrained, but distinctive, behind-the-scenes expressions of cultural heritage activism are evident. Concerns about state-like actors, violence and destruction, deal-making, etc. in the World Heritage inscription process are present, but rare on Wikipedia’s World Heritage pages. Instead, hyper-local and process issues dominate controversies on Wikipedia."
Author's copy
Author's copy (accepted manuscript version) and blog post: https://woborders.blog/published-elsewhere/new-maps/
Hello again! From the sowing and reaping of crops, to planning birthdays, anniversaries and other events, the days of the year are an essential part of all our lives. Here we interview a dedicated group of Wikipedia editors, chronologists and augurs at WikiProject Days of the Year.
{{CN}} tag to the info in the linked article (or remove it if it's a WP:BLP or date-of-birth (WP:DOB) issue). If not, copy the citation and add it to the DOY article.That's it for this month; please feel free to suggest a WikiProject for an interview (or interview a WikiProject yourself!) here.
July provided a welcome distraction for pandemic-riddled times with much sports content. And then August brought in an early reminder that the 9/11 attacks are about to complete 20 years with more.
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Giannis Antetokounmpo | 
|
2,034,685 | _(cropped)_(cropped).jpg)
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The NBA Finals wrapped up on Tuesday, with the Milwaukee Bucks prevailing over the Phoenix Suns. The game's MVP is Antetokounmpo, a Bucks player hailing from Greece; previously, he was the league's MVP for two straight years. |
| 2 | 2020 Summer Olympics | 
|
1,974,359 | .jpg){kind=small}
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International sports fans now will spend two weeks in the very unfavorable (for those outside East Asia/Australia) Japan Standard Time to see the multi-sport event that started in spite of the pandemic delaying it for a year (and the protests of a populace that started immunizing itself too late). One of #1's teammates, Jordan Nwora, will compete for the Nigerian basketball team – Giannis' Greece certainly missed him as they couldn't qualify. |
| 3 | Jeff Bezos | 
|
1,018,493 | 
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The recently retired Amazon CEO has decided to pour his fortune into escaping the rest of us. The Blue Origin NS-16 mission took Bezos into near-space for a couple minutes before safely landing. The mission was largely an advertisement for Blue Origin, a company that will provide more rich guys with very short trips to Space™. |
| 4 | Old (film) | 
|
976,648 | 
|
The newest M. Night Shyamalan film opened this week. Shyamalan used to be famous for making great movies with surprising twists, though after a few embarrassing pictures in the mid 2000s, he instead became a punchline. Judging by the Rotten Tomatoes score, Old might not be the next The Sixth Sense, but at least it's not the next The Happening. |
| 5 | Naomi Osaka |
|
877,081 | 
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The opening ceremony of #2 ended with the Olympic cauldron lit by a current local idol, this tennis player who certainly also hoped to ignite during her tournament. |
| 6 | Deaths in 2021 | 
|
849,619 | 
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You take what you get And get what you please It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees! |
| 7 | Space Jam: A New Legacy |
|
846,983 | 
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Welcome back to the Space Jam! (Alright!) One could wonder for ages why someone in 1996 thought it was necessary to real-life retcon Michael Jordan's 1995 return to basketball so that he was instead playing alongside the Looney Tunes characters, even though most conclusions would probably just amount to corporate greed and what I like to call crossover lust. But you wouldn't have to wonder about whether or not it was a slam dunk in theaters, which is why we received this so-so sequel starring LeBron James in 2021.
A New Legacy first got people talking back in March, when promo images for the film showed that Lola Bunny, the love interest of Bugs Bunny, was designed a little less provocatively this time. Inevitable outrage occurred, because duh, which might have been worth it if A New Legacy didn't completely miss the rim. (#1 possibly dodged a bullet declining the movie) Critics hated it, audiences hated it, meaning the only winners of this overlong basketball game are the movie execs lining their pockets with nostalgia bucks. Thufferin' thuccotash! |
| 8 | Money in the Bank (2021) |
|
776,667 | 
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WWE held its latest event, which showcases a ladder match. |
| 9 | Black Widow (2021 film) |
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736,095 | .jpg)
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#7 took its place atop the box office, and given the fact that Disney+ offers the opportunity to watch it at home, either for a surplus now or for free in a few months, Black Widow isn't making the usual Marvel truckloads of money (though it at least will gross more than The Incredible Hulk), but unlike Space Jam, reviews were positive. It can also please viewers who don't vouch for the men's rights movement, and has a post-credits scene that certainly makes people eager to watch the Hawkeye Disney+ show. |
| 10 | Collin Morikawa |
|
732,845 | 
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On July 18, this American golfer won the Open Sandwich in the English town of Sandwich. Next, Tokyo (#2). |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2020 Summer Olympics |
|
3,775,926 | .jpg)
|
Sports fans of the New World (and maybe a few of the Old one as well) are currently sleep-deprived to fit into the Tokyo Standard Time where the biggest multi-sport event is happening. The pandemic that delayed the Olympics is still having its effects felt, with medalists forced to wear masks on the podium and such. |
| 2 | Simone Biles |
|
2,654,995 | _(cropped)_(cropped).jpg)
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Simone Biles, the most successful American gymnast of all time, withdrew mid-way through the Women's artistic team all-around citing mental health problems. She also withdrew from individual contests, opening the way for compatriot Sunisa Lee and Brazilian Rebeca Andrade, among others, to win it all. Certainly not the way all the media who claimed she'd be the name of the Olympics expected things to go. |
| 3 | Katie Ledecky |
|
1,444,410 | 
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Ledecky won her sixth individual Olympic gold medal this week—the most of any female American swimmer, and the third most of any American period, after Carl Lewis and... |
| 4 | Michael Phelps |
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1,376,312 | .jpg)
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The most successful Olympian of all time is retired now, but people are still keen to remind themselves of his records. |
| 5 | Tom Daley |
|
1,256,729 | 
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This British diver made his Olympics debut at Beijing 2008, aged 14. He became World Champion for the first time in 2009 in the 10 m platform. He is a three-time World Champion, five-time European Champion and four-time Commonwealth Champion (across two displines). Yet, he didn't become Olympic Champion until 2021. When he did, this picture (the first one) even promoted an emotional reaction from me. It was also fun to see him knitting on the stands. |
| 6 | Joey Jordison |
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1,219,852 | 
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A break from sports to go tragic: Jordison, founding drummer of metal band Slipknot, passed away on Monday at just 46. |
| 7 | India at the 2020 Summer Olympics | 
|
1,086,402 | 
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In contrast to neighbor China, India's massive population didn't translate into a nation dominating on sports. Hence in one week of #1, only one medal came, a silver by weightlifter Saikhom Mirabai Chanu (pictured). It is India's 29th overall Olympic medal – for comparison's sake, that's only one more than China's worst performance in a single edition. |
| 8 | Caeleb Dressel |
|
979,812 | .jpg)
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To the despair of people who want non-American swimmers to win for a change, this guy (who already got 2 relay golds in 2016) appeared at #1 like a second coming of #4, winning five races. |
| 9 | 2020 Summer Olympics medal table |
|
918,449 | .jpg)
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Which is the most successful country at these games so far? If gold medals are the standard, it's China (so far). If overall medals is the way, it's the United States. (You might notice US media always shifts standards when the country lags behind...) In other news, San Marino and Turkmenistan got their first medals of any colour and Bermuda and the Philippines take their first golds. Bermuda and San Marino are the smallest countries to achieve those respective accomplishments (in terms of population). |
| 10 | Dusty Hill |
|
918,056 | .jpg)
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The longtime bassist/singer of ZZ Top passed away early this week at the age of 72, 5 days after the band played without him for the first time in 51 years – the other leader, Billy Gibbons, said Hill specifically asked him to put his guitar tech in his place. |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2020 Summer Olympics |
|
3,278,702 | 
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One more week where sports fans supported their countries from a distance, even in host city Tokyo, as the same pandemic that delayed it for a year forced events without outsiders or reduced crowds. The Games closed on Sunday, August 8, to the relief of those who are losing their sleep to watch events late at night. At least the next ones are only three years away and, for Europeans, in a more favorable timezone! |
| 2 | The Suicide Squad (film) |
|
1,912,835 | _(cropped).jpg)
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And for another thing that was around in August 2016, DC Comics' supervillainous black ops team had another go, and instead of a messy production clearly showing studio interference, it's a lively and unorthodox production clearly showing writer-director James Gunn is a weird guy. It's not for everyone (specially with the amount of blood, tasteless dialogue and rats!), but certainly fun, and thus reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. The director of the previous maligned version pulled a Zack Snyder: "it wasn't my movie"; weird timing suggests he doesn't want to be compared to a better movie and now knows that fans will get behind directors disavowing their work if they blame corporations. Move along, Alan. |
| 3 | Neeraj Chopra |
|
1,840,314 | 
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Our South Asian friends managed to turn #1 into their most successful showing ever, including javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra winning India's first athletics medal (and looking good doing it), a gold no less! In total it was 7 medals, including a return to the podium for the country's most victorious Olympic sport, field hockey. And considering fellow billion people nation China usually emasses the same quantity of medals in a single day, it's been long discussed how India never fares well in multi-sport events. |
| 4 | India at the Olympics |
|
1,362,217 | ,_Shri_Kiren_Rijiju_at_the_unveiling_ceremony_of_the_Team_India_Official_Olympic_Kit,_on_the_occasion_of_Countdown_to_Tokyo_Olympics,_in_New_Delhi_on_June_03,_2021_(4).jpg)
| |
| 5 | India at the 2020 Summer Olympics |
|
1,222,400 | ||
| 6 | Marcell Jacobs |
|
1,135,626 | 
|
This Italian sprinter won the Men's 100 metres sprint, taking the crown that had been #10's since 2008, #10 having retired. Marcell then went on to win the Men's 4 × 100 metres relay. This is the first time Italy has won either event. |
| 7 | Athletics at the 2020 Summer Olympics |
|
1,114,844 | 
|
People who can run, jump and throw stuff really well. The United States are still the most victorious, but the dominance of Jamaica in sprint races and East Africa in long ones remains unbroken. And there was an amusing story in that the two guys who were tied for first place in the high jump opted not to do a tiebreaker and just share the gold. |
| 8 | 2020 Summer Olympics medal table |
|
1,052,094 | 
|
Americans had gone rogue and started sorting tables by most medals in an apparent attempt to claim you're better than you actually are. And then in the last day the USA gets a few golds – including one very painful for one of the writers here – to still finish at the top, to the chagrin of every other country. This week also saw Burkina Faso win their first medal at the Olympics, in the Men's triple jump. And like in 2016, the previous host country managed to get more medals than when they had athletes in every sport! |
| 9 | Simone Biles |
|
961,851 | 
|
After withdrawing from several events after suffering from the "twisties" (where you lose orientation whilst rotating; very dangerous, as shown by the case of a Soviet gymnast who got tetraplegic in a botched landing), she returned for the balance beam, in which she finished third. |
| 10 | Usain Bolt |
|
885,806 | .jpg)
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Like Michael Phelps the other week, a dominating athlete that went out on a high note at the previous Games yet still attracts people's attention. |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Suicide Squad (film) |
|
2,004,116 | .jpg)
|
The newest DCEU film, following a squad of supervillains compelled by the U.S. government to fight a big monster, was released to theatres and HBO Max on August 5. The Suicide Squad is a reboot/sequel of 2016's Suicide Squad (no "The"). While no-The was an embarrassment for all involved, The is getting pretty decent reviews – it only won't make as much money (hasn't even broken $100 million, a quantity the other surpassed in a weekend). |
| 2 | Lionel Messi |
|
1,709,170 | 
|
One of the world's best footballers bid a tearful good-bye to his old club (FC Barcelona) and joined a new one (#5). |
| 3 | Neeraj Chopra |
|
1,242,885 | 
|
The games are over, with the closing ceremony being held on August 8. If you miss international sports don't worry; the 2020 Summer Paralympics start on August 24 and the 2022 Winter Olympics is in only a few months (thanks, COVID).
Chopra, a javelin thrower, became the first Indian track and field athlete to medal, and a gold no less, on August 7. |
| 4 | 2020 Summer Olympics | 
|
1,080,347 | 
| |
| 5 | Paris Saint-Germain F.C. |
|
1,047,096 | 
|
Messi's new team plays at the park of princes and was, coincidentally, bought by the Qatari then-crown prince (now Emir) in 2011. The team is also reuniting Messi with friend and former Barça teammate Neymar. |
| 6 | Taliban |
|
948,626 | 
|
The United States military invaded Afghanistan less than a month after 9/11, nearly twenty years ago. A total withdrawal of U.S. troops started in the waning years of the Trump administration, with President Biden setting a deadline for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. As troops left the country, the Taliban—an Islamist terrorist group that the U.S. had invaded Afghanistan to remove from power—took control of several major cities. |
| 7 | Deaths in 2021 |
|
909,342 | 
|
And I tread a troubled track My odds are stacked I'll go back to black... |
| 8 | Trevor Moore (comedian) |
|
818,709 | 
|
The whitest kid you know passed away on August 7. He's left behind a bunch of great sketches; probably the best known is one about how you can't say "I want to kill the President of the United States of America", which prompted an actual Supreme Court case. |
| 9 | Vikram Batra |
|
780,441 | 
|
Shershaah, a film based on Batra's service in the Kargil War, was released to Amazon on Thursday. |
| 10 | Andrew Cuomo |
|
758,143 | 
|
In February, the Governor of New York state was accused of sexually harassing multiple women on his staff. After widespread calls on him to step down, he denied the allegations and told his Attorney General to investigate. That report, concluding that he is (allegedly) a menace to women around him, dropped on Monday; Cuomo promptly held a press conference where he again denied, this time showing a slideshow of him touching the faces of and kissing countless people. The next day, he put in his two weeks notice. |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Taliban |
|
6,195,799 |
|
Good news: the United States's war in Afghanistan is over, after 20 years of bloody, expensive occupation.
Bad news: The United States did not do any nation-building. As the U.S. pulled out its troops, the Taliban – Islamist fundamentalists, a.k.a. the antagonists of 2000s American culture – removed during the invasion of 2001, took power over the weekend with little resistance. American President Joe Biden has come under fire from everybody in Washington, including the former President that had started the withdrawal. |
| 2 | Afghanistan |
|
4,384,165 | ||
| 3 | Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan |
|
1,658,975 | Once the Taliban took Kabul, they effectively reinstated the government that existed from 1996 to 2001. The old government was notoriously repressive of women and blew up some really big Buddha statues before getting ousted by the Americans. However, this new government have styled themselves as "Taliban 2.0" and seem keen to tell the world that they intend to be less extreme this time around. Not that many believe them... | |
| 4 | Sean Lock |
|
1,418,904 | .jpg)
|
This British comedian died this week, aged 58. He once joked that NASA killed Michael Jackson. What made it so funny was his delivery, something for which he was well-known. Lock also appeared frequently on panel shows, most famously 8 Out of 10 Cats. |
| 5 | Ashraf Ghani |
|
1,347,322 | _(cropped).jpg)
|
Afghanistan's president since 2014, who had been helping the nation rebuild ever since the invasion, fled the country the same day of the Taliban's hostile takeover. |
| 6 | Vikram Batra |
|
1,282,514 | 
|
Going a little south of Afghanistan to India, busy remembering a war through Shershaah, a film based on this captain's service in the Kargil War. |
| 7 | Fall of Kabul (2021) |
|
1,182,724 | 
|
One of the most retrograde governments in recent history (#3) was forcibly removed from Afghanistan after the Battle of Tora Bora in 2001, but in 2003 started to reorganize and try to get back into power. The Americans and Taliban signed the Doha Agreement agreeing to remove US troops last year, which only served to fuel the insurrection that took over the capital Kabul and will reinstate Taliban. |
| 8 | 2021 Taliban offensive |
|
1,107,809 | ||
| 9 | Hibatullah Akhundzada |
|
970,805 | #1's current leader. | |
| 10 | War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) |
|
875,738[1] | 
|
After Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush started the War on Terror and sent all hell loose on #2, where said terrorist group was given refuge. #1 might (possibly) have been willing to talk, but that would've required stopping the bombings that eventually escalated to their removal. Afterwards, soldiers from all nations of NATO remained there to help the country rebuild and contain a Taliban insurgency until their withdrawal this year, leading to all this recent turmoil. |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cristiano Ronaldo |
|
1,857,188 | 
|
On August 22, Ronaldo played his first game in this year's Serie A. It was also probably his last game for Juventus, as his transfer to Manchester United was announced this week, rejoining the club where he made his breakthrough from 2003-2009, after being set to join Manchester City beforehand. |
| 2 | Charlie Watts |
|
1,644,892 | .jpg)
|
The longtime drummer for the Rolling Stones died on Tuesday. The surviving band members and numerous other musicians paid tribute to him. Since Watts was a member of the band for six decades, it remains unclear if the Stones will continue without the Wembley Whammer. |
| 3 | Spider-Man: No Way Home |
|
1,273,853 | .jpg)
|
After a leak, the trailer for the eighth solo movie of Marvel Comics' most popular hero (third in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) was released. And it's clear the other movies are returning in a way reminiscent of the animated flick Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, as Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin and Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus appear in the preview, and Jamie Foxx's Electro is also confirmed. |
| 4 | Afghanistan |
|
990,547 | 
|
The NATO-led evacuation of foreign nationals from Afghanistan was interrupted by a suicide bombing at the NATO-controlled Hamid Karzai International Airport on Thursday. The current death count is at 182, including 13 members of the U.S. military. Some American political figures are, in light of this, pushing for President Biden to either move up the troops-leaving-deadline or to simply restart the war; it seems that the guy who literally just pulled out of Afghanistan isn't eager to go right back in. |
| 5 | Deaths in 2021 |
|
940,780 | 
|
In homage to #2: Catch your dreams before they slip away Dying all the time Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind Ain't life unkind? |
| 6 | SummerSlam (2021) |
|
929,184 | .jpg)
|
WWE's latest event, bringing back John Cena as he might be in theaters with The Suicide Squad but will never turn his back on his wrestler origins. |
| 7 | The Rolling Stones |
|
928,717 | 
|
Unlike The Beatles, who broke up amid conflict, the other standout of the British Invasion remained together and on the spotlight for six decades. It's up in the air whether the Stones will continue without #2, aside from finishing the current tour with Steve Jordan. |
| 8 | Taliban |
|
901,298 | 
|
The terrorist group in control of #4 is not behind the airport bombing. In fact, the group that has claimed responsibility, a local ISIL branch, has been fighting the Taliban for year. |
| 9 | Candyman (2021 film) |
|
587,635 | .jpg)
|
After three movies in the 90's, Clive Barker's spectral assassin who appears if his name is spoken five times in the mirror was brought back in this movie (originally planned for last year, but you know...), still played by Tony Todd and with positive reviews. |
| 10 | Havana syndrome |
|
568,329 | 
|
Staff at multiple U.S. embassies, most recently in Hanoi, have been dealing with the "Havana syndrome" for several years. It's either
Who's to say? |
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Everything I said in The Guardian article was true from my perspective. They might have exaggerated some things – but the quoted stuff was true and from my heart. I do absolutely adore the Wikipedia project and spreading accessible information to everyone is such a fantastic thing to be part of. I'm glad, as well, that there's people smarter than me taking care of the serious stuff so I can waste my time in sports because that has always been my passion right from when I could first talk.
Researching the athletes was a genuine pleasure. It started by accident when I innocently looked up the just-announced IOC Refugee team to find out their experiences and saw a couple of names were in red. I haven't counted how many we've done or still need to do; the figures in the article were new to me.
It's been fun! The experience enhanced my viewing of the games. Both in honouring the fantastic athletes who are the pinnacle of human physical achievement, providing a marker of a moment in time: right here right now, these were the people who did this; and also personally knowing some of the back stories of those competing in more detail than I would normally has been superb in providing extra context and interest. I can thoroughly recommend editing the articles for the Paralympics and Paris 2024.
I'm still really new to it all in many ways – someone sent me a barnstar this week and I had to google what it was. I would be delighted to give three out though, now that I think I know what they are. I guess it would only be fair to give them to the names I feel like I saw the most cleaning up my work, for which I offer thanks and apologies. This isn't scientific at all but the first three that came to mind were Seacactus 13, John B123, and JTtheOG. Something I didn't say in The Guardian article is that I do not have all my sight so there are aspects of the process that I will always inherently struggle with until I can find work-arounds. Whilst I believe it's far more frustrating for me than it is for others, no one can underestimate the job that was on the hands of those who checked my work!
I enjoy most parts of Wikipedia and I welcome the quirks. I find it amusing to see someone change references to the "Tokyo Olympics" and change them to the "2020 summer games" only to spot someone else a few hours later change it to "Tokyo games". That is just very funny to me, and human.
There were very few negatives. I'm fairly long in the tooth, I think I have decent perspective, and collating information from the Internet isn't the most important thing I do in the day. But if those things weren't in place I would most probably have been put off and discouraged by a very small minority of users/admins who lean towards being rude, impatient and dismissive of new users. I would encourage the view that everyone can bring value and we should imagine speaking to someone online the same way as if we were speaking to them in real life, as if we had just knocked at their door. It is fine to have strong feelings about your passions but it is also okay to take a break until you can represent your best self again.
People have sent lovely emails and messages wanting to help and I've just found out about the Paralympic project so will direct people towards that. There's been contact from some UK radio stations which I'm not confident about doing, but if I get persuaded I'll do my best to promote Wikipedia and all the fine users and editors that make it. Thanks to everyone.
