| External videos | |
|---|---|
 North Platte’s Wikipedia page displays dark history, 3:21, KNOP-TV, October 4, 2021 |
Mayor Brandon Kelliher of North Platte, Nebraska thinks that the town of about 24,000 residents needs to improve the town's image on the internet. He even campaigned on the issue in the election. He may be right. Looking at the Wikipedia article for the town, he saw a 1929 lynching as the main event highlighted in the town's history along with the expulsion of Black residents which immediately followed. Local museum curator, Jim Griffin, confirms the accuracy of the history on Wikipedia but wants to balance information on the lynching. The news anchor concludes that city officials are "working to find a solution that adds a more positive spin to North Platte's history on the page".
Wikipedia editors should be quick to let the North Platters know that we just report the facts, as gathered from reliable sources weighing the coverage according to the weights given in those sources.
Wikipedians should write more, not less, about lynchings. Several thousand people were lynched in the U.S. There are over 800 counties where well documented lynchings occurred, most have articles which omit any information about the lynchings. Compare the extensive well-written history of Leonardtown, Maryland with this recent article in The Washington Post. Many people could benefit from access to information on lynching. Black people would like to know their history better, and to know that the world has not forgotten their struggle. White people who still wonder "What's the big deal about Black lives matter?" or "Why ruin a football game by kneeling during the National Anthem?" could also benefit. Knowing the truth can set us all free.
It turns out that North Platte already had some balancing information on Wikipedia. The article North Platte black exodus was balanced by North Platte Canteen, which is about providing a rest stop for soldiers and sailors during and shortly after World War II, 1941–1946. Neither article was well integrated into the article on the town. Both are showing their age and need to be updated.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
| Platte Canteen, 7:00, Jay Lorenzen, August 26, 2007. | |
| Bob Greene on History Bookshelf Once Upon a Town, 3:55-49:47, C-SPAN, June 24, 2002 |
We may still have some balancing left to do. Twelve years after the lynching a remarkable event occurred – spread out over five years, running from early morning to late at night – which completely changed my view of the town. The women of North Platte and the surrounding small towns voluntarily served over 6 million U.S. military personnel during 10–15 minute train maintenance stops. Most of the soldiers and sailors were coming from boot camp and being deployed in combat. Perhaps they hadn't seen a friendly civilian face since entering boot camp.
The Nebraska women were not paid for their work or for the food supplies. They had to contend with wartime rationing of food and gasoline. They served up to 30 trains each day and gave away 30 birthday cakes each day. The canteen was well documented in local newspapers, wartime films and postcards, as well as a 2002 book Once upon a Town by Chicago journalist Bob Greene. The 288 pages show that Greene considered the North Platte Canteen to be America at its absolute best.
There's one postcard photo taken of the canteen that I'd like to show you but can't include here for copyright reasons: PFC Clifton Hall receives a birthday cake from Mrs. Lyda Swenson. Private Hall, a Black man, looks a bit surprised but otherwise shows little emotion. Mrs. Swenson's expression is odd, but inscrutable. The mystery is solved when you look at the expressions of the seven women who surround them. Their smiles are all beaming.
There's no way that I can reconcile these two events – the lynching and the canteen – happening in the same small town 12 years apart. Truth, or at least the history told in reliable sources, may be stranger than fiction, or the stories told in fringe sources. But if we can document those two seemingly irreconcilable events, we can include them both.
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An RfA candidacy favored 123 to 1 was closed with the comment "This was unsuccessful due to the candidate being ArbCom blocked during the nomination process." Eostrix was blocked as a sockpuppet of Icewhiz during the RfA, though the Arbcom decision was not unanimous.
Beeblebrox explained "This was a very determined, carefully planned attempt to fool the community, and it nearly succeeded, probably would have if it weren't for one particular committee member who doggedly pursued this for quite some time, although it obviously acquired a sense of urgency when the account ran for adminship."
The community generally reacted with shock and thanks for Arbcom's vigilance. Few editors defended Eostrix or questioned the decision.
Little or no public evidence on the guilt or innocence of Eostrix and Icewhiz has been available. The Signpost emailed Icewhiz for a response, which was evasive. They wrote that they would neither deny nor confirm the sockpuppeting allegations or even whether they edit Wikipedia at all. The Wikilawyer-like tone of the two Icewhiz responses and even some exact wording matched extensive email discussions between Icewhiz and The Signpost conducted in 2019.
A new account on a Wiki-discussion site claimed that they were Eostrix and denied being a sockpuppet. Members of that site were generally unimpressed with the denials. They claimed that Eostrix and Icewhiz consistently made the same rare editing mistake – spelling "albeit" as "all be it".
Several editors asked whether candidates for adminship should automatically be checked for socks on the theory that we can't risk having a long-term abuser become an admin. Worm That Turned and others expressed horror that editors' privacy could be violated so routinely, until it was shown that checkuser data was used by stewards to verify election results. Thereafter the objections focused on arguments that checkuser data wouldn't have helped discover the socks in this particular case, and then to a statistical argument that CU data doesn't help in any case where there is no prior evidence of sockpuppetry. – S
Toby Negrin, the head of WMF's product department, posted a letter of resignation on 12 October. The function of the department is to "build, improve and maintain the features of Wikimedia sites". This departure leaves the WMF with less than half of the C-team that was previously around: the positions of the heads of the Technology, Communications, and Operations departments are all still vacant, as is the CEO. – Y, B
Wikimedia Enterprise, the commercial data service launched by the WMF, officially opened for business on October 25. With three different API services offered starting at $25,000/year, the product is designed for corporations who depend on Wikimedia data such as Google posting knowledge boxes on their search page. It is designed to minimize or eliminate any backflow effects on Wikipedia content or the Foundation. The WMF has capped commercial revenue at 30% of overall revenue. Previous coverage in The Signpost resulted in some skeptical comments from Wikipedians. – G
In last month's News and notes, we covered the RfA 2021 review in "Another look at requests for adminship". The review has progressed into a brainstorming phase to address these issues, and possibly a handful of others:
There is no fixed deadline, but it may have wrapped up by the time The Signpost is published. We will cover more details at this month's Discussion report. – B
3–5% of editors using Apple's Safari browser may be blocked in the next few months. This includes logged-in, active editors who may not understand why they've encountered a block. This is because of iCloud Private Relay, a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities. – Tech News weekly editors, selected by B
Some months it just pours. There was a lot of Wikipedia news this month, from the serious (WMF's ban on some Chinese Wikipedia contributors) to the silly (the "Depths of Wikipedia" Instagram account). Dig in!
| External videos | |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia: The Fight for Facts, BBC Click, October 19, 2021, 9:45 | |
| Has China 'Hacked' Wikipedia?, BBC Click, October 16, 2019, 8:43 |
The long-running BBC program Click reports, for the second time in as many years, on editing conflicts on the Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia). The most recent report focuses on the WMF office action that banned 7 editors and desysoped 12 admins. The Click program was expanded slightly in a recent print article.
As background, a screenshot (at 3:25) of a chat site run by a group of pro-Beijing editors is translated as "The idea sounds ok, dox their ID and report it to National Security Police". The "physical harm" cited by the WMF to justify the bans is only briefly implied by "threatening edits" (3:35).
The report, about 10 minutes long, features four interviews: two from pseudonymous 'pro-democracy' editors, another from Enming Yan, a now-banned admin on zh.wikipedia from the 'pro-Beijing camp', closing with Jimmy Wales's views.
The two pro-democracy editors state that pro-Beijing editors have become much more aggressive. The first diagnoses an "overflow of patriotism in China", but does not believe that the pro-Beijing editors are paid to edit. The second emphasized their difficulties editing with pro-Beijing editors, and their inability to have their complaints heard. Yan states that mainland Chinese users are simply providing their perspective, and that Wikipedia's neutrality has been harmed by the office action. He states that the editing balance now favors anti-Beijing forces.
The central question is "are Wikipedia's open-knowledge goals compatible with a world in which different countries have different views?" Wales states that Wikipedia is a global, not localized, project. He defends the office action and redirects the focus back to the root of the problem, the "biggest thing preventing mainland Chinese people" from editing is the Chinese government, Jimmy says.
For previous Signpost coverage on this topic, see July, Special report; September, Opinion; News and notes "Wikimedia users 'physically harmed'; WMF bans or desysops nineteen"; and In the media "China: Infiltration, physical harm, and bans"; and this month's Community view. – G – S
Stephen Harrison, reporting in Slate, may have the final word in the case of the banned Chinese editors. Setting the stage with the contentious relationship between China and Wikipedia in 2015 and 2019, he moves right to the heart of the matter: the bans as explained by Maggie Dennis, WMF's Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability, who stresses the importance of combating harassment, "including in some cases physically harming others." Heather Ford, an associate professor of digital and social media at the University of Technology Sydney, explains why China – and other countries – may care about their coverage in Wikipedia.
Harrison talks with people on all sides of the issue and lets mainlanders explain why they care about Wikipedia rather than the larger encyclopedia Baidu Baike, which "publishes a lot of garbage." The conclusions are much the same as the BBC's report. But, given the limits of video versus print, the details and even the logical flow are more complete.
Ninety-year-old William Shatner, aka Captain Kirk, took a 10-minute suborbital joyride on Blue Origin's New Shepard flight 18 to the edge of space on October 13, compliments of an enterprising young man named Jeff Bezos. Kirk reportedly took the shuttlecraft because the transporter beam was out of order.
Two paying passengers, Chris Boshuizen, cofounder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, cofounder of Medidata Solutions, went along for the ride. According to CBS, neither paying passenger "has an entry in Wikipedia and both seem content to keep personal details personal". What's this? Klingons attempting a double reverse Streisand? The Klingons deny the accusation.
Blue Origin Vice President Audrey Powers was also on the flight. But she had to wait three days before she got an article. "Beam me up, Scotty", a misquote purportedly from Captain Kirk, has had an article for 16 years, as well as a disambiguation page. "It's borderline on the simulator, captain. I cannae guarantee that she'll hold up!". We can only wonder how it all ends. – S
Noam Cohen, a longtime reporter on all things Wikipedia, has a new article: "VIPs expect special treatment. At Wikipedia, don't even ask." Appearing in The Washington Post, the article shows how big shots are sometimes treated on Wikipedia. Just to drop a few names: John C. Eastman, Jimmy Wales, Mark Dice, Richard Dawkins, Amy Fisher, Andrew Yang (allegedly), the United States Congress, the Vatican, and the Gupta family of South Africa. Keep up the good work, folks!
Cohen does note a few BLP mix-ups or other failings: Edward Kosner, articles that include the real names of porn stars, deadnaming, and the subject of this month's opinion article.
Cohen concludes "But with the big platforms choosing to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted ... there is one corner of the Internet that turns a skeptical eye toward everyone, even VIPs." Another example of modern mainstream journalism treating Wikipedia as "the good cop" of the internet, as previously described in this book chapter from Wikipedia@20.
Angela Merkel will soon give up her job as chancellor of Germany which she has held for 16 years. AFP and The Statesman find power in the Merkel rhombus, aka Merkel-Raute in German. They note "It has its own Wikipedia page and its own emoticon." "<>" – S
Reflecting cultural biases, German Wikipedia described homeopathy as simply eine alternativmedizinische Behandlungsmethode, "a form of alternative medical treatment", but English Wikipedia says it is "pseudoscience" (The Local, Germany's long-standing love affair with homeopathy [in English]). Maybe someone read the article – German Wikipedia was edited to add "pseudoscience" to the lede on 14 October.
To be fair, we note that distinguishing science from pseudoscience, the demarcation problem, is an application of epistemology and that – according to Wikipedia – the appearance of the word epistemology in English was predated by the German term Wissenschaftslehre (literally, theory of science), which was introduced by philosophers Johann Fichte (German) and Bernard Bolzano (Bohemian) in the late 18th century. – B
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A stylish, well-written, new podcast dot com dedicates its first six episodes to Wikipedia.
The series runs for another four weeks. A different series on another web project will be coming in January.
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The Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Director, Jacob Rogers, this month published a triumphant essay on Wikimedia's Diff blog, titled "A victory for free knowledge: Florida judge rules Section 230 bars defamation claim against the Wikimedia Foundation". As he says in his post describing this legal victory for the Foundation,
The case began when plaintiff Nathaniel White sued the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2021, claiming that the Foundation was liable for the publication of photos that incorrectly identified him as a New York serial killer of the same name. Because of its open nature, sometimes inaccurate information is uploaded to Wikipedia and its companion projects, but the many members of our volunteer community are very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur. Notably, this lawsuit was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020. Wikimedia moved to dismiss the amended complaint in June, arguing that plaintiff's claims were barred by Section 230.
In its order granting the Wikimedia Foundation's motion to dismiss, the court affirmed that "interactive computer service providers" such as the Foundation generally cannot be held liable for third-party content like Wikipedia articles and photographs. ... the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects. The court rejected this argument because it directly conflicts with Section 230 ...
This outcome perfectly demonstrates how critical Section 230 remains to crowdsourced projects and communities.
— Diff
The case discussed in Rogers' essay on Diff concerned the Wikipedia biography of New York serial killer Nathaniel White. For more than two years this Wikipedia article had as its lead image a police photograph of a quite different Nathaniel White, an African-American man resident in Florida whose picture has also, equally erroneously, been used in a Discovery Channel broadcast on the New York serial killer of the same name.
The image was inserted into the Wikipedia article by User:Vwanweb on 28 May 2018, incorrectly identified as originating from the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. It was removed from the article on 4 September 2020 – an edit attributed by Wikipedia only to an American IP address, rather than a registered Wikipedia user account.
The removal of the image occurred about a week after Karl Etters, writing for the Tallahassee Democrat, reported that the Florida Mr. White had sued the Discovery Channel for defamation. In his article, Etters wrote that Wikipedia was also using the wrong picture to illustrate its article on the serial killer: "A Google search turns up the name of the Florida Nathaniel White with a Wikipedia page showing his photo and label as a serial killer."
Taken together, these facts contradict Rogers' characterization of how well Wikipedia deals with cases such as this:
Now, surely no individual editor can be blamed for having failed to see the Tallahassee Democrat article. But it is just as surely inappropriate in a case like this, where real harm has been done to a living person – on which more below – to praise community processes. It would seem more appropriate –
The obvious issue is image sourcing, and especially the sourcing of photographs of criminals. The original upload of the picture by User:Vwanweb cited crimefeed.com as the source of the picture. Crimefeed.com today redirects to investigationdiscovery.com, a site owned by Discovery, Inc., which also owns the Discovery Channel. The Web Archive shows that an article on Nathaniel White was indeed published on the site on August 2, 2017. The article itself is not in the archive, but its URL matches the truncated "http://crimefeed.com/2017/08/31713..." URL listed in the log of the upload.
If this, then, was Vwanweb's source, subsequent events clearly showed that it was unreliable. And even less trustworthy sites (such as murderpedia.org) have been and are used in Wikipedia to source police photographs. Surely Wikipedia's guidelines, policies and community practices for sourcing images, in particular images used to imply responsibility for specific crimes, would benefit from some strengthening, to ensure they actually depict the correct individual.
Correctly indicating image provenance in an article, along the lines of the "Say where you read it" guideline that applies to written texts, is another aspect that may require attention: according to the upload information, the picture came from a "true crime" site, not the New York State Department as was indicated in the article.
As Rogers explains in his Diff essay, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is essential to the way Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites have operated for the past twenty years. The key sentence in Section 230 is this: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." But the law has come under fire lately in the US, both from the political right and from the political left.
Republicans who feel their views are being censored online argue that social media websites have abandoned the ideals of plurality and political diversity, and that as a consequence websites should no longer enjoy Section 230 privileges that were originally designed to benefit neutral hosts. Some Democrats, meanwhile, have criticized sites for hiding behind Section 230 and doing too little about problematic content. In their view, Section 230 was created to enable sites to moderate content without liability risk to them, and if they don't do so, then the law is not fit for its purpose.
A common but mistaken idea about Section 230 in this context is that site operators like the Wikimedia Foundation would "lose" their protection if they started to moderate more content than they were legally required to remove (i.e. if they went beyond copyright infringements, child pornography, court-ordered removal of defamatory content, etc.). This notion is often expressed as follows: "If the Foundation were to start moderating content, it would no longer be a platform, but a publisher, and would become liable for everything posted on its sites."
This is almost the exact opposite of the truth. As Mike Godwin, former General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, explained in Slate last year, Section 230 was actually "designed to empower internet companies to remove offensive, disturbing, or otherwise subscriber-alienating content without being liable for whatever else their users posted. The idea was that companies might be afraid to censor anything because in doing so, they would take on responsibility for everything." Section 230 was designed to remove that risk.
Interested readers can find more information on this issue in the following articles:
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The Diff essay contains another paragraph related to Section 230 that is worthy of particular attention. It implies that Mr. White would have done better to direct his complaint at User:Vwanweb. Let's look at this passage in detail. Rogers states:
It is important to note that Section 230's broad protection of Wikimedia projects and other online services does not leave litigants like Mr. White without options. Instead, the law simply requires that litigants direct their complaints at the individuals who made the statements at issue, rather than the forums where the statements were made. This both allows litigants to challenge the appropriate parties responsible for their harm and protects online hosting companies like the Wikimedia Foundation from the costs associated with liability for user-generated content.
— Diff
This may sound plausible and equitable enough to the general reader, but Rogers surely knows that Wikipedia editors, by and large, write under the cover of pseudonymity – a practice which the Wikimedia Foundation explicitly encourages and vigorously defends. Identifying contributors is no easy task – and certainly not one the Foundation wants people to pursue. According to the Wikimedia Foundation's Universal Code of Conduct, which is in the process of being adopted, determining and sharing a contributor's identity is "unacceptable". So, how genuine is this advice given to Mr. White?
Moreover, there is no reason to assume that User:Vwanweb, the editor concerned, would have been able to give appropriate compensation to Mr. White. To cite a precedent, when John Seigenthaler learned the identity of his pseudonymous Wikipedia defamer, Brian Chase, Seigenthaler ended up feeling sorry for Chase, and interceded with Chase's employer, who had fired Chase, to give him his job back.
Nor is there any reason to assume any malice or racist motives on the part of Vwanweb. That user had been very involved in Wikipedia's crime articles for a while, frequently requesting and uploading police photographs. In 2016, Vwanweb argued passionately (and unsuccessfully) for including criticism of an instance of all-white jury selection in a criminal case in which the perpetrator was white and all the victims were black. Their insistence on including criticism of this practice eventually earned them a warning for edit-warring. If there was any race whose failings this editor was likely to highlight on Wikipedia, judging by that episode, it was Caucasians.
I believe that like many other editors, Vwanweb simply followed community practices they had observed here. In this subject area, this involves widespread use of "true crime" sources that present crime as entertainment, and whose level of reliability is akin to that of tabloids and other types of publications that are banned or deprecated as sources in other parts of Wikipedia.
When asked for comment by The Signpost the WMF legal department responded that they are not trying to encourage victims to sue Wikipedia contributors, only that there may be others beyond the WMF who can be held responsible.
In this particular case the Discovery Channel was sued and is not protected by Section 230. But in the general case, would the majority of victims be able to find another responsible party?
Here are some excerpts from Mr. White's complaint. It states that after the 2018 Discovery Channel broadcast,
… friends and family contacted Plaintiff concerning the broadcast and asking Plaintiff if he actually murdered people in the state of New York.
Plaintiff assured these friends and family that even though he acknowledged his criminal past, he never murdered anyone nor has he ever been to the state of New York. …
Plaintiff has been threatened with harm to his person and shunning by members of the public who, because of the broadcast and social and digital media imagery, assumed that Plaintiff was the vicious killer who committed the murders in New York state. …
Plaintiff has resorted to dressing incognito so he is not recognized in order to preserve his life and damp down the threats he received.
Defendants published this false and defamatory image, photo and information regarding Plaintiff to a third party which is and was the public at large on its television broadcast, social media and digital & electronic audience which encompasses millions of people in Florida and billions of people around the world.
Plaintiff is an African-American man and Defendants appear to believe that all African-American men are interchangeable and that no one would notice or care Defendants were defaming an innocent man, not even other African-Americans, in their description of Plaintiff in this matter.
It is obvious in this case that Plaintiff is not the gruesome murderer that was supposed to be depicted in Defendants' broadcasts and media platforms and that this is more than a simple, excusable or inadvertent error.
African-Americans have always borne an unequal brunt of punishment in this country and this behavior continues from these private Defendants upon Plaintiff.
— Nathaniel White's complaint
This has clearly been an extremely harrowing experience for Mr. White, as it would surely have been for anyone.
While to the best of my belief the error did not originate in Wikipedia, but was imported into Wikipedia from an unreliable external site, for more than two years any vigilante Googling Nathaniel White serial killer would have seen Mr. White's color picture prominently displayed in Google's knowledge graph panel (multiple copies of it still appear there at the time of writing). And along with it they would have found a prominent link to the serial killer's Wikipedia biography, again featuring Mr. White's image – providing what looked like encyclopedic confirmation that Mr. White of Florida was indeed guilty of sickening crimes.
Moreover, it can be shown that Mr. White's image spread to other online sources via Wikipedia. On the very day the picture was removed from the article here, a video about the serial killer was uploaded to YouTube – complete with Mr. White's picture, citing Wikipedia. At the time of writing, the video's title page with Mr. White's color picture is the top Google image result in searches for the serial killer. All in all, seven of Google's top-fifteen image search results for Nathaniel White serial killer today feature Mr. White's image. Only two black-and-white photos show what seems to have been the real killer.
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The Wikimedia Foundation has in the recent past cited the fate of George Floyd and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests as its inspiration for the Knowledge Equity Fund, a $4.5 million fund set up last year to support racial equity initiatives outside the Wikimedia movement. It has declared "We stand for racial justice", expressing the hope that the Wikimedia projects would "document a grand turning point – a time in the future when our communities, systems, and institutions acknowledge the equality and dignity of all people. Until that day, we stand with those who are fighting for justice and for enduring change. With every edit, we write history." A subsequent blog post on the AfroCROWD Juneteenth Conference again referenced the Black Lives Matter movement.
Yet here we have a case where a very real black life was severely harmed, with Wikipedia playing a secondary, but still highly significant part in the sorry tale. The Wikimedia blog post contains no acknowledgement of this fact. Instead it is jubilant – jubilant that the Wikimedia Foundation was absolved of all responsibility for the fact that Mr. White was for over two years misrepresented as a serial killer on its flagship site, the result of a pseudonymous Wikimedian trusting a source that proved unreliable.
Now we can shrug our shoulders and say, "This sort of thing will happen once in a while." Would we have accepted this sort of response from the police force in George Floyd's case?
The Seigenthaler case resulted in changes to Wikipedia's referencing requirements for biographies of living people. Will this present case result in similar changes to sourcing practices for images, especially those implying responsibility for a crime? Who will help Mr. White clean up his continuing Google footprint as a serial killer?
There is also a deeper moral question here. What kind of bright new world is this we are building, in which it is presented to us as a cause for celebration that it was possible for a black man – a man, perhaps, not unlike George Floyd – to be defamed on our global top-20 website with absolute impunity, without his having any realistic hope of redress for what happened to him here?
Editors are brainstorming and proposing changes to the Requests for adminship (RFA), following discussions in which editors found issues with large parts of the process (see the September issue's Discussion report). The participants have identified eight key issues to tackle and have brainstormed ways to tackle them that are varied both in scope and substance. Editors can propose solutions until November 7, 2021 at the 2021 Requests for adminship proposals page.
Eight key problems with RfA were identified during Phase 1 of the RfA review process, which concluded on September 29. According to the main page of the 2021 RfA review. These problems were:
- Corrosive RfA atmosphere The atmosphere at RfA is deeply unpleasant. This makes it so fewer candidates wish to run and also means that some members of our community don't comment/vote.
- Level of scrutiny Many editors believe it would be unpleasant to have so much attention focused on them. This includes being indirectly a part of watchlists and editors going through your edit history with the chance that some event, possibly a relatively trivial event, becomes the focus of editor discussion for up to a week.
- Standards needed to pass keep rising It used to be far easier to pass RfA however the standards necessary to pass have continued to rise such that only "perfect" candidates will pass now.
- Too few candidates There are too few candidates. This not only limits the number of new admin we get but also makes it harder to identify other RfA issues because we have such a small sample size.
- "No need for the tools" is a poor reason as we can find work for new admins
- Lifetime tenure (high stakes atmosphere) Because RfA carries with it lifetime tenure, granting any given editor sysop feels incredibly important. This creates a risk-averse and high-stakes atmosphere.
- Admin permissions and unbundling There is a large gap between the permissions an editor can obtain and the admin toolset. This brings increased scrutiny for RFA candidates, as editors evaluate their feasibility in lots of areas.
- RfA should not be the only road to adminship Right now, RfA is the only way we can get new admins, but it doesn't have to be.
According to Wugapodes and Primefac, who created the closing summary that identified which problems enjoyed community consensus, the identification of issues 1–5 as problems enjoyed "clear consensus", while the identification of issues 6–8 as problems enjoyed "rough consensus". The two administrators noted that there were two additional concerns identified that "have a numerical rough consensus but have very low participation relative to other issues", choosing to classify them as having achieved "no consensus." These were:
- The RfA process is biased against long-term editors The problem is that mud sticks. It is much harder for a veteran contributor to become an admin, compared to a fresh editor with one or two years of history, since usually the latter has a much more pristine record than the former.
- Expecting the unexpected The only known thing about RFAs is that they are rather unpredictable. It isn't clear for a given candidate what is on and off the table regarding their edit history. The things that have the potential to sink an RFA can almost never be guessed beforehand.
Editors floated a number of ideas to solve the community-identified problems with RfA via the review's brainstorming page. Of particular note, editors who have proposed creating an alternate admin-making process to RfA were given a contingent green light by Wikimedia Foundation's legal department (WMF legal) to explore their options. Barkeep49, citing permission from Jrogers (WMF) posted an email communication from WMF legal that identified the Foundation's current stance:
I discussed this internally, and we are comfortable with the community exploring alternative methods to RFA. The key point, per our previous commentary on the issue is to ensure that the process is one that can make sure that the selected candidates are overall trustworthy and responsible. We would want to try and ensure that people who have access to deleted content don't either accidentally or purposely leak it. At this point, given the concerns the community has raised with the existing RfA process, we would be open to reviewing other processes that might achieve the same overall goal.
— Jacob Rogers, Senior Legal Manager
Various methods for alternate processes to RfA were suggested along these lines. Barkeep49 described an idea to create a community-elected "Adminstrator Appointment Board" that, after a discussion period, would vote to decide on whether an individual should be given adminship; some editors—both in support and in opposition to the idea—pointed to the failed 2014 proposal for the Administrative Standards Commission as a baseline to evaluate against. Another alternate method to become an administrator was offered by WereSpielChequers: non-administrators that do sufficiently well (>65% support) in the Arbitration Committee elections could by default become admins. Others, such as Yair rand submitted an idea for RfA to be composed of two phases—the first to "establish an outline of the candidate's characteristics, qualities and qualifications, experience and expertise" and the second to determine "whether or not a person with this profile should be made an administrator, determined by !vote with normal bureaucrat closing ranges". Worm That Turned advanced a separate idea for a two-phase RfA during which the first phase would be a moderated discussion on the candidate's aptitude for adminship and the second phase would be an anonymous vote.
Along another vein, there were several ideas on altering how adminship can be revoked. Chetsford advocated having a probationary period for new administrators during which they could be subject to binding recall by the community. Extraordinary Writ proposed a "PROD-style adminship" process where potential administrators only answer three standard questions and become administrators by default unless a certain number of editors objected to their adminship; the idea would not prohibit individuals who fail the PROD-style adminship process to undergo RfA.
A full list of the brainstormed ideas is available at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2021 review/Brainstorming.
Since October 24, editors have been able to formally add their proposals to a list for community evaluation, with a November 7 deadline to submit proposals. The community evaluation process begins on October 31 and will last until November 30, according to the 2021 RfA review hub page. Following the end of community evaluation period, the proposals will be evaluated for consensus, and those measures that achieve consensus will be implemented. "[H]opefully," the 2021 RfA review hub page says, implementation will "be fast and not require any further phases."
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
A field experiment[1] involving 57,084 newly created user accounts on French Wikipedia examined the effect of pre-formulated welcome messages (example), finding no statistically significant effect on retention (i.e. whether the user made an edit within one week) or time spent contributing (estimated based on edit time stamps). The researchers also compared two variants of the welcome message with and without a "human mentorship" offer (i.e. a "contact me" phrase), likewise with no significant differences between the two. The study was carefully pre-registered [6] (a practice that has been gaining popularity in various research fields amidst the replication crisis but is still not common among the publications we are usually covering here).
The authors note that their findings are "consistent with field experiments on other language Wikipedia communities ... however, [they] are in contrast to previous work that observed a positive effect of sending an invitation to the newcomer forum (the "Teahouse") on new editor retention in English Wikipedia [cf. our previous review ]. The divergent findings could have multiple explanations. First, the Teahouse study used a slightly different intervention. [...But ] The Teahouse study might also have been a false positive" because of a statistical problem involving multiple comparisons.
In an accompanying blog post, the authors note that "at the Wikimedia Foundation, the Growth Team has been re-thinking the new editor experience through designs like the Newcomer homepage." This work has likewise involved randomized experiments to "learn more about what types of content is effective in driving activation and retention rates". While the full results on the effects of providing newcomers with an initial version of that homepage have not been published yet, it has been informally reported that it did not indicate increased retention, consistent with the French Wikipedia experiment. However, the WMF Growth team subsequently found that adding "newcomer tasks" to the Newcomer homepage increased both retention and the number of edits made during the first week.
The French Wikipedia study was done by Cornell University's "Citizens and Tech" lab (originally founded as CivilServant), which has been doing various other studies on Wikimedia projects, including a related one about the "thanks" feature (see our previous review: "Receiving thanks increases retention of new editors, but not the time contributed to Wikipedia"). On Twitter, the lab's founder J. Nathan Matias connected the study to current debates on "how to govern big tech", arguing that
"This kind of study is part of the answer:
- open, transparent research designed with/for the public
- platform-independent
- public-interest problem-solving rather than PR / profit"
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 and paper:[2]
"we propose the task of table-guided abstractive biography summarization, which utilizes factual tables [i.e. infoboxes in biographical Wikipedia articles] to capture important information and then generate a summary of a biography. We first introduce the TaGS (Table-Guided Summarization) dataset , the first large-scale biography summarization dataset with tables. Next, we report some statistics about this dataset to validate the quality of the dataset. We also benchmark several commonly used summarization methods on TaGS and hope this will inspire more exciting methods. [...] In the real-world application which provided automatic biography summarization service, we will employ human editors to double-check the generated summary to ensure the correctness of content and grammar before publish[ing] the summary."
The paper contains no examples of the generated summaries, and the code and corpus that it describes are not publicly available. However, the authors (five Beijing-based researchers) indicate that they might make the latter accessible upon request to researchers who agree to a copyright statement claiming that "The dataset is only for research purposes. Without permission, it may not be used for any commercial purposes and distributed to others."
From the abstract:[3]
"This research measures the participation of Asian countries in [the sharing economy] through their contributions to a global sharing economy platform-Wikipedia. This study uses language as a proxy for each country, which allows for a macro-scale comparison of factors related to participation in sharing economy. The study finds that in addition to expected factors related to the global digital divide and the country's development level, other factors such as country's size, dominant language, and cultural factors also play a significant role. Lower development levels, multi-ethnic (multi-language) and smaller populations can be a severe impediment to the development of the sharing economy. Government policy (China) or unique Internet structure (South Korea) can create significant outliers. Contributing to the sharing economy is also more common in countries located near the self-expression and rational-secular ends of the Inglehart-Welzel model, and the uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation dimensions of the Hofstede model."
(see also presentation slides)
From the abstract:[4]
"... we expanded upon the known collaborative mechanisms on the English Wikipedia and demonstrated that the collaboration model is best captured through the interplay of these mechanisms. We annotated talk page conversations for types of power plays or vies for control over edits that are made to articles, to understand how policy and power play mechanisms in editors' discussions account for behavior in English (EN), Farsi (FA), and Chinese (ZH) language editions of Wikipedia. Our findings show that the same power plays used in EN exist in both FA and ZH but the frequency of their usage differs across the editions."
From the abstract:[5]
"...we propose a simple model that describes the dynamics around peaks of popularity by incorporating key features, i.e., the anticipatory growth and the decay of collective attention together with circadian rhythms. The proposed model allows us to develop a new method for predicting the future page view activity and for clustering time series. To validate our methodology, we collect a corpus of page view data from Wikipedia associated to a range of planned events, that are events which we know in advance will have a fixed date in the future, such as elections and sport events. [...] restricting to Wikipedia pages associated to association football, we observe that the specific realization of the event, in our case which team wins a match or the type of the match, has a significant effect on the response dynamics after the event."
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) (preprint)
Blog post, Research project page on Meta-wiki
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) code
As a long-time Wikipedia reader and editor, I first discovered Wikipedia in 2003 and have never gone without it since. I still remember all the nights I spent clicking on link after link in enwiki and wound up with 30 open Internet Explorer windows (that was back when browsers had no tabs), after reading Wikipedia for an entire night without any sleep. I can now no longer imagine a world in which we did not have free access to the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. I started my zhwiki account back in 2005 in order to create and edit zhwiki articles. I mainly function as a translator from enwiki to zhwiki, given the cornucopia of articles on enwiki and the dearth of articles on zhwiki, and my native proficiency in both languages.
My views on the banning of seven Chinese editors and the desysoping of 12 more by WMF office action last month represent only my own opinions. I hope that my vantage point, from an ordinary long-time reader and editor, will add a fresh perspective on the ongoing debate, and that my long tenure on zhwiki, including the recent changes, will show the urgent need for the WMF’s recent actions. As I am also a Wikimedian from China, much of what I write here is also a critique of some of my fellow Wikimedians from China.
My first perspective, and one that is the most important to recent events, is simply common etiquette. I am not just talking about the usual good faith Wikipedia editing etiquette, but rather the fundamental etiquette of holding a civil discussion in a modern liberal free-speech society. This fundamental etiquette has been lacking lately on zhwiki. I felt this most acutely after my return to zhwiki from a 7-year Wiki sabbatical. During one month (July 2021), I was reported to 3RR (zhwiki’s Edit warring board) twice, ANM (zhwiki’s version of ANI) 4 times, and AIAV (zhwiki’s Administrator intervention against vandalism) four times. I'd never been reported once in my life on zhwiki prior to July 2021. Editing zhwiki never felt this difficult before. It was like struggling in a pit of molasses, making me too bogged down to complete any useful edit, discussion, or discourse. If so much happened to a single person over the course of a single month, I can only imagine the collective grievances felt by the wider zhwiki community at having to constantly expend needless energy, the time and effort to deal with these editors and their behavior day-in-and-day-out, over the course of these past two or three years. For every step taken forward, three steps were taken backward. Why did zhwiki deteriorate to this state? It may be because of the influx of Wikimedians from mainland China. some of whom have never been taught basic etiquette of communicating in a civil and polite manner, which is fundamental to the proper conduct of free speech. As free speech does not exist in mainland China, for some Wikimedians free speech is an entirely unfamiliar and foreign concept. China is not a diverse society, so some Wikimedians have no tolerance for opinions that are at odds with their own. This is at the root of the problems plaguing zhwiki right now: some Wikimedians from mainland China, having no idea how to conduct proper civil discussions in a free-speech environment - having come from a free-speech-barren country where this etiquette was never taught to them in the first place, employing methods such as edit warring and weaponizing the reporting boards (and, in more extreme cases, threatening to report some Hong Kong Wikimedians to the National Security apparatus in Hong Kong, which directly precipitated some of the actions taken by the WMF recently) in order to intimidate the zhwiki community at large into cowering and catering to the pro-Beijing narratives that they are advancing. Viewed in this light, the steps taken by the WMF are merely the first urgently needed steps to restore a healthy zhwiki community.
My second perspective is that of some Wikimedians from China’s misunderstanding of the terms "democracy" and "freedom of speech". This is not surprising considering that the true meanings of these terms are taboo in China and China's government has always deliberately distorted these terms into: "freedom of speech" = "you can say whatever the hell you want" and "democracy" = "a person who is elected with many votes represents the will of the people (or heaven’s mandate), and hence cannot be impeached, even though the votes may have been rigged and the person an asshole", in order to set up strawman attacks on Western democracies as being “essentially anarchic” (when it comes to free speech) or "run by the shadow hands of big capitalists" (when it comes to ousting unsuitable leaders voted in on rigged votes), and in order to tout China’s system as being the best. More importantly, what some Wikimedians from China have never learned, a concept that may be entirely foreign to them, is that there are circumstances under which the notions of "democracy" and "freedom of speech" just do not apply. The notion that democracy and freedom of speech only apply to public spaces that are under the jurisdiction of a state’s government is new to them. That they do not apply to private spaces. A very simple example would be: if you are employed by the Acme company, and you say "Acme sells garbage", then you may be fired, and that has nothing to do with freedom of speech. The same can be said of Twitter and Facebook banning Trump, YouTube censoring inappropriate videos, and WMF taking actions to globally ban some people on zhwiki as the WMF sees fit. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are all private spaces that are owned by Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the WMF respectively, and so the concepts of "democracy" and "freedom of speech" may not apply under these circumstances.
My third perspective is that of the well-known psychological phenomenon of "Stockholm Syndrome". This is most exemplified by Wikipedians of Mainland China User Group's (WMCUG’s) first open letter to the WMF:
In addition, if Wikipedia in mainland China is really as dangerous as what Maggie suggested in her statement, then I suppose that isn’t it is going to push mainland Chinese Wikimedians into a more dangerous situation (original Chinese wording reads “firepit”) if the Foundation publicly "condemns" the Chinese government and potentially angers them?
— Cast Away Illusions, Prepare For Struggle — WMC’s First Open Letter on the Recent Office Action
I don’t know whether Maggie was suggesting that the reason for "it is dangerous to contribute in China" was the Chinese government’s blockade on Wikipedia, or because of the existence of the WMC being a "gang" that scares people off. For the former, I hope that the Foundation will immediately withdraw the statement that "condemns" the Chinese government
— Cast Away Illusions, Prepare For Struggle — WMC’s First Open Letter on the Recent Office Action
WMCUG points out that WMF is "abandoning China", even if this accusation was true, when faced with a regime that actively blocks all Wikimedia projects, what is the WMF supposed to do? Appease to China’s government and self-censor all relevant articles in the hope that China might unblock Wikimedia projects, when in fact the rationales for China’s blocking of Wikimedia projects (along with many other websites) are totally opaque, arbitrary, and unpredictable to begin with? The last time such an appeasement approach was used was on the eve of the Second World War, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler ceding the entire Sudeten territory of Czekoslovakia to Nazi Germany, and we all know how that approach went down the annals of history. Instead of criticizing China’s government for its unacceptable behaviour in blocking all Wikimedia projects, WMCUG instead lays their blame squarely on the WMF, who in this case is also a victim of China’s Great Firewall. Such behaviour from the WMCUG constitute archetypal "Stockholm Syndrome" behaviours.
My fourth perspective is that some Wikimedians from China have a lack of basic understanding of the international consensus, reality and norms regarding some proper nouns. A most germane case in point would be the proper noun "Taiwan". The international consensus regarding Taiwan is that it is its own sovereign state, having its own defined territory, government, citizenry and sovereignty. That Taiwan is a state independent from China (albeit a non-UN state with limited official international recognition and limited official diplomatic ties with other countries). However, some Wikimedians from China have been indoctrinated from a very young age that "Taiwan is a province of China", and so they bring these views with them when they first visit zhwiki. It is easy, then, to imagine the shock they get when they see the Taiwan and Republic of China articles on zhwiki for the first time — those articles being very, very different from their counterparts on the Baidu Baike encyclopedia and essentially anathema to Wikimedians from China. It is then easy to imagine fuses being lit in the heads of these Wikimedians, which will lead to them directly engaging in massive edit wars with the entire zhwiki community at large, as they attempt to "correct" and these articles that are so anathema to them. To the rest of the zhwiki community, such behaviour is tantamount to vandalism.
My fifth perspective concerns Maggie Dennis's use of the word "infiltration". This word is not being used inappropriately here. Judging by the vehement reactions of some Wikimedians from China against the use of this word, it must have rubbed squarely on their sore spot, which, given the China context, usually means that we must have at least hit on some semblance of the underlying truth (i.e. having caught some Wikimedians from China with their hands in the cookie jar, their embarrassment leading to their visceral reactions to this word). Let me put it this way: maybe not all seven people banned are under the orders of China’s government to infiltrate zhwiki and to attempt to spin things in a more positive light for China's government, but if you were to tell me that all seven people are innocent and are acting of their own accords, having nothing to do with China's government, then you would definitely be pulling my leg. China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping has set "cyber-sovereignty" as the overarching prime directive of China’s Internet control strategy, and Wikipedia is an obvious "first battleground" for China’s government to attempt to take over in order to advance its "cyber-sovereignty" agenda. I know this flies in the face of one of the most fundamental tenets of Wikipedia — "not a battleground" — but then again China’s government has never been quite good at following any rules, laws, regulations, or guidelines, even those of its own. The title of WMCUG’s first open letter to the WMF, "Cast Away Illusions, Prepare For Struggle", which came from Mao Zedong,[a] who was a mastermind at waging civil wars and creating internal domestic conflicts (such as the Great Cultural Revolution) that ended up claiming millions upon millions of innocent Chinese lives, is further testament to the idea of China’s government treating Wikipedia as one of its primary "battlegrounds without smoke or gunfire", upon which to wage its ideological warfare against the wider international community, and the free world at large.
My final perspective concerns "China’s government had never harassed any Wikimedians" which is an argument some Wikimedians from China repeatedly tout, especially in comparison to what they perceive to be the "draconian actions" taken by the WMF against the seven people. Just because China’s government has never harassed any Wikimedians so far does not mean that China's government won't harass any Wikimedians in the future. For the past twenty years, China's government had left people such as Vicky Zhao, Bingbing Fan, and Jack Ma alone, and look at the things China's government had done to these people recently. One can never predict which individuals or organizations a totalitarian government is going to go after next. So the fact that a totalitarian government hasn't gone after Wikimedians in China is really nothing to write home about, and actively bragging about it and flaunting it in the WMF's face is, in my opinion, merely another facet of the manifestation of "Stockholm Syndrome" in these Wikimedians from China.
James Bond once met Octopussy. Now here on Wikipedia is 007 vs. Squid Game.
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Squid Game | 
|
2,508,476 | 
|
Korea's cultural ascent, which led to many Western fans of the local pop music and TV shows, finally leads to an article atop Wikipedia's most viewed, a Netflix show about a man down on his luck who joins a mysterious survival game. |
| 2 | Death of Gabby Petito | 
|
1,786,655[1] | 
|
Eight days after being declared missing, the remains of Petito, a van life traveler, were found at a camp site in Wyoming. Preliminary results from an autopsy indicate a homicide, and a manhunt is on for Petito's fiancé/boyfriend (media stationed outside his home shown in picture). There is discussion about whether missing white woman syndrome might have fueled the amount of attention given to the case. |
| 3 | Willie Garson |
|
1,387,842 | .jpg)
|
The American actor best known for his appearance in Sex and the City died on September 21, aged 57, of pancreatic cancer. In a career spanning dozens of films and TV series from 1986 till his death (including a posthumous release) he somehow failed to win any awards (so far). |
| 4 | 2021 Canadian federal election | 
|
1,151,886 | 
|
"There's an election happening, and it's called a snap election because it was called three minutes ago and ends in a hot second, unlike an American election, which lasts about 597 days." Indeed, one month after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked for a dissolution of the Parliament, Canada already chose its House of Commons representatives again. Trudeau's Liberals still came out on top. |
| 5 | Christopher Reeve | 
|
1,151,269 | 
|
Google used a doodle to give an homage to Reeve, the standard against live-action portrayals of Superman are compared to, on what would've been Reeve's 69th birthday had the actor not passed away in 2004 (9 years after becoming quadriplegic in a horse riding accident). |
| 6 | Sex Education (TV series) |
|
1,050,270 | 
|
Season three was released on September 17. I haven't seen it yet, but I intend to. |
| 7 | Deaths in 2021 | 
|
890,767 | .jpg)
|
If this ever-changing world in which we're living Makes you give in and cry Say live and let die! |
| 8 | Ted Lasso |
|
855,503 | 
|
It was Emmy time again, and the big winner in the comedy categories was this Apple TV+ show about an American football coach hired to manage the football he knows as soccer across the Pond in a sabotage attempt that unexpectedly works out well. |
| 9 | 2019 Canadian federal election |
|
679,216 | 
|
Two years ago, the Liberals didn't get a majority in the parliament. They tried again this year (see #4), and still couldn't. |
| 10 | Michael Schumacher | 
|
662,073 | 
|
Netflix released Schumacher, a documentary on the German driver who in the early 2000s left no chance for anyone else in Formula One, setting up records that only recently started being broken by Lewis Hamilton. Just don't expect the man himself to give his opinion, as ever since a skiing accident in 2013 Schumacher has been in recovery privately. |
.png)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Squid Game |
|
4,675,856 | .svg)
|
After Parasite comes another Korean product to continuously surprise (and often horrify) viewers thanks to Netflix, where people with high debts try to get money by risking their lives playing games such as Red Light Green Light, Tug of war and marbles, plus extracting shaped toffee from its mold. |
| 2 | No Time to Die |
|
1,422,511 | 
|
After much delay, the newest James Bond film is hitting theaters—though not the United States, which has to wait two weeks before watching Daniel Craig do spy stuff. |
| 3 | Midnight Mass (miniseries) |
|
1,114,940 | .jpg)
|
Back to Netflix, with a supernatural horror show where an isolated island experiences weird events after the arrival of a priest played by Hamish Linklater. |
| 4 | Venom: Let There Be Carnage |
|
1,080,748 | .jpg)
|
And for a movie the US did get, Tom Hardy is back as Spider-Man's dark counterpart, this time against Woody Harrelson as Carnage. |
| 5 | 2021 German federal election |
|
894,480 | 
|
Elections were held on September 26, though no colorful coalition has been formed yet. Regardless of who gets a majority, Angela Merkel will be stepping down as chancellor. She held the office for almost 16 years, only lagging behind the guy who united Germany and the guy who reunited Germany. |
| 6 | Deaths in 2021 |
|
849,592 | 
|
Fool me once, fool me twice Are you death or paradise? Now you'll never see me cry There's just no time to die |
| 007 | Daniel Craig |
|
723,569 | .jpg)
|
What an appropriate number. #2 marks the last time James Bond's tuxedo is used by Daniel Craig. Despite being not well-received upon his announcement as Bond, Craig ended up as the actor with the longest tenure! (even if part of that owes to studio financial issues and a pandemic) And there's another investigation for him to return to in Knives Out 2. |
| 8 | HoYeon Jung |
|
711,309 | 
|
This model-turned-actress is getting the brunt of the attention among #1's cast as "067". (But let's give a shout out to the second most prominent woman of the show, Kim Joo-ryoung, who provides many laughs in such a dark series as "212") |
| 9 | List of James Bond films | 
|
397,663 | 
|
#2 is the 25th (27th, counting a spoof and a remake) time Ian Fleming's spy reached the silver screen. Hopefully by the 60th anniversary of the series next year Eon Productions will have already picked who will be the 007th James Bond. |
| 10 | R. Kelly |
|
620,745 | 
|
You'd think a man whose real-life romantic history consists of marrying an underage girl in the 90s, abusing underage girls on tape in the 2000s, and keeping a harem of underage girls locked away in his home in the 2010s would have been behind bars a long time ago, let alone on the registry, but we live in a society where someone can get away with all that as long as their fictional romantic history is suave enough. It's probably in poor taste to praise anything the ironically dubbed "Pied Piper" did at this point, as separating the art from the artist becomes difficult when the art is merely a reflection of the artist's own depravity. In any case, Kelly was found guilty of sexual exploitation of a child, bribery, racketeering and sex trafficking this week, and is looking at a life sentence. |
.png)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Squid Game |
|
5,400,927 | .jpg)
|
Most shows wouldn't attract quite this much attention in the second week after their release—let alone in the third week—even those released on Netflix and especially those not made by and for Western audiences. But just when we thought the K-wave couldn't grow any larger, it turned into a tsunami and engulfed us all with this critically acclaimed Korean game show where people down and out and down on their luck play children's games for an enormous cash prize. That's as dark as it gets for the whole show, trust us. If you don't believe us, just watch and see for yourself! Though, based on this week's explosive view count and the fact that Squid Game is set to become Netflix's biggest show of all time, you probably already have. |
| 2 | No Time to Die |
|
1,564,145 | 
|
Craig. Daniel Craig. His final mission as Bond was finally released in the United States this week after being released in just about every major film market in weeks prior. There may be no time for Craig's Bond to die, but there's certainly 163 minutes worth of screen time to watch him live again. |
| 3 | Zodiac Killer |
|
1,088,838 | 
|
The Case Breakers, an independent team of 40 cold case investigators, claimed they identified this still-mysterious murderer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The police disagree with their discovery, deeming it too reliant on circumstantial evidence. |
| 4 | List of James Bond films |
|
928,512 | A series survived so many things that could've made it irrelevant - the Counterculture of the 1960s, the end of the Cold War, the War on Terror, the PATRIOT Act, the current political atmosphere and correctness - is still ranking high in pop culture and on Wikipedia. | |
| 5 | The Guilty (2021 film) | 
|
956,860 | 
|
After a limited release last month, this American remake of a gritty 2018 Danish crime thriller, about a 911 dispatcher who gets a call from a kidnapped woman, was released on Netflix last week. It stars famed anti-showering advocate Jake Gyllenhaal and doesn't seem to be wowing audiences or critics, many of whom feel as though the original was good enough on its own. |
| 6 | HoYeon Jung |
|
950,107 | .jpg)
|
When any series reaches the critical mass that Squid Game has, there are two people who are guaranteed to become breakout stars: the show's protagonist (Lee Jung-Jae) and a beloved side character. Enter HoYeon Jung, who, after establishing a name for herself in the modeling world as a runner-up on the 4th season of Korea's Next Top Model, made her acting debut in #1. In it, she plays Kang Sae-byeok, who flees North Korea and needs money to pay a broker to find the rest of her family members who didn't make it across the border. As expected, she's essentially become the face of Squid Game, and became the most-followed Korean actor on Instagram this week by a huge margin. |
| 7 | Venom: Let There Be Carnage |
|
863,091 | .jpg)
|
Marvel's most toxic hero received a slimy sequel that premiered in American theatres last week, and earned $100 million in just 5 days, tying it with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as the fastest film to reach that milestone during the pandemic. Given that again there is Tom Hardy going insane as Eddie Brock and his symbiote partner, only this time joined by the equally unhinged villains Woody Harrelson as Carnage and Naomie Harris (the Moneypenny of #2, only in a Tia Dalma getup) as Shriek, critics and audiences favored this one over the original, although overall reception is still mixed. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2021 |
|
856,211 | 
|
People like us Know how to survive There's no point in living If you can't feel alive |
| 9 | Daniel Craig |
|
778,724 | .jpg)
|
Craig's run as James Blond finally comes to a close with the release of No Time to Die (#2), which, because the pandemic caused the film's release to be delayed for over a year, officially makes him the longest-running Bond actor. He managed to imbue new life into a character that's been around for over a half-century, which is no easy feat, and he'll surely be missed as 007. |
| 10 | Midnight Mass (miniseries) |
|
697,813 | 
|
Yet another Netflix series that's bringing in droves of viewers, even if its page on here is looking a bit bare. Just in time for spooky season, it's a creepy, existential tale about a man who suffers from a drunk driving accident who returns to his small island community. There's also a charismatic priest who arrives in said community and begins making miracles happen. Bless up! It's gotten rave reviews from critics and continues to be a hit after being released two weeks ago, but, as illustrated by some of the other entries on here, it's not touching some of Netflix's more popular exports this week. |
.png)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Squid Game |
|
3,648,028 | 
|
Despite this being the fourth week after it first dropped on Netflix, it's been all green light, no red light for this South Korean pop culture behemoth. At this rate, we'll being seeing it at the top of the report for as many weeks as there were players in the Squid Game. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what it's about, or what people have been saying about it, or why it's become so popular. All I have to offer is this Jersey club remix of that notorious song. |
| 2 | Tyson Fury |
|
1,843,976 | 
|
Tyson's Fury surely came in handy during his third and final boxing match against heavyweight champ Deontay Wilder, whom he beat with a violent knockout punch in the 11th round of the bout. Even in all of their fighting fury, Fury still tried to prove he was a gentle giant by going to give Wilder, who was bleeding profusely out of his ear, a handshake. Wilder declined, which Fury attributed to him not reciprocating his "love and respect" for him, but if I had to guess, I'd say the blood gushing out of him might have played a part as well. |
| 3 | No Time to Die |
|
1,227,745 | 
|
In spite of plenty of things against the 25th James Bond, such as a tumultuous pre-production with changes in directors and release dates, a pandemic delaying it some more, and the involvement of the person who inflicted Fleabag upon the world, No Time to Die manages to close Daniel Craig's tenure as 007 packing quite the emotional punch. Critics and audiences have responded well, although Bond still has to at least double its current $341 million worldwide gross to make a profit. |
| 4 | Burari deaths |
|
1,027,990 | .jpg)
|
In 2018, a whole family was found dead in their Delhi house, with everyone but the strangled grandmother appearing to have hanged themselves. Netflix released a docuseries based on this morbid incident, House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths. |
| 5 | David Amess |
|
1.005.344 | 
|
While holding a constituency meeting, this member of the British Parliament was stabbed to death in what is considered a terrorist incident motivated by Islamist extremism. Amess was made a Knight Bachelor in 2015 for public service, having been a MP since 1983. His death comes just over 5 years since Jo Cox was murdered by a white supremacist, and has reignited the debate about MPs' security. |
| 6 | Deaths in 2021 |
|
836,205 | 
|
For this is the end I've drowned and dreamt this moment So overdue, I owe them Swept away, I'm stolen... |
| 7 | Halloween Kills |
|
815,624 | .jpg)
|
Even Michael Myers, one of the most indestructible serial killers in film history, was helpless against the goddamned pandemic, which delayed the eleventh time he hit the big screen[2] to this year. A sequel to the 2018 film that ignored all previous follow-ups, Halloween Kills lives up to the name by featuring some of the most brutal deaths in the series, starting with the firemen who ensured Michael didn't burn to death in Laurie Strode's basement. It didn't win critics over, as reviews felt disappointment at how, unlike its predecessor, the movie did not try to stray far from slasher film convention. At least there is a chance to finish things well in next year's Halloween Ends. |
| 8 | Adele |
|
780,670 | .jpg)
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Looks like we finally got a hello from the other side. As soon as the performer of the Bond theme quoted at #6 got divorced, jokes flew that all was set for another heartbreak album that would sweep charts and awards. And now it's officially coming, as Adele announced that her fourth record, 30, will be released in November, while also issuing lead single "Easy on Me". The song broke plenty of single-day streaming records before the day was even over and will undoubtedly be sitting pretty atop charts across the globe. |
| 9 | Deontay Wilder |
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743,564 | 
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#2 had been planning to fight compatriot Anthony Joshua, but this former heavyweight champion exercised a contractual clause asking for a rematch, hoping to finally avenge what he had claimed to be a cheated fight. But instead Fury won again. |
| 10 | List of James Bond films |
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722,279 | 
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A guy who is supposed to be discreet, yet introduces himself with his full name and goes after every woman he sees. He also sometimes drinks on the job. Six actors have played him - as put by Alan Moore, "Jock", "Fry", "Eyebrows", "Lovey", "Posh" and "Scary" - across 25 movies, and even if the latest (#3) has a tragic ending, don't expect a retirement any time soon. |
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| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Colin Powell |
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2,232,933 | 
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Powell, the first African-American secretary of state, died on October 18 due to complications from COVID-19 and concurrent bone cancer. Powell had quite the career: he was a four-star general and served as the United States National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush the Elder before becoming Secretary of State under Bush the Younger, in addition to formulating the Powell Doctrine. However, his legacy is clouded by his involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the resulting Iraq War. | |||
| 2 | Squid Game |
|
2,218,010 | 
|
The fact that a page having around two million pageviews for the week is an indication that it's "losing steam" is pretty astounding, but then again, so is the show that earned those views. We've seen this South Korean smash hit, about a bunch of people who risk their lives playing children's games, at the top of the Report for the past four weeks, so forgive us if we don't care to go into any more detail than necessary about it. There may be a spike in views by the time Halloween rolls around, as we're sure to see an endless number of Squid Game costumes of varying quality and taste levels. | |||
| 3 | Dune (2021 film) |
|
2,049,552 | 
|
The second film adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 novel (#10) was released internationally a month ago, but opened in the United States on October 21. And unlike David Lynch's oft-maligned 1984 version, Denis Villeneuve's new interpretation (intended to be the first of a two-part adaptation) is getting great reviews and is poised to make some money. | |||
| 4 | Alec Baldwin |
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1,333,697 | _(cropped).jpg)
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Tempting as it may be to crack jokes about Jack Donaghy going through the five stages of grief, this whole situation might be a bit too tragic to be glib about. This week, while on set in New Mexico for the upcoming Western film Rust, Baldwin discharged a prop gun (which, according to court documents, he was told was safe before using) that turned out to be a bit less prop-y and a bit more shoot-y than expected. Two people were hit: Joel Souza, the film's director, and Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer whose injuries were fatal. | |||
| 5 | Brandon Lee |
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1,034,719 | 
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The Rust shooting that takes up a good chunk of this Report has sparked numerous comparisons to the untimely death of Bruce Lee's son, who famously lost his life in 1993 to an almost identical prop-gun-firing incident on the set of The Crow. The similarities were evident enough to prompt a response from Lee's relatives on his Twitter page, but the circumstances are obviously at least a little different: Lee's role in The Crow was set to make him an international star, while Hutchins's work was always behind the camera. | |||
| 6 | You (season 3) |
|
941,823 | 
|
Me?
This Lifetime-turned-Netflix series about a stalker and serial killer named Joe Goldberg, played by Gossip Girl's gossip guy Penn Badgley, entered its third season last week. It focuses on the relationship between him and Love (Victoria Pedretti), the object of his affection from season two to whom he gets married after learning that she's just as psycho as him. It's received mostly positive reviews and enough attention to finally knock that goddamned game which I won't mention again out of Netflix's coveted number one spot. | |||
| 7 | Deaths in 2021 |
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873,574 | .jpg)
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Since sadly there's reminiscences of #5's death, let's quote from The Crow soundtrack:
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| 7 | You (TV series) |
|
869,661 | 
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On a personal note, I never bothered making it past season one after having to deal with a cast of unbelievably unrootable-for characters, including the main love interest/victim, Beck, (pictured on the left when she was a Disney Princess) whose entire role can be summed up in this video. | |||
| 9 | Halloween Kills |
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851,994 | _(cropped).jpg)
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Serial killer Michael Myers (or "The Shape", in case you thought we were talking about the guy who voiced Shrek) returns to menace Laurie Strode in the 12th film of the Halloween series[2] and the sequel to the 2018 soft reboot. Like its predecessor, the David Gordon Green-helmed slasher features Nick Castle and Jamie Lee Curtis reprising their roles from John Carpenter's legendary first Halloween from 1978.
While the film is doing decent business at the box office—especially for an R-rated movie in the middle of a damn pandemic—reviews aren't as strong as they were in 2018, with critics finding it messy and not as fresh as its predecessor. | |||
| 10 | Dune (novel) |
|
808,546 | 
|
The source material for #3, a philosophically challenging journey written by Frank Herbert about Paul Atreides and his home planet of Arrakis, where a life-extending drug and interplanetary travel fuel source known as melange (or "Spice") is harvested, also happens to be the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time. A number of sequels were written and, as mentioned above, it's also received some other critically-panned adaptations over the years. |
^2 There are twelve Halloween movies, but Halloween III: Season of the Witch doesn't feature Michael Myers. It's a long story.
Wikimedia Toolhub is a new and improved way to find Wikimedia tools. Toolhub allows users to browse, categorize, and search tools. Tools are web applications that can do many things; some examples are the XTools edit counter and CopyPatrol. At press time, the new Toolhub indexes 1500 of these tools, with many of them having origins in the Wikimedia volunteer community rather than being created by Wikimedia Foundation staff.
While new users almost always use Wikipedia's default settings and features, experienced editors, community outreach organizers, researchers, automated process users, and especially curious hobbyists have specific needs beyond routine website offerings. Meeting many of these needs requires data storage or processing beyond what MediaWiki offers, and consequently, must be accomplished in off-wiki software. Tools meet many of these needs, and Toolhub now provides a convenient way to find the right tool for a given purpose. Perhaps Toolhub will make some tools more popular, resulting in more support for them from both the community and the Foundation.
Previous tool directories, like Hay's tools, were ad hoc and less comprehensive. Continuing the history lesson, developers used to host tools on Toolserver, a service of Wikimedia Deutschland, but now most tools are hosted on Toolforge, a service of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Toolhub can be found at https://toolhub.wikimedia.org. – B and E
The Coolest Tool Award is an annual award ceremony showcasing the Wikimedia tools that the community nominates for being useful and worth publicizing. Previous winners of this prize are now indexed in the Wikimedia Toolhub, whereas before, the various tools which won prizes or were nominated could not be found anywhere in a single list.
Nominations for the Coolest Tool Award 2021 closed 27 October. However, watch the page for prize announcements, or in wiki-spirit, post messages on relevant talk pages to help the judges in the competition make good evaluations for what tools to recognize. – B
You can now "subscribe" to a discussion and get notifications for new replies in it! This is a very exciting change. This feature was implemented by the Editing Team as part of the Talk pages project. We appreciate their hard work. You can enable this feature, which is part of the Discussion Tools beta, by checking the "Discussion tools" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features and clicking "Save". – E
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 4:00–5:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.
Success has many fathers. This story is a small but beautiful example of how Wikipedia helps with the reproduction of images, told via the stories of the "fathers" of the image in question.
This story begins on the 17th of January 1974 in the small city of Beverwijk, in the Netherlands. The 36th edition of the Wijk aan Zee chess tournament is taking place, and it attracts a multitude of chess grandmasters from across the world: Argentina, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Spain and the US (though, notably, no Russians). The tournament was (and still is) sponsored by steel producer Hoogovens, later Tata Steel.
The tournament concludes and is won by the American chess and poker player Walter Browne, with a score of 11/15. Local Dutch newspapers, without the budget to pay photographers of their own, rely on photo news agencies for pictures of the event. The Anefo photo agency sends Rob Mieremet. He shoots 13 photographs in total. Mieremet (1947–2015), as winner of the Silver Camera award for best Dutch photographer in 1973, is certainly a good photographer, but he is no ardent lover of chess. He is unsure as to the name of one of the players, so he names one of the photographs "Browne" (assuming it to be Walter Browne, the tournament winner). The photo is thus filed as "Browne". Despite this, any chess players would know the pictured person to be the famous Serbian chess player Milan Matulović (who would go on to take bronze in the tournament).
After 44 years of operation, Anefo closed its doors in 1989, and its photo archives were handed over to the Netherlands Government Information Service (Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst). The collection was further transferred to the Dutch National Archives (Nationaal Archief) in 1996. In 2011 the National Archives and partner Spaarnestad Photo uploaded 350,000 photographs to the database http://gahetna.nl – originally under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA-3.0), later under a CC-zero license, which made most photographs freely available. Several thousand of these photographs were then uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Wikipedia volunteers, with the intention that they be used in Wikipedia articles.
One such volunteer was Mr.Nostalgic. A Dutch Wikipedian, and a keen photographer himself, Mr.Nostalgic works for a pharmaceutical company, and photography is his hobby. He saw value in the National Archives collection, and decided to upload 350,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons on his own initiative, in his spare time, using 5 laptops and Pulover's Macro Creator.
Over a period of five months, Mr.Nostalgic uploaded 2,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons a day, including 270k photos from the original Anefo archives. Lo and behold: the photograph of Milan Matulović, still disguised as "Browne", snuck its way into Wiki Commons on 23 October 2018. That same evening, another Wikipedian (me – Vysotsky) identified "Browne" as "most probably Milan Matulović", and added the photograph to several different language versions of the Wikipedia article about Matulović. Two years later (Nov. 2020), Wikipedia user Materialscientist uploaded a cropped version of the photo.
In 2020, the national postal service of Serbia, Pošta Srbije, decided to honour five chess grandmasters. They chose "the first Serbian chess grandmaster, chess bohemian and romantic, globetrotter and polyglot" Bora Kostić, alongside Petar Trifunović, Milan Matulović, Milunka Lazarević and, of course, Svetozar Gligorić.
The artistic design was done by Boban Savic, but the original images were supplied by the Serbian Chess Federation and a sports journalist. These original images were without a doubt obtained via Wikimedia Commons. Not only was the image of Matulović almost certainly taken from the original Anefo photograph, but the photo used of Petar Trifunović bore similarities to another Anefo photograph by Harry Pot from 1962. The inevitable conclusion: Serbian postage owes a debt to Wikipedia-style cooperation.
Three Wikipedians worked together with two non-Wikipedians and several institutions, all separated by time and geography, to achieve a real world result that none of them might have expected.
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Making a change to its content is as simple as clicking the edit button and typing something in. And more often than not, what happens next for new editors is that their addition gets reverted and is hidden from everything but the edit history of the page. In theory Wikipedia's barriers to entry are very low, but the barriers to making a meaningful contribution to the encyclopedia's contents are much, much higher. In some ways this is a good thing – Wikipedia's exclusion of a lot of new additions helps it achieve the seemingly impossible task of presenting reliable, high-quality information on a wiki that anyone can edit. But it also means that Wikipedia's base of contributors, the topics they choose to write about, the information they choose to include, and the way they choose to phrase their contributions is limited to the group of people who make it past these barriers.
For those of us who work on trying to expand the demographic profile of Wikipedia contributors, it's important to understand the policies and processes that shape content inclusion and exclusion on Wikipedia. But even a basic understanding of the key policies and processes can take years to grasp. A nuanced understanding of how they play out in practice – both the written and unwritten rules – is even more difficult.
This is what makes Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality such a valuable addition to the growing collection of scholarly and popular writing around Wikipedia. Zach McDowell and Matt Vetter are experienced members of the community of Wikipedians and educators who have been incorporating Wikipedia assignments into their teaching over the last decade. The authors have worked with Wiki Education for years both as instructors and, in Zach's case, as a research fellow.
Over the two decades of its existence, Wikipedia has grown to the point where it has become the encyclopedia. Instead of explaining Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia, we now explain other encyclopedias in relation to Wikipedia. While Wikipedia's policies on inclusion and exclusion were meant to limit its coverage to reality and avoid hoaxes, the project has come to shape reality, or at least shape what's important for the many of its readers: if it isn’t covered, is it really that important?
In the book, Zach and Matt take a careful look at key policies and try to tease out a lot of the underlying assumptions of the policy-writers. From the perspectives of the early techno-utopian Wikipedians, a statement like "Be Bold" was a way of telling potential contributors that they didn’t need to ask anyone's permission to make Wikipedia better. But for a different audience, this means something different; the book quotes their students as saying they "ultimately felt more anxiety than boldness" and found themselves "afraid to upset, anger, or disappoint" the original authors of the work they were editing.
These disconnects between policy as designed and as interpreted, between intent and effect, are the kinds of things that have kept Wikipedia from being what it was designed to be.
By looking at the interplay between policy and the way that policy is applied, Zach and Matt manage to introduce readers to the importance of the community aspect of Wikipedia. Many of Wikipedia's readers don’t understand that behind the text, there is a community of individuals with different ideas and opinions of how to interpret policy. When someone reverts your edit, it isn’t Wikipedia, it's a certain Wikipedian. Unlike a top-down organization where there's someone who can decide what a policy means and how it's going to be interpreted, the application of policy on Wikipedia is a socially constructed reality built through a process of discussion, debate, and negotiation. The book explains this by invoking Steven Thorne's "culture-of-use" theory, which provides a conceptual framework that is likely to help people who are new to Wikipedia make sense of this sort of thing.
By creating a framework for understanding Wikipedia, I believe that the book will demystify Wikipedia for a wide range of people. The book is an academic work (albeit a very readable one) and should be a necessary primer for anyone interested in studying Wikipedia. But it's also very helpful for Wikipedians who are interested in fixing its problems. The book is a critique of Wikipedia, but it's written by people who love the project and are optimistic about its future. Far too often Wikipedia is written about either in purely positive terms or dismissed as hopelessly exclusionary and sexist.
As a person who has spent much of the last 17 years thinking about and interacting with Wikipedia policy and its impact on knowledge, existing editors, and new ones, this book gave me a lot to think about. I didn’t agree with everything they said in the book, but even when I disagreed it tended to be over matters of interpretation rather than matters of fact. I love the fact that I finally have a source I can reference instead of feeling the need to explain everything from first principles.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about how Wikipedia works, or who wants to make Wikipedia better. The fact that they were able to release it under an open license means it's freely available (either as a .pdf or through Amazon's Kindle store) and easily accessible to anyone who has the time.
You can watch a presentation about this book from WikiConference North America here.
Hello again! Like a well functioning library, Wikipedia operates smoothly and effectively not just because of what knowledge is stored, but because of how it is accessed, and how easy it is for interested readers to access it. Redirects are one part of the way that this happens. Redirects on Wikipedia outnumber articles by 3:2. Here we interview a group of passionate editors at WikiProject Redirect.
That's it for this month. Please feel free to suggest a WikiProject for an interview (or interview a WikiProject yourself!) here
This issue, we have a crossword, made by Wikipedians for Wikipedians. Inspired by previous crosswords in The Signpost, it can be played online at the following link, or on pencil-and-paper by printing out the image below.
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Across 1. Junkie 3. Community water source 7. Roman field treatment 10. Gardener's friend 11. Meta 14. Today's featured questions 16. Signature box, alternately (Alternate clue: Article, Talk, and Template are examples) 17. Edit-addicted autodidacts battle 18. Come in white and red, with x 21. I'm dynamite! I'm a power load! 22. Please, sir, may I have some more clue? (Alternate clue: unlinked, unfindable) 23. The backend 24. Originally non-bias |
Down 2. Coined by TMRC at MIT 4. His name is oft-invoked with Law 5. Obvious gibberish, in other words (Alternate clue: Lie detector skeleton) 6. IATA United Airlines, extended 8. Newbie cafe 9. Philosophy of reduction 12. Clarification, for short 13. When blue becomes 101 un-quartered (Alternate clue: chain mold) 15. Banish from view, for short 19. Google borrows heavily from it 20. As powerful as Queen Elizabeth |
Happy crosswording! Answers will come with our next issue. Hints will be provided in the comments below, so beware spoilers as you scroll!
