On June 8, a new page was added to the Wikimedia Foundation's official wiki, bearing the weighty title: "Terrorist and violent extremist content procedures and guidelines". The document, first posted by WMF Tech Law Lead Counsel Charles Roslof, laid out procedures through which the Wikimedia Foundation would accept and respond to a "request for Terrorist Content notice of action" via a "Terrorist Content Sub-Group" of the WMF Trust & Safety team: requests are to be followed by an internal review by the WMF legal team to ensure that they were in fact legally required. However, this review process is not guaranteed to be public, and it is unclear whether even the fact of requests having been accepted will be a matter of public record – the policy says that "the Foundation may be limited by applicable law in disclosing the information about these requests".
Initially, the policy specified that requests would be accepted from "relevant law enforcement authorities in the United States of America (USA), European Union (EU), or a member nation of the EU". However, a subsequent revision on June 10 updated the policy and changed some wording, omitting the specific reference to jurisdiction (as of press time, the policy now refers only to "relevant law enforcement authorities"). It also added a passage clarifying removals that the WMF objected to ("Please note that the Foundation may also be in the course of appealing the Legal Order, but prohibited from reinstating the content in question unless and until it has succeeded in its appeal").
This page's only incoming link is from the site's list of policies, and as of press time it has not been mentioned on the WMF's official news page or Twitter account, making it difficult to tell whether this is a simple formalization of existing practice or a new mechanism entirely.
The policy is fairly short, and does not reference active content removal measures being taken on the WMF's part, instead relating only to the WMF's response to reports from government agencies. It remains to be seen what the ultimate implications of such a policy are. The definition of "terrorism" is notoriously inconsistent – our own perpetual topics of furor on international politics can provide good examples of this – and it is unclear precisely what the interplay will be between this policy and takedown requests from jurisdictions such as, for example, the Russian Roskomnadzor. — J
The Wikimedia Foundation is appealing a ₽5,000,000 (67888.66 USD or 60441.37 Euros) fine issued by a Russian court relating to the decision not to remove information verboten in Russia from several Russian Wikipedia articles. The fine came after the court found that the Wikimedia Foundation operated within the Russian Federation and that the content in question (largely related to the Russo-Ukrainian War) was illegal under Russian law. The Signpost has previously reported that publishers in Russia must only use government-approved facts and terminology when covering military operations.
The appeal was made on June 6; the WMF put out a statement (Russian-language version) outlining their rationale for the appeal on June 13, saying that the decision to fine the Wikimedia Foundation was based on from erroneous claims that the Wikimedia Foundation operated within the territory of the Russian Federation, and that the fine itself violated rights to free expression and access to knowledge. The Wikimedia Foundation also objected to allegations of "disinformation", writing in the statement:
Russian-language Wikipedia is a crucial second draft of history, written by and for Russian speakers around the world who volunteer their time to make reliable, fact-checked information available to all. Blocking access to Wikipedia in Russia would deny more than 145 million people access to this vital information resource. Further, the articles flagged for removal uphold Wikipedia’s standards of neutrality, verifiability, and reliable secondary sources to ensure articles are based in fact. They are well-sourced, including citations to a variety of established news sources. The articles continue to be improved by Wikipedia volunteer editors from all over the world with more sources and up-to-date information.
Russia's telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, previously sought to restrict access to certain articles on the Russian Wikipedia within the Russian Federation, taking umbrage to the characterization of Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine as an "invasion", "aggression", or "war". On March 31, the regulator threatened the WMF with a ₽4,000,000 fine for publishing what it called "unreliable socially significant materials, as well as other prohibited information".
A list of Wikipedia pages banned in Russia is available on the Russian Wikipedia. As of press time, the list of articles restricted by the Russian Federation has expanded beyond the Russian language articles, and now includes some articles from the English Wikipedia. — M
The WMF's 2020 Form 990, released last month, enables some interesting insight into where the Wikimedia Foundation has been spending its money, especially in light of claims by the Foundation that "a lot" of the money raised through donations is flowing into the Global South (see this issue's In the media section). Firstly, page 1 of the Form 990 shows that the WMF reported:
up from $120,919,258).
down from $112,162,122).According to the Form 990, $92 million of the total expenditure – that is, all but $20 million of it – was spent in the United States. This includes $5.5 million that the Wikimedia Foundation did not actually spend, but added to its own endowment at the Tides Foundation.
As for expenditure in the rest of the world, the Form 990 divides this into expenses for "Program Services" (mainly technical and legal support for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites) and "Grantmaking" (to grow global reach and increase contributor diversity). Of the $20 million spent on "Program Services" and "Grantmaking" outside the United States, most of it – around $15 million (9% of total WMF revenue) – went to Europe and North America outside the US (i.e. Canada and Mexico). This left a little over $5 million – or about 3% of total revenue – for the entire rest of the world. The two main regions in the rest of the world that saw funding for Program Services and Grantmaking in 2020 were Africa and East Asia/Pacific. The regional breakdown was as follows:
| World regions (excl. North America and Europe) | Spending (US$) | % of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 2.0 million | 1.3% |
| East Asia and the Pacific (Australia, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) | 1.3 million | 0.8% |
| South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, etc.) | 0.6 million | 0.4% |
| Middle East and North Africa | 0.6 million | 0.4% |
| South America | 0.5 million | 0.3% |
| Russia and neighbouring states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc.) | 0.1 million | 0.06% |
| Central America and the Caribbean | 0.1 million | 0.06% |
Total spending in the Global South (understood to comprise the Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South America, Central America and the Caribbean), therefore, amounted to just $3.8 million. That is 2.4% of total revenue – or 3.4% of global expenditure.
The Form 990 also gives a detailed breakdown for "Grantmaking" alone, without the expenses classed as "Program Services". According to this breakdown, grants given outside the United States totaled $3.5 million, of which $1.2 million went to Europe ($666,875 to organizations and $496,615 to 32 individuals). As for grants given to organizations (page 32–33 of the Form 990) and individuals (page 34) in the Global South, these were mainly focused on Sub-Saharan Africa and South America, with the amounts going to South Asia – home to almost 2 billion people – looking particularly small by comparison:
| Global South regions | Grants total (US$) | % of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 1,368,343 | 0.9% |
| South America | 418,934 | 0.3% |
| Middle East and North Africa | 84,969 | 0.05 |
| South Asia | 78,537 | 0.05% |
| Central America and Caribbean | 2,925 | 0.002% |
Overall, the "Grantmaking" amounts reported in the Form 990 for the above regions of the Global South totaled $1,953,708, or 1.2% of WMF revenue in 2020 – a very minor part of the WMF budget, especially bearing in mind that the Foundation enjoyed an effective surplus of more than $50 million. It will be interesting to see how these figures will develop in the years to come. See also the Foundation's own 2020–2021 grantmaking report on Meta. – AK
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As first reported Friday in Mediazona, a Belarusian court sentenced Wikipedian Mark Bernstein (User:Pessimist2006, of no relation to User:MarkBernstein) to three years of a type of house arrest for "gross violation of public order". He'd been in custody since March 11, previously sentenced to 15 days in jail for disobeying an official. After his release he wrote on social media, "I am free. Healthy physically and mentally. Thank you all for your support," according to Zerkalo.
The charges arose because Bernstein edited the Russian Wikipedia, giving information that appeared to violate a new law of the Russian Federation which limited how news on Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine could be reported. His type of punishment is informally known under the odd name "home chemistry". ("Chemistry" is an informal term originated in the Soviet Union, where it originally meant incarceration combined with work at a place with health hazard, such as a chemical plant. In the current context, "home chemistry" means that the person lives at home with restrictions in freedom, and continues to work, with part of their salary withheld by the state.)
On June 6, Reuters (and many others) reported that the WMF was appealing a fine imposed by Russia on the foundation for similar alleged violations of the Russian law. See this issue's News and notes. – Sb
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Stephen Harrison published a well-researched and circumspect summary of Tamzin's Request for Adminship in Slate: "Inside Wikipedia's Historic, Fiercely Contested 'Election'". Tamzin's RfA had been remarkable for having attracted 340 supports, 112 opposes and 16 neutrals – the highest-participation RfA in the project's history – and for its focus on the role administrator candidates' political views should (or should not) play in assessing their eligibility for the role.
Harrison commented on the fact that of Wikipedia's 1,034 administrators, only about 500 (465 at the time of writing) are considered active. Moreover, the number of successful Requests for Adminship per year is far lower than the number of administrators who die, leave the project, or otherwise lose the tools (voluntarily or otherwise). In part, this is a reflection of the fact that candidacies for Adminship have become a gruelling process:
Because it's a lifetime appointment, some Wikipedians have taken to treating RfA with all the seriousness and showmanship of the SCOTUS confirmation hearings—except that the Wikipedia version is all in written form, taking place on a dedicated wiki page.
Harrison concludes that something has to give:
Although there have been several calls over the years for RfA reform and proposals to make the process less corrosive, Wikipedia editors told me there has not yet been substantial progress in this area. According to a 2021 RfA inquiry hosted on Wikipedia, "Because RfA carries with it lifetime tenure, granting any given editor sysop feels incredibly important. This creates a risk-adverse and high-stakes atmosphere."
Then again, the notion that Wikipedia admins must have their powers for the rest of their days is certainly not an immutable law of the universe. With enough buy-in, that rule is just as editable as any wiki page. In Wikipedia as in life, we must pursue options for dialing down the heat.
For prior Signpost coverage on the 2021 RfA Reform initiative, see last October's Discussion report or the wrap-up at December's News and notes. – AK
Entrepreneur, which has often published articles promoting paid editing on Wikipedia, puts forward a more moderate view in Do Entrepreneurs Need a Wikipedia Page? The article dutifully explains that, to get a Wikipedia entry:
you need coverage in numerous reliable secondary sources, independent of the subject ... On the other hand, Wikipedia retains a reputation as being filled with a plethora of niche and un-noteworthy pages, or pages that contain incorrect claims based on dubious sources or no sources at all ... With a Wikipedia page, you may become a target of random trolls, ex-spouses, former business associates or disgruntled employees. Just because you could, doesn't mean you should.
It sounds like they've read the essay "An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing". They raise the specter of outing yourself as a phony – "Smart audiences can spot thinly disguised sponsored content" – and add:
Some (and perhaps many) Wikipedia editors are not just selfless nerds, but rather cold-blooded paid mercenaries. I have witnessed their work firsthand and was surprised at the audacity that editors-turned-paid-media-consultants exhibited in protecting their clients and dismantling substantiated, empirically factual information to maintain an entirely false narrative that their clients paid for. Once you have a Wikipedia page, make sure you allocate a budget to defend it from paid attacks or random vandals.
Despite covering most of the major points of why an entrepreneur should not hire a paid editor, they miss the main point. Whether there should be an article on a particular businessperson or company is for Wikipedians to decide, not entrepreneurs with conflicts of interest, or their paid flunkies.
In How to Edit your Law Firm’s Wikipedia Page: 3 Golden Rules on JDSupra, a newsletter for law firms, the founder of a legal PR firm says it all very simply:
That should work just fine, unless too many Wikilawyers get involved. – Sb
The Australian identified a Wikipedia editor as a campaign staffer for an MP candidate prior to the last national election. The newspaper accused the Wikipedia editor of inserting disinformation into articles about candidates of opposing parties and removing damaging information about favored candidates. The main MP candidate involved won the election and said that the Wikipedia editor worked on their election campaign and edited Wikipedia, but the two activities were entirely separate.
When contacted by The Signpost through their user page email, the Wikipedia editor requested that they not be identified. They said, "there are currently defamation proceedings around" the article in The Australian. "It's "a pure piece of slander from beginning to end."
An investigation by The Signpost revealed that the editor admitted on-wiki to using multiple accounts, but said that he was unfamiliar with Wikipedia rules on sockpuppeting. An apparent autobiography of the editor has been nominated for deletion. – Sb
On May 28, timed to coincide with the start of this year's fundraising season in India (emails May 23 – June 20, banners May 31 – June 28), the Indian Express published a piece titled: "Raju Narisetti interview: 'Wikipedia is building trust with transparency'". The interview with Wikimedia Foundation board member Narisetti focused in particular on efforts to expand Wikipedia content in Indian languages and on the contributions of Indian editors to Wikipedia. Moving on to the topic of the Foundation's fundraising, the write-up of the interview continued as follows:
"More than 75% of the money we raise globally goes to two things. One is to give money back to the volunteer community so they can launch a new language. Two is about half of it goes to the infrastructure. You need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it's reliable," he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users.
The statement that "most of" the money raised is flowing into the global south was queried by this reporter on the Wikimedia-l mailing list. In response, Megan Hernandez explained on Meta on June 2 that –
Raju was unfortunately misquoted, per a direct transcript of the interview. He more generally said "a lot of it is actually flowing into the global south" not "most of it." This is in line with our regional grantmaking in the "Global South" as well as other investments, including our technology support, which, as you know, ensures that Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages globally. We have requested a correction to his quote.
A disclaimer was duly added to the article on June 3, and the passage now reads:
"Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed Western markets, a lot of it is actually flowing into the global south, where the growth will come in languages and users."
For an analysis of WMF regional spending see this issue's News and notes. – AK
Reply All, the venerated podcast about the internet and society, used Annie Rauwerda's Depths of Wikipedia account as the hook for its second-to-last episode ever. They dove into three pages she's featured – cute aggression, the Pittsburgh toilet, and economist Guy Standing.
The last segment is perhaps of most interest to Wikipedians, as reporter Kim Nederveen-Pieterse sat down with (well, called) Standing himself. Shockingly, he claimed to be entirely unaware of his internet renown. But after Nederveen-Pieterse explained the legendary edit war over his photo and caption, he was asked to take a stand.
Standing wasn't too thrilled with the edit warring. "My goodness. What a waste of people's time, I'd have thought," he said. "It's sad." (We know.)
But he took no issue with the joke itself. "If it's a little aside that draws people to smile, that's great. Because we need a little humor in our lives, especially at this horrible time," he said. "But I hope that it draws people's attention to the serious messages that I've been trying to convey through my work" highlighting the feasibility of a universal basic income.
The Signpost has previously published an opinion piece which expressed appreciation for the Guy Standing joke and argued for the value of humor on Wikipedia. – S
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This month, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has been fundraising in the Global South. It has also published finance updates in its quarterly reviews. This seems, therefore, a good time to review the Foundation's fundraising messages against the background of its increasing wealth.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been doing very well in recent years. In 2020/2021 (the WMF's fiscal year runs from July to June), the Foundation reported an increase in net assets of over $50 million while the Wikimedia Endowment – which is held by the Tides Foundation and organizationally separate from the Wikimedia Foundation – increased in value from $62.9 million to over $100 million. Altogether, then, the work of WMF fundraisers last year brought in about $90 million more in revenue than the Foundation spent, bringing total Wikimedia assets to over $330 million.
How are things shaping up in the current financial year, due to end on June 30? The Finance & Administration department's third-quarter review, put online this month, states that in the first three quarters of the 2021/2022 financial year the Wikimedia Foundation already exceeded its annual target of $150 million, taking $153.6 million in revenue while spending less than it budgeted for.
As a result, Foundation assets rose by another $51.9 million. Together with this year's increase in the value of the Endowment and the Foundation's as yet unreported fourth-quarter revenue, this means that the WMF will now have a very comfortable cushion of about $400 million. Almost all of this is in cash and investments.
It is worth remembering that the influx of such substantial amounts of money, raised mostly through email campaigns and fundraising banners placed on Wikipedia, has completely transformed the WMF as well as its assumptions about what kind of organization it is – or should be.
In 2013 – less than a decade ago – Erik Möller (the WMF's VP of Engineeering and Product Development at the time) thought the Wikimedia mission would be sustainable on "$10M+/year". Indeed, 2010 marked the first time annual WMF expenses exceeded $10 million – three years after Wikipedia first became a global top-ten website. Today, the WMF is an organization with around 600 staff and contractors, rising compensation for its top executives (eight of whom saw compensation for their roles increase to more than $300,000 by 2020) and annual salary costs estimated at around $200,000 for each full-time employee – more than twice as much as the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Internet Archive, for example, judging by a comparison of the most recent Form 990 for each.
Money is also changing the very nature of the movement: an increasing number of decisions are no longer made on-wiki, by a community of unpaid volunteers, but by functionaries and paid staff of the WMF and its affiliates. In days past, the contributors that built Wikipedia were only bound by a shared interest in free knowledge; but money has increasingly become part of the glue that ties the movement together. And the WMF holds the purse strings, controlling the unprecedented wealth that results from its fundraising success.
The WMF mainly uses a two-pronged approach in its fundraising: it sends emails to past donors, inviting them to continue their support, and it places fundraising banners on Wikipedia. According to the most recent Fundraising report, 35% of WMF revenue is brought in by emails, 29% by desktop banners, 25% by mobile banners and 11% by other sources. The timing of the email and banner campaigns varies by country. This month, emails and banner campaigns ran in India, Latin America and South Africa.
The WMF makes sample email texts and designs available for review (see Meta). Below are six key phrases from the first of the three India emails shared on Meta that caught my eye – and, I am sure, that of many recipients. Emphases (bold text) are mine.
(1) We choose not to charge a subscription fee, but that doesn't mean we don't need support from our readers
(2) kindly consider giving again, or even increasing your gift, to keep Wikipedia free and independent.
The email's authors are first introducing the notion of a subscription fee – by commenting on its absence – and then go on to say that people should give again to keep Wikipedia free – which in the context of the previous passage can only mean they should give to avoid a subscription fee being charged in the future.
What the reader is not told is that the very WMF mission is "to make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity."
It is only because of this commitment that the volunteers who actually write Wikipedia – a task in which the Wikimedia Foundation plays no part – are prepared to do it for free.
There is also an obvious logical contradiction in begging people – especially people in developing countries – for money "to keep Wikipedia free".
(3) About a year ago, you donated Rs. 313 to keep Wikipedia online for yourself and millions of people around the world. Each year, fewer than 2% of Wikipedia readers choose to support our work.
(4) please renew your gift to ensure that Wikipedia remains independent, ad-free, and growing for years to come
(5) can we count on you to renew your solidarity with a small donation? It will keep Wikipedia online, ad-free, and growing for years to come
References to keeping Wikipedia "online and ad-free" were commonly used on fundraising banners in the mid-2010s, and were discontinued after significant controversy (see the 2015 Signpost report). It is somewhat surprising, therefore, to see them used in emails sent to donors in India today. The WMF has confirmed that it has no intention of retiring these stock phrases – which would have been far more justified fifteen or twenty years ago, when the Foundation was finding its feet financially, but seem very out-of-step with current financial realities.
The above quotes also refer to Wikipedia's "independence" – a theme that has been used on the Wikipedia banners as well (in phrases like "This Sunday, we request you to sustain Wikipedia's independence" or "protect Wikipedia's independence").
But if this independence is to be measured by the WMF's money reserves – which are now over ten times greater than they were ten years ago, and about three times greater than they were as recently as five years ago – it is surely under far less threat than ever before.
(6) 31% of your gift will be used to support the volunteers who share their knowledge with you for free every day.
This is another interesting phrase. 31% of 2020–2021 donations revenue would have been about $50 million. The WMF says the 31% figure comes from the annual report (where it is called "Direct support to communities" and refers to 31% of spending, which is of course much less than 31% of revenue). But even so, it is somewhat unclear what specifically this amount refers to. It is an order of magnitude greater than the WMF's grants to the community in 2020–2021. And those who write our articles, take our photos, and maintain our armadas of bots and modules and templates are doing it for free.
What do you think? We'd love to hear from you below.
This Discussion Report covers some of the debates on this great site of ours that were closed or archived from May 30, 2022 through June 2022. Three of them stood out as especially notable, which are as follows:
On May 6th, Mx. Granger started a manual of style discussion on the use of the names "Chinese Communist Party" and "Communist Party of China" across Wikipedia articles. Editors discussed the justification behind allowing the use of either name, and others proposed alternatives such as "Chinese government". The conversation did not appear to reach any particular consensus despite decent participation, and as of the time of publishing is still open.
A formal request for comment was initiated by Beeblebrox on June 14th to decide the fate of Administrative action review (a.k.a. XRV). The proposals centered around reviving it or retiring it and marking it as historical. After nearly a week of discussion, the RfC was closed with the consensus that the community would prefer to improve the process and fix the issues raised.
The village pump saw a suggestion on June 3rd that all articles not deletable under WP:BLPPROD having no sources in their history be moved to draftspace. It was opposed by 27 editors over the course of three weeks and closed by Thryduulf with "a strong consensus that mandatory draftification will either not improve or even harm the encyclopaedia".
When a new person steps up to a position, they inevitably want to make some changes. So, now that I've pulled Picture of the Day into my despotic regime, let's discuss how I'm going to ruin... um.... run it.
So, I'm Adam Cuerden, I've been a Wikipedian since around the start of 2006. I work a lot on restoring historic images. For example:
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And, yes, that was terribly self-indulgent. Just like this article is pretty much me indulging my sense of humour because I really hate talking about myself unless I can be horribly sarcastic and poke fun of myself the whole time. I'm sure that gimmick won't get old. Anyway! In late May this year, while I approached 8% of all featured pictures on English Wikipedia,[Note 1] I was asked if I wanted to take over Picture of the Day, and apparently the mad cackling couldn't be heard all the way from Scotland, so no-one stopped me and it looks like I've gotten the position. Not that anyone else seemed to want it. It's actually apparently a lot of work and people tend to burn out on it in a few years, so, um... Thanks?
Given I have about one in twelve featured pictures, every June will be Adam Month, where every single picture will be by me. Or... we'll go more-or-less rigidly in order, to try and keep everything fair, changing around things only to celebrate holidays and avoid multiple similar images in a row. Probably the last one. Less controversial. And I like the other image creators.
All joking aside, I do plan to try to be rigidly fair. This means:
I also plan to stop a few practices I never liked. For example, occasionally sets of images would be put on the main page using a random algorithm to select one to display, meaning each image could have as little as the equivalent of a couple hours on the main page. This seems mean to our content creators, as it trivialises things that may have taken a lot of work. (Also, I'm still a little salty about the time it happened to me.) The templates are already set up to handle two images, even though this is, for some reason, not documented, and it's fairly trivial to include a small gallery where appropriate. It might mean breaking up sets into smaller parts, but that's better than dumping them in a way that hides most of the images unless people want to roll for a new random image over and over.
Secondly, I'm not going to censor POTD any more than absolutely necessary. Some things shouldn't be on the main page, but some of the decisions of the past feel rather arbitrary, especially when you consider what we've put on the Main Page without controversy. Consider these:
![The Large [Breasted?] Bathers by Renoir Picture of the Day for 10 November 2019](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre-Auguste_Renoir,_French_-_The_Large_Bathers_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
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As such, it's rather surprising to see images had been kept off the main page which arguably aren't nearly as bad. Both of the below appeared in Wikipedia:POTD/Unused, which was meant as a place to put images that could not possibly be put on the main page, and I fail to see why these arguably tamer images would fail to make the cut.
I feel Picture of the Day should be a balancing act between potential harm and potential educational benefit, with a bias towards running the image, and I'm not seeing any significant harm from running these images. However, I do see harm in censoring them, as it sets weird precedents, makes odd value judgements (seagull poop is worse than dead people?), and just generally feels wrong. There were originally a couple sentences here encouraging people who disagreed with this decision to join in a discussion, because I am willing to change my mind, but... it turns out that I submitted this article too late for May's publication and, by the time June's Signpost comes around, my plans will already have come to fruition, so... Mwahaha?
Of course, some things were kept off the main page for a reason. In the simplest case, the image is unused, or the article it's connected to is too short. Article improvement or finding a use for them might bring these back into consideration. Similarly, Featured Pictures are as prone to going out of date as any other project, so something like File:WMAP 2010.png, which has been reduced to an infobox decoration, might have been worth main paging ten years ago, but we now have better. Likewise, File:Love or dutyb.jpg has had its scan at the Library of Congress much improved, so can probably wait on a delist-and replace nomination, especially as a nearly identical version of the same restored image has been on the main page before. (This has now happened. As I said, missed the May cutoff date for publication.)
All those, however, could theoretically be put (or, at least, have potentially been put) on POTD in some form. Some types of images have potential harms that may well outweigh any educational value. For example, one featured picture shows a lynching. Not only have such images been used for vandalism, but the specific picture has absolutely no documentation as to where it happened or who the victim was, so the harm of making whole groups of people feel unwelcome is not balanced by any significant educational value whatsoever. Something like this, while we'd probably still want to discuss it going on the main page, feels like a much better way to cover such horrific events sensitively.
It's all a bit of a challenge, but I do promise to do my best.
Oh, right. The gimmick of this article!
In order to destroy Picture of the Day:
But, most importantly for your goal of dooming Picture of the Day:
Of course, if you want to actually help make Wikipedia a better place and help Picture of the Day (and make my reign eternal), replace all the "Don't"s with "Do"s.
Well! Here we are! My first Featured Content Report since becoming POTD Co-ordinator. Well, I say "mine". What I've been doing is set up all the lists of promoted content and the credit for who created them (and, I'm absolutely sure, sometimes miscrediting something), get featured pictures looking good, dig through the surprisingly convoluted featured topic process, and then go away and hope someone else fills out all the short descriptions of the articles and lists, while still getting my name first in the credit, and then maybe finish up a few entries at the end, when most of the work's done. Isn't that horribly unfair? Mind, it still takes about three hours to get it to this state so if Wikipedia:WikiProject JavaScript wants to replace my job with a very small shell script, as the coder joke goes, please do.
Twenty-five featured articles were promoted this period.
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Twenty-one featured pictures were promoted this period, including the two at the top of this report and one at the bottom.
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One featured topic was promoted this period, after being nominated by FrB.TG
Nineteen featured lists were promoted this period.
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Trends in support percentage during a request for adminship are rarely informative, and these trends are difficult to interpret even when they might be informative.
As a first order approximation, let's assume there's an RfA where no new information comes to light over the course of the request and everyone !votes independent of each other. In this case, if we were to poll every Wikipedian, there would be some global, unobserved support percentage for the population; call it p. Given an RfA with n participants, each !vote in an RfA can be considered a Bernoulli trial with probability p. The number of supports, s, at any given time can be simulated by combining the results of multiple Bernoulli trials; this can be modeled as a binomial distribution of n trials and probability p.
RfAs run for multiple days and are among the most attended discussions on the project; this suggests that the final support percentage is a reliable stand-in for the population support percentage. By contrast, the trend line tells us almost nothing and may in fact be misleading. Our binomial model is the same we would use to model the ratio of heads to tails in successive coin flips. Imagine we are going to flip a coin for a contest and we want to prove that the coin we are flipping is fair. We flip it 150 times and track the number and order of heads and tails. After 150 coin flips, the ratio of heads to tails would be very informative: if it is far away from a 50% split then the coin is not fair. The order these flips occur in, however, is uninformative, and in fact, using it as evidence for an argument is logical fallacy known as the gambler's fallacy.
Our first order approximation of RfA trend lines represents a hypothesis regarding !voting behavior. Absent evidence to the contrary, we assume editors review the candidate and comment independently of others just like the result of a coin flip does not depend on prior results. But an RfA is not a series of independent tests. The amount of information available to a !voter includes not only other comments, but new question answers, and summary statistics like current support percentage. These can consciously or unconsciously affect how a participant !votes and justifies an alternate hypothesis: each !vote is related to the ones that came before it (and maybe even after it). If the population support percentage, p, doesn't change then this distinction is immaterial to our model.
Reconsider the coin flip example: if the probability of getting heads depends on the previous result such that getting a heads changes the probability from 50% to 50% (i.e., no change), then the dependent model and independent model will produce the exact same results. Differences only arise if the dependence changes the underlying probability. In statistical terms, we can say that the binomial distribution is robust against violations of the independence assumption as long as the sample size is much smaller than the population. For example, let's assume that getting a heads increased the likelihood of getting another heads. In that situation our independent trial model will be accurate at first but get more inaccurate as we have more trials since the non-independence will keep compounding making heads more and more likely. Bringing this back to RfA, the influence of prior votes on later ones is not a serious threat to the binomial (independent trial) model. It would only affect our model if there were thousands of !voters or if there was a major shift in the underlying probability.
Editors look at trend lines because they believe that (or want to evaluate whether) earlier votes influenced later ones to such an extent that a major shift occurred in the underlying probability. considering how !votes are non-independent, this intuition makes sense but is flawed. Essentially, this is a model selection problem, and the starting assumption ought to be the null hypothesis. As discussed above, this means that without evidence, we should assume that the order of !votes is not meaningful, just like the order of coin flips. Claiming that a coin is unfair because of the order of heads and tails is fallacious, so we cannot reject the null hypothesis on the basis of the trend line alone; we need some other kind of evidence. What is critical to understand in the context of RfA is that the trend line cannot tell us whether a change in the underlying support percentage occurred; they are only useful if we already assume that happened and even then can only help us determine when.
Like any hypothesis testing tool, a trend line is only useful if we already have a hypothesis. Unless there is an independent reason to believe the information available to participants has changed, the trend line is most likely to reflect randomness in the sample rather than a meaningful pattern. Without a rational argument as to why early !voters did not have the same information as late !voters, an argument from trend-line data is weak.
.jpg)
# Config variables
N = 150 # How many !votes to simulate
switchPoint = 90 # At what vote should the probability switch
p.start = 0.76 # Probability of support before switchPoint
p.end = 0.6 # Probability of support after switch point
# Data lists
voteList = c()
meanSeries = c()
# Simulation
for(i in 1:N) {
if ( i < switchPoint ) {
p = p.start
} else {
p = p.end
}
voteList[i] = rbinom(1,1,p)
meanSeries[i] = mean(voteList)
}
# Plot the result
plot(1:150,meanSeries,xlab='!vote number',ylab='Support percentage',type='l')
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
This paper[1] presents an analysis of "the entire history of all 3.5 M tables on the English Wikipedia for a total of 53.8 M table versions." In an accompanying conference poster, the researchers summarize their findings as follows:
Wikipedia tables
- ... like to socialize! 🥳
- ... share genes! 🧬
- ... live a fast-paced life! 🏎️
- ... tend to be immortal! 💓
The paper itself presents various interesting results in slightly more scholarly detail.
.png)
The authors note Wikipedia contained "almost no tables" in its first three years, after which:
"Using tables in Wikipedia became more popular only around 2004 and tables were fully adopted by end of 2006. Since then, every month around 20,000 new tables are created (about one every two minutes). The hypothesis that insertion frequency would decrease once tables are inserted at all relevant locations seems false: While the number of new pages created per month drops since 2007, the insertion-rate of new tables remains constant. This relative increase in tables per page shows that more and more data is stored in a structured fashion, raising the relevance of methods to extract knowledge from said tables."
As an aside, there is no mention of Wikidata in the paper (a sister project of Wikipedia launched in 2012 aimed at providing structured machine-readable data), nor of the more recent efforts to store tabular data on Wikimedia Commons for use on (e.g.) Wikipedia. While there are tools to generate Wikipedia tables automatically from the structured data available on Wikidata, they are not widely used yet.
.png)
A "histogram of the maximum number of tables that ever existed simultaneously on a Wikipedia article" demonstrates that
The vast majority of Wikipedia articles contain only a few tables [...]. On the other hand, most tables appear on pages together with other tables. Only 19.1% of all tables appear alone on a Wikipedia article."
These results appear to provide the empirical foundation for the party emoji in the conference poster (above).
The racecar emoji refers to various results on how often tables are changed. From the author's perspective of reusing information from tables outside of Wikipedia, they stress that "in a one-month-old snapshot, already 4.4% of tables are outdated."
.png)
A violin plot of table "freshness" (i.e. time since the table's last update) over table age (i.e. time since the table's creation) shows that
"The median rises until a certain point, after which it stays constant or slightly decreases again. However, the distribution is skewed towards the two ends of the spectrum: tables either are very frequently updated or are hardly ever changed."
The authors note that the distribution of the number of updates per table has "a large skew", with one outlier being "a table on social networking websites that was updated more than 10,000 times during its lifetime. At least 1,310 tables were each updated more than 1,000 times during their lifetimes."
The paper also examines schema changes of existing tables (e.g. the addition, removal or renaming of columns). It finds e.g. that "about half of all tables never change their schema", and that schemata can evolve into various specializations, such as in this example visualizing "genes" shared by around 500 football-related tables:
.png)
Lastly, the conference poster's "immortality" claim is quantified as follows:
"69.5% of all tables ever created have survived until the end-date of our dataset. If a table is deleted, then this usually happens at the beginning of its lifetime. [...] While the vast majority of tables is never deleted (57.2%) or deleted only once (29.9%), there is a larger skew in the distribution of deletes. One table that explains the Wiki syntax was deleted 620 times during its lifetime, mostly from vandalism."
See also our earlier coverage of related research: "Neural Relation Extraction on Wikipedia Tables for Augmenting Knowledge Graphs", "TableNet: An Approach for Determining Fine-grained Relations for Wikipedia Tables", "Methods for Exploring and Mining Tables on Wikipedia"
The June 2021 issue of "She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation" featured several articles examining Wikipedia with a focus on its relation to academia, including by longtime Wikipedians Piotr Konieczny (User:Piotrus) and Dariusz Jemielniak (User:Pundit).
Konieczny's first contribution, titled "From Adversaries to Allies? The Uneasy Relationship between Experts and the Wikipedia Community"[2], provides a historical overview and literature review, concluding that "Collaborating with Wikipedia is increasingly common in academia, though barriers remain" and that "Wikipedia’s anti-elitist culture and academia’s anti-amateur culture are still at odds." Konieczny commiserates with his "fellow experts" who try to contribute to Wikipedia, but holds up a mirror:
"Undeniably, we receive unfair treatment on Wikipedia. At the same time, the proverbial shoe may be on the other foot. Many experts view Wikipedia as a still-recent startup that should recognize how badly it needs experts and give them special privileges—but without acknowledging that Wikipedia’s model of knowledge creation requires everyone to earn those privileges on the site.
Furthermore, Konieczny reminds academics who complain about hostile Wikipedians about their own power structures:
"Are some Wikipedians impolite? Certainly. So are some journal reviewers. Was your Wikipedia edit removed or article deleted? How different is it from having a journal or conference submission rejected? Is the power of experienced Wikipedia volunteers or administrators superior to that of a newbie editor? The answer is yes—in the same way that a journal editor or grant reviewer has leverage over one’s submission."
In a short commentary,[3] Jemielniak agrees with Konieczny's analysis of these two polarized stances as "the underlying cultural problem", and calls for "institutional support [for Wikipedia] from beyond the Wikimedia Foundation or Wiki Education Foundation", e.g. by "counting [Wikipedia editing] towards tenure reviews at universities."
In another response, titled "Wikipedians among Us: From Allies to Reformers"[4], Kara Kennedy also largely agrees with Konieczny's observations, but "sheds light on some of [his] oversights, including the still-present issues of bias and gaps in content and quality due to a lack of diversity in editorship".
In a third response,[5] the journal's editor-in-chief Ken Friedman (User:Kenfriedman0) argues that Wikipedia "suffers from the internally-focused cultural patterns among Wikipedians that prevent the improvements needed for a high quality reference work". Among other observations, he focuses on the Wikimedia Foundation's statement (in its fundraising messages) that 98% of Wikipedia readers do not donate, claiming that "This admission contains a message that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t seem to understand. When only 2% of the audience for a widely used not-for-profit project is willing to support the project they use, this suggests that the project might not survive as a commercial venture."
In the concluding piece, Konieczny responds to the three comments, joining Jemielniak and Kennedy in making "The Case for Institutional Support: It’s High Time for Governments and University Administration to Actively Support Wikipedia". [6] He devotes some space to Friedman's recollections of his own negative experiences of trying to contribute to Wikipedia. Examining the on-wiki record, Konieczny notes that the only dispute appears to have been about "whether to insert several names on the list of Fluxus members—an art movement Friedman was involved in both as artist and later, scholar—or not," whereas Friedman's larger contributions all appear to have been accepted. Konieczny argues that "[t]his illustrates the classic notion of negativity bias: we are much more likely to remember the bad experiences than the good ones, even if the latter are more common".
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:[7]
"To supplement current globalization indexes, I propose a new index, the Wikipedia Global Consciousness Index (WikiGCI). [...] The first research objective is to construct the new index as an empirical assessment of global consciousness by applying the top 100 global articles as the empirical units. Global articles are the Wikipedia articles edited in the most countries, identified by geolocating the IP address edits. Furthermore, I discursively analyze how these Wikipedia articles express global consciousness by statements of global wholeness in their narratives. [...] The second research objective is to discursively analyze regional patterns in Wikipedia’s global and local articles. I performed a mixed method, multilingual discursive analysis to examine how four globalizing discourses (references to the countries in the world’s economic core, the use of English in citations, references to international media institutions, and the monetization of commodities) can distinguish place representations between two groups of articles. [...] This discourse analysis reveals that the representation of the world is not strictly determined by the core. While the socio-economic power in the core creates the globalizing discourses, non-core editors engage with the discourses to depict the world based on the socio-historic conditions of their countries."
From the abstract:[8]
"On 18th January 2012 in the ‘first Internet strike’ against the American ‘Stop Online Piracy Act' legislation, over two thousand Wikipedians took part in the vote concerning whether their site should undertake a protest action, with vast majority expressing support for this action. However, the vote participants formed only a tiny fraction of the total number of Wikipedians who number in millions. [...] This paper discusses the intricate dynamics between Wikipedia egalitarian ethos and the creed to discuss project matters deliberately on one hand and the conspicuous lack of promotion and advertisement stemming from a rule against ‘canvassing’ and an overall skepticism regarding the status of majority votes. While voters' passivity and lack of interest play a major role, as expected, another factor emerges as a significant factor responsible for the low levels of participation: an inefficient information distribution system, as the vast majority of Wikipedians were not aware of the ongoing discussions and the vote itself until after their conclusion.
See also our review of an earlier paper by the same author: "Wikipedia’s SOPA Strike considered as international political movement", and his own review of a 2012 paper: SOPA blackout decision analyzed"
post-print (freely available)
At its best, Wikipedia offers eloquently written articles, pulled together from a variety of sources. At its worst, Wikipedia offers hastily written abstracts from a single source. And, perhaps just as bad, one-to-one translations from the English Wikipedia to less-active language versions. Why just as bad? Because direct translations fail to address topics that might not be important for an English speaking audience, yet are very important for others. Italian translations of books by James Joyce, for example, are important for Italian readers of Wikipedia – while many English speaking Wikipedians couldn’t care less.
Seven years ago, I uploaded a photograph of the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Schwarzenbach was a rich, independent and eccentric writer and journalist, who travelled the world as if she was walking through the woods of rural Switzerland, where she was born. She was an ardent photographer too, who took photos in Afghanistan, Belgian Congo, Eritrea, Georgia, India, Iraq, Russia, the United States and 20 other countries.
Photos of her were then quite hard to find: I had to browse through several books before I found a suitable photograph which also had a suitable copyright status. That photo (right), with Schwarzenbach holding a Rolleiflex Standard 621-Camera, looked like a selfie from around 1938 – at first sight.
Schwarzenbach died from a fall on her bicycle in the Swiss Alps. Her mother destroyed most of her letters and diaries. Wikipedia tells us: "A friend took care of her writings and photographs, which were later archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern." That's almost true. The executors of her will, Erika Mann and Anita Forrer, weren't exactly close friends. In the end, Anita Forrer took care of the photographic and literary archives of Schwarzenbach. She treated the archives as a treasure in the library she founded, the Biblioteca Engiadinaisa, and later donated the Schwarzenbach archives to the Swiss Literary Archives. And in that archive I found the supposed selfie again: as a photo made by Anita Forrer in Malans, Switzerland, in 1938.
Anita Forrer, the guardian of the Schwarzenbach archives, was a hell of a woman. Born in 1901 in St. Gallen, she visited a poetry reading by Rainer Maria Rilke when she was 18 years old. Lightning struck and, as Rilke later put it in a letter to her, he became an external reference point to her "in the geometry of the heart to somehow get the measure of the distances and relations in the vast space of feeling". Their correspondence (70 letters over a period of seven years) was published in 1982. Forrer developed, worked in Paris and Luzern, was briefly married and travelled the world. She had an affair with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and travelled to the United States before WWII. A photograph of Forrer was not hard to find: the UC Berkeley Library's digital collections had a nice photograph, shot by Johnny Florea in 1938.
But there's something odd about the files in the UC Berkeley collections. Three photographs of Anita Forrer are accompanied by a photo card calling "Miss Anita Forrer" a "Swiss woman auto racer". I was not surprised at all. As Forrer was a graphologist, photographer and a spy, she might as well be an auto racer. After all, she had been a driver for the American Red Cross Motor Corps in WWII, so why shouldn't she race cars? But, as one source is no source, I removed that assertion from a Wikipedia article. I hope this piece encourages others to find out if Anita Forrer really was an automobile racer. Any help would be appreciated. The English Wikipedia still lacks an article about Anita Forrer (which will be written soon, of course), but the German and Dutch Wikipedias have made the attempt.
Wikimedia Enterprise, a first-of-its-kind commercial product designed for companies that reuse and source Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects at a high volume, today announced its first customers: multinational technology company Google and nonprofit digital library Internet Archive. Wikimedia Enterprise was recently launched by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, as an opt-in product. Starting today, it also offers a free trial account to new users who can self sign-up to better assess their needs with the product.
As Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects continue to grow, knowledge from Wikimedia sites is increasingly being used to power other websites and products. Wikimedia Enterprise was designed to make it easier for these entities to package and share Wikimedia content at scale in ways that best suit their needs: from an educational company looking to integrate a wide variety of verified facts into their online curricula, to an artificial intelligence startup that needs access to a vast set of accurate data in order to train their systems. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a feed of real-time content updates on Wikimedia projects, guaranteed uptime, and other system requirements that extend beyond what is freely available in publicly-available APIs and data dumps.
"Wikimedia Enterprise is designed to meet a variety of content reuse and sourcing needs, and our first two customers are a key example of this. Google and Internet Archive leverage Wikimedia content in very distinct ways, whether it’s to help power a portion of knowledge panel results or preserve citations on Wikipedia," said Lane Becker, Senior Director of Earned Revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation. "We’re thrilled to be working with them both as our longtime partners, and their insights have been critical to build a compelling product that will be useful for many different kinds of organizations."
Organizations and companies of any size can access Wikimedia Enterprise offerings with dedicated customer-support and Service Level Agreements, at a variable price based on their volume of use. Interested companies can now sign up on the website for a free trial account which offers 10,000 on-demand requests and unlimited access to a 30-day Snapshot.
Google and the Wikimedia Foundation have worked together on a number of projects and initiatives to enhance knowledge distribution to the world. Content from Wikimedia projects helps power some of Google’s features, including being one of several data sources that show up in its knowledge panels. Wikimedia Enterprise will help make the content sourcing process more efficient. Tim Palmer, Managing Director, Search Partnerships at Google said, "Wikipedia is a unique and valuable resource, created freely for the world by its dedicated volunteer community. We have long supported the Wikimedia Foundation in pursuit of our shared goals of expanding knowledge and information access for people everywhere. We look forward to deepening our partnership with Wikimedia Enterprise, further investing in the long-term sustainability of the foundation and the knowledge ecosystem it continues to build."
Internet Archive is a long-standing partner to the Wikimedia Foundation and the broader free knowledge movement. Their product, the Wayback Machine, has been used to fix more than 9 million broken links on Wikipedia. Wikimedia Enterprise is provided free of cost to the nonprofit to further support their mission to digitize knowledge sources. Mark Graham, Director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shared, "The Wikimedia Foundation and the Internet Archive are long-term partners in the mission to provide universal and free access to knowledge. By drawing from a real time feed of newly-added links and references in Wikipedia sites – in all its languages, we can now archive more of the Web more quickly and reliably."
Wikimedia Enterprise is an opt-in, commercial product. Within a year of its commercial launch, it is covering its current operating costs and with a growing list of users exploring the product. All Wikimedia projects, including the suite of publicly-available datasets, tools, and APIs the Wikimedia Foundation offers will continue to be available for free use to all users.
The creation of Wikimedia Enterprise arose, in part, from the recent Movement Strategy – the global, collaborative strategy process to direct Wikipedia’s future by the year 2030 devised side-by-side with movement volunteers. By making Wikimedia content easier to discover, find, and share, the product speaks to the two key pillars of the 2030 strategy recommendations: advancing knowledge equity and knowledge as a service.
Interested companies are encouraged to visit the Wikimedia Enterprise website for more information on the product offering and features, as well as to sign up for their free account.
For more information on Wikimedia Enterprise:
In spite of the Top 1000 list stopping (the responsible editor wants some help), we continued to compile the most viewed articles, including streaming shows, movies, and a celebrity lawsuit that just wouldn't leave.
.png)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ray Liotta | 
|
3,574,274 | 
|
An actor who worked for decades with a shameful start and varied roles (as quoted by him in the "Personal life" section, "I've done movies with the Muppets. I did Sinatra. I did good guys and bad guys. I did a movie with an elephant."), albeit his more famous involved criminals, such as Goodfellas and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Liotta died at 67 in his sleep as he filmed in the Dominican Republic. |
| 2 | Robb Elementary School shooting |
|
2,184,027 | 
|
Just a week and some change after a mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York grocery store, as well as another mass shooting at a Taiwanese church in California (which received considerably less press attention, due to a lower death toll), the United States is still bowling for Columbine as the Columbine effect sadly continues. Right before noon on May 24, an 18-year-old shooter walked into a Texas elementary school and opened fire on a single classroom, killing 19 children and two adults and injuring nearly as many. Not only is this the umpteenth mass shooting this year, but it's also the third-deadliest school shooting in the United States, ever. It's reignited some much-needed but likely fruitless discussions about the state of gun control in America, and also called into question the necessity of law enforcement in shootings like these, following revelations that police officers on the scene didn't apprehend the shooter for up to an hour after he entered the building, and stopped parents who attempted to save their children while officers went in to go save their own. |
| 3 | Amber Heard |
|
1,484,469 | .jpg)
|
Although these star-crossed star exes have been at the top of this list for Depp's highly-publicized defamation trial against Heard for weeks now, it seems their star is fading now that the trial has come to a close. |
| 4 | Johnny Depp | 
|
1,435,657 | ||
| 5 | Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting |
|
1,421,229 | 
|
Mass elementary school shootings are a fairly rare type of tragedy, so when one does take place, it's not surprising that people might flock to read about the last major one. This one, which took place in 2012, had an even higher death toll than the above entry, claiming the lives of 20 students and six staff members, and parents of its victims were predictably outspoken about the recent shooting. |
| 6 | Stranger Things (season 4) |
|
1,379,860 | 
|
The final season of Stranger Things ... is not here yet, as is the current trend the season has been split in two parts and this is only the first part of season 4. The seven episodes are extra long. The final two episodes are due to be released in five weeks time on July 1, 2022. |
| 7 | Top Gun: Maverick |
|
1,259,132 | 
|
36 years later (a few of them due to pandemic delays), Tom Cruise's Maverick again takes us on a highway to the Danger Zone on his Mighty Wings across the sky, and critics and audiences alike were willing for some Playing With the Boys, with glowing reviews and over $100 million on its opening weekend. |
| 8 | Uvalde, Texas | 
|
1,004,871 | 
|
This small, Hispanic-majority town a few dozen miles away from San Antonio was probably not hoping to enter the headlines this week for the reasons it did (#2). |
| 9 | The Great Gama |
|
939,737 | 
|
This Indian heavyweight, who went undefeated for all five decades of his wrestling career, was honored with a Google Doodle for his 144th birthday. |
| 10 | List of school shootings in the United States | 
|
878,739 | 
|
You probably don't need a whole morose list to remind you of this fact, but in case you somehow forgot, there's been a lot of 'em, including #2 and #5. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sidhu Moose Wala |
|
3,083,071 | 
|
In an unfortunate proof that violence in rap isn't limited to the U.S., this controversial Punjabi rapper was shot in his car by an unidentified group. Some significant controversy arose as his security had been cut shortly before he was killed. |
| 2 | KK (singer) |
|
2,986,232 | _(headshot).jpg)
|
Moose Wala wasn't the only Indian singer to die this week; KK, a playback singer in multiple languages from a completely different genre of music, died of a heart attack shortly after a concert. |
| 3 | Stranger Things (season 4) |
|
2,665,381 | _Stranger_Things2.jpg) |
Most of the fourth season of Stranger Things was released last week, with the final episodes being held back to the start of July. The season is a bit darker than previous ones, and features strange (and stranger) things happening in Hawkins and a second, less fantasy-y storyline set in Kamchatka. |
| 4 | Amber Heard |
|
2,176,373 |
|
The lawsuit revealing a seemingly mutually abusive marriage is over: on June 1, Heard was found liable on three counts of defaming her ex-husband Depp. (Though it wasn't a total victory for Depp; the jury found that one of his lawyer's statements regarding Heard was also defamatory.) If Depp's career was sent down after the last time this went to court, expect hers to suffer too—there are rumors of her Mera, a highlight of Aquaman, being cut from the sequel. |
| 5 | Johnny Depp |
|
2,091,010 | ||
| 6 | Top Gun: Maverick |
|
2,066,402 | 
|
After repeatedly being delayed, Maverick was finally released on May 27, 36 years after its predecessor (#8). The film received rave reviews—with many considering it one of the best films of Tom Cruise's career and superior to the original Top Gun—and has already grossed over $548 million worldwide. |
| 7 | Stranger Things |
|
1,837,177 |
|
The Duffer Brothers revival of both Stephen King and Steven Spielberg from the 80s has returned to Netflix (#3). |
| 8 | Top Gun |
|
1,226,408 | 
|
The biggest hit of 1986 concerned naval aviators going to the TOPGUN academy. Only two of its characters returned for the belated sequel at #6, Cruise's Maverick and Val Kilmer's Iceman – who has only one heartbreaking scene, especially as the character reflects Kilmer's health history being a cancer survivor who now can't even speak properly. |
| 9 | Val Kilmer |
|
1,212,420 | 
| |
| 10 | Elizabeth II | 
|
1,208,775 | .jpg)
|
The United Kingdom and a bunch of other places celebrated their Queen's Platinum Jubilee this week, with pageantry, salutes, shows and a ridiculous skit with Paddington Bear. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vikram (2022 film) |
|
1,647,903 | .jpg)
|
This Indian film is now the highest-grossing Tamil production of the year. Much like another 2022 release (#3), it is a spiritual sequel to its namesake 1986 film, and follows a retired secret agent trying to take down a drug syndicate. The film also kicks off a cinematic universe with a sequel to follow. |
| 2 | Jurassic World Dominion |
|
1,500,071 | 
|
For possibly the final time, the revived dinosaurs hit theaters once again. This time, to unite the casts of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, the script is kind of busy to give one plot to Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum and another to Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard – surprisingly, both are mostly concerned with subjects other than dinosaurs, namely locusts and a cloned girl, leading to many negative reviews. Still, there is enough action with prehistoric creatures to satisfy fans, and Dominion is making a killing at the box office, getting close to $400 million after its North American release. |
| 3 | Top Gun: Maverick |
|
1,402,047 | 
|
Unlike the above, a very liked sequel. And the Navy pilots have brought in an impressive $748 million worldwide, making it the second most successful Tom Cruise movie after Mission: Impossible – Fallout. |
| 4 | Stranger Things (season 4) |
|
1,346,569 |
|
A Series of Stranger Things hit Hawkins, Indiana as Series 4 of Stranger Things premiered on Netflix two weeks ago, and it manages to fit three storylines together in a way that actually works. The page continues to get a lot of views, presumably from people trying to find out when they get to watch the last two episodes. |
| 5 | Top Gun |
|
1,239,201 | 
|
Adequately, the thing splitting the Upside Down is one of the biggest hits of the 1980s, released in the same 1986 of the latest season. |
| 6 | Stranger Things |
|
1,152,897 |
|
The Duffer Brothers' 80s-in-the-2020s Netflix show has returned for most of its fourth season. |
| 7 | Elizabeth II |
|
896,612 | .jpg)
|
The 4-day weekend celebration of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee ended on June 5 with a three-hour long pageant. It started with a military parade, before part 2 celebrated 70 years of British culture and part 3 focused on celebrating the 70-year milestone. |
| 8 | The Boys (TV series) |
|
888,096 | 
|
Prime Video brought back the show with jerk superheroes causing bloody injuries no one will not see in the Marvel and DC movies. And like season 2, the third was three episodes upfront followed by weekly ones, so expect the show to remain on this list. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2022 |
|
887,690 | 
|
Then swing your rope slowly and rattle your spurs lowly, And give a wild whoop as you carry me along; And in the grave throw me and roll the sod o'er me, For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong... |
| 10 | Amber Heard |
|
838,115 | 
|
While the most publicised trial since O. J. Simpson wrapped up over a week ago, the article on the defendant continues to receive a lot of attention. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Juneteenth |
|
1,297,409 | .jpg)
|
After the George Floyd protests in 2020, interest in this holiday marking an end to chattel slavery across the United States (following its abolition in Texas in 1865) rose greatly, prompting Joe Biden to declare it a federal holiday the following year. A couple centuries late on that one, Joe, but at least we got there eventually, and we had our very first official celebration of Juneteenth as a country the day after this week's Report ended. Too bad slavery didn't really go away. |
| 2 | Jurassic World Dominion |
|
1,060,281 | 
|
The core message of Jurassic Park could be described as rampant greed making us blind to our actions, but that hasn't stopped Universal from milking every last coin out of this dinosaur of a franchise. Speaking of last, this is now the sixth and final installment in the Jurassic Park universe, and it ends the series on a sour note, according to critics and viewers, who have suggested that the franchise needs to be encased in amber, never to be brought back again. But we all know how well that worked in the first one. |
| 3 | Juancho Hernangómez |
|
1,054,518 | 
|
Hustle, Adam Sandler's latest reminder he can do good movies, stars this Spanish basketball player in his debut acting role as...a Spanish basketball player. Maybe that's for the best, since sports stars are always best at playing themselves anyway. Well, almost always. |
| 4 | Stephen Curry |
|
1,066,585 | _(cropped).jpg)
|
The Golden State Warriors point guard makes his triumphant return to this list after bringing the team to victory at the 2022 NBA Finals against the Boston Celtics and earning his first NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award for the win. |
| 5 | Warren Jeffs |
|
1,047,458 | He's the infamous polygamist leader of the controversial Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a sect of Mormon fundamentalism which has often been identified as a white supremacist cult, who was charged with child sexual assault for allegedly forcing underage girls in the Church to marry adult men. Now, he's also one of the subjects of Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, Netflix's newest addition to the "cult-o-mania" genre, which was released last week. What a career! | |
| 6 | Top Gun: Maverick |
|
1,014,701 |
|
The '80s classic about a fighter pilot named Maverick who gets the chance to train at the Navy's Fighter Weapons School (aka TOPGUN), got a sequel in which he returns to the program to train new pilots. Even if it's gotten mostly rave reviews, not everyone is raving about it, as recent discussions about the film revolving around the possibility of it just being shiny military propaganda. |
| 7 | Vikram (2022 film) |
|
866,225 | .jpg)
|
Much like another 2022 release (#6), this film is a spiritual sequel to its namesake 1986 film, and follows a retired secret agent trying to take down a drug syndicate. The film also kicks off a cinematic universe with a sequel to follow. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2022 |
|
865,951 | .jpg)
|
And when this building is on fire These flames can't burn any higher I turn sideways to the sun And in a moment I am gone... |
| 9 | Stranger Things (season 4) |
|
812,660 |
|
Even if the eagerly awaited second volume of this bingeable horror-drama's fourth season still hasn't come out three weeks after the release of the first one, that hasn't slowed down its momentum or caused it to lose its spot on this list. I haven't personally watched this much buzzed-about season, mainly because I have yet to watch the first three buzzed-about seasons, but one thing that does really excite me about the show is that it brought Kate Bush's melancholic masterpiece "Running Up That Hill" to number one on charts across the globe 37 years after its release. It has something to do with headphones, Velma, and the effects of bath salts, if I had to guess. |
| 10 | Stranger Things |
|
767,554 |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Roe v. Wade |
|
2,554,445 | .jpg)
|
Well, we knew it would come, but now the shadow has truly returned. On June 24, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that effectively legalised abortion in much of the country. Abortion will now become illegal in many states, forcing millions across the country to either risk an illegal abortion or give birth against their will. |
| 2 | Juneteenth |
|
1,304,668 | .jpg)
|
After the George Floyd protests in 2020, interest in this holiday marking an end to chattel slavery across the United States (following its abolition in Texas in 1865) rose greatly, prompting Joe Biden to declare it a federal holiday the following year. A couple centuries late on that one, Joe, but at least we got there eventually, and we had our very first official celebration of Juneteenth as a country this week. Too bad slavery didn't really go away. |
| 3 | Draupadi Murmu |
|
1,156,860 | 
|
The former governor of Jharkhand earned her place on this week's list after she was selected by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, as the Indian presidential nominee for the National Democratic Alliance, or NDA, a right-wing coalition led by the BJP. Winning the election, which is almost guaranteed for Murmu based on the BJP's grip on India's government, would make her India's first tribal president and the second female president. |
| 4 | Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness |
|
1,088,839 | .jpg)
|
The latest MCU installment was released on Disney+ this week. |
| 5 | Top Gun: Maverick |
|
938,050 | .jpg)
|
Tom Cruise returns as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in a movie acclaimed for combining good character moments with impressive aerial sequences. It already passed $900 million worldwide, and could very soon become the highest-grossing movie of the year, surpassing the above. |
| 6 | Deaths in 2022 |
|
862,770 | 
|
For the life of me, I cannot believe We'd ever die for these sins, we were merely freshmen |
| 7 | The Boys (TV series) |
|
836,257 | .jpg)
|
The jerk superheroes being confronted by ruthless people (who now managed to find a way to get superpowers and level the fight) keep on releasing new episodes on Prime Video, with the latest one featuring a superhero orgy that is a great reminder of Guybrush Threepwood's immortal quote "The human body is a beautiful thing. Most of the time. Ew." |
| 8 | The Umbrella Academy (TV series) |
|
760,572 | 
|
Like the above, another unconventional superhero streaming show which had its third season released, only on Netflix. It even has to acknowledge real world gender transitions, as Ellen Page's Vanya is now Elliot Page's Viktor. |
| 9 | Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV series) |
|
752,391 | .jpg)
|
Disney has been churning out a lot of just-alright series in what appears to be a quantity-over-quality move on their part. This show turned out to be a case, as for all the good of bringing back Ewan McGregor, the plot was ultimately unnecessary (sure, an exiled Kenobi is a great starting point; but why have him meet Darth Vader again, when it just undermines their fatal re-encounter in the Death Star? or having Princess Leia as a child, as if she needed to have met Ben to send him a helping plea?), and the final episode had critics complaining that it just felt like a rehash of other, better Star Wars films, to which a roundtable of crotchety old rich men at Disney's HQ probably said "But you all love reboots! You keep going out to see them every time!" (Lightyear begs to differ...) |
| 10 | Elvis Presley |
|
745,817 | 
|
Thank you, thank you very much, Hollywood, for meeting what seems to be an annual quota for rock star biopics. This time, Elvis is about one of the very first people to bring rock 'n' roll to the masses--even if he was only able to do so after infamously stealing it from Black people-- and his rocky relationship with his manager Colonel Tom Parker. The eponymous film was directed by Baz Luhrmann, who's mostly known for flashy remakes of other, arguably better films based on books (plus a movie that only reuses a title), and stars Austin Butler, who got his start on the Disney-Nickelodeon circuit as the one-time beau(s) of Hannah Montana and Zoey Brooks. Butler stepped into the pompadoured singer's blue suede shoes, and viewers have noticed that his affected demeanor and voice as Elvis have creeped into interviews he's done long after the movie was filmed. The devil in disguise? It just might be. |
For the May 19-June 19 period, taken from Wikipedia:Database reports/Most edited articles last month.
| Rank | Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Robb Elementary School shooting | 3916 | High profile, rapidly updating events generate high edit counts. This was no exception. Read above for more. |
| 2 | 2022 monkeypox outbreak | 2476 | The new COVID? It seems unlikely. However, this article was created on May 17, and like 2019-2020 China pneumonia outbreak (to give the original name), the article is generating high interest in both views and edit count. |
| 3 | Deaths in 2022 | 1958 | Many thousands of people die everyday, and with the number of people who are considered notable (rightly or wrongly) it is no surprise that this article gets hundreds of edit a week. |
| 4 | Bigg Boss (Malayalam season 4) | 1682 | The Malayalam-language version of Big Brother is currently in week 13 of 15 (at time of writing, June 20) |
| 5 | Top Gun: Maverick | 1277 | The current second highest-grossing movie of the year, with nearly $900 million. I don't care about the politicized people claiming it's military propaganda, it's an incredible piece of work. |
| 6 | Wye College | 1226 | User:Ed1964 is cleaning up the article on this British college that closed in 2009. |
| 7 | Depp v. Heard | 1131 | This court drama was decided on June 1. |
| 8 | 2022 French Open – Men's singles | 1065 | Every year, you can expect the article on this Grand Slam to be vandalized to note Rafael Nadal is the only guy who seems to win it anymore. |
| 9 | 2022 Australian federal election | 970 | Australia had an election this month, which resulted in a change of government. This attracted a lot of edits to the page, mostly from people updating the results every few hours. |
| 10 | Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II | 840 | Celebrations were held to note it's been 70 years since Elizabeth II was crowned. |
| 11 | List of equipment of the Ukrainian Ground Forces | 810 | Attention to this remains strong as the Russians don't leave. One editor is particularly dedicated as to keeping weaponry used by the Security Service of Ukraine or the Ministry of Internal Affairs away. |
| 12 | Canada national ringette team | 809 | While ice hockey fans followed the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs, one user updated articles on ringette, which is hockey for girls without body contact. |
| 13 | Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV series) | 807 | Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi was one of the unquestionably good things in the Star Wars prequels, and so he gets a limited series on Disney+, that now even made him meet Darth Vader nearly a decade before their fatal re-encounter. |
| 14 | 2022 Pacific hurricane season | 782 | Our very dedicated cadre of tropical cyclone-related editors is keeping itself busy. |
| 15 | 2022 French Open – Women's singles | 766 | In the Roland Garros tournament that does give a chance for other people to get a title, the winner was current #1 Iga Swiatek. |
| 16 | 2021 PBA 3x3 season – Third conference | 758 | If you needed proof of how the Philippines love basketball, just check how much effort User:Engr. Smitty put into updating the local 3x3 tournament! |
| 17 | 2022 United States House of Representatives elections | 729 | With the primary season in full swing, this page also kept being updated as candidates won primaries, lost primaries, entered races, withdrew from races and changed parties throughout the month. |
| 18 | 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in California | 726 | |
| 19 | 2022 Lebanese general election | 722 | A new parliament was chosen by a country still under civil protests and recovering from a freak explosion. |
| 20 | 2022 FIVB Volleyball Women's Nations League | 718 | Volleyball's annual tournament. A reminder that maybe watching this will help wash away some pain I had with this sport last year. |
| 21 | Elon Musk | 709 | One of the most popular pages on Wikipedia, both among editors and viewers it seems, as updates on news stories, copyediting and a few light edit wars populated its history tab. |
| 22 | Sidhu Moose Wala | 678 | As mentioned above, a recently murdered Indian rapper. |
| 23 | 1916 Pioneer Exhibition Game | 678 | An Australian rules football article being worked on by Lindsay658. |
| 24 | 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine | 631 | Mariupol is still occupied, Ukraine is still trying to hold onto Sievierodonetsk after Russia failed to take Kyiv, and Russian filtration camps are popping up to deal with Russia's self-imposed problem of not knowing what to do with the people whose homes they destroyed. In short, things are still awful. |
| 25 | List of Acts of the Parliament of Scotland to 1707 | 630 | Being worked on by James500. |
The solstice is passed, and depending on where you live, it's either the start of summer, the start of winter, or you're near the equator and it's pretty much just another day. But that last one is a little hard to provide images for, so....
Also, the Summer section probably has a bit of a British focus, because it's harder to come up with random weird and interesting things for places you haven't been. My apologies. I think a broad topic like "Summer" is honestly harder to be diverse with than a more narrow topic (at least if it's one person writing it).
As the ancient song goes:
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As the 1916 poem by Ezra Pound goes:
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Across:
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Down:
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Green boxes: Shortcut to a warning not to climb this dressed as Spider-Man
lamp.ssa
anoa.pan
liprouge
...screw
three...
fairlead
arb.orgy
sms.trek
Copy/paste this into your sandbox to fill it out in the visual editor! You'll still need the original numbering as reference on this page.
Note: the next crossword appeared in the 24 December 2023 issue, in its own dedicated column.
