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Dispatches: Historic election proves groundbreaking on the Main Page

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By Karanacs and SandyGeorgia

On November 4, 2008, Wikipedia made its own contribution to history by displaying two Featured articles (FA) as Today's featured article (TFA) on the main page. Moreover, for the first time, one of these articles had previously been featured on the main page. The articles represented the two major candidates—Barack Obama and John McCain—in the 2008 United States Presidential Election.

Barack Obama's official portrait
Barack Obama's official portrait

The Barack Obama article was brought to featured status by User:Meelar in August 2004; this version appeared on the main page on August 18, 2004. Since then User:HailFire, User:Tvoz and User:Bobblehead have become the major contributors to the article. The article has retained featured status for four years; this status was reaffirmed at four separate Featured article reviews: January 2007, July 2007, April 2008 and September 2008. As Obama's presidential campaign gained strength in 2008, editing conditions at the page deteriorated. Several threads were launched at the Administrators' noticeboards to complain of edit warring, personal attacks, incivility, and assumptions of bad faith. In July 2008, a proposal that Obama-related pages be placed on article probation was made; the proposal was quickly approved and endorsed several days later. Three days after the election, the article was again nominated for a review.

John McCain's official portrait
John McCain's official portrait

In March 2008, the article on John McCain was prematurely nominated for Featured Article status by an editor who had not previously worked on the article. That nomination failed, but User:Ferrylodge and User:Wasted Time R continued to work to improve the article. Ferrylodge renominated it in August 2008 and it was promoted without any opposition. By November 2008, Ferrylodge had added about 1,000 edits to the article and Wasted Time R had contributed an additional 500 to his 450 edits at the time of the first Featured article candidacy.

Main page discussion

On October 27, User:Remember initiated a discussion at the talk page of Today's Featured Article/Requests (TFA/R) on whether to highlight the articles of the two primary U.S. presidential candidates. The original proposal would have placed the election winner's article on the main page on November 5, and the other candidate's article on the main page on November 6. Other editors were opposed to the proposal for various reasons, including the uncertainty of knowing the winner's identity at midnight (UTC) on November 5 and that having the two articles on consecutive days would be too US-centric. Remember then proposed an alternate solution—have both articles featured on election day. User:SandyGeorgia moved the proposal to TFA/R on October 30 as an Ignore all rules (IAR) request to solicit more opinions. A lively discussion (archived here) ensued. Among the concerns were:

  • potential for vandalism,
  • bias against third-party candidates,
  • Barack Obama had already been featured on the main page,
  • the precedent of having two FAs on the main page would encourage future requests for two or three articles to be featured simultaneously,
  • potential conflict with the In the News (ITN) section of the main page, and
  • too US-centric.

After more spirited discussion, by November 3, the proposal had 28 supports and 12 opposes. FA Director and TFA Coordinator User:Raul654 agreed to run the unprecedented double TFA and to repeat a TFA which had already run on the mainpage, saying:[1]

Ok, so as I read this, ITN isn't going to do anything with the election until after midnight UTC. If that's the case, my largest worry is alleviated. My second worry is setting precedents with regard to featuring (A) two articles at once, or (B) featuring articles on the main page a second time, remain. However, I think this can be dealt with by me saying, here and now, that this is an extremely unusual thing that I have absolutely no intention or desire to repeat in the future. Does that satisfy everyone? Raul654 (talk) 22:06, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Article protection

Independently of the Today's Featured Article discussion, editors at the Administrator's noticeboard discussed what level of protection the articles should be given as the election approached. With the election cycle nearing a close, vandalism and POV-pushing on these articles made it hard for the regular editors to keep the pages at a state that followed Wikipedia's core policies, including the policy on biographies of living people. On October 29, full protection for both the Obama and McCain articles through November 5, the day after the election, as well as the articles on their vice-presidential nominees Joe Biden and Sarah Palin was proposed. Several dozen editors joined the discussion, and after a brief period of full protection, the articles were semi-protected until election day with the understanding that full protection would be enabled on election day.

Response

Originally, the two TFAs were listed in alphabetical order. User:Cyde Weys then added Javascript to randomly change the order in which the blurbs appeared as the page was refreshed. Nevertheless, Talk:Main Page and the TFA page registered several complaints from readers upset that a certain candidate was listed first. A few other readers perceived the selection of these two articles as too US-centric and requested that a similar effort be implemented for other elections. Several others were concerned that only the candidates from the two major political parties were featured, and others were displeased that both articles were fully protected.

Overall, however, response to the double TFA was very positive. Raul654 was lauded for his boldness in choosing to run a double TFA, and for ignoring all the rules to feature the Obama article a second time. Many liked the format as an unbiased way to acknowledge the United States presidential election. User:JayHenry remarked that "I'm mostly happy that we tried something outside the box. The outside the box idea that gets implemented is an increasingly endangered species on Wikipedia."[2] Among those offering kudos on Raul654's talk page were User:maclean25, who awarded Raul a special "Tightrope Award", and User:Fvasconcellos, who posted:[3]

You have my instant respect, for what it's worth :) IAR was made for this. This, and the reasoning and process behind it, is the Wikipedia I love, the Wikipedia I signed up for, etc. etc. Thanks. Fvasconcellos 01:54, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Election day statistics

November 4 page hits, by hour, for the articles Barack Obama and John McCain
November 4 page hits, by hour, for the articles Barack Obama and John McCain

Throughout the day on November 4, the Obama and McCain articles remained in the top five most popular articles on Wikipedia. For much of the day, the Obama article was the most popular, and received, on average, almost twice as many visitors as the McCain article.[4] In the last 90 minutes of the day (from 4 Nov 23:05 UTC until 5 Nov 00:38 UTC), there were over 210,000 searches for "Barack Obama" (not including any redirects).

In total, while the articles were featured on the Main page, Obama's article (including redirects) received about 728,000 hits, and McCain's article (including redirects), received about 365,000 hits. Together, they received over 1 million hits.[5] In comparison, the TFA for November 3, Delhi, received about 130,000 hits while it was on the main page.

Notes

  1. ^ Raul654 comment at TFA/R
  2. ^ JayHenry comment at Talk:Main Page
  3. ^ Fvasconcellos comment at User talk:Raul654
  4. ^ The average number of hourly visitors to "Barack Obama" from 3 Nov 23:00 through 4 Nov 23:00 was 28,248; for "John McCain", the average was 14,493. See history for Template:Popular articles
  5. ^ Notes on election traffic statistics
  • Cohen, Noam. "Updating a Reference Site on the Fly". The New York Times.
  • Goad, Robin (November 4, 2008). "Analysis: UK Internet Searches for the US Election". DigitalMediaWire.
  • Kharif, Olga (November 3, 2008). "Election Day Plays Out on the Social Web". Business Week.
  • Lang, Derrik J. "Virtual world celebrates Obama's win". Associated Press. (Referencing this edit.)



Also this week:
  • 2008 fundraiser
  • ArbCom elections
  • Book review
  • Search engine
  • Board resolutions
  • News and notes
  • Dispatches
  • Features and admins
  • Technology report
  • Arbitration report
    • (← Previous Dispatches) Signpost archives (Next Dispatches→)
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    Discuss this story

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    == Pieces ==
    FYI - I originally proposed having the presidential winner on November the 5 and the loser on the 6th. That did not seem to get much traction because people thought it would be too US centric to run the articles back-to-back, and because people thought it would be bias to have the winner on the next day (plus the fact you might not know who the winner is). So then I proposed the alternative to have them both featured on the 4th, and people seemed to really like this idea (and some to really hate it). Remember (talk) 15:57, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Splicing that in so it can be prosified there ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:05, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Ok, so as I read this, ITN isn't going to do anything with the election until after midnight UTC. If that's the case, my largest worry is alleviated. My second worry is setting precedents with regard to featuring (A) two articles at once, or (B) featuring articles on the main page a second time, remain. However, I think this can be dealt with by me saying, here and now, that this is an extremely unusual thing that I have absolutely no intention or desire to repeat in the future. Does that satisfy everyone? Raul654 (talk) 22:06, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

    [5] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:12, 8 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Media

    Notes from Risker

    Hi Sandy, got your message—graceful as ever in sharing the credit! Just a few notes at this point, more may follow once I get my head around things.

    • I'd already asked Henrik to create some hour-by-hour article view graphs for the two articles, they might be an interesting visual for this.
    • I'll try to work out the periods of time that each article was semi- and fully protected through the course of the day.
    • I recall that at one point during the day, the Obama article was getting over 750 hits/hour. The stats remain available, but are a bit complex because hits on pages redirecting to the main articles need to be included. I'll see what I can do to get proper tallies there.
    • One of my concerns, particularly during the (North American) daytime, was that it takes about five seconds to revert vandalism; given the number of hits the article was getting, that could mean more people would see those few seconds of vandalism as look at the majority of our articles in an entire week.

    I will probably think of more things in the next few days. Risker (talk) 06:35, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks, Risker; we've got more than a week to work on this, and Jbmurray will likely do a lot of the writing as soon as he gets to it, so I'm just roughing in the pieces for now. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:38, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I put together a quick look at the page views for the main articles. The chart and statistics do not include other redirects. IF there is more information available, I'd be happy to put it in. Karanacs (talk) 19:17, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I've checked all the traffic through redirects for November 4th, and whilst I can't give an hour-by-hour breakdown, it seems that 7% of McCain's total traffic that day was from redirects, and 15% of Obama's - so we at least can tell roughly how much the graph undershoots. I'll update the daily totals in the article just now. Shimgray | talk | 23:27, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    weekend

    I'll help out on this at the weekend. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 19:11, 5 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Potential title

    "Dispatches: Historic election proves groundbreaking on the Main Page" –Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 01:16, 6 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Another story, from the NYT

    Thought you might find this interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/technology/internet/10link.htm?_r=1&oref=slogin Risker (talk) 05:17, 10 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    It notes in passing what the pageviews were - I dug up some numbers on this, and it might be interesting to mention the traffic specifically for the 4th, when the TFAs were live.
    Obama's article got 620k hits, whilst McCains got 338k - if we think of this as the division of the "whole traffic", 65% of readers went to Obama. This seems remarkable, but it's quite consistent with the overall average - Obama was getting about 60% through October, and on November 3rd he got almost exactly 65% of the traffic to the two. So our readers preferred to read about Obama, but not by any more than usual. (This says something, but I'm not sure quite what.)
    The articles were much more popular than the normal FAs - a FA of the day usually gets, what, 100k hits? Obama got 375,000 more than the previous day, McCain got 200,000 more, and between them they managed almost a million pageviews, with another 120k visiting the article on the election. This is an exceptional rate - it looks like we definitely did well at serving up what readers wanted. Well done to those who pushed for it! Shimgray | talk | 12:35, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Ooops! I see you mentioned this above already. Oh, well... pre-empted :-) Shimgray | talk | 12:39, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Copyeditors needed

    I think that the bulk of the content is here now. I would appreciate any help with copyediting. Karanacs (talk) 19:32, 11 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    I've given it a once-over, but I find it to be pretty well done, and not needing too much work. Another pair of eyes would certainly be useful, though.
    One question on the protection section: In fact, the Obama article was at semi-protected level for 8 hours 33 minutes, and the McCain one for 7 hours 20 minutes (in two separate episodes of 2 hours 40 mins and 4 hours 40 mins), following a request to Raul from Jossi. The period of full protection between the two semi-protections on the McCain article was in response to edit-warring and vandalism by a sleeper vandalism account. The reinstatement of protection to both articles appears to have been related to edit-warring and the increasing risk of vandalism. Risker (talk) 04:05, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Feel free to add whatever is needed, I'm off for the day, only logged on today to see if this was on deadline, and it will publish soon. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:06, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    I've given it a quick tidy, but couldn't spot anything wildly odd. I'll try again later if I have a chance, when more awake. Shimgray | talk | 09:03, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

    Increase in traffic for both articles when they were on the main page

    It's not easy to tell if the traffic that both articles got while they were on the main page was because of the main page or just because on that particular day, people searched online for their names and clicked on the link to Wikipedia (since Wikipedia articles usually appear near the top of search results). A better way of doing the statistics would have been to use a lesser known redirect, like Barry Obama as an example, so that when the traffic spikes it'd be easier to see by how much. Just something useful to remember for next time, perhaps. Gary King (talk) 17:00, 14 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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