Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-06-10
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-10/From the editors
Two households, both alike in dignity
"Happy families are all alike," Leo Tolstoy said, "but unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion." While there is truth to that statement, I've never found it entirely right. Unhappiness can strike in many forms, but there are several we all share, the most obvious, and in many ways the most painful, is bereavement. The unexpected death of the eldest son of US Vice President Joe Biden brought respect and sympathy from viewers worldwide, while on the other end of the spectrum, Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, erstwhile scion of the Kardashian clan, followed a route to personal happiness that I doubt Tolstoy had ever conceived, but in the process put an end to his seemingly successful marriage.
For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of May 31 to June 6, 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Bruce Jenner/Caitlyn Jenner 
4,124,013* 
On June 1, the former track and field star and honorary Kardashian announced that he had completed his transition to womanhood, and was answering to the name Caitlyn. In keeping with the habits of his former family, his transition was accompanied by a full-on media blow-out, including a cover shoot for Vanity Fair. Perhaps surprisingly, America seems to have welcomed her with open arms, though you wouldn't know that from the response of the right-wing press, whose reaction has been, to quote the Washington Post, "apocalyptic". *Numbers are combined with her now-redirected former name. Her current name alone gained 1,249,139 views this week.
2 Game of Thrones (season 5)
902,536 
As we approach the season finale, it seems A Song of Ice and Fire is getting some fire back, as numbers jumped again by another 80,000 views. This week's episode was the highest-rated since the première, and numbers are only likely to increase next week. 3 Beau Biden 
876,235 
The former Attorney General of Delaware and elder son of US Vice President Joe Biden died this week of brain cancer, aged just 46. 4 Marilyn Monroe 
802,950 Lifetime premièred a biopic of the legendary sex goddess in the weekend leading up to what would have been her 89th birthday on June 1. The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe starred Kelli Garner as Marilyn and Susan Sarandon as her mother. 5 Joe Biden 
777,579 
The bereaved Vice President of the United States got some sympathy views in the wake of his son's untimely death (see above). 6 Stephen Curry
675,368 
On June 4, this record-breaking basketball wunderkind, who has been leading the Golden State Warriors to the NBA Finals, beat LeBron James's Cleveland Cavaliers in a tight battle. 7 List of Game of Thrones episodes 
665,093 See #2. 8 Kris Jenner
665,093 
The mother of the media-genic Kardashian clan and now-ex-Mrs-ex-Bruce Jenner has been tactfully quiescent in the wake of her former husband's coming out, though that hasn't stopped the media stoking rumours about rampant jealousy and catfights between the two. 9 San Andreas (film)
652,261 
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's biggest starring role to date rises to become the most popular film on the list, probably in part because it inspired Californians by the carload to purchase earthquake insurance. The film had a boffo $53 million opening weekend in the States last week, though this Friday's numbers augur a rather steep dropoff. Critics seem equally nonplussed, with the film currently resting at 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. 10 Mad Max: Fury Road
613,713 
Numbers are falling steeply for this belated action sequel, but it still retains its position ahead of Pitch Perfect 2, which beat it soundly at the US box office.
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Arbitration case attracts media coverage; Wikipedia in Israel
UK media coverage of "sockpuppet investigation block" arbitration case
UK political blog Guido Fawkes reported on the proposed decision of the Sockpuppet investigation block arbitration case: "Wikipedia slaps down Grant Shapps' LibDem tormentor" (8 June). This was followed by numerous reports in the UK mainstream media later that day. The BBC was first to weigh in ("Censure for Grant Shapps' Wikipedia accuser"), to be followed by the Guardian, one of whose writers appears to have started the entire affair when he emailed a Wikimedia UK staffer ("Wikipedia volunteer faces reprimand over 'Shapps account' investigation"). Other publications reporting the story included:
- The Spectator: "Wikipedia reprimands editor who accused Grant Shapps of ‘sock puppet’ edits"
- The Times: "Wikipedia editor censured over Shapps"
- Mirror: "Wikipedia raps Grant Shapps controversy editor after ruling there was 'no proof' Tory changed his own page"
- The Independent: "Andy McSmith's Diary: Shapps Wiki leak latest"
- Sun Nation: "Wiki gets heavy with Grant Shapps irritant"
- Huffington Post: "The Waugh Zone: Beware the Wiki man"
- City A. M.: "Grant Shapps sockpuppet whistleblower Richard Symonds forced out by Wikipedia committee"
- Welwyn Hatfield Times: "Grant Shapps takes swipe at media after Wikipedia administrator sanctioned"
On 9 June, after the formal conclusion of the arbitration case, the Guardian reported that the Contribsx account had been unblocked by a Wikipedia administrator: "Wikipedia: account at centre of row 'not linked' to Grant Shapps". On Twitter, frequent Wikipedia critic David Auerbach pointed out that the author of the article, Randeep Ramesh, "was also the original recipient of the leak". Breitbart weighed in on 10 June, opining that the "Shapps case raises questions for Wikipedia and The Guardian"; according to Breitbart, the "Guardian reader’s editor is investigating complaints against the newspaper."
Detailed coverage of the arbitration case itself will be provided in next week's Arbitration Report. A.K.
Wikipedia in Israel
Wikimedia Foundation executive director Lila Tretikov visited Israel and Palestine earlier this month for a number of Wikimedia-related events.
Tretikov was the keynote speaker at the 2015 Wikipedia Academy Israel Conference in Herzliya. The topic of the conference was education, and in an interview there with i24news Tretikov was optimistic about Wikipedia's ability to meet the educational challenges of the future:Tretikov visted a middle school in Hertzliya where students had been assigned the task of contributing information to Wikipedia about their city and local history. She told the Jerusalem Post "In Israel, this is the first country where we see innovation really happening on the scale where it’s a country-wide program, and that’s in primary education."Our power is in every human being around the world because people are motivated by their intrinsic motivators, by their desire to contribute, their desire to learn, and their desire to teach, and we have hundreds of thousands of contributors around the world who are participating without us having to pay them.
During her time in the area, Tretikov met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Prime Minister's office noted that his father, historian Benzion Netanyahu, was an editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica. Tretikov accompanied Israeli Wikimedians on one of the regular meetings of the Elef Millim project, this one to the Old City of Jerusalem. Hebrew for "a thousand words", the project tours and photographically documents sites of historical interest. Tretikov also met with Palestinian Wikimedians in Ramallah.
The Jerusalem Post noted that Tretikov will visit again in April 2016 for the Wikimedia hackathon, the first time this event will be held outside North America or Europe.
In related Wikipedia news, the Jerusalem Post also reported (June 2) on a discussion on the Hebrew Wikipedia about racially charged comments made by prime minister Netanyahu on the day of the March 2015 Israel legislative election. The discussion resulted in the comments remaining in the encyclopedia. Also, Jimmy Wales was interviewed on the July 1 episode of The Cost of Doing Business on TLV1. G.
In brief
- World Oceans Day edit-a-thon: In National Geographic, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson of the Waitt Institute writes "How Hosting an Edit-A-Thon Made Me Trust Wikipedia" (June 12). G.
- Maverick: Gizmodo UK profiles Jimmy Wales, "The Maverick Who Brought The Encyclopaedia Into the Internet Age" (June 11). G.
- "Don’t read Wikipedia on me for God’s sake": In an London Evening Standard profile (June 11) of historian Andrew Roberts, Roberts told the newspaper that "a mutual friend" informed him that his Wikipedia article was being edited by Richard Tomlinson, the MI6 agent who was convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act 1989 for providing his publisher with a seven-page synopsis of the book eventually published about his intelligence career, The Big Breach. Roberts called Tomlinson "a full-scale traitor" and said "He must have a lot of time on his hands that he thinks that it's worthwhile saying that I cling-filmed the lavatories at school, and that was the reason for my expulsion." G.
- Republicans attempt to steal another political contest: Roll Call reports (June 11) that the article for the Congressional Baseball Game was edited from an IP address assigned to the US House of Representatives to name the Republican Party the winner of the 2015 game, the 54th, before it had been played. Both parties were tied at 38-38-1 and the Democratic Party had won the previous six years in a row. However, the Democratic Party later won the June 11 game, extending their winning streak. G.
- The illusion of perfection: In The Conversation, Craig Blewett, Senior Lecturer at University of KwaZulu-Natal, writes "Why it’s time the world embraced Wikipedia" (June 10). Blewett concludes that "Our attempts to ban students (and writers) from using these modern digital spaces will inevitably fail. And, in the meantime, it will rob us of the opportunity to engage in conversation, rather than blind content consumption." G.
- First Pole on the Wikimedia Foundation board: Radio Poland reports (June 9) on the election of Dariusz Jemielniak to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the first Pole to serve on the Board (see Signpost coverage). They report that "The prestigious seven-person team had to date not included anyone from outside the USA and Western Europe." This is true of the current composition of the Board, but previous members have been from outside these areas, including Ting Chen and Bishakha Datta. G.
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- Wikipedia plagiarist bounces back: Ben Terris of the Washington Post profiles (June 9) Benny Johnson, the BuzzFeed journalist who was fired after plagiarizing from Wikipedia and other sources (see previous Signpost coverage). Johnson is now a content director for Independent Journal Review. Gawker alleges that the profile was a "rehabilitation" of Johnson written by a personal friend, but a Post spokesperson told Gawker that there was no "conflict of interest, such as a personal relationship with the subject of the story". G.
- How to use Wikipedia: Adam Earnheardt, chair of the department of communication at Youngstown State University, writes in The Vindicator about "Teaching my students to use Wikipedia" (June 7). G.
- Difficult school exam sparks Wikipedia vandalism: Sky News reports (June 5) on how the difficulty of a GCSE maths exam prompted outrage on social media and the vandalism of the Edexcel article. G.
Wikimedia sites are going HTTPS only
Today it was announced that Wikimedia sites are going to become HTTPS only, finishing up 10 year effort of rolling out HTTPS. In December 2005, Brion Vibber set up an experimental HTTPS server using special urls like https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page.
In 2011, HTTPS became available using canonical urls like https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Main_Page, which allowed for the usage of protocol-relative urls (//wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Main_Page) to avoid serving HTTP content in pages loaded over HTTPS (mixed content).
Since August 2013, all logged in users used HTTPS; however, that system had some drawbacks. If a user clicked an HTTP link, they would be redirected to HTTPS, but their initial click would leak what page they were trying to visit. To counter that, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is also being rolled out, which instructs browsers to only visit the website over HTTPS. Wikimedia sites will also be added to browser's HSTS preload lists, which will make sure the browser uses HTTPS even if you have never visited the website before to see the HSTS information.
As of writing, only 7 language groups have been converted[1]: ca, el, en, he, it, ug, zh. The Russian Wikipedia has been practically HTTPS-only since August 2014[2].
- Legoktm is a software engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation, and he wrote this in his volunteer capacity.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-10/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-10/Opinion
Chapter financial trends analyzed, news in brief
Chapter-Wide Financial Trends Report published
This week saw the publication of the Chapter-wide Financial Trends Report 2013, a now-completed research project that examines the finances and outlays of the 36 movement-affiliated chapters for the period January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2013. "We, the Finance Fellows, following extensive research and collaboration with the participating chapters, have created a potential reporting guide for all chapters, thematic organizations, and other movement groups, to report data in a way that is more consistent and comparable across the movement. It is also within this report we highlight some our key findings."
The report was delivered by four "finance fellows", who according to their introductions to the community on the wikimedia-l mailing list in October of last year are "a multicultural team consisting of 4 young professionals ... happy to introduce a 6-month movement-wide project that focuses on the consistency of how we operate". The work stems from a presentation titled "Chapters in Numbers", prepared for Wikimania 2013 by prominent Polish Wikipedian Michał Buczyński, who is now a community-elect member of the Funds Dissemination Committee; the work was supported by the WMF Board's Audit Comittee. The initial announcement was followed by questions from chapter community members about whether or not the process, though explicitly stated not to be a full audit, will incur additional reporting overhead on the chapters being examined; on this topic, CFO Garfield Byrd wrote that "The project has been designed so that the fellows will be using existing data provided by movement entities and the Fellows will only be reaching out to movement entities with clarifying questions". There were also concerns about the timetable and the absence of prior community notification of the existence of the project (the project had apparently been in planning for two months by that time).
The project and the findings are available on the meta-wiki. Some data highlights:
- In 2013, the total revenue of Wikimedia chapters amounted to $21,082,633. Of this, 98% was generated by global north chapters and the remaining 2% by the chapters in the global south. The total sum of donations received by the chapters was $14,531,232; the total sum of grants, $5,677,083.
- The results obtained by the survey are heavily skewed by Wikimedia Germany, far and away the largest of the chapters and one of only two which, after movement restructuring in 2011–12, still handles its own fundraising campaigns. The money obtained in these campaigns is mostly transferred back to the Wikimedia Foundation for disbursal in Germany and elsewhere, an activity technically classified as an "expense" in financial terms. While in total the chapters nominally spent $20,765,557, close to half of this comes from this movement of money; in size terms, Wikimedia Germany has a further disproportionate presence as by far the largest of all of the Wikimedian chapters. In fact, excluding Wikimedia Germany from expense analysis completely (removing both its financial movements and its regular staffing and operating costs) quarters the chapters' total expenses, down to $4,782,622—an indication of how important Germany has proven for the movement at large.
- Grants were the majority source of revenue for 24 chapters: 82% from the WMF and 18% from other sources (usually institutional partners). Donations were the majority sources of support and revenue for the remaining 12 chapters (9 chapters from Europe and 3 from Asia/Pacific).
- 16 chapters recorded event funding as their highest expenditure, but operating costs, primarily labor expenses, were reported as highest expense by the remaining 20. Though not explicitly stated in the report, together the two facts above this illustrate differences in the way that chapters operate: labor chases larger grants, while donations are more passive and easier to manage. R
Brief notes
- Wikimedia swaps to HTTPS: Hypertext Transfer Protocol—the omnipresent
httpfor short—has long been more or less the standard as web access protocols go. Yet soon after the June 2013 Edward Snowden revelations the Wikimedia Foundation unveiled plans (far from unique) to speed up the implementation of the more secure HTTPS as the new default for the projects. Just short of two years later, in a blog post tellingly co-penned by members of the Foundation's legal and engineering teams, the Foundation is unveiling HTTPS-by-default as the site's new access paradigm. HTTPS first had a presence on Wikipedia in 2005, when long-time Foundation tech Brion Vibber enabled on a single testbed server, funneling traffic through thehttps://secure.wikimedia.org/subdomain. The current URLs and a more robust system were enabled in 2011, but progress was fairly slow past that point—until the Snowden revelations gave the project a shot in the arm in 2013. It is worth remembering also that, as the Signpost reported earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation is the top-billed party in an ACLU lawsuit against the NSA. R - Mediawiki API changes: A change is expected to occur in the way that Mediawiki software handles
action=queryresults sometime by the end of this month. The change is expected to cause compatibility issues affecting many of the bots that have not yet been retrofit to work with the new schema, and have to do with the way that continuations are handled within queries to the Mediawiki API, the primary way that the sites' many bots talk to and modify content on the Wikimedia sites. A list of affected bots, current as of early June, was presented in the mailing list. R - New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, NeilN (RfA). R
- Wikimedia UK volunteer strategy consultation: Wikimedia UK unveiled a volunteer strategy consultation call to action this week, outlining the chapter's desire to "transform the way we work so that we can bring volunteering right into the heart of the charity." The new strategy presages a volunteer strategy consultation that is to take place in London on July 25th, emphasizing volunteer interactions through project-based working practices, volunteer engagement and evaluation panels, and other structural changes at the organization (like a new project coordinator position). Of the proposal the organization has to say:
| “ | We have over the past 18 months moved to a more focused mode of work when delivering projects that we run in collaboration with external partners. Building relationships with major organisations has shown that this can bring success in terms of impact, value for money, and perceived reputation in the movement and in the public mindset. These relationships not only open doors for us in terms of access to content, goodwill and expertise, but will also increasingly prove vital in formulating the basis for fundraising appeals and gaining the confidence of grant making organisations. They are worthy of more time, consistent focus and development, which is why we want to particularly focus on these this year and beyond, as well as bringing our broader volunteer work into this project-based approach. | ” |
- Wiki Loves Africa: Wikimedians are invited to vote on the theme for this year's Wiki Loves Africa photo-contest. The contest is funded jointly by the Wikimedia Foundation (via a Personal Engagement Grant) and French telecom company Orange (a long-standing founding partner in the Wikipedia Zero initiative); last year's four winners all fit into the theme of African cuisine, while this year's theme is to be narrowed down from a list of six possibles, with "Fashion" and "Architecture" being the current front-runners. R
- Search and discovery now just discovery: According to changes to the Foundation's staff and contractors page the newly minted "search and discovery" team has had its official title changed to just "discovery". R
- Metrics and activities: This month's Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting is scheduled for Thursday, June 11, 18:00 UTC. The topic of this month's meeting, which is the largest and most regular of the Foundation's IRC office hours, is the "Strategy Preview": for more background on the WMF's institutional rethink, see Signpost coverage of the State of the WMF report and the Foundation's still-recent community strategic consultation. Also continuing on the format of the strategy refresh that was performed last meeting is the return of the now-regularized "Community Update". R
- Wikimania discussions: A call was made on the Wikimania-l mailing list for topics to be addressed in this year's Wikimania Discussion Room: "Wikimania is not only about presentations - but also about meeting your colleagues from around the world, and having encouraging, inspiring and impactful discussions. To this end, we will organise again the 'Discussion Room' at Wikimania, a structured track of round table discussion sessions with moderation: no speakers, everybody can participate in the discussion. And the topics focus on community topics!" R
- Wikipedia meetups near you: From the WM Blog: R
| “ | Wikipedia meetups social events centered around Wikipedia or one of its sister projects. They happen in real life with real humans and can be large affairs, sponsored and hosted by universities, or smaller informal meetings held in a cafe down the street. They can be loosely themed or focused on a specific topic or article. Anyone is welcome to attend, and often people who are new to Wikipedia can learn how edit the encyclopedia by learning from experienced editors in person. These events happen in cities and towns all around the world. You can find a meetup happening near you by clicking the link above — you may also find other meetups tailored to other languages and regions by clicking the languages on the lower right side of the page. | ” |
- Wikipedia articles per speaker: A spreadsheet highlighting the distribution of the presence of Wikipedia articles per language speakers was presented this week in a post to the mailing list. In tangentially related news, the Signpost is currently seeking editors that would be interested in preparing data visualizations for our newspaper, using the new Graphs extension; inquire on our talk page or try speaking to Resident Mario directly. R
- Wikipedian in Residence: Czech Wikipedian Blahma is this week's newest Wikipedian in Residence, at Masaryk University. R
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