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28 October 2015

 

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/From the editors


2015-10-28

Canada, the most popular nation on Earth

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By Milowent
Everybody Knows Canada!
With the triumph of Justin Trudeau (#1) in the Canadian federal election (#13), he also placed top in our chart this week, though some of this Internet popularity appears to be due to his "hotness". This also placed his father and former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau at #4. And with "Back to the Future Day" falling on October 21, Canadian-American actor Michael J. Fox landed at #3. Thus, three of the top five spots this week, and seven of the Top 25 (beating the five placed by India in July), are Canada-related. As the 37th most populated country in the world, this seems a feat unlikely to soon be repeated.

Elsewhere on the chart, the coming of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which still doesn't happen until December, took up two slots in the Top 10. A new age-titled album from singer Adele placed #7, and the Top 10 was rounded out by a Reddit thread about a rare disease, and the stalwart Deaths in 2015.

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.

For the week of October 18 to 24, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Justin Trudeau C-class 2,709,956
Trudeau is expected to soon take over as Prime Minister of Canada following the success of his Liberal Party in the recent Canadian federal election. Trudeau's father Pierre Trudeau (#4) served in that role from 1968-1984 (with a brief break in 1979-80). With over 2.7 million views for the week, this was quite a popular event. To some unknown extent, the article's views were inflated by widespread press coverage about the subject's attractiveness, both pro and con.
2 Star Wars: The Force Awakens C-class 1,271,270
If you've caught the press coverage about this upcoming movie here and there, you may be asking yourself, is this thing ever coming out? A poster and new trailer was released last week, which apparently caused a frenzy on the part of the internet not ogling the force of Justin Trudeau. And for those us not that closely involved, the answer is that it rolls out in parts of Europe on December 16, the U.K. on December 17, and North America on December 18.
3 Michael J. Fox Good Article 933,448
October 21, 2015 was "Back to the Future Day" – the day in the future that Marty McFly (played by Fox) traveled to in the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II. And though we don't have true hoverboards or a Jaws 19 movie, and the Chicago Cubs just missed their chance to make it to the World Series, the Internet nostalgia engine was running out of control. And with fathers and son Trudeau, the appearance of the Canadian born Fox means that Canada, the 37th most populated country in the world, has placed three of the top five articles this week, a feat unlikely to ever be repeated.
4 Pierre Trudeau B-class 860,884
Ranked by scholars as one of the greatest Canadian prime minsters, and also the slightly less attractive forebear of this week's #1.
5 Back to the Future Good Article 767,683
See #3, # 11, and #15.
6 Black hole Good Article 612,175
Up from #13 last week, but a debatable entry. The first entry without 1970/80s roots, as the 1979 Disney film The Black Hole simply does not generate that much warm nostalgia. Though a Reddit thread could lift an article like this into the Top 10 on any given week, we do not see any such thread. Stats.grok.se shows a jump in views starting on October 13 from a few thousand per day to over 40,000 per day. It has 25% mobile views (not the either 0% or 99% typical of bot-view popularity), but we may drop this from the list if these steady views continue and a human-based explanation cannot be found.
7 Adele C-class 581,472
The popular singer's new album 25 will be released on November 20. The first single, "Hello", debuted on October 23. As of this writing, the video for "Hello" already has 73 million views.
8 Star Wars Good Article 567,518
See #2.
9 Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva Start-class 545,423 October 24 saw the most interest in this article, generated by a Reddit thread that stated "[today I learned] that there is a disease that makes the body repair injuries using bone, over the course of many years, this leads to the victim becoming more and more like a statue." Non-sensational headlines like this actually can get attention on Reddit; they don't need to use clickbait thread titles like "Feeling lethargic today? Find out if rare disease may be turning you into stone!"
10 Deaths in 2015 List 535,526
The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550 thousand on average, apparently heedless of who actually died. Deaths this week included NASA specialist Robert W. Farquhar whose projects included the first probe to intercept a comet in 1985 (October 18); Miss Austria 2013 Ena Kadić, who died from injuries sustained from falling off a mountain (October 19); Polish-Austrian economist Kazimierz Łaski, a leading proponent of Post-Keynesian economics (October 20, pictured); Pakistani cricket manager Yawar Saeed (October 21); Former Mexican senator Tomás Torres Mercado, who died in a plane crash (October 22); Croatian chess grandmaster Krunoslav Hulak (October 23); and 20-year-old British charity fundraiser Kirsty Howard (October 24).



2015-10-28

The world's Wikipedia gaps; Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA

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By Andreas Kolbe, Gamaliel and Loicyouth
Road to Mnyakanya High School, Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 2007

The world's Wikipedia gaps

GOOD magazine reports (Oct. 27) on the inferior quality and much smaller contributor pool of other language versions of Wikipedia. The article's author, Mark Hay, begins his discussion with an article from the Zulu Wikipedia that was highlighted on Reddit some weeks ago:

A decade ago, Nkandla was the setting of an award-winning documentary, The Orphans of Nkandla, which resulted in the creation of The Africa Project. It is a matter of record that AIDS and poverty have ravaged many children's lives in KwaZulu-Natal. But Hay's observation about minor language versions of Wikipedia remains broadly correct. Indeed, a slide shown at Wikimania 2014 indicated that of Wikipedia's then-284 (today: 291) language versions,

  • 12 were dead (locked);
  • 53 were "zombies" (open, no editors);
  • 94 were struggling (open, fewer than 5 editors);
  • 125 were "in good or excellent health" (presumably, judging by the definitions of the previous three categories, this number included all Wikipedias that had 5 or more editors).

The implications for quality are obvious.

Deploring Wikipedia's "cumbersome self-created bureaucracy and inter-editor sniping", Hay suggests that these global imbalances are unlikely to right themselves: while it may be tempting to think that the more established Wikipedias are bigger and more developed merely because they had several years' head start on smaller language versions, the smaller language versions show no sign of replicating the extraordinary boom the English Wikipedia underwent in its early years. In fact, Hay argues, the global volunteer base shrank by a third between 2007 and 2013.

Hay then proceeds to place his hopes in auto-translation apps, and reviews two multilingual projects:

  1. Omnipedia, a project being developed by researchers at Northwestern University, "capable of culling, comparing, and automatically translating data from 25 different Wikipedia language editions simultaneously, presenting them in simplified form", and
  2. Manypedia, an Italian project, online today, that "can automatically translate two Wikipedia articles side by side and point out incongruous information between them – or just translate an existing article into a different language".

Hay suggests that "complementary data from across all the world's Wikipedias" could be mined and translated "back to your native language site, thus attaining the online encyclopedia's egalitarian ideal". This is an overly optimistic view, given the present day's appalling, practically unreadable quality of many machine translations, which would leave prospective readers of Wikipedias stocked with machine translations profoundly frustrated – a point that can be verified by looking at some of Manypedia's article translations.

The English translation of the Persian article on "Third World" for example (enter http://www.manypedia.com/#!|en|Third_World|fa as the URL and click "Translate" in the right-hand panel) includes gems like

Imagine a Zulu reader trying to learn about physics or chemistry from a text that is as proficiently authored in Zulu as the above passage is clear and concise English.

There is little reason to argue with Hay's conclusion, however:

AK

Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA

United States presidential candidate Ben Carson

Breitbart accuses (Oct. 27) Wikipedia and Google of having prominently linked the name of Ben Carson, an acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon and a Republican candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 presidential election, to a pedophile advocacy group, the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

As evidence Breitbart shows a screenshot of a Google search results page, which lists Carson's Wikipedia biography as the top result (below the sponsored link and the "In the news" section), with "North American Man-Boy Love", "Seventh-day Adventist Church" and "Craniopagus twins" highlighted as hyperlinked key points in blue.

A Carson campaign spokesperson told Breitbart,

The spokesman blamed "pranksters" for the inappropriate highlight.

NAMBLA is mentioned in Wikipedia's biography of Carson because the term occurs in a 2013 comment of Carson's that is quoted verbatim in the article, and in which Carson said, "Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition." (Carson subsequently apologized for the remark.) The acronym NAMBLA in the quotation has from time to time been hyperlinked in the Wikipedia article.

While the Carson team's frustration with the Google entry is understandable, it seems speculative to suggest that the hyperlink must have been placed so as to increase the term's chances of appearing in the Google snippet, or that Google staff specifically selected the term to appear in its snippet from the many available.

It bears mention though that according to Wikipedia's manual of style, quotations should generally remain free of hyperlinks. At the time of writing, the Google snippet no longer references NAMBLA. AK

In brief

  • EFF comments on NSA lawsuit: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a critical comment (Oct. 29) on the recent dismissal of the Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA lawsuit (see previous Signpost coverage). AK
  • Follow-up to the Atlantic story: Women’s fashion and lifestyle website Verily covers (Oct. 28) last week's story in The Atlantic on "Wikipedia's hostility to women" (see coverage in the previous Signpost issue and the related, much-discussed Signpost editorial). Going beyond a mere summary of the Atlantic article, the piece argues that "Not only does anonymity give some Internet users the evil courage to spew vitriol, but it can sometimes lead to victim blaming as well." A Korean site also picked up the story. AK
  • Why the arts need to fix Wikipedia: ArtsHub discusses (Oct. 28) Wikipedia's Art+Feminism initiative along with the work museums are doing to fill content gaps in Wikipedia. AK
  • Debunking Wikipedia conspiracy theories: In the September/October issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Susan Gerbic, co-founder of Guerrilla Skep​ticism on Wikipedia, writes (Oct. 28) "Is Wikipedia a Conspiracy? Common Myths Explained", where she discusses common misconceptions in the skeptical community about Wikipedia. G
  • Lack of media attention to Wikipedia: VentureBeat (Oct. 26) and The Next Web (Oct. 27) pick up on a recent Signpost editorial by Signpost editor-in-chief Gamaliel that was republished in a slightly edited version on the Wikimedia blog, arguing that Wikipedia receives remarkably little press attention compared to other top-ten sites. Both The Next Web and VentureBeat agree that the post raised a valid point; The Next Web suggests that the "all-too-silent Wikimedia Foundation is partly to blame". Gamaliel clarified in a reader comment at The Next Web that he would like to see more investigative journalism in the media's Wikipedia coverage, as opposed to a reliance on Wikimedia press releases. AK
  • Wikipedia Monument celebrates first anniversary: Inverse.com marks (Oct. 22) the first anniversary of the world’s first and only monument in tribute to Wikipedia in Słubice, Poland. The bronze sculpture cost $14,000. Krzysztof Wojciechowski, a Polish professor, felt deep gratitude for the contributions of Wikipedia and its editors to shared knowledge, leading him to suggest the monument to the town's administration. L



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.


2015-10-28

Tech news in brief

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By Wikimedia tech ambassadors
The following content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week

  • Recurrent item  The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
  • The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [1]
  • You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [2][3]
  • When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [4][5]
  • Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [6]


Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/Opinion


2015-10-28

English Wikipedia reaches five million articles

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By Gamaliel

The English Wikipedia reached five million articles on November 1 with the article Persoonia terminalis, a shrub native to eastern Australia. The article was created by Cas Liber, an Australian Wikipedian who has been editing since 2006. He has created and edited a number of Featured Articles on similar topics and is active in projects like WikiProject Fungi and WikiProject Plants. Liber was one of a number of editors submitting articles around the same time to try to hit the milestone. He wrote "I tried to pick articles I could get to FA status at some point...to show the world that we could FAC the 5000000th." No free image of Persoonia terminalis is currently available, but a number of Wikipedians have independently contacted an Australian photographer who posted copyrighted images of the shrub's two subspecies to Flickr.

The event has been marked by a Wikimedia blog post and a letter from the community, which is reproduced here.

Previous milestones Date Article
1 million 1 March 2006 Jordanhill railway station
2 million 9 September 2007 El Hormiguero
3 million 17 August 2009 Beate Eriksen
4 million 13 July 2012 Ezbet el-Borg


Brief notes

Wikidata is three years old.


Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/Serendipity


2015-10-28

It’s time to stop the bullying

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By Smallbones

Gangs of bullies and trolls rove the internet and make life difficult for the rest of us. We get our share of them on Wikipedia. As a website that invites everybody to edit as long as they follow our rules, there’s little we can do to prevent them from coming here. Last week’s article in The Atlantic by Emma Paling, "Wikipedia's Hostility to Women”, shows that incivility and harassment of women has become common here. But we don’t have to accept that state of affairs.

How can we stop this incivility and harassment? A key role has to be played by the Arbitration Committee, who can ban or otherwise sanction the harassers. Unfortunately they have not done so. The three arbitration cases on the Gender Gap Task Force (GGTF), Gamergate, and Lightbreather show that heavier sanctions are given to women and men who stand up to the harasser than to the actual harasser. The problem now is less the fault of the bullies than with ArbCom.

I’ve never really considered myself to be a feminist – it just hasn’t been my personal fight. But I do strongly believe that everybody should be able to contribute to Wikipedia without being harassed, regardless of their nationality, race, religion, or gender. And maybe I’m just a bit old-fashioned. Bandying about the word “cunt” in a mixed conversation, as one well-known editor has done, insults not only the woman targeted, but every woman who sees the discussion. Indeed it insults the entire community. Most importantly, I just hate seeing people being bullied.

Fortunately, there is one direct way that we can change ArbCom and make a change in how we handle the bullying problem. In a few weeks elections for two-year terms will be held for eight out of the fifteen arbitrators.

First there needs to be at least eight candidates standing for election who are solidly committed to stopping the bullying. They don’t need to all be women, although that would send a loud and clear message to all concerned. They don’t need to all be feminists. All they need is to be committed to stopping the bullying.

The formal requirements to be a candidate are few. You need to be at least 18 years old, have registered for a Wikipedia account before November 1 and have at least 500 mainspace edits before then. You’ll need to disclose your identity to the Wikimedia Foundation and sign a confidentiality agreement if you win. You do not need to be an administrator. You can nominate yourself from November 8 to November 17.

Finding good candidates is the most important step. If at least eight candidates don’t nominate themselves, we can’t elect them. Nobody should worry about there being too many good candidates; the election mechanics simply do not disadvantage those viewpoints with “extra candidates”. It’s time for you to step up to the plate.

The formal requirements to vote are also fairly minimal. You need to have an account by October 28 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits by November 1. You cannot be currently blocked. Voting takes place from November 23 to December 6.

How can you tell who to vote for? All candidates are asked questions before the election and they all have editing histories. The first thing you should check is whether they fully commit to stopping the bullying, or just say a few fluffy phrases about it. Otherwise you might have to read and investigate for a long time. There will be voter guides to help you decide, put out by whoever thinks voters will listen to them. There may actually be more voter guides than candidates, so I’ll suggest just finding one guide written by an editor you know and trust, if you can’t sort through all the information on your own.

The mechanics of the election are unusual. You can support as many of the candidates as you like, oppose as many as you like, or vote “neutral.” Please don’t vote neutral, it is just throwing away your vote. But please do support every candidate who meets your standards, and oppose every candidate who does not.

After throwing away the neutral votes, the eight winners are those who have the highest percentage of support votes. Taking last year as a guide, the winners will need about 60% supports. That’s somewhere between 210 and 250 support votes. In short, a couple hundred well placed votes can decide the election. It’s a sure thing that ArbCom’s decisions have offended that many editors. And it is almost as easy to elect 8 arbitrators as it is to elect one.

ArbCom can be changed, Wikipedia can be changed. The bullying can be stopped.


Smallbones has been an editor on the English Wikipedia since 2005. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.



Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/In focus


2015-10-28

A second attempt at Arbitration enforcement

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By GamerPro64

Another week, another case being accepted by the Arbitration Committee. This time we return to a topic that is still relatively new as a second Arbitration enforcement case is now open. And like before this is focused on Eric Corbett and his actions.

Background

Eric Corbett has been a named party in multiple cases in Arbcom, including the first Arbitration enforcement case back in August and the Gender Gap Task Force (GGTF) case from December 2014. The latter case resulted in two remedies implemented on Corbett: the first being topic banned from the Gender Gap topic, and the second having him prohibited from "shouting at, swearing at, insulting and/or belittling other editors."

On The Atlantic

On 21 October, The Atlantic published a piece titled "How Wikipedia is Hostile to Women". The piece referenced the controversial Lightbreather case which saw Lightbreather site-banned indefinitely back in July. The article also mentions Eric Corbett, quoting him saying to Lightbreather, "The easiest way to avoid being called a cunt is not to act like one." This quote was made back in July 2014, before he was prohibited from swearing at other editors. Due to the controversial topic of sexism on Wikipedia (and in general), this article was brought up at Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales' talk page. In the discussion editors talked about the article's inaccuracies, including the article's erroneously calling Corbett an administrator on the site. Corbett went onto the thread to defend himself but was blocked for a month by Kirill Lokshin due to violating his topic ban from the Gender Gap topic after making comments on the gender gap on Wikipedia. (It should be noted that Lightbreather was also a member of GGTF). This block was lifted by Yngvadottir a few days later, resulting in her being Level II desysopped by the Arbitration Committee "For reversing an arbitration enforcement block out of process". Corbett himself stated that he didn't want to be unblocked.

And that brings us to where we are now, with admin Black Kite being the filing party of the case. Black Kite was a named party in the first Arbitration enforcement case. In that case it was found that they found no grounds to block Corbett for a different incident but had the decision overruled by GorillaWarfare, who blocked Corbett for a month without discussion. GorillaWarfare, an Arbitrator, has recused herself from the current case. The remedy to that case was to delegate the drafters of the case to amend and clarify both WP:ACDS and WP:AE. This remedy doesn't seem to have been implemented yet, with the Discretionary sanctions page having little changed. With five open cases currently ongoing we may have to continue waiting for any action on the amendments.

In brief


Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/Humour

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