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20 February 2018

 

2018-02-20

The future is Swedish with a lack of administrators

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By Evad37 and Bri
Lunch at Wikimania 2019?

A Swedish Wikimania

In 2019, Wikimania will be held in Sweden, although the exact location is yet to be determined. Announcing the decision, Ellie Young of the Wikimania Committee said:

The Swedish proposal beat out three other proposals from teams in Armenia, Perth, and Prague. –E

Zeroing out Wikipedia Zero

Wikipedia Zero eighty-sixed

The WMF is ending the Wikipedia Zero program, which has provided more than 800 million people with access to Wikipedia free of mobile data charges. The reasons given by WMF for ending the program were "drop off in adoption and interest... due, in part, to the rapidly shifting mobile industry, as well as changes in mobile data costs". Zero had been critiqued by Vice magazine as embodying "digital colonialism" and for serving free porn and pirated movies. Early comments on the post brought up the issue of net neutrality. –B, E

Shaping the future

The Wikimedia Foundation has released a research report on "Wikimedia's role in shaping the future of the information commons", available as a PDF on Commons or on Medium. The report, based on the Wikimedia 2030 strategy discussions held last year, presents insights, recommendations, and discussion points from the WMF's staff and consultants. –E

Wandering in the RfA desert of 2018

Too late for this one. Maybe there's another RfA about to come forward?

With zero RfAs in January, this year looks more like 2016 than 2017 according to Wikipedia:RFA by month. If we have another year of under 20 successful RfAs, things will not look good. Commentary to June 2017 Signpost's News and notes by Widefox said 50 is a replacement number.

In the great 2011 RfA Reform debate, it was noted by Swarm "August 2011 saw only one promotion, a monthly low that has only been reached one other time in RfA history". So, a phenomenon that was alarming or even worth reconsidering the whole RfA process then, seems to be getting barely any attention at all at this time. Or is it? Your comments are invited below. –B

Brief notes



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2018-02-20

Politically diverse editors write better articles; Reddit and Stack Overflow benefit from Wikipedia but don't give back

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By Barbara Page, FULBERT, Steve Jankowski, and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Politically diverse editors and article quality

Controversy is an organized sport for some editors but may alert readers that there is more than one view on a topic.
"The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds"[1]
Reviewed by FULBERT

While politics in the United States appears to be increasingly polarized around extremes in political discourse, it was unclear how this affected the open, collective production of knowledge that is Wikipedia.

The researchers used a data dump of English Wikipedia from 12/1/16, including all edits made since its start within the domains of politics, social issues, and science. They focused on the "American liberalism" and "American conservatism" categories and sub-categories as delimiters, with breakdowns in social issues and science down four levels from the root. The researchers reached out to the Wikipedia community, Wikimedia staff, and those who directly inquired on the page they created through Meta-Wiki, with 118 responses overall for their survey. The researchers then analyzed user edits to determine political alignment based on contributions to conservative or liberal articles.

The researchers found that "articles attracting more attention tend to have more balanced engagement from editors along the conservative-liberal spectrum" (p. 4). They then measured the quality of articles using a tool developed by Wikimedia research staff (ORES), and determined that higher political polarization was associated with higher article quality. All this fed into their study goals of exploring the relationship between diversity of political alignment and article quality and bias. Through their statistical analysis, they determined that the quality of articles in Wikipedia improves when editors on both sides of politically polarized issues work together to seek collaborative consensus on topics. While this research was directly focused on politically-related topics, it surfaced both a need for political diversity and for motivated contributors.

(Cf. related earlier coverage: "Being Wikipedian is more important than the political affiliation", "Cross-language study of conflict on Wikipedia")

The study of controversy

"Computing controversy: Formal model and algorithms for detecting controversy on Wikipedia and in search queries"[2]
Reviewed by Barbara Page and Tilman Bayer

This paper presents a "method for automatic detection of controversial articles and categories in Wikipedia", based on three data sources:

  • Ratings submitted by readers via the Article Feedback Tool (AFT) in 2011 and 2012
  • The list at Wikipedia:List of controversial issues (manually maintained by Wikipedia editors)
  • A sample of 512 sections drawn randomly from the talk pages of articles on that list ("Surprisingly, only 19.5% of the sections turned out to be controversial").

The researchers argue that applying a mathematical model to Wikipedia talk page controversies has the potential of incorporating a 'controversy' metric in web-searches. This should give those searching for information on a topic a way to quickly assess controversial topics. Wikipedia provides researchers with accessible and historical controversial discussions. The authors further describe their work: "[Assessing] the controversy should offer [readers] a chance to see the 'wider picture' rather than letting [them] obtain one-sided views." The authors' conclusions were: "Our approach can be also applied in Wikipedia or other knowledge bases for supporting the detection of controversy and content maintenance. Finally, we believe that our results could be useful for...understanding the complex nature of controversy..."

Students edit but still doubt the value of Wikipedia

"Wikipedia in higher education: Changes in perceived value through content contribution"[3]
Reviewed by Barbara Page

Students are a convenient group to study, especially if being studied is part of the syllabus. The 240 students in this study readily admitted to using Wikipedia as a resource even though they did not be consider it to be 'reliable and trustworthy'. Using Wikipedia as a resource does not necessarily encourage content contributions by students. In addition, when the students in this study actually added content, their perceptions of the reliability and usefulness of Wikipedia did not change.

(For coverage of various other papers studying the use and perception of Wikipedia by students, see also our 2017 special issue on Wikipedia in Education)

Researching the research using Wikipedia as a corpus

"Excavating the mother lode of human-generated text: A systematic review of research that uses the Wikipedia corpus"[4]
Reviewed by Barbara Page

The amount of research that uses Wikipedia as a source of data continues to grow and enough scholarly content now exists that systematic reviews are available. Computer science has especially been quick to see the potential of this 'mother lode' and how it can be used to study information retrieval, natural language processing, and ontology building. The reference section in this article itself makes interesting reading if only to appreciate the collection of data sets and other research that exists and continues to expand.

(See also our earlier coverage of literature reviews, some involving the same authors: "A systematic review of the Wikipedia literature", "'Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia readers and readership'", "Literature reviews of Wikipedia's inputs, processes, and outputs")

Sneaky editing and masking bias

"Persistent Bias on Wikipedia: Methods and Responses"[5]
Reviewed by Barbara Page

Apparently, Wikipedia editors are not the only ones who have observed biased editing. The author of this research article (already mentioned in a previous issue) used his own article as a case study and example of biased editing. It is no surprise that an editor can 'nominally' follow editing guidelines to maintain their bias. Here is the 'how to' on such behavior:

  • deleting positive material
  • adding negative material
  • using a one-sided selection of sources
  • exaggerating the significance of references and topics

Those who are biased sometimes support their editing even in 'the face of resistance'. This is done by:

  • reverting edits
  • selectively invoking Wikipedia rules
  • overruling (bullying?) resistant editors

When bias is challenged by other editors, the strategies for dealing with it is making complaints, 'mobilizing counterediting', and exposing the bias. The authors' stinging conclusion speaks for itself: "It is worthwhile becoming aware of persistent bias and developing ways to counter it in order for Wikipedia to move closer to its goal of providing accurate and balanced information."

Seeking credibility

"Information Fortification: An Online Citation Behavior"[6]
Reviewed by Barbara Page

This study is a rebuttal to a 2005 position paper by Forte (one of the authors) and Bruckman, which had drawn "on Latour’s sociology of science and citation to explain citation in Wikipedia with a focus on credibility seeking". Citing sources is associated with other issues of bias and identifies the patterns used to in citing sources to encourage and even fabricate controversy. This study was limited to non-scientific topics and used data derived from edit logs, interviews and text analysis. "[I]nformation fortification [is] a concept that explains online citation activity that arises from both naturally occurring and manufactured forms of controversy."

Anti-vandalism on Wikidata

"Overview of the Wikidata Vandalism Detection Task at WSDM Cup 2017"[7]
Reviewed by Barbara Page

Vandalism of Wikidata can have significant disruptions in the use of the data leading to flaws in the analysis of such data. Collaborative efforts continue to address these concerns and included some friendly 'competitions'. Strategies for 'fighting' vandalism at this time include manual review, community feedback, and analyzing reverting patterns. Other 'vandalism' fighting tools are being developed. Interesting is the discussion about the effort to use "psychologically motivated features capturing a user’s personality and state of mind..."

Wikipedia's one-way relationships with Reddit and Stack Overflow

"Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities"[8]
Reviewed by Steve Jankowski

There is a growing body of literature that examines Wikipedia's role in creating value for other websites as part of a media ecosystem. Adding to these studies is the work of Vincent, Johnson & Hecht who examined the bidirectional value created for Reddit and Stack Overflow. Conceptually, the authors distinguished between two sets of metrics to define this value. For Reddit and Stack Overflow, they understood value as being a function of user engagement (score/votes, comments, page views) that is contextualized by potential revenue. For Wikipedia, value is likewise seen as user engagement, characterized by edit count, editors gained, editors retained, and article page views, but is not contextualized by revenue (p.4).

Based on this operationalization of value, the authors assessed the amount of content and links created through associative and causal analyses. They found that Wikipedia provided substantial value to Stack Overflow and Reddit. Most clearly, they illustrated this by explaining how posts containing Wikipedia links gained engagement levels that were estimated to be worth $100K per year (p.2). However, this level of engagement did not operate in the reverse. The authors found "negligible increases" (p.2) to the number of edits and editor signups. Based on these results, the authors observed that the relationship between Wikipedia and the two communities was "one-way", with Wikipedia providing more value than it received in return.

Considering this new direction in studying Wikipedia, there are a number of elements that require commentary. The first is the obvious care the authors displayed in their methods. For example, they were conscious of the need to adjust their analyses to consider the skew of current events by providing inter-rater agreement on the required qualitative analysis that this required. The second comment is that there is a conceptual mismatch of using revenue as an appropriate metric for analyzing value created "between communities", considering that the communities themselves do not receive any profit. Perhaps future research in this area might need greater granularity in the type of relationships that reflect differences between community-to-community, owner-to-owner, and community-to-owner.

Despite this terminological slippage, this research adds specific details to Van Djick's analysis of the social media ecosystem[9] where she described the character of the relationship between Google and Wikipedia within a for-profit context. Likewise, the article provides greater support to conclusions presented in an earlier study conducted by McMahon, Johnson & Hecht.[10] In that paper, Google's usage of Wikipedia content in its Knowledge Graph results was shown to reduce the amount of through traffic when a link to Wikipedia was removed. As the authors of both papers agree, contextualizing Wikipedia as part of an ecosystem is significant for understanding and assessing how external relationships can be adapted to the sustainability of Wikipedia.

A 2015 study confined to the subreddit /r/todayilearned (TIL) found "strong statistical evidence suggesting Reddit threads affect Wikipedia viewership levels in a non-trivial manner", but did not examine effects on editor activity.[11]

"Knowledge categorization affects popularity and quality of Wikipedia articles"[12]
Reviewed by FULBERT

This empirical research paper explored how knowledge categorization – common in classification systems within the information sciences – works as a scientific and social process when Wikipedia articles are attended to by editors. Categorization leads to nesting of information under major topics, and the further down a hierarchy, the less editing attention articles appear to garner. Articles higher in the hierarchy are referred to as coarse-grained, and while these receive the most attention, their levels of quality have not been the focus of previous studies.

The researchers analyzed a database dump of the English-language Wikipedia from October 20, 2016, considering all articles that were members of at least one category (n=5,006,601). They defined granularity as the length of the shortest path from the root (main category), which averaged 7.59 across all articles, which they then compared to the number of article edits (which related to preception of higher quality articles), the number of articles as rated by importance (done individually by WikiProjects), perceptions of quality (based on being classified as a featured article), and the notion of return on effort (quality of an article relative to the amount of work done on it by editors). They conducted non-parametric and parametric statistical analyses using numerous variables based on the many article records through their data dump.

There were many levels of findings, with the main one being that articles in coarse-grained categories (those nearest the top of the hierarchies) received the most number of edits and attention from editors, though they were least likely to be featured (highest quality) articles. This seemed to surprise the authors, as it means that those articles that receive the most attention (by editors) overall lack the depth of quality found in featured articles, most of which are further down the hierarchy.


"Mean number of edits is displayed in the x-axis. The linear regression coefficient α1 of the granularity variable explaining the number of edits [...] is displayed in the y-axis. Area of points is proportional to the number of articles in the respective top-level category. (Figure 6 from the paper)


"The baseline probability of featured articles in the respective TLC [top-level category] is displayed in the x-axis. The logistic regression coefficient of the granularity variable, when controlling for the number of edits [...], is displayed in the y-axis." (Figure 7 from the paper)

Conferences and events

See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

Compiled by Barbara Page and Tilman Bayer
  • "Time-focused analysis of connectivity and popularity of historical persons in Wikipedia"[13] From the abstract: "Our study sheds new light on the characteristics of information about historical people recorded in the English Wikipedia and quantifies user interest in such data. We propose a novel style of analysis in which we use signals derived from the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia as well as from article view logs, and we overlay them over temporal dimension to understand relations between time periods, link structure and article popularity."
  • "Patients are content with Dr. Google"[14] (Article in German, translated title: "Health information: He who searches, will find – Patients are content with Dr. Google") 72% of patients in Germany consult "Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias" for health information. 54% find Wikipedia "trustworthy".
  • "WikiLyzer: Interactive Information Quality Assessment in Wikipedia"[15] From the abstract: "We developed WikiLyzer, a toolkit comprising three Web-based interactive graphic tools designed to assist (i) knowledge discovery experts in creating and testing metrics for quality measurement , (ii) users searching for good articles, and (iii) users that need to identify weaknesses to improve a particular article. A case study suggests that experts are able to create complex quality metrics with our tool and a report in a user study on its usefulness to identify high-quality content."
  • "To link or not to link: Ranking hyperlinks in Wikipedia using collective attention"[16] From the abstract: "... we tackle overlinking in Wikipedia as a ranking problem. We apply Learning to Rank algorithms to evaluate the click frequency of links in an effort to distinguish the most useful links for users. To accomplish this, we develop a ground truth, which serves as baseline for our algorithm and compare hyperlink features to implement the most advantageous ones. The results show 86.2% accuracy with the top-6 most useful features and 87.7% accuracy with the complete feature set. Considering these results, we outline a solution to the overlinking problem. By removing the most inadequate links, we suggest that readability of Wikipedia articles could be improved while preserving most of its useful links."
  • "Usage of Wikipedia by health science and social sciences & humanities undergraduates of University of Peradeniya and SouthEastern University of Sri Lanka"[17] From the paper: "[Survey] participants were given five options to indicate how they use information services and technologies in searching for their study requirements. The study show that 79% of total students access Wikipedia and 78% use Google to find their information followed by Google scholar (60%), library (57%), and other databases 43% . 69% of FAC and 67% of FAHS students mentioned Wikipedia as their first source of information while embarking into searching for information. 79% students of both faculties use Wikipedia as the first source, while 69% use it as the only source. [...] According to the outcome of the study, Wikipedia was crowned as the first source and most common source when undergraduates seek for information."
  • "Emo, Love, and God: Making Sense of Urban Dictionary, a Crowd-Sourced Online Dictionary [Wiktionary]"[18] Conclusions: "The lexical content of UD [Urban Dictionary] is radically different from that of Wiktionary, another crowd-sourced, but more highly moderated dictionary. In general, we can say that the overlap between the two dictionaries is small. Considering all unique UD headwords that are not found in Wiktionary, we found that this number is almost three times the number of headwords that uniquely occur in Wiktionary. However, if we exclude words with only one definition in UD (which tend to be infrequent or idiosyncratic words), we found the opposite pattern, with Wiktionary-only headwords amounting to almost three times the UD-only headwords."

References

  1. ^ Shi, Feng; Teplitskiy, Misha; Duede, Eamon; Evans, James (2017-11-29). "The wisdom of polarized crowds". Nature Human Behaviour. 3 (4): 329–336. arXiv:1712.06414. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0541-6. PMID 30971793. S2CID 8947252.
  2. ^ Zielinski, Kazimierz; Nielek, Radoslaw; Wierzbicki, Adam; Jatowt, Adam (2018). "Computing controversy: Formal model and algorithms for detecting controversy on Wikipedia and in search queries". Information Processing & Management. 54 (1): 14–36. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2017.08.005.
  3. ^ Soler-Adillon, Joan; Pavlovic, Dragana; Freixa, Pere (2018). "Wikipedia in higher education: Changes in perceived value through content contribution". Comunicar (in Spanish). 26 (54): 39–48. doi:10.3916/c54-2018-04. ISSN 1134-3478. English version here
  4. ^ Mehdi, Mohamad; Okoli, Chitu; Mesgari, Mostafa; Nielsen, Finn Årup; Lanamäki, Arto (2017). "Excavating the mother lode of human-generated text: A systematic review of research that uses the wikipedia corpus" (PDF). Information Processing & Management. 53 (2): 505–529. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2016.07.003. S2CID 217265814.
  5. ^ Martin, Brian (2017). "Persistent Bias on Wikipedia: Methods and Responses". Social Science Computer Review: 089443931771543. doi:10.1177/0894439317715434. S2CID 65125326. Closed access icon Author's copy
  6. ^ Forte, Andrea; Andalibi, Nazanin; Gorichanaz, Tim; Kim, Meen Chul; Park, Thomas; Halfaker, Aaron (2018-01-07). "Information Fortification: An Online Citation Behavior" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork, GROUP 2018, Sanibel Island, FL, USA, January 07-10, 2018. ACM. pp. 83–92. doi:10.1145/3148330.3148347. ISBN 9781450355629. S2CID 20820320.
  7. ^ Heindorf, Stefan; Potthast, Martin; Engels, Gregor; Stein, Benno (2017). "Overview of the Wikidata Vandalism Detection Task at WSDM Cup 2017". arXiv:1712.05956 [cs.IR].
  8. ^ Vincent, Nicholas; Johnson, Isaac; Hecht, Brent (2018-04-21). "Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities" (PDF). CHI 2018. Montréal, QC, Canada: Association of Computing Machinery.
  9. ^ Dijck, José (2013). The culture of connectivity : a critical history of social media. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 7.4. ISBN 9780199970780.
  10. ^ McMahon, Connor; Johnson, Issac; Hecht, Brent (2017). "The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies". Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. AAAI. pp. 142–151.
  11. ^ Carson, S. L.; Dye, T. K.; Goldbaum, D.; Moyer, D.; Carson, R. T. (2015). "Determining the influence of Reddit posts on Wikipedia pageviews". Wikipedia, a Social Pedia: Research Challenges and Opportunities: Papers from the 2015 ICWSM Workshop. ICWSM 2015. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. pp. 75–82. ISBN 9781577357377.
  12. ^ Lerner, Jürgen; Lomi, Alessandro (2018-01-02). "Knowledge categorization affects popularity and quality of Wikipedia articles". PLOS ONE. 13 (1): e0190674. Bibcode:2018PLoSO..1390674L. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0190674. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 5749832. PMID 29293627.
  13. ^ Jatowt, Adam; Kawai, Daisuke; Tanaka, Katsumi (2018-02-08). "Time-focused analysis of connectivity and popularity of historical persons in Wikipedia". International Journal on Digital Libraries. 20 (4): 287–305. doi:10.1007/s00799-018-0231-4. ISSN 1432-5012. S2CID 254084505.Closed access icon
  14. ^ "Gesundheitsinfos: Wer suchet, der findet – Patienten mit Dr. Google zufrieden". Spotlight Gesundheit, Bertelsmann Stiftung. 2018.
  15. ^ di Sciascio, Cecilia; Strohmaier, David; Errecalde, Marcelo; Veas, Eduardo (2017). WikiLyzer: Interactive Information Quality Assessment in Wikipedia. IUI '17. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 377–388. doi:10.1145/3025171.3025201. ISBN 9781450343480.
  16. ^ Thruesen, P.; Čechák, J.; Sezñec, B.; Castalio, R.; Kanhabua, N. (December 2016). To link or not to link: Ranking hyperlinks in Wikipedia using collective attention. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data). pp. 1709–1718. doi:10.1109/BigData.2016.7840785. Closed access icon
  17. ^ Dehigama, Kanchana; Jazeel, M. I. M. (2017-12-07). "Usage of Wikipedia by health science and social sciences & humanities undergraduates of University of Peradeniya and SouthEastern University of Sri Lanka". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  18. ^ Nguyen, Dong; McGillivray, Barbara; Yasseri, Taha (2017-12-22). "Emo, love and god: Making sense of Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary". Royal Society Open Science. 5 (5). arXiv:1712.08647. doi:10.1098/rsos.172320. PMC 5990761. PMID 29892417.



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2018-02-20

Arbitration committee prepares to examine two new cases

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By Bri

Ongoing cases

Great cases are bad cases according to one well known judge

Joefromrandb and others – recapping from the previous issue of The Signpost: a number of behaviors were cited including hostile editing in the form of personal attacks, assumptions of bad faith, inflammatory edit summaries, and edit warring. The evidence phase closed 11 February and arbs moved to accept (14/0/1). No evidence was provided by non-parties nor from Joefromrandb himself. Does this mean the charges of incivility will be taken on face value? Arb Newyorkbrad said "it's difficult to address things ... without a response from him, which I still hope he will provide".

Civility in infobox discussions, formerly titled "Civility issues", concerns incivility surrounding discussions of infoboxes for artists. The evidence phase closed 19 February with no evidence provided by non-parties. The respondent Cassianto is still on a self-imposed block set to expire in about 60 days. Will Arbcom create new policy for this apparently volatile area? Probably not if Opabinia regalis's comment is any guide: "This seems like a poor foundation on which to build the widely perceived as inevitable Infoboxes 2 case", echoed by Newyorkbrad: "historically this [unresolved policy question] is not the type of problem that this Committee's decisions have been best suited to solve". Does it sound like hard cases make bad law to anyone else?

Declined requests

A case initiated by Gatoclass against Fram on 5 February was declined. Both users are administrators. The case involved behavior around Did you know nominations, and other editors requested that it be handled locally; one commenter stated that the "dispute, which is storm/teacuppy, seems to have come to arbitration unnecessarily".



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2018-02-20

Addicted to sports and pain

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By Serendipodous, Soulbust and Stormy clouds
This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report.

I like pleasure spiked with pain, and music is my aeroplane (January 28 to February 3)

Addicted to pain?

Human beings are odd creatures. We are currently living through the safest and most secure era our species has ever experienced, and yet we seem addicted to pain. If we cannot have it ourselves, we seek to feel it vicariously. It's the only explanation I can conceive for this week's list, which is topped by a fake blood sport and riddled with death, depredation, and allegations. Multiple people on this list either died horribly and unexpectedly, were accused or accused others of having done unspeakable things, or some combination of the above. Even the Bollywood movie this week sparked riots and death threats. This is particularly striking when you consider that this was also the week of the Grammys, and yet, as per usual on Wikipedia, that show has left a small footprint.

For the week of January 28 to February 3, 2018, the most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Royal Rumble (2018) C class 2,135,143
A 50% jump in numbers from last week's no 1, Virginia Woolf. I suppose you could call this a victory for women's progress, since this was the first ever Royal Rumble to feature women on the bill (including winner Asuka (pictured)). Cool. Now all we need to tackle is that 7% representation on US corporate boards. And the 19% representation in the US Congress. And the 31% among college professors, despite earning 60% of all master's degrees. But you know, baby stomps.
2 Joe Kennedy III 1,286,359
In a politics in which style and name recognition, well, trump actual experience, it seems only fitting that the Democrats would drag out the latest member of their razzle dazzle dynasty to counter the President's State of the Union. Who cares if he's only been in politics since 2012, and only out of school since 2010? He just has to flash those Jack pearlies and all's right with the world. Maybe.
3 Padmaavat 1,119,564
India, ya know I love ya but baby you crazy. This historic epic based on the poem Padmavat and starring Deepika Padukone (pictured) was released last week and is already making some big crore in spite of controversy – Padmaavat has been accused of being right wing, anti Muslim, even of endorsing mass immolation – that led to the movie being banned from a few Indian states, riots, firebombing, death threats to the director and cast, and even threats of mass suicide. Despite these handicaps it has managed to earn over ₹2 billion ($31.2 million) in 11 days.
4 Roger Federer 1,111,867
Spillover from last week's win at the Australian Open.
5 Alauddin Khalji 1,071,016
The male focus of the love story behind the film Padmaavat (#3). Betcha didn't know that Aladdin was an actual name.
6 Mark Salling 1,052,219
The actor best known for playing Puck on Glee committed suicide this week awaiting sentencing for possession of child pornography.
7 Bruno Mars 1,052,219
The funkster won six Grammys from six nominations at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards this week, on top of the four he won two years ago. Maybe time to spread the love around?
8 Deaths in 2018 List 756,173
Numbers remain stable for the lodestone of this list.
9 Rani Padmini 755,032
The legendary 13th– and 14th-century Indian queen (Rani) who is the main character of Padmaavat (#3).
10 Larry Nassar 732,847
Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years before we caught this physician who molested gymnasts in the guise of medical treatment. Twenty-five years. And remember that we're talking about a sport usually contested by teenagers! No wonder the thing that actually led Nassar to be arrested was the FBI discovering he had an extensive child pornography collection and a video of him molesting underage girls. The sentence of 60 years in prison seems too light in retrospect.

Birds of play (February 4 to 10)

Inside the stadium on Super Bowl LII game day.

Unlike last year, a Falcon won during Super Bowl week. Of course, I'm talking about Falcon Heavy (#14), which had its maiden flight conducted by SpaceX on February 6. Elon Musk (#1) is of course the founder and CEO of SpaceX.

Now, let's address the obvious theme one will find throughout this list: Super Bowl LII (#10), the 52nd edition of the Super Bowl. Quarterback and Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles (#2) and head coach Doug Pederson led the Philadelphia Eagles (#10) to victory over Tom Brady's (#5) New England Patriots. The Super Bowl for the Eagles was the franchise's first, meaning they're now on the List of Super Bowl champions (#9). Also Super Bowl-related: the game's half time performer Justin Timberlake, and The Cloverfield Paradox (#4), a Netflix film which received praise for its Super Bowl commercial marketing.

Oh... hey, there's even more sports with the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics (#8) happening this week. This rendition notched 1.23 million page views, an increase from the 2014 event's 1.06 million page views during its opening ceremony week.

And then there was Travis Scott (#3) and Kylie Jenner (#7), who both found their way into the top 10 after announcing the birth of their child.

For the week of February 4 to February 10, 2018, the most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Elon Musk 1,986,094
The best type of billionaire. Sure, he wasn't the Super Bowl MVP, but he was the MVP of the Top 25 Report, and isn't that what really matters? Elon was of interest this week because of that SpaceX company of his conducting its Falcon Heavy (#14) launch.
2 Nick Foles 1,977,688
Named Super Bowl MVP as he led the underdog Philadelphia Eagles to their first Super Bowl championship over the reigning New England Patriots (#20) dynasty.
3 Travis Scott 1,718,006
La Flame and Kylie Jenner (#7) announced the birth of their baby on February 6.
4 The Cloverfield Paradox 1,632,812
Although director Julius Onah's (pictured) film was applauded for its clever (err clover?) marketing via dropping the film on Netflix mere hours after it was teased in a Super Bowl commercial, it received generally negative reception for the film's actual content.
5 Tom Brady 1,601,211
As a fan of the Miami Dolphins, parity in the NFL, and breaths of fresh air, nothing is sweeter than seeing Tom Brady lose. Although, I guess he already has 5 reasons to not be too upset. 6 if you add Gisele.
Green up arrow Up 14 spots from last week.
6 Justin Timberlake 1,563,698
JT performed at the Super Bowl's half time show. His dancing was phenomenal, but his overall performance did seem to attract a mixed reception, especially when compared to other recent Super Bowl half time performers.
7 Kylie Jenner 1,327,038
Kylie announced the birth of her child this past week, which had many on social media buzzing about and visiting her article.
8 2018 Winter Olympics 1,234,016
The Super Bowl wasn't the only major sports event to occur this week. The 2018 Winter Olympics held its opening ceremony in Pyeongchang County on February 9, so definitely expect this article to maintain high traffic through its closing ceremony on February 25.
9 List of Super Bowl champions 1,163,663 You can add the Eagles to this list now.
10 Super Bowl LII 1,114,569
A rematch of Super Bowl XXXIX: New England Patriots vs. Philadelphia Eagles. The almost Galactic Empire-like New England Patriots vs. the underdog Philadelphia Eagles. One of the most exciting and competitive Super Bowls from start to finish in a while... and for those in Philly, LII is the Rocky II to XXXIX's Rocky.

Snow Leopards (February 11 to 17)

This week's report can be summarily reduced to three events – the cinematic behemoth that is Black Panther, the ongoing Winter Olympics in South Korea, and the horrific school shooting in Florida. The report is dominated by articles related to these topics, diverse as they may be. Media may captivate, between incessant sports coverage and Hollywood productions, but the sad tragedy of pointless bloodshed casts a dark shadow over the report as a whole. Though less diverse than usual, there is stark contrast and interesting content in this week's iteration of the Report, between the weather-plagued Olympics and the searing and scorching heat of Wakanda. Ergo, I found the report riveting to compile, and hope that it is as engaging to peruse as it was to produce.

Without further ado, for the week of February 11 to February 17, 2018, the most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Black Panther (film) 2,341,749
Black Panther (director Ryan Coogler pictured) may not be the first film adaptation of a black superhero, but it is arguably the first good one. The masses, this Wikipedian included, journeyed to the fictional utopia of Wakanda to follow the adventures of the fabled King T'Challa, and it has captured the cultural zeitgeist in doing so. I think that the willingness of the Big Six to buck their shared history and make stories about minorities is a massive positive for the industry, and like their last such effort, Black Panther's cultural relevance is being leveraged into a box office behemoth.
2 Shaun White 2,253,849
The greatest snowboarder of all time consolidated this lofty title in Pyeongchang this week, as he claimed his third gold medal in the sport. His display was utterly dominant, as he performed tricks with immense prowess and poise. If his famous amigo is anything to go by, we can anticipate White to diversify into games of swiftly declining quality.
3 2018 Winter Olympics 1,816,173
The Winter Olympics have never interested me in the slightest. Perhaps this is a result of my homeland's abysmal track record, but it has always struck me as the lesser Olympic games, reducing in scale and importance. Yet, even for me as a snow grinch, this year's ceremony is piquing my interest: between phenomenal performances by American snowboarders (#1 and #12), and the political significance of the host's ice hockey team, this is a highly intriguing event.
4 Priya Prakash Varrier 1,177,538
A very curious entry here, as the Indian sub-internet was set alight by a mere wink this week. The model, who will star in the upcoming film Oru Adaar Love, set the information superhighway abuzz this week following the release of a trailer for the movie. So far, so routine, even if the film's premise is toned down compared to some of its cinematic compatriots. Yet, the intriguing part of this story arises from the fact that the fourth most popular article of this week does not even exist now. It was a fleeting stub... just like a wink.
5 Valentine's Day 1,125,181
The annual ceremony of consumerism love rolled around again this year, bringing with it a cornucopia of chocolate, flowers, and interred hearts. I do not subscribe to the Hallmark holiday, yet I did enjoy myself this year as my little Liver birds shredded their Portuguese opponents in the Champions League. So, footie fans, even if they were not on a date, it was ensured that no Liverpudlian would walk alone.
6 Johnny Weir 1,007,840
Weir, a former figure skater, is part of a duo with Tara Lipinski on NBC, covering the Winter Olympics. The LGBTQ activist engages audiences daily by commenting on events over in Pyeongchang, and this is drawing many internet users to his article. I can't say that I find the sport too intriguing, but their shared commentary is riveting and humorous, perhaps accounting for their popularity.
7 Curling 843,968
Hands down the greatest part of the Winter Olympics, ice pétanques is riveting. This sport lies squarely at the intersection of skill, mental computation, teamwork, and precision, and I adore it. I could watch it indefinitely, which is convenient, as NBC need to air something to maintain their wall of coverage.
8 Tara Lipinski 840,046
The former figure skater and Olympic champion is part of NBC's analysis panel for the Winter Olympics (#3) alongside her co-anchor, Johnny Weir (#6). Perhaps her ubiquity on the Peacock network has propelled her figures on Wikipedia upwards, as has her sharp critiques of the skaters. Living outside of the US, I cannot say that I am too familiar with Lipinski and her credentials to analyse the Winter Olympics, but the last syllable of her surname is irrefutably apt.
9 Elon Musk 810,064
For many wealthy celebrities, one has to discuss the negative attributes of the person alongside the positives. There is a reason why the biographies of so many Forbes favorites are so long. Yet for Musk, it could be summarised thusly – ameliorated online finance, revolutionised vehicular transport, enhanced space transport, and may be our Martian colonist. Now that he slotted a car in orbit, he is multiple steps closer, and also produced an amazing video in the process.
10 Deaths in 2018 741,231
People have a horrible tendency to die. It is inescapable and inevitable, and there is nothing that we can do to alter this fundamental truth. No amount of wealth, no accumulated notability, no masterful magnum opus, nothing will prevent this. Notable individuals die too, and this week, as with any other, hundreds of thousands of people journeyed to a list of their names, to ruminate and reminisce on love and legacy.

Exclusions

  • These lists excludes the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.



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2018-02-20

Entertainment, sports and history

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By Eddie891
The K-25 building of the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant aerial view, looking southeast. The mile-long building, in the shape of a "U" was the world's largest building when completed in 1944.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers recently promoted articles and lists. Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Three featured articles were promoted.

Anne Hathaway has received multiple awards, including an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and a Primetime Emmy

11 featured lists were promoted.

Denis Compton was one of England's top batsmen in 1946–1959 Test cricket
Australian Meg Lanning has scored the most centuries in women's One Day International cricket.
Tom Mix in an ad for his 1919 feature Rough Riding Romance.

Four featured pictures were promoted.



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2018-02-20

Paragraph-based edit conflict screen; broken thanks

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By Evad37
The new edit conflict prototype resolves conflicts at the paragraph level.

Paragraph-based edit conflict screen

Goat-cat or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Edit Conflict

WMDE Technical Wishes, the team behind the current two-column edit conflict beta feature, has developed a new prototype for resolving edit conflicts. It works by letting you create a merged version by resolving conflicts at the paragraph level – where for each conflicting paragraph, you choose either your edit or the conflicting edit as a basis for the merged version, and edit it as needed. Further information is available on Meta.

No thanks

[Update: This is now fixed.] As of 20 February, the "thanks" system has been malfunctioning on English Wikipedia. According to a Village pump discussion, clicking the link appeared to have no effect for one user, while the main, reproducible problem is "the thanks function is thanking the last unthanked edit in the page, regardless of which edit is chosen, so in many cases it is thanking the wrong edit/user". The links have been hidden from view, and a bug report filed on Phabricator with the highest "Unbreak now!" priority.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #6, #7, & #8. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

  • Problems
    • Special:Export has a higher error rate right now. This means that the export does not always work. You should check to make sure your page exports worked. The developers are working on fixing this. [1]
    • Linter is reporting estimated counts instead of actual counts for some wikis. This is because of performance problems. You might notice a false higher number in linter counts for some categories. This will be fixed as soon as the performance problem has been fixed. [2]
    • Last week the way that Visual Editor displays references lists was changed. As a result, the references generated by specific templates like {{sfn}} are not visible in the references list whilst editing. [3][4]
  • Recent changes
    • Bureaucrats can now add and remove the accountcreator permission by default. This means the user can help create a large number of accounts, for example for an editathon. Wikis can change this if they want to. [5]
    • The Wikidata vandalism dashboard is a new tool to monitor vandalism on Wikidata labels and descriptions. It is filtered by language. [6]
    • Info pages for file pages now show the file's SHA1 hash value in the table of basic information. This is so users can see that the file is the same as the one they uploaded. [7]
    • When you review an edit made with the visual editor you can check a visual diff of your changes besides the wikitext diff. If you pick one diff type it will remember and show you that in future. The visual diff will now be the type first shown to new users. [8]
    • When you use a gallery to show images you can define the size, like gallery widths="150px". You could use em or % instead of px but it would make no difference. You can now only use 150px or nothing (150). If you write something else, instead of treating it like px, it will not work. [9]
    • The wording when you send a thanks message will change. Instead of Yes or No it will say Thank and Cancel. It will also be easier to understand that all thanks are public. [10]
    • Redirects connected to Wikidata can create double Wikidata items. There will now be a tracking category for this. Wikis that don't want it can disable it. [11]
    • TemplateStyles has been deployed to the Swedish Wikipedia. TemplateStyles is a feature to make it easy to add CSS to templates without administrator privileges. This allows for better adaptability to screen sizes, especially on mobile where are half our total page views. If your community would like to be the next to have the feature, please submit a task on Phabricator. [12][13][14]
    • Registration pages now collect keyboard/mouse usage information for research on identifying spambots.
    • You can opt in to a new beta feature that lets you use visual diffs on history pages. [15]
    • The visual editor shows and lets you edit templates in one way, and reference lists in another. This meant that templates that only contain a fake reference list, like {{reflist}}, would not get updated as you edited. Now they will update as you edit, but you will no longer be able to visually edit them as templates. [16]
    • The abuse filter extension has a new feature contains_all that you may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string. [17]
    • The explanation of the abbreviations on the recent changes page could overlap with the list of changes. This has been fixed. [18][19]
    • You can now see statistics for pageviews per wiki per country. You can see this on maps or in a table. [20]
  • Future changes

Installation code

Further information: Wikipedia:User scripts § How to install user scripts
  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:TheJJJunk/ARA.js' ); // Backlink: User:TheJJJunk/ARA.js
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:SoledadKabocha/copySectionLink.js' ); // Backlink: User:SoledadKabocha/copySectionLink.js
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Ale_jrb/Scripts/statusCheck.js' ); // Backlink: User:Ale_jrb/Scripts/statusCheck.js
  4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Anomie/nosubmitsummary.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anomie/nosubmitsummary.js
  5. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:SoledadKabocha/enterInSummaryPreviews.js' ); // Backlink: User:SoledadKabocha/enterInSummaryPreviews.js
  6. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:MusikAnimal/previewUserboxes.js' ); // Backlink: User:MusikAnimal/previewUserboxes.js
  7. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Splarka/oldafd.js' ); // Backlink: User:Splarka/oldafd.js
  8. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew/WatchingIndicator.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anne drew Andrew and Drew/WatchingIndicator.js
  9. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Anchorvale/scripts/RecentChanges.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anchorvale/scripts/RecentChanges.js
  10. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Anchorvale/scripts/RandomRootpage.js' ); // Backlink: User:Anchorvale/scripts/RandomRootpage.js



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2018-02-20

Traffic report of weirdness

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By Barbara Page

Lowest quality high-popularity articles – Who is reading this stuff?

Writing humourous articles about Wikipedia is easy because a lot of things are pretty ridiculous. We're thinking of inane talk pages that contain 247 archived discussions of exactly what size an image should be or the message that appears right above the editing window when we try to add a picture of our cat to the cat article. If you don't believe the following pageview numbers, just check the edit histories themselves.

This report on stub traffic is probably generated every day. Since we don't know how to give attribution to a bot, we can all just blame the bot's keeper for the creation of this traffic report. We have done our best to explain the unexplainable. Our theory is this: Indians read Wikipedia in far greater numbers than readers from other English-speaking countries. We have concocted multiple theories. Maybe these articles are viewed because the subjects recently passed away died. Only a few articles mentioned the mortality of their topics. We have never heard of any of these people listed below except Jimmy Connors, but the bot made a mistake on that listing. We are anticipating a travel grant to attend Indian cricket games to research these and similar topics.

Last updated: 2018-02-06 03:24 (UTC)
Weekly page views as of: 2018-02-03

Rank Article Status Views Very Deep, insightful and scholarly critiques, notes. incredulous statements, and comments
1 Mel Metcalfe Stub 108,209 Those Germans again! They templated this page to tell us that their article is better. There are exactly 19 words in the lead. This is barely a stub and should be moved to the English or German Wiktionary.
2 Jason Sangha Stub 55,952 A Punjabi Jatt Sikh cricket player. Obviously he has a lot of fans. Just imagine a simultaneous convention of these folks at the same place and time as Wikimania 2018. The Wikimedia cricket team could play the Fans-of-Jason-Sangha team and surpass the number of viewers who watched the (US) superbowl. As impossible as this sounds, just remember the premise of this Signpost article-the impossible happens all the time.
3 Ihana Dhillon Stub 48,832 At least this Indian actress is backed up by eight references that prove she exists.
4 Tamil Rockers Stub 45,904 Half of the two references is from a spammy blog. Unfortunately the blog discussion is closed and you aren't able to leave comments. This anonymously-run company(?) seems to have filled the role of a type of film-Napster in the state of Tamil Nadu.
5 Kamlesh Nagarkoti Stub 42,499 Pick up some new SAT words from this article like subedar, and crores. My favorite reference is this:[1]
  1. ^ "'I sat inside the washroom when my bidding was on'". ESPNcricinfo. Retrieved 2018-02-09.
6 Justin Herwick Stub 41,628 The page view numbers have got to be wrong. There are 23 words in the lead. One theory is that his mom owns 25 laptops that continually refresh the page all day and all night long. He has one 2002 reference. He recently organized an undocumented Art and Feminism edit-a-thon but since no one learned to edit, they sat around eating pizza and installed a page-refreshing app on their desktop that helped build up the page view numbers.
7 Isabella Gomez Stub 40,893 This actress is probably astoundingly gorgeous. We are pretty sure that readers come to her page to see if they can lift an Commons image of her to put up in their locker at school. How can +40,000 people read this and not correct the grammar?
8 Ollolai Stub 39,399 This is absolutely impossible. I don't know exactly how many people live in this commune (which may mean city in Italian) but each of the 45 residents must also have 200 continuously looping laptops that refresh the page every half second. Bots have made half the edits to this stub and it is still there. Absolutely even MORE astounding is that this stub exists in the following language Wikipedias: Aragonese, Armenian, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chinese (Min Nan), Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German (those Germans again), Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Latin (who speaks this again?), Lombard, Malay, Neapolitan, Persian, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sardinian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Sicilian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tarantino, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Venetian, Volapük, Waray
9 Ishaan Khatter Stub 36,663 You remember him, right? He starred in Vaah! Life Ho Toh Aisi! in 2005. Two of the editors that helped edit this stub have since been blocked but their legacy lives on.
10 Jen Selter Stub 35,653 Look! We can cram the whole article in this little box:
"Jennifer Leigh "Jen" Selter (born August 8, 1993) is an American Internet celebrity and fitness model. She attracted significant media attention for her coming out at a young age, initially on the photo-sharing website Instagram." A direct reference and link to Instagram is provided that proves this.
11 Jimmy Connors Stub 35,224 This is not a stub but obviously the bot messed up. Maybe the bot 'wishes' it were a stub.
12 Richard Gregson Stub 33,770 What a yawner. Its been a stub since 2015 and he is known for being married to Natalie Wood and making a baby.
13 Hassa bint Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan Stub 33,079 Besides messing up the formatting of this table, this stub has no citations. She has a very long name and was married to an emir. She died unreferenced in 2015.
14 Trap music Stub 32,645 This disambiguation page gets a lot of looks. I haven't checked this out yet, but I think readers might be looking for a rapper.
15 Milly Shapiro Stub 31,336 Cute little theatre star. Still not sure why so many pageviews. Do this many readers follow the career of child stage stars? I don't think I want to know the answer.
16 "Hot Sex" Stub 31,253 This is not what you think or was hoping it would be. All 31,253 readers were all thinking the same thing as you are now.
17 Gully Boy Stub 31,241 A future Indian film starring a whole bunch of blue-linked people. I wonder how many pageviews they get?
18 Lists of deaths by year Stub 31,161 This article proves that no one has died before 1987. Based upon the Recent deaths article I can actually believe the pageviews of this list page, it really isn't a stub.
19 Aryaman Birla Stub 30,641 Indian cricket players have a lot of stubs.
20 Neelima Azeem Stub 30,325 Movie star with one reference.
21 UFC on Fox: Poirier vs. Gaethje Stub 29,047 Another article about something that hasn't happened yet. I can tell you that at least 29,000 people are really, really looking forward to this. It also contains a template that is three times longer than the article itself. The articles listed in the template no doubt lead to at least 300 other stubs on wrestling-and again, you should know this sport is NOT faked.
22 Pierre Aubameyang Stub 28,769 Finally! A popular soccer player. One reference but I think everyone in his family has an article. I checked the article on one of his kids – Suprise! not a stub. At least you would think his kids would be stubbier and have more pageviews.
23 Takeoff (rapper) Stub 27,769 We LOVE our rappers. Imagine this: What if this rapper was an Indian cricket player, had a summer home in the commune of Ollolai, had some kids who were professional soccer players who only played in one game, starred in an obscure film, died before 2002, and was married to an emir? The Foundation's servers would be so worked up over this stub they would explode.



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