The Signpost
Single-page Edition
WP:POST/1
28 October 2015

From the editor
The Signpost's reorganization plan—we need your help
News and notes
English Wikipedia reaches five million articles
In the media
The world's Wikipedia gaps; Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA
Op-ed
It’s time to stop the bullying
Arbitration report
A second attempt at Arbitration enforcement
Traffic report
Canada, the most popular nation on Earth
Recent research
Student attitudes towards Wikipedia; Jesus, Napoleon and Obama top "Wikipedia social network"; featured article editing patterns in 12 languages
Featured content
Birds, turtles, and other things
Technology report
Tech news in brief
Community letter
Five million articles
 

2015-10-28

The Signpost's reorganization plan—we need your help

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By Gamaliel


The Signpost needs your help.

Last week's issue of the Signpost was the best issue yet during my tenure as editor-in-chief. We published a lot of strong material that readers responded to positively — and sometimes negatively! My thanks to our goes to our contributors, including Andreas Kolbe, Armbrust, GamerPro64, Thibbs, Serendipodous, and the work behind the scenes of people like Tony1, Resident Mario, and others.

When people look at the quality of the issue we published and the number of contributors, I can understand why they might think the Signpost is doing just fine—but we're in trouble. During much of this year, we had a strong core of four to five editorial board members and a number of other regular contributors. More recently, however, we've lost some of those contributors, and board members either left or had to drastically reduce the time they spent on the Signpost due to real-life commitments. This includes my co-editor-in-chief, Go Phightins!, who is currently inactive but will continue to contribute sporadically. We barely have time to publish what we do publish, which is usually many days late.

The time demands are so many that we wanted to publish this piece you’re reading right now several weeks ago, but I didn’t have the time to organize and write it until now.

Some of our regular contributors create self-contained sections that can be published with little effort by others. For example, Serendipodous and Milowent create Traffic on their own—probably the most consistently high-quality section in the Signpost—and most weeks we publish it without changing anything except the occasional stray comma.

Other sections require significant work. For example, take last week's special report on GamerGate. It was originally published in the WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, so all we had to do was slap it in a page of our own, right? Not really. Let's consider how much time it took to get that piece to our readers.

  • First, Thibbs deserves full credit for doing nearly all of the work, from writing an excellent piece to creating the graphs and contacting the participants.
  • Second, however, you also have to consider the time it took the staff of the newsletter to prepare it for the original publication, as well as the time of the four interviewees and the work it took to coordinate their contributions.
  • Third, to publish it in the Signpost, three current and former members of the editorial board examined and copyedited it in-depth because of the piece's length and the controversial nature of the material.

As you can see, in addition to the hard work of the writers who produce our features, a lot of work goes into publishing the Signpost that goes unseen and unnoticed by our readers. But they would surely notice its absence, and as those tasks fall to fewer and fewer people, we struggle to keep the quality of the publication high.

Currently we have a very fluid organizational structure, which is a charitable way of saying we are unorganized. It has its advantages, being flexible and adaptable, but many regular tasks are not getting done and we don't have the opportunity to take on new ones. When someone brings us an exciting new idea for the Signpost, again and again our response has to be "We love it, but who’s going to do it?"

With that in mind, three members of the editorial board met at WikiConference and hammered out a reorganization plan. "Compartmentalization" is the key word; we want to take regular tasks and distribute them among more people so they get done regularly and don't fall on just a few people, prompting them to burn out and leave. We've sketched out a structure and we'd like to find people to fill these roles. We still want to be flexible; more than one person could share the duties of a single role, or, more likely, one person could take on more than one role.

Under this plan, the Signpost will still be coordinated by an editor-in-chief. They will also help fill in whatever roles are needed temporarily. The new editorial board will consist of the EIC and eight associate editors. Four of them will be responsible for coordinating and publishing (but not writing) each week's edition. This includes coordinating with contributors, copyediting, and making sure that their sections are publication-ready, with images and conforming to the Signpost style guide.

  • News: News and Notes, In the Media, Arbitration Report, and Technology Report. This role will be filled by Andreas Kolbe.
  • Features: Featured Content, Traffic, WikiProject Report, Recent Research, Gallery, Tech News, and Blog.
  • Editorial: Op-eds and Editorial. This role will be filled by me.
  • Special Reports/Projects: This role will be filled by Tony1.

They will be assisted by four others:

  • Publication: This person will coordinate with the content editors to set a publication time and will be the person responsible for performing the publication process. A bot does most of the work; the primary tasks are organizing the front page each week (writing snippets and choosing an image) and cleaning up whatever the bot missed when it skips a step. This person will have to be comfortable enough with wiki-markup to cut and paste whatever is missing from the publication instruction page to the appropriate Signpost pages.
  • Personnel and recruitment: We need a people person. This role will be responsible for the care, upkeep, and recruitment of contributors and dealing with any issues.
  • Social media and outreach: This person will be responsible for promoting the Signpost via social media (primarily Facebook and Twitter, but an ambitious individual could branch out) and for making sure suggestions get to the appropriate editor.
  • Style/Tagging/Templates: This person will be responsible for maintaining the Signpost's style guide, templates, and tagging initiative. This role will be filled by Resident Mario.

Of course, none of these people would have any work to do if it weren't for our contributors. There has traditionally been an overlap between the roles of editor and contributor, but we and our readers don't want the same people writing everything every week.

Even if you don't want to commit to a weekly role on the Signpost, we need your help writing the content for these sections, even if you only contribute an occasional small piece to a section like In the Media or Featured Content. Feel free to contact the editor for the section you are interested in, or just dive into a draft article and start writing.

We realize this is an ambitious plan, but we don't have any choice but to try. The alternatives mean, at minimum, a lower-quality and less-frequent Signpost. If we don't get more help soon, the next step will be to permanently cancel regular sections and make the Signpost a bi-weekly or monthly publication.

We don't want to fall silent like our sibling publications on the French and Portuguese Wikipedias. Thank you for reading and supporting Wikipedia's weekly newspaper.

— Gamaliel, Signpost editor-in-chief



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2015-10-28

English Wikipedia reaches five million articles

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By Gamaliel
Related articles
Previous milestones

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.



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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.



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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.




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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



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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).



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2015-10-28

Student attitudes towards Wikipedia; Jesus, Napoleon and Obama top "Wikipedia social network"; featured article editing patterns in 12 languages

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By Jonathan Morgan, Morten Warncke-Wang, Piotr Konieczny, and Tilman Bayer

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

Students value Wikipedia both for quick answers and for detailed explorations

Reviewed by Jonathan Morgan

This paper[1] reports findings from a survey of Norwegian secondary school students about their use of Wikipedia in the context of their coursework. The survey of 168 students between the ages of 18 and 19 consisted of 33 Likert scale questions and two free response questions. The goal was to assess how Wikipedia figured into students' literacy practices, a concept that encompasses students' and teachers' attitudes towards the resources they use to learn and the social context in which they engage with those resources, as well as the process by which they read, remember, and understand the information provided by each resource.

The main finding of the study is that students' attitudes towards Wikipedia are overwhelmingly positive, but they find the information presented in Wikipedia less trustworthy than their official course materials. Although 90% of respondents rated their textbooks as more trustworthy, they cited the ease of finding factual information (such as dates, names, etc) as a key reason for preferring Wikipedia. They also reported that Wikipedia was better than their textbooks at explaining the "big picture" of a given topic, as well as facilitating more in-depth exploration. In the words of one survey respondent: "If you need to, you can read elaborations about a given topic, or you can just read the summary if that is what you need."

These findings suggest that the primary advantage that Wikipedia offers to students is its flexibility: it allows students to find quick answers and more detailed accounts with equal ease. The findings also suggest that both students and teachers would benefit from a better understanding of how to critically evaluate the quality of information presented in Wikipedia and other open online information resources.

The study also confirmed findings from previous studies: that the vast majority of students use Wikipedia to supplement their official course resources (textbooks, etc), that most of them access Wikipedia via Google search, and that English-speaking students tend to seek information on the English-language Wikipedia first, regardless of their first language or national origin.

Jesus, Napoleon, and Obama top the "Wikipedia social network"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

A (conference?) paper titled "Beyond Friendships and Followers: The Wikipedia Social Network"[2] applies social network theory to the analysis of relationship between subjects of Wikipedia biographical articles. Using Wikidata and Wikipedia metadata, the authors produce a number of findings. Some of them will not be unexpected to readers, such as that "By far the largest occupational groups are politicians and football players", or "The page with the most mentions of persons is Rosters of the top basketball teams in European club competitions" (with 4,694 mentions of 1,761 different persons). The most referenced persons are Jesus and Napoleon, followed by Barack Obama, Muhammad, Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler, and George W. Bush. Over four fifths of the links in Wikipedia are to male persons, which roughly reflects the gender distribution of Wikipedia biographies; a similar distribution confirms that most of the biographies focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors, however, do not dwell on the social science implications of their findings, but merely suggest that their tool can be used to refine Wikipedia categories and disambiguation tools. The findings are interesting from the perspective of alternate approaches to categorization, as it may suggest possible new categories that haven't yet been created by human editors, and perhaps provides a mathematical model of how Wikipedia categories can be created.

"Exploration of Online Culture Through Network Analysis of Wikipedia"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

This paper[3] also uses social network theory, as well as the Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values, and McCrae's Five factor model of personality to ask research questions about the concept of online culture; in particular whether it is universal or differs for various national cultures. It focused on 72 Featured Articles in 12 languages (unfortunately, the authors do not explain any reasons for choosing those particular 12 languages over the others); discounting bots, the authors analyzed more than 150,000 editors and 250,000 edits. The authors find that most Wikipedia edits are what they call self-loops, or individual editors making edits to the same articles they have edited before, without their editing being interrupted by edits by another editor. They fail to make any comment on what that really means for the vision of Wikipedia as a collaborative environment. The authors find significant differences in editing patterns between certain Wikipedia projects, though this reviewer finds the description of said differences (focusing on a case study of one Japanese and one Russian article) rather curt. Similarly, their discussion of how the results fit (or don't) with the established theories of Hofstede and others is interesting, but rather short; that unsatisfying brevity may however be due to editorial requirements (the entire paper is only 3.5k words long, instead of the more common average of about 8k). The authors conclude that "new dimensions of online culture can be explored from directly observed online behavior", something that one hopes they'll revisit themselves, together with their dataset, in a longer paper that will do proper justice to it.

In brief

Vandalism detection research neglects smaller languages

Reviewed by Morten Warncke-Wang

A paper at the 19th International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers (CSCC)[4] provides an overview of research on vandalism detection in Wikipedia, with a focus on the usage of machine learning. One of the paper’s conclusions is that future research should aim for language-independency, as little progress has been made outside of the English, German, French, and Spanish Wikipedia editions.

Automatic quality assessment using the "collaboration network"

Reviewed by Morten Warncke-Wang

“Measuring Article Quality in Wikipedia Using the Collaboration Network”[5] is a paper that proposes an improved model of co-authorship to be used in predicting the quality of Wikipedia articles. Trained on a stratified sample of articles from the English Wikipedia, it is shown to outperform several baselines. Unfortunately, the dataset used for evaluation omits Start-class articles for no apparent reason, and used the latest revision of an article, which might differ considerably from when an article received its quality rating.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

Dissertations
Mean amount of content added per edit, per editor's experience level (illustration from "607 Journalists")
  • "607 Journalists: An evaluation of Wikipedia’s response to and coverage of breaking news and current events"[6] See also blog post
  • "Wiki is not paper: Fixing and breaking the 'news' on Wikipedia"[7] From the abstract: "The case studies include the "Barack Obama" article, which is used to investigate the establishment and maintenance of the "fact" that Obama is described as an 'African American,' despite his mixed-race heritage. ... The second case study uses the article on the 2008 war in the Georgian province of South Ossetia to investigate the transnational and transcultural pitfalls of 'bias' in the writing of a 'neutral' article. The final case examines the decision to publish controversial material by examining the article on the 2006 Muhammad cartoons controversy. This article was crucial on Wikipedia in establishing the protocol in publishing such images."
  • "User interaction with community processes in online communities"[8] From the abstract: "We find that articles that are deleted from Wikipedia differ from those that are not in many significant ways. We also find, however, that most deleted articles are deleted extremely hastily, often before they have time to develop. We use our data to create a model that can predict with high precision whether or not an article will be deleted. ... We propose to deploy a system utilizing this model on Wikipedia as a set of decision-support tools to help article creators evaluate and improve their articles before posting. ... English Wikipedia’s Articles for Creation provides a protected space for drafting new articles, which are reviewed against minimum quality guidelines before they are published. We explore the possibility that this drafting process, which is intended to improve the success of newcomers, in fact decreases newcomer productivity in English Wikipedia, and offer recommendations for system designers."
  • "Detecting Vandalism on Wikipedia across Multiple Languages"[9]
More recent publications
  • "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content: Pseudo-Experimental Evidence on Wikipedia"[10] From the abstract: "[On the German Wikipedia, the featuring of an article on the main page does] affect neighboring articles substantially: Their viewership increases by almost 70 percent. This, in turn, translates to increased editing activity. Attention is the driving mechanism behind views and short edits. Both outcomes are related to the order of links, while more substantial edits are not." See also by the same author: "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content"
  • "Peer Effects in Collaborative Content Generation: The Evidence from German Wikipedia"[11] From the abstract: "editors who contribute to the same articles and exchange comments on articles’ talk pages work in collaborative manner sometimes discussing their work. They can, therefore, be considered as peers, who are likely to influence each other. In this article, I examine whether peer influence, measured by the average amount of peer contributions or by the number of peers, yields spillovers to the amount of individual contributions."
  • "Wikipedia Page View Reflects Web Search Trend""[12] (see also datasets, slides) From the abstract: "We found frequently searched keywords to have remarkably high correlations with Wikipedia page views."
  • "Wikipedia edition dynamics"[13] From the abstract: "It is argued that the probability to edit is proportional to the editor's number of previous editions (preferential attachment), to the editor's fitness and to an ageing factor." See also by the same authors: "The dynamic nature of conflict in Wikipedia"
  • "Cultural Similarity, Understanding and Affinity on Wikipedia Cuisine Pages"[14] See also "Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia - A study of 31 European food cultures"
  • "The influence of network structures of Wikipedia discussion pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects"[15] From the abstract: "The evaluation suggests that an intermediate level of cohesion with a core of influential users dominating network flow improves effectiveness for a WikiProject, and that greater average membership tenure relates to project efficiency in a positive way."
  • "Technological Nudges and Copyright on Social Media Sites"[16] From the abstract: "Using an adapted taxonomy, this article identifies the technological features on predominant social media sites—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia—that encourage and constrain users from engaging in generative activities. Notwithstanding the conflicting narrative painted by recent litigation around copyright in relation to content on social media sites, I observe that some of the main technological features on social media sites are designed around copyright considerations." (However, the paper never mentions that Wikipedia's content is under a free license.) "In contrast to the other social media sites, I note that Wikipedia does not allow its users to comment on content; hence there is little room for this alternative form of modification."
  • "The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction"[17]
  • "Students' use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of use and perceptions of usefulness"[18] (survey of 1658 undergraduate students) From the abstract: "87.5% of students report using Wikipedia for their academic work, with 24.0% of these considering it ‘very useful’. Use and perceived usefulness of Wikipedia differs by students’ gender; year of study; cultural background and subject studied. Wikipedia mainly plays an introductory and/or clarificatory role in students information gathering and research."
  • "Snooping Wikipedia Vandals with MapReduce"[19] From the abstract: "[Using] MapReduce ... we are able to explore a very large dataset, consisting of over 5 millions articles [actually pages on enwiki, including non-articles] collaboratively edited by 14 millions authors, resulting in over 8 billion pairwise interactions. We represent Wikipedia as a signed network, where positive arcs imply constructive interaction between editors. We then isolate a set of high reputation editors (i.e., nodes having many positive incoming links) and classify the remaining ones based on their interactions with high reputation editors."
  • "An agent-based model of edit wars in Wikipedia: How and when consensus is reached"[20] From the abstract: "We show that increasing the number of credible or trustworthy agents and agents with a neutral point of view decreases the time taken to reach consensus, whereas the duration is longest when agents with opposing views are in equal proportion." See also last issue's review of a different numerical model of edit wars: "More newbies mean more conflict, but extreme tolerance can still achieve eternal peace"

References

  1. ^ Blikstad-Balas, Marte (2015). ""You get what you need" : A study of students' attitudes towards using Wikipedia when doing school assignments". Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. 3831 (October): 1–15.Closed access icon
  2. ^ Johanna Geiß, Andreas Spitz, Michael Gertz: Beyond Friendships and Followers: The Wikipedia Social Network PDF
  3. ^ Park Sung Joo, Kim Jong Woo, Lee Hong Joo, Park Hyunjung, Han Deugcheon, and Gloor Peter. Exploration of Online Culture Through Network Analysis of Wikipedia. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, ahead of print. doi:10.1089/cyber.2014.0638 Closed access icon
  4. ^ Hamiti, Mentor; Susuri, Arsim; Dika, Agni. "Machine Learning and the Detection of Anomalies in Wikipedia" (PDF). Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers.
  5. ^ de La Robertie, Baptiste; Pitarch, Yoann; Teste, Olivier. "Measuring Article Quality in Wikipedia Using the Collaboration Network" (PDF).
  6. ^ Joseph R. B. Sutherland: 607 Journalists: An evaluation of Wikipedia’s response to and coverage of breaking news and current events. Dissertation, Aberdeen Business School - Robert Gordon University, April 2015 PDF
  7. ^ Lyons, J. Michael: Wiki is not paper: Fixing and breaking the "news" on Wikipedia. Dissertation, Indiana University, 2015, 206 pages; [1] Closed access icon
  8. ^ Gelley, Shoshana Bluma. User interaction with community processes in online communities. Dissertation, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, 2015 [2] Closed access icon
  9. ^ Khoi-Nguyen Dao Tran: Detecting Vandalism on Wikipedia across Multiple Languages. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The Australian National University, May 2015 PDF
  10. ^ Kummer, Michael E. (2014-12-29). Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content: Pseudo-Experimental Evidence on Wikipedia. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2567179.
  11. ^ Olga Slivko: Peer Effects in Collaborative Content Generation: The Evidence from German Wikipedia. Discussion Paper No. 14-128, Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW). December 22, 2014, updated March 3, 2015 PDF
  12. ^ Mitsuo Yoshida, Yuki Arase, Takaaki Tsunoda, Mikio Yamamoto. Wikipedia Page View Reflects Web Search Trend. The 2015 ACM Web Science conference (WebSci15). Oxford, UK, June 28 - July 1, 2015. Authors' copy
  13. ^ Gandica, Y.; F. Sampaio dos Aidos; J. Carvalho (2014-12-30). "Wikipedia edition dynamics". arXiv:1412.8657.
  14. ^ Paul Laufer: Cultural Similarity, Understanding and Affinity on Wikipedia Cuisine Pages. Master Thesis, TU Graz, August 2014 PDF
  15. ^ Xiangju Qin, Pádraig Cunningham, Michael Salter-Townshend: The influence of network structures of Wikipedia discussion pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects. Social Networks Volume 43, October 2015, Pages 1–15 doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2015.04.002 Closed access icon
  16. ^ Tan Ms, Corinne (2015). "Technological Nudges and Copyright on Social Media Sites". Intellectual Property Quarterly (1): 62–78.
  17. ^ Grundkiewicz, Roman; Junczys-Dowmunt, Marcin (2014-09-17). "The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction". In Adam Przepiórkowski; Maciej Ogrodniczuk (eds.). Advances in Natural Language Processing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing. pp. 478–490. ISBN 978-3-319-10888-9. Closed access icon
  18. ^ Neil Selwyna, Stephen Gorardb: Students' use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of use and perceptions of usefulness. The Internet and Higher Education, Volume 28, January 2016, Pages 28–34 doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.004 Closed access icon
  19. ^ Michele Spina, Dario Rossi, Mauro Sozio, Silviu Maniu, Bogdan Cautis: Snooping Wikipedia Vandals with MapReduce. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), doi:10.1109/ICC.2015.7248477. PDF (authors' copy)
  20. ^ Arun Kalyanasundaram, Wei Wei, Kathleen M. Carley, James D. Herbsleb: An agent-based model of edit wars in Wikipedia: How and when consensus is reached. Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference, L. Yilmaz, W. K V. Chan, I. Moon, T. M. K. Roeder, C. Macal, and M. D. Rossetti, eds. PDF.



Reader comments

2015-10-28

Birds, turtles, and other things

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By Staff
The 2014 Picture of the Year on Wikimedia Commons is finally a Featured Picture here.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 11 October to 18 October.


Featured articles

A juvenile Perijá tapaculo

Eight featured articles were promoted this week.

Featured lists

One featured lists were promoted this week.


Featured pictures

Twenty-eight Wikipedia:featured pictures were promoted this week.



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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. [3]
  • 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. [4][5]
  • When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [6][7]
  • Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [8]


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



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2015-10-28

Five million articles

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By Wikipedia editors


Shortcuts

The English Wikipedia has reached 5,000,000 articles with
Persoonia terminalis (a type of shrub),
created by Australian contributor Cas Liber on 1 November 2015 at 12:27 UTC.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – 5,000,000 articles
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – 5,000,000 articles

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

— Jimmy Wales, co-founder
Video

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 as a project to build an online, free-access, free-content encyclopedia entirely from scratch. Since then, it has grown to be the largest encyclopedia ever created, comprising more than five million articles in English, while still relying on the contributions of volunteers. The English Wikipedia community thanks the millions of users whose edits over the past fourteen-plus years have made this remarkable accomplishment possible.

A brief history

Wikipedia officially launched on 15 January 2001, with Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as its leaders, on a single computer server as the successor to Nupedia. Its first major mainstream media coverage was in The New York Times on 20 September 2001. In the first year of its existence, more than 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created – a rate exceeding 1,500 articles per month. Today, there are Wikipedia editions in more than 200 languages, accompanied by a dozen additional free-content projects, such as Wikimedia Commons. In March 2006, the English Wikipedia reached one million articles. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is currently the world's sixth most popular website, receiving approximately eight billion pageviews per month. We reached five million articles on 1 November 2015.

A work in progress

Wikimedia projects are constantly under development.

While Wikipedia is an incredible success, it remains a work in progress. There are still great gaps in its coverage with millions of important topics missing from its pages. Many articles – even vital ones – are not yet considered high-quality. Of our five million articles, only a few tens of thousands have passed a vetting process for good or featured status, and more than half are short stubs or start-class articles. There are also more than 200 non-English-language editions of Wikipedia that need volunteers. In other words, there is still much work to be done – and you can help!

How you can help

Video of Wikipedians from around the world who contribute to a variety of Wikipedia's language editions

Wikipedia is written by the people who use it. Anyone, regardless of background, can contribute to building the encyclopedia. You don't even have to register an account (though there are good reasons to do so). If you find an article you can improve, edit the article to make it more accurate and useful for others. Each page contains edit buttons for you to make those changes immediately. Any improvement, whether it's fixing a typo or drafting a brand new article, is greatly appreciated.

Wikipedia values boldness and the pursuit of consensus. Don't be afraid or disillusioned if your first contributions are undone – Wikipedia is a collaborative project, which means that sometimes we disagree. That's okay. Each page on Wikipedia has a talk page dedicated to discussing improvements, and fellow editors have a talk page where you can contact them individually.

Welcome

If you're new here, firstly: welcome. We sincerely hope you like it here and decide to stay. Below are some helpful links to get you started:

If you want to find an article to improve, here are some pointers and areas to contribute:

If you get stuck, a variety of resources are available to assist you. The page Wikipedia:Questions lists locations where you can ask for help. The most valuable assets, however, are your fellow Wikipedians. If you have any questions about editing Wikipedia, friendly Wikipedians at the Teahouse will be more than happy to provide answers. You can also meet Wikipedians in person in many places around the world; see Wikipedia:Meetup for more information.

If you are already a Wikipedian, thank you for your contributions. We hope you continue to contribute to this amazing compendium of human knowledge.

Sincerely,
The Wikipedia community

Press contacts

Members of the press may contact the following for comments:




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