Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/From the editors
No show for the Globes
While the 71st Golden Globe Awards, held on 12 January, had an impact on the top 25, their presence was largely absent from the Top 10. With the exception of Best Actor winner Leonardo DiCaprio, the only Golden Globe entrants in the Top 10 are films that would have been there anyway. The most prominent film on the list remains The Wolf of Wall Street, which didn't even win in the Best Drama category. It will be interesting to see if this disinterest carries over to the Oscars in March.
For the full top 25 of the week, including exclusions, see WP:TOP25.
For the week of 12–18 January, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages* were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Dian Fossey 
2,807,879 The controversial gorilla conservationist whose life was dramatised in Gorillas in the Mist got a Google Doodle on what would have been her 83rd birthday if she hadn't been murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1985. 2 Jordan Belfort 
799,325 Onetime stockbroker who spent 22 months in prison for running a penny stock boiler room, he went on to write the books that the film The Wolf of Wall Street is based on. 3 Sherlock (TV series) 
741,350 
The contemporary-set revamp of the Sherlock Holmes mythos has become a surprise global hit (and turned its star, Benedict Cumberbatch into an international sex symbol) and is now watched in 200 countries and territories (out of 254), so it's not surprising that its much ballyhooed return from a two-year hiatus was met with feverish anticipation. 4 Facebook
735,322 
A perennially popular article 5 The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 film)
669,530 Despite not winning a Golden Globe, Martin Scorsese's acclaimed account of one person's contribution to our general economic misery remains popular with the public; it opened to a respectable $34 million on Christmas Day, and has now made almost $125 million worldwide. 6 American Hustle (2013 film)
495,752 David O. Russell's Golden Globe-winning, star-studded caper is getting strong reviews and decent box office, having grossed $108 million domestic in its first 38 days. 7 Leonardo DiCaprio
465,193 
The superstar got a Golden Globe for his performance as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (see above). 8 Deaths in 2014 List 442,753 
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. 9 Sunanda Pushkar 
414,873 The curious case of a minister's wife, who was found dead by her husband, Shashi Tharoor, after having received texts suggesting he had been having an affair with a journalist, has excited the Indian press after the coroner ruled her death unnatural. 10 United States
410,618 
The 8th most popular article of 2013 and the 3rd most popular Wikipedia article between 2010 and 2012. Even when not on the list, this article is a perpetual bubble-under-er. Not really surprising that the country with by far the most English speakers would be the most popular on the English Wikipedia.
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Wikipedia for robots; Wikipedia—a temperamental teenager
Wikipedia for robots
An article in USA Today announced a European-funded project called RoboEarth that is designed to give robots a mechanism by which to access information to dispense. The project is backed by five technical universities in Europe who recently met in the Netherlands.
| “ | But RoboEarth is more than an encyclopedia. It has a system of networked computers that allow it to perform intensive computing tasks that smaller computers—or in this case simpler robots—may not be able to. It also allows individual robots to communicate between themselves, the so-called RoboCloud of networked computers, and the robot database. | ” |
Wikipedia: a temperamental teenager
Several articles this week noted that Wikipedia is now 13 years old. One, from Mashable.com, opined that Wikipedia has "reshaped the knowledge industry". The article noted that one of Wikipedia's de facto competitors, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has made changes due to Wikipedia, including a 2005 report from Nature that asserted Wikipedia is almost as reliable as Britannica in terms of accuracy despite the encyclopedias' different methods of publication—crowdsourcing for Wikipedia, and top scholars with rigorous review processes for Britannica. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), noted that, in the opinion of WMF, "In a nutshell, our biggest challenge in 2014, the 13th year of Wikipedia, is: How do we continue to grow that community of global editors?" He went on to say, "How do we sustain that growth, and how do we support the people who are editing Wikipedia today?" The article concluded by wondering what Wikipedia's future holds:
| “ | With more than 30 million articles in 285 languages, Wikipedia seems to be the awkward teenager, sometimes struggling to hide its growing pains. But as the site attempts to come of age, one can't help but wonder what it might turn into if it's around anywhere close to the nearly 250 years Britannica has endured. | ” |
In brief
- Jimmy Wales promotes … cell phones?: NBCNews.com reported that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is promoting a cell phone service called The People's Operator, which, according to its Wikipedia page, aims to be an "ethical" mobile network provider. Wales is a co-chair of the network.
- Wikipedia shows the value of a vibrant public domain: The Electronic Frontier Foundation asserted the value of a vibrant public domain in an article detailing the principles it feels should define and guide copyright policy.
- Richard Sherman is (not) human garbage: LegalInsurrection.com noted that after Seattle Seahawks defensive back Richard Sherman made some controversial comments in the aftermath of his team winning a conference championship game to go to the Super Bowl, his Wikipedia article was vandalized to indicate that he is "human garbage", and to change a picture of him to one of a monkey. The vandalism was promptly removed, and the article semi-protected.
- Wiki-Validation for Judith Newman: Judith Newman wrote a follow-up to her New York Times article (discussed in last week's In the Media), describing the feelings she experienced while watching her article being created, nominated for deletion, and kept, along with observations on several Wikipedia editors.
- Fictitious children in Wikipedia: Hugh Dennis was asked by The Telegraph whether he really had two adopted children named Sidney Smith and Dominic Vincent, as stated in his Wikipedia biography. He replied, "Ha, ha, no, my son added that – and if you look at it tomorrow, he'll probably have changed their names again for a laugh." The false information was removed by User:Bilby a day after the Telegraph article appeared; it had been present for four months.
- Ukrainian Wikipedia goes dark: KyivPost reports that the Ukrainian Wikipedia is displaying a banner protesting new laws that make criticizing government officials a crime. Starting from January 21, the report said, the Ukrainian Wikipedia will also go offline for 30 minutes each day to protest the new legislation.
- Collaboration between Cancer Research UK and Wikimedia UK: Third Sector reported that Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is looking for a Wikipedian in Residence to help ensure Wikipedia's information on cancer is correct and up to date. CRUK is believed to be the first organisation of its type to create a position for a Wikipedian in Residence. Jon Davies of Wikimedia UK said, "This new role would see Wikimedia UK and CRUK joining forces to build on Wikipedia's extensive information on cancer. The possibility of recruiting cancer scientists to help edit these important articles is very exciting."
Architecting the future of MediaWiki
This week we're interviewing Brion Vibber about the then-upcoming Architecture Summit. Brion is a long time Wikipedian, the first employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and currently the lead software architect working with the mobile team.
What do you hope to get out of the Architecture Summit?
- I hope to get a better sense of community involvement in moving things forward in the MediaWiki world. We've done a lot of ad-hoc discussions in small groups but we don't have a good "big picture"—I'm hoping this and future Arch Summits can help us get that: get people involved in the core, make sure multiple voices are heard, and get us to really rally around potentially big changes that are going to take a lot of work to do.
Are there any requests for comment or topics you're especially looking forward to discussing and implementing?
- Service-oriented architecture interests me greatly—we're breaking more and more pieces out into services like search engine, parsing, image scaling; and with experiments like mobile apps we're even changing out the front end in some areas. Potentially, more pieces that fit together and can be maintained separately could be a big change in how we work.
What do you view your role as an architect as?
- It's a vague and mysterious term which no one understands. :) But seriously, as a longtime contributor with lots of fingers in the pudding, as one might say, I can provide historical perspective and, hopefully, can help say "that's a good idea" and "that's a bad idea"!
Recently, there have been discussions about Wikimedia's needs versus the needs of other MediaWiki users in terms of software development, and now the MediaWiki release process has been contracted out to a third-party. Do these differences affect your decisions as an architect?
- It's definitely interesting—when software that used to be done by a tiny group gets used more and more, it takes on a life of its own. I think that's a great thing, and having more input from third-party users is only going to help us make a stronger more flexible product.
You've said that a push is being made for a MediaWiki 2.0. Code aside, what do you think some of the biggest difficulties will be in working towards that goal?
- We're going to have to have some large projects that take time and are controversial with users—look at the VisualEditor project with its associated Parsoid backend for a living example, and the discussions currently going on around video (especially MP4) and discussion systems (Flow etc). These are going to be Hard because we have to "sell" them to a user community which consistent of multiple constituencies, some of which are loud and make themselves heard and some of which are silent. Of course other things like improving the search engine are almost invisible, but just as much work on the backend!
- I think we're going to reach 2.0 piece by piece, by reforming and refactoring and adding new abilities, and perhaps trimming off some of the old.
Many Wikimedia communities felt that the Foundation was not receptive enough to feedback during the VisualEditor deployment. As a longtime community member and MediaWiki developer, what is your take on the situation?
- We're definitely still learning how to handle these situations... Visual Editor is one of our "moonshot" projects that's very important, and the trade-off between making it available for real testing and keeping it out of the way of people who have established workflows—or don't want to deal with the intermediate bugs—is ... a learning experience.
It's been a little over a year since your last interview with the Signpost. Anything interesting and exciting that you've worked on since then that you'd like to share?
- I've done a lot of work on mobile apps which excites me; we can do more system integration than we can do with a plain web site—but that might change in the future! The web gains a lot of abilities over time, and I'll be excited to see the day when we really can ignore "native apps" on any platform.
- It's also just a good litmus test for reusing and re-presenting content—and for figuring out how to integrate a community workflow into a separate tool. There've been editing helper tools for desktop for a long time but they've always been niche. The apps need to be able to represent the common reader *and* the power user, and it's an interesting set of tradeoffs.
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks. Content incorporated from Tech News.
- Deployment freeze: With the combination of a US holiday on Monday and the Architecture Summit, there will be no major deployments this week. (announcement)
- Special:ActiveUsers disabled: Due to performance issues, the special page has been disabled on all Wikimedia wikis. (code change)
- No modules requested: The text users see when directly visiting load.php has been improved. Developers are still unsure who "Max" is. (code change)
- The JavaScript that supports playing videos will now be loaded differently. If you notice videos that go directly to the file when clicked, please file a bug or report it to Bawolff. (bug 55550)
- Engineering report published: The December 2013 report covering the Wikimedia Foundation's engineering activities has been published onwiki (blog version), and in summary form.
- ULS disabled: Due to performance issues, the UniversalLanguageSelector extension was temporarily disabled. Users can opt-in to it by enabling it in their preferences. (bug 56433)
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/Opinion
Modification of WMF protection brought to Arbcom
Philippe Beaudette's July 2013 application of pending changes level two (PC2) on the article Conventional PCI—an action taken under his job as the Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Community Advocacy and its rarely used office actions policy—has escalated to the Arbitration Committee after an editor upgraded it to full protection.
In this case, pending changes were applied after a DMCA takedown notice was issued to the Foundation. The notice forced the WMF to remove links to PCI's Local Bus Specifications revisions 2.1, 2.2, and 3.0, according to its official policy governing takedown notices:
| “ | In some cases, the Foundation may be required to remove content from a Wikimedia Project due to a DMCA take-down notice. ... to retain safe harbor status, the Foundation is required to comply with validly formulated notices even if they are spurious. ... As a matter of policy, the Wikimedia Foundation will terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of repeat infringers as provided under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 512). … In the event that material is removed due to a DMCA notice, the only recourse for restoring such material is to file a counter-notice with the Foundation. ... Please note that filing a counter-notice may lead to legal proceedings between you and the complaining party to determine ownership of the material. | ” |
English Wikipedia administrator Kww objected to the nature of the protection, since an extensive discussion determined that PC2—which requires review before edits from autoconfirmed and anonymous editors—"should not be used" on the English Wikipedia. While Kww will typically downgrade PC2-protected articles to PC1 or semi-protection, in this case he increased the level of protection (to "fully protected"—only admins can edit) to avoid PC2 from being active on an English Wikipedia article. Doing so put him into conflict with the Foundation for the second time in recent memory; in September, Kww implemented what the Foundation called "badly flawed" code blocking the VisualEditor.
In response, Beaudette wrote Kww that he "just spoke to the legal team about your actions and asked them what to do. ... We select the level of action very specifically and with a great deal of care. If you have a problem with it, you're invited to contact us prior to taking action. That's the minimum standard expected of any admin when overriding an action, much less an office action." Beaudette advised that "On any other wiki, I'd be removing your tools right now. However, on this wiki, because there is a functional Arbitration Committee, I'm going to, instead, refer this to them for them to determine what sanction to take."
As of publishing time, the Committee is voting 6–1 to admonish Kww for "for knowingly modifying a clearly designated Wikimedia Foundation Office action." The motion continues that Kww did so without "any emergency and without any form of consultation", and declines his request for a full case, as it would involve a review of an inviolable office action.
In brief
- English Wikipedia:
- Two RfBs at once: Unusually, there are two current requests for bureaucratship (RFBs). Bureaucrats, known colloquially as "crats", can appoint admins and crats based on community decisions, remove admin rights in certain circumstances, change usernames for most users, and grant and remove bot status. The RFBs are for Worm That Turned, to close 27 January, and Acalamari, to close 31 January.
- Military historian of the year: The Bugle reports that the Military history WikiProject has awarded its prestigious "Military historian of the year" award to AustralianRupert. The award "recognizes the editors who have contributed most to the field of military history on Wikipedia over the course of a given year", as voted on by members of the project. The related "Military newcomer of the year" was given to Khanate General.
- Affcom appoints new members: The Wikimedia Foundation's Affiliations Committee, more commonly known as "Affcom", has resolved to add two new people to its membership, and to reappoint two others. Lodewijk Gelauff and Galileo Vidoni, along with new members, Cynthia Ashley-Nelson and Kirill Lokshin, will serve until 2016. Affcom is the Foundation's primary vehicle for selecting new Wikimedia affiliates.
- Chinese Wikivoyage: The Chinese Wikivoyage was created and opened for editing on 14–15 January.
- Education newsletter published: The Wikipedia Education Program has published its newest newsletter. While its page on Outreach appears to be out-of-date—for example, it makes no reference to the much criticized Wiki Education Foundation, a legally separate organization that now runs the US and Canada aspects of the initiative—the program appears to be partnering with professors in four countries (Brazil, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan) and boasts of much more extensive efforts in others.
- Foundation evaluates institutional content donations: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its latest program evaluation on the impact of content donations from GLAMs—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. It concluded, in part, that the average implementation time is three months, and large portions of the uploaded content remain unused on Wikimedia projects. Comments on the talk page have criticized the practice of mass image uploads from these sources.
- Picture of the Year competition begins: The first of two rounds in the Wikimedia Commons 2013 Picture of the Year competition has opened for voting. Editors with more than 75 edits to Commons before 1 January this year are eligible to vote for as many images as they wish in this round.
- Visiting Scholar, Wikipedia Affiliate: The US' George Mason University is seeking a Wikipedia visiting scholar. The position, detailed on-wiki, will involve an individual with limited access to scholarly resources, at least a year's editing history, and experience writing Wikipedia articles on historical topics. They will be granted free access to George Mason's online libraries "to help improve Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy by providing Wikipedia editors with access to the best scholarly information resources while providing a model for other universities to do likewise."
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-22/Humour