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7 May 2014

News and notes
New system of discretionary sanctions; Buchenwald; is Pirelli 'Cracking Wikipedia'?
Traffic report
TMZedia
In focus
Foundation announces long-awaited new executive director
WikiCup
2014 WikiCup enters round three
In the media
Google and the flu; Adrianne
WikiProject report
Singing with Eurovision
Featured content
Wikipedia at the Rijksmuseum
 

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-05-07/From the editors


2014-05-07

TMZedia

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By Serendipodous

For all the claims of Wikipedia bringing the world's knowledge to all who want it, it seems that the human race most wants a tabloid newspaper; a quick source for TV listings, pop culture facts, celebrity gossip and, above all, scandal—with some nice juicy racism thrown in too.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.

For the week of 27 April to 3 May, the ten 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 Donald Sterling C-class 2,155,108 What's more likely to generate watercooler conversation than a racist outburst by a privileged aged white guy? A nonsensical racist outburst. If one does not wish to "associate with black people", as he put it, owning a basketball team is probably not the way to go. And if he doesn't want black people "brought to his games," one wonders how he deals with his team's roster, which currently consists of 12 black individuals and two Caucasians. He's been banned from the NBA, though that is unlikely to affect his revenue stream.
2 The Amazing Spider-Man 2 C-Class 618,326
For a sequel to a reboot no one asked for, this movie is proving very popular with the public; after finally opening in its home territory, it scored $35 million on its first day, on top of $155 million it has already earned overseas. It's not surprising that this was released in foreign markets before its home territory; the original Spider-Man made $822 million worldwide, with the domestic and international grosses split roughly 50/50. The rebooted Amazing Spider-Man (this film's predecessor) made $752 million worldwide, but with international grosses now comprising 2/3 the total. This radical shift in Hollywood's biosphere has taken place in just a decade, and it is already altering hunting strategies, for good or ill.
3 Bob Hoskins Start-class 593,143
Much loved and respected actor who passed away on 29 April. Although he played the quintessential well'ard Cockney in films like The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa, Hoskins was perhaps ironically best known for playing the American PI pastiche Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
4 Amazon.com B-Class 538,283
This article has been veering wildly (and suspiciously) around the view graph for several weeks, but at least now its presence on the list has a reason: Amazon Fire TV; a digital streaming device to watch online content on a HDTV. How it distinguishes itself from the three or four other such devices currently on the market is a matter of some dispute.
5 May Day B-Class 499,206
Before it was International Workers' Day, May Day, aka May 1, was a fount of odd and esoteric traditions.
6 Game of Thrones B-class 492,768
New seasons of this immensely popular show always draw people to Wikipedia.
7 Deaths in 2014 List 422,311
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article.
8 Man-Thing C-Class 407,317 Marvel Comics' monster-man, to whom DC's Swamp Thing, debuting 18 months later, would bear an uncanny resemblance, got some press after it was revealed he would appear in an upcoming episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..
9 Shakira B-Class 372,839
The Colombian singer with the famously swiveling hips had a number of encounters with the media this week; between being the subject of a popular Reddit thread, being upstaged by Ariana Grande at the iHeartRadio Music Awards (see below), and posting a photo of her adorable toddler Milan on her Twitter feed, she's certainly made a splash amongst the cyber-chatterati, whether she intended to or not.
10 Game of Thrones (season 4) Start-Class 371,364
This is the page with the plot synopses for each episode.


2014-05-07

Google and the flu; Adrianne

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By Go Phightins!
Editor's note: In the media will now be a monthly section, published the first edition of each month, and will cover Wikipedia and more broadly the Wikimedia movement over the preceding month. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to bringing you more great editions of ITM in the future. This edition includes summaries and links to what should have been in issues dating back to February.

Wikipedia outdoes Google in tracking flu

See also: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-04-30/Recent research

Boston Children's Hospital postdoctoral fellow David McIver and a team have determined that using page view statistics from Wikipedia, they can track flu progression better than the Center for Disease Control can using Google searches.

The researchers seek to have a more "holistic" view of where flu-like symptoms are prevalent. Jay Walsh, WMF Communications Director, commented that the WMF is "always excited and intrigued when people make new/creative uses of our data, within the boundaries of the law and our privacy policy." He did caution, however, that data of this nature should be extrapolated and analyzed only by medical professionals. Only time will tell the effectiveness of the data, but for now, it appears to be an interesting and exciting alternate use of Wikipedia.

Passing of Adrianne Wadewitz

The Signpost has previously covered the sad fact that a famed, beloved Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz has died in a rock climbing fall. The New York Times published an obituary that recapped her life and work on Wikipedia. WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner commented: "It is a huge loss for Wikipedia. She may have been our single biggest contributor on these topics—female authors, women's history." Noam Cohen wrote for the Times that "Ms. Wadewitz's interest in rock climbing played out on Wikipedia. Her last editing was to improve an article about Steph Davis, a prominent female climber and wingsuit flier. In Ms. Wadewitz's hands, the article became filled with personal details, spectacular photos, a highlighted quotation and 25 footnotes." Wadewitz's presence is already missed on Wikipedia.

February

  • Defamatory Wikipedia: Lexology.com published an article detailing strategies for managing defamatory Wikipedia pages geared towards corporate attorneys. The article highlights our insistence on reliable sources supporting content, and outlines deletion processes.
  • Bots overtaking humans? Several media outlets covered the increasing tendency for bots to be a large source of edits on Wikipedia and Wikidata. A new app has been created to study the source of edits on the projects. The Daily Dot writes: "The program found that, over a three day period in late 2013, over 3.8 million edits were made to the 287 different language-based Wikipedia sites." These references have more detailed coverage.[1][2][3][4]
  • MediaWiki vulnerabilities exposed An article recapped some vulnerabilities that were exposed to the open-source MediaWiki platform (which Wikipedia uses), and gave some takeaways on the subject from which we all can learn.
  • Jimmy Wales' phone venture again in the news—Jimmy Wales' new phone venture, covered in previous editions of ITM, received additional coverage, predominantly centering around the legal requirements of a corporation.
  • Wikipedia's geographical bias—Motherboard.vice.com published an article examining the geographic distribution of Wikipedia's entries, concluding that the United States and Great Britain receive an overwhelming majority of the entries.
  • Greek lawsuit: A Greek editor was sued for edits he made to the Wikipedia biography of a former politician. (see related Signpost coverage: "Greek Wikipedia editor faces down legal challenge"). In addition to the WMF blog, outside coverage came from Arstechnica, lifo.gr, Protothema, Newsbeast, and the Daily Dot.
  • Wikipedia in printed form?: Printing just one copy of Wikipedia would require 1,193,014 pages, but a group that calls themselves the "Wikipedia Books Project" wants to do just that. According to an article in The Daily Dot, the project needs $50,000, and according to the project website, they have raised a little over a quarter of that. Subsequently, the project received more media attention.
  • Wikipedia's medical articles contain errors: [1]
  • Vandalism from UK government IP addresses: [2] [3] [4] [5]
  • Should government agencies edit Wikipedia?: WMF spokesman Jay Walsh recently spoke to NextGov.com about courses of action government employees can take when they spot errors regarding their agency or its jurisdiction on Wikipedia.
  • India: Candidates for Lok Sabha have to declare their social media accounts, including Wikipedia. (15 February)
  • A Noongar Wikipedia: [6] [7] (17 February)
  • Telugu Wikipedia: [8]
  • Wikipedia loses readers in Poland: [9]
  • WikiBear: [10] [11] [12] (17–20 February 2014)
  • Is Wikipedia the best place to promote women in art?: [13] (20 February 2014)
  • Doctor Wikipedia: [14] (20 February 2014)
  • Royal Society edit-a-thon: [15] (23 February 2014)
  • Are PR people breaking Wikipedia?: [16] (25 February 2014)
  • Wikipedia's spatial solipsism: [17] [18] (25 February 2014)
  • Assessing BLP quality through text mining: [19] (25 February 2014)
  • Terms of Use discussion: [20] (27 February 2014)
  • Oscar winner ... according to Wikipedia: [21] (2 March 2014)
  • Finnish Wikimedia donations: [22] (see related Signpost coverage: "Finnish investigation of donations to the WMF"; 2 March 2014)
  • Conspiracy theories in the German Wikipedia: [23] (2 March 2014)
  • Gaming Wikipedia: [24] (7 March 2014)
  • Wikipedia writers' forum in Azerbaijan: [25] (7 March 2014)

More recently

  • WMF has a new executive director: The WMF hired Lila Treitkov as its new executive director, and that received some media coverage, including from The Wall Street Journal, which chronicled her career, and noted her path from the Soviet Union to Wikipedia. (see related Signpost coverage: "Foundation announces long-awaited new executive director")
  • Is there hope for Wikipedia's medical articles?: The Atlantic wondered whether Wikipedia's medical articles would ever be definitive, credible, and comprehensive. The article commented on a study from The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association on the usage of Wikipedia as a medical resource.
  • TLDR: Io9.com reports on a new service that condenses Wikipedia articles to one sentence.
  • Peoria Wikipedia page vandalized: The Peoria Journal-Star notes that some amusing vandalism found its way onto the Peoria, Illinois Wikipedia page.
  • What exactly is trivial?: Sunny Hostin evidently doesn't pay on bets, and either her or an impostor don't want that information in her Wikipedia article. Regardless, it received some media coverage.
  • An alternate aesthetic version of Wikipedia: so how would you like a more "aesthetically pleasing experience" while viewing Wikipedia? A new iPad app can help you do just that, reports Cnet.com.au. The app shows you Wikipedia articles in 17th century ligature and style, rather than an "Arial wasteland".
  • Slurs from a UK government computer draw attention: Among many other sources, the UK version of The Huffington Post reported that "inflammatory" and "sickening" edits made to at least one Wikipedia article came from the computer of a British civil servant working on a government computer. The UK government initiated an investigation, and subsequently, it was determined that government computers have made more offensive edits to articles on Muslim topics, among others.
  • Political articles suffer in terms of NPOV: 'Tis the season for campaigns and elections, and thus, tis the season for vandalism and non-neutral edits on such articles, according to an article from the India Times. Wikipedia's own Sitush was quoted in the article.
  • Wikipedia: A bias against women?: If you edit Wikipedia, you may have heard we may have a gender bias. Nevertheless, an article published recently in The National chronicles new research into the extent and ramifications thereof.
  • George Bush's paintings less than impressive?: According to a recent article, some of George W. Bush's paintings of world leaders including the one of his father, George H.W. Bush, which have attracted notoriety within the media, appear to be based on images appearing in the leaders' respective Wikipedia articles.
  • Pete Forsyth opines: Wiki Strategies proprietor and Signpost op-ed contributor Pete Forsyth recently wrote an editorial that was published in, among other locations, USA Today, prior to the announcement of WMF's new executive director. He stated qualifications for such an individual, perhaps the most important of which would be an aptitude for dealing with annoying people, e.g., all of us!
References
  1. ^ Steiner, Thomas (February 5, 2014). "Bots vs. Wikipedians, Anons vs. Logged-ins". Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '14 Companion. p. 547. arXiv:1402.0412. doi:10.1145/2567948.2576948. ISBN 9781450327459.
  2. ^ "The Shadowy World of Wikipedia's Editing Bots". Emerging Technology From the arXiv. MIT Technology Review. February 13, 2014.
  3. ^ "New app tracks Wikipedia edits by Internet bots and humans". Press Trust of India. New Delhi Television. February 24, 2014.
  4. ^ Joshi, Chinmay (February 24, 2014). "Bots Vs. Wikipedians App To Track Edits By Bots On Wiki Pages". CrazyEngineers.

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2014-05-07

New system of discretionary sanctions; Buchenwald; is Pirelli 'Cracking Wikipedia'?

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By Tony1 and The ed17

The English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) introduced the first form of what are known as the "discretionary sanction" (DS) in 2009. From then until 2011 this developed into the system that was used until last Sunday, 4 May, when the 12 active arbitrators unanimously passed a motion replacing all DS provisions with an updated procedure. The new DS regime, called Discretionary sanctions (2014), is the result of an elaborate review process involving both the community, since last September, and the committee, for more than a year.

The Signpost understands that the DS system was and still is a response to the overwhelming task of managing the wars that flare up on many articles on "hot-button" areas of knowledge—typically those that are ideological, cultural, racial, and scientific flashpoints in human society. The English Wikipedia is especially vulnerable to these wars because it receives about 40% of the page-visits and 40% of the edits of the 290 language Wikipedias; this tends to attract people who want their views to prevail on the global stage. In recent years the site's judicial and administrative resources have struggled to cope with the chaos and personal nastiness that can ensue when foes meet on that stage.

Under the old approach (which is not easy to grasp from the text), any editor, or ArbCom itself, could place a DS template on the talkpage of another editor participating at a DS-listed article, exposing that editor to a heightened risk of being banned on the basis of their subsequent activity on the article or its talkpage. This was interpreted by some editors as an unfair and poorly applied millstone around their neck, not helped by language on the template that appeared to blame, and the fact that they typically felt "singled out".

The new approach is a marked shift from this. Now, a newly designed template merely alerts editors to the fact that the article or talkpage they have edited is DS-listed. There is no overt blame in the wording, and the template is issuable by anyone to all editors who edit a DS-listed article or talkpage. This is an attempt to remove any stigma and to avoid catching editors new to the topic, or the site, unawares. To avoid cascades of templating for regular editors of a topic, an editor can receive only one DS alert for a DS-listed topic in a 12-month period. One arbitrator we queried used an analogy with a poorly signed ban on parking in a particular street: "now all motorists on the street are personally alerted to this fact in a polite, neutral way". All that is missing from the updated DS page is a brief lead explaining what discretionary sanctions are.

Since the management of hot-button articles is often prone to gaming, both old and new versions are couched in legalistic terms, as can be seen from the diff of old versus new. Where a DS is actually applied after the informational template has been issued, appeal is via either AN/I, Arbitration enforcement, or directly to ArbCom. If either of the first two is chosen, a further appeal can be made to ArbCom.

The Signpost asked arbitrator AGK to comment on the changes. He told us that he sees three main benefits:


"The system is now fit for purpose," AGK said, "and less intimidating and dense, so people won't need to turn to ArbCom once a week, asking for clarifications. The alerts system is now also automatically logged. MediaWiki keeps a record of all ArbCom alerts issued, so editors no longer need to keep hundreds of logs updated."

In brief

This film from the Buchenwald concentration camp was taken shortly after it was liberated from Nazi German forces. The still frame of several stacked bodies, featured on Commons' main page on 8 May, can be seen at 4:10.
  • Commons and dead bodies: The Wikimedia Commons' media of the day for 8 May, featured on a main page that is seen by over 80,000 people each day, showed a still frame (Editor's note: contains graphic material) of dead bodies from a broader video of the Buchenwald concentration camp. An email to the Wikimedia-l mailing list (titled "Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses") opined "This isn't the first time that Commons frontpage has featured content that, while often appropriate material to be hosted by Commons, has been framed in an inappropriate way likely to cause dismay, upset, or scandal to the average Wikimedia Commons viewer. It flies in the face of the WMF-board endorsed principle of least astonishment—no one expects to click on Commons' homepage to see a still image of a stack of corpses at Buchenwald." Discussion continues on the mailing list and Commons.
  • Wikimania: Scholarships have been awarded for Wikimania 2014 in London. Katie Chan, the chair of the Scholarship Committee, told the Signpost via email that compared with previous Wikimanias, "the Wikimedia Foundation has increased the scholarship budget this year", so they were "able to award the largest number of scholarships in the history of Wikimania." However, this year's process did not go off without difficulty: the announcement of scholarship recipients was delayed for about a month, something Chan attributed to an overly ambitious target schedule.
  • Adrianne: A Wikipedia editor who perished several weeks ago in a rock-climbing accident is continuing to have an impact both in the media and on Wikipedia. The Boston Globe published an editorial where it praised her edits to Wikipedia: "Scholar of British literature Adrianne Wadewitz never appeared on The New York Times bestseller list or on the talk-show circuit, but she probably did more to increase popular understanding of female writers than almost anyone else in her field. ... But her influence was much greater outside academia—as a volunteer editor on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. / Her work will help ensure that information on women’s contributions to literature, philosophy, and even, in a piece she finished just before her death, rock climbing is at the world’s fingertips." On Wikipedia, a video of her speaking about the impact of Wikipedia is now featured on the English Wikipedia, and the children's literature portal has been nominated for featured status.
  • Academics vandalizing Wikipedia: In a piece brazenly titled "Are you an academic who vandalises wikipedia? Then stop it!", Alaric Hall—a lecturer at the University of Leeds and Wikipedia editor since 2005—told an anecdote about an academic colleague who proudly boasted on Facebook about vandalizing Wikipedia's article on Queen Elizabeth II as a demonstration for his students. As Hall goes on to note, "Six minutes (and perhaps twenty views by innocent encyclopedia-readers) later, of course, some upstanding member of society fixed the page (which to me is the real take-home point for this individual’s students)." He asked how ethical it was to purposefully introduce poor or untrue information into a source of knowledge, and whether these actions foster the critical engagement that the professors are presumably going for. This comes on the heels of a study that found that 43% of academics have edited Wikipedia.
  • Super-spreader student edits reverted, restored: University of Michigan ecologist and professor Meghan Duffy blogged about her experience allowing a student to do her coursework on Wikipedia. As alluded to in the title, it did not go well. The student's edits to super-spreader were reverted by the page's creator with comments that the professor described as "hostile", despite at least one Wikipedian seeing them as "better". It was only when other editors picked up on the blog post and Hacker News that the majority of the student's edits were restored, leading Duffy to comment:
  • Wiki Loves Earth: An international photography competition modeled on Wiki Loves Monuments has started. Wiki Loves Earth aims to encourage contributors to upload photographs on natural heritage sites. It runs until the end of May.
  • Wikimedia Foundation, movement entities
    • FDC assessments: Staff assessments for the Funds Dissemination Committee's second annual round have been published on Meta. Of note is the Wikimedia Foundation's proposal, which includes no funding requests and was reviewed by a movement entity that it itself funds (Wikimedia Germany).
    • Audit Committee: The Wikimedia Foundation's Audit Committee, which "represents the Board of Trustees in its oversight of financial and accounting issues", is calling for volunteers.
    • New data center: The Foundation's data center, which has been fully or partially hosted in Florida since its founding, will finally leave the state in favor of CyrusOne in Dallas, Texas. Mark Bergsma, Director of Technical Operations and Lead Operations Architect, stated that "The CyrusOne bid met our key requirements at a very competitive price. It is a modern and large facility with a highly redundant and efficient power and cooling infrastructure. In addition, the state of Texas maintains an independent power grid, which may be beneficial in case of major power issues affecting our Ashburn facility."
    • Pakistan: The Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan has been officially recognized by the Affiliations Committee
    • Privacy policy: Now that the Foundation's Board of Trustees has approved the Wikimedia sites' new privacy policy, the organization's legal team has announced that it will go into effect after a one-month notice period.
    • Hovercards: Inspired by the long-time Navigation popups Wikipedia feature, "hovercards" are in beta and available for trial by logged-in users. According to Wikimedia Highlights, hovercards are "brief previews of a Wikipedia article or other wiki page, displayed when the reader hovers over a link to that page. The preview consists of the lead paragraph and first image of the article."
  • Pirelli: A suspicious video titled "Cracking Wikipedia" appeared on the Ads of the World website, claiming to have promoted Pirelli, a tire manufacturing company, by replacing images on Wikipedia articles with similar items that include Pirelli logos in the background. Yet neither the Signpost, nor any readers of our Twitter post, has found any article on the English, Spanish, or Portuguese Wikipedias where such a replacement was done; this appears to have been a proposal or a simple mockup. An emailed inquiry to Havas Digital, the advertising agency listed as being behind the video, was quickly acknowledged but not substantively responded to within a week's time. (Editor's note: public access to the video was blocked after the publication of this article. In anticipation of such a move, the Signpost has stored a copy of the video, which originally appeared on the Ads of the World website here and on Youtube here.)

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2014-05-07

Foundation announces long-awaited new executive director

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By The ed17
Lila Tretikov: the WMF's new boss

In a live video stream on 1 May, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that Lila Tretikov will be replacing Sue Gardner, its executive director. Gardner, who has been in the position since 2007, declared her intention to leave more than a year ago.

Tretikov started her career in the technology world in 1999 as an engineer with the Sun-Netscape Alliance, the name used by Netscape during its acquisition by AOL. Over the succeeding years, she founded her own company and served as a senior director of development for TeleSpree before moving to SugarCRM, where she had been employed for the past eight years. Tretikov was also named as a 2012 finalist in the Female Executive of the Year – Business Services category.

Tretikov served most recently as SugarCRM's chief product officer, which is based in Cupertino, California, and produces Sugar, a customer relationship management system. The Foundation has described the company as an "open-source, cloud-based software vendor": "SugarCRM sponsored an open source project with more than 30,000 contributors and deployed by over 1.5 million individuals in 120 countries and 26 languages. Lila’s responsibilities during her tenure included product strategy, engineering, operations, IT, product management, professional services, marketing, and user experience."

According to the company's Wikipedia article, it was founded in 2004 to create a strictly open-source customer relationship management software. Having joined only a few years after its founding, Tretikov has a wealth of experience from its open-source activities, despite its August 2013 announcement that the software's newest version, Sugar 7, would not include a community edition, and a February 2014 community post notifying users that they would no longer be releasing new community versions.

Tretikov addressed this in the live announcement, saying that while she had championed community involvement with Sugar, the decision to discontinue new community editions was made by the company's board.

Having held these varied roles, Tretikov comes to the Foundation with a strong skill set. Her personal LinkedIn profile emphasizes the hiring and developing of people, technical management, and product design. These, and a surprisingly lengthy list of other required qualifications the Foundation was looking for, factored into their decision to hire her:


According to Gardner and Foundation board chair Jan-Bart de Vreede, "Lila is precisely what we set out to find."

In announcing Tretikov, Gardner described this complex set of requirements as forcing them to look for a "unicorn—one that we weren't sure existed". These arose because Gardner was given the unusual chance to grow into the role: under her leadership, the WMF has undergone fundamental changes. In 2007, its budget was only $3.5 million. By 2012, this had risen to an annual $22.3 million, the year in which a five-country fundraiser netted $25 million in just nine days. Over the same period, the Foundation has expanded beyond a simple server-supporting organization, funding programs from education to GLAM opportunities. The WMF itself was transplanted from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco, along with expansion from fewer than 10 employees to 160 by 2012 and 207 today.

Coverage of Tretikov's hiring was collated by Pete Forsyth, and included the New York Times (Noam Cohen), the Wall Street Journal, and Re/code. Follow-up stories in English appeared in Mashable and WebProNews.

In related news, Tretikov's partner Wil Sinclair has joined Wikipedia and Wikipediocracy, the latter leading to forum members offering their suggestions for reforming Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, including that he try to have various Foundation staff members fired. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-05-07/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-05-07/Humour

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