World Cup dominates for another week

This week it's still more and more World Cup, with five entries out of the top ten (and 14 out of the Top 25). While tennis and pop culture make a few cameo appearances, the Indonesian presidential election is the only hard news subject to draw sufficient attention to make the list. Since this week's data goes through 13 July, the date of the World Cup final, next week should see a great shift to other topics of interest.

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

For the week of 7 to 13 July 2014, 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	Amazon.com		1,234,236		The Amazon.com article suddenly reappeared in the top 25 a few months ago after a long absence; then it was No. 5 two weeks ago (466,100 views), and dropped out again last week (247,821). It had a big jump again this past week, all the way up to No. 1. It's always difficult to determine the reasons for the popularity of website articles (how many are simply misaimed clicks on the Google search list?), but another round of stories about Amazon and drones, as well as a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit complaining that Amazon is promoting in-app purchases by children may have contributed to this article's extreme popularity this week.
2	2014 FIFA World Cup		1,179,986		Down from 1,604,100 views last week, the tournament came to a close on 13 July with Germany defeating Argentina in the final match.
3	FIFA World Cup		1,049,265		The broader article on the history of the World Cup competition may have been accessed by people looking for the long view, but in truth it was probably more to do with people looking for the more specific article above. Up from 758,356 views last week.
4	Indonesian presidential election, 2014		653,933		The presidential election in Indonesia was held on 9 July, though results are not due until July 20. The race pits Prabowo Subianto and Hatta Rajasa against Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla.
5	Laverne Cox		552,258		The American transgender actress became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy award in an acting category; she was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black.
6	Lionel Messi		470,138		The Argentine forward and captain of the national team is a contender for the title of "best footballer on the planet", though he was unable to lead his team to victory in the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final on July 13.
7	Neymar		465,282		Brazil's star footballer retained great readership interest despite being knocked out by an injury in their July 4 match against Colombia. His absence led to Brazil's crushing loss in its next match against Germany; Neymar reportedly turned off his television to play poker after Germany scored its seventh (and final) goal.
8	Brazil national football team		451,828		Despite the heartbreaking loss to Germany, Brazil's fans can take solace in the fact that they have won five World Cup championships, more than any other country (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002).
9	Novak Djokovic		445,169		Djokovic won the men's singles title at the 2014 Wimbledon Championships on July 6, which day saw the bulk of the week's views for this entry.
10	Transformers: Age of Extinction		444,905		This action film, the fourth in the live-action Transformer film series, is down from #2 last week.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/In the media Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Technology report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Opinion

2014-07-16

Bot-created Wikipedia articles covered in the Wall Street Journal, push Cebuano over one million articles

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By The ed17

The Swedish Wikipedia's prolific Lsjbot, which has created a significant proportion of the site's 1.7 million articles and has nearly single-handedly pushed it to being the fourth-largest Wikipedia, was covered in the Wall Street Journal this week.

In its front page article, the US newspaper reported that the bot has created 2.7 million articles, which is apparently a reference to the Waray-Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias (where Lsjbot is also active), and that "on a good day", it creates 10,000 articles.

The Wall Street Journal's article comes as the Cebuano Wikipedia is now the twelfth Wikipedia to cross the million article mark, almost entirely from the boost of these formulaic articles. Of these, over 40% (Swedish, Waray-Waray, Cebuano, Vietnamese, and Dutch) have received significant help from automated article creation scripts. The highest depth of these five is Vietnamese, with 18; Swedish follows with 11, and the others are all under ten. By comparison, the German Wikipedia has a depth of 90.

The process of bot-created articles has proved controversial among Wikimedians; by way of commenting, German Wikipedian Achim Raschka pointed the Signpost to an entry Denis Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie, titled "Aguaxima". Diderot lamented that all they knew about the Aguaxima was that it was a plant in Brazil, yet he still had to describe it: "If all the same I mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something stupid than to find no article at all."

Disagreement with these edits even led to a proposal last year that would have banned the overuse of bot-created articles on Wikimedia projects.

Still, they are not the first Wikipedias to utilize bots to augment human article creators: in 2007, Volapük and Lombard were expanded by over 100,000 bot articles each; Tagalog saw a similar rise. Lombard editors later placed a moratorium on new automated articles and deleted most of them; the Lombard Wikipedia currently has around 31,000 articles. Volapük is hovering around 120,000, and the Tagalog Wikipedia has close to 63,000.

Waray-Waray, Cebuano, and Tagalog are three of the largest languages of the Philippines. Volapük is a 19th-century constructed language from Germany, and Lombard is a Romance language from northern Italy. Vietnamese is primarily limited to Vietnam, while Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname.

In brief

Related articles

2014-07-16

Make your own book with Wikiproject Wikipedia-Books
6 June 2011

ArbCom tally pending; Pediapress renderer; fundraiser update; unreferenced BLP drive
6 December 2010

Fundraisers start for Wikipedia and Citizendium; controversial content and leadership
15 November 2010

Wikipedia books launched worldwide
10 May 2010

Wikipedia-Books: Proposed deletion process extended, cleanup efforts
22 March 2010

New Book namespace created
11 January 2010

35k donated, WikiProject for Wikipedia-Books, 2M rated articles, and more
30 November 2009

Books extension enabled
2 March 2009

More articles

Make your own book with Wikiproject Wikipedia-Books 6 June 2011 ArbCom tally pending; Pediapress renderer; fundraiser update; unreferenced BLP drive 6 December 2010 Fundraisers start for Wikipedia and Citizendium; controversial content and leadership 15 November 2010 Wikipedia books launched worldwide 10 May 2010 Wikipedia-Books: Proposed deletion process extended, cleanup efforts 22 March 2010 New Book namespace created 11 January 2010 35k donated, WikiProject for Wikipedia-Books, 2M rated articles, and more 30 November 2009 Books extension enabled 2 March 2009