For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.
Unlike last year, Wikipedia viewers seem to have embraced the Christmas spirit, with three topics in the top 10 (and nine in the top 25) focused on the holiday season. The other theme this week was movies (which are really just another aspect of the Christmas season) with four slots about movies or people who were the topic of movies. And of course, the passing of the great Joe Cocker was noted as well.
So, the story goes that this typically absurd American male comedy film starring Seth Rogen (pictured) and James Franco, which lampoons a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, led to the November 2014 Sony Pictures Entertainment hack, and then subsequent internet threats to unleash "September the eleventh" levels of violence if the movie was released, which led movie theater chains to refuse to screen the film, which led Sony to pull the movie's release altogether, a reaction which a cybersecurity expert called "beyond the realm of stupid." (There's a reason you're never supposed to negotiate with terrorists; doing so is handing the fox the key to your chicken coop.) North Korea denied the hack, and saw its own flimsy internet connections flame out on December 22. On December 23, Sony announced the movie would now get a "limited release" on December 25, and on December 24, released the film online. The online release generated an "opening weekend" gross of $15 million, with two million downloads in the first three days, which goes to show that: a) it is possible to keep people safe without conceding to those who threaten them; b) controversy is free advertising and c) movie theatres are dead.
And, just like last year, the most queried element of the holiday season is not Christmas, but its less-celebrated addendum. Perhaps Americans remain puzzled over why their Commonwealth cousins get an extra day of Christmas each year, and what on Earth the Nativity has to do with pugilism (to be fair, no one really knows how Boxing Day got its name, and any stories you hear are pretty much stabs in the dark).
This Bollywood film starring Aamir Khan debuted on December 19. The Indian press seems to have liked it, with Bollywood Hungama calling it "a solid entertainer that will surely entertain the masses and classes alike", and reviewer Subhash K. Jha giving it 4 out of 5 stars, saying "'PK' is a film designed to warm the cockles of the heart." The plot revolves around the arrival a human-looking alien on earth who needs to recover a stolen piece of his equipment, and includes satire regarding the phenomenon Indian "godmen". The film grossed about US $25 million in its opening weekend and, in its first 11 days has already become the second-highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, with a worldwide box office of Rs4.34 billion ($68 million).
This American sniper, whose life was the subject of the appropriately named Clint Eastwood-directed film American Sniper, which went into wide release on Christmas Day, is considered the most lethal in US military history, with 160 confirmed kills. Unfortunately, he was murdered last year by a PTSD-afflicted veteran whom he had taken to a shooting range. Before he died, he had claimed that he had once punched former wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura in 2006 for badmouthing U.S. President Bush and the military. Ventura sued him for defamation, eventually getting a $1.8 million jury award. Last week, Ventura filed a new lawsuit directly against HarperCollins, who published Kyle's book, called, naturally, American Sniper.
The final instalment of The Hobbit film series debuted in New Zealand on December 11, and the United States on December 17. The film topped the US charts in its second weekend and, as of December 29, has already earned nearly $600 million worldwide.
The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550,000, apparently heedless of who actually died.
2014-12-31
Study tour controversy; class tackles the gender gap
A "study tour" by the ChandigarhMunicipal Corporation for the purpose of researching development projects has been the subject of much controversy and criticism in the Indian press. The trip, from August 31 to September 9, took 26 officials of Chandigarh, the capital of the northern Indian states of Haryana and Punjab, to Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu in south India, Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal in east India, and Port Blair, the capital of the territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the east of continental India. The trip has been criticised on a number of grounds: its cost, 2.78 million rupees (about 44 thousand US dollars), the fact that many officials were accompanied by relatives, that officials allegedly skipped meetings to go sightseeing, and that travel arrangements were made by a travel agency owned by a relative of one of the officials.
The trip has resulted in a 20 page report recently submitted to Chandigarh mayor Harphool Chandra Kalyan. The Hindustan Times described it as a "vague report" (December 28) consisting of material largely available on the government websites of the trip's travel destinations. The Indian Expressdescribed (December 29) the report in more detail. It noted a number of government websites from which material was taken "verbatim", with the introduction of new factual and spelling errors. It also noted that the report copied extensively from the Wikipedia articles for Port Blair and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. The Express wrote "the only original part are the photographs".
University class attempts to address gaps in Wikipedia coverage
Wikipedia editors are predominantly male. (Data as of April 2012)
The issue is that because Wikipedia is a cultural text and, therefore, participates in the creation of knowledge . . . what sort of knowledge is being created because only certain people are participating in the editing process? It passes as objective, it passes as universal knowledge, when, in fact, it comes from a very particular perspective — overwhelmingly white or overwhelmingly male.
Professor Williams assigned the class to edit Wikipedia pages of aboriginal women, then to create their own articles about them. Such efforts can help address the gender gap here, but this effort is an example of the difficulties outside efforts encounter when they unwittingly conflict with the expectations of Wikipedia editors and the policies of the encyclopedia. Metro noted that some of the articles created for the class had been "taken down". One article cited by Metro was about Métis blogger Samantha Nock. The student expressed her pride in her Wikipedia creation: "It's like my baby now and I don’t want it to be taken down. If it's taken down, I will revise it and put it back up." However, following the publication of the Metro article, the Wikipedia article on Nock was deleted after a discussion at Articles for Deletion.
There is a disconnect between outside observers who express surprise that articles like YouTube Poop exist while articles about aboriginal bloggers are deleted, and the Wikipedia editors who expect those articles to comply with established policies and formats. Until that disconnect is successfully addressed, efforts like this will struggle in combating the gender gap and other blind spots in Wikipedia coverage.
In brief
"The Impact of Wikipedia", a 2012 video starring Adrianne Wadewitz created by the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia bookshelf: Times Higher Educationreviews (January 1) the upcoming book by Nathaniel Tkacz, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness.
The MP from Wikipedia: On the December 26 edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme Today, Jimmy Wales suggested that votes in the UK's House of Commons should be conducted electronically. He said “The security risks would be minimal, you would have a good record of what people said and you would speed up the process so that Parliament could get more done."
Getting the last word: LiveSciencereports (December 24) that California Institute of Technology professor of geophysics Don L. Anderson's extensive preparations before his December 2 death of cancer included asking his relatives to update his Wikipedia article.
Wikipedia Free Ghana: In a press release (December 24), MTN Ghana announced that it is offering free mobile access to Wikipedia in Ghana as part of the Wikipedia Zero initiative.
Genealogical blues: In an interview (December 20) with The Independent, actress Anna Chancellor expressed disatisfaction with part of her Wikipedia article detailing genealogical links to a number of peers and other notable figures, including Jane Austen. (Chancellor portrayed Caroline Bingley in an adaptation of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.) Chancellor said "Can't you imagine? You've worked hard all your life to be an actress, or whatever you've done, and that is what's presented to you. Don't you think that's embarrassing? I don't enjoy being quoted as saying that's who I am, because I don't feel that is who I am." The section was removed following the publication of the interview on the grounds that it was largely unsourced.
Wikidata accepts the Open Data Publisher Award at the ODI Awards in London, 4 November 2014. Second from the right is team-member Magnus Manske, a researcher in the fields of high-throughput sequencing and data visualisation. Manske created MediaWiki and more recently has written some 100 tools on WMFlabs, many of them to facilitate contributions to Wikidata and the ways in which it is used.
Wikidata, Wikimedia's free linked database that supplies Wikipedia and its sister projects, is gearing up to submit a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. The proposal, supported by more than 25 volunteers and half a dozen European institutions as project partners, aims to create a virtual research environment (VRE) that will enhance the project's capacity for freely sharing scientific data.
The goal is to overcome the insular approach of conventional, feature-complete environments by building on Wikidata's existing community and role in sharing scientific data. Instead of secure, self-contained and often discipline-specific platforms, the push is designed to enhance the open collaborative functionalities that Wikidata already provides to enable new forms of research and public interaction among both professional and citizen scientists.
The Wikidata meets archeology symposium in Berlin, March 2013Wikidata's development teams in June 2014A Wikidata diagram in English explaining the terminology of a Wikidata statement, in this case for "Douglas Adams" (Q42).
Wikimedia projects have a long track-record of interaction with the research community, for example through Gene Wiki, which has been creating content on human genes since 2008. A blog post on the Gene Wiki's recent efforts to create Wikidata items for all human genes, followed by the publication of the underlying proposal, is what triggered the drafting of the present proposal.
This was closely followed by an announcement from Google that their collaborative knowledge base, Freebase, will be de-commissioned in early 2015, and that they look forward to the integration of Freebase into Wikidata, which is currently under discussion.
These developments came at the end of a solid year of progress for Wikidata, including increased usability. Through 2014, the local community is now the fourth-most-active editing community among Wikimedia projects—after the English Wikipedia, Commons, and the German Wikipedia. Externally, the project gained additional recognition by winning the Open Data Publisher Award 2014, presented by Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, and Nigel Shadbolt.
This proposal is significant because no other open collaborative project—or "virtual research environment", in EU parlance—can connect the free databases in the world across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. With the inclusion of Freebase into Wikidata in 2015, the project will be capable of providing a unique open service: for the first time, that will allow both citizens and professional scientists from any research or language community to integrate their databases into an open global structure, to publicly annotate, verify, criticise and improve the quality of available data, to define its limits, to contribute to the evolution of its ontology, and to make all this available to everyone, without any restrictions on use and reuse.
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The proposal is being prepared under the guidance of Wikimedia's long-serving volunteer for open science cooperation, biophysicist Daniel Mietchen. He works at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, the city where Wikidata's developmental team is located; the Museum will act as the institutional coordinator of the project. More than 10 institutions have signalled their interest in joining the endeavour as associate partners, in addition to the volunteers, Wikimedia Germany (which has been primarily responsible for developing Wikidata), and the other five European partner institutions. Research from one of them—the Open University of Catalonia—is also featured in this issue's Recent research.
Mietchen told the Signpost that the budget, between €1m and €2m, would be invested primarily in building technical infrastructure, improving Wikidata's two-way connections with external data sources (including their ontologies), and training scientists and interested members of the editing community. Succeeding in EU rounds is notoriously difficult; if approved, it would be by far the biggest competitive external grant for a Wikimedia project. Either way, the proposal will be a significant conceptual and methodological advance; because it is drafted under a CC-BY license, it is available to other proposers or funders to engage with and build on.
Even before the current proposal was conceived, the Wikidata community had been exploring ways of improving ties to scientific communities in several respects. Back in 2012, the German community held a joint workshop with scholars from universities that included Cambridge, Stanford and Oxford to investigate the usability of the project for research (Signpostcoverage). In 2013, Wikidata's WikiProject Chemistry discussed ways to collaborate with PubChem, one of the largest chemical databases.
Mietchen says that the team would welcome community members to participate in the drafting, to review the proposal text, or to help shape the advisory board and network of associate partners. The EU's application deadline is 14 January, so timely contributions are particularly helpful. Upcoming steps on the path to the finishing line are on the project page. Beyond that deadline, the proposal is intended to spark follow-ups with a disciplinary or regional focus, and as a seeding ground for the newly created WikiProject Wikidata for research to develop procedures for the coordination of future activities between the research and Wikidata communities.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-12-31/Serendipity
The Wiki Education Foundation, the separate non-profit that administers Wikipedia's Education Program in the US and Canada, recently ended their support of the campus ambassador program. The program was started in July 2010 as part of the Public Policy Initiative. Campus Ambassadors (with the epcampus flag) are meant to be a real-world Wikipedia representative on campus, interacting with the professors and students before these new editors are sent to Wikipedia. While campus ambassadors presumably remain part of Wikipedia's global Education program, students in the US and Canada may no longer be seeing these volunteers in their classrooms. I was one of those campus ambassadors and I did not take the news well. It hit me hard because being an ambassador was primarily what I joined Wikipedia for. I found out about the campus ambassador position in 2013 and decided to start racking up edits on Wikipedia in order to submit an application. I have always thought that although we cannot seem to stop Randy in Boise from editing, we can always try to recruit his antithesis.
Wikipedia is great for the literate self-selectors that can teach themselves by going through our numerous instructional pages. Just as our edit-a-thons accomplish outreach amongst those that will not be self-taught so too does our campus ambassador program reach those not already interested in wiki. Campus ambassadors put a face and a voice to the nebulous Wikipedia movement. For many coming to Wikipedia for the first time this real person in front of them was far more approachable and understandable. I felt utility in bringing the passion I have for the semantic wiki concept to college students so they would eagerly jump into it, too. Our campus ambassadors could instruct in a way our tutorials could not. When the program worked well, students and professors interacted with Wikipedia properly and some good academic content was added. Students not only got a grade for their class but they also contributed to living knowledge. They learned about both the reliability of Wikipedia and the community of editors, well beyond the academic facts learned in their class.
My criticism of the WEF has been that it never made an effort to manage those volunteer ambassadors. While professors like Adrianne Wadewitz could function as their own campus ambassadors, random professors that had heard about Wikipedia might assign their students to edit articles unaware Wikipedia had a formal program with which to participate and had no ambassador knocking on their office door. Some Wikipedians might be interested in volunteering as ambassadors but had no nearby classes using Wikipedia to interact with and no plan to initiate collaboration. Unless a Wikimedia chapter subsidized these activities no money was being allocated to support ambassador activity. Coverage was therefore uneven and in some cases ineffective. When classes of more than 40+ students taught by ill-informed professors arrived on-wiki without the preparation campus ambassadors could provide, editors bore the brunt of turmoil as articles were inundated with poorly-sourced material or copyright violations.
The WEF announced the change on December 18th, effective with the upcoming Spring semester. The announcement indicated that WEF sought to consolidate control of the program, making their own paltry staff accountable for interactions with the classes. But if the ambassadors we did have were insufficient to the task then reason dictates having zero ambassadors would not work any better. Unless the WEF planned to hire our intrepid volunteers I'm not sure what the way forward would be. What is the community's remaining education program in the US and Canada after all of its functions had been subsumed into the WEF?
Of course, the Education Program is less about teaching students and more about controlling the scholastic flood which arrives on our shores one way or the other. Wikipedia has been a magnet for some classes without Wikipedia's prodding and unless we put a person on campus these students will simply start editing without anyone on wiki knowing why. The education program noticeboard regularly documents these "stealth classes;" groups of new editors all sloppily editing in the same subject areas replying that their edits must stay due to a class assignment. I recall having to drop-in unannounced on one professor who failed to either reply to several talk page messages or return my numerous e-mails. They sent their students to Wikipedia with no regard for our guidelines or programs and I became the first Wikipedian they interacted with. Now I feel disempowered to conduct this sort of outreach and I fear many easily preventable problems will mount. Since the WMF fancies itself a grant-making organization I would suggest funding the ambassador program through organizations like the WEF and keeping coverage in both areas dense with institutes of higher learning and the schools where professors have historically been proponents of the program. I can only assume the WEF plans to effectively end the Education Program in the US and Canada by restricting course participation to the short list of professors they approve and banning the rest, batch reverting the edits of entire classes. Time will tell if this is the correct strategy.
The views expressed in these op-eds are those of the authors only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should email the Signpost's editor.
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