Media coverage of the Arnnon Geshuri no-confidence vote

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

Reviewed by Brian Keegan

Wikipedia pages are edited with varying levels of consistency: stubs may only have a dozen or fewer revisions and controversial topics might have more than 10,000 revisions. However, this editing activity is not evenly spaced out over time either: some revisions occur in very quick succession while other revisions might persist for weeks or months before another change is made. Many social and technical systems exhibit "bursty" qualities of intensive activity separated by long periods of inactivity. In a pre-print submitted to arXiv, a team of physicists at the Belgian Université de Namur and Portuguese University of Coimbra examine this phenomenon of "burstiness" in editing activity on the English Wikipedia.^[1]

The authors use a database dump containing the revision history until January 2010 of 4.6 million English Wikipedia pages. Filtering out pages and editors with fewer than 2000 revisions, bots, and edits from unregistered accounts, the paper adopts some previously-defined measures of burstiness and cyclicality in these editing patterns. The measures of editors' revisions' burstiness and memory fall outside of the limits found in prior work about human dynamics, suggesting different mechanisms are at work on Wikipedia editing than in mobile phone communication, for example.

Using a fast Fourier transform, the paper finds the 100 most active editors have signals occurring at a 24-hour frequency (and associated harmonics) indicating they follow a circadian pattern of revising daily as well as differences by day of week and hour of day. However, the 100 most-revised pages lack a similar peak in the power spectrum: there is no characteristic hourly, daily, weekly, etc. revision pattern. Despite these circadian patterns, editors' revision histories still show bursty patterns with long-tailed inter-event times across different time windows.

The paper concludes by arguing, "before performing an action, we must overcome a “barrier”, acting as a cost, which depends, among many other things, on the time of day. However, once that “barrier” has been crossed, the time taken by that activity no longer depends on the time of day at which we decided to perform it. ... It could be related to some sort of queuing process, but we prefer to see it as due to resource allocation (attention, time, energy), which exhibits a broad distribution: shorter activities are more likely to be executed next than the longer ones."

Reviewed by Brian Keegan

Google Trends is widely used in academic research to model the relationship between information seeking and other social and behavioral phenomenon. However, Wikipedia pageview data can provide a superior – if underused – alternative that has attracted some attention for public health and economic modeling, but not to the same extent as Google Trends. The authors cite the relative openness of Wikipedia pageview data, the semantic disambiguation, and absolute counts of activity in contrast to Google Trends' closed API, semantic ambiguity of keywords, and relative query share data. However, Trends data (at a weekly level) does go back to 2004, while pageview data (at an hourly level) is only available from 2008.

In a peer-reviewed paper published by PLoS ONE, a team of physicists perform a variety of time series analyses to evaluate changes in attention around the "big data" topic of Hadoop.^[2] Defining two key constructs of relevance and representation based on the interlanguage links as well as hyperlinks to/from other concepts, they examine changes in these features over time. In particular, changes in the articles' content and attention occurred in concert with the release of new versions and the adoption of the technology by new firms.

The time series analyses (and terms used to refer to them) will be difficult for non-statisticians to follow, but the paper makes several promising contributions. First, it provides a number of good critiques of research relying exclusive on Google Trends data (outlined above). Second, it provides some methods for incorporating behavioral data from strongly related topics and examining these changes over time in a principled manner. Third, the paper examines behavior across multiple languages editions rather than focusing solely on the English Wikipedia. The paper points to ways in which Wikipedia is an important information sources for tracking publication and recognition of new topics.

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

This paper^[3] data mines Wikipedia's biographies, focusing on individuals' longevity, profession and cause of death. The authors are not the first to observe that the majority of Wikipedia biographies are about sportspeople (half of them soccer players), followed by artists and politicians. But they do make some interesting historical observations, such as that the sport rises only in the 20th century (particularly from the 1990s), that politics surpassed religion in the 13th century, until it was surpassed by sport, and so on. The authors divide the biographies into public (politicians, businessmen, religion) and private (artists and sportspeople) and note that it was only in the last few decades that the second group started to significantly outnumber the first; they conclude that this represents a major shift in societal values, which they refer to as "hidden revolution in human priorities". It is an interesting argument, though the paper is unfortunately completely missing the discussion of some important topics, such as the possible bias introduced by Wikipedia's notability policies.

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

This paper^[4] looks into gender inequalities in Wikipedia articles, presenting a computational method for assessing gender bias in Wikipedia along several dimensions. It touches on a number of interesting questions, such as whether the same rules are used to determine whether women and men are notable; whether there is linguistic bias, and whether articles about men and women have similar structural properties (e. g., similar meta-data, and network properties in the hyperlink network).

They conclude that notability guidelines seem to be more strictly enforced for women than for men, that linguistic bias exists (ex. one of the four words most strongly associated with female biographies is "husband", whereas such family-oriented words are much less likely to be found in biographies of male subjects), and that as the majority of biographies are about men and men tend to link more to men than to women, this lowers visibility of female biographies (for example, in search engines like Google). The authors suggest that Wikipedia community should consider lowering notability requirements for women (controversial), and adding gender-neutral language requirements to the Manual of Style (a much more sensible proposal).

Reviewed by Tilman Bayer

A survey^[5] of 372 anesthesists and critical care providers in Austria and Australia found that "In order to get a fast overview about a medical problem, physicians would prefer Google (32%) over Wikipedia (19%), UpToDate (18%), or PubMed (17%). 39% would, at least sometimes, base their medical decisions on non peer-reviewed resources. Wikipedia is used often or sometimes by 77% of the interns, 74% of residents, and 65% of consultants to get a fast overview of a medical problem. Consulting Wikipedia or Google first in order to get more information about the pathophysiology, drug dosage, or diagnostic options in a rare medical condition was the choice of 66%, 10% or 34%, respectively." (A 2012 literature review found that "Wikipedia is widely used as a reference tool" among clinicians.)

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.

• "How do Twitter, Wikipedia, and Harrison's Principles of Medicine describe heart attacks?"^[6] From the abstract: "For heart attacks, the chapters from Harrison's had higher Jaccard similarity to Wikipedia than Braunwald's or Twitter. For palpitations, no pair of sources had a higher Jaccard (token) similarity than any other pair. For no source was the Jaccard (token) similarity attributable to semantic similarity. This suggests that technical and popular sources of medical information focus on different aspects of medicine, rather than one describing a simplified version of the other."
• "Information-seeking behaviour for epilepsy: an infodemiological study of searches for Wikipedia articles"^[7] From the abstract: "Fears and worries about epileptic seizures, their impact on driving and employment, and news about celebrities with epilepsy might be major determinants in searching Wikipedia for information."
• "Wikipedia and neurological disorders"^[8] From the abstract: "We determined the highest search volume peaks to identify possible relation with online news headlines. No relation between incidence or prevalence of neurological disorders and the search volume for the related articles was found. Seven out of 10 neurological conditions showed relations in search volume peaks and news headlines. Six of these seven peaks were related to news about famous people suffering from neurological disorders, especially those from showbusiness. Identification of discrepancies between disease burden and health seeking behavior on Wikipedia is useful in the planning of public health campaigns. Celebrities who publicly announce their neurological diagnosis might effectively promote awareness programs, increase public knowledge and reduce stigma related to diagnoses of neurological disorders."
• "Medical student preferences for self-directed study resources in gross anatomy"^[9] From the abstract: "To gain insight into preclinical versus clinical medical students' preferences for SDS resources for learning gross anatomy, [...] students were surveyed at two Australian medical schools, one undergraduate-entry and the other graduate-entry. Lecture/tutorial/practical notes were ranked first by 33% of 156 respondents (mean rank ± SD, 2.48 ± 1.38), textbooks by 26% (2.62 ± 1.35), atlases 20% (2.80 ± 1.44), videos 10% (4.34 ± 1.68), software 5% (4.78 ± 1.50), and websites 4% (4.24 ± 1.34). Among CAL resources, Wikipedia was ranked highest."

• "Transparency, control, and content generation on Wikipedia: editorial strategies and technical affordances"^[10] From the abstract: "Even though the process of social production that undergirds Wikipedia is rife with conflict, power struggles, revert wars, content transactions, and coordination efforts, not to mention vandalism, the article pages on Wikipedia shun information gauges that highlight the social nature of the contributions. Rather, they are characterized by a “less is more” ideology of design, which aims to maximize readability and to encourage future contributions. ... Closer investigation reveals that the deceivingly simple nature of the interface is in fact a method to attract new collaborators and to establish content credibility. As Wikipedia has matured, its public notoriety demands a new approach to the manner in which Wikipedia reflects the rather complex process of authorship on its content pages. This chapter discusses a number of visualizations designed to support this goal, and discusses why they have not as yet been adopted into the Wikipedia interface."
• "Policies for the production of content in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"^[11] From the abstract: "It is a case study with qualitative approach that had Laurence Bardin's content analysis as theoretical and methodological reference."
• "Validity claims of information in face of authority of the argument on Wikipedia"^[12] From the abstract: "proposes to approach the claims of validity made by Jürgen Habermas in the face of the authority of the better argument. It points out that Wikipedia is built as an emancipatory discourse according to Habermas' argumentative discourse considering the process of discursive validation of information."
• "Wikipedia and history: a worthwhile partnership in the digital era?"^[13]
• "Is Wikipedia really neutral? A sentiment perspective study of war-related Wikipedia articles since 1945"^[14] From the abstract: "The results obtained so far show that reasons such as people’s feelings of involvement and empathy can lead to sentiment expression differences across multilingual Wikipedia on war-related topics; the more people contribute to an article on a war-related topic, the more extreme sentiment the article will express; different cultures also focus on different concepts about the same war and present different sentiments towards them."
• "The heart work of Wikipedia: gendered, emotional labor in the world's largest online encyclopedia"^[15] (CHI 2015 Best Papers award, slides)
• "Knowledge quality of collaborative editing in Wikipedia: an integrative perspective of social capital and team conflict"^[16] From the abstract: "Despite the abundant researches on Wikipedia, to the best of our knowledge, no one has considered the integration of social capital and conflict. [...] our study proposes the nonlinear relationship between task conflict and knowledge quality instead of linear relationships in prior studies. We also postulate the moderating effect of task complexity. [...] This paper aims at proposing a theoretical model to examine the effect of social capital and conflict, meanwhile taking the task complexity into account."

• "Visualizing Wikipedia article and user networks: extracting knowledge structures using NodeXL"^[17]
• "Utilising Wikipedia for text mining applications"^[18] From the abstract: "Wikipedia ... has proven to be one of the most valuable resources in dealing with various problems in the domain of text mining. However, previous Wikipedia-based research efforts have not taken both Wikipedia categories and Wikipedia articles together as a source of information. This thesis serves as a first step in eliminating this gap and throughout the contributions made in this thesis, we have shown the effectiveness of Wikipedia category-article structure for various text mining tasks. ... First, we show the effectiveness of exploiting Wikipedia for two classification tasks i.e., 1- classifying the tweets being relevant/irrelevant to an entity or brand, 2- classifying the tweets into different topical dimensions such as tweets related with workplace, innovation, etc. To do so, we define the notion of relatedness between the text in tweet and the information embedded within the Wikipedia category-article structure."
• "Integrated parallel sentence and fragment extraction from comparable corpora: a case study on Chinese-Japanese Wikipedia"^[19] From the abstract: "A case study on the Chinese--Japanese Wikipedia indicates that our proposed methods outperform previously proposed methods, and the parallel data extracted by our system significantly improves SMT [ statistical machine translation ] performance."
• "How structure shapes dynamics: knowledge development in Wikipedia – a network multilevel modeling approach"'^[20] From the abstract: "The data consists of the articles in two adjacent knowledge domains: psychology and education. We analyze the development of networks of knowledge consisting of interlinked articles at seven snapshots from 2006 to 2012 with an interval of one year between them. Longitudinal data on the topological position of each article in the networks is used to model the appearance of new knowledge over time. [...] Using multilevel modeling as well as eigenvector and betweenness measures, we explain the significance of pivotal articles that are either central within one of the knowledge domains or boundary-crossing between the two domains at a given point in time for the future development of new knowledge in the knowledge base." (cf. earlier paper coauthored by the same researchers: "Knowledge Construction in Wikipedia: A Systemic-Constructivist Analysis")

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2016-01-27

Death and taxes

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By Milowent

Notable deaths continue to draw high notice on Wikipedia for another week. And though Glenn Frey's (#1) passing didn't generate nearly as much attention as David Bowie (#1 last week, #4 this week), it is yet another high profile death leading the chart. And even the pop culture entries are serious, with convict Steven Avery (#3), the subject of the documentary Making a Murderer (#7), riding high for yet another week, and survival epic The Revenant at #2. Isn't it time for another vacuous chart topper we can simply get a laugh from, like twerking?

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 January 17 to 23, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Glenn Frey		1,861,483		The founding member of American rock band the Eagles (#8) died on January 18. Though only about 15% of the whopping 11.7 million views David Bowie got on last week's chart, Frey was a highly successful artist on a much more human scale.
2	The Revenant (2015 film)		1,283,947		Alejandro González Iñárritu's Western survival epic starring Leonardo di Caprio (#23, pictured) continues to be popular.
3	Steven Avery		1,062,963		Avery is an American prisoner who is the subject of the popular new Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer which was released on December 18. (Episode 1 is available free on YouTube.) Avery served 18 years in prison, from 1985 to 2003, after being framed by the local police for a sexual assault he plainly did not commit. During his subsequent civil lawsuit for compensation, during a period of explosive depositions, he was charged with the murder of a local photographer, and later convicted. The documentary is compelling to watch, and it causing a fair amount of controversy, and thus bringing continuing attention to this article.
4	David Bowie		1,052,526		Contrary to popular belief, chameleons do not change colour to match their surroundings; they change colour to reflect their mood and their relationships with others. From the moment that David Robert Jones changed his name to David Bowie, he proved himself chameleonic in the true sense. His career was a kaleidoscope of reinventions; not just of music and appearance but of persona, profession and gender identity, each time anticipating the reactions of his audience, and usually forcing them to catch up with him. Fiercely intelligent and unafraid to show it, he also anticipated the effects of technological change, releasing Space Oddity five days before the launch of Apollo 11, and using the Internet to interact with fans years before the age of social media. His work as an actor also frequently ran leaps ahead of audiences, whether as an alien in Nicolas Roeg's initially ill-regarded but now lauded The Man Who Fell To Earth, or as Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson's Labyrinth, a critical bomb that would go on to become a fixture of children's video libraries, and earn him an entire new generation of fans. But his death earlier this month at the age of 69 may prove his greatest leap ahead yet; while ill with cancer for the preceding 18 months, he refused to publicise his condition and instead used his last time on Earth to compose Blackstar, one of his best reviewed albums in decades. Just as Bowie lived as art, he died as art, and the video for "Lazarus", the second single from Blackstar, which featured a suddenly aged Bowie blindfolded on a hospital bed, would become an epitaph to the world. Once again, we had to catch up with him, and the shock of his unexpected death shivered across his pan-generational fanbase, pushing Blackstar to #1 in the US album chart, astoundingly for the first time, and giving him not only the highest single-day tally of YouTube VEVO views ever recorded, but also, incidentally, the first ever eight-figure weekly Wikipedia viewcount, with over 11.7 million views on last week's chart.
5	Martin Luther King, Jr.		945,522		The American holiday dedicated to him fell on January 18 this year.
6	Star Wars: The Force Awakens		884,009		The reignition of the Star Wars remains in the Top 10 for another week.
7	Making a Murderer		801,724		See #3.
8	Eagles (band)		782,648		See #1. The Eagles of Death Metal were on the chart in November, and they got their name from this band, as a sarcastic reference. Do people in their 20s listen to the Eagles today? I have no idea. Though wildly popular in their time, their music is also clearly of their time, and did not pretend to be otherwise.
9	Deaths in 2016		684,964		The annual list of deaths is usually fairly consistent in weekly views, but is up again for second week.
10	Suicide Squad (film)		681,863		A superhero film slated for release on August 5 in the United States.

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2016-01-27

This week's featured content

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By Armbrust

---

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 17 to 23 January.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Featured articles

Six featured articles were promoted this week.

• The Yugoslav monitor Sava (nominated by Peacemaker67) was a Temes-class river monitor built for the Austro-Hungarian Navy as SMS Bodrog. During World War I she was part of the Danube Flotilla, and fought the Serbian and Romanian armies from Belgrade to the mouth of the Danube. In the closing stages of the war, she was captured by the Serbs, and was transferred to the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and renamed Sava. During World War II, Sava served with the 1st Monitor Division. She laid mines in the Danube near the Romanian border, and fought off several attacks by the Luftwaffe. After the war she was raised once again, and was refurbished to serve in the Yugoslav Navy. As of 2014, Sava was still in service as a gravel barge.
• Norodom Ranariddh (nominated by Mr Tan) (born 1944) is a Cambodian prince, politician and law academic. He is the second son of Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia and a half-brother of the current king, Norodom Sihamoni. He was the first Prime Minister of Cambodia, serving between 1993 to 1997, and subsequently as the President of the National Assembly between 1998 and 2006.
• Isabella Beeton (nominated by SchroCat) (1836–1865) was an English journalist, editor and writer. Her name is particularly associated with her first book, the 1861 work Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. In 1857 Beeton began writing for The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. She translated French fiction and wrote the cookery column, though all the recipes were plagiarised from other works, or sent in by the magazine's readers.
• Banksia caleyi (nominated by Casliber) is a species of woody shrub of the family Proteaceae, native to Western Australia. Commonly known as the red lantern banksia or Caley's banksia, it generally grows as a dense shrub up to 2 m (7 ft) tall, has serrated leaves and unusual red, pendent inflorescences which are generally hidden in the foliage. It was named in honour of the English botanist George Caley, and has currently no recognised subspecies.
• The Lexington-Concord Sesquicentennial half dollar (nominated by Wehwalt) was a commemorative coin struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1925 in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The coin was designed by Chester Beach. The coins were sold for $1, and were vended at the anniversary celebrations in Lexington and in Concord; they were sold at banks across New England. Although just over half of the authorized mintage of 300,000 was struck, almost all of the coins that were minted were sold.
• The Peresvet class (nominated by Sturmvogel 66) was a group of three pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Russian Navy around the end of the 19th century. The class had three ships, which were all lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Peresvet and Pobeda participated in the Battles of Port Arthur and the Yellow Sea and were sunk during the Siege of Port Arthur. They were salvaged after the Japanese captured Port Arthur and incorporated into the Imperial Japanese Navy. Peresvet was sold back to the Russians, and sank after hitting German mines in the Mediterranean in early 1917. Pobeda, renamed Suwo, remained in Japanese service and participated in the Battle of Tsingtao in late 1914. The ship was disarmed in 1922 and probably scrapped around that time. Oslyabya sailed to the Far East with the Second Pacific Squadron to relieve the Russian forces blockaded in Port Arthur and was sunk at the Battle of Tsushima.

Featured lists

Three featured lists were promoted this week.

• Shakib Al Hasan (born 1987) is a professional cricket player who plays for the Bangladesh national cricket team. With 15 five-wicket hauls across all formats of international cricket (nominated by Aftabuzzaman and Vensatry), he ranks equal 40th in the all-time list, and first among his countrymen. Shakib's first five-wicket haul came against New Zealand during the first Test of the 2008–09 home series; he took seven wickets for 36 runs in New Zealand's first innings.
• The 2015 Giro d'Italia was the first of cycling's Grand Tours to take place in the 2015 road cycling season. It was the 98th edition of the competition. The race started on 9 May in San Lorenzo al Mare and ended on 31 May in Milan. 22 teams and 198 cyclists (nominated by Relentlessly) were registered for the event. The 17 UCI WorldTeams were automatically invited and obliged to attend the race. Additionally five UCI Professional Continental teams were awarded wildcard places by RCS Sport, the organisers of the Giro. As there were nine men in each team, the initial startlist consisted of 198 riders. However, as LottoNL–Jumbo's George Bennett was forced to withdraw before the race start, only 197 riders started the first stage.
• Lost in Translation is a 2003 comedy-drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. The film focuses on the relationship between a washed-up movie star, Bob Harris, and a recent college graduate in an unhappy marriage, Charlotte, over the course of one week in Tokyo. Lost in Translation received awards and nominations in a variety of categories (nominated by Johanna), particularly for Coppola's direction and screenwriting as well as the lead acting performances from Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. The film received 63 awards from 113 nominations.

Featured pictures

Seven featured pictures were promoted this week.

• 
  Hollywood Sign
  (created by Der Wolf im Wald; nominated by Nikhilb239)
• 
  Camille Saint-Saëns
  (created by Pierre Petit; restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden)
• 
  Charles Gounod
  (created by Nadar; restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden)
• 
  Promotional flyer for Supir Istimewa
  (created by the Persari Film Corporation; restored and nominated by Crisco 1492)
• 
  Jacques Offenbach
  (created by Nadar; restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden)
• 
  William Grant Still
  (created by Carl Van Vechten; restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden)
• 
  View from Stalheim
  (created by Johan Christian Dahl; nominated by Godot13 and Hafspajen)

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