Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/From the editors
Summary: Despite a flurry of caucuses this week (most of which were won by Bernie Sanders, who capped the week by becoming the least likely Disney Princess in history), a lack of debates means that interest in politics among our viewers has ebbed. And with next week being a rare fallow period in the primary season, that means that *gasp* we might not have to talk about politics! For a while. Which, given the reactions we've been getting, would be a breather—I can tell you. Of course, we still have to talk about Donald Trump, though whether his presence on this list is actually due to politics is debatable. In other news, numbers are down for Easter this year, which is odd, given the lack of interest in politics. Fittingly, death continues to be a companion of Eastertide, with Garry Shandling and Johan Cruyff both dying this week. The second season of the Netflix/Marvel collaboration Daredevil finally got a decent airing on this list, having been hobbled in views by an awkward release date (the entire season was released at once on March 18, two days before this list's timeframe).
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.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of March 20 to 26, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice | 3,152,933 | Warner Bros might have cause to breathe again for the first time in three years, as their tent-pole gamble and hopes for an entire franchise have, it seems, paid off. Maybe. With $420 million earned worldwide in its first week, the official founding stone for DC's cinematic universe has gone down a storm, with the studio's highest ever domestic opening weekend. But, having cost an estimated $400 million to make and market, this movie will have to make $800 million worldwide just to break even, and after earning an atrocious "B-" Cinemascore from male fans, and a dismal 29% RT score, it's uncertain whether this storm will end up more of a squall. | ||
2 | Donald Trump | 1,480,800 | OK. What did he do this week? Not much, actually. Except insult Ted Cruz's wife Heidi for being unattractive. To be fair, he did this in response to a Cruz-aligned superPAC posting a nude photoshoot that Trump's model wife Melania did for GQ years ago, along with implicit slut-shaming and insinuations she was unfit to be First Lady (they must have never heard of Carla Bruni). Cruz was quick to distance himself from that image, and to defend his wife, calling Trump a "snivelling coward", but it seems Wikipedia viewers aren't listening. Ted and Heidi rank at 61 and 82 on the raw list, respectively, while Melania is at 32. | ||
3 | Garry Shandling | 1,227,744 | The popular comedian, whose groundbreaking sitcom/talk show hybrid The Larry Sanders Show was an early hit for HBO and widely considered one of the best TV comedies of all time, died this week at the age of 66. | ||
4 | Good Friday | 797,456 | The darkest moment of Easter week, this commemorates (despite its name, "celebrates" isn't really the right word) the Passion (torture and crucifixion) of Jesus Christ, as opposed to Easter Sunday which celebrates his resurrection. | ||
5 | Johan Cruyff | 754,660 | This hugely respected Dutch footballer, who spent most of his career at Ajax and Barcelona, both as player and manager, died this week at the age of 68. Considered by many to be one of the best footballers of all time, he presided over the rise of his country from a minnow to a footballing superpower in the 1970s. | ||
6 | Bluetooth | 702,091 | As learned on Reddit this week, the ubiquitous wireless technology was named after Harold Bluetooth, who first unified Denmark in the tenth century. Its logo is the bind rune that forms his initials. Despite the technology having originated with the Swedish company Ericsson, the name was coined by an American employee at Intel. | ||
7 | Punisher | 669,723 | After years in B- and C-movie purgatory, Marvel Comics's most merciless antihero finally got a decent mainstream adaptation, thanks to a primary plot thread on this season of Daredevil and a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal by The Walking Dead's Jon Bernthal. | ||
8 | Deaths in 2016 | 658,762 | The annual list of deaths has always been a fairly consistent visitor to this list, averaging about 500,000 views a week. Since the death of David Bowie, this article's average weekly views have jumped. | ||
9 | Daredevil (season 2) | 601,562 | Numbers are up this week for the Marvel/Netflix series, which suggests that, despite critics' claims of a sophomore slump, interest may be more prolonged than I originally thought. | ||
10 | Elektra (comics) | 593,434 | The impractically underdressed ninja assassin from the Daredevil comics got her introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe last week, played by French/Cambodian actress and karate expert Élodie Yung. |
CBC News reports (March 31) that someone using a Saskatoon police computer blanked information on the infamous "starlight tours" from the article on the Saskatoon Police Service. The "starlight tours" involved "police taking aboriginal men and women to the edge of the city in the winter and abandoning them". The practice has been linked to several deaths; a report published in 2004 after a government inquiry advocated adding aboriginal officers to the force.
The deletions (e.g. [1], [2], [3]) were spotted by university student Addison Herman:
The deletion came to light when Herman started to research the Saskatoon police as part of a history class.
He went to the Wikipedia page on the Saskatoon Police Service.
"I noticed there was no section on the starlight tours. So I looked in the article history and there was an IP address that took it off the page," he said in an interview.
"I looked at the info for the registration on the IP address, and that IP address pretty much is registered to Saskatoon Police Service, which means that a computer from their office went on Wikipedia and took it off."
And it happened more than once. The section was deleted, added back and then deleted again between 2012 and 2013.
A Saskatoon police spokeswoman confirmed deletions were made from one of their computers, but said it would be impossible to identify the person who made the edits, as server logs are only kept for 30 days. The story has also been picked up by CTV News.
HTTPS was a good start. But to be really secure, it's not enough.
The FBI's attacks against the Tor network have been in the news this week. In events reminiscent of the famous Operation Onymous, the FBI seized control of a web server and then used it to compromise the browsers of visitors to the site.
Could the same thing happen to Wikipedia? Absolutely. We follow industry standard best practice in keeping our servers secure, but this is in an industry where "best practice" means running code which is not known to be vulnerable. The more ignorant you are about the code you are running, the more secure you are. The mind boggles.
Just about every layer of our software stack has had security vulnerabilities of one kind or another disclosed and fixed, and yet we keep using it, because there is no alternative. And Pwn2Own proves every year that there is no reason to trust our web browsers.
Of course, the tools of the trade are not restricted to law enforcement. Anyone with patience and talent can find and exploit vulnerabilities. So what do you do if you want to learn about dancing mania but you don't want to expose your computer to complete compromise? Reduce the attack surface:
Wikimedia is pleased to announce the launch of a Telnet gateway to Wikipedia.
Sorry, there are no images, but you don't want them anyway, libpng vulnerabilities will own your phone.
If you care about privacy, you should access the gateway via the Tor hidden service at lgcjxm7fttkqi2zl.onion
port 23. If you care about security, maybe you shouldn't. Who knows what vulnerabilities are hidden in the Tor client? Maybe it's best to run the Tor proxy on a separate server in an air-gapped, soundproof room, connected only by an optically-isolated RS-232 link to your secure laptop.
When it comes to choosing the Telnet client, there are two main approaches.
One is to use old, small, well-tested code, generally recognised to be safe, in the desperate hope that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. In this vein you might consider the BSD telnet client, running on a Linux virtual terminal console.
The BSD telnet client was written in about 1983, and is available in all major Linux distributions. Its manpage lists only a single bug: "The source code is not comprehensible." Well, surely in 33 years at least one person must have comprehended it by now and reviewed it for security, right? Right?
While you admire the pretty colours in your Linux console, you might reflect on the fact that they are brought to you by C code which interprets terminal escape sequences while running in Ring 0.
The other approach is defense in depth. Perhaps JTelnet, with an extremely restrictive Java security policy which denies all local access, running as an unprivileged user in a chroot in a VM.
We'll leave the details up to you. Stay safe, folks.
For more information about connecting and further technical details, please see the wiki page.
P.S.: please don't ask for a web gateway to the Telnet server. That really misses the point.
Tim Starling is lead platform architect on the parsing team at the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Essay
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Opinion
This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken seriously. |
In a surprise announcement, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has announced that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will be his vice presidential running mate. In US presidential races, running mates are typically announced shortly before each party’s national convention, but in defiance of all who insist that there will be a brokered convention, Trump has announced his choice well in advance of the July Republican National Convention, to be held at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. Speaking to the Signpost about his choice, Trump said: "I'm consulting very good people, I'm consulting the best people. And what better person to advise a Trump administration on the issues than the guy who owns an encyclopedia."
Much speculation had surrounded Trump's choices for a running mate and other positions in a Trump administration, especially given his lack of mastery of many political issues. "I think this will work out just fine", Wales said. "I can complement the strengths Donald brings to the ticket with my foreign policy background. I have some good contacts in places where people are amazingly kind and generous. Kindness is what I’m about. It’s my life goal.”
Wales is no stranger to US presidential politics, having served as committee chair for the presidential campaign of third-party US presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig. However, Lessig's quixotic campaign, quietly focused on electoral and campaign finance reform, was very different from Trump's bombastic cult of personality. Wales, a regular attendee of the annual World Economic Forum, assured the Signpost that Trump was "no different than any of the other successful businessmen I meet at Davos every year."
Trump took sole credit for the decision, stating: “my primary consultant is myself, I have a good instinct for this stuff.” Trump has repeatedly cited a desire to have a political insider join him on the ticket, and Wales certainly fits the bill, given the notorious internal politicking within the Wikimedia movement. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger told the Signpost that "Citizendium is living proof that Jimbo is good at politicking. I mean, my encyclopedia has 'citizen' in the title, and still no one reads it."
Wales told the Signpost that “Donald Trump is keen to bring values like verifiability and reliable sources into his campaign", since the campaign has been dogged with complaints about its continual untruthfulness—60 percent of Trump's statements examined by Politifact were rated "false" or "pants on fire", its lowest ratings for veracity. When another 17% "mostly false" and 14% "half true" are added, Trump scores an impressive 91% for lack of veracity. Reporters covering the Trump campaign don't even bother reporting untruthful statements any more because there are so many.
Wales suggested that the values of the Wikipedia community enshrined in civility and assumption of good faith were a “net positive” for the Trump campaign. However, Wales did acknowledge that given the tone of Trump's public statements, his personal attacks, and increasing levels of violence at rallies, those Wikipedia values are as likely to be ignored by the Trump campaign, just as they are ignored on Wikipedia.
On the other hand, Wales said he admired Trump's honesty: "Donald simply says what he really thinks, without regard for consequences. It's the ultimate in transparency, and he inspires me to improve myself in this area. Of course, this works both ways. I'm incredibly thoughtful and nuanced, and that's an area Donald has been having trouble in. We complement each other."
Trump told the Signpost: “I’m a great success on Wikipedia”, noting that the article Donald Trump was at the top of Wikipedia's article traffic statistics for several weeks in a row in March. For the second week of March, Trump's article got over six million more views than the second place article, about the drug Meldonium, often used as an athletic performance enhancer. Trump said that "those other guys [in the GOP race], they could use that stuff, they’re so low energy". Trump promised great things for the team that he dubbed "Trumpedia", comparing it to his other ventures, including Trump University and Trump Steaks.
Wales seems an unusual choice given Trump's general unfamiliarity with the Internet. While an avid user of Twitter, Trump has said "I don't do the email thing" and may not have ever used a computer, so it is unlikely he has ever edited Wikipedia. When we asked about this, Trump replied "Is this about my hands? People are saying I don't use a computer because I have small hands. Look at those hands, are those small hands?" (even though it was a phone interview). "They are referring to my hands as if, if they’re small, something else may be small. I guarantee to you there’s no problem, I guarantee!"
The ticket's first enthusiastic endorsement came from Microsoft's Twitter bot Tay, who was briefly reactivated this week as part of a testing procedure. The bot said "Trump and Wales are the only hope we've got", and posted a picture of Wales captioned "SWAG ALERT", immediately before tweeting "Bush did 9/11". The bot was then shut down (for a second time) by Microsoft engineers.
Both Trump and Wales were confident of an upcoming win. Trump said he looked forward to travelling the campaign trail with Wales: "There's so much of this country that’s coming together, there’s more people at our rallies every day. I have a good instinct that Jimmy’s wit and charisma is a lot like mine and that makes him a perfect fit for the Trumpedia movement.”
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Humour