Wikipedia policy suppresses sharing of information
- This article written by the Signpost editorial board.
Recent prominent events and decisions on English Wikipedia have focused on what information, published elsewhere on the web, can be appropriately republished or linked on Wikipedia itself. Such questions about information and ethics are essential to any serious effort to organize and publish information. Here at the Signpost, we aim to present debates like this to our readership, and offer analysis to help our readers track the progress of various discussions, and participate more effectively.
Typically, the proper role of the Signpost is not to take a position, but to offer a platform for exploration and reflection. In July 2016, for instance, we ran an op-ed piece from Wikipedian Doc James, who argued in favor of permitting the republication of information that is already public; and in the spirit of a healthy and diverse discourse, we would gladly run essays arguing otherwise, provided they are rooted in an exploration of what will help Wikipedia thrive.
On this topic, however, our relationship to Wikipedia is more complex. Wikipedia is not merely the subject matter of the Signpost; it is also the platform on which the publication rests. For us to play a useful role in sharing information and stimulating discourse about Wikipedia, we must be able to link to relevant source material; our writers and editors must be able to speak without fear of retaliation or censure. As with all publications, our ability to inform our readership relies on freedom of the press. We must regard any policy or enforcement that might have a chilling effect on our contributors’ words as a potential threat to our core purpose.
Wikipedia's policies on no personal attacks and harassment contain language that if strictly interpreted would severely impede our ability to bring you the news; and recent discussions suggest that strict interpretation is to be expected. As of this writing, Wikipedia’s harassment policy states (emphasis added):
Posting another editor's personal information is harassment, unless that person had voluntarily posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia. Personal information includes legal name, date of birth, identification numbers, home or workplace address, job title and work organisation, telephone number, email address, other contact information, or photograph, whether any such information is accurate or not. Posting such information about another editor is an unjustifiable and uninvited invasion of privacy and may place that editor at risk of harm outside their activities on Wikipedia. This applies to the personal information of both editors and non-editors.
Like any news outlet, the Signpost routinely publishes quotations from, and links to, a wide variety of materials on the web, including personal web pages, blog posts, press releases, affiliate sites, and wikis other than English Wikipedia. In many cases—and for no nefarious purpose—those public pages contain information that the definition above would categorize as “personal”, though Wikipedia policy may be the only framework that categorizes it that way. Thus, if the Signpost is to carefully adhere to a strict interpretation of current Wikipedia policy, we are forced to curtail the quantity and quality of information we offer our readers.
This state of affairs is not desirable for any news outlet that hopes to keep its readers informed. In the short term, we will append a short message, linking to this editorial, to the bottom of any story in which we must compromise our intended words to comply with Wikipedia policy. In the longer term, we look forward to a day when Wikipedia’s policies can adequately protect individuals’ genuine privacy interests while simultaneously supporting various legitimate discussions involving identity and related topics.
The Signpost loses and gains a co-editor-in-chief
User:Go Phightins! is stepping down from his position as the Signpost's co-editor-in-chief today:
It is not without a degree of disappointment that today I announce that effective immediately, I will be stepping down as co-editor-in-chief of the Signpost. My tenure has lasted 18 months, but due to real-life obligations, there have been prolonged droughts where I have been barely able or not at all able to contribute. It is not fair to the remainder of the team that produces this publication for me to continue to hold a title without contributing my fair share. Therefore, now is a good time for me to step back. I plan to continue to advise and contribute as I can in the future, but will do so in a reduced capacity.
I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to The ed17 for offering me (a.k.a. dragooning me) to take on this responsibility in January 2015, Rob for serving with me for most of this tenure and taking on a lion's share of the publication process, Tony for his unwavering support of the publication's goals and reliable reporting as one of our most prolific writers, the entire Signpost editorial board for their consistent work in churning out issue after issue, and especially Andreas for his willingness to be drafted into service on this project and his huge body of work maintaining it.
My sincerest hope is that the publication continues on its current upward trajectory while attracting new blood to help give those who have been longstanding contributors a break to avoid burnout.
To that end, it is with surpassing pleasure that we announce that Pete Forsyth will be joining us as our new co-editor-in-chief. Pete has been a Wikipedian since 2006, and has covered Wikipedia happenings in the Signpost, and in news outlets from USA Today to the blogs of Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation. We are excited to have him join us in this official capacity.
As always, we are eager for new contributors, and now is a great time to consider whether joining The Signpost team is something you are willing to do. Please contact Rosiestep if that's something you would be interested in doing.
Thank you for your continued loyal readership!
Sincerely,
Ben Go Phightins!
Thank you, Ben, for your many years of service to the Signpost. I am delighted that you will continue to be a member of the Signpost editorial board, and contribute as and when time allows.
I am equally delighted to welcome Pete Forsyth as my new co-editor-in-chief. Pete brings outstanding smarts, insight and experience to the position, and I couldn't have wished for a better replacement. I look forward to our work together, covering news in and around the Wikimedia world. AK
Foundation presents results of harassment research, plans for automated identification; Wikiconference submissions open
Foundation presents results of harassment research, plans for automated identification
The figures are deeply unsettling: 28% of editors say they have experienced criticism of their work, 24% believe that other editors are "not fun to work with", and 11% have experienced harassment. This was the introduction of a presentation by Maggie Dennis—the WMF’s director of support and safety and interim senior director of community engagement—about onwiki harassment to the WMF's monthly Metrics and Activities Meeting on 28 July. In the Foundation's consultation late last year, its workshop in February 2016, and in the results of its survey in 16 languages, stories have emerged that highlight the "frustration, shame, and helplessness" of harassed editors, she said. Among the key findings were that:
- females are more likely to experience harassment than males;
- more than half of those who reported harassment subsequently decreased their onwiki participation;
- 42% found that their attempts to deal with harassment were ineffective;
- half of those who witnessed harassment avoid becoming involved;
- two-thirds of those who did intervene experienced retaliation from the protagonist
Among the most common forms of harassment reported in the slide at 17:31 were content vandalism (27%), trolling or flaming (24%), name-calling (17%), discrimination (14%), and stalking (13%). Less prevalent but more concerning were threats of violence (6%), outing (6%), impersonation (5%), hacking (3%), and revenge porn (2%). Unspecified experiences were rated at 15%.
What becomes clear from viewing Maggie Dennis's presentation is that harassment is a highly prevalent behaviour at the interface of three problematic phenomena that continue to plague the WMF's sites: the gender gap, the flatlining of editor numbers, and the maintenance of the quality of the sites for readers. The Foundation is investigating measures to address the harassment problem in the communities; proposals for impending action include the default protection of user pages, the creation of a help page on all Wikipedias, and research into current mechanisms for dealing with harassment.
Dennis then introduced Ellery Wulczyn, from Wikimedia Research, who explained the progress of a program to develop an algorithmic approach to detecting personal attacks on the English Wikipedia—a collaborative project between the WMF and Jigsaw, a division of Alphabet, a holding company for Google. The project has created a data "pipeline" of examples of personal comments on the site, used this to develop a model for automated detection of harassment, and analysed the data to try to develop a system with the same level of accuracy as humans. Samples of comments were judged by 10 humans and a scale was derived of how likely each comment was to be harassing. From this a model was developed, and the claim was made that this is a 95% match with a later pooled human assessment of whether examples constituted harassment. A demonstration is at wikidetox.appspot.com, which readers are invited to visit and test for themselves. The algorithm determined that there is an 82% likelihood that this statement of mixed but ultimately insulting intention was harassment:
- "Congratulations. I don't know whether you are aware of this fact or not, but you have shown your qualified stupidity."
The algorithm determined a 69% probability that "F#@$ you, a$$h0l3" was a personal attack; and the different grammatical contexts of "I will punch your lights out" and "Let's drink punch" were rated at 59% and 17% likelihoods of harassment, respectively. However, Wulczyn pointed out that the system is only as good as the depth of the corpus of personal attack patterns to which it has been exposed, with human rankings; for example, "Your intellect is lacking" was determined as having only a 10% probability of being an attack.
The intention now is to continue the program of "training" the system to achieve scores approaching zero false positives. The immediate goal is to explore the prevalence, dynamics, and impact of personal attacks on the English Wikipedia, and to create a complete historical dataset of talkpage comments with probability scores (which will be released publicly) for input to the "training" process.
The program is still at an early stage. Among the next goals is to integrate the algorithm with the ORES API system to enable extensions and tools to be built on top of the model. Readers with questions or suggestions are welcome to visit the dedicated page on Meta. T
Wikiconference submissions open
The 2016 Wikiconference North America, which will occur in San Diego, California, from October 7–10, invites interested editors to submit proposals to host a workshop, seminar, panel, tutorial, or other program during the event. Submissions can be made here. GP
Brief notes
- Revamped app unveiled: A revamped Android app was released last week for Wikipedia. Its new homepage has been designed to help users access information more quickly and efficiently, and the app is now available worldwide in the Google Play store. More information was released in a Foundation blog post. GP
- Language detection added to Wikimedia search engine: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales's vision to provide everyone in the world with an encyclopedia "in their own language" took another step last week when a feature was deployed on the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish-language Wikipedias that will detect unsuccessful searches that may have been intended in another language. The blog post that announced the feature did not define a timeline for deploying the feature globally (it did state a few other language Wikipedias that will get it next), but did encourage users to test the feature in an online demo. GP
Paid editing service announced; Commercial exploitation of free images; Wikipedia as a crystal ball; Librarians to counter systemic bias
Reputation management firm announces Wikipedia editing service
A reputation management and search engine optimisation firm has announced a professional service for creating, altering, monitoring, updating, and translating Wikipedia pages and has launched a corresponding Internet portal. In its communications, the firm assures potential clients that ownership of a Wikipedia article is a prominent asset, enhancing their online reputation.
The press release contains a contact name, a city, a phone number, and an email address identifying an employer (whose web page also includes a photograph of the contact, along with details of other staff members). All of this is "personal information" as defined in WP:Outing. AK / PF
The Signpost aspires to provide readers with sufficient information to evaluate the news we report and the opinions our op-ed writers express. However, English Wikipedia policy prevents us from doing so in some routine cases. We withheld significant information in this story to comply with our interpretation of Wikipedia’s policies.
Photographer sues Getty for appropriation of donated images
Beginning in 1988, photographer Carol M. Highsmith donated thousands of images to the Library of Congress for free use by the general public, only to see Getty Images, a stock photo company, appropriate them, in some cases without attribution, add their own watermark, and then accuse Highsmith of copyright infringement. Hyperallergic reports that Highsmith sued Getty and another stock photo business, Alamy, for copyright infringement, asking for $1 billion in damages, including compensation for over 18,755 images Getty appropriated as well as punitive damages because the company had been previously liable for the same violation against another photographer within the past three years. She learned that both agencies had been charging fees to customers for use of her images and sending threat letters to others who had used her free images. The complaint states, “The defendants have apparently misappropriated Ms. Highsmith’s generous gift to the American people ... not only unlawfully charging licensing fees ... but are falsely and fraudulently holding themselves out as the exclusive copyright owner.” Inspired by the example of Dorothea Lange, Highsmith wanted to document all 50 states, and these images now form the Carol M. Highsmith Collection at the LOC. (July 27) MTbw
Wikipedia as a crystal ball
The Atlantic studied trends in the number of edits to Wikipedia articles about potential vice-presidential picks, noting a 2008 Washington Post story on an upsurge in Wikipedia article edits prior to the VP selection of Sarah Palin. This year, The Atlantic noted increased editing activity each time various hopefuls such as Tom Vilsack and Elizabeth Warren were paraded into public view. Based on this metric, a dramatic upsurge in editing of Tim Kaine's article prior to Hillary Clinton's July 22 announcement shows that Wikipedia accurately foreshadowed the selection of the Democratic VP nominee. The story was also covered by New York Magazine and Bloomberg Politics. (July 22) MTbw
Librarians to counter systemic bias
Pacific Standard reports on a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant for a project called "Amplify libraries and communities through Wikipedia". The article draws particular attention to the dearth of women and people of colour in Wikipedia's volunteer base ...
As James Hare, president of Wikimedia DC, told the New York Times in 2015:
“The stereotype of a Wikipedia editor is a 30-year-old white man, and so most of the articles written are about stuff that interests 30-year-old white men. So a lot of black history is left out.”
... as well as the hostile reception new editors may receive. In the words of Merrilee Proffitt, one of the project leads, Wikipedia ...
can be a challenging environment. The thing that someone said to me that resonates is, “Wikipedians are very nice in person, but can be mean online.” You don’t get subtleties in online communication. These are all volunteers, they’re doing it on their spare time, they’re not getting paid, they’re very protective of that. They’re a little suspicious of new editors and what might be motivating them.”
It’s a lot to expect all librarians to get on board with this project. But if they did, you’d be talking about essentially closing Wikipedia’s gender gap in one fell swoop.
Librarians' racial bias, on the other hand, is much the same as in Wikipedia, so addressing racial bias “may be a bit trickier”:
“It’s safe to say that librarians are also disproportionately white, but the communities we serve are incredibly diverse,” Proffitt says. “What librarians can do by becoming Wikipedians is bring this out to their people. Public libraries are in every corner, and serve such a variety of audiences.”
(July 27) AK
In brief
- PETA appeals in monkey selfie case: Firstpost reports that animal rights organisation PETA has filed an appeal to the US Court of Appeals in the monkey selfie copyright case. PETA wants the monkey to be declared the image's copyright owner. The Wikimedia Foundation has previously argued that the image is in the public domain, while nature photographer David J. Slater has argued that the image's copyright is rightfully his, as despite the fact that the monkey pressed the shutter release of his camera, he travelled to Indonesia at his own expense, befriended the monkeys over a period of days to create the situation in which the shot could occur, and set up the camera and tripod for the shot. (August 3) AK
- Pokemon Go vs the Bible: Gizmodo notes that Wikipedia's article on Pokémon Go has a lot more footnotes than its article on the Bible. “The Bible, the most widely circulated book of all time, a text assembled and scrutinized and debated over the course of millennia, has 113 endnotes. There are 78 fewer points of citation on Wikipedia’s page about the Bible than there are on its page about Pokémon Go.” And the Bible didn't seem alone in being comparatively under-researched: “Baseball, America’s previous pastime, has 188 citations at the moment. It was tied with Pokémon Go this morning but has now fallen behind.” Gizmodo went on to list “some other Wikipedia entries that have fewer endnotes than Pokémon Go”: Tuberculosis (166), Imperialism (103), Charity (practice) (25), Masturbation (141), Space Invaders (132) and Pokémon (114). (August 1) AK
- Dulquer Salmaan: Indian actor Dulquer Salmaan told a radio channel that his Wikipedia article makes him younger than he is, reports Indiaglitz. (July 29) AK
- Liberal history edit-a-thon: The Liberal Democrat Voice announces that an edit-a-thon on UK Liberal history will take place at the National Liberal Club on August 24. (July 29) AK
- Updated Android app for Wikipedia: VentureBeat, Android Authority and many others have reported the launch of the new Android app. (July 28) AK
- Constitutional Amendments need attention on Wikipedia: The National Law Journal (US) announced the July 29 edit-a-thon hosted by the Law Library and the National Archives in collaboration with Wikimedia DC. (July 27) AK
- Taylor Swift: Digital Spy and many others ran reports on the recent vandalism to the biography of American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. (July 20) AK
Kevin Gorman, who took on Wikipedia's gender gap and undisclosed paid advocacy, dies at 26
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Kevin Gorman, a US Wikipedian active primarily on the English Wikipedia, has passed away after complications from a number of rare genetic disorders. He was 26.
Kevin joined Wikipedia as part of the 2010–11 Public Policy Initiative, a pilot project that tested the waters to see if Wikipedia could be adopted as a teaching tool in US universities. This initiative was later turned into the Wikipedia Education Program.
At the time, Kevin was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, taking a "Politics of Piracy" class in the spring 2011 semester, and it was probably from that classroom that he made his first edit, on 1 February 2011.
Kevin took to the site as a duck to water, making nearly 2500 edits in his first four months, and branching out into mushrooms, a topic for which he had a passion. By April, he had signed up to help facilitate a Wikipedia-oriented class that would be held in the following semester, and within two months had landed a summer communications internship with the Wikimedia Foundation. He came back to the WMF for a short time in 2013 to author a retrospective report on the organization's grants process, which took care to point out several significant potential risks in the process. In February 2014 he made international news headlines by becoming the first person to hold a Wikipedian-in-residence position at a US university.
As a volunteer, Kevin took on a heavy and often harassment-inducing load in combating bias in Wikipedia articles related to the men's rights movement—an effort that attracted coverage in the celebrity and pop-culture site Jezebel.
It was these experiences, according to the Feminist Philosophers blog, that persuaded Kevin to "attend the first class of Alex Madva’s feminist philosophy course, and ultimately led [him] to play an integral role in identifying and redressing the underrepresentation of feminist philosophy and women philosophers on Wikipedia." He later also became a moderator of the gendergap Wikimedia mailing list.
Some of those philosophers are listed in his userspace, and editors will note that many articles still need to be written.
Kevin took on some of the work of exposing undisclosed paid advocacy on Wikipedia, which is where we had personal contact. Thanks to him, the Signpost helped to uncover the edits of Wiki-PR, a public-relations company that contravened several policies and guidelines—especially those related to sock puppetry—to manage thousands of articles for pay. The "source", referenced three times in that initial story, was Kevin. He was also a primary driver behind a feature story on Wiki-PR from Martin Robbins of Vice. These revelations were enough to engender a strong reaction from the Foundation, which directly led to changes in the global terms of use.
Kevin continued to tackle paid advocacy right up until his 12,000th and last edit—a post on the harassment policy's talk page which read (in part):
| “ | Last time I kept track there were at least 30 paid editing outfits. Any guess as to how many there are now that most of those who could take care of them and track them are gone, deliberately discouraged from doing so or no longer capable of doing so? | ” |
Kevin died in July 2016 from a combination of what his family described as multiple "very rare" genetic disorders, which had caused or were in addition to other serious illnesses that afflicted him—everything from sepsis to encephalitis. These ailments were a factor in a significant reduction in editing after August 2014.
Despite his health issues, he did try to turn his experience into a positive by contributing a significant amount of content to the article on immunoglobulin therapy—a treatment he himself was receiving. He wrote that he needed the treatment because he "never developed an immune system, and as a result, need[ed] frequent injections of antibodies pooled from y'alls blood plasma. ... the reason I got sick so often was because I had no immune system."
Kevin's generosity in death lives on through other people; with his prior permission, medical staff were able to use his liver, kidney, and heart for people in need. This kindness as a donor should surprise no one: he dedicated his life to helping others. It is a legacy that might cause us to be proud and grateful.
Community members are leaving condolences on Kevin's English Wikipedia talk page, and there are plans to work on the organ donation (see WikiProject Medicine) and Marfan syndrome articles in his honor.
His family has created a memorial on Facebook; according to his father, Kevin's friends in Berkeley are planning to hold a memorial service in the city on 21 August.
- The ed17 was the editor-in-chief of the Signpost from 2012 to 2015. He currently works for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Summer of Pokémon, Trump, and Hillary
Your traffic reports for the weeks of July 10–16, July 17–23, and July 24–30.
For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED. For the most popular articles that ORES models predict are low quality, see WP:POPULARLOWQUALITY.
July 10–16, 2016
Let it Pokemon Go: Pokémon Go led the chart for a second week, with a substantial 4.7 million views. This is a flashback to people's complaints about Wikipedia circa 2005—that the site was dominated with Pokemon articles. Well, the world finally caught up to our advance research. Aside from the esport, politics and regular sports dominate the chart. Sports entries are split among Ultimate Fighting Championship articles; football, with the conclusion of UEFA Euro 2016; and tennis, due to Wimbledon. The lack of any Google Doodle or Reddit "Today I Learned" threads anywhere in the Top 25 this week seems unusual.
For the week of July 10 to 16, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Pokémon Go 
4,778,652 
Way up from 1.37 million views last week to lead the chart for a second week. Many non-players simply enjoy reading the stories of the ridiculous things happening due to it, such as people wandering into places not really appropriate for gaming such as cemeteries, neighbor's yards, and so on. Oh, and accidents. Until and unless someone dies, it is mostly harmless fun, right? 2 Theresa May 
1,738,109 
The new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. May had previously been the British Home Secretary since 2010, but the shockwaves of Brexit have been to May's benefit. That's the way history goes for individual people, mostly unpredictable except in hindsight. 3 Mike Pence 
1,651,153 
Don't tell Donald Trump (#23), but his newly announced vice-presidential candidate got far more views this week. Trump's media skills generated a great deal of interest in his VP pick, though there was some suggestion that he almost tried to back out of the Pence pick at the last minute. Though more conservative than Trump on social issues, the Governor of Indiana is generally considered a safe and stable selection by the Republican party, more so than the other reported finalists for the VP slot, Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie. 4 Sultan (2016 film)
1,220,923 
Second week on the chart, with about 70,000 more views than last week. One big difference between Hollywood and Bollywood is that in Bollywood, stars still matter. And Salman Khan (pictured) rules the roost right now. His last big film, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, dominated Eid al-Fitr weekend and went on to make nearly $100 million. Now he's done it again: his latest, a wrestling drama, was also released on Eid and took in nearly ₹1.96 billion ($29 million) in its first six days. 5 UFC 200
1,139,080 
Second week on the chart, as is typical of these UFC Saturday events. The latest in the mixed martial arts tournament series was held at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas (pictured) on 9 July. Headliner Amanda Nunes defeated Miesha Tate in the first round. 6 Bastille Day
977,775 
The French national holiday has never made it on the Top 25 before, so sadly, its appearance is most likely due to the 2016 Nice attack. 7 Cristiano Ronaldo
946,953 
Up from #21 last week. Playing for the Portugal national football team (#24), the man sometimes called the world's most famous athlete led his team to victory in the final of UEFA Euro 2016 (#10) over France, and earned the Silver Boot award. 8 Andy Murray 
831,169 
The men's singles winner at Wimbledon over Milos Raonic (#12) occurred on July 10. 8 Brock Lesnar
750,002 
Lesnar defeated Mark Hunt in the heavyweight match at UFC 200 (#5). 10 UEFA Euro 2016
744,132 
Numbers are down again this week, but its been a long run in the charts for this football tournament. Portugal won for the first time, on July 10.
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July 17–23, 2016
Trumpapalooza: Last week's American news was dominated by the Republican National Convention, which could have been named the Trump Convention, because Trump family members were highlighted among the speakers every night. FIVE of the top ten slots this week are Trumps, even including Donald Trump's first wife, Ivana Trump (#8), who wasn't even at the convention. I cannot recall any prior instance of a single family dominating the chart like this. And outside the Top 10, two more Trump offspring made the list, plus Trump's second wife, Marla Maples, was #11.
For the week of July 17 to 23, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Melania Trump
2,990,596 
How is The Donald not #1 this week? Well, his third wife gave a speech on Monday night at the Republican National Convention. This type of speech is usually non-controversial and helps humanize the candidate. This one kicked off a negative three day news cycle because the speech lifted some passages from Michelle Obama's speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. This fact was initially denied by the campaign (which to date is notorious for not being coordinated in its public statements), but finally admitted to on Wednesday, though blamed on one of Trump's employees, Meredith McIver, who has been the ghostwriter for a number of Donald's books. 2 Donald Trump
2,796,617 
Trump is now officially the Republican nominee for President of the United States, and accepted the nomination in a lengthy speech on July 21. 3 Pokémon Go
2,029,089 Down from 4.7 million views last week, but still going strong. How long is the shelf life of this thing? I was out to dinner the other night and half the people I saw walking around were teenagers looking at their phones playing Pokémon Go. I shook my fist at the sky like a cranky old man and felt better. The article has improved from Start Class to B-Class in the last week, now with a staggering 184 references. 4 Ivanka Trump
1,775,380 
Probably the most liked Trump outside core Trump-fandom, Trump's daughter Ivanka gave a speech introducing her father at the Republican National Convention, though she touted some policy positions that sounded like she was introducing a Democratic candidate. 5 Tim Kaine
1,513,047 
Kaine, a current United States Senator, and former Governor from Virginia, was named as Hillary Clinton's vice-presidential running mate on July 22. I must say Kaine was not high on my radar because he does not showboat online, though the Wall Street Journal put him on Hillary's shortlist last month. Virginia is also a swing state, probably a must-win for either candidate to be elected. 6 Kabali (film)
1,351,718 
This Tamil language film starring Rajinikanth (#27) (pictured) debuted on July 22 to mixed reviews, but broke box office records, earning around ₹211.75 (US$31 million) worldwide during its opening weekend. 7 Stranger Things (TV series)
1,165,953 
This Netflix science-fiction series was released on July 15 to positive reviews. 8 Ivana Trump
1,032,111 
Donald Trump's (#2) first wife, mother of Ivanka (#4), as well as Donald Jr. (#20) and Eric (#13). She was not in Cleveland last week, but instead in St. Tropez "with her dog and Italian lover" as the Daily Mail tells us. I would guess some of these views include people trying to get to Ivanka's article. 9 Tiffany Trump
1,019,203 
Donald Trump's (#2) only child with Marla Maples (#11) (his second wife), who also spoke at the convention last week. 10 Mike Pence
940,781 Donald Trump's (#2) Vice-Presidential candidate, down from 1.65 million views last week.
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Bonus: Just missing the WP:TOP25 for July 17–23:
- #26: Jared Kushner. 477,091. Husband of Ivana Trump #8.
- #27: Rajinikanth. 444,678. Star of #3.
- #28: Bat Pussy. 437,767. Reddit-fueled.
- #29: Ice Cube
- #30: List of Pokémon
July 24–30, 2016
Hillary Summer: The Democratic National Convention (not to be confused with the Democratic National Committee, both abbreviated DNC) was held this week, and culminated in Hillary Clinton receiving her coronation as the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States; the first woman to be so named by a major political party in the US, though that string of qualifiers is a reminder of just how behind the rest of the world the US is in this regard. Unlike last week's Republican Convention, which saw a flood of interest in all things Trumpian, the DNC hasn't generated as much traffic; numbers are down across the board, and Hillary got less than half the views of her rival. This weaker showing allowed the traditional concern of the American summer season, movies, to get a strong look-in, particularly toward the bottom of the list.
For the week of July 24 to 30, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Hillary Clinton 
1,331,698 
One puzzling feature of this list over the last year is how seldom Hillary Clinton has appeared on it, despite the constant media hum of the 2016 election and the near omnipresence of her competitor. Some might argue that they already know everything they need to about Hillary; after all, she's been a global figure for longer than many of our readers have been alive. But the same could also be said of Donald Trump, and interest in him has obviously not waned. At this point it is clear that people just aren't as excited about her. On paper, she is one of the most qualified people ever to run for President of the US, and yet, ignoring post-convention "bumps" after each party's convention, polls place her neck and neck with Donald Trump, a man with no political qualifications and no coherent policy goals who just this week told a dictator to commit espionage against the United States. In what should be her moment in the sun, nominated as her party's candidate, endorsed wittily by a sitting President, and even supported by her onetime arch-rival Bernie Sanders, her article didn't generate even half the views Trump got during his nomination week, and he lost the top spot to his wife. 2 Kabali (film)
1,118,570 This Indian film (not Bollywood- it's in Tamil; Bollywood films are strictly Hindi) starring Rajinikanth (pictured) has, despite mixed reviews, smashed records in its first week of release, earning ₹3.2 billion ($48 million) worldwide and already placing itself as the second (or third, depending on the source) highest-grossing Tamil film ever. 3 Stranger Things (TV series)
1,110,852 This Netflix science-fiction series (basically an 8-hour homage to early 80s kid-centric flicks like E.T., The Goonies and Explorers) was released in its entirety on July 15 to positive reviews. 4 Donald Trump
1,022,010 To be fair, he was probably going to be on this list anyway; the timeframe includes the comedown from his convention spike. But there's no denying the sudden boost he got on 28/29 July, when he suggested on-air that the Russians should hack Hillary Clinton's (#1) email server, making him arguably the first ever US presidential candidate to invite a foreign power to attack his own country. 5 Tim Kaine
1,018,201 Kaine, a current United States Senator, and former Governor from Virginia, was named as Hillary Clinton's vice-presidential candidate on July 22. I must say Kaine was not high on my radar because he does not showboat online, though the Wall Street Journal put him on Hillary's shortlist last month. Virginia is also a swing state, probably one Trump would have to win to have any chance of being elected. 6 Suicide Squad (film)
854,350 
DC Comics' ramshackle crew of pressganged supervillains, forced to do the will of a shadowy organization or let their heads explode, are the stars of one of the most anticipated films in the nascent DC Cinematic Universe, due for release on 5 August. 7 Bill Clinton
849,257 
The former President widely regarded as one of the most persuasive speakers in modern American politics drew on all his talents to support his wife's candidacy for his former position. Whether it worked or not is unclear; many were nonplussed by his oration, which, having begun with the phrase, "In the spring of 1971, I met a girl..", drew unintentional attention to his infidelities. 8 Chelsea Clinton
857,452 
The woman who very well could become the first offspring of two US Presidents gave a warmly received speech in support of her mother's candidacy at the DNC. 9 Pokémon Go
806,097 The curiousest thing about Pokemon Go, at least for me, is how it has dissolved the barrier between video games and reality. Video games are the most popular entertainment medium in the world, but they have always been confined to certain spaces- that kid shouting abuse through his headset in his mother's basement; the harried mother catching some alone time on the bus; the family pulling out the console on Christmas Day. All easy to ignore. But now, the game has not only entered the outside world, but it has become the outside world- to the point where people who have never even contemplated playing a video game have found themselves pulled into this one, as their houses and places of business were transformed into gyms and Pokestops. 10 Star Trek Beyond
681,239 
The latest in the Star Trek reboot film series has been holding steady for a second week. The film stars Chris Pine (pictured) as Captain Kirk, and was released on July 22 to positive reviews. It grossed over $117 million in its opening weekend, but has seen some pretty steep drops since then.
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Women and Hawaii
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.
Featured articles
Eight featured articles were promoted these weeks.
- The 2008 UAW-Dodge 400 (nominated by MWright96) was the third stock car race of the 2008 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. It was held on 2 March 2008, before a crowd of 153,000 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The 267-lap race was won by Carl Edwards of the Roush Fenway Racing team who started from second position. Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished second and Greg Biffle came in third. The race attracted 12.1 million television viewers.
- Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman (nominated by KAVEBEAR) (1845–1863) was an American Union Army soldier of Native Hawaiian descent. Considered one of the "Hawaiʻi Sons of the Civil War", he was among a group of more than one hundred documented Native Hawaiian and Hawaii-born combatants who fought in the American Civil War while the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was still an independent nation.
- Margaret Lea Houston (nominated by Maile66) (1819–1867) was First Lady of the Republic of Texas during her husband, Sam Houston's, second term as President of the Republic of Texas. They met following the first of his two non-consecutive terms as the Republic's president, and married when he was a representative in the Congress of the Republic of Texas. She was his third wife, remaining with him until his death.
- Douglas MacArthur's escape from the Philippines (nominated by Hawkeye7) began on 11 March 1942, when General Douglas MacArthur and members of his family and staff left Corregidor Island, where his forces had been surrounded by the Japanese. They traveled in patrol torpedo boats for two days through stormy seas patrolled by Japanese warships to reach Mindanao. From there, MacArthur and his party flew to Australia in a pair of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, ultimately arriving in Melbourne by train on 21 March. In Australia, he made his famous speech in which he declared, "I came through and I shall return".
- The Hawaii Sesquicentennial half dollar (nominated by Wehwalt) was struck in 1928 by the United States Bureau of the Mint in honor of the 150th anniversary of Captain James Cook's landing in Hawaii, the first European to reach there. Only 10,000 were struck for the public, making it rare and valuable. Chester Beach made the plaster models for the coins from sketches by Juliette May Fraser. Although the issue price, at $2, was the highest for a commemorative half dollar to that point, the coins sold out quickly and have risen in value to over a thousand dollars.
- Theodore Komnenos Doukas (nominated by Cplakidas) (died c. 1253), was ruler of Epirus and Thessaly from 1215 to 1230 and of Thessalonica and most of the rest of Macedonia and western Thrace from 1224 to 1230. He was also the power behind the rule of his sons John and Demetrios over Thessalonica in 1237–46.
- SMS Körös (nominated by Peacemaker67) was the name ship of the Körös-class river monitors built for the Austro-Hungarian Navy. The ship was part of the Danube Flotilla, and fought various Allied forces from Belgrade down the Danube to the Black Sea during World War I. After the war, she was transferred to the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and renamed Morava. During the World War II German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, Morava was the flagship of the 2nd Mine Barrage Division, and operated on the Tisza river. She fought off attacks by the Luftwaffe, but was forced to withdraw to Belgrade. Due to high river levels and low bridges, navigating monitors was difficult, and she was scuttled by her crew. She was later raised by the navy of the Axis puppet state the Independent State of Croatia and continued in service as Bosna until June 1944, when she struck a mine and sank.
- Catherine Zeta-Jones (nominated by SchroCat and Krimuk90) (born 1969) is a Welsh actress. Zeta-Jones aspired to a theatrical career from an early age. She studied musical theatre at the Arts Educational Schools, London, and made her adult stage breakthrough with a leading role in a 1987 production of 42nd Street. Her screen debut came in the unsuccessful French-Italian film 1001 Nights (1990), and she found greater success as a regular in the British television series The Darling Buds of May (1991–93). Zeta-Jones established herself in Hollywood with roles in the action film The Mask of Zorro (1998) and the heist film Entrapment (1999). Zeta-Jones has received such accolades as an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award and a Tony Award, and in 2010 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her film and humanitarian endeavours. She is married to the actor Michael Douglas with whom she has two children.
Featured lists
Two featured lists were promoted these weeks.
- The Kerala State Film Award for Best Actor (nominated by Charles Turing) is an honour, begun in 1969, presented annually at the Kerala State Film Awards of India to an actor for the best performance in a leading role in the Malayalam cinema. Until 1997, the awards were managed directly by the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Government of Kerala. Since 1998, the awards have been controlled by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, an autonomous, non-profit institution functioning under the Department of Cultural Affairs. The awardees are decided by an independent jury constituted every year by the Academy. They are announced by the Minister for Cinema and are presented by the Chief Minister. Throughout the years, accounting for ties and repeat winners, the Government of Kerala has presented a total of 49 Best Actor awards to 27 different actors. The recipients receive a figurine, a certificate, and a cash prize of ₹100,000 (US$1,200).
- Michael Schumacher (born 1969) is a German racing driver who has won seven Formula One world championships. Schumacher contested 308 races in his career which included 91 Grand Prix wins (nominated by Cowlibob and The Rambling Man); the majority of his race victories were for the Ferrari team with 72. His most successful circuit was Magny-Cours, where he won eight times in his career. Schumacher's largest margin of victory was at the 1994 Brazilian Grand Prix, a race in which he lapped the field, and the smallest margin of victory was at the 2000 Canadian Grand Prix when he beat teammate Rubens Barrichello by 0.174 seconds.
Featured pictures
Fourteen featured pictures were promoted these weeks.
Easier navigation via better wikilinks
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Making it easier to navigate within article networks via better wikilinks
- Reviewed by Jonathan Morgan and Tilman Bayer
A paper to be presented at the 2016 OpenSym conference titled "Evaluating and Improving Navigability of Wikipedia: A Comparative Study of Eight Language Editions"[1] attempts to determine which links should appear at or near the top of a Wikipedia article. Using the Wikipedia clickstream data, the four researchers found that on the English Wikipedia, an average of 30% of article traffic comes via links from other Wikipedia articles. They cite previous research[2][3] (coauthored by some of the same authors, like a third related paper[4]; see also here) which has shown that most readers focus their attention on the content of an article that appears "above the fold"—usually just the lede section and the top of the infobox. This suggests that it would be easier for readers to browse related content if links to the most relevant related articles appeared near the top of an article, which would improve the overall navigability of Wikipedia. Their goal is to make it easier for readers to move between related pages by determining which articles are most closely related to a given article, and should therefore be linked in the top section where readers are mostly likely to see them.
The researchers determined the relationships between articles without using keywords or categories. Instead, they generated a type of directed network graph called a bow tie model, which determines how closely the linked article is to the article that links to it based on the relationships between other articles that link to and from both of them. By looking at the links present within different 'views' of a large set of articles (e.g. the first lede paragraph, the whole lede section, the infobox, or the entire page) across different wikis, the researchers could quantify how much related content is accessible from the part of an article that readers are mostly likely to see. They concluded by describing how their research findings could be used to create a system for recommending links that should be included in article ledes and infoboxes.
The paper also sheds new light on the widely discussed phenomenon that by clicking on the first link in an Wikipedia article and repeating the process, one will eventually arrive at the article philosophy:
- "For the English Wikipedia we indeed find that the vast majority of articles (97%) leads to the cycle containing the philosophy article. This finding also holds true for a large majority of articles in the German, French and Russian Wikipedias. For the Spanish and Italian Wikipedias, the dominant cycle contains the article on psychology, while for Dutch, the dominant cycle consists of the articles on knowledge and know-how."
Briefly
New research journal about Wikipedia and higher education
A new journal called Wiki Studies is being launched. As explained by founding editor Bob Cummings (a professor for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and author of a 2009 book titled "Lazy virtues: teaching writing in the age of Wikipedia"):
- Wiki Studies is an interdisciplinary, open-access, peer-reviewed journal focusing on the intersection of Wikipedia and higher education. We are interested in most all of the same topics hosted on the research listserv and the newsletter, including articles about pedagogical practices, epistemology, bias, mission, and reliability. We will not charge for submission or publication, and will offer open access to readers. We will host on Open Journal Systems.
The submission deadline for the first annual volume, envisaged to appear in March 2017, is 31 December 2016.
Conferences and events
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
Other recent publications
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.
- "Wikipedia's semantics of openness: Ideas and implementations of the Internet's extended participation potentials in the context of collaborative knowledge production" (sociology dissertation in German, original title: "Die Offenheitssemantik der Wikipedia. Ideen und Verwirklichungen der erweiterten Beteiligungspotentiale des Internets im Kontext kollaborativer Wissensproduktion").[5]
- "Towards a (de)centralization-based typology of peer production"[6] From the paper: "This paper proposes a typology of peer-production platforms, based on the centralisation/decentralisation levels of several of their design features. Wikipedia [presented as an example of a platform with "centralised architecture" but "decentralised governance"] is a case of governance being semi-distributed among several nodes structured in semi-centralised clusters (administrators and editors control what is accepted or rejected in case of conflict) or decentralised local networks (chapters for choosing projects and thematics on which to focus, e.g. the Wikicheese project of Wikimedia France)."
- "Developing an annotator for Latin texts using Wikipedia"[7] From the abstract: "Although Wikipedia is an excellent resource from which to extract many kinds of information (morphological, syntactic and semantic) to be used in NLP tasks on modern languages, it was rarely applied to perform NLP tasks for the Latin language. The work presents the first steps of the developement of a POS Tagger based on the Latin version of Wiktionary and a Wikipedia-based semantic annotator."
- "Candidate searching and key coreference resolution for Wikification"[8] From the abstract: "Wikification is the task to link textual mentions in a document to articles in Wikipedia. It comprises three main steps, namely, mention recognition, candidate generation, and entity linking. For candidate generation, existing methods use hyperlinks in Wikipedia or match a mention of discourse to Wikipedia article titles. They may miss the correct target entity and thus fail to link the mention to Wikipedia. In this paper, we propose to use a mention as a query and Wikipedia [sic] own search engine to look for additional candidate articles. [...] our proposed method outperforms or achieves competitive results in comparison to some state-of-the-art systems, but is simpler and uses less features."
- "Generating article placeholders from Wikidata for Wikipedia—increasing access to free and open knowledge"[9] From the abstract: "The major objective of this thesis is to increase the access to open and free knowledge in Wikipedia by developing a MediaWiki extension called ArticlePlaceholder. ArticlePlaceholders are content pages in Wikipedia auto-generated from information provided by Wikidata. [...] This thesis [...] includes the personas, scenarios, user-stories, non-functional and functional requirements for the requirement analysis. The analysis was done in order to implement the features needed to achieve the goal of providing more information for under-resourced languages. The implementation of these requirements is the main part of the following thesis."
- "Analysing the Usage of Wikipedia on Twitter: Understanding Inter-Language Links"[10] From the abstract: "In this paper, we analyse links within tweets referring to a Wikipedia of a language different from the tweet's language. [...] We find that the main cause for inter-language links is the non-existence of the article in the tweet's language. Furthermore, we observe that the quality of the tweeted articles is constantly higher in comparison to their counterparts, suggesting that users choose the article of higher quality even when tweeting in another language. Moreover, we find that English is the most dominant target for inter-language links." (See also presentation slides and our coverage of a preceding paper: "Wikipedia and Twitter".)
- "Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets"[11] From the abstract: "With the Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets, we have created a toolkit that facilitates working with Wikipedia data from within a spreadsheet context. We make these tools available as open-source on GitHub [1], released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license." (See also meta:Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets)
- "Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Editors through Crowdsourcing"[12] From the abstract: "...we propose a method for assessing the quality of Wikipedia editors. By effectively determining whether the text meaning persists over time, we can determine the actual contribution by editors. This is used in this paper to detect vandal. However, the meaning of text does not always change if a term in the text is added or removed. Therefore, we cannot capture the changes of text meaning automatically, so we cannot detect whether the meaning of text survives or not. To solve this problem, we use crowdsourcing to manually detect changes of text meaning. In our experiment, we confirmed that our proposed method improves the accuracy of detecting vandals by about 5%."
- "Finding Structure in Wikipedia Edit Activity: An Information Cascade Approach"[13] From the abstract: "This paper documents a study of the real-time Wikipedia edit stream containing over 6 million edits on 1.5 million English Wikipedia articles, during 2015.[...] Our findings show that by constructing information cascades between Wikipedia articles using editing activity, we are able to construct an alternative linking structure in comparison to the embedded links within a Wikipedia page. This alternative article hyperlink structure was found to be relevant in topic, and timely in relation to external global events (e.g., political activity)."
- "With a Little Help from my Neighbors: Person Name Linking Using the Wikipedia Social Network"[14] From the abstract: "In this paper, we present a novel approach to person name disambiguation and linking that uses a large-scale social network extracted from the English Wikipedia."
- "Cleansing Wikipedia Categories using Centrality"[15] From the abstract: "We propose a novel general technique aimed at pruning and cleansing the Wikipedia category hierarchy, with a tunable level of aggregation. Our approach is endogenous, since it does not use any information coming from Wikipedia articles, but it is based solely on the user-generated (noisy) Wikipedia category folksonomy itself." See also https://github.com/corradomonti/wikipedia-categories
- "Learning Web Queries For Retrieval of Relevant Information About an Entity in a Wikipedia Category"[16] From the abstract: "... we present a novel method to obtain a set of most appropriate queries for retrieval of relevant information about an entity from the Web. Using the body text of existing articles in a Wikipedia category, we generate a set of queries capable of fetching the most relevant content for any entity belonging to that category. We find the common topics discussed in the articles of a category using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and use them to formulate the queries. Using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network, we reduce the number of queries by removing the less sensible ones and then select the best ones out of them."
- "On the Retrieval of Wikipedia Articles Containing Claims on Controversial Topics"[17] From the abstract: "This work presents a novel claim-oriented document retrieval task. For a given controversial topic, relevant articles containing claims that support or contest the topic are retrieved from a Wikipedia corpus."
- "Automatic Discovery of Emerging Trends using Cluster Name Synthesis on User Consumption Data"[18] From the abstract: "Technically it is possible for the telecommunication companies to recommend suitable advertisements if they can classify the web sites browsed by their customers into classes like sports, e-commerce, social networking, streaming media etc. Another problem is to classify a new website when it doesn't belong to any of the existing clusters. In this paper, the authors are going to propose a method to automatically classify the websites and synthesize the cluster names in case it doesn't belong to any of the predefined clusters. [...] This proposed system uses the Wikipedia data [from articles about such websites] to construct the document for the websites browsed by the customers."
- "Applying a Multi-Level Modeling Theory to Assess Taxonomic Hierarchies in Wikidata"[19] From the abstract: "In this paper, we address the quality of taxonomic hierarchies in Wikidata. We focus on taxonomic hierarchies with entities at different classification levels (particular individuals, types of individuals, types of types of individuals, etc.). We use an axiomatic theory for multi-level modeling to analyze current Wikidata content, and identify a significant number of problematic classification and taxonomic statements. The problems seem to arise from an inadequate use of instantiation and subclassing in certain Wikidata hierarchies."
References
- ^ Lamprecht, D.; Dimitrov, D.; Helic, D.; Strohmaier, M. (2016). "Quality Evaluating and Improving Navigability of Wikipedia: A Comparative Study of Eight Language Editions" (PDF). In Proceedings of 12th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. OPENSYM '16. Berlin, Germany: ACM.
- ^ Lamprecht, Daniel; Lerman, Kristina; Helic, Denis; Strohmaier, Markus (2016-05-12). "How the structure of Wikipedia articles influences user navigation". New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. 0 (0): 1–22. doi:10.1080/13614568.2016.1179798. ISSN 1361-4568.
- ^ Dimitrov, Dimitar; Singer, Philipp; Lemmerich, Florian; Strohmaier, Markus (2016-04-11). Visual Positions of Links and Clicks on Wikipedia (PDF). 25TH INTERNATIONAL WORLD WIDE WEB CONFERENCE. Montréal, Québec, Canada. p. 2. doi:10.1145/2872518.2889388.
- ^ Lamprecht, Daniel; Helic, Denis; Strohmaier, Markus (2015-04-22). "Quo Vadis? On the Effects of Wikipedia's Policies on Navigation". Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
- ^ Groß, Linda (2016). "Die Offenheitssemantik der Wikipedia. Ideen und Verwirklichungen der erweiterten Beteiligungspotentiale des Internets im Kontext kollaborativer Wissensproduktion". Universität Bielefeld.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ^ Rosnay, Melanie Dulong de; Musiani, Francesca (2016-03-26). "Towards a (De)centralization-Based Typology of Peer Production". tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. 14 (1): 189–207. ISSN 1726-670X.
- ^ Guarasci, Raffaele (March 2016). Developing an annotator for Latin texts using Wikipedia. HAL Archives Ouvertes, working paper
- ^ Pham, Minh T. X.; Cao, Tru H.; Huynh, Huy M. (2016). "Candidate Searching and Key Coreference Resolution for Wikification". Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication. IMCOM '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 83:1-83:5. doi:10.1145/2857546.2857631. ISBN 9781450341424.
- ^ Kaffee, Lucie-Aimée (2016-04-02). "Generating Article Placeholders from Wikidata for Wikipedia - Increasing Access to Free and Open Knowledge". HTW Berlin (University of Applied Sciences).
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ^ Zangerle, Eva; Schmidhammer, Georg; Specht, Gunther (2016). "Analysing the Usage of Wikipedia on Twitter: Understanding Inter-Language Links". Proceedings of the 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). HICSS '16. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society. pp. 1920–1929. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2016.243. ISBN 9780769556703.
- ^ Steiner, Thomas (2016). "Wikipedia Tools for Google Spreadsheets" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 997–1000. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891112. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Suzuki, Yu; Nakamura, Satoshi (2016). "Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Editors Through Crowdsourcing" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 1001–1006. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891113. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Tinati, Ramine; Luczak-Roesch, Markus; Hall, Wendy (2016). "Finding Structure in Wikipedia Edit Activity: An Information Cascade Approach" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 1007–1012. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891110. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Geiß, Johanna; Gertz, Michael (2016). "With a Little Help from My Neighbors: Person Name Linking Using the Wikipedia Social Network" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 985–990. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891109. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Boldi, Paolo; Monti, Corrado (2016). "Cleansing Wikipedia Categories Using Centrality" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 969–974. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891111. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Yadav, Vikrant; Kumar, Sandeep (2016). "Learning Web Queries for Retrieval of Relevant Information About an Entity in a Wikipedia Category" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 1013–1014. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891114. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Roitman, Haggai; Hummel, Shay; Rabinovich, Ella; Sznajder, Benjamin; Slonim, Noam; Aharoni, Ehud (2016). "On the Retrieval of Wikipedia Articles Containing Claims on Controversial Topics" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 991–996. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891115. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Chattopadhyay, T.; Maiti, Santa; Pal, Arindam; Ghose, Avik; Pal, Arpan; Viswanathan, Shanky; Sivakumar, Narendran (2016). "Automatic Discovery of Emerging Trends Using Cluster Name Synthesis on User Consumption Data: Extended Abstract" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 981–983. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891116. ISBN 9781450341448.
- ^ Brasileiro, Freddy; Almeida, João Paulo A.; Carvalho, Victorio A.; Guizzardi, Giancarlo (2016). "Applying a Multi-Level Modeling Theory to Assess Taxonomic Hierarchies in Wikidata" (PDF). Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web. WWW '16 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 975–980. doi:10.1145/2872518.2891117. ISBN 9781450341448.
All-new notifications page helps Wikimedians focus on what matters most
Until recently, wiki users haven’t had much reason to visit the Special:Notifications page. Outside of aggregating all your old messages, it didn’t do much.
Last week, however, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Collaboration team completed a round of major enhancements to the notifications system that included a complete rewrite of the notifications page. The page’s new design and tools make it a place where users can both get a broader overview of all their messaging activity, and narrow their focus to just the topics that interest them most. Here’s a quick tour of this new messaging hub—and a look at a few other new features that are making the notifications system more convenient and helpful.
View the whole wiki world: On the notifications page, you can now monitor messages from all the wikis on which you’re active. This “cross-wiki” capability has been available in the drop-down notification panels for a few months, but the panels display only a subset of the newest notifications and show only unread cross-wiki messages. On the notifications page, you can see your entire message history on a remote wiki—both read and unread—as if you were there
Narrow your focus: One of the most noticeable features on the new notifications page is the recent activity panel of filtering options on the left. The recent activity panel lists all the wikis on which you have unread messages as well as the individual pages that the messages are about. Clicking on a wiki name gives you access to all your notifications on that wiki (as described above). Clicking on a specific page enables you to focus in on a subject or discussion by accessing all your new and old messages about that page. Next to recent activity, another set of filters at the top of the notifications page lets you filter by read or unread message status—helping users surface older messages or concentrate only on what’s new.
A cleaner, more readable interface, with improved pagination and power tools for marking groups of messages as read, cap off a list of improvements that make this formerly obscure page into one that notification power users, in particular, will want to take a second look at. (To access that page, type “Special:Notifications” in the search bar or click on the “all notifications” link at the bottom of the notifications panels.)
Beyond the Page
In addition to completing work on the notifications page, the Collaboration Team launched a number of other new notification features recently.
Expandable bundles: Users have complained for some time about getting barraged by similar notifications related to a single page or event. Repetitive thank-you messages, for example, can be a distraction for some highly active editors.
Expandable bundles make such duplicative messages more manageable: Users receive one collective message (“5 people thanked you for your edit …”), which can be expanded to reveal the individual notifications underneath. Introduced originally for cross-wiki messages only, bundling is now reducing clutter across a range of message types.
More consistent classification: Another complaint from users has been that they didn’t understand the logic used to differentiate “alerts” versus “messages” in the two drop-down notification panels. Alerts, with its bright red icon, suggests a level of urgency. So why, for example, were page-link messages in that category? It was distracting for many to have that red icon light up, only to find some innocuous announcement. To create a system that’s more predictable and consistent with expectations, we surveyed users from the English- and French-language Wikipedias about which notifications they feel are the most urgent, and then completely re-sorted the panels accordingly. Astute users have noticed message types switching sides (no, not a bug!). A few may have observed that the “messages” panel is now called “notices”, a change that more accurately describes this somewhat less critical group. You can read more about how notifications are classified over on MediaWiki.org.
Changes to mark as read/unread: In the past, opening the alerts panel caused all the notifications there to be marked as read. Now that alerts are explicitly the messages that users consider most crucial, this makes little sense, and the automatic marking-as-read has been removed.
While it’s possible that this change might lead to a buildup of unread messages, new and more convenient controls for marking messages as read/unread should offset the risk. There’s a new link on the notifications page that marks all messages in a given wiki as read with one click. And users can now easily toggle between read and unread states by simply clicking on the blue read/unread indicator in the corner of every message.
Let us know what you think: The Collaboration team has been making improvements to the notifications system for the last ten months or so. This last round of releases completes our planned work, and the team is moving onto other projects—but we’ll keep fixing problems and our ears are always open for good ideas. If you have praise, blame, comments or bugs to contribute, please stop by the notifications talk page and let us hear from you.
Joe Matazzoni, Product Manager, Editing Product team
Wikimedia Foundation
User script report (January to July 2016, part 1)
Text may be adapted from the respective listings there; see the page's history for attribution.
User scripts allow registered users to customise almost any aspect of the Wikipedia interface. They can enhance the reading experience, assist with editing, or provide other functionality, supplementing the choices already available in Special:Preferences. See Wikipedia:User scripts for further information, including instructions.
Reading
- Serendipity[1] (source) by User:Mxn – Inserts alphabetically adjacent article content to distract you the way traditional print encyclopedias used to. Also disables newfangled hypertext features.
- Link Redirect Title[2] (source) by User:Fred Gandt – Modifies the title heading of any redirect destination page, creating a link to the proper destination. Created for and only tested with the Vector skin.
- Client-side MathJax[3] (source) by User:Esquivalience – Enables MathJax rendering of mathematical notation within <math> tags. Preferences -> Appearance -> Math must be set to "LaTeX source". Fast once cached in your browser.
- GeoHack replacement script (source) by User:Evad37 – Replace coordinates' external links to GeoHack with direct links to a single mapping provider.
Editing
- Section Footers[4] (source) by User:Fred Gandt – Adds subtle clones of all section headings (including [ edit ] links) to the end of their respective sections; allows section editing from the bottom of all sections (reported to be glitchy)
- Comments in local time[5] (source) by User:Mxn – Displays signature timestamps in your local time, relative to the current time. A replacement for Wikipedia:Comments in Local Time with better language and timezone support.
- Pending Changes Link[6] (source) by User:Omni Flames – Adds a "Pending Changes" link on the top toolbar, primarily designed for Pending Changers Reviewers.
- QuickLinks[7] (source) by User:Music1201 – Adds links to the toolbar for the following pages: Articles for deletion, Pending changes, New pages, and Random AFC.
- View statistics[8] (source) by User:קיפודנחש – Adds a "View statistics" item to the "More" menu, showing view statistics in a popup dialog. uses Template:PageViews graph
Others
- responsiveHistoryCompare[9] (source) by User:Fred Gandt – Dynamically moves Compare selected revisions buttons next to the selected revisions on
action=historypages. - Close XfD[10] (source) by User:Czar – Adds the latest semi-automated closure tools for XfD discussions, accessible either in-line or via a tab at the top of standalone XfD discussion pages
Installation code
- ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Mxn/serendipity.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Fred_Gandt/linkRedirectTitle.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Esquivalience/mathjax.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Fred_Gandt/sectionFooters.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Mxn/CommentsInLocalTime.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Omni Flames/PendingChangesLink.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Music1201/QuickLinks.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:קיפודנחש/viewstats.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Fred Gandt/responsiveHistoryCompare.js}} - ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
{{subst:iusc|1=User:Czar/closexfd.js}}
In brief
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia tech ambassadors. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- A prototype for structured data on Commons is available now. [2]
- The RevisionSlider beta feature can now be tested on mediawiki.org, German Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia.
Problems
- Renamed users on some wikis were not connected to their account on other wikis between 20 July and 21 July. This has been fixed. [3]
Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).
