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28 Oct 2015

2015-10-28

The Signpost 's reorganization plan—we need your help

The Signpost needs your help.

Final week'southward issue of the Signpost was the best consequence however during my tenure equally editor-in-chief. We published a lot of strong material that readers responded to positively — and sometimes negatively! My thank you to our goes to our contributors, including Andreas Kolbe, Armbrust, GamerPro64, Thibbs, Serendipodous, and the piece of work backside the scenes of people like Tony1, Resident Mario, and others.

When people look at the quality of the issue we published and the number of contributors, I can understand why they might think the Signpost is doing simply fine—but nosotros're in trouble. During much of this year, we had a strong cadre of 4 to 5 editorial board members and a number of other regular contributors. More than recently, even so, we've lost some of those contributors, and board members either left or had to drastically reduce the fourth dimension they spent on the Signpost due to real-life commitments. This includes my co-editor-in-principal, Get Phightins!, who is currently inactive but will go along to contribute sporadically. We barely take time to publish what we do publish, which is unremarkably many days late.

The time demands are so many that we wanted to publish this piece you lot're reading correct at present several weeks ago, simply I didn't have the time to organize and write it until at present.

Some of our regular contributors create self-contained sections that tin can be published with little effort past others. For example, Serendipodous and Milowent create Traffic on their own—probably the most consistently high-quality section in the Signpost—and most weeks we publish it without changing anything except the occasional stray comma.

Other sections require significant piece of work. For example, take concluding week's special report on GamerGate. It was originally published in the WikiProject Video Games Newsletter, so all we had to practise was slap it in a page of our own, right? Non really. Let's consider how much time information technology took to become that piece to our readers.

• First, Thibbs deserves full credit for doing nearly all of the work, from writing an excellent piece to creating the graphs and contacting the participants.
• 2nd, however, you as well have to consider the time information technology took the staff of the newsletter to prepare it for the original publication, also as the fourth dimension of the four interviewees and the work information technology took to coordinate their contributions.
• 3rd, to publish information technology in the Signpost, three current and former members of the editorial board examined and copyedited it in-depth because of the piece'south length and the controversial nature of the material.

Every bit you tin can see, in addition to the hard work of the writers who produce our features, a lot of work goes into publishing the Signpost that goes unseen and unnoticed past our readers. But they would surely notice its absenteeism, and as those tasks fall to fewer and fewer people, nosotros struggle to keep the quality of the publication high.

Currently we take a very fluid organizational structure, which is a charitable way of maxim we are unorganized. It has its advantages, being flexible and adjustable, but many regular tasks are not getting done and nosotros don't accept the opportunity to take on new ones. When someone brings united states of america an exciting new thought for the Signpost, again and again our response has to be "We love it, only who's going to do information technology?"

With that in heed, three members of the editorial lath met at WikiConference and hammered out a reorganization plan. "Compartmentalization" is the key discussion; we desire to accept regular tasks and distribute them amid more people so they get washed regularly and don't autumn on just a few people, prompting them to fire out and leave. Nosotros've sketched out a structure and we'd like to observe people to fill these roles. Nosotros still want to exist flexible; more than than one person could share the duties of a single role, or, more likely, ane person could accept on more than one role.

Under this program, the Signpost will nevertheless be coordinated by an editor-in-chief. They will also help fill in whatever roles are needed temporarily. The new editorial board will consist of the EIC and eight associate editors. Four of them will be responsible for coordinating and publishing (but not writing) each week'south edition. This includes coordinating with contributors, copyediting, and making sure that their sections are publication-set up, with images and conforming to the Signpost style guide.

• News: News and Notes, In the Media, Mediation Report, and Technology Report. This role will be filled by Andreas Kolbe.
• Features: Featured Content, Traffic, WikiProject Report, Contempo Research, Gallery, Tech News, and Web log.
• Editorial: Op-eds and Editorial. This function will exist filled by me.
• Special Reports/Projects: This role will be filled past Tony1.

They will be assisted by four others:

• Publication: This person will coordinate with the content editors to set a publication fourth dimension and will be the person responsible for performing the publication process. A bot does well-nigh of the piece of work; the primary tasks are organizing the front page each week (writing snippets and choosing an image) and cleaning upward whatever the bot missed when information technology skips a step. This person will accept to be comfy enough with wiki-markup to cutting and paste whatever is missing from the publication instruction page to the appropriate Signpost pages.
• Personnel and recruitment: We demand a people person. This office will be responsible for the care, upkeep, and recruitment of contributors and dealing with whatever issues.
• Social media and outreach: This person volition be responsible for promoting the Signpost via social media (primarily Facebook and Twitter, but an aggressive private could branch out) and for making sure suggestions get to the appropriate editor.
• Mode/Tagging/Templates: This person will be responsible for maintaining the Signpost 's style guide, templates, and tagging initiative. This office will be filled by Resident Mario.

Of form, none of these people would have any piece of work to practice if it weren't for our contributors. There has traditionally been an overlap between the roles of editor and contributor, but we and our readers don't desire the same people writing everything every week.

Even if you don't want to commit to a weekly role on the Signpost, nosotros need your help writing the content for these sections, fifty-fifty if you only contribute an occasional pocket-sized piece to a department like In the Media or Featured Content. Experience free to contact the editor for the section y'all are interested in, or just dive into a draft commodity and start writing.

We realize this is an ambitious plan, but we don't have whatsoever choice just to try. The alternatives mean, at minimum, a lower-quality and less-frequent Signpost. If we don't go more assistance soon, the next step volition exist to permanently abolish regular sections and make the Signpost a bi-weekly or monthly publication.

We don't want to autumn silent like our sibling publications on the French and Portuguese Wikipedias. Thank you for reading and supporting Wikipedia's weekly paper.

— Gamaliel, Signpost editor-in-master

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2015-10-28

English Wikipedia reaches five 1000000 articles

There are currently half dozen,499,582 articles on Wikipedia.

The English Wikipedia reached five million articles on November 1 with the article Persoonia terminalis, a shrub native to eastern Australia. The commodity was created by Cas Liber, an Australian Wikipedian who has been editing since 2006. He has created and edited a number of Featured Articles on similar topics and is active in projects similar WikiProject Fungi and WikiProject Plants. Liber was one of a number of editors submitting manufactures effectually the aforementioned fourth dimension to try to hitting the milestone. He wrote "I tried to pick articles I could go to FA status at some point...to show the globe that we could FAC the 5000000th." No free image of Persoonia terminalis is currently available, merely a number of Wikipedians have independently contacted an Australian photographer who posted copyrighted images of the shrub's two subspecies to Flickr.

The issue has been marked past a Wikimedia weblog post and a letter of the alphabet from the community, which is reproduced here.

Previous milestones	Date	Article
1 million	ane March 2006	Jordanhill railway station
2 million	9 September 2007	El Hormiguero
iii meg	17 August 2009	Beate Eriksen
4 1000000	xiii July 2012	Ezbet el-Borg

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2015-10-28

The globe'southward Wikipedia gaps; Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA

The earth's Wikipedia gaps

Practiced mag reports (October. 27) on the junior quality and much smaller correspondent pool of other language versions of Wikipedia. The article's writer, Mark Hay, begins his discussion with an article from the Zulu Wikipedia that was highlighted on Reddit some weeks ago:

"

Last month, a Due south African Redditor going past the handle lovethebacon took to the site'due south r/southafrica forum to share a weird experience he had while surfing Wikipedia recently. He noticed that the Zulu-language folio for Nkandla, a town of 3,557 people in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa's 2nd-largest (and fairly well-developed) province, ended with the following phrase: "Nazo isintandane ziningi lengculazi. Iyidolobha impofu." Roughly translated, lovethebacon explained, this means: "Orphans [here] have HIV. [This is the] capital of the poor." That's a broad statement, both uncouth and untrue, and so information technology'due south understandable that the Wikipedia entry would enhance a hackle or ii. But given the size of this crowdsourced, philosophically anarchic digital encyclopedia, we in the Westward are accustomed to the notion that nosotros'll come across a stinker or two while browsing around. The site itself even acknowledges this, cautioning that there are only so many airtight, authoritative manufactures in its database. Many of us believe that once nosotros signal out offensive blips and glitches, dutiful editors will come along and fix them. Nonetheless in the case of the Zulu Wikipedia and many others, that belief may be unfounded. Non only are non-English Wikipedias on par smaller, but they too tend to have fewer editors, meaning they run a greater hazard of perpetuating questionable information within a lodge – a situation that doesn't seem most to change anytime soon.

"

A decade ago, Nkandla was the setting of an award-winning documentary, The Orphans of Nkandla, which resulted in the creation of The Africa Project. It is a thing of record that AIDS and poverty have ravaged many children's lives in KwaZulu-Natal. Just Hay's observation almost minor linguistic communication versions of Wikipedia remains broadly correct. Indeed, a slide shown at Wikimania 2014 indicated that of Wikipedia'south then-284 (today: 291) language versions,

• 12 were expressionless (locked);
• 53 were "zombies" (open, no editors);
• 94 were struggling (open, fewer than 5 editors);
• 125 were "in proficient or excellent health" (presumably, judging by the definitions of the previous three categories, this number included all Wikipedias that had v or more than editors).

The implications for quality are obvious.

Deploring Wikipedia's "cumbersome cocky-created hierarchy and inter-editor sniping", Hay suggests that these global imbalances are unlikely to right themselves: while it may be tempting to think that the more established Wikipedias are bigger and more than developed merely considering they had several years' head start on smaller language versions, the smaller language versions show no sign of replicating the extraordinary boom the English language Wikipedia underwent in its early years. In fact, Hay argues, the global volunteer base shrank by a third between 2007 and 2013.

"

The whole situation tin feel a piffling futile – a depressing reaffirmation of entrenched inequalities born out of what was supposed to be an accessible, egalitarian, and idealistic site.

"

Hay then gain to place his hopes in car-translation apps, and reviews ii multilingual projects:

1. Omnipedia, a project beingness developed past researchers at Northwestern University, "capable of culling, comparing, and automatically translating information from 25 different Wikipedia language editions simultaneously, presenting them in simplified grade", and
2. Manypedia, an Italian project, online today, that "can automatically translate ii Wikipedia articles adjacent and betoken out incongruous data between them – or just translate an existing commodity into a different language".

Hay suggests that "complementary data from across all the world's Wikipedias" could be mined and translated "back to your native language site, thus attaining the online encyclopedia's egalitarian ideal". This is an overly optimistic view, given the present day'due south appalling, practically unreadable quality of many motorcar translations, which would go out prospective readers of Wikipedias stocked with automobile translations greatly frustrated – a point that tin can be verified by looking at some of Manypedia'due south commodity translations.

The English language translation of the Persian commodity on "Third World" for instance (enter http://www.manypedia.com/#!|en|Third_World|fa as the URL and click "Interpret" in the right-mitt panel) includes gems like

"

Definition In academic circles, the term South, developed and underdeveloped 3rd globe countries used to refer to.

"

Imagine a Zulu reader trying to learn almost physics or chemistry from a text that is every bit proficiently authored in Zulu as the above passage is articulate and curtailed English.

In that location is footling reason to argue with Hay's conclusion, yet:

"

At the very least, if these initiatives proceeds a bit of traction, they can showtime a serious conversation about continued shortcomings and differences between Wikipedias, driving u.s. toward more systematic changes and tactics that tin can fill the earth's glaring content gaps once and for all.

"

AK

Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA

Breitbart accuses (October. 27) Wikipedia and Google of having prominently linked the proper name of Ben Carson, an acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon and a Republican candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 presidential election, to a pedophile advocacy grouping, the Northward American Man-Male child Dearest Clan (NAMBLA).

As evidence Breitbart shows a screenshot of a Google search results page, which lists Carson's Wikipedia biography as the top result (below the sponsored link and the "In the news" section), with "Northward American Human-Boy Love", "Seventh-day Adventist Church" and "Craniopagus twins" highlighted every bit hyperlinked primal points in bluish.

A Carson campaign spokesperson told Breitbart,

"

We've complained to Google and filled out requests to accept it down that have been ignored.

"

The spokesman blamed "pranksters" for the inappropriate highlight.

NAMBLA is mentioned in Wikipedia's biography of Carson because the term occurs in a 2013 comment of Carson'due south that is quoted verbatim in the article, and in which Carson said, "Matrimony is between a man and a adult female. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are. They don't get to change the definition." (Carson afterwards apologized for the remark.) The acronym NAMBLA in the quotation has from time to time been hyperlinked in the Wikipedia article.

While the Carson team's frustration with the Google entry is understandable, it seems speculative to propose that the hyperlink must have been placed so equally to increase the term's chances of actualization in the Google snippet, or that Google staff specifically selected the term to appear in its snippet from the many bachelor.

Information technology bears mention though that co-ordinate to Wikipedia's manual of mode, quotations should mostly remain free of hyperlinks. At the time of writing, the Google snippet no longer references NAMBLA. AK

In brief

• EFF comments on NSA lawsuit: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a critical annotate (Oct. 29) on the contempo dismissal of the Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA lawsuit (see previous Signpost coverage). AK
• Follow-up to the Atlantic story: Women's fashion and lifestyle website Verily covers (Oct. 28) last calendar week's story in The Atlantic on "Wikipedia's hostility to women" (encounter coverage in the previous Signpost consequence and the related, much-discussed Signpost editorial). Going across a mere summary of the Atlantic article, the piece argues that "Not only does anonymity give some Internet users the evil courage to spew vitriol, only it can sometimes lead to victim blaming also." A Korean site also picked up the story. AK
• Why the arts need to set up Wikipedia: ArtsHub discusses (Oct. 28) Wikipedia's Art+Feminism initiative forth with the piece of work museums are doing to fill content gaps in Wikipedia. AK
• Debunking Wikipedia conspiracy theories: In the September/Oct consequence of Skeptical Inquirer, Susan Gerbic, co-founder of Guerrilla Skep​ticism on Wikipedia, writes (Oct. 28) "Is Wikipedia a Conspiracy? Common Myths Explained", where she discusses common misconceptions in the skeptical community almost Wikipedia. G
• Lack of media attention to Wikipedia: VentureBeat (October. 26) and The Adjacent Web (Oct. 27) pick up on a contempo Signpost editorial by Signpost editor-in-chief Gamaliel that was republished in a slightly edited version on the Wikimedia blog, arguing that Wikipedia receives remarkably niggling press attention compared to other top-ten sites. Both The Next Web and VentureBeat agree that the post raised a valid point; The Next Spider web suggests that the "all-too-silent Wikimedia Foundation is partly to blame". Gamaliel clarified in a reader comment at The Adjacent Web that he would like to see more investigative journalism in the media's Wikipedia coverage, as opposed to a reliance on Wikimedia press releases. AK
• Wikipedia Monument celebrates offset anniversary: Inverse.com marks (Oct. 22) the offset anniversary of the world'due south first and only monument in tribute to Wikipedia in Słubice, Poland. The bronze sculpture cost $14,000. Krzysztof Wojciechowski, a Polish professor, felt deep gratitude for the contributions of Wikipedia and its editors to shared knowledge, leading him to suggest the monument to the town's administration. L

Do yous want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit side by side week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.

Reader comments

2015-ten-28

It'due south time to stop the bullying

Gangs of bullies and trolls rove the internet and brand life difficult for the residuum of the states. We get our share of them on Wikipedia. As a website that invites everybody to edit as long as they follow our rules, in that location's little nosotros tin can do to prevent them from coming here. Final week's article in The Atlantic past Emma Paling, "Wikipedia'south Hostility to Women", shows that incivility and harassment of women has become common hither. Just we don't have to accept that state of affairs.

How tin can nosotros stop this incivility and harassment? A cardinal function has to exist played past the Arbitration Commission, who can ban or otherwise sanction the harassers. Unfortunately they take not done then. The three arbitration cases on the Gender Gap Task Forcefulness (GGTF), Gamergate, and Lightbreather testify that heavier sanctions are given to women and men who stand up to the harasser than to the actual harasser. The problem at present is less the mistake of the bullies than with ArbCom.

I've never really considered myself to be a feminist – it merely hasn't been my personal fight. Only I do strongly believe that everybody should be able to contribute to Wikipedia without being harassed, regardless of their nationality, race, religion, or gender. And peradventure I'm but a flake onetime-fashioned. Bandying about the word "cunt" in a mixed chat, as one well-known editor has washed, insults not only the woman targeted, but every woman who sees the discussion. Indeed information technology insults the entire community. Most importantly, I just hate seeing people existence bullied.

Fortunately, there is one direct fashion that we can change ArbCom and brand a change in how we handle the bullying problem. In a few weeks elections for 2-year terms volition exist held for viii out of the 15 arbitrators.

First at that place needs to be at least eight candidates standing for election who are solidly committed to stopping the bullying. They don't need to all exist women, although that would send a loud and clear message to all concerned. They don't need to all be feminists. All they need is to be committed to stopping the bullying.

The formal requirements to be a candidate are few. You need to be at least 18 years old, have registered for a Wikipedia account before November i and have at least 500 mainspace edits before then. You'll demand to disclose your identity to the Wikimedia Foundation and sign a confidentiality agreement if you win. You lot do non demand to be an administrator. You tin can nominate yourself from November viii to Nov 17.

Finding adept candidates is the about important step. If at least eight candidates don't nominate themselves, we tin't elect them. Nobody should worry about at that place being also many skillful candidates; the ballot mechanics simply do not disadvantage those viewpoints with "extra candidates". It's fourth dimension for you to step up to the plate.

The formal requirements to vote are also fairly minimal. You need to have an business relationship past October 28 and take made at least 150 mainspace edits by November ane. Yous cannot be currently blocked. Voting takes place from November 23 to December half dozen.

How tin yous tell who to vote for? All candidates are asked questions before the election and they all have editing histories. The showtime thing you should check is whether they fully commit to stopping the bullying, or just say a few fluffy phrases most it. Otherwise you might have to read and investigate for a long time. At that place will exist voter guides to help you lot decide, put out by whoever thinks voters will listen to them. In that location may actually be more voter guides than candidates, so I'll suggest just finding i guide written by an editor you know and trust, if you can't sort through all the information on your ain.

The mechanics of the election are unusual. You can support as many of the candidates as you similar, oppose as many as you like, or vote "neutral." Delight don't vote neutral, it is just throwing away your vote. But please exercise support every candidate who meets your standards, and oppose every candidate who does not.

Later throwing away the neutral votes, the eight winners are those who have the highest percent of support votes. Taking last year equally a guide, the winners will need virtually sixty% supports. That's somewhere between 210 and 250 support votes. In curt, a couple hundred well placed votes tin decide the election. It's a certain thing that ArbCom's decisions have offended that many editors. And it is almost as easy to elect 8 arbitrators equally it is to elect i.

ArbCom can exist changed, Wikipedia can exist changed. The bullying can be stopped.

Smallbones has been an editor on the English Wikipedia since 2005. The views expressed in this editorial are his solitary and exercise non reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.

Reader comments

2015-10-28

A second endeavour at Arbitration enforcement

Some other week, another case being accepted by the Arbitration Committee. This fourth dimension we return to a topic that is still relatively new equally a second Arbitration enforcement case is now open. And like before this is focused on Eric Corbett and his actions.

Background

Eric Corbett has been a named party in multiple cases in Arbcom, including the first Mediation enforcement case back in August and the Gender Gap Task Strength (GGTF) instance from December 2014. The latter case resulted in 2 remedies implemented on Corbett: the first being topic banned from the Gender Gap topic, and the second having him prohibited from "shouting at, swearing at, insulting and/or belittling other editors."

On The Atlantic

On 21 October, The Atlantic published a piece titled "How Wikipedia is Hostile to Women". The piece referenced the controversial Lightbreather case which saw Lightbreather site-banned indefinitely dorsum in July. The article besides mentions Eric Corbett, quoting him proverb to Lightbreather, "The easiest way to avoid being called a cunt is not to human activity similar one." This quote was made dorsum in July 2014, before he was prohibited from swearing at other editors. Due to the controversial topic of sexism on Wikipedia (and in full general), this article was brought upwardly at Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales' talk page. In the discussion editors talked virtually the article's inaccuracies, including the article's erroneously calling Corbett an administrator on the site. Corbett went onto the thread to defend himself but was blocked for a month by Kirill Lokshin due to violating his topic ban from the Gender Gap topic after making comments on the gender gap on Wikipedia. (It should be noted that Lightbreather was besides a member of GGTF). This block was lifted by Yngvadottir a few days later, resulting in her existence Level II desysopped by the Arbitration Committee "For reversing an arbitration enforcement cake out of procedure". Corbett himself stated that he didn't desire to exist unblocked.

And that brings us to where we are at present, with admin Blackness Kite being the filing party of the instance. Black Kite was a named party in the start Arbitration enforcement case. In that case information technology was establish that they found no grounds to block Corbett for a different incident but had the conclusion overruled by GorillaWarfare, who blocked Corbett for a calendar month without discussion. GorillaWarfare, an Arbitrator, has recused herself from the current case. The remedy to that instance was to delegate the drafters of the example to amend and clarify both WP:ACDS and WP:AE. This remedy doesn't seem to have been implemented yet, with the Discretionary sanctions page having little changed. With five open cases currently ongoing nosotros may take to continue waiting for whatever activity on the amendments.

In brief

• Overlapped sanctions: The Arbitration Committee has rescinded remedies in multiple cases "to prevent defoliation and overlap betwixt existing sanctions".

Reader comments

2015-10-28

Canada, the most popular nation on World

With the triumph of Justin Trudeau (#1) in the Canadian federal election (#xiii), he likewise placed acme in our nautical chart this week, though some of this Cyberspace popularity appears to exist due to his "hotness". This also placed his father and sometime Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau at #4. And with "Dorsum to the Futurity Solar day" falling on October 21, Canadian-American actor Michael J. Fox landed at #3. Thus, iii of the top 5 spots this week, and vii of the Height 25 (chirapsia the five placed past India in July), are Canada-related. As the 37th nearly populated country in the world, this seems a feat unlikely to presently be repeated.

Elsewhere on the chart, the coming of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which still doesn't happen until December, took up two slots in the Top 10. A new age-titled album from singer Adele placed #7, and the Top ten was rounded out by a Reddit thread about a rare affliction, and the stalwart Deaths in 2015.

For the full pinnacle-25 listing, see WP:TOP25. See this department for an explanation of whatsoever exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, encounter here.

For the week of October 18 to 24, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as adamant from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Commodity	Course	Views	Image	Notes
i	Justin Trudeau		ii,709,956		Trudeau is expected to soon have over every bit Prime Minister of Canada following the success of his Liberal Party in the recent Canadian federal election. Trudeau's father Pierre Trudeau (#4) served in that function from 1968-1984 (with a brief break in 1979-fourscore). With over 2.7 one thousand thousand views for the week, this was quite a popular event. To some unknown extent, the commodity's views were inflated past widespread press coverage nearly the subject's attractiveness, both pro and con.
2	Star Wars: The Strength Awakens		one,271,270		If you've caught the press coverage most this upcoming movie here and there, you may exist asking yourself, is this matter always coming out? A poster and new trailer was released last week, which apparently acquired a frenzy on the role of the cyberspace not ogling the force of Justin Trudeau. And for those us not that closely involved, the answer is that it rolls out in parts of Europe on December 16, the U.K. on December 17, and North America on December 18.
three	Michael J. Fox		933,448		Oct 21, 2015 was "Back to the Future Solar day" – the day in the future that Marty McFly (played by Fox) traveled to in the 1989 moving-picture show Back to the Future Office II. And though we don't take true hoverboards or a Jaws 19 movie, and the Chicago Cubs merely missed their risk to arrive to the Globe Series, the Internet nostalgia engine was running out of control. And with fathers and son Trudeau, the advent of the Canadian born Fox means that Canada, the 37th almost populated country in the earth, has placed 3 of the top five articles this week, a feat unlikely to e'er be repeated.
4	Pierre Trudeau		860,884		Ranked by scholars as ane of the greatest Canadian prime minsters, and also the slightly less attractive forebear of this week's #1.
v	Back to the Time to come		767,683		See #3, # eleven, and #15.
6	Black hole		612,175		Upwardly from #13 terminal calendar week, but a debatable entry. The first entry without 1970/80s roots, as the 1979 Disney film The Black Hole but does non generate that much warm nostalgia. Though a Reddit thread could lift an article like this into the Meridian 10 on whatsoever given week, we practice not run across any such thread. Stats.grok.se shows a spring in views starting on October 13 from a few yard per twenty-four hour period to over 40,000 per day. It has 25% mobile views (not the either 0% or 99% typical of bot-view popularity), merely we may drop this from the list if these steady views keep and a human-based explanation cannot be found.
7	Adele		581,472		The popular singer'due south new album 25 will be released on November 20. The first single, "Hello", debuted on October 23. As of this writing, the video for "Hello" already has 73 1000000 views.
8	Star Wars		567,518		See #2.
9	Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva		545,423		October 24 saw the almost interest in this article, generated by a Reddit thread that stated "[today I learned] that at that place is a disease that makes the body repair injuries using os, over the course of many years, this leads to the victim becoming more and more like a statue." Not-sensational headlines like this really tin can become attending on Reddit; they don't need to utilise clickbait thread titles similar "Feeling lethargic today? Observe out if rare illness may be turning you into stone!"
x	Deaths in 2015		535,526		The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably abiding; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550 thousand on average, apparently heedless of who actually died. Deaths this week included NASA specialist Robert Due west. Farquhar whose projects included the beginning probe to intercept a comet in 1985 (Oct 18); Miss Republic of austria 2013 Ena Kadić, who died from injuries sustained from falling off a mount (October 19); Shine-Austrian economist Kazimierz Łaski, a leading proponent of Post-Keynesian economic science (October 20, pictured); Pakistani cricket manager Yawar Saeed (October 21); Former Mexican senator Tomás Torres Mercado, who died in a airplane crash (October 22); Croatian chess grandmaster Krunoslav Hulak (October 23); and twenty-twelvemonth-one-time British clemency fundraiser Kirsty Howard (October 24).

• See the WP:TOP25 for entries 11-25.
• Only Missing the Top 25 This Week: #26 Steve Jobs; #27 List of Bollywood films of 2015; #28 Ross Rebagliati (some other Canadian); #29 The Walking Dead (TV serial); #thirty The Walking Dead (flavour half dozen); #31 The Martian (film); #32 Stephen Hawking; #33 Hell in a Cell (2015) (wrestling pay-per-view consequence); #34 United States; #35 Pyaar Ka Punchnama ii (Hindi motion-picture show)
• From the Raw WP:5000: #100 Expletive of the Billy Goat (a Chicago Cubs reference; 198,382 views); #250 The Vox (U.South. season 9) (119,156 views); #500 Asperger syndrome (87,696 views); #1000 Gone Daughter (film) (62,167 views); #2500 Julianne Moore (37,345 views)

Reader comments

2015-10-28

Student attitudes towards Wikipedia; Jesus, Napoleon and Obama height "Wikipedia social network"; featured commodity editing patterns in 12 languages

A monthly overview of contempo bookish research nearly Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, likewise published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Students value Wikipedia both for quick answers and for detailed explorations

Reviewed past Jonathan Morgan

This newspaper^[one] reports findings from a survey of Norwegian secondary schoolhouse students nigh their use of Wikipedia in the context of their coursework. The survey of 168 students between the ages of 18 and 19 consisted of 33 Likert scale questions and ii gratuitous response questions. The goal was to assess how Wikipedia figured into students' literacy practices, a concept that encompasses students' and teachers' attitudes towards the resource they apply to larn and the social context in which they engage with those resources, too as the process past which they read, recollect, and empathise the information provided by each resource.

The chief finding of the study is that students' attitudes towards Wikipedia are overwhelmingly positive, merely they observe the information presented in Wikipedia less trustworthy than their official course materials. Although 90% of respondents rated their textbooks as more trustworthy, they cited the ease of finding factual information (such as dates, names, etc) as a primal reason for preferring Wikipedia. They also reported that Wikipedia was better than their textbooks at explaining the "big picture" of a given topic, equally well as facilitating more in-depth exploration. In the words of one survey respondent: "If you demand to, you lot can read elaborations virtually a given topic, or y'all tin just read the summary if that is what yous demand."

These findings suggest that the primary advantage that Wikipedia offers to students is its flexibility: it allows students to detect quick answers and more than detailed accounts with equal ease. The findings likewise advise that both students and teachers would benefit from a amend understanding of how to critically evaluate the quality of information presented in Wikipedia and other open up online information resource.

The study also confirmed findings from previous studies: that the vast majority of students use Wikipedia to supplement their official grade resources (textbooks, etc), that most of them access Wikipedia via Google search, and that English language-speaking students tend to seek information on the English-language Wikipedia outset, regardless of their kickoff language or national origin.

Jesus, Napoleon, and Obama top the "Wikipedia social network"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

A (conference?) paper titled "Across Friendships and Followers: The Wikipedia Social Network"^[2] applies social network theory to the assay of relationship between subjects of Wikipedia biographical manufactures. Using Wikidata and Wikipedia metadata, the authors produce a number of findings. Some of them volition non exist unexpected to readers, such as that "By far the largest occupational groups are politicians and football players", or "The page with the most mentions of persons is Rosters of the top basketball teams in European club competitions" (with 4,694 mentions of 1,761 different persons). The almost referenced persons are Jesus and Napoleon, followed by Barack Obama, Muhammad, Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler, and George W. Bush. Over four fifths of the links in Wikipedia are to male persons, which roughly reflects the gender distribution of Wikipedia biographies; a like distribution confirms that most of the biographies focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors, yet, practise non dwell on the social scientific discipline implications of their findings, just merely propose that their tool tin can be used to refine Wikipedia categories and disambiguation tools. The findings are interesting from the perspective of alternate approaches to categorization, as it may propose possible new categories that oasis't yet been created past human editors, and perhaps provides a mathematical model of how Wikipedia categories can exist created.

"Exploration of Online Culture Through Network Analysis of Wikipedia"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

This paper^[3] too uses social network theory, equally well equally the Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values, and McCrae's 5 factor model of personality to ask research questions about the concept of online culture; in particular whether it is universal or differs for various national cultures. Information technology focused on 72 Featured Articles in 12 languages (unfortunately, the authors practice not explain any reasons for choosing those particular 12 languages over the others); discounting bots, the authors analyzed more than than 150,000 editors and 250,000 edits. The authors find that most Wikipedia edits are what they telephone call self-loops, or individual editors making edits to the same articles they have edited before, without their editing existence interrupted by edits by another editor. They fail to make whatsoever comment on what that really means for the vision of Wikipedia as a collaborative surround. The authors discover significant differences in editing patterns between sure Wikipedia projects, though this reviewer finds the clarification of said differences (focusing on a case written report of one Japanese and 1 Russian article) rather curt. Similarly, their discussion of how the results fit (or don't) with the established theories of Hofstede and others is interesting, simply rather curt; that unsatisfying brevity may however be due to editorial requirements (the unabridged newspaper is only 3.5k words long, instead of the more common boilerplate of about 8k). The authors conclude that "new dimensions of online culture can be explored from directly observed online beliefs", something that one hopes they'll revisit themselves, together with their dataset, in a longer paper that will do proper justice to it.

In brief

Vandalism detection research neglects smaller languages

Reviewed by Morten Warncke-Wang

A paper at the 19th International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers (CSCC)^[four] provides an overview of inquiry on vandalism detection in Wikipedia, with a focus on the usage of car learning. One of the paper's conclusions is that future inquiry should aim for language-independency, as piffling progress has been made outside of the English, German, French, and Spanish Wikipedia editions.

Automatic quality assessment using the "collaboration network"

Reviewed by Morten Warncke-Wang

"Measuring Commodity Quality in Wikipedia Using the Collaboration Network"^[five] is a paper that proposes an improved model of co-authorship to be used in predicting the quality of Wikipedia manufactures. Trained on a stratified sample of articles from the English Wikipedia, it is shown to outperform several baselines. Unfortunately, the dataset used for evaluation omits Beginning-class articles for no apparent reason, and used the latest revision of an article, which might differ considerably from when an article received its quality rating.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in fourth dimension for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published enquiry.

Dissertations

• "607 Journalists: An evaluation of Wikipedia's response to and coverage of breaking news and current events"^[6] See also blog post
• "Wiki is not paper: Fixing and breaking the 'news' on Wikipedia" ^[7] From the abstract: "The case studies include the "Barack Obama" article, which is used to investigate the establishment and maintenance of the "fact" that Obama is described as an 'African American,' despite his mixed-race heritage. ... The 2d case study uses the article on the 2008 war in the Georgian province of Southward Ossetia to investigate the transnational and transcultural pitfalls of 'bias' in the writing of a 'neutral' article. The concluding case examines the decision to publish controversial material past examining the commodity on the 2006 Muhammad cartoons controversy. This article was crucial on Wikipedia in establishing the protocol in publishing such images."
• "User interaction with customs processes in online communities" ^[8] From the abstract: "We discover that articles that are deleted from Wikipedia differ from those that are not in many significant ways. We also find, still, that most deleted articles are deleted extremely hastily, often before they have time to develop. We use our information to create a model that can predict with loftier precision whether or non an article volition be deleted. ... Nosotros propose to deploy a system utilizing this model on Wikipedia as a ready of decision-support tools to assist article creators evaluate and amend their articles before posting. ... English language Wikipedia'south Articles for Cosmos provides a protected space for drafting new articles, which are reviewed against minimum quality guidelines before they are published. We explore the possibility that this drafting process, which is intended to improve the success of newcomers, in fact decreases newcomer productivity in English Wikipedia, and offer recommendations for system designers."
• "Detecting Vandalism on Wikipedia across Multiple Languages" ^[ix]

More contempo publications

• "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content: Pseudo-Experimental Bear witness on Wikipedia" ^[10] From the abstract: "[On the German Wikipedia, the featuring of an article on the principal page does] affect neighboring articles substantially: Their viewership increases by almost 70 percentage. This, in turn, translates to increased editing activity. Attending is the driving mechanism behind views and brusk edits. Both outcomes are related to the order of links, while more substantial edits are not." Come across as well by the aforementioned author: "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content"
• "Peer Effects in Collaborative Content Generation: The Evidence from High german Wikipedia" ^[11] From the abstruse: "editors who contribute to the same manufactures and exchange comments on articles' talk pages work in collaborative style sometimes discussing their work. They can, therefore, be considered as peers, who are likely to influence each other. In this commodity, I examine whether peer influence, measured past the average corporeality of peer contributions or by the number of peers, yields spillovers to the amount of individual contributions."
• "Wikipedia Page View Reflects Spider web Search Trend""^[12] (meet besides datasets, slides) From the abstruse: "Nosotros institute frequently searched keywords to have remarkably loftier correlations with Wikipedia page views."
• "Wikipedia edition dynamics" ^[13] From the abstract: "It is argued that the probability to edit is proportional to the editor's number of previous editions (preferential attachment), to the editor'south fitness and to an ageing factor." See also by the same authors: "The dynamic nature of disharmonize in Wikipedia"
• "Cultural Similarity, Understanding and Affinity on Wikipedia Cuisine Pages" ^[fourteen] See besides "Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia - A study of 31 European food cultures"
• "The influence of network structures of Wikipedia discussion pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects"^[15] From the abstract: "The evaluation suggests that an intermediate level of cohesion with a core of influential users dominating network flow improves effectiveness for a WikiProject, and that greater average membership tenure relates to projection efficiency in a positive mode."
• "Technological Nudges and Copyright on Social Media Sites" ^[16] From the abstract: "Using an adapted taxonomy, this commodity identifies the technological features on predominant social media sites—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia—that encourage and constrain users from engaging in generative activities. Notwithstanding the alien narrative painted past recent litigation around copyright in relation to content on social media sites, I notice that some of the chief technological features on social media sites are designed effectually copyright considerations." (Notwithstanding, the newspaper never mentions that Wikipedia'due south content is under a complimentary license.) "In contrast to the other social media sites, I note that Wikipedia does not allow its users to comment on content; hence there is trivial room for this alternative form of modification."
• "The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction" ^[17]
• "Students' use of Wikipedia every bit an academic resource — Patterns of utilise and perceptions of usefulness" ^[18] (survey of 1658 undergraduate students) From the abstruse: "87.5% of students report using Wikipedia for their academic work, with 24.0% of these because it 'very useful'. Use and perceived usefulness of Wikipedia differs by students' gender; year of study; cultural background and subject studied. Wikipedia mainly plays an introductory and/or clarificatory role in students data gathering and research."
• "Snooping Wikipedia Vandals with MapReduce" ^[xix] From the abstract: "[Using] MapReduce ... we are able to explore a very big dataset, consisting of over 5 millions manufactures [really pages on enwiki, including non-articles] collaboratively edited by fourteen millions authors, resulting in over viii billion pairwise interactions. We represent Wikipedia every bit a signed network, where positive arcs imply effective interaction betwixt editors. Nosotros then isolate a set of high reputation editors (i.e., nodes having many positive incoming links) and allocate the remaining ones based on their interactions with loftier reputation editors."
• "An amanuensis-based model of edit wars in Wikipedia: How and when consensus is reached" ^[twenty] From the abstract: "We show that increasing the number of credible or trustworthy agents and agents with a neutral point of view decreases the time taken to achieve consensus, whereas the duration is longest when agents with opposing views are in equal proportion." See also last issue's review of a different numerical model of edit wars: "More newbies mean more conflict, but extreme tolerance can nevertheless reach eternal peace"

References

1. ^ Blikstad-Balas, Marte (2015). ""You get what y'all need" : A study of students' attitudes towards using Wikipedia when doing school assignments". Scandinavian Periodical of Educational Research. 3831 (October): i–xv.
2. ^ Johanna Geiß, Andreas Spitz, Michael Gertz: Beyond Friendships and Followers: The Wikipedia Social Network PDF
3. ^ Park Sung Joo, Kim Jong Woo, Lee Hong Joo, Park Hyunjung, Han Deugcheon, and Gloor Peter. Exploration of Online Culture Through Network Analysis of Wikipedia. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, alee of print. doi:10.1089/cyber.2014.0638
4. ^ Hamiti, Mentor; Susuri, Arsim; Dika, Agni. "Machine Learning and the Detection of Anomalies in Wikipedia" (PDF). Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers.
5. ^ de La Robertie, Baptiste; Pitarch, Yoann; Teste, Olivier. "Measuring Article Quality in Wikipedia Using the Collaboration Network" (PDF).
6. ^ Joseph R. B. Sutherland: 607 Journalists: An evaluation of Wikipedia's response to and coverage of breaking news and current events. Dissertation, Aberdeen Business School - Robert Gordon Academy, April 2015 PDF
7. ^ Lyons, J. Michael: Wiki is not paper: Fixing and breaking the "news" on Wikipedia. Dissertation, Indiana University, 2015, 206 pages; [1]
8. ^ Gelley, Shoshana Bluma. User interaction with community processes in online communities. Dissertation, Polytechnic Institute of New York Academy, 2015 [2]
9. ^ Khoi-Nguyen Dao Tran: Detecting Vandalism on Wikipedia across Multiple Languages. Thesis submitted for the caste of Doctor of Philosophy, The Australian National Academy, May 2015 PDF
10. ^ Kummer, Michael Eastward. (2014-12-29). Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content: Pseudo-Experimental Evidence on Wikipedia. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2567179.
11. ^ Olga Slivko: Peer Furnishings in Collaborative Content Generation: The Bear witness from German Wikipedia. Discussion Paper No. fourteen-128, Centre for European Economical Research (ZEW). Dec 22, 2014, updated March 3, 2015 PDF
12. ^ Mitsuo Yoshida, Yuki Arase, Takaaki Tsunoda, Mikio Yamamoto. Wikipedia Page View Reflects Web Search Trend. The 2015 ACM Spider web Science conference (WebSci15). Oxford, Britain, June 28 - July one, 2015. Authors' copy
13. ^ Gandica, Y.; F. Sampaio dos Aidos; J. Carvalho (2014-12-thirty). "Wikipedia edition dynamics". arXiv:1412.8657.
14. ^ Paul Laufer: Cultural Similarity, Understanding and Analogousness on Wikipedia Cuisine Pages. Main Thesis, TU Graz, August 2014 PDF
15. ^ Xiangju Qin, Pádraig Cunningham, Michael Salter-Townshend: The influence of network structures of Wikipedia give-and-take pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects. Social Networks Volume 43, October 2015, Pages 1–15 doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2015.04.002
16. ^ Tan Ms, Corinne (2015). "Technological Nudges and Copyright on Social Media Sites". Intellectual Belongings Quarterly (1): 62–78.
17. ^ Grundkiewicz, Roman; Junczys-Dowmunt, Marcin (2014-09-17). "The WikEd Error Corpus: A Corpus of Corrective Wikipedia Edits and Its Application to Grammatical Error Correction". In Adam Przepiórkowski; Maciej Ogrodniczuk (eds.). Advances in Tongue Processing. Lecture Notes in Informatics. Springer International Publishing. pp. 478–490. ISBN978-3-319-10888-9.
18. ^ Neil Selwyna, Stephen Gorardb: Students' use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — Patterns of utilize and perceptions of usefulness. The Internet and Higher Didactics, Volume 28, January 2016, Pages 28–34 doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.004
19. ^ Michele Spina, Dario Rossi, Mauro Sozio, Silviu Maniu, Bogdan Cautis: Snooping Wikipedia Vandals with MapReduce. 2015 IEEE International Briefing on Communications (ICC), doi:10.1109/ICC.2015.7248477. PDF (authors' copy)
20. ^ Arun Kalyanasundaram, Wei Wei, Kathleen One thousand. Carley, James D. Herbsleb: An amanuensis-based model of edit wars in Wikipedia: How and when consensus is reached. Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Briefing, L. Yilmaz, Westward. Thou V. Chan, I. Moon, T. M. Yard. Roeder, C. Macal, and M. D. Rossetti, eds. PDF.

Reader comments

2015-x-28

Tech news in brief

The post-obit content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

Reader comments

2015-10-28

Five million articles

Past the Wikipedia community

• WP:5M
• WP:5MIL

The English Wikipedia has reached v,000,000 articles with
Persoonia terminalis (a type of shrub),
created past Australian contributor Cas Liber on one November 2015 at 12:27 UTC.

---

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free admission to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 as a project to build an online, costless-access, free-content encyclopedia entirely from scratch. Since and then, it has grown to be the largest encyclopedia ever created, comprising more five million articles in English, while nonetheless relying on the contributions of volunteers. The English Wikipedia community thank you the millions of users whose edits over the past xiv-plus years have made this remarkable accomplishment possible.

A cursory history

Wikipedia officially launched on 15 January 2001, with Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as its leaders, on a unmarried estimator server as the successor to Nupedia. Its showtime major mainstream media coverage was in The New York Times on 20 September 2001. In the commencement year of its existence, more than 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created – a rate exceeding 1,500 manufactures per month. Today, there are Wikipedia editions in more than than 200 languages, accompanied past a dozen additional free-content projects, such as Wikimedia Eatables. In March 2006, the English Wikipedia reached ane million manufactures. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is currently the earth's 6th virtually popular website, receiving approximately eight billion pageviews per month. Nosotros reached v million articles on 1 November 2015.

A work in progress

While Wikipedia is an incredible success, it remains a piece of work in progress. At that place are even so peachy gaps in its coverage with millions of of import topics missing from its pages. Many articles – even vital ones – are non yet considered high-quality. Of our five meg articles, only a few tens of thousands have passed a vetting procedure for good or featured condition, and more than one-half are brusque stubs or offset-class manufactures. There are besides more than 200 not-English language-language editions of Wikipedia that demand volunteers. In other words, at that place is still much work to be washed – and you can help!

How you tin can assist

Video of Wikipedians from effectually the world who contribute to a diverseness of Wikipedia'south language editions

Wikipedia is written past the people who utilise it. Anyone, regardless of background, can contribute to edifice the encyclopedia. Yous don't even take to annals an account (though there are adept reasons to practise so). If you notice an article you lot tin can improve, edit the commodity to make information technology more accurate and useful for others. Each page contains edit buttons for you to brand those changes immediately. Any improvement, whether it'due south fixing a typo or drafting a make new article, is profoundly appreciated.

Wikipedia values disrespect and the pursuit of consensus. Don't be agape or disillusioned if your showtime contributions are undone – Wikipedia is a collaborative project, which means that sometimes we disagree. That's okay. Each page on Wikipedia has a talk page dedicated to discussing improvements, and fellow editors have a talk page where you can contact them individually.

Welcome

If yous're new here, firstly: welcome. We sincerely promise you lot like information technology here and decide to stay. Below are some helpful links to get yous started:

• V pillars of Wikipedia – the primal principles that guide our controlling
• Research help – Strategies for utilizing Wikipedia's cognition
• Tutorial – a simple 9-page guide on the basics of Wikipedia editing
• The Wikipedia Hazard – an interactive one-hr bout that will assist you engage in the basics of editing
• Contributing to Wikipedia – a one-hour comprehensive outline of the nuts of contributing

If y'all want to find an article to improve, hither are some pointers and areas to contribute:

• Wikipedia:Community portal – collaborations, tasks, and news virtually the English Wikipedia
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Quango/Directory – A directory of WikiProjects, which are groups of editors working to better manufactures inside each project'south scope
• Wikipedia:Vital articles – Topics on which the English language Wikipedia should take corresponding high-quality articles
• This calendar week's commodity for comeback is Bank check

If you get stuck, a variety of resources are available to assist yous. The page Wikipedia:Questions lists locations where you can ask for help. The most valuable assets, however, are your young man Wikipedians. If you take any questions well-nigh editing Wikipedia, friendly Wikipedians at the Teahouse will be more than than happy to provide answers. You can also come across Wikipedians in person in many places around the earth; come across Wikipedia:Meetup for more data.

If you are already a Wikipedian, thanks for your contributions. We hope you lot go along to contribute to this astonishing compendium of human knowledge.

Sincerely,
The Wikipedia community

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