Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2018-10-01

From the editor
Is this the new normal?

News and notes
European copyright law moves forward

In the media
Knowledge under fire

Discussion report
Interface Admin policy proposal, part 2

Arbitration report
A quiet month for Arbcom

Traffic report
John McCain's death generates over 7 million hits, followed by historical low

Technology report
Paying attention to your mobile

Gallery
A pat on the back

Blog
After a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil, a drive to preserve what knowledge remains

Recent research
How talk page use has changed since 2005; censorship shocks lead to centralization; is vandalism caused by workplace boredom?

Humour
Signpost Crossword Puzzle

Essay
Expressing thanks

 

2018-10-01

Is this the new normal?

By Bri

Still cranking away

You may notice that this issue is thinner than the past several, with the departure of our former Editor-in-Chief, Kudpung, and other newsroom changes. The Signpost will attempt to maintain a monthly publication schedule even if it is at the expense of content.

If you miss the old feature-packed editions, come join as a contributor or supporting writer; or just lend a hand with copyediting, layout, and other behind-the-scenes activities. Please take a look at how to contribute to The Signpost if you might be interested.

Reader comments

2018-10-01

European copyright law moves forward

By Bri

Protest banner on the English Wikipedia seen from a German IP address in July

EU Copyright Directive Article 13

On September 12, the European Parliament approved Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (Article 13), which had received much press back in June – including coverage in The Signpost. Even protest banners on the English Wikipedia displayed for European users, and full shutdowns occurred for some European language Wikipedias. Many comments on the proposed legislation concerned its effect on media largely dependent on many contributors, described as potentially chilling public discussion and putting up barriers to collaborative works by placing the burden for prevention of copyright infringement on the hosting party. The impact of the legislation has yet to be fully reckoned, but it did include carve-outs for non-profit uses intended for platforms such as Wikipedia. Still, we don't know what the downstream effect on commercial users and remixers of the CC-BY-SA content will be.

Brief notes

Additional contributors: Pythoncoder

• Former Arbitration Committee member GorillaWarfare was blocked by Fram over interactions with former Editor-in-Chief Kudpung at the Signpost comments page; the non-consultative unblock by Fuzheado that followed led to a request for community review at the administrators' noticeboard – the verdict: "BAD BLOCK".
• Wikipedia:Spoken articles has released 857 of their 1360 available articles via Academic Torrents here. — P
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, L235 with a 240/4/4 RfA closed 3 September (98% voting in favor of promotion). Justlettersandnumbers has 98% in favor as we go to press, with closure imminent.
• Six administrators were desysopped in September due to inactivity.

Reader comments

2018-10-01

Knowledge under fire

By Bri, Eddie891, and Pythoncoder

Wikipedia digitally preserving artifacts lost in National Museum of Brazil fire

The National Museum of Brazil in 2011

The National Museum consumed by fire in 2018

Mental Floss reported this month on Wikipedia's effort to "digitally preserve" some of the priceless items destroyed in the recent National Museum of Brazil fire. The effort began with a tweet by the Wikipedia Twitter account encouraging people to do this.

“ There were over 20 million objects inside the #MuseuNacional. Did you take a photo of any of them? Help us preserve the memories of as many as we can and add them to @wikicommons. Here's how to do it from your desktop:

1. Visit commons.wikimedia.org
2. In the left sidebar, click "upload file" (just under "participate"). Create an account if needed.
3. Select photos to donate, and click "continue."
4. Select "This file is my own work", and hit "next".
5. Choose a title, describe what the photo shows, and add the category "Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro". (That Commons category is right here: [Category:Museu Nacional])
6. Click "next", and you're done!

” — @Wikipedia

Hundreds of files have already been uploaded and the collection can be browsed here. The article also encouraged people to upload more images and add descriptions to existing ones. — P

Read more about the effort to preserve the contents of the National Museum of Brazil at this month's Wikimedia blog report.

United States Congress

[[File:|center|300px|alt=Separate photographs of Dianne Feinstein on the left and Brett Kavanaugh on the right, both in formal attire at the Senate hearings, their names and positions overlayed across each photograph]]

Wikipedia and the confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh received media attention.

Members of, and goings on in, the United States Congress were heavily in the media this month, particularly over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, and Lindsey Graham had personal information posted on their Wikipedia pages. Also during the hearing, the page Devil's Triangle (disambiguation) was anonymously edited to add "a popular drinking game enjoyed by friends of judge Brett Kavanaugh." Both edits appeared to come from the Capitol.

• May, Ashley (28 September 2018). "Devil's Triangle Wikipedia page changes definition during Kavanaugh hearing". News (Politics). USA Today. Gannett Company. Archived from the original on 29 September 2018. Retrieved 29 September 2018.
• Nelson, Steven (28 September 2018). "Sheldon Whitehouse on Kavanaugh: 'I don't believe a devil's triangle is a drinking game'". News (White House). The Washington Examiner. MediaDC. Archived from the original on 29 September 2018. Retrieved 29 September 2018.
• Papenfuss, Mary (28 September 2018). "Judiciary Committee Members Doxxed During Kavanaugh Testimony". Politics. HuffPost. Oath Inc. Archived from the original on 29 September 2018. Retrieved 29 September 2018.
• Burr, Thomas (27 September 2018). "Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee are victims of online 'doxing' as Wikipedia posts home addresses and phone numbers". News (Politics). The Salt Lake Tribune. Washington. Archived from the original on 29 September 2018. Retrieved 29 September 2018.
• Thebault, Reis (28 September 2018). "Fight over Kavanaugh nomination finds its oddest front yet: Wikipedia pages". Politics. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 29 September 2018. Retrieved 29 September 2018.
• Rodriguez, Jesus (27 September 2018). "Judiciary Republicans' personal information published during Kavanaugh hearing". Congress. Politico. Capitol News Company. Archived from the original on 29 September 2018. Retrieved 29 September 2018.

See further coverage here and here. — E

In brief

55 Savushkina Street, home of the Internet Research Agency troll farm

Other contributors: Bri

• Battleground Mentality: "Wikipedia has resisted information warfare, but could it fight off a proper attack?", in the New Statesman
• Noting a Non-Notary: "The Wikiman" about English Wikipedia's most prolific editor, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, in William and Mary Alumni Magazine
• The Right to !Vote: Wikipedia focuses world's attention on New Zealand suffragette Kate Sheppard, in The New Zealand Herald
• 0.0007% of one whole Bezos: Amazon donated US$1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation said in a statement that "[b]y donating to the Wikimedia Endowment, Amazon shows an understanding of the need to invest in the long-term success of Wikipedia", in Business Insider and others.
• Artistic License: The Tate has begun using Wikipedia entries to provide information on artists in their collection. The museum said that they do "not have the resources to create biographies for every individual" and Wikipedia provides "the most up to date and reliable biography possible within the constraints of our resources", in The Art Newspaper.

Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next month's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.

Reader comments

2018-10-01

Interface Admin policy proposal, part 2

By Pythoncoder

One of the proposed intadmin logos

Stop the presses... The interface admin proposal has at long last been closed. The process for admins requesting the right will be as follows:

• Venue: WP:BN
• Process: Admin makes a request, with a rationale, at the correct venue, to request access to the permission. The request will remain open for 48 hours for first-time requests. Re-admin requests, not under a cloud, will not have a waiting period. No notice at other noticeboards is required. Bureaucrats may inquire about why admins are requesting access at their discretion. Users may discuss the applicant, but the final decision rests with the reviewing bureaucrat.
• Duration of right: Permanent by default, can be temporary if requested.

The closer, Cyberpower678, also laid out a process for nonadmins to request the right, but it is not active right now, per the consensus on another RfC. More info is available at WT:INTADMIN and WP:INTADMIN.  pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 13:21, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

The originally published article is below:

Interface Admin policy proposal heads to a vote... I mean !vote

Discussion on proposed policies for interface administrators (hereafter intadmins) on the English Wikipedia are continuing at Wikipedia talk:Interface administrators. The availability to edit Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript (JS), and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) pages in the site-wide MediaWiki namespace, or in the subpages of other editors, will be restricted to editors with the interface-admin user right. There are currently 13 intadmins.

The main RfC concerns the current (as of writing) version of the proposal page, which reads as follows (condensed for clarity):

Process for requesting

Administrators who wish to request this permission may make a new request at Wikipedia:Interface administrators' noticeboard. A notice should be posted to WP:VPT and WP:AN to invite community participation. Those making a request are encouraged to answer the following two questions:

• Please describe any relevant on-wiki experience you have for this role.
• Please outline, without breaching your personal privacy, any off-wiki experience or technical expertise you may have for this role.

Requests will be open for one week, during which any editor may comment on the request. Editors are encouraged to comment on the requester's level of trust and technical ability. An uninvolved bureaucrat will close the discussion and provide the user right to the requester if there is consensus in the discussion.

Removal of permissions

Permission should be removed by bureaucrats in the following circumstances:

1. Interface administrators who have made no edits or logged actions for at least 12 months.
2. Voluntary request by the interface administrator at the bureaucrats' noticeboard.
3. After misuse of the access, by consensus at the administrators' noticeboard.
4. Upon removal of administrator access, for any reason.
5. By request of the Arbitration Committee.

More importantly... what should the intadmin T-shirt look like?

The main RfC currently has 37 supports and 29 opposes. A few supporters expressed a "perfect is the enemy of good" mentality, while some opposers mentioned not wanting to create a new WP:RfA-style process. Several alternative proposals have also appeared attempting to address some of these concerns. These proposals include: one with no RfA-like process, just a request that bureaucrats decide on, one with a waiting period of 48 hours, and one that requires applicants to indicate a need for the tools.

While discussions continue, a de-facto "RfTA" process has popped up on the busy talk page, where candidates who pass get the permission for 60 days. Since the last article, several more intadmins have now been given the tools by community consensus, adding Oshwah, Cyberpower678, Deryck Chan, and former Signpost editor-in-chief Ragesoss to the group, which previously consisted of TheDJ, MusikAnimal, MSGJ, Xaosflux, Mr. Stradivarius, and Amorymeltzer.

Another (less critical) discussion going on at the page is what the intadmin logo should be. The most popular suggestion is a pliers logo, but other suggestions include a caliper or some variation of the wrench.

Should highlighted signatures be banned?

A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Signatures was had on whether highlighting in signatures should be banned as disruptive. The proposer, Rhododendrites, says that highlighted signatures distract from the content of discussions. Other supporters of a highlighting ban want to ban all custom signatures (which some opposers of the proposal pointed out as a perennial proposal). Some opposers opposed a blanket ban because some highlighting could be considered acceptable, so long as it was not disruptive and meets accessibility requirements like those pertaining to color. Other opposers questioned whether this is a problem at all.

Other discussions this month

• On Wikipedia talk:Shortcut: Should WP:2SC be changed to say that only "the most common shortcuts" should be put in link boxes? (It currently reads "one or two common shortcuts". Supporters point out pages like What Wikipedia is not, where a large number of shortcuts are listed for each section because they are all believed to be useful; others just dislike having an "arbitrary" number listed. Some opposers question whether the large amount of shortcuts are actually needed on pages like WP:NOT. 20 supports and 7 opposes as of September 29.
• On WP:RSN: Per community consensus, Breitbart News "should not be used, ever, as a reference for facts"; shortcut WP:BREITBART. It is now semi-officially listed alongside such sources as The Daily Mail.
• On Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Taiwan stations): Should Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Taiwan stations) be made a guideline?
• On the village pump: A proposal has been made to prevent new users (less than either 20 edits, 30 days/500 edits, or 90 days/500 edits) from being able to index their userpages in search results. The purpose of this would be to prevent spam. The proposal was made in response to a log-only edit filter (Special:AbuseFilter/930) being created.
• On the talk page for the infobox manual of style: Should genres be removed from music infoboxes?

Reader comments

2018-10-01

A quiet month for Arbcom

By Bri

Arbcom's offices mostly empty in August and September

There was no Arbitration Report in the last issue of The Signpost due to no new case requests to report. It seems this month is not much different.

New requests for case

• Request "Muse Edits Reversal" was declined as premature on September 6.
• Request "'Incel' Article Ownership and Neutrality Dispute" was declined as a content dispute and premature on September 9.
• Request "Creationism and NPOV" was withdrawn on September 14 as falling under pseudoscience discretionary sanctions.

Other notes

Additional contributors: Pythoncoder

• Alex Shih resigned as Arbitrator, CheckUser, and Oversighter.
• The annual Arbitration Committee pre-election RfC is going on now. This October, the electoral commission will be selected. The CheckUser and Oversight appointment process is also ongoing.
• A motion to update activity requirements for checkusers and oversighters is under consideration (permlink). Community input has been invited.

Reader comments

2018-10-01

John McCain's death generates over 7 million hits, followed by historical low

By Igordebraga and Stormy clouds

This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Stormy clouds (August 26 to September 1), Igordebraga/Stormy clouds (September 2 to 8), Stormy clouds (September 9 to 15), and Stormy clouds/Igordebraga (September 16 to 22). Prepared for The Signpost by Acorri.

Courage is not the absence of fear (August 26 to September 1)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (August 26 to September 1, 2018)

Once again, we have a report dominated by death. The omnipresent, inescapable reaper, bound to strike down each and every person reading this with the same ferocious, fearsome, fatal fall. The looming specter, lurking in the shadows of our collective existence, waiting for the moment to capitalise upon our unpreparedness, and unwillingness to let go of life. This week's report in particular is spearheaded by one prominent death—that of Senator John McCain, whose demise has propelled not only his own (former) BLP to an enormous viewcount, but also those of his extended family. Various subjects interject between the McCain bios, from the ongoing sporting bonanza over in Asia to the latest young adult hit streaming on Netflix. Owing to McCain's seismic impact on Wikipedia views, the report is considerably more lopsided than normal, but that neither detracts from nor diminishes its inherent intrigue.

For the week of August 26 to September 1, 2018, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	John McCain		6,187,238		We begin with the biggest news of the week, and the fourth-highest views of the year—the death of John McCain, one of the most prominent members of the United States Senate and leaders of the Grand Old Party over the past few decades. McCain first rose to fame following his torturous tenure as a prisoner of war of North Vietnam, and subsequently climbed up the political ranks. He was denied the head job by a certain charismatic Democrat, and he never served in a cabinet position either, but rather remained a massively influential voice in the Senate, especially in recent years as he rejected Trumpian proposals on issues such as healthcare. Diagnosed with glioblastoma last year, the news of his passing was perhaps an inevitability in the interim, yet this didn't prevent him making seismic waves in terms of page views amongst the dogged denizens of Wikipedia, whose intrigue led them to tunnel through various familiar links, including McCain's widow Cindy (#2), and divorced wife Carol (#3).
2	Cindy McCain		1,308,386
3	Carol McCain		1,193,628
4	2018 Asian Games		1,152,563		Aside from the aforementioned death of a senator, the other recurrent story at the apex of this iteration of the report is the Asian Games, which have drawn to a close as of the time of writing. Held in Jakarta and Palembang, Indonesia, the games shone a spotlight upon the very best Asian athletes, as—like the alchemists of yonder—they transformed their blood, sweat, and tears (along with their incredible athletic aptitudes) into some precious metals. Evidently, their sporting endeavours engrossed a cohort of our readers, landing the event in the top 5 once again.
5	Meghan McCain		1,148,650		As with a large number of massive deaths, McCain's demise seems to have inspired a large amount of link-clicking, as readers and editors of Wikipedia click through all the family members of a deceased person, discovering all they can on a curiosity-fuelled binge. In the case of Meghan, McCain's daughter, they would have discovered her burgeoning television career, which has thus far culminated with a gig co-hosting The View alongside Whoopi Goldberg and company.
6	2018 Asian Games medal table		1,042,412		A list recounting all of the medals awarded to the participants of #4. With an astonishing 289 medals, it was China who reigned supreme. This shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise to avid fans of the Games, given that they have achieved this feat on ten consecutive occasions. Perhaps more impressive was the fact that 46% of their medals were of the aureate inclination, which bodes well for Chinese prospects in the next games, which they will host in Hangzhou.
7	India at the 2018 Asian Games		982,059		Once again, a large amount of the attention paid towards the Asian Games came from India, as people from Uttar Pradesh to Kerala browsed the information superhighway to check up on their country's progress. India only placed eighth on the medal table, so one has to imagine that the swarm of page views stems not from their performance, but from the fact that the nation has the second most anglophones worldwide. Nonetheless, there were some highlights, such as the victory of Rohan Bopanna (pictured) and his partner Divij Sharan in tennis.
8	Deaths in 2018		771,880		People die. Some of those people have attracted attention from reliable sources, and have Wikipedia articles. Upon their deaths, their names coalesce and convene on a list for the deceased. The morbid among us love this list, and ensure that it never leaves the Top 25. Bad news sells, after all. The numbers observing this week's voyage down the Styx was especially buoyant courtesy of #1.
9	Aretha Franklin		726,044		The musically inclined on Wikipedia are evidently still reeling from the death of the "Queen of Soul", as she still attracts swathes of views a fortnight past her untimely passing. However, in a very odd convergence of topics, the Special One inadvertedly honoured Franklin's legacy during a ridiculous meltdown following his team's 3–0 defeat to 'arry and Co. Personally, I think that all any of us can ask for in our prayers is a little respect when we're at home.
10	Crazy Rich Asians (film)		722,067		Hollywood doesn't exactly have a spotless record when it comes to the portrayal of minorities on the silver screen. This has been particularly true of roles of Asian origin. Just ask Cowboy Khan or Puck the Stereotype for evidence. Nonetheless, diversity pays these days, and the latest surprise hit has proven this once more, as Warner Bros. makes significant bank off the back of the film, which looks likely to three-peat at #1 in the box office. No word on its quality, as it isn't out in the Emerald Isle just yet, but my more stately friends have assured me that it is quite entertaining.

Full report

My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why I got out of bed at all (September 2 to 8)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (September 2 to 8, 2018)

Yet another week led by mourning. Along with holdover John McCain (#6) and the never-leaving death list (#9), the top two entries are actor Burt Reynolds, dying after a long life at 82 (and bringing along two exes) and rapper Mac Miller, gone too soon at 26 (bringing along an ex, #8, some loony fans turned against). Hip hop also makes itself present with Eminem (#10) and a young rapper he's now on a beef with (#7). The rest, we'll split them in threes: protesters are recognized (#3), executives are judged, and judges are protested; the US Open ends for women (#4) while European football starts a new tournament; TV is present through BET, Netflix, and Amazon Prime; India learns about a holiday inspiration, watches movies, and decriminalizes homosexuals; and the US celebrates a holiday watching scary (#5) and funny movies.

For the week of September 2 to 8, 2018, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Burt Reynolds		4,068,946		Burt Reynolds was an icon of Hollywood manliness in the 1970s and 1980s, starring in hits such as Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit (while also having this hilarious cameo in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie). In the 1990s, he experienced a brief resurrection with Boogie Nights that even earned him an Academy Award nomination. And now his storied career ends with his death at the age of 82 due to a heart attack.
2	Mac Miller		3,812,212		Celebrated rapper Mac Miller died of a possible drug overdose, a few months short of becoming another musician who died at 27. Not that hip hop departures usually get to that age—XXXTentacion earlier this year being a sad example of this—as they brag about living dangerously (see also: this list).
3	Colin Kaepernick		1,244,891		Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.
4	Naomi Osaka		1,243,354		The first Japanese tennis player to win a Grand Slam, namely the US Open, is a woman who is multi-ethnic to the extreme: along with a name and complexion that show she's biracial Japanese (her father is Haitian), Osaka was raised in the United States.
5	The Nun (2018 film)		1,202,025		A great case for those who think Hollywood sequels, prequels, and whatnot sometimes get a little too far: a scary nun who appeared in one scene of The Conjuring 2 followed the steps of Annabelle and got its own picture. Reviews have been unflattering, finding it full of many sins (boo!) of the horror genre (along with that of being unintentionally funny), but it still handily recouped its $22 million budget in just its opening weekend with $57 million, enough to both top the box office and be the largest opening of The Conjuring Universe.
6	John McCain		1,045,213		The late war-hero-turned-politician—who, along with a long tenure as senator, was the Republican candidate in the 2008 presidential election—had his memorial services held this week.
7	Machine Gun Kelly (rapper)		942,841		After Eminem (#10) had a diss track on Machine Gun Kelly, "Not Alike", the Cleveland rapper replied to the Rap God with a track called "Rap Devil". Time will tell if bad things will ensue for MGK.
8	Ariana Grande		822,927		As if mourning the death of ex-boyfriend Mac Miller (#2) wasn't bad enough for this pop singer, ill-tempered fans decided to blame her for the rapper's death. Unlike the ones calling her "Mac Killer", Ms. Grande has been thoughtful and civilized about the matter.
9	Deaths in 2018		786,247		It's a shame we have to die, my dear No one's getting out of here alive
10	Eminem		766,293		Twenty years after introducing Slim Shady in "My Name Is", Marshall Matters showed he's still atop the rap genre with the surprise release of new album Kamikaze, full of diss tracks on just about everybody—including people much younger than Em such as Machine Gun Kelly (#7). It also included a rap based on the Marvel anti-hero Venom, tied to the upcoming movie.

Full report

The Court of the Rising Sun (September 9 to 15)

Most Popular Wikipedia Articles of the Week (September 9 to 15, 2018)

While incorporating some notable deaths, this week's iteration of the Top 25 Report is not entirely consumed by them, a nice change of pace from recent weeks. Rather, it is the action at Flushing Meadows, and a controversy embroiling tennis' biggest female name, which takes centre court. Further down, the list is populated with a veritable cornucopia of visual treats, from blockbuster releases to streaming delights. Google also contributes an engrossing entry, which almost excuses them for their surveillance of us all, while Eminem's return makes the list feel less empty. Finally, of course, the shadow of 9/11 weighs heavily over the report too. More diversity than recent reports ensures that this one is intriguing. Enjoy.

For the week of September 2 to 8, 2018, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Naomi Osaka		2,104,708		Sport makes its way atop the report again, forcing me to reminisce of heady days of yonder. Simpler times, before a string of high-profile deaths took over. Osaka became the first Japanese victor of a Grand Slam, triumphing over her heavily favoured opponent (#9) in straight sets amidst controversy, and thus claiming pride, glory, and fame in Flushing Meadows; this propelled gargantuan views on her article, lifting the sportswoman to #1.
2	Mac Miller		1,587,222		And now from rising stars to fallen ones, we return to the land of the deceased with the 26-year-old rapper behind hits such as 100 Grandkids and an ode to el futuro Presidente. Having died of an apparent drug overdose, just missing on an infamous illustrious club, hip-hop fans flocked toward his article, while his more heinous and repugnant fans took it as an opportunity to harass his ex-girlfriend.
3	September 11 attacks		1,565,391		Franklin Delano Roosevelt infamously declared December 7 to be a "date that will live in infamy". For the modern generations, that date is September 11. Very few people will ever forget first hearing of the incident that felled two towers, and cost nearly 3,000 people their lives. The 20th century was changed irrevocably and profoundly by the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, its ramifications clearly persisting as far as the fall of the Berlin Wall. History will come to see 9/11 in a similar fashion, the catalyst for the War on Terror, a war whose consequences are still playing out, even with the malevolent mastermind gone. A day that changed America forever; a day that proved the Big Apple was strong; a day that will live forever in infamy, lest we ever forget—as such, with the seventeenth anniversary falling during the week, it is scarcely surprising to see it here.
4	The Nun (2018 film)		1,277,971		After a duo of films about a doll made a tidy return, Warner Bros. returned to the well to conjure another box office hit. The film itself is supposedly less superb than its receipts would indicate, reliant on lazy scares and melodrama (habits horror movies should shake). From my perspective, a possessed and demonic novitiate is far from the scariest thing related to the convent.
5	The Predator (film)		880,436		Speaking of mediocre Hollywood releases, we have the newest installment in the apex sci-fi franchise. The unstoppable, well, predator, returns to the silver screen some thirty years after it tormented the T-800 and—despite the immense talent on show, and the solid reputation of the director—the flick has underwhelmed both financially and critically. Guess we don't all get to the choppa.
6	M. Visvesvaraya		758,439		M. Visvesvaraya, an engineer from India, appears on the list courtesy of Google (it was always going to be Google or /r/TIL) as the search engine giant devoted a doodle to the genius responsible for many monumental civil engineering triumphs across India, from the Krishna Raja Sagara dam to the flood defence system of Hyderabad. Most of his work centred on the Mysore State, earning him both a knighthood and the Bharat Ratna.
7	Deaths in 2018		737,098		Ever a constant on the report, the reaper slices into the Top 10 once more as yet another raft of people were ferried down the Stygian way this week. And, as ever, swathes of people checked in on the list of the fallen, bolstered in terms of views by the demises of #2 and #10.
8	Elon Musk		729,998		Elon Musk has taken a few reputational knocks in recent months. Following the Tham Luang cave rescue, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO controversially referred to one of the cave divers as a "pedo". More recently, he smoked a joint during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, sending Tesla shares into a tailspin (from which they have recovered), despite the increasing legality of the drug stateside. All of this contributed to an inordinately high amount of views on the billionaire genius' article.
9	Serena Williams		614,288		Serena, with 23 Grand Slam titles to her name as a solo player, is indisputably the greatest female tennis player of her generation. Thus, it came as a shock that she lost on home turf clay to #1. Despite only managing to claim six games over the two sets, much of the attention after the game fell not on Osaka's shoulders, but on the very public disagreement between Williams and umpire Carlos Ramos, which culminated in Ramos awarding penalty points against Williams for off-court coaching from Patrick Mouratoglou, and subsequently breaking her racket. This led Williams to proclaim Ramos a "liar" and a "thief", and to cite sexism as a cause for his perceived biases. This, like a net, split the tennis community right down the centre.
10	Burt Reynolds		603,183		Hollywood lost a great last week as Burt Reynolds succumbed to cardiac arrest at the age of 82, and the ramifications of his death were still rippling this week, seeing him make the Top 10. The actor, famed for his captivating turn in Smokey and the Bandit amongst many other renowned flicks, was one of the largest stars in Hollywood for a generation, and will be sorely missed.

Full report

Wikipedia Hits the Mat (September 16 to 22)

Some weeks are slow, but this one was so bad views-wise that for the first time since 2014 the report is topped by something with less than 800,000 views. And said #1 is a wrestling event, and there are some more violent sports entries as well (#8 and #14 are boxers, #15 and #20 American football players). Otherwise, readers sought predators of the sexual (#5, #7) and alien hunter kind (#6), rap arguments (#3), scary movies and TV, India spicing things up a bit with TV (#3) and cricket, movies in theaters (#10) or having their trailers released (#9), Elon Musk still on the news, and some stuff that you just can count on appearing—holidays, Netflix, and, of course, death (#2).

For the week of September 16 to 22, 2018, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Hell in a Cell (2018)		754,131		The tenth edition of this wrestling event (though not the only one to feature said cage) was held in San Antonio, Texas.
2	Deaths in 2018		730,409		Things are so slow that the only constant was people checking our obituary.
3	Machine Gun Kelly (rapper)		706,982		This is as big as you're gonna get, so enjoy it Had to give you a career to destroy it
4	Anup Jalota		635,774		This popular Indian singer is on the current edition of the popular show Bigg Boss.
5	Christine Blasey Ford		560,826		The latest step in at least delaying the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination (#7) was given by this psychologist and professor, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault back when they were in high school.
6	The Predator (film)		559,729		Hunter, hunted, which are you? Diablo, come again To make trophies out of men The extraterrestrial big-game hunter—whose appearance is described in the movie as "an alien Whoopi Goldberg" (in Brazil, we compare him to Carlinhos Brown) and who has already butted heads with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny Glover, Adrien Brody, and the Alien—returned to theaters in a production that wasn't DIY, but still made by Black & Dekker. Full of blood, quips, and action, but a bit weird in its plotting, The Predator has split critics and fans while also struggling a bit in the box office ($40 million in the US and $94 million worldwide, against a budget of $88 million). As a fan of those movies, I hope it isn't the end for this ugly mofo.
7	Brett Kavanaugh		550,921		In the words of Samantha Bee "I can't believe this needs saying, but it's never okay to try to rape somebody (#5)—not even in high school! Not even if you're totally gonna be a Supreme Court justice."
8	Gennady Golovkin		546,964		One year after a controversial bout with Canelo Álvarez that ended in a split draw, the Kazakh middleweight world champion fought him again—and lost his titles.
9	Carol Danvers		536,859		The trailer for Captain Marvel was released, giving comic fans a first look at the superheroine played by Brie Larson (pictured).
10	A Simple Favor (film)		505,694		Anna Kendrick (pictured) investigates the disappearance of Blake Lively in this mystery film by Paul Feig (back to directing after the unfairly maligned Ghostbusters, and only his second movie that isn't a comedy), which has been getting positive reviews and good box office. Maybe I'll give it a shot.

Full report

Exclusions

• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

Reader comments

2018-10-01

Paying attention to your mobile

By Evad37

Wikimedia developers are improving the mobile website.

“ The Readers web team is working on improving the contribution features on the mobile website. The team is working on showing pages that are currently unavailable on mobile. We are starting by designing improvements to the mobile navigation. We want your feedback on the latest navigation prototype.

Earlier this year, we collected feedback on a previous version of our mobile navigation design in a set of 30 interviews at Wikimania. We worked with the results of the interviews and now have a new version of our prototype.

We would like your feedback on the latest version! In particular, we are curious for your thoughts on the layout of the mobile navigation as well as on the larger number of links available. We appreciate any and all comments.

Right now, we’re researching the navigation for the new feature set. We want to focus on making it feel more familiar and useful for contributors than the current mobile menu. We want it to include pages that contributors are likely to navigate to and will find useful. Please visit the project page and try out the demo on your mobile device. Then help answer a few questions about your experience. Thank you!

” — CKoerner (WMF), Village pump post

You can read more about advanced mobile editing and other things the developers plan to work on over the next year; there is also a presentation you can watch.

Making the wikis work better on mobile phones is also something editors can help with. There is a list of recommendations for making content easier to read in the mobile view. You can add things to the page and ask others to help.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

• up-one-lvl-kbd (source) by User:Enterprisey – The "U" keyboard shortcut now goes up one subpage level.
• Invert (source) by User:BrandonXLF – inverts the colour of all Wikipedia pages.
• link-section-edits (source) by User:Enterprisey – The grey text is now a link in edit summaries, just like the "→".
• cv-revdel (source) by User:Enterprisey – Quickly add {{copyvio-revdel}} to a page.
• Subpages (source) by User:BrandonXLF - Adds a sub pages link in the personal toolbar.
• What Links Here (source) by User:BrandonXLF – Adds a WhatLinksHere link in the personal toolbar (note: There's one in the left toolbar already).
• UserLogToolbar (source) by User:Danski454 – replaces the Logs link on user page with Logged actions (like the old Logs link) and Target logs (logs where the user or main user page is the target).
• SectionRemover (source) by User:Flooded with them hundreds – removes selected section(s) from a page.
• PageMoverClosure (source) by User:Flooded with them hundreds – closes RM discussion, includes (page mover nac) in the closure.

Bot tasks

Recently approved tasks

• PrimeBOT (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 29) – Approved 14:38, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
• RonBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 9) – Approved 23:01, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
• RonBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 10) – Approved 17:06, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
• Ahechtbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 3) – Approved 10:54, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
• PrimeBOT (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 28) – Approved 15:00, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
• TWLBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Approved 13:02, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
• KadaneBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Approved 12:50, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
• Krdbot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Approved 16:39, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Current requests for approval

• ZackBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 10) – Open
• MusikBot II (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 2) – Open
• FRadical Bot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Open
• EranBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 3) – Open
• Galobot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Trial complete
• TokenzeroBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) (Task: 6) – Trial complete
• Texvc2LaTeXBot (BRFA · contribs · actions log · block log · flag log · user rights) – Trial complete

Latest tech news

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2018 #36, #37, #38, and #39. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Recent changes

• There is a new user right for users who can edit CSS and JavaScript for the entire wiki. Before this all admins could edit CSS and JavaScript. This was a security risk. This group is called interface administrators. Administrators can delete user CSS and JavaScript pages. [1][2]
• There will be an A/B test on the Wikipedia mobile website. It starts this week. It tests how we show templates that show information about an article. The test will last two weeks. [3][4]
• You can now use different CSS rules for different skins when you edit templates. This is because of TemplateStyles. [5]
• wp10 in ORES is now called articlequality. [6]
• When you get a new message on your talk page you get a yellow message in the toolbar. The preference to show or not show this has been removed. [7]
• When you added or edited a template with the visual editor the input boxes were very big. This has been fixed. The input boxes will now be smaller until you click on them. Then they will change size to fit the text. [8]
• The Wikimedia Commons mobile app has a new version. Images uploaded using Nearby are now automatically added to the associated Wikidata item. You can browse other images on Commons. You can see your achievements and your upload statistics. It has also fixed some bugs. [9]
• MediaWiki web requests now have a time limit of 60 seconds for GET requests and 200 seconds for POST requests. [10]
• Special:AncientPages can hide disambiguation pages. [11]
• The preferences form has changed to use the standard look. If you see any problems please report them on Phabricator. [12]

Problems

• UploadWizard had problems with campaigns. Users could not upload files. This has now been fixed. [13]
• You can get a notification when a link is made to a page you created. This has not worked since June. It was fixed last week. [14]
• Some diffs showed lines in the wrong order. This was fixed last week. [15]
• Marking a cross-wiki notification as read didn't work every time. The other wiki was not updated. This has now been fixed. [16]
• <maplink> did not work for a few days. This was because of a bug. This has now been fixed. [17]
• {{subst:REVISIONUSER}} is used by some templates. For a period edits saved with {{subst:REVISIONUSER}} would save the previous user's name and not your username. This is now fixed. Edits made before the bug was fixed will still be wrong and need to be corrected. [18]
• When you move a page the title still shows the old page name. The developers are working on fixing this. [19]
• You could not see the menu on the notifications page on the mobile version. This has now been fixed. [20]

Future changes

• The RelatedSites extension will be removed from Wikivoyage.
• Unused projects on the Wikimedia Cloud virtual private server will be removed. This will happen in October. Projects can be marked if they are being used. [21]

Meetings

• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 3:00–4:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.

Installation code

Further information: Wikipedia:User scripts § How to install user scripts

Reader comments

2018-10-01

A pat on the back

By Bri

For reasons we at The Signpost don't fully comprehend, the art of butter sculpture is popular at state fairs (and their Canadian equivalents) during the summer. To celebrate the last month of the season for those in the Northern hemisphere, here are some images of that pursuit.

• 
  The sculpture by Caroline Shawk Brooks started it all at the Centennial Exposition of 1876
• 
  A sculptor working in a refrigerated compartment at the 2012 Canadian National Exhibition
• 
  Udderly meta
• 
  Butter sculpture depicting Father Hennepin and guides discovering St. Anthony Falls, Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis
• 
  Teddy Roosevelt sculpture, 1910 Minnesota State Fair

Reader comments

2018-10-01

After a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil, a drive to preserve what knowledge remains

By João Alexandre Peschanski

The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. For more information on this partnership see our content guidelines.

A statue of Brazilian Emperor Pedro II stands in front of his burning palace—and the site of the National Museum of Brazil.

As the global community of volunteer Wikimedia editors mourns the destruction of this amazing museum, this post pays tribute to all editors who have contributed restlessly to tell the story of the National Museum, our history.

On 2 September, disaster struck the National Museum of Brazil: a massive fire devastated the building and its extensive holdings. Centuries of cultural heritage, including recordings of dead languages and ancient artifacts from pre-Columbian times, were lost.

But amid the carnage and destruction, a movement has risen, one with the aim of adding as much knowledge about the museum's collections to Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia) before anything more is lost forever.

This mobilization includes the creation and development of articles about the disaster that destroyed the museum, which held the oldest scientific collection in Brazil and was one of the largest museums in Latin America, and the launching of a campaign to gather images on the building and collection. Long-time Wikimedia editors and first-timers got together to make sure we would learn from this incident, one that forcefully reminds us that the goal of recording the sum of all knowledge has a deadline.

The first Portuguese Wikipedia edit about the National Museum fire was made by an anonymous user at 8:40 PM (UTC time), minutes after reports were being made on TV. One hour and a half later, long-time Wikimedian DarwIn created an entry about the fire itself. It initially read that "the fire at the National Museum was a fire of large proportion at the National Museum, in Rio de Janeiro, on September 2, 2018."

According to the museum's entry on the English Wikipedia, "The National Museum held a vast collection with more than 20 million objects, encompassing some of the most important material records regarding natural science and anthropology in Brazil, as well as numerous items that came from other regions of the world and were produced by several cultures and ancient civilizations [...] The museum also held one of the largest scientific libraries of Brazil, with over 470,000 volumes and 2,400 rare works."

Improvements on the article were coordinated among Wikimedians through social networks, as tasks were being assigned or taken up by many. On the Portuguese Wikipedia, around 250 people contributed to the entry on the museum and on the fire from 2 to 6 September. As of 10 September, entries on the fire existed in 21 languages.

---

The first picture of the fire was uploaded at 11:23 PM, only hours after the fire had begun. The photographer, Felipe Milanez, is a university professor and journalist, who had worked on research projects with the team of the National Museum. As he posted on Facebook on what he was seeing, I asked him to send me pictures of his to upload to Wikimedia Commons (a formal authorization to use the image followed). He sent five images; in just three days, this set was seen over 2 million times, particularly an image of the statue of the Brazilian Emperor Pedro II with the museum on fire behind. This was Felipe Milanez's first contribution to Wikimedia projects.

"People need to know about this, [and] people need to see this", said Felipe Milanez on why he was contributing to Wikimedia Commons. He also wrote reports for the local and international press. According to him, the disaster that struck the National Museum was associated with a lack of investment from the Brazilian government, which had cut funding for the institution.

Wikimedians then began publishing a call on social networks for people to upload images to Wikimedia Commons, a freely licensed media repository that holds many of the images used on Wikipedia, on the museum building and collection. In just three days, around 2,000 images of the museum taken before the fire have been uploaded. Images received were normally uploaded to a generic category on Commons, and more experienced users then worked to curate the content, often communicating through private messaging to discuss categorization strategies.

Student Juliana Gouy was one of those responding to the call. The National Museum is to her a special place, somewhere she went to with her family as a child; it was a calm refuge from Rio de Janeiro, one of the largest and most hectic cities in Brazil. "As soon as I heard the fire was going on," she said, "I felt the need to look at the pictures I had taken there and I thought many of my friends would like to see them. I shared these pictures publicly, and then many people started liking them." That's when she was approached to contribute the images to Wikimedia Commons.

Juliana Gouy had never contributed to Wikimedia Commons, and had actually never heard of the project. She uploaded a small set of images and, as she was having trouble with the UploadWizard, was given help to upload around 200 pictures of the museum building and its collections.

As content was being produced collaboratively, editors of the Portuguese Wikipedia agreed to a proposal by long-time editor Dornicke that a site banner should appear above all pages to mourn the loss of so much cultural heritage. This led to a formal call, translated into eleven languages, for people to contribute images on the building and collection to Wikimedia Commons.

---

This campaign, asking people to contribute their images of the National Museum, is still on. There is no fully digitized collection of the museum's holidings, much less the ones that were destroyed in the fire. We need your help in preserving as much of the museum's knowledge as we possibly can.

You may also be interested in helping with other Wikimedia museum partnerships, such as the Museu do Ipiranga, the Brazilian National Archives, and an ongoing facial reconstruction of Luzia.

---

PS: A WikiProject on the Portuguese Wikipedia has been created to coordinate content curation and production on Museu Nacional: Wikipédia:Projetos/Museu Nacional.

Reader comments

2018-10-01

How talk page use has changed since 2005; censorship shocks lead to centralization; is vandalism caused by workplace boredom?

By Jonathan Morgan, Tilman Bayer, and Nøkkenbuer

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

Do we all (still) talk before we type?

Reviewed by Jonathan Morgan

One of the earliest research papers on Wikipedia is called "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia" by Fernanda Viégas and Martin M. Wattenberg, then of IBM Research. In that paper, the researchers perform a series of analyses of Wikipedia, including visualizations of article growth using their HistoryFlow visualization platform, in order to understand how Wikipedia editors coordinate their activities around content production, curation, and quality control. Their analysis revealed that between 2003 and 2005, Wikipedia talk pages grew at a greater rate than article pages—which suggested that explicit coordination among editors had become increasingly important as the community and encyclopedia grew. In order to investigate this trend, they performed content analysis on a purposeful sample of 25 article talk pages in order to understand how these discussion spaces support article development. Among their findings were that 58% of talk page posts included requests or proposals to edit the related article. Other types of talk page posts included requests for information about the article, references to vandalism, references to policy, and off-topic remarks.

The findings and methods from "Talk Before You Type" have informed many subsequent studies of Wikipedia. As of September 2018, the study has been cited over 400 times according to Google Scholar. However, the content analysis portion of the study focused on a relatively small number of talk pages, and only talk pages on English Wikipedia. Furthermore, the study was conducted over a decade ago. So it's fair to ask: do other language editions of Wikipedia use talkpages the same way as the English Wikipedia does? And how may have collaboration practices on the English Wikipedia itself changed in the intervening decade?

A recent paper published in the proceedings of the 2018 OpenSym conference addresses both of these questions. Titled "We All Talk Before We Type?: Understanding Collaboration in Wikipedia Language Editions" and written by researchers at the University of Washington, it attempts to replicate Viégas and Wattenberg's content analysis using a larger and more recent sample of talk page posts from English, Spanish, and French Wikipedias. The researchers find evidence that different Wikipedia communities use talk pages differently: for example, Spanish Wikipedia articles seem to feature an overall higher proportion of requests for information than either English or French, and a higher proportion of Information Boxes. However, the most striking result of their study is that while proportions of different kinds of talk page posts are broadly similar across the three Wikipedias they analyzed, they are all substantially different from the results of the 2007 study. In particular, while Viégas and Wattenberg found that 58% of talk page posts included requests for editing coordination, only 35–37% of posts in the newer sample implicated coordinated editing activity.

This result suggests that the way editors use talk pages has changed dramatically since the 2005 sample was collected. It may be an indication of changes in the focus of editing work on Wikipedia. Perhaps the work of maintaining a much larger and fuller Wikipedia requires less direct coordination than was necessary earlier in the project's development, when more editors focused on writing and expanding new articles. It's also possible that the Wikipedia editor communities, which now contain a much higher proportion of experienced editors, are able to coordinate their activities more effectively in a stigmergic manner, making "talking before you type" less necessary. Future research can build on this work by examining other differences, such as between the editing dynamics of other older and younger Wikipedias, as well as examine potential cultural forces that mediate how editing communities talk to, and work with, one another.

"Stigmergic Coordination in Wikipedia"

Reviewed by Nøkkenbuer

On the matter of stigmergy, another paper presented at OpenSym 2018 titled "Stigmergic Coordination in Wikipedia" investigated evidence for just that. From the abstract: "Using a novel approach to identifying edits to the same part of a Wikipedia article, we show that a majority of edits to two example articles are not associated with discussion on the article Talk page, suggesting the possibility of stigmergic coordination. However, discussion does seem to be related to article quality, suggesting the limits to this approach to coordination."

Although the researchers only analyzed two articles, namely Abraham Lincoln and Business from the English Wikipedia, they concluded that "the data presented in this paper suggest that a substantial fraction of the edits made on Wikipedia are coordinated without explicit discussion on the Talk pages", which they hypothesize as representative of stigmergic coordination. In fact, it appears that the majority of edits analyzed demonstrated stigmergic behavior; although this may be obvious for minor edits and fixing vandalism, the stigmergy was apparent even in substantial edits. Moreover, the authors caution that due to the "overly strict operationalization" they used in gathering and analyzing the data, these analyses may be underestimating the reality of stigmergic editing in Wikipedia.

What Wikipedia's biographical data tells us about the world's painters, writers and scientists

Five recent papers that study the influence and relations of historical persons based on the biographical coverage on Wikipedia, compiled by Tilman Bayer:

Leonardo da Vinci had the highest PageRank on five of the seven Wikipedias examined in this study.

"Community Detection with Metadata in a Network of Biographies of Western Art Painters"

From the abstract: "[...] we look at the structure of the influences between Western art painters as revealed by their biographies on Wikipedia. We use a modified version of modularity maximisation with metadata to detect a partition of artists into communities based on their artistic genre and school in which they belong. We then use this community structure to discuss how influential artists reached beyond their own communities and had a lasting impact on others [...]"

See also earlier coverage of similar research: "The history of art mapped using Wikipedia"

"Interactions and influence of world painters from the reduced Google matrix of Wikipedia networks

From the abstract:: "This study concentrates on extracting painting art history knowledge from the network structure of Wikipedia. Therefore, we construct theoretical networks of webpages representing the hyper-linked structure of articles of seven Wikipedia language editions. These seven networks are analyzed to extract the most influential painters in each edition using Google matrix theory. Importance of webpages of over 3000 painters are measured using PageRank algorithm. The most influential painters are enlisted and their ties are studied with the reduced Google matrix analysis. [...] For instance, our analysis groups together painters that belong to the same painting movement and shows meaningful ties between painters of different movements. We also determine the influence of painters on world countries using link sensitivity between Wikipedia articles of painters and countries. [...] The world countries with the largest number of top painters of selected seven Wikipedia editions are found to be Italy, France, Russia."

For each of these seven Wikipedia languages, the paper contains a list of the top 50 painters by PageRank, led by Pablo Picasso in case of the French Wikipedia, Leonardo da Vinci for the English, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian Wikipedia, and Rembrandt van Rijn on the Dutch Wikipedia.

"Time-focused analysis of connectivity and popularity of historical persons in Wikipedia"

From the abstract: "... we look into Wikipedia articles on historical people for studying link-related temporal features of articles on past people. [...] We propose a novel style of analysis in which we use signals derived from the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia as well as from article view logs, and we overlay them over temporal dimension to understand relations between time periods, link structure and article popularity. In the latter part of the paper, we also demonstrate several ways for estimating person importance based on the temporal aspects of the link structure as well as a method for ranking cities using the computed importance scores of their related persons."

Wikipedia conveys "a rather conservative, old-fashioned version of world literature"

"World Literature According to Wikipedia: Introduction to a DBpedia-Based Framework"

From the abstract: "... it is our goal to [analyze] the representation of world literature in Wikipedia with its millions of articles in hundreds of languages. As a preliminary, we introduce and compare three different approaches to identify writers on Wikipedia using data from DBpedia, a community project with the goal of extracting and providing structured information from Wikipedia. Equipped with our basic set of writers, we analyze how they are represented throughout the 15 biggest Wikipedia language versions. We combine intrinsic measures (mostly examining the connectedness of articles) with extrinsic ones (analyzing how often articles are frequented by readers) and develop methods to evaluate our results. The better part of our findings seems to convey a rather conservative, old-fashioned version of world literature, but a version derived from reproducible facts revealing an implicit literary canon based on the editing and reading behavior of millions of people."

The authors published their datasets at http://data.weltliteratur.net/, including lists of the top 25 writers for various language editions by various measures (e.g. Mircea Eliade leads by page length on the English Wikipedia.)

Scientific awards increase reader and editor attention for winning scientists, but not so much for their research

"Collective Attention towards Scientists and Research Topics"

From the abstract: "we compare the temporal pattern of information supply (article creations) and information demand (article views) on Wikipedia for two groups of scientists: scientists who received one of the most prestigious awards in their field and influential scientists from the same field who did not receive an award. Our research highlights that awards function as external shocks which increase supply and demand for information about scientists, but hardly affect information supply and demand for their research topics. Further, we find interesting differences in the temporal ordering of information supply between the two groups: (i) award-winners have a higher probability that interest in them precedes interest in their work; (ii) for award winners interest in articles about them and their work is temporally more clustered than for non-awarded scientists."

Conferences and events

See the research events page on the Meta Wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

We start by highlighting four papers from the Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2017):

"Wikipedia vandalism is linked to labor, perhaps serving as relief from stress or boredom"

"Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Reverted Wikipedia Edits"

From the abstract: "The paper at hand analyzes vandalism and damage in Wikipedia with regard to the time it is conducted and the country it originates from. First, we identify vandalism and damaging edits via ex post facto evidence by mining Wikipedia's revert graph. Second, we geolocate the cohort of edits from anonymous Wikipedia editors using their associated IP addresses and edit times [...]. Third, we conduct the first spatio-temporal analysis of vandalism on Wikipedia. Our analysis reveals significant differences for vandalism activities during the day, and for different days of the week, seasons, countries of origin, as well as Wikipedia's languages. [...] the ratio is typically highest at non-summer workday mornings, with additional peaks after break times. We hence assume that Wikipedia vandalism is linked to labor, perhaps serving as relief from stress or boredom, whereas cultural differences have a large effect."

"Shocking the Crowd: The Effect of Censorship Shocks on Chinese Wikipedia"

From the abstract: "In this study, we examine changes in collaborative behavior of editors of Chinese Wikipedia that arise due to the 2005 government censorship in mainland China. Using the exogenous variation in the fraction of editors blocked across different articles due to the censorship, we examine the impact of reduction in group size, which we denote as the shock level, on three collaborative behavior measures: volume of activity, centralization, and conflict. We find that activity and conflict drop on articles that face a shock, whereas centralization increases."

"Spam Users Identification in Wikipedia Via Editing Behavior"

From the abstract: "[...] our approach reaches 80.8% classification accuracy and 0.88 mean average precision. We compared against ORES, the most recent tool developed by Wikimedia which assigns a damaging score to each edit, and we show that our system outperforms ORES in spam users detection. Moreover, by combining our features with ORES, classification accuracy increases to 82.1%."

English Wikipedia still engaged in rule-making, but with "strong shift toward deliberation"

"The Evolution and Consequences of Peer Producing Wikipedia's Rules"

From the abstract: "Using a corpus of 725,000 revisions made to 2,012 pages about rules and rule discussions since 2001, we explore the dynamics of English Wikipedia's rule-making and maintenance over time. Our analysis reveals a policy environment marked by on-going rule-making and deliberation across multiple regulatory levels more than a decade after its creation. This dynamism is however balanced by strong biases in the attention and length towards older rules coupled with a diminishing flexibility to change these rules, declining revision activity over time, and a strong shift toward deliberation."

"Wikipedia as a gateway to biomedical research: The relative distribution and use of citations in the English Wikipedia"

From the abstract: "This study aims to establish benchmarks for the relative distribution and referral (click) rate of citations—as indicated by presence of a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)—from [English] Wikipedia, with a focus on medical citations. [...] all DOIs in Wikipedia were categorized as medical (WP:MED) or non-medical (non-WP:MED). Using this categorization, referred DOIs were classified as WP:MED, non-WP:MED, or BOTH, meaning the DOI may have been referred from either category. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Out of 5.2 million Wikipedia pages, 4.42% (n = 229,857) included at least one DOI. 68,870 were identified as WP:MED, with 22.14% (n = 15,250) featuring one or more DOIs. WP:MED pages featured on average 8.88 DOI citations per page, whereas non-WP:MED pages had on average 4.28 DOI citations. For DOIs only on WP:MED pages, a DOI was referred every 2,283 pageviews and for non-WP:MED pages every 2,467 pageviews. DOIs from BOTH pages accounted for 12% (n = 58,475)."

(Compare also an ongoing research project by the Wikimedia Foundation about how readers use citations: m:Research:Characterizing Wikipedia Citation Usage)

"Can conference papers have information value through Wikipedia? An investigation of four engineering fields"

From the abstract: "[...] citations in Wikipedia and Scopus were compared for conference papers (and journal articles) published in 2011 in four engineering fields that value conferences. Wikipedia citations had correlations that were statistically significantly positive only in Computer Science Applications, whereas the correlations were not statistically significantly different from zero in Building & Construction Engineering, Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering and Software Engineering. Conference papers were less likely to be cited in Wikipedia than were journal articles in all fields, although the difference was minor in Software Engineering."

"Wikipedia-integrated publishing: a comparison of successful models."

From the abstract: "In the first model, peer-reviewed material is published in a journal and subsequently copied to Wikipedia under a compatible licence (typically Creative Commons). This produces new, high-quality articles and is easily consistent with current open access journal practices. A second, less common format is where material is first published in Wikipedia, then subjected to academic peer review before being published as a journal article. This model is also compatible with the recent practice of improving and peer-reviewing existing Wikipedia pages. A third model is where a journal requires authors to update Wikipedia as part of the journal's publication process. This allows content to be pitched at different levels for the journal and Wikipedia."

"Research Faux Pas: The Stigma of Wikipedia"

From the paper:

Imagine, if you will, hosting a research party and inviting all of the major [research] databases. Everyone who's anyone would be there [e.g. JSTOR, ScienceDirect and LexisNexis. ...] Then Wikipedia shows up to this party and suddenly the room goes silent. Web of Science won't even make eye contact with him. "Who invited this imposter?" whispers one of the ProQuest databases. The agitation is almost tangible.

Even though he could easily mingle with any of the guests and has brought enough food and drinks for everyone, Wikipedia stands alone in the corner of the room. He's the most popular person in the world, yet no one is happy to see him at this research party. [...]

Wikipedia finally snaps and screams, "What did I do to deserve this? Why do you all hate me so much?" PsycINFO looks over and says, "You're a liar, Wikipedia! You're untrustworthy and lack integrity. You have 1,350 administrators, 6,000+ reviewers, and countless editors making you the poster child for dissociative identity disorder. Your presence soils our reputations in academia. [...]

This is the stigma of Wikipedia in the world of scholarly research [...]

The essay's author, a librarian at San Jose State University, concludes that this stigma "is strong and it will likely dominate the narrative for quite a while, but that stigma does not necessarily hold up against the findings regarding Wikipedia's accuracy and authority. More and more research is emerging that suggests otherwise. For content that is not politically charged or controversial, Wikipedia has proven to be as good as, if not better than, some its peers."

References

Supplementary references

Reader comments

2018-10-01

Pencils are mandatory

By Barbara Page

You will want to get out your printer and pencils to participate in this month's article. The pencil works better if you chew on the end of it. Good luck! Answers will appear next issue.

Across

Too large to sharpen but highly effective

(This is a clue)

Two administrators discussing
the answer to 13 down

5. The house where new editors go when they have questions about creating an article about themselves or their company
8. How many pillars are there?
9. Where Jimbo now lives
11. What we all do (begins with E)
12. Such pretty pictures
16. What WP stands for
17. Cool tool when you want to get your edit count stratospheric
19. Write this when you want people to know what you think
21. A topic- or article-specific consequence of being naughty
22. A rarely used tool of appreciation
24. Discuss grants and other Wiki things in this project
26. Most populous English-speaking country
27. Three times you are out
28. A toddler's plaything or the consequences you can face when you are very, very naughty
29. The other English Wikipedia
31. Have a good idea? Ask for one of these!
32. Shocking facts about improved articles
33. Entertainment, drama and sentencing all in one place

Down

1. Don't do this to newcomers (but it's OK after about 1,000 edits, slather them in barbeque sauce and toss them on the grill)
2. When two editors keep reverting each other, they have started an edit _____.
3. Girly biography Project, Women in _____
4. A foundation that tricks students into contributing to Wikipedia
6. Being sharp or sarcastic
7. Cranky and irritable
10. Make one of these when you are typing the same thing over and over
13. An old name for administrator
15. Entertainment and drama that is article specific
16. Large sea creatures without the letter H
18. Where the Village discusses anything and everything
19. Private canvassing
20. The highest rating possible for an article
23. Grooviest way to add categories to an article or a toasted feline
25. Funny guy
28. What you want to be
29. An article that is pretty darn short
30. The WikiProject that no one talks about

Reader comments

2018-10-01

You can do it! Just say thanks.

By Barbara Page, Struthious Bandersnatch, OlEnglish, JoeHebda, and Geekdiva

Created in April 2008 by Struthious Bandersnatch and with major contributions from OlEnglish, JoeHebda, and Geekdiva, Wikipedia:Expressing thanks continues to remind us how each other's work is thankless only if we let it be.

Expressing thanks for another user's helpful, generous, or positive actions is an important activity for cultivating community virtues such as civility and WikiPeace. Sending thanks communicates one's attitude towards other users. This page lists common methods for communicating thanks to other users. In its entirety it does not represent a policy or even a guideline; the encouragement of positive behavior is a topic of guidelines and policies such as etiquette, civility, WikiLove, and WikiPeace.

Direct thanks

A message of thanks is most often directly placed on the other user's talk page. In general, when any change is made to a user's talk page, that user will receive a message notifying him or her of the change the next time he or she views any Wikipedia page.

• Custom written message: the best method of thanks is often a short written note mentioning the circumstance and gesture you are expressing thanks for.
• Notifications/Thanks offers a way to give positive feedback on Wikipedia. This feature (added June 2013) lets editors send a 'Thank you' notification to users who make useful edits.
• {{Smile}} and other templates can be used and provide graphics, standardized text, and a pleasant layout for your message. Some templates permit the customization of the message text and you could also copy the source of the template if you wish to customize it.
• WP:Awards are a special templates that usually convey a message of thanks or a recognition of a user's virtue. Most awards such as barnstars are granted on individual initiative—any user can give barnstars, not just administrators or bureaucrats—so be bold. A small number of awards are the result of a community process. Many different ones are listed here.

More public gestures

• To make an announcement of thanks in response to an especially worthy action, you might place a temporary or permanent notice on your own user page.
• A nice cup of tea and a sit down is both an essay and sort of a forum for appreciating members of the community.
• Account authority promotion: If the user deserving of thanks initiates a request for adminship or a request for bureaucratship or another community process requesting community input on the user's conduct it would be an appropriate gesture to render your (honest) opinion of the user in that forum.
• WikiGnome Kudos

Guidelines for expressing thanks

• If a user's talk page is receiving a large number of thank-you messages, it may be considerate to wait until a "quieter time" to add your own message.
• If you are expressing thanks in a tense situation, to someone with whom you are having a dispute, or to someone who has otherwise expressed suspicion of you, use caution. While a message of thanks might express good faith or an attitude of compromise, unless it is viewed by the receiving party as entirely sincere, it may arouse further suspicion or be viewed as patronizing. A different demonstration of good faith may be more appropriate.

See also

• Wikipedia:Notifications/Thanks
• {{Thank you}}
• {{Thank You IP}}
• {{WikiThanks}}, a nice template to thank others
• Wikipedia:Thank you, an essay on civility
• Wikipedia:Expect no thanks, an essay on the need for gratitude

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Editorial comment: Most readers probably enjoy The Signpost and would miss it if it were to disappear. Though hand-wringing abounds, we might all be surprised if we would thank those who have contributed to The Signpost – especially those who contribute on a regular basis. It just might keep it alive. Barbara ✐  ✉

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