Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-09-19
Ushahidi research tool announced, Citizendium five years on: success or failure?, and Wikimedia DC officially recognised
Changes to The Signpost
This week's issue of The Signpost is the eleventh and final publication that I will have the pleasure of editing; I am soon to start at the University of Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, with its many new demands upon my time. It is therefore a useful juncture to update you, our readers, on how The Signpost has been evolving.
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Building on from the work of HaeB, The Signpost is looking to move beyond its core purpose as an informative news provider. I think we have largely cracked that nut – at least for news of interest to English Wikipedians – and I hope that you, our hundreds of readers, would agree with me on that. We cannot, however, rest on our laurels and during my short editorship I have been all too aware that we have no more readers now than we did two years ago.
My personal hypothesis is that while The Signpost is good at informing, it has struggled at times to entertain. For this reason I have used my editorship to support the reintroduction of the Opinion Desk, which I hope will provide a steady stream of interesting Op-Eds for you to enjoy (no opinion essay is included in this issue merely to keep the number of reports at a manageable level). If you feel strongly about an issue that you think deserves greater coverage, I invite you to contribute to that column. As for breaking it in, well, we've trialled a controversial narrative, a largely uncontroversial call-to-arms, and a humorous poem. All three I hope you will have found both entertaining and in some sense provocative.
Previous editors HaeB and Ragesoss commented on a need to remain independent and to "constructively criticise" the Foundation's actions where necessary. Although I have been unable to find a breakthrough in realising this vision more effectively, I have been able to start work on a common editorial policy that communicates this and the many other components of the broader Signpost vision to all new Signpost editors. In addition, I hope that it will also be able to describe current best practice when dealing with controversial areas, such as those where the Foundation and a local community are in conflict. I therefore welcome all your thoughts on what you think The Signpost does well, and what you think it could be doing better, in the comments section of this article. The plan is to agree on the content of the new document within the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that.
In the meantime, I'm passing the baton on to a combined editorship, comprising User:SMasters and User:Skomorokh. Each future issue will be managed and directed by one of these two volunteers, whom I wish all the best.
Thank you for your continued support,
User:Jarry1250 (outgoing editor-in-chief)
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Ushahidi research tool announced, Citizendium five years on: success or failure?, and Wikimedia DC officially recognised
WikiSweeper research project announced
Ushahidi, a non-profit information mapping software organization, has announced its intention to develop a wiki research tool built for Wikipedians editing breaking-news articles. The project was announced by the company and the Wikimedia Foundation on their respective blogs. In the past, Wikipedia has proved to be a valuable tool for disseminating breaking news (see this week's "Popular pages" report for specific examples); according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the site helps consumers of news to "understand and filter the news by curating and summarizing it as quickly and as accurately as possible."
Ushahidi intends to analyze how Wikipedians gather and distill information and create a tool based on their existing data-gathering software, WikiSweeper (or simply Sweeper for short). Most Wikipedians have their own verification techniques, but the tool would present a stream and identify accurate and relevant information, even including non-English sources where applicable. The project was born from a meeting between the Wikimedia Foundation's Erik Möller and Jon Gosier, a former director of Ushahidi.
Citizendium, half a decade later
Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the first public announcement of Citizendium, the free volunteer-written online encyclopedia project founded by Larry Sanger (known for his role in starting Wikipedia until 2002). In his September 15, 2006 essay (corresponding to a talk at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin), Sanger emphasized that he had "always been an enormous fan of Wikipedia, and I still am", but then listed numerous "serious and endemic problems" of Wikipedia which had motivated a fork of the project's processes and articles (the latter plan was changed soon after the actual start of the Citizendium wiki in 2007). As evident from Sanger's remarks and the Signpost coverage at the time, Citizendium was intended as a project that "aims to rival Wikipedia", though its fortunes have been mixed. For example, a July 2007 analysis in The Signpost (2008 followup) already declared that Citizendium "has not reached a critical mass of participation" (a conclusion questioned in the same Signpost edition by a member of Citizendium's executive committee, which invited Wikipedians to join the project and stated that "we're ultimately on the same side: that of making more and better free content available to the world." Wikipedians too have taken non-competitive perspectives on Citizendium, e.g. porting some of its content to Wikipedia, analyzing the lessons it might offer for Wikipedia, or even arguing that the Wikimedia Foundation should support it when Citizendium found itself in financial troubles last year). Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most scathing criticism of the project comes not from egalitarian Wikipedians, but originates from the perspective of scientific scepticism, as evidenced by the extensive Article on Citizendium at RationalWiki (which is currently cited on Citizendium's article about itself).
Before founding Citizendium, Sanger had worked for the Digital Universe project, which had likewise required users to state their real names, and given a special role to authenticated experts. After the start of Citizendium, Sanger took up work for WatchKnowLearn.org, another freely accessible website with user-contributed content (a database of links to free educational videos), founded around 2006 and publicly launched (as WatchKnow) in 2008. (A Wikipedia article about the site has been started recently, and on its talk page, Sanger has posted corrections and supplied more information about the project's history.)
On the occasion of the five-year anniversary, regular Signpost writer Tom Morris (formerly an active author at Citizendium and a former member of Citizendium's editorial council) interviewed Daniel Mietchen, the managing editor of Citizendium. Daniel is also the Wikimedian in Residence for Open Science (Signpost coverage), and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Research Committee.
Five years on, what do you think Citizendium has achieved?
- Daniel: Larry's original proposal to add a special role for experts did not find a lot of support, and so one way to look at the history of Citizendium is that it has continued to stimulate the discussion on how experts and the public could collaborate in a wiki environment. In a wiki landscape ranging from sites with next to no role for experts (e.g. Wikipedia) to others which are expert only (e.g. Scholarpedia), Citizendium provides an important landmark.
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about Citizendium?
- Daniel: There is actually a a whole list of these, though it could use an update. The most important ones, probably, are that Citizendium is often perceived as being expert-only and too academic in terms of topics covered. There are actually rather few experts participating, and many of the articles being worked on are about non-academic topics.
- Another one is that it is supposed to be an antipode to Wikipedia. As long as both projects use CC-BY-SA, they effectively collaborate, and the purpose of having several such platforms is then to provide participants with a choice in terms of the environment they prefer for contributing. Citizendium strives to make the editing experience pleasant for all contributors, while giving special weight to expert opinion.
Critics of Citizendium say that the bureaucracy got too heavy, too early. The effect of this has been to make the editing process more political, with otherwise active article writers becoming elected bureaucrats and a lot of political power games. Do you agree with this assessment?
- Daniel: Like any other international web platform, Citizendium has a number of interfaces to the offline world – technical, legal and financial. Some sort of bureaucracy is thus inevitable, and the Citizendium Charter is meant to deal with these matters. However, given the rather small user base that we have, the more we engage in such regulatory affairs, the more this distracts from the main purpose of the project, which is "to collect, structure, and cultivate knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free."
- (See also Signpost coverage: "Citizendium adopts charter, Larry Sanger's leading role ends")
Do you think Citizendium's financial woes are going to be resolved any time soon?
- Daniel: I hope so, and any constructive contributions to this are welcome. One way to tackle that could be to try to integrate Citizendium more tightly with the wider Open education community.
One thing we have both stressed is the importance of contextualization of knowledge. Citizendium did this by embracing subpages (with articles being just one part of an "article cluster"). Wikimedia seems to spread the potential contextualization between different projects with the 'Gallery' subpage being Commons, while the 'Related Articles' subpage being handled by 'Outline' pages and categories. Do you think Citizendium has a better model here?
- Daniel: There are multiple ways to contextualize knowledge on MediaWiki – and categories, subpages and namespaces can all play a role in this, as can spreading this functionality across installations. In terms of Related Articles, I indeed prefer the Citizendium approach, though it could benefit from automation, e.g. by way of integration with Semantic MediaWiki. I like the way in which Commons serves as a hub (also beyond Wikimedia, by way of InstantCommons), and would like to see something similar for other wiki components, like templates, references or even user profiles and preferences.
I was talking to a PhD student the other day who told me they don't trust anything that is said in Wikipedia about academic topics, but they do frequently use the references and bibliography section. Both Citizendium and the fork of Citizendium, Knowino, have Bibliography subpages and Citizendium also has an External Links subpage, which allows editors to develop an annotated bibliography of both scholarly and web resources. English Wikipedia does have some bibliography pages (Bibliography of New York, Evelyn Waugh bibliography). Do you think developing bibliographic resources could be something Wikimedia could try or might this be something only specialist academic wikis end up doing?
- Daniel: A wiki-based project in which every potential resource has its own wiki page (e.g. On the Origin of Species) that would provide information on the resource (e.g. its metadata, versioning information, public and expert perception) would be great. Open Library goes in this direction. I think Wikimedia could play a role in such a project, and a number of proposals revolving around this are being discussed. I also think that early coordination with scholarly – and librarian – communities is important for such a project to succeed, and there may even be a role for some reference managers.
- There is a related workshop foreseen for the upcoming WikiSym, focusing on literature about wikis.
What do you think Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects can learn from Citizendium's successes and failures?
- Daniel: There have been quite a few courses in the Eduzendium scheme that provide support – as have similar initiatives at Wikimedia – to the idea that improving encyclopedic content is actually quite compatible with doing coursework, so using wikis in educational settings may be a promising avenue.
- Other insights that can be drawn from Citizendium are less newsworthy on the web – that real names foster a more friendly atmosphere and that community engagement works best if priorities, governance principles and communication channels are being developed in a transparent manner and applied coherently –, or within expert communities, that there are few incentives to contribute to anything for which experts do not receive credit.
If we were betting, would you put €50 on Citizendium being around in five years time?
- Daniel: I don't like bets, but it will be around in one way or the other, as it is available under an open license. Perhaps there is even a way to turn it into one of several community-focused frontends for a wider distributed wiki architecture.
In brief
- Thursday, September 22: Office hours with the Wikimedia Foundation's executive director are scheduled in the #wikimedia-office IRC channel.
- Friday, October 6: Voting for the second round of 2011 Steward elections comes to a close.
- Wikimedia DC formally recognized as a chapter: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees have now unanimously voted in favor of recognizing Wikimedia District of Columbia as a chapter. The group, founded in May, was officially recognised as a chapter by way of a resolution on September 12. The board has granted the organization interim permission to use Wikimedia trademarks until a chapter agreement is signed. Wikimedia DC will be holding their annual members meeting on October 1 and will re-elect their board at the meeting. Additional events have been planned for Wikimedians in the DC area; a full list of these is available from the chapter's website, wikimediadc.org.
- Steward elections start: The second steward elections in 2011 began 4 days ago on September 15, 2011. Former Wikimedia Foundation volunteer coordinator Cary Bass has left the position, so stewards have created an Election Committee. 17 editors are currently in the running for the position.
- MediaWiki update: The next version of the MediaWiki software, MediaWiki 1.18, will be deployed to selected Wikimedia projects starting Monday, September 19 and finishing on October 4, 2011, when the Wikimedia Foundation will complete the deployment for all projects, including the English Wikipedia. See this week's "Technology Report" for more details.
- Wikimania videos: On the YouTube channel of Wikimedia Israel, several more video recordings of presentations from this year's Wikimania conference became available last week (see also this week's Technology report for a list of tech-related ones).
- Wikimedia UK report: Wikimedia UK has published the UK chapter report for August 2011, including updates on its GLAM program, Wikimania sponsorship and application for charitable status, which would qualify it for tax breaks.
- Wikimedia Philippines report: The 2010 annual report of the Philippine Wikimedia chapter has been published.
- Milestones: The Zazaki Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles and 500 uploaded files, while the Belarusian (Tarashkevitsa) Wikipedia has reached 100,000 pages. The Esperanto Wiktionary has reached 100,000 page edits; the Luxembourgish Wiktionary has reached 1,000 entries.
- First "Wiki Academy" in India: The Indian Wikimedia chapter held its first Wiki Academy, attended by 20–30 library professionals of Department of Public libraries in Bangalore.
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes three new administrators, the first in the month of September 2011. GB fan (nom) has been a Wikipedia editor for more than four years; this was the second candidacy (with the first under another user name). Regarding current contributions, GB Fan said "I am not a big content writer. I am more of a gnome and like to work behind the scenes". Rannpháirtí anaithnid (nom) has been editing since July 2004, except for a year when (s)he invoked the "right to vanish". This was also a second candidacy, with the first in 2007. Rannpháirtí anaithnid said that "Most of my content development is centered around Ireland-related topics and so I am active contributor to Wikipedia:WikiProject Ireland and related discussions." Ks0stm (nom) has been editing since May 2007, and is a weather enthusiast studying meteorology at a respected atmospheric sciences college. He intends his admin work to be in the areas in which he has the most experience: WP:UAA, WP:AIV, speedy deletion, and relatively uncontroversial WP:ITN and WP:AfD discussions. At the time of publication there was one live RfA: Richwales, due to finish on September 24.
- Wikipedia ambassador survey: Results from the first Wikipedia ambassador survey were released at the conclusion of the Public Policy Initiative, that ended this summer. Participants agreed on four major outcomes, noting (among other things) that Wikipedia content improved, the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool increased, and that there was an increase of Wikipedia's credibility among academia. The results will be used to guide the Public Policy Initiative's successor, the Global Education Program.
- Death of editor: The Signpost notes with regret that the Military History project was informed of the death of User:bahamut0013 (aka Sergeant Robert P Lemiszki Jr., United States Marine Corps), an administrator and erstwhile member of the audit subcommittee. He last edited on May 21.
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Wikipedia: yesterday's news? Calls for women, doctors, and scholars of humanities; Wales makes Wikimedia work "look easy"
Wikipedia: big idea or yesterdays' news? A historian's quandary
In The Atlantic, historian Marshall Poe recounted his experiences in attempting to pitch, write and sell an overarching "book of ideas" with Wikipedia as its central focus. After stumbling across Wikipedia whilst pursuing an interest in reader-contributed informational resources, Poe was struck by a citation to his work on an obscure Austrian diplomat. He became fascinated by the sheer depth of the project, its radical transparency in providing page histories of each change to an article, and the emergent social order of its a-hierarchical community of contributors. In September 2005, his autobiographical article was nominated for deletion a week after he created it (as MarshallPoe). His curiosity piqued by these encounters, Poe writes that he delved further into the intricacies of the nascent website, and wrote for the editors of The Atlantic Monthly – for whom he had been working as a researcher – a vivid and short-form history of the founding of the project and its early leaders: "The Hive" (September 2006). This was followed – within a month – by two additional Wikipedia-centric articles for the magazine: "A Closer Look at the Neutral Point of View (NPOV)", a case study of the encyclopaedia's handling of controversial content focusing on the Abortion entry, and "Common Knowledge", a personal history of the historian's experiences with the burgeoning project.
Around this time, Poe describes how Wikipedia had become a hot topic in the thinking press, and that he saw an opportunity to author the "book of ideas" he had long dreamt of. Poe recounts how, having found himself a literary agent who had read his piece with enthusiasm to score him a book deal, he was told he had the requisite stature (as an academic and contributor to a respected intellectual periodical) but needed a hook, a captivating and counterintuitive thesis that would serve as the book's "big idea" and catchy title, and thus, it was hoped, propel it and Poe into the bestselling ranks of instant classics such as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, and James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. Poe chose "Wikipedia changed everything". A New York publisher duly took the bait (and offered considerable remuneration). Given six months to capture Wikipedia right in the spotlights of the zeitgeist, Poe writes about how he began researching in earnest, but quickly ran into a stumbling block: Wikipedia did not change everything – the thesis did not hold. "The truth about Wikipedia", Poe recalls, "was messy", and his manuscript a "convoluted story involving evolution, human nature, media technologies, and their effects on human society and thought." Poe's historians' nous could not countenance Wikipedia-as-big-idea – instead finding it to be a phenomenon of "irreducible complexity" that defied any attempt at breezy reductionism. By the time he had reworked the manuscript into a difficult "book of ideas", Wikipedia's moment had deemed to have passed, and the publisher had lost interest, Poe writes. The modest impact of subsequent book-length studies of Wikipedia-style collaboration,[1] such as Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (2008), Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution (2009), and Joseph Reagle's Good Faith Collaboration (2010), may well bear Poe's insight out.
In brief
- Sue Gardner on the gender gap: Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner was interviewed by CBC Radio's Nora Young on September 12. During the "Spark" program, Gardner discussed the gender gap and efforts to encourage female contributors.
- Antarctica and the 21st century: The floatingsheep collective released their report Geographies of the World's Knowledge (pdf), which included a segment on the distribution of Wikipedia articles geographically and temporally. Drawing from roughly 1.5 million articles in a 2010 database download, the report revealed among other findings that more articles had been written about Antarctica (7,800) than any South American or African nation, that the country with the most internet users (China) accounted for barely 1% of articles, that its biographical articles overwhelmingly geolocate to Western Europe and, from the 18th century on, North America, and that vastly more biographies per year were written for the 20th and particularly the 21st century compared to preceding time periods.
- Calls for medical contributors: In the UBC [University of British Columbia] Medical Journal, Wikipedian James Heilman, MD (Doc James) explained to his colleagues "Why we should all edit Wikipedia": "The next printed article your patient comes in with may be yours." Heilman is on the board of directors of Wikimedia Canada, which is currently offering a C$1000 scholarship to the Canadian student who makes "the most significant contribution to Wikipedia’s medical content."
- Wikipedia and the media wasteland: In 1961, Newton N. Minow, the then Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), criticized the quality of US commercial TV programming, in his famous Wasteland Speech (so named after his challenge to broadcasters to watch their own TV station for a day, predicting that "what you will observe is a vast wasteland"). Last week, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Minow's speech with a forum about "News and Entertainment in the Digital Age", with many prominent panelists from US media and academia answering Minow’s challenge to the media to "do better", in a contemporary context. The most memorable answer (as cited by Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member Ethan Zuckerman) came from The New York Times columnist Virginia Heffernan: "Register as a Wikipedia editor today. Twice, if you’re a woman." According to O'Reilly Radar, "the audience greeted this exhortation with much acclaim. Hefferman directed her request particularly at renowned historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was sitting right in front of her. And Goodwin expressed some surprise at the idea that she too could edit Wikipedia. But she admitted to being intrigued at the idea and willing to consider doing it."
- ReadWriteWikipedia: Technology blog ReadWriteWeb discussed Wikipedia several times this week, covering the launch of a new mobile site and outlining Ushahidi's new Wikimedia partnership (see "News and notes").
A panel of students who contributed to Wikipedia as part of their assignments, taken at the July 2011 Wikipedia in higher education summit. The event spurred further thoughts on student–Wikipedia interaction in the disciplines of the liberal arts. - Wikipedia in liberal arts colleges: On the blog of NITLE (the US National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education), the organization's labs director asked whether it was possible to use "Wikipedia in the liberal arts classroom?", reflecting on her impressions from the Wikipedia in higher education summit in July.
- Defending Wikipedia: "The Bell Ringer", a student newspaper at Augusta State University (a public university in the US), published an opinion piece entitled "In the defense of Wikipedia", lauding its breadth and depth of coverage whilst acknowledging the weakness of the anyone-can-edit model for quality control and concluding by restating his case that those articles which are carefully researched and dense with citations more than compensate for the occasional vandalised entry.
- New Yorker cartoon: The New Yorker published a cartoon about Wikipedia, making light of the vanity of the subject of a stub-length BLP.
- Running Wikipedia: harder than it looks?: Jimmy Wales' recent presentation for the Cambridge Network (see last week's "In the news") was summarized in a blog post that highlighted the challenges in increasing Wikipedia's global reach and diversity: "Running Wikipedia, possibly not as easy as Jimmy Wales makes it look". (The exact level of control Jimmy Wales exerts over Wikipedia remains a controversial issue within the wider community; as such, the title may be considered erroneous.)
Corrections
- ^ A previous version of this article incorrectly implied that Shirky's Here Comes Everybody was a book-length study of Wikipedia.
Reader comments
On the Wikinews fork
| “ | As far as I'm concerned, The Open Globe is a feeble attempt at oneupmanship started by a disenfranchised editor who didn't get his own way, and didn't like how things were run. What they do is their business now - I wish them no ill will, I just hope they realise that instead of forking they'd have been better helping us reform instead of going off in a huff. | ” |
| “ | To see OG fork from Wikinews is sad, we've lost some good editors who've gone, we've lost friends, and most of all, I can feel an air of resentment amongst the community the likes of which I've never seen before. It's a loss for both of us, I feel - there's no mutual support there now. | ” |
| “ | I would think that Wikinews has simply never produced enough critical mass of any one genre, sufficient to create and maintain a large readership that wants that genre. | ” |
| “ | TechEssentials is honored to have such a successful and wonderful project joining our family and we wish them the best of luck as they fulfill their goal: to create a free, open news source. | ” |
| “ | I, and many other Wikinewsies, don't bear any ill-will towards the forkers, and I firmly believe that Wikinews can learn a lot from the OpenGlobe project. I understand their motivations and wish them the best of luck, and I hope a mutually-beneficial arrangement between the two communities can be found in the future. | ” |
As reported briefly in last week's edition of The Signpost, several editors from the English Wikinews have forked the project and created a new site, OpenGlobe. Wikinews, a sister project to Wikipedia, was established in 2004 and is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. OpenGlobe, which launched last week, shares both Wikinews' format (a wiki) and like Wikinews focuses on creating freely licensed and neutral news collaboratively. It is not, however, under either the technical or administrative supervision of the WMF.
In order to achieve its operational independence, the OpenGlobe website will be hosted by wiki-based site group TechEssentials. Both OpenGlobe and Wikinews use the MediaWiki software and the format is very similar, although the OpenGlobe project plans on some major changes; its editors feel that it will find making such changes much easier now they can avoid the formalities of Wikimedia's own feature request system. Unlike Wikinews, OpenGlobe has only one language version (English), although this may change in the future. Both sites are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license; but whilst they could share stories, OpenGlobe and Wikinews are currently generating separate content and look set to do so for some time.
The English Wikinews had less than two dozen highly active users before the schism. Of these, OpenGlobe has attracted several long-time Wikinews contributors, who cite disputes with other editors and a lack of technical support as issues. According to the OpenGlobe founder, User:Tempodivalse, "at least nine users have pledged to support this fork". Both projects are inviting users to contribute to their content.
Several threads on foundation-l and other Wikimedia mailing lists discuss the fork. It has also raised issues regarding the technical support that the Wikimedia Foundation provides for its smaller projects. (Further discussion on this can be found in this week's "Technology report".)
The Signpost spoke with the OpenGlobe's founder, Tempodivalse.
Why did you start the OpenGlobe?
- OpenGlobe was created mainly due to frustration with perceived rudeness/hostility among Wikinewsies and the project's writing structure. I think it has become strangled by bureaucracy, making it very hard to write an article and have it approved. Stories have to go through very rigorous checks for verifiability and copyright before they can be published, and even a small error can result in denial of publication.
- This process takes a long time, meaning that by the time the articles go "live", they are several days old and are of questionable newsworthiness. In many cases, articles have to be deleted before publication because they are simply not "recent" anymore.
How did you gather support and set the project up?
- I and fellow Wikimedian User:the_wub first threw around the idea of a fork a few weeks ago. I was intrigued, and shared our ideas with several other Wikinewsies who I knew weren't happy with the Wikinews status quo. Everyone I talked to was supportive, and we quickly found someone who was willing to host a wiki for us (the staff at TechEssentials). Everything fell into place from there. Once the project went online, more users gradually got involved.
What is the project's relationship with Wikinews?
- I feel it's slightly strained, although I hope we can coexist amicably. Reaction among Wikinews editors to the fork was mixed: some are interested to see where OG goes, but many are critical, suggesting the project would become unreliable and fail, because it doesn't intend to follow Wikinews' bureaucratic review process. In my view, the main disagreement is that we wanted a new, fresh approach that Wikinews editors were unwilling to try.
What is different about OpenGlobe and Wikinews?
- Primarily, OpenGlobe will have a more lax publication policy. Instead of requiring very detailed checks to every article before it goes "live", we'll probably have only rudimentary checks for glaring errors and neutrality. The idea is that editors will continue to make corrections and improvements later, as they see them. This is a more community-oriented and wiki-like approach, I feel. OG also plans to foster a more welcoming and helpful atmosphere to newcomers. (There are other differences, but these are the most important ones.)
What will be happening with OpenGlobe in the future?
- We're still in the early stages of development, so I don't exactly know what direction things will take. We want to expand our userbase and readership, using social media like Facebook and Twitter to get the news out. I'm hoping we become a news source that people can go to for comprehensive, reliable, open-source, and unbiased information.
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Back to school
- Join the 2012 Bacon Challenge, an effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of bacon in time for National Pig Day at the beginning of March 2012. The Bacon WikiCup is being held concurrently. Join in the deliciously fun competition and earn an award for your efforts.
- Stephen King, Wes Craven, Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, M. Night Shyamalan, and R. L. Stine could use your help at WikiProject Horror.
- The September Copyedit Backlog Elimination Drive is underway. Clean up Wikipedia and earn barnstars along the way!
- WikiProject Images and Media is sponsoring a drive to move free images to Commons this month. It's an easy way to improve the availability of free media and earn barnstars for yourself!
- Wikipedia Loves Libraries micro-conferences inspired by the GLAM WikiProjects and the Great American Wiknic will be held in cities across North America in October 2011. Find one near you!
This week, we're hitting the books with WikiProject Schools. Started in February 2004, WikiProject Schools has built up a collection of 11 Featured Articles, 5 Featured Lists, and 27 Good Articles. School articles are frequent targets for vandals, requiring the watchful eyes and verification resources available at WikiProject Schools. The project maintains lists of articles that need emergency attention, infobox corrections, general cleanup, and merging. We interviewed CT Cooper and Kudpung.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Schools? Do you focus on a type of school, a geographic region, or only schools you have attended?
- CT Cooper: WikiProject Schools was one of the first projects I joined when I became a significant contributor to Wikipedia back in 2007. I have historically focused on schools in Hampshire, England, since that is that is where I am from, and I have made significant to improvements to The Petersfield School, a school I previously attended. However, I have also contributed to school articles for places I have never visited or even previously heard of, often in response to the poor state of some articles I come across, such as Savannah Country Day School.
- Kudpung: I'm a retired teacher, teacher trainer, and lecturer, so 'schools' is naturally a major area of my Wikipedia interest. I started contributing to schools by writing some articles about schools in my home county of Worcestershire, England, in particular Hanley Castle High School which I attended as a boarder when it was still a selective grammar school. I then set out to improve and expand other articles on schools in the county, then the rest of the UK, and finally through participation in WP:WPSCH other school and education related articles, including many in the USA and other countries.
Nine schools are the subjects of featured articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some of the challenges of bringing a school-related article to featured status?
- CT Cooper: Most of my direct contributions have involved bringing up poor quality articles to a reasonable standard, rather than to FA. However, I have for years assessed articles as part of the assessment department, and that has frequently involved giving advice on how to improve articles to B-class and beyond. From my experience, probably the biggest challenge with getting a school article to featured status is with referencing, and a lack of it is usually the biggest criticism I make when assessing article quality. Getting a good breadth of sources for the details necessary for an FA, particularly on the history of older schools, needs more than a Google search, and often involves a lot of work offline.
- Kudpung: I'm not aware of having contributed to any school FA. Contrary to what is generally believed, it's very difficult to expand many school articles to a reasonable size beyond 'start' or 'C' class; the requirement for independent published reliable sources is generally only met by the most ancient and/or prestigious of all schools. American schools appear to base much of their notability on reports of their sport and athletic results. This is not the case of the UK where school reputations are made mainly on academic achievements that don't necessarily receive heavy press coverage.
How does the project handle the notability of schools? Are there any clear cut-off points for primary and secondary schools?
- CT Cooper: By far the most controversial topic of school articles is the application of notability, with schools being a key battleground in the war over deletionism and inclusionism. The issue has literally been discussed endlessly for years, with much bitterness on both sides.
- Kudpung : The answer is: It doesn't handle the notability of schools. It's interesting to note however that schools are exempted from Speedy deletion section A7 - An article about a real person, individual animal(s), organization (e.g. band, club, company, etc., except educational institutions), or web content that does not indicate why its subject is important or significant. The topic is the source of much invective and bad faith between inclusionists and exclusionists who do not necessarily address pragmatic solutions for school notability. Comparative school performance tables, good school guides, and government inspection grades are not awards and are therefore probably not sources of notability, although they are often cited at AfD. Guidelines for notability are based on an interpretation of a statement made by Jimbo Wales in 2003, and which has become an unofficial precedent for tens of thousands of school articles. In 2011 Jimbo made it clear that the interpretation of his earlier comment is no longer applicable. The quandary is now greater than ever, with decisions on notability being based more on emotion than on common sense and policy. It's very difficult to help the creators of school pages understand that their article is not notable. As an admin, I now largely avoid school AfD because it is absolutely unclear on what basis I should vote and/or close them.
Is neutral point of view an issue when writing school-related articles? In what ways does the project keep POV edits in check?
- CT Cooper: Yes definitely. School pupils often like to write negative, even libellous, remarks about their school on Wikipedia, but this is often simply dealt with as vandalism. More problematic cases include the schools themselves, or even the local authorities in some cases, taking it upon themselves to re-write their school articles.
- Kudpung: It's as important for school related articles as it is for all Wikipedia articles. Most school pages are written and edited by single purpose accounts and often contain a lot of puffery, promotion, and rivalry. The creators of these pages are mainly teachers, school administrators, and local authority personnel who are unlikely to read up on guidelines and policies just for creating one article; they are even less likely to return to the article later, or their own talk page, to see if it has been tagged. They need to be encouraged to revisit Wikipedia to follow up on their articles. Repair and improvement of these articles is carried out by a tiny number of WP:WPSCH gnomes who patiently slog through the lists of school articles requiring attention.
Does the project collaborate with any other projects? Is there any overlap between WikiProject Schools and WikiProject Universities?
- CT Cooper: There is no formal collaboration between WikiProject Schools and any other project, though school articles inevitably overlap with many different WikiProjects. Our main parent project is WikiProject Education, though this is not very active at this time. WikiProject Schools avoids overlap with WikiProject Universities by only covering institutions that do not award degrees in their own right – regardless of if "college" or "school" is in the name, which means that WikiProject Schools does cover further education colleges and sixth form colleges. However, the issues faced by both projects do still overlap, with essays such as Wikipedia:Avoid academic boosterism, which was originally written for universities, being cited for school articles as well. Content about schools also extends to sections in locality articles, which inevitably means working with local, regional, and national WikiProjects for many different countries, including country by country education WikiProjects such as WikiProject Education in Australia.
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- CT Cooper: WikiProject Schools is always looking for new contributors, and there are plenty of things that can be done to help. Articles in need of emergency, short term attention is used to identify threatened articles, and users are welcome to help keep on top of this list. The article request department lists missing articles, alongside Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/High schools, since there are probably thousands of notable schools still to be written about on Wikipedia. There is also the assessment department which deals with the momentous task of assessing the quality and importance of thousands of school articles. The number of articles in both Category:Unassessed school articles and Category:Unknown-importance school articles is dropping, but both are still backlogged.
- Kudpung: The most pressing needs are attention to the backlogs of school articles for improvement. The project has over 300 participants, but in reality, fewer than ten are truly active and most of those are the project coordinators. Most editors added their names to the project because they believe it is a requirement for creating or editing school articles. A special welcome message has been added to the repertoire of welcoming committee templates, and a dedicated help desk for school articles has been created in the hope of encouraging new editors to seek assistance with school articles. New solutions need to be found to channel new school article editors and creators to the schools project pages before they start work. Urgently needed improvements to the New Article Wizard could be brought into play.
Next week, we'll poke around the showroom before taking a test drive. Until then, polish your hubcaps and visit the archive.
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The best of the week
Featured articles
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* Murasaki Shikibu (nom), a Japanese novelist, poet, and lady-in-waiting at the imperial court during the Heian period, at the end of the 10th and start of the 11th century. (Truthkeeper88) picture at right
* Sesame Street (nom), an American children's television series that combines the Muppets, animation, short films, and humour. The program was conceived in 1966 and premiered on PBS in 1969 to positive reviews, some controversy, and high ratings. (Christine)
* Fomitiporia ellipsoidea (nom), a species of polypore fungus first recorded in China in 2008; one specimen produced the largest fruit body ever recorded. (J Milburn)
* HMS Hood (nom), one of four Admiral-class battlecruisers ordered in mid-1916. HMS Hood symbolised the British Empire before World War II. Her sinking by the German battleship Bismarck in 1941 was a huge shock. (Sturmvogel 66)
* Flight Unlimited (nom), a 1995 aerobatic flight simulator video game that allows players to pilot reproductions of real-world aircraft and to perform aerobatic manoeuvres. Players may fly freely, race through floating rings against a timer or take lessons from a virtual flight instructor. (J Milburn)
Three featured articles were delisted:
* History of Miami (nom: referencing and prose)
* International Space Station (nom: referencing, prose, MOS compliance, and images)
* Blaise Pascal (nom: referencing, comprehensiveness and image compliance)
Featured lists
Twelve lists were promoted:
* 2002 Asian Games medal table (nom) (Bill william compton.) picture at right
* List of number-one albums from the 2000s (UK) (nom) (Nominated by A Thousand Doors.)
* List of 350cc Motorcycle World Champions (nom) (NapHit.)
* List of Manchester United F.C. players (25–99 appearances) (nom) (HonorTheKing and 03md.)
* Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (P–Q) (nom) (Killervogel5.)
* List of posthumous number-one singles (UK) (nom) (ChrisTheDude.)
* List of Arizona hurricanes (nom) (Titoxd.)
* Venues of the 1952 Winter Olympics (nom) (Arsenikk.)
* IBM Award (nom) (Purplebackpack89.)
* List of Major League Baseball players from Australia (nom) (Afaber012.)
* 300 save club (nom) (Staxringold.)
* List of accolades received by Sense and Sensibility (film) (nom) (Ruby2010)
One featured list was delisted:
* List of United States Navy ratings (nom: lead, referencing, style)
Featured pictures: Muhammad and Crisco talk
Eight images were promoted (click on "nom" to view medium-sized images):
* Mikumi Panorama (nom; related article), a national park in Mikumi, near Morogoro, Tanzania, east Africa. The park was established in 1964 and currently covers 3230 km²; nevertheless, it's only the fourth-largest in the country. Photographer Muhammad Mahdi Karim told The Signpost, "I've been to Mikumi quite a lot, as it's much closer to Tanzania's capital city, Dar es Salaam, than the other national parks. It's also less crowded with tourists than the other parks, since most don't know about it. Ideally, one would use a jeep to go through the park, but during the dry season even a bus or a van would do. I usually go with the family: we spot the animals, and I shoot the photographs. I took three of the four pictures featured last week—the panorama, the giraffe, and the elephant—from the vehicle, so there wasn't much setting up to do: often, timing and spontaneity are essential. The last time we were there, in June, I'd just acquired a new zoom lens, and asked everyone to be on the lookout for birds; we ended up seeing birds we'd never seen before." Of his images of birds, four are featured of a total of nine uploaded, and two to three more will be nominated. "I might get more in my next trip in a month or so", he says. Coordinates. picture at top
* Giraffe (nom; related article), again taken in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania, by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim. picture at right
* Elephant portrait (nom; related article), A female African bush elephant raises her trunk as a warning sign in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania (created by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim).
* Alstroemeria x hybrida (nom; related article), Alstroemeria x hybrida Peruvian Lily photographed in the Lalbagh Botanical gardens, Bangalore, India, by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim.
* Enoch Powell (nom; related article), British Conservative Party statesman, writer, academic, poet, and former soldier, and well-known for his controversial 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech. (created by English society-photographer Allan Warren (born 1948).
* Golden Whistler (nom; related article), which photographer User:JJ Harrison says is "a bird more often heard than seen in close quarters. My last good chance for a photo-op was in 2008, and I simply didn't have the equipment for it at that time. This photo shows all of the important plumage."
* Striated Pardalote (nom; related article), on a Silver Wattle in Tasmania, Australia (created by User:JJ Harrison).
* Semar kris redux (nom; related article), an asymmetrical dagger most strongly associated with the culture of Indonesia, but nowadays also indigenous to Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei. The kris is famous for its distinctive wavy blade, but many have straight blades as well. Both a weapon and spiritual object, kris are often considered to have magical powers, with some blades associated with good luck and others bad luck. User:Crisco 1492, who took the original image, told The Signpost that "the image is of a single gayaman-style kris—the blade is at bottom and the sheathe at the top. It features Semar on the handle, floral etching on the sheathe, and a dragon design on the blade. The sheathe is 40 cm (16 in) long through the middle; the guard is made of wood." (Semar is a character in Javanese mythology who frequently appears in shadow plays. He is one of the "clowns", but is in fact divine and very wise.)
"This particular kris is relatively new, although I don't know when exactly it was made. I bought it roughly a month ago for a Javanese-style ceremony in which men traditionally wear a kris. The craftsman was one of two who sells kris in Beringharjo Market in Yogyakarta. Kris used as weapons, as opposed to their ceremonial function, generally have less decorative and sharper blades. I didn't buy an older kris (some of which have distinctive markings and even sometimes a distinctive smell) because the Javanese believe that many are inhabited by powerful spirits. The blade is of iron with gold leaf, the sheathe is of bronze, and the wooden part appears to be of teak. I photographed it at my boarding house in Java, with ambient lighting. Thanks to JJ Harrison for his work turning this into this, which is more or less what is featured now." picture below
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ArbCom narrowly rejects application to open new case
Two cases are currently open:
- Senkaku Islands, which looks at the behavior of editors involved in a dispute over whether the naming of the articles "Senkaku Islands" and "Senkaku Islands dispute" is neutral, moved into its fifth week. It is alleged that the content dispute has been exacerbated by disruptive editing.
- Abortion, a dispute over the lead sentence of Abortion and the naming of abortion-related articles, also said to have been exacerbated by disruptive editing, similarly moved into its fifth week.
There are pending requests for clarification for three cases: Transcendental meditation movement (since August 26), Digwuren (since August 24), and Ireland article names (since August 19). There is also one case with a pending request for amendment: Russavia-Biophys.
Committee twice declines to arbitrate administrator
On 23 August, La goutte de pluie resigned her position as an administrator as the result of a community recall process. KuduIO requested arbitration regarding her editing some weeks ago, alleging that she had abused her position of trust. This week, the original request for arbitration was officially declined by the committee, 3 to 5. The main voice for the arbitrators moving to decline was PhilKnight, who argued that the community could (and was) handling the situation by itself and ArbCom did not need to intervene. The same day the request was archived, a new request was submitted by OpenInfoForAll, which was speedily declined with OpenInfoForAll's consent a day later.
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MediaWiki 1.18 deployment begins, the alleged "injustice" of WMF engineering policy, and Wikimedians warned of imminent fix to magic word
MediaWiki 1.18 deployment begins
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On September 16, WMF director of platform engineering Rob Lanphier announced the deployment schedule of the latest version of MediaWiki, version 1.18, approximately seven months after the deployment of version 1.17. Due to the completion of the heterogeneous deployment project, software engineers at the Foundation have the chance for the first time to deploy to some Wikimedia wikis before others; developers reason that a staged deployment, when combined with a smaller release, will avoid many of the difficulties experienced in previous deployments when millions of visitors experienced small defects that only came to light at deployment time. With this in mind, Lanphier outlined the schedule as:
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As of time of writing, only four revisions (out of many hundreds) still need to be reviewed before deployment can commence. Lanphier encouraged users to test the wikis immediately after deployment and report any issues through the #wikimedia-tech connect IRC channel. Theoretically, MediaWiki 1.18 introduces several major new features, including support for gender-specific user pages, better directionality support for RTL languages, and protocol-relative URLs. Although Wikimedia wikis already benefit from a selection of the most major new features (priority changes are rapidly merged into production code), a myriad of smaller changes not yet debuted will indeed go live in the forthcoming rolling program of deployments. A full list of these is also available.
After the deployments, there will be a lag before the software is marked as stable enough for external sites to use and MediaWiki 1.18 is officially released. For version 1.17, the lag was four months, but the absence of under-the-hood changes in 1.18 means that an official release is scheduled for "shortly after" the internal deployment is complete on October 4.
Wikimedia "injustice" over lack of support for smaller projects
To say that only the English Wikipedia exclusively receives technical support is a misunderstanding. Instead, I would characterise the WMF's prioritisation as an "A rising tide lifts all boats" policy. Even if a first deployment is to Wikipedia, they will generally benefit other projects as well.
Projects like Wikinews and Wiktionary almost certainly require more specialized product development and devotion in addition to the general development work that benefits all projects. However, it's my own view that this kind of specialized development is best served by ensuring that we give the global community great spaces to innovate and create new things. Recently we've been working on improved support for gadgets, and we're also working to create Wikimedia Labs, which we hope will make it possible to test and develop software under conditions that are very close to the WMF production environment. This means that, provided you're willing to invest sufficient resources, you should be able to get a project much closer to "WMF readiness" than you are today with far less WMF help.
The WMF's role for specialised improvements is chiefly in reviewing and deploying the code that volunteers have taken the time to write. Where we don't do so in a timely and reasonable fashion, we must strive to do better.Following the news on Monday that members of the English Wikinews community are to break away, a spotlight was cast on the Foundation's policy towards its smaller projects, particularly when it came to technical support. "They couldn't get essential components deployed for 2 years or so," opined Kim Bruning, whilst Jon explained the problems in the technical assistance the Wikinews project received in more detail. His words seem to conflict with those of OpenGlobe founder Tempodivalse, who did not cite conflict with the Foundation as among his motivations for starting the project:
| “ | I can't speak for the entire Wikinews community, but a lot of it was the lack of technical assistance. Wikinews really need[ed the GoogleNewsSitemap extension] to be even remotely useful and it was very difficult to get any help at all. Eventually the community wrote the extension themselves but couldn't get the dev's to review it appropriately. This was drawn out over several years [until] the Foundation really started to turn around and give much better support starting about 1 year ago. ... There is also a host of other backend and support style related issues ... Simply put, the Wikinews concept needs a much more specific set of assistance than the general "Here's a wiki, have fun". | ” |
WereSpielChequers, meanwhile, suggested an overhaul of the mechanism for deciding which projects should receive paid developer attention:
| “ | I think it would be great if we could ringfence some IT budget for bottom up initiatives ... What I'd like to see is a prioritisation page on Meta comparing the priority of multiple potential developments, - much like the way Wikimania chooses presentations. That way projects and editors could make a pitch for IT investments that their communities actually had consensus for - currently even the English Wikipedia can get consensus for change but not get IT resourced for it to happen. | ” |
Among the most damning public criticism of current Foundation policy was that from MZMcBride:
| “ | From Wikimedia's perspective, I think this is "one down, several hundred to go." Wikimedia has made it clear that its singular focus is the English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are peripheral; all other project types are abandoned. Perhaps with the exception of Wikimedia Commons, which is able to pull in grant money, so it continues to receive some level of technical support. ... It's a great injustice to countless contributors that they receive support in name only ... I sincerely hope whoever administers your new site will treat you better than Wikimedia has. | ” |
In brief
Not all updates may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
With all page requests from those browsing Wikipedia on their handheld devices now being routed via the new MobileFrontend extension, administrators are being asked to update the HTML of the main pages of their home wikis to embed extra metadata. The metadata is then used to build up an improved mobile homepage.
{{REVISIONUSER}}to be "fixed": A commonly used magic word's functionality will change significantly as developers plan to fix a bug. The{{REVISIONUSER}}tag currently returns the username of the user who last edited the page, except when someone is editing that page, when it instead displays that editor's name. Developers plan to fix this soon (bug #19006), fundamentally changing the nature of the magic word. As a result, edit notices and templates used to preload or customise content that rely on the magic word will become non-functional; there are currently no firm plans to create another magic word with the existing functionality.
The logo of the DBpedia project, a machine-readable version of Wikipedia that was updated this week - DBpedia 3.7 released: DBpedia, the RDF-based Semantic Web/Linked Data version of Wikipedia, was updated to version 3.7 this week. It now uses the July 2011 Wikipedia dumps and has 3.64 million entries with data derived from 97 language versions of Wikipedia (the previous edition used data from late 2010). The latest release now contains information derived from articles that exist only in non-English editions of Wikipedia as part of a long-term project to make DBpedia better reflect the multilingual nature of Wikipedia. In total, the database, which aims to provide a machine-understandable version of Wikipedia, now contains approximately a billion "triples" (essentially individual statements of fact derived from articles, of the form "Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935"); as many as two-thirds of these came from non-English Wikipedias.
- Wikimania presentations now online: As reported by WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller on the wikitech-l mailing list, the videos of a number of technical-related Wikimania presentations have been uploaded to YouTube by Wikimania Israel. These include a presentation by Roan Kattouw and Timo Tijhof about the ResourceLoader that shipped with MediaWiki 1.17 ([1]) and Markus Glaser's presentation about testing ([2]). A full list of videos is also available.
- I18N bug triage: This week's bug triage focussed on internationalisation-related bugs, and was attended by 9 developers online. Of those, two were new to MediaWiki, impressing bugmeister Mark Hershberger (wikitech-l mailing list).
- Special:PrefixIndex made more usable: with the resolution of bug #18424, the visual look of the Special:PrefixIndex page will be tweaked to allow the navigation text to be more easily read and the pages to be more easily navigated between.
- History of MediaWiki explored: There was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about a recent call to developers to recount their memories of the early days of the MediaWiki software and the design decisions taken since. Some were enthusiastic about the project, which has been commissioned by a book writer, whilst others found it a waste of time.
- English Wikipedia Bots: this week, a bot was approved on the English Wikipedia for removing flag icons from infoboxes, whilst a bot task relating to the handling of requested move tags on pages in userspace is still open for discussion.
- Pageview statistics released in "dump" form: After the issue of page view statistics was examined, and it was found that http://stats.grok.se was one of only a very small number of sites actually processing the raw page logs into numerical form, the Foundation have released the full processed dataset to the public (wikitech-l mailing list). The figures stretch back to December 2007, although the statistics for a large period at the end of 2009 were found to be unreliable due to server overload (see previous Signpost coverage).
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Article stats for the English Wikipedia in the last year
This is a special report for the Signpost, showing how many people look at the most popular articles. This report covers the last fourth months of 2010 and first eight months of 2011 on the English Wikipedia; if you want to see how many hits a specific page is getting, visit the counter at stats.grok.se, or, depending on your interface language, you may be able to click the "View history" tab of the page of interest, and then the "Page view statistics" link.
Page view countdown
Statistics from Wikiroll.com. Statistics for other language variants of Wikipedia are available from the same site. Annotations are those of this report's author(s). This list is of articles only; other namespaces are omitted.
- Main page – The page with the most hits, of course, was the main page. With more than 100,000 visits an hour, our flagship page wins the jackpot.
- Facebook – At the number two spot in our countdown, rather unsurprisingly, is Facebook, itself one of the top ten viewed sites on the Internet, along with Google and Wikipedia. Despite Google's higher visitor numbers, it fails to outrank Facebook, perhaps in part due to its seeming familiarity.
- Wiki – What are we on? Everyone wants to find out. On this optimistic reading, readers are bursting to read about free editing sites, with a not too bad 2300+ hits an hour. (On the other hand, a pessimist might argue that surfers simply search for "wiki" when they mean Wikipedia, and then click through to the top hit, Wikipedia's article on wikis in general.)
- Google – The company behind the world's favourite search engine, getting checked out on the world's largest free encyclopedia. Again, this could well be a case of mistaken identity; the article on Google Search itself ranks at approximately 500th on the list.
- Search – Actually a redirect to searching, it seems the readers are trying to get to Special:Search – without much luck. At least 1700 visits an hour to this page.
- Deaths in 2011 – Sorry to have such a sad thing on our list, but it's what the stats say. Visitors check for the latest obituaries at least 1680 times an hour, visiting the page more than that of any individual.
- Amy Winehouse – Understandably, I think, why this one comes up at No.7. The late singer clocks in at an incredible 1600 views an hour for the first six months of 2011, helped mainly by a spike in pageviews that included over 9 million visits to her page in the week following her unexpected death.
- United States – Possibly the world's most influential country, and the largest single source of traffic to the English Wikipedia, the United States places at number 8.
Songstress and pop icon Lady Gaga had the twelfth most popular article, racking up over a thousand views per hour.
- Glee (TV series) – A rather unexpected one cropping up here, with a respectable 1100+ page views per hour. A popular culture phenomenon among younger age groups, the show receives 10 million viewers per airing in the United States (plus more on syndication to other countries).
- Justin Bieber – The second singer for the list, completing the top ten viewed articles on Wikipedia. Not all these readers are fans, however: Justin also ranks as one of the most vandalised pages on the site.
- Wikipedia – The project itself, just missing the top ten, with 28.8K a day; it is only Google hit #4 for the search term.
- Lady Gaga – Another singer, coming in at number 12, to amaze us with 1040 an hour. Like other celebrities, her article fluctuates depending on press coverage, spiking during moments of controversy. For example, her appearance at the Grammys caused her visitor numbers to triple overnight.
- Sex – Breaking away from type of subjects in the top 12, this one comes in at 1000 an hour.
- Osama bin Laden – This terrorist is number 14 in the countdown, also with 1000 hits an hour on average; nonetheless, the article about Al-Qaeda leader would have not ranked but for his day on the 2 May, which prompted over 5 million visits.
- India – At 15th, the second most popular country, view-wise, with 890/h. With Internet access climbing, however, it may yet surpass the US: it has nearly four times the population.
- Eminem – Rolling in as the last one on our list, with at least 870 views an hour, or 20,880 a day!
Following closely on are YouTube, United Kingdom, and Selena Gomez, with the list continuing for millions more entries—far too many to include here. You can find the full list at WikiRoll.com.
Analysis
The top five results were as expected, with the Main page and Google and Facebook and such. After that the list changes to reflect recent events, with entries such as Deaths in 2011 and Glee, emphasising that Wikipedia is often used as a source of news and popular culture updates. The project itself, Wikipedia, is only just outside the top ten, and India crops up three entries before the United Kingdom, at 18.
In previous periods, the top articles have been pretty much the same, with the lower ones again changing to reflect current events. Last year, for instance, large numbers of people looked at the 2010 Copiapó mining accident; in 2009, people read about Michael Jackson and his death.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article, the newest in a series of half-yearly reports about Wikipedia's the top-viewed pages, to be brought to you every six months when Rcsprinter123 compiles a new list from WikiRoll. Expect the main page to be top again though! In the meantime, all sorts of other stats are available WP:Statistics for the English Wikipedia; many other projects have similar pages.
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