Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-12-09
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/From the editors
So do you laugh, or does it cry?
Singer Scott Weiland (#1) who died this past week wrote many cryptic lyrics, including "So do you laugh or does it cry?", in 1994's "Interstate Love Song". And things that either make us laugh or cry are the things that tend to dominate this Report every week. But aside from Weiland's death, the Top 10 is entertainment-dominated this particular week.
For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.
For the week of November 29 to December 5, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Scott Weiland 
1,149,112 
The former lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots was found dead on his tour bus in Minnesota on December 3, likely the result of a drug overdose. Weiland was an unabashed rock star-type who came out of a 1990s grunge-era that was very ambivalent about 70s rock glamour. Sadly, Weiland's long history of drug use made his death not terribly shocking to many. 2 Tyson Fury
1,076,733 
On November 28, the British professional boxer defeated Wladimir Klitschko (#14) in a match held in Düsseldorf to become the unified heavyweight champion. This ended Klitschko's reign, the second longest in heavyweight history. 3 Lucy Maud Montgomery
1,063,021 
The author of Anne of Green Gables was honored with a Google Doodle on her 141st birthday on November 30. 4 Facebook 
1,057,020 
Always a popular article, but rarely this high on the chart. Founder Mark Zuckerberg's (#18) recent announcement that he planned to give away 99% of the gazillions he has earned from giving us the ability to "like" posts about internet memes and keep informed of the insane racist rantings of your distant relatives likely caused the view bump this week. 5 Jessica Jones
914,281 
Down from #1 last week, a drop of a million views. The Netflix series based on this Marvel Comics superhero, starring Krysten Ritter (pictured), debuted on November 20, 2015, and, like its predecessor, Daredevil, shot to the top of this list. Pandemic binge-watching of the latter among MCU fans led to a rapid decline in interest, as everyone scoffed down the entire season in two days. This series seems to be fairly slightly better, at least here. 6 Krampus 
842,714 
As Yuletide falls in the German-speaking regions of the Alps, children are told not only of jolly Saint Nick with his sack of toys; they are also told of Krampus, whose sack is empty, waiting to be filled with naughty children who will then be carried to his lair. He isn't the only "anti-Santa" out there; the Dutch have Zwarte Piet, and the Haitians have Tonton Macoute, but Krampus's demonic appearance caught the eye of America last year, where he became a leering antidote to the oversaturation of manufactured Christmas cheer, and this year, it seems he's back, no doubt aided by an upcoming movie. 7 Jessica Jones (TV series)
830,756 See #5 8 Google
787,850 
Ironically, it can be hard to google Google to figure out why Google is especially popular in a given week. When I googled "Scott Weiland" (#1), for example, I immediately learned he was dead. Last week Google had only 252,348 views (#80 on raw WP:5000). The only edit of note to Google during this week was a link to Project Fi, which looks like Google's plan to provide cell phone service primarily using Wi-Fi networks. 9 Kobe Bryant
659,062 
On November 29, the American basketball star announced that he will be retiring at the end of the current NBA season. This means that every time he plays in a city for the final time on his "farewell tour" (a disambig article that seems ripe for expansion?), it will be a minor news story. 10 Adele
631,753 
"Hello, it's Adele, if you're wondering, after seven weeks yes I'm still here." And will no doubt stay in the Top 25 for a bit longer.
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Political editing in the context of the US presidential primaries
Digital Trends reports (Dec. 10) on political editing in the context of the presidential primaries in the United States.
| “ | The United States is currently in the grip of a presidential primary, meaning people are looking for impartial information on the parties and politicians involved. Wikipedia will be the go-to source for a great swathe of this knowledge. But who's writing these entries, and for what purpose? It turns out, both ends of the political spectrum are making their voices heard—a process that can distort the truth. | ” |
The article, written by Brad Jones and titled "Beneath every presidential candidate's Wikipedia page lies a vicious tug-of-war", discusses editing at the Bernie Sanders article and features comments from Calidum, one of many editors to have contributed to that Wikipedia biography.
| “ | The run of the mill vandalism I see everyday isn't that big of an issue to me, because it's quickly dealt with," Calidum [says]. "Sometimes I even laugh at it before reverting it." But there's another kind of edit that's a more serious concern to upstanding users like him.
"The bigger issue for me, and I would assume many editors, though I can't speak for them, is people who use Wikipedia to push a certain agenda or engage in battleground behavior. Those are not as frequent as vandalism, but far too common," Calidum tells me. "And, while the community has ways of dealing with vandalism, its ability to handle point-of-view pushers and similar problematic editors is lacking. |
” |
Jones says he got in touch with Calidum because of a particular edit to the Sanders biography made by an account named Autoerotic Mummification, since indefinitely blocked as a sockpuppet of Grundle2600.
| “ | As you may well have guessed by now, Grundle2600's political views tend to the right. [...] There are no doubt plenty of trolls who visit Wikipedia solely for the purpose of vandalism. Grundle2600 doesn't seem to be part of that contingent. He's clearly making edits that he believes are useful, and isn't swayed by the Wikipedia community's point of view. | ” |
Jones then moves on to the question of what oversight there is on Wikipedia, quoting James Alexander, manager of Trust & Safety at the Wikimedia Foundation, and Juliet Barbara, the Foundation's Senior Communications Manager.
| “ | James is one of 280 paid employees on the books of the Wikimedia Foundation. Their job isn't to decide what sort of content ends up on the site. Instead, it's to ensure that the platform provides an open and neutral space for its community, who are then free to shape its output for themselves. [...]
Of course, there are systems in place should things get out of hand. "We probably get one or two threats of harm per week," James told me. He's part of a group of staff members who can be contacted at any time about a serious situation, whether he's at his computer or fast asleep in bed. But such situations don't include routine edits. The Wikimedia Foundation is keen to wash its hands of any decision-making that influences what sort of viewpoint is represented on the site. To maintain true neutrality, it's crucial that the community is trusted to police itself. |
” |
Juliet adds that Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee is there to handle conflicts between editors and that undisclosed paid advocacy is another issue—though one that seems to have become less prevalent in party politics:
| “ | The fact that it's so obvious means that it's no longer a viable option for political parties. "They're trying to help explain to their candidates and their members the right way to do it," James continues, without mentioning a particular party by name. "They're getting better." [...]
But what about Grundle2600, who's spent seven years being told that his edits don't fit the bill? Is he a dedicated editor trying to ensure a balanced view, or a political missionary looking to enforce his agenda? That depends on who you ask—and it's the reason the war to mold Wikipedia won't end as long as the site exists. |
” |
In brief
- Predictable results: The National, which recently branded Scottish LibDem politician Alistair Carmichael a "liar" on its front page, gleefully reports (Dec. 11) on a Wikipedia edit that changed the description of Carmichael's interests to "lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, & lying." Although the edit was automatically tagged as "Possible vandalism, repeating characters", it lasted three hours before being reverted. The article has since been put under Pending Changes protection.
- Rush fan: CBC News is intrigued (Dec. 11) that there is apparently a Rush fan in the Canadian government, based on IP edits reported by a Twitter bot.
- Don't fall for Wiki-denial: An article by Elizabeth Farrelly in the The Sydney Morning Herald argues (Dec. 9) that "there's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia. After 15 years and some 37 million articles it's time to admit that we all use Wikipedia, and it's good [...] as an exercise in the leaderless, collaborative and largely anonymous pursuit of scholarly excellence, Wikipedia also possesses an astonishing beauty."
- Wikipedia—giving Deepak Chopra a rough deal? The Huffington Post features an article (Dec. 8) by Ryan Castle on editing at the Deepak Chopra biography, claiming—as did an earlier article by the same writer—that tendentious editors are unduly biasing the biography against Chopra: "Since the first article was published about Wikipedia's dishonest biography on Deepak Chopra and the online harassment that surrounds it, three major developments have occurred. First the Wikipedia editors involved dramatically increased their condemnation of Dr. Chopra, and secondly they harassed the writer of the article across Wikipedia and the internet. Given that this was precisely the behavior they were being critiqued for, these consequences were predictable." Castle lists and links five common talk page arguments at Talk:Deepak Chopra which he feels are "misleading and/or biased", along with his counterarguments. Castle is founder of the Integrative Studies Historical Archive & Repository, an initiative of the Chopra Foundation.
- Wikimedia fundraising: Nonprofit Quarterly reports (Dec. 7) on the ongoing Wikimedia fundraising drive in an article titled "Fundraising at Wikipedia: Enormously Effective, But ..." The International Business Times, too, has an article on the matter (Dec. 5), titled "Wikipedia fundraising drive: Should you donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation?"
- Where are Wikipedia's Latinos? El Tecolote reports (Dec. 3) on the comparative lack of Latinos in the Wikipedia community in an article also republished (Dec. 7) in Latina Lista. "There is a scarcity of American Latinos who write and edit for English Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute and participate. How serious a problem this is, it's difficult to say precisely; the Wikimedia Foundation does take semi-annual surveys of its editors and administrators [Ed. note: The author is mistaken on this point—no general editor surveys have been run since 2012.], but it does not collect statistics related to their ethnicity. [...] When Wikipedia did its first survey in 2011 of people who write and edit its articles, an angry storm ensued when it was revealed that only 9 percent of Wikipedians were women. But there was no such outcry over the lack of other underrepresented groups."
Tech news in brief
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Revision scoring will help to automatically identify bad-faith and good-faith edits. The point is to make it easier to block vandals and welcome newcomers. It currently supports Wikidata and 14 Wikipedias. [1]
Problems
- Meta was not given access to information from Wikidata last week. This will happen later. [2]
Changes this week
- You will be able to use wikilinks in Flow topic titles. [3]
- IP users will have a toolbar with links to the user talk page and user contributions. Some Wikipedias already have this feature. [4]
- You will be able to edit the graph size in the visual editor. You can either specify the size in the graph dialog or drag it to be the size you want it to be. [5]
- It will be easier to write math in the visual editor if you don't know LaTeX. You can use symbol buttons instead. [6]
- You will be able to use syntax highlighting when you write math with LaTeX in the visual editor. [7]
UploadWizard will look a bit different. [8]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all Wikipedias from 10 December. (calendar).- New MediaWiki versions will now be on Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedia on Wednesdays. Other Wikipedias get the new MediaWiki version on Thursdays. [9]
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 December at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topics this week are "Graph/Graphoid/Kartographer – data storage architecture" and "Parametric JSON builder". The meeting will be on 9 December at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- A new beta feature will show users links to related articles at the bottom of an article. It will not be enabled by default. [10]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/Opinion
ArbCom election results announced
On Thursday 10 December, the three scrutineers for this year's Arbitration Commmittee election—Wikimedia stewards Mardetanha, Shanmugamp7, and Einsbor—announced the results, a little more than three days after the close of voting. The nine new arbitrators, who will take up their roles on 1 January, are Opabinia regalis, Casliber, Keilana, GorillaWarfare, Drmies, Kirill Lokshin, Gamaliel, Callanecc, and Kelapstick (all two-year terms but for Gamaliel, who will have a one-year term). Three have already served terms on the Committee (Casliber, GorillaWarfare, and Kirill Lokshin); two current arbitrators who stood for election—Thryduulf and LFaraone—were unsuccessful. Five retiring arbitrators did not seek re-election: Euryalus, Seraphimblade, Roger Davies, AGK, and NativeForeigner. A graphical representation of the Committee's membership from 2014 to 2018 appears on the election page.
There were several notable features of the election, related to the much larger number of voters. A remarkable 2674 editors participated, nearly five times that for last year's election (Figure 2); this means that an astonishing 53,480 voter choices were made—a total of 2674 voters × 20 candidates. The sole apparent reason for this precipitous increase was the posting of notifications before the election to all eligible voters' talkpages. Embracing a much larger part of the eligible electorate was associated with a huge rise in the proportion of neutral votes, since this attracted many voters on the periphery of the traditional core of ArbCom-interested editors: last year, 35% of votes cast were neutral; this year, 50% were neutral. Figure 3 shows the breakdown of supports, neutrals, and opposes for the past seven elections (starting with the introduction of Securepoll in 2009). Over the years, the contour of the grey bars (proportion of neutral) is similar to that of the number of voters (Figure 2).
Related to the surge in neutrals was a slight drop in the proportion of supports (from an average of 30.0% to 28.8%), and a major drop in opposes, from 34.8% to 21.3%; it is unclear why this should have been associated with the broadening of the electorate, and readers may be able to provide further interpretations of this phenomenon. So much was the drop in opposes that, unlike last year, there were significantly fewer of them than supports.
Another consequence of surge in voter numbers was a reduction in raw proportional support for the most popular candidates. Last year, the top four candidates were supported by between 50% and 60.5% of voters; this year, the top four were supported by just over 40% of the electorate, and the other successful candidates ranged from the high 30s down to 27.6%.
Community members have provided interesting and informative tables and graphs on the election talkpage. Among these are one showing the distribution of voters' edit counts over the past three elections, prepared by Opabinia regalis, and a table of the alignment of each voter guide with the result, prepared by Smallbones.
The Signpost's editor-in-chief Gamaliel was a candidate in the election. In line with our conflict-of-interest policy, he was not involved in any way with the preparation or writing of this article. Mdann52 serves on the Signpost's editorial board and has just been appointed as a trainee ArbCom clerk, but was also not involved in this story.
Brief notes
- Community mourns passing of Wikimedia Serbia founder: Wikimedians on Wikimedia-l report that Branislav Jovanović (BraneJ), a founder and board member of Wikimedia Serbia, has died. Wikimedians are posting tributes on his user page in Meta.G
- Philippe Beaudette joins Wikia: Philippe Beaudette (Philippe (WMF)) has joined Wikia as their Senior Director of Community. Wikia, a for-profit wiki hosting company whose wikis include a number of popular pop culture websites like the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia, was founded in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling, a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Beaudette worked for the WMF in various capacities since 2009 and announced he would be leaving the post of WMF Director of Community Advocacy in September (see previous Signpost coverage).G
- Oversight permissions removed: Deskana and Ronhjones have had their oversight permissions removed due to inactivity. As well, DoRD has resigned from both oversight and checkuser teams. The Committee has restored checkuser rights for Beeblebrox.GP
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/Serendipity
Wikidata: Knowledge from different points of view
This is the third in a series of recent Signpost op-eds about Wikidata, including "Wikidata: the new Rosetta Stone" and "Whither Wikidata?".
Wikidata has recently celebrated its 3rd birthday. In these three short years it has managed to become one of the most active Wikimedia projects, won prizes, and is starting to show its true potential for improving Wikipedia. It is being used more and more both inside and outside Wikimedia every day. At the core of Wikidata is the desire to give more people more access to more knowledge. This is what we should be held accountable to. And I am the first to admit that we still have a long way to go.
What beliefs are at the core of Wikidata? Is it a database like any other?
We built Wikidata with a few core beliefs in mind that shine through everywhere. The most fundamental one is that the world is complicated and there is no single truth--especially in a knowledge base that is supposed to serve many cultures. This belief is expressed in many decisions, big and small:
- Wikidata allows you to express many different points of view about the same data point and they can live side-by-side. It allows you to express much more nuance than any other database I know.
- Wikidata is not about the truth but about what other sources say. When different sources claim different things, we can record them and expose them to the reader to interpret and decide.
- Wikidata doesn’t restrict you. You can say that a city has a cat as a mayor. (Because doh! This really happened.)
All this comes at a cost. My life would be a lot easier if we decided to just build a simple yet stupid database ;-) However we went this way to allow for a more pluralistic worldview as we believe it is crucial in a knowledge base that supports all Wikimedia projects and more. Here are some examples where we are starting to show this potential:
- Jerusalem having several values for country and capital of
- Jesus Christ having several values for father
- Chelsea Manning having several values for sex and gender
The goal here is to describe the world in a useful way. Even with the possibilities we have built into Wikidata, it will not be possible to truly represent the whole complexity of the world. Natural language, and thus Wikipedia, is much more suited for that and will continue to be. But there is value in a knowledge base for the many pieces of information we encounter every day that do not require that level of nuance. Today already a lot of great things are being built using data from Wikidata. Here are just a few of them:
- Inventaire, a website that uses data from Wikidata to build author profiles among other things.
- Genewiki improving gene-related articles on English Wikipedia and more
- Wikipedia gender indicator giving us a detailed analysis of our content gaps and biases with the help of Wikidata
- AskPlatypus answering our natural language questions based on data in Wikidata
- Histropedia allowing us to build beautiful timelines powered by Wikidata
- Games making it very easy to meaningfully contribute to our projects
Structured data is changing the world around us right now. And I am working towards having a free and open project at the center of it that is more than a dumb database.
Is Wikidata’s data bad? Is Wikipedia’s data better? Does it matter?
For Wikidata to truly give more people more access to more knowledge, the data in Wikidata needs to be of high quality. Right now, no one denies that the quality of the data in Wikidata is not as good as we would like it to be and that there is still a lot of work to do. Where opinions differ is how to get there. Some say adding more data is the way to go, as that will lead to more use and thereby more contributions. Others say removing data and re-adding it with more scrutiny is the only way to go. Others say let’s improve what we have and make usage more attractive. All of them have merit depending on where you are coming from. At the end of the day what will decide is action based on community consensus. Data quality is a topic close to my heart, so I have been thinking a lot about this. We are tackling the topic from many different angles:
More eyes on the data: The belief behind this is that the more people are exposed to data from Wikidata the better the quality will become. To achieve this, we have already done quite some work including improving the integration of Wikidata’s changes in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. Next we are building the ArticlePlaceholder extension and automated list articles for Wikipedia based on the data in Wikidata. We will additionally make it easier to re-use the data in Wikidata for third parties. We will also look into building more streamlined processes for allowing data-reusers to report issues easily to create good feedback loops.
Automatically find and expose issues: The belief behind this is that to handle a large amount of data in Wikidata, we need tools to support the editors in their work. These automatic tools help detect potential issues and then make editors aware of them, so they can look into them and fix them as appropriate. To achieve this, we already have internal consistency checks (to easily spot issues like people who are older than 150 years or an identifier for an external database that has the wrong format). We have also worked on checking Wikidata’s data against other databases and flagging inconsistencies for the editors to investigate. Furthermore, more and more visualizations turn up that make it easier to get an overview of a larger part of the data and spot outliers and gaps. And probably the most important part is machine-learning tools like ORES that help us find bad edits and other issues. We have made great progress in this area in 2015 and will realize more of this potential in 2016. Overall the fact that Wikidata consists of structured data makes it much easier to automatically find and fix issues than on Wikipedia.
Raise the number of references: The belief behind this is that we should have references for many of the statements in Wikidata, so people can verify them as needed. This is also important to stay true to our initial goal of stating what other sources say. We have just recently made it easier to add references hopefully leading to more people adding references. More will be done in this area. The primary sources tool helps by suggesting references for existing statements. And the recently accepted IEG grant for StrepHit will boost this even further. And last but not least, there is a rather active group of editors working on WikiProject Source MetaData. All this will help us raise the number of referenced statements in Wikidata. We have already seen it increase massively from 12.7% to 20.9% over the past year because of these measures as well as a change in attitude.
Encourage great content: Wikidata as a project needs to build processes that lead to great content. It starts with valuing high-quality contributions more and highlighting our best content. We have showcase items for a while now which are supposed to put a spotlight on our best items. The process is currently undergoing a change to make it run more smoothly and encourage more participation.
Make quality measurable: We are working on various metrics to meaningfully track the quality of Wikidata’s data. So far the easiest and most-used metric is the number of references Wikidata has and how many of those refer to a source outside Wikimedia. We should however take into account that Wikidata also has a very significant amount of trivial, self-evident, or editorial statements that do not need a reference. One example of this is the link to the image on Wikimedia Commons. More than three million statements are "instance of: human"! The percentage of references to other Wikimedia projects is especially high for these trivial statements. On the other hand, the percentage of references to better sources is much higher for non-trivial statements like population data. The existing metric is too simplistic to truly capture what quality on Wikidata means. We need to dive deeper and look at quality from many more angles. This will include things like regular checks of a small random subset of the data.
All of those building blocks are being worked on or are already in place. Already today in its arguably imperfect state, Wikidata is helping Wikipedia raise its quality by finding longstanding issues on Wikipedia that only became apparent because of Wikidata, like a Wikipedia having two articles about the same topic without being aware of it. Or two Wikipedias having different data about a person without any useful reference. Wikidata gives a good way to finally expose and correct these mistakes. Once we have a data point and a good reference for it on Wikidata, it can be scrutinised more thoroughly and then used much more widely than before.
Trust and believing in ourselves
Do we trust our own model and way of working? Wikipedia started just the same way as Wikidata. It didn’t have high-quality data and it certainly didn’t have a lot of references for its articles. But with a lot of dedicated work this changed and today Wikipedias (at least the biggest ones!) are of fairly high quality. I see no reason why we can’t do this for Wikidata once again--with an amazing community, better tools at our hands, and the lessons we have learned in Wikipedia. But let’s also not fall into the trap of demanding perfection.
What do we do now?
- Encourage more re-users of Wikidata’s data to give their users a way back to Wikidata. Histropedia and Inventaire are two examples of re-users doing that already and it is a mutually beneficial partnership.
- Make it easier to use Wikidata’s data inside and outside of Wikimedia.
- Improve existing quality tools around Wikidata and make more use of them.
- Make existing knowledge diversity tools easier to use, promote them more and make more use of them.
- Make the outside world more aware of knowledge diversity and plurality.
- Increase the diversity in our contributor base to cover more cultures and worldviews.
At the end of the day, Wikidata is a chance to raise the quality bar across all our projects together. Let’s make it reality. That’s how we give more people more access to more knowledge every day.
- Lydia Pintscher is the Product Manager for Wikidata at Wikimedia Deutschland.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/In focus
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/Arbitration report
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/Humour