Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2017-06-23

Single-page Edition

WP:POST/1

23 June 2017

News and notes
Departments reorganized at Wikimedia Foundation, and a month without new RfAs (so far)

In the media
Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill

Op-ed
Facto Post: a fresh take

Featured content
Will there ever be a break? The slew of featured content continues

Traffic report
Wonder Woman beats Batman, The Mummy, Darth Vader and the Earth

Recent research
Utopian bubbles: Can Wikipedians create value outside of the capitalist system?

Technology report
Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all

2017-06-23

Departments reorganized at Wikimedia Foundation, and a month without new RfAs (so far)

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By Altercari

Interim Vice-President of Product Toby Negrim (pictured) made the announcement alongside CTO Victoria Coleman.

Wikimedia Foundation changes

Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a reorganization of the Product and Technology departments. The re-org is expected to deliver better product development with community engagement and an audience-based approach, a more efficient pipeline and to "better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction". In the new organization, the Product department will be renamed the Audiences department. The Editing team becomes the Contributors team; the Reading team the Readers team. The Discovery team will be distributed to the Readers team and the Technology department (but will still work together on various projects). The Fundraising Tech team will be moved to the Technology department. Team Practices group members working directly with teams in the Audiences and Technology departments will move into those teams, and the rest will move to the Talent & Culture department, under the newly-appointed T&C Chargée d’Affaires Anna Stillwell. Four audience verticals will be condensed into three: Readers, Contributors and Community Tech. The Design Director role will be reintroduced.

Brief notes

New administrators: There were no new administrators created since ONUnicorn as reported in the previous edition of The Signpost, and no new requests for adminship in the month of June. B.
Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones: 1,000 articles: Bislama (7 April 2017); Doteli (21 May 2017). 2,000: Livvi-Karelian (21 March 2017); Lao (28 April 2017). 5,000: Classical Chinese (4 February 2017); Komi (11 March 2017). 10,000: Mingrelian (1 May 2017); Min Dong (12 June 2017). 20,000: Quechua (15 February 2017); Interlingua (1 April 2017); Sundanese (16 April 2017); South Azerbaijani (27 May 2017). 50,000: Bengali (30 April 2017); Malayalam (2 May 2017); Javanese (7 May 2017). 100,000: Tamil (8 May 2017). 500,000: Arabic (6 March 2017).
Wikimedia Strategy: Cycle two (discussion of five thematic clusters) concluded on June 12. The strategy team is adjusting the process, and cycle three (defining a direction based on thematic clusters) is due to kick off in July. A.
Fair use: Wikipedia has launched FairCopyrightOz, teaming up with organisations in favor of fair use in Australia. Among the metrics, 12 million banner impressions in the first ten days, and over 67,000 landing page views in the first week. B.
WikidataCon 2017: WikidataCon 2017 registration, scholarship applications, and call for submissions are open. The event will be held 28 – 29 October 2017 in Berlin. B.
WMF Board Governance Committee: James Heilman joined the WMF committee as a volunteer and advisory member. According to the announcement on Wikimedia-l, Heilman will be a non-voting member of the Board Governance Committee and his tenure will serve as onboarding in case of future Board appointment. James edits the English Wikipedia as Doc James and is an administrator. B.
I4OC: On April 6, 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that they, along with 29 publishers and various organizations had founded the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) aimed at making citation data freely available for anyone to access. E.

Reader comments

2017-06-23

Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill

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By Jonatan Svensson Glad

This Signpost "In the media" report covers media primarily from April to June 2017.

Kalanick's nipples

The nipples in question

The anatomy of Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick's chest area, more exactly his nipples, has been the talk of the month. That is at least what one can gather from a Motherboard article (June 9), in which the author Sarah Emerson asks why Wikipedia hasn't replaced the image with any of the "dozens of fair use, high-resolution options" on Flickr. This because she fails to understand our strict policy on fair use images, disallowed when free alternatives are available. However, she's partly correct that there exist a few alternatives, like this one by TechCrunch.

The article includes two screenshots of "heated" debate from the talk page spanning three years. However, this discussion only included six comments in total, one of which pointed out that the nipples were worth some $2.1 billion each. Normally I would have applied {{citation needed}} to such a statement, but given that a 5-minute Uber fare in central Stockholm costs me $13, I'm not so surprised that the pennies trickle in for the CEO. J.

Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill

The reality drama series that is the Donald Trump presidency continues onwards with its latest breathtaking episode. In a shocking development Newsweek reports (June 8) that with the help of the Twitter account @CongressEdits they've been able to uncover a traitor within the midst of the United States House of Representatives. As the Comey hearing unfolded, a rogue agent used a House IP address to add a controversial example of obstruction of justice to our encyclopedia. J.

In brief

How long will this logo have to be used on Turkish Wikipedia?

Facto Post: a fresh take

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By Charles Matthews

Wikicite 2017

I come late to the vision thing. I remember still that when I was standing for the Foundation Board in 2006, one Wikimedian described my platform as "pragmatic", though not in a good way. I suppose I have usually felt that the main way to build an encyclopedia is an enormous amount of painstaking effort. Right now, though, I feel the need to kick up a fuss.

The catalyst was the latest in the WikiCite conference series. I missed the Vienna meeting in late May, but it was clearly vibrant in a way that can only be welcomed. I started the Facto Post mass message to bottle the buzz.

Backstory: Wikimedia integration

I count myself as a four-tab Wikimedian. This means that when I sit down to my machine, I have Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource and Wikidata tabs open. I have been heavily involved with Wikisource since 2009, and Wikidata since 2014. I arrived on Wikipedia in June 2003. So, where is Wikimedia heading right now? I have taken part in the current Wikimedia movement strategy exercise, and have mixed feelings about it. Radicalism? I don't see it there.

I have tried thinking about Wikimedia integration around Wikidata. I think this is happening, but it is hard to explain to anyone not already a Wikimedian working on several of the sister projects. Some people seem to feel threatened by Wikidata. Others regard it, with rather more justification, as the sonic screwdriver of the Wikimedia universe: Brion Vibber is supposed to have said that it solves all problems.

Presentation and content

I put my head over the parapet with s:Wikisource talk:Wikimedia Strategy 2017#Greater scope for data, citation reform and integration on Wikipedia, and make the clear case for our place in education. What would I be meaning there?

"Citation reform" suggests something is broken. Not everyone would agree. But consider whether the reader is able to view Wikipedia references consistently, in a given style. Is there a setting in "Preferences" for that? No, there may be 100 different referencing styles used in Wikipedia, and by convention there has to be a good reason for an editor to change the referencing style in an article. Normally, and this is a strength of Wikipedia, the reader is the customer here. In the way references are presented, the original author of an article has more of the status of someone who is "always right", in selecting the citation style.

Software engineers are going to recognise the issue here, namely separation of presentation and content. The essential content of a reference can be displayed in numerous ways, e.g.: which comes first, given name or family name of an author (content)? The reader who really wants family name written first, which always reminds me of old library card indexes, could in principle have that option via "Preferences" (presentation). That is a futuristic idea: another is that we should actually know the area of text that a reference applies to. (Strange but true, we don't now.) In any case, Wikidata could do the job of implementing the separation.

Integration: a fresh take

ContentMine logo

Here and now, I'm still talking about integration, but in a more encyclopedic way. Crucially, too, in a community way. The input-output issues around Wikidata now seem like a good way to understand things in the large, not just Wikidata's place among sister projects. Wikidata inputs (automated, semi-automated, and via the fact mining which I'm working on at WikiFactMine project). Holding areas such as mix'n'match, potentially LibraryBase. Wikidata outputs, not just to infoboxes but via SPARQL, and some form of WikiCite export (in other words, reuse of bibliographic and citation data held in Wikidata).

What I was saying in detail about citation reform is a technical possibility once the WikiCite project takes hold. It is a good example of a way ahead. I would think less of a Wikimedia movement strategy that didn't mention such things.

So I mean to take "post-Wikidata" seriously. About five years since its inception, there is a new perspective available, coming from Wikidatans, but not only them. Librarians find it of interest, some of the open science crowd, those looking for the salvation of digital humanities.

Facto Post

I felt, already last summer, that Wikidata was undeniably doing something for the digital humanities, moving our take beyond GLAM. See Andrew Gray's blogpost in the first issue of Facto Post. People really should get behind new tech possibilities for Wikimedia, I say. I believe that the "technophile versus Luddite" stand-off is divisive rather than helpful. I respect the caveat-oriented scepticism that is appropriate to new technology, but the difference between entering a caveat and nitpicking is a judgement call. So, I will go so far as to question the judgement of those who can only find nay-saying in their hearts.

To get past the title, Facto Post is a play on words. Ex post facto is Latin for "retrospectively", so reversed is possibly "prospectively"? But the play is also from the middle of "WikiFactMine", on which I'm currently working: I have a summer job as Wikimedian in Residence, at ContentMine, whose project it is. Fact as in "fact mining", a subarea of text and data mining, for us the extraction of scientific facts from original papers. Some of them are headed for Wikidata, as referenced entries.

Tim Berners-Lee himself is planning a revised Web; he praised our governance, if adding that Wikipedia is not perfect. And it is not. We are still straining to adjust Wikipedia to the semantic Web concept, his previous version. In fact, the potential is only just becoming apparent in terms of Wikimedia content being much more easily manipulated. Taming the plethora of referencing styles is just a start. The excitement is emergent, not just another "next big thing". I sought to nail it in the Editorial to the first issue of Facto Post. No doubt several passes will be needed.

Sign up to the Facto Post mailing list, do.

Reader comments

2017-06-23

Will there ever be a break? The slew of featured content continues

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By Eddie891

Panoramic view of the Amphitheatre of El Jem, an archeological site in the city of El Djem, Tunisia.

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from May 21 through June 18 . Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Featured articles

German troops registering people from Kragujevac and its surrounding areas prior to their execution

Grey-necked wood rail

The skeleton of a dire wolf recreated in the Sternberg Museum of Natural History

Kalākaua 1883 dime

The War Memorial outside City Hall in Norwich

German tanks during Operation Citadel

Olympic Avenue in downtown Arlington

The Civic Building in Jerome, Arizona

Louis Leblanc in 2009

A view of the Chrysler Building from the Empire State Building on November 20, 1953.

This image shows Hurricane Katrina. Studies regarding the name-letter effect have shown that people with a name beginning in K especially donated to the relief effort.

Isabelle Eberhardt in 1895

Twenty-two featured articles were promoted.

Heathenry (new religious movement) (nominated by Midnightblueowl) also termed Heathenism or Germanic Neopaganism, is a modern Pagan religion. Classified as a new religious movement, its practitioners model their faith on the pre-Christian belief systems adhered to by the Germanic peoples of Iron Age and Early Medieval Europe. Scholarly estimates put the number of Heathens at no more than 20,000 worldwide, with communities of practitioners active in Europe, North America, and Australasia.
Final Fantasy VII (nominated by ProtoDrake) is a role-playing video game developed by Square for the PlayStation console. Released in 1997, it is the seventh main installment in the Final Fantasy series. Published in Japan by Square, it was released in the West by Sony Computer Entertainment, the first in the series to be released in Europe. The game's story follows Cloud Strife, a mercenary who joins an eco-terrorist organization to stop the world-controlling megacorporation, Shinra, from using the planet's life essence as an energy source. Assisted by a large pre-release promotional campaign, Final Fantasy VII received widespread commercial and critical success upon release, and is still widely regarded as a landmark title and one of the greatest games of all time. It was acknowledged for boosting the sales of the PlayStation and popularizing Japanese role-playing games worldwide.
The Kragujevac massacre (nominated by Peacemaker67) was the mass murder of between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly Serb men and boys in the city of Kragujevac by German soldiers on 21 October 1941. It occurred in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, and came in reprisal for insurgent attacks in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of 10 German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others.
The grey-necked wood rail (nominated by RileyBugz ) (Aramides cajaneus) is a species of bird in the family Rallidae, the rails. It lives primarily in the forests, mangroves, and swamps of Central and South America. The species is usually found at elevations from sea level to 2,000 metres (6,600 ft), although some have been found above that. The rail has both a grey head and gray neck. In the nominate, the back of the head has a brown patch. The upperparts are olive-green to dark brown. The chest and flanks are a rufous colour, with the belly, rump, and tail being black. The legs are coral-red, the bill is a bright greenish-yellow, and the eyes are red. This rail rail feeds on a wide range of foods, from molluscs to seeds. It is also known to feed on the feces of giant otters.
No. 1 Aircraft Depot RAAF (nominated by Ian Rose) (No. 1 AD) was a maintenance unit of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Formed in July 1921 at RAAF Point Cook, Victoria, it relocated to the nearby RAAF Laverton in March 1926. As well as servicing aircraft and other equipment, in its early years the depot supported survey flights in Australia and the Pacific region. It was also responsible for training maintenance staff. No. 1 AD was disbanded in December 1994, its functions having been taken over by other units and private contractors. At the time of its disbandment, it was the oldest RAAF unit in continuous operation.
Dire wolf (nominated by William Hariss) (Canis dirus, "fearsome dog") is an extinct species of the genus Canis. It is one of the most famous prehistoric carnivores in North America along with its extinct competitor, the sabre-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis. The dire wolf lived in the Americas during the Late Pleistocene epoch (125,000–10,000 years ago). The species was named in 1858, four years after the first specimen had been found. The dire wolf was about the same size as the largest modern gray wolves (Canis lupus), the Yukon wolf and the northwestern wolf. C. d. guildayi weighed on average 60 kg (130 lb) and C. d. dirus on average 68 kg (150 lb). Its teeth were larger with greater shearing ability than C. Lupis and its bite force at the canine tooth was the strongest of any known Canis species. The dire wolf is thought to have been a pack hunter, and the latest dire wolf remains have been dated to 9,440 years ago.
Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (nominated by Wehwalt) is a leading case in American tort law on the question of liability to an unforeseeable plaintiff. The case was heard by the New York Court of Appeals, the highest state court in New York; its opinion was written by Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo, a leading figure in the development of American common law. The plaintiff, Helen Palsgraf, was taking her daughters to the beach on an August day in 1924. As two men attempted to board a train before hers, one (aided by railroad employees) dropped a package that exploded, causing a large coin-operated scale on the platform to hit her. She subsequently sued the railroad, arguing that its employees had been negligent. After multiple appeals, the Court of Appeals, in a 4:3 decision decided that there was no negligence because the employees, in helping the man board, did not have a duty of care to Palsgraf as injury to her was not a foreseeable harm from aiding a man with a package. The precedent set by this case that tort liability only occurs when a defendant breaches a duty of care that they owe to a plaintiff, causing the injury sued for, has been widely accepted in American law.
Eve (2003 TV series) (nominated by Aoba47) is an American television sitcom, created by Meg DeLoatch, which originally aired for three seasons on United Paramount Network (UPN) from September 15, 2003, to May 11, 2006. Featuring an ensemble cast consisting of Eve, Jason George, Ali Landry, Natalie Desselle-Reid, Brian Hooks, and Sean Maguire, the show revolves around two sets of male and female friends attempting to navigate relationships with the opposite sex. The series was produced by The Greenblatt-Janollari Studio, Mega Diva Inc., and Warner Bros. Television; the executive producers were Robert Greenblatt and David Janollari.
Pacific blue-eye (nominated by Cas Liber) (Pseudomugil signifer) is a species of fish in the family Pseudomugilidae native to eastern Australia. First described by Austrian naturalist Rudolf Kner in 1866, it is a common fish of rivers and estuaries along the eastern seaboard from Cape York in north Queensland to southern New South Wales, the Burdekin Gap in central-north Queensland dividing the ranges of the two subspecies. A small silvery fish averaging around 3–3.5 cm (1 ¹⁄₈–1 ³⁄₈ in) in total length, the Pacific blue-eye is recognisable by its blue eye ring and two dorsal fins. It forms loose schools of tens to thousands of individuals. It eats water-borne insects as well as flying insects that land on the water's surface, foraging for them by sight. The Pacific blue-eye adapts readily to captivity.
Norwich War Memorial (nominated by HJ Mitchell) (also known as Norwich City War Memorial or Norwich Cenotaph) is a First World War memorial in Norwich in Eastern England. It was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the last of his eight cenotaphs to be erected in England. The monument is is today a grade II* listed building. In 2015, it became part of a "national collection" of Lutyens' war memorials.
The Kalākaua coinage (nominated by Wehwalt) was a set of silver coins of the Kingdom of Hawaii dated 1883, authorized to boost Hawaiian pride by giving the kingdom its own money. They were designed by Charles E. Barber, Chief Engraver of the United States Bureau of the Mint, and were struck at the San Francisco Mint. The issued coins are a dime (ten-cent piece), quarter dollar, half dollar, and dollar. The coins met a hostile reception from the business community in Honolulu, who feared inflation of the currency in a time of recession. After legal maneuvering, the government agreed to use over half of the coinage as backing for paper currency, and this continued until better economic times began in 1885. After that, the coins were more eagerly accepted in circulation. They remained in the flow of commerce on the islands until withdrawn in 1903, after Hawaii had become a US territory.
The Battle of Prokhorovka (nominated by Eye Truth) (12 July 1943), one of the largest tank battles in history, was fought between Waffen-SS units of Nazi Germany and Red Army units of the Soviet Union during the Second World War in the Eastern Front. It was the climax of the German offensive, Operation Citadel, and occurred when the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army intercepted the II SS-Panzer Corps of the German Wehrmacht near Prokhorovka. The 5th Guards Tank Army was decimated in the attack, but succeeded in preventing the Wehrmacht from capturing Prokhorovka and breaking through the last heavily fortified Soviet defensive belt. With the Germans unable to accomplish their objective for Operation Citadel, they cancelled it and began redeploying their forces to deal with new pressing developments elsewhere. The failure of the operation marked the first time in the war that a major German offensive was halted before it could break through enemy defences and penetrate into their operational or strategic depths. The Soviet Union thus permanently gained the strategic initiative, while Germany permanently lost the capacity to launch offensives of such scale on the Eastern Front.
Adventure Time (nominated by Gen. Quon) is an American animated television series created by Pendleton Ward for Cartoon Network. It follows the adventures of a boy named Finn (voiced by Jeremy Shada) and his best friend and adoptive brother Jake (John DiMaggio)—a dog with the magical power to change shape and size at will as they travel through the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo. Adventure Time has been a ratings success for Cartoon Network and some episodes have attracted over 3 million viewers; despite being aimed primarily at children, it has developed a following among teenagers and adults. The show has received positive reviews from critics and won awards including: six Primetime Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, three Annie Awards, two British Academy Children's Awards, a Motion Picture Sound Editors Award, a Pixel Award, and a Kerrang! Award.
Arlington, Washington (nominated by Sounder Bruce ) is a city in northern Snohomish County, Washington, United States, part of the Seattle metropolitan area. The city lies on the Stillaguamish River in the western foothills of the Cascade Range, adjacent to the city of Marysville. It is approximately 10 miles (16 km) north of Everett, the county seat, and 40 miles (64 km) north of Seattle, the region's largest city. As of the 2010 United States Census, Arlington has a population of 17,926.
Jerome, Arizona (nominated by Finetooth) is a town in the Black Hills of Yavapai County in the U.S. state of Arizona. Founded in the late 19th century on Cleopatra Hill overlooking the Verde Valley, it is more than 5,000 feet (1,500 m) above sea level. It is about 100 miles (160 km) north of Phoenix along State Route 89A between Sedona and Prescott. Supported in its heyday by rich copper mines, it was home to more than 10,000 people in the 1920s. As of the 2010 United States Census, its population was 444. Jerome made news in 1917, when strikes involving the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) led to the expulsion at gunpoint of about 60 IWW members, who were loaded on a cattle car and shipped west. Production at the mines, always subject to fluctuations, boomed during World War I, fell thereafter, rose again, then fell again during and after the Great Depression. As the ore deposits ran out, the mines closed, and the population dwindled to fewer than 100 by the mid-1950s. Efforts to save the town from oblivion succeeded when residents turned to tourism and retail sales. Jerome became a National Historic Landmark in 1967. In the early 21st century, Jerome has art galleries, coffee houses, restaurants, and a state park and local museum devoted to mining history.
Evita (1996 film) (nominated by FrankRizzo) is a 1996 American musical drama film based on the 1976 concept album of the same name produced by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, which also inspired a 1978 musical. The film depicts the life of Eva Perón, detailing her beginnings, rise to fame, political career and death at the age of 33. Directed by Alan Parker, and written by Parker and Oliver Stone, Evita stars Madonna as Eva, Jonathan Pryce as Eva's husband Juan Perón, and Antonio Banderas as Ché, an everyman who acts as the film's narrator. The film had a limited release on December 25, 1996, before opening nationwide on January 10, 1997. It grossed over $141 million worldwide. The film received a mixed critical response; reviewers praised Madonna's performance, the music, costume designs and cinematography, while criticism was aimed at the pacing and direction. Evita received many awards and nominations, including the Academy Award for Best Original Song ("You Must Love Me"), and three Golden Globe Awards for Best Picture – Comedy or Musical, Best Original Song ("You Must Love Me") and Best Actress – Comedy or Musical (Madonna).
Fallout 4: Far Harbor (nominated by Anarchyte) is an expansion pack for the 2015 video game Fallout 4, developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. Far Harbor was released on May 19, 2016 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One as downloadable content (DLC). The game is set in the year 2287, in the aftermath of a nuclear war that destroys most of the United States. In the game, the player character is recruited by a detective agency to investigate the disappearance of a young girl living in a remote area. Far Harbor's announcement was made three months after the release of Fallout 4. The expansion was influenced by player feedback on the base game's dialogue system, which was not considered to be as successful as the other game mechanics. The development team also noticed the players' interest in releases that added large amounts of explorable territory. The price of Fallout 4's season pass was increased because of the expansion's size. The expansion received generally favorable reviews from critics.
Louis Leblanc (nominated by Kaiser matias) born January 26, 1991) is a Canadian retired professional ice hockey centre. Leblanc spent three seasons with the Canadiens (beginning in 2011), mainly playing for their American Hockey League (AHL) affiliates, before being traded in 2014 to the Anaheim Ducks, who kept him in the AHL. In 2015, Leblanc moved to Europe, joining HC Slovan Bratislava of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), though he only played seven games for them before being released. After appearing in four games for Lausanne HC of the Swiss National League A, he retired from hockey. Internationally, Leblanc played in the 2008 Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament, where Canada won the gold medal, and in the 2011 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships, where he helped Canada win a silver medal. Leblanc was considered a draft bust, having failed to reach his potential and retiring from hockey at an early age.
The 1966 New York City smog (nominated by Brandt Luke Zorn) was a historic air-pollution event in New York City that occurred from November 23–26, that year's Thanksgiving holiday weekend. It was the third major smog in New York City, following events of similar scale in 1953 and 1963. On November 23, a large mass of stagnant air over the East Coast trapped pollutants in the city's air. For three full days, New York City experienced severe smog with high levels of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, smoke, and haze. Smaller pockets of air pollution pervaded the New York metropolitan area throughout other parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. On November 25, regional leaders initiated a "first-stage alert" in the city, state, and neighboring states. During the alert, leaders of local and state governments asked residents and industry to take voluntary steps to minimize emissions. People with respiratory or heart conditions were advised by health officials to stay indoors. The city's garbage incinerators were shut off, requiring massive hauling of garbage to landfills. A cold front dispersed the smog on November 26 and the alert ended. A medical research group conducted a study estimating that 10 percent of the city's population suffered some negative health effects from the smog. City health officials initially maintained that the smog had not caused any deaths, but studies have found that 168 people likely died because of the smog, and 366 people likely had their lives shortened. The smog served as a catalyst for greater national awareness of air pollution as a serious health problem and political issue. New York City updated its local laws on air pollution control, and a similar weather event passed in 1969 without major smog. Prompted by the smog, President Lyndon B. Johnson and members of Congress worked to pass federal legislation regulating air pollution in the United States, culminating in the 1967 Air Quality Act and the 1970 Clean Air Act. The 1966 smog is a milestone that has been used for comparison with other recent pollution events, including the health effects of pollution from the September 11 attacks and pollution in China.
Nil Battey Sannata (nominated by Numerounovedant) (English: Zero Divided by Zero Equals Nothing; slang for "Good For Nothing"), released internationally as The New Classmate, is a 2016 Indian comedy drama film directed by Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari in her feature debut. Produced by Anand Rai, Ajay Rai, and Alan McAlex under the banners of Colour Yellow and JAR Pictures, the film was co-written by Iyer, Neeraj Singh, Pranjal Choudhary, and Nitesh Tiwari. Swara Bhaskar starred as Chanda Sahay, a high-school drop-out household maid and single mother of a sullen young girl named Apeksha, played by Ria Shukla. The film's theme is a person's right to dream and change their lives, irrespective of social status. Released in India on 22 April 2016, Nil Battey Sannata was distributed by Eros International and garnered critical and audience acclaim.
The name-letter effect (nominated by Edwininlondon) is the tendency of people to prefer the letters in their name over other letters in the alphabet. Whether subjects are asked to rank all letters of the alphabet, rate each of the letters, choose the letter they prefer out of a set of two, or pick a small set of letters they most prefer, on average people consistently like the letters in their own name the most. Crucially, subjects are not aware that they are choosing letters from their name.
Isabelle Eberhardt (nominated by Freikorp) was a Swiss explorer and writer. As a teenager, Eberhardt published short stories under a male pseudonym. She was considered a proficient writer on the subject of North Africa despite learning about the region only through correspondence. She moved to Algeria in May 1897 where she dressed as a man and converted to Islam, eventually adopting the name Si Mahmoud Saadi.

Featured lists

Ajay Devgn

The Wiggles (with a fan) in 2004

Mel Gibson

Jeff Gordon

Twenty-two featured lists were promoted.

Ajay Devgn is an Indian Bollywood film actor, director and producer who has acted in, directed, and/or produced over 100 movies and three television shows (nominated by Skr15081997), his first movie being in 1985 (Pyari Behna) and his most recent in 2017.
Rhode Island is a state located in the Northeastern United States. According to the 2010 United States Census, Rhode Island is the 8th least populous state with 1,052,567 inhabitants and the smallest by land area spanning 1,033.81 square miles (2,677.6 km) of land. Rhode Island is divided into 39 incorporated municipalities (nominated by Mattximus), including 8 cities and 31 towns, grouped into 5 historic counties which have no municipal functions as the state has no county level of government. The entire area of the state is governed by town administrations except for areas within the boundaries of cities.
Australian children's musical group The Wiggles have released seventy-seven total albums (nominated by SatDis) (comprised of forty-eight studio albums, three live albums, eight compilation albums, one audiobook, four karaoke albums, one extended play and two singles). Thirteen of the group's albums have been certified by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) as gold, platinum and double platinum. Two of their albums have reached the top 20 on the ARIA Albums Chart.
Norwich City F.C. is an association football club based in Norwich, Norfolk, and was founded in 1902. As of the 2017–18 season they play in the EFL Championship. The club's first manager, John Bowman, was appointed in 1905. Since then, 39 men have held the job (nominated by The Rambling Man and Dweller) on a permanent basis. As of May 2017, the former Borussia Dortmund reserve-team coach Daniel Farke occupies the role. Ken Brown holds the record for most games in charge, with a total of 367 between 1980 and 1987. Excluding caretaker managers, the shortest reigns were those of George Swindin and Jimmy Jewell, who both managed 20 games.
Kane Williamson is an international cricketer who represents the New Zealand national cricket team. As of May 2017, he is the captain of the team in One Day International (ODI) and Twenty20 International (T20I) formats. A right handed top order batsman, he has scored seventeen and nine (nominated by Vensatry)centuries in Test and ODIs, respectively. In January 2015, former New Zealand cricketer Martin Crowe noted that, "we're seeing the dawn of probably our greatest ever batsman" in Williamson. His 69-ball 100 not out—made against Zimbabwe in October 2011—is the fourth fastest ODI century by a New Zealander. His highest score of 145 not out came against South Africa in January 2013. He has scored centuries against all Test-playing nations except West Indies. Four months later, he became the sixth player to score 10 Test centuries before the age of 25 when he made 132 against England at the Lord's. In August 2016, he became the fastest and youngest player to score centuries against all Test-playing nations in the format. As of May 2017, he has the most Test centuries for New Zealand. Williamson has played 39 T20Is since his debut in October 2011 and is yet to score a century in the format; his highest score remains 73 not out.
In baseball, a hit is credited to a batter when he reaches first base – or any subsequent base – safely after hitting a fair ball, without the benefit of an error or a fielder's choice. One hundred fourteen different players (nominated by Bloom6132) have recorded at least six hits in a single nine-inning Major League Baseball (MLB) game to date, the most recent being Anthony Rendon of the Washington Nationals on April 30, 2017. Regarded as a notable achievement, five players have accomplished the feat more than once in their career; no player has ever recorded more than seven hits in a nine-inning game. Davy Force was the first player to collect six hits in a single game, doing so for the Philadelphia Athletics against the Chicago White Stockings on June 27, 1876.
Mel Gibson, AO, is an American actor, director, producer and screenwriter with dozens of films and television productions (nominated by Bluesphere) to his name including appearances in in the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon blockbuster film series, acting in and directing the Academy Award winning Braveheart in 1995 and directing the Academy Award winning Hacksaw Ridge in 2016.
La La Land is a 2016 American romantic musical comedy-drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle. Starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, the film focuses on two young people struggling to make ends meet in Los Angeles, while pursuing their dreams as artists. The film was successful at the box office, earning over $430 million against its $30 million budget. Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, surveyed 332 reviews and judged 93% to be positive. The film has been nominated for 250 awards, winning 108; its direction, screenplay, music and the performances of Gosling and Stone have received the most attention from award groups. La La Land received 14 nominations (winning 6) at the 89th Academy Awards tying records for most nominations by a single film with All About Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997). The film garnered a leading seven Golden Globe Award nominations, and the film also led the 70th British Academy Film Awards with five wins and 11 nominations.
The American rock band Rise Against has recorded 128 songs, which include 115 original songs and 13 covers. The band was formed in 1999, and signed a recording contract with the independent record label Fat Wreck Chords the following year. During the early part of their career, Rise Against's music was characterized by its gritty combination of hardcore punk and melodic hardcore. With the release of Appeal to Reason, the band's music shifted toward a more accessible and radio-friendly sound, with greater emphasis on production value. Rise Against is well known for their outspoken social commentary, which often permeates their lyrics. Of the band's 128 songs, fifteen have been released as singles, while three have been promotional singles. Their best charting singles are "Help Is on the Way", which reached number eighty-nine on the Billboard Hot 100; and "Savior", which held the record for the most consecutive weeks spent on both the Hot Rock Songs and Alternative Songs charts, with sixty-three and sixty-five weeks respectively. Two singles from Siren Song of the Counter Culture, "Give It All" and "Swing Life Away", helped broaden Rise Against's mainstream appeal.
The Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actress is an award presented annually at the Hong Kong Film Awards (HKFA). It is given to honour an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance in a Hong Kong film. The 1st Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony was held in 1982. Since its inception, 78 actresses have been nominated for the award with 25 actresses winning at least one of the 35 awards. As of 2017's 36th Hong Kong Film Awards, Kara Wai is the most recent winner for her role in Happiness.
North Somerset is a unitary authority in the ceremonial county of Somerset, England. In the United Kingdom, the term listed building refers to a building or other structure officially designated as being of special architectural, historical or cultural significance; Grade II* structures are those considered to be "particularly significant buildings of more than local interest". There are 80 Grade II* listed buildings in North Somerset (nominated by Rod). The oldest are Norman churches. From the Middle Ages onward there are more churches and some manor houses, such as Tyntesfield, Clevedon Court and Leigh Court, with their ancillary buildings. The list includes several village or church crosses and monuments in churchyards. More recent entries include Birnbeck Pier which was designed by Eugenius Birch and opened in 1867, and the Waterworks at Blagdon which was completed in 1905.
Jeff Gordon is an American racing driver who drove in the NASCAR Cup Series full-time from 1993 to 2015, winning 93 Cup Series races and four Cup championships. Over the course of his racing career, Gordon won a total of 98 NASCAR races (nominated by Bcschneider53), 93 of which were in the Cup Series.
Test cricket is the oldest form of cricket played at international level. A Test match is scheduled to take place over a period of five days, and is played by teams representing Full Member nations of the International Cricket Council (ICC). Australia holds many Test cricket records (nominated by Ianblair23) including having played 801 Test matches resulting in 377 victories, 215 defeats, 207 draws and 2 ties for an overall winning percentage of 47.06, the highest winning percentage of Test playing teams.
American band Ivy has recorded 78 songs, (nominated by Carbrera) and material for six studio albums, one extended play (EP), and for various compilation albums and soundtracks.
American band Death Grips has released 71 musical works (nominated by Littlecarmen), comprising of six studio albums, one compilation album, three extended plays (EPs), one mixtape, seven singles, eight promotional singles, three remixes, and 42 music videos.
Rail transport in Walt Disney Parks and Resorts (nominated by Jackdude101) can be found in every theme park resort property owned or licensed by Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, the theme park and vacation resort segment of the larger Walt Disney Company. Each Disney theme park resort has a rail transport system serving its general resort area, whether it's a monorail system located inside the Disney resort properties in the United States and Japan, or a conventional rail system connecting external rail networks to the Disney resorts in France and China. The Walt Disney Parks and Resorts chain of theme parks is the largest on the planet by annual attendance with over 140.4 million visitors in 2016, and the rail systems located inside its properties play key roles as modes of transportation and as attractions for its visitors.

Featured pictures

Six featured pictures were promoted.

A malachite kingfisher
(created and nominated by Charlesjsharp)
The PlayStation Vita
(created by Evan-Amos and nominated by Armbrust)
Diagram of a chicken egg in its ninth day of incubation showing all four extraembryonic membranes along with the embryo, the air pocket, and the shell
(created and nominated by KDS4444)
A yacare caiman in the Pantanal, Brazil
(created and nominated by Charlesjsharp)
Cassius blue (Leptotes cassius theonus) from Cuba, a small butterfly from the Lycaenidae family.
(created and nominated by Charlesjsharp)
Margaret Hamilton next to (presumably a printout of) the navigation software she and her team produced for the 1969 Apollo Project
(created by Draper Laboratory, nominated by Adam Cuerden)

Featured topics

[[File:|center|240px|]]

Máscara Dorada, a Mexican luchador enmascarado associated with Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre

One featured topic was promoted.

Current Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre championships (nominated by MPJ-DK) In professional wrestling, championships are competed for in pre-determined matches and as a result of storylines by a professional wrestling promotion's roster of wrestlers. As of 2016, the Mexican Lucha libre or professional wrestling promotion known as Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (Spanish for "World Wrestling Council"; CMLL) promotes 23 different championships; 12 championships are designated as World Championships for various weight divisions, 5 championships are on the national level, and 6 championships are on the regional level. The championships are divided into multiple weight classes, as well as gender specific and size-specific divisions. There are thirteen male singles championships spread out over various weight classes, three championships for tag teams, three for Trios (three-man teams), two for female competitors, and two for Mini-Estrella competitors. The oldest CMLL championship is the Mexican National Welterweight Championship, created on June 17, 1934, which is also the oldest, still active, championship in professional wrestling.

Reader comments

2017-06-23

Wonder Woman beats Batman, The Mummy, Darth Vader and the Earth

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By Eddie891

Ann Louise Gilligan (right), Irish feminist theologian, made the Deaths in 2017 list on the fourteenth. Here she is pictured with her politician wife Katherine Zappone attending a service at the Trinity College chapel in 2014.

The Top 25 Report summarizes the most popular articles each week, drawing from Andrew West's Top 5000 list. We often republish the top 10. Here are all 25, with commentary by OZOO, Igordebraga and our own Eddie891.

Summer blockbusters and sports, Trump and world events

It has been an eventful week in the world of Wikipedia page views. Gal Gadot (retaining first place from last week) was buoyed by the success of the Wonder Woman (2017 film), which took second place. The 2017 NBA Finals kept Kevin Durant (#3), LeBron James (#11), Steph Curry (#17), the Golden State Warriors (#21) and List of NBA Champions (#10) in the top 25. Despite mixed reviews, The Mummy (2017 film) was propelled to #5. Other entertainment figures and productions ranked high as well. A movie about Tupac Shakur shot him up to #12, Dear Evan Hansen was propelled to #14 and Orange Is the New Black was catapulted up to #19 after the release of a fifth season.

On a sadder note, injury and deaths (#9) also ranked high on the list. The deaths of Adam West (#4), and the injury of Steve Scalise (#8) featured prominently. E.

The twenty-five most popular articles on Wikipedia for the week of June 11, 2017, were:

Rank	Page	Image	Views	Class	Comments
1	Gal Gadot		1,233,820	C Class	Having made her name playing Gisele Yashar in the The Fast and the Furious franchise, Israeli actress and model Gadot has moved on to playing Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman in the nascent DC Extended Universe. The character debuted in last year's Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice; Gadot returns as Wonder Woman in the eponymous film. And on the subject of that film...
2	Wonder Woman (2017 film)		1,192,581	C Class	...it is second in this list. Patty Jenkins has directed the fourth film in the DC Extended Universe, and the first superhero movie from a major studio to have a female lead since 2005's Elektra, since when there have been three new Batmen, two new Hulks and two versions of the Fantastic 4, to give you an idea of how long that is in film-making time. The film has thusly obtained some symbolic value as a test of the viability of female led movies in the modern era, and with a gross of $571.8 million to from opening day to June 19, it's probably passed.
3	Kevin Durant		1,053,517	Good Article	Top scorer for Golden State Warriors in every game of the 2017 NBA Finals, unanimously named the winner of the Most Valuable Player Award.
4	Adam West		961,246	C Class	The late Batman actor saw much interest after his death on June 9, at 88 years old. He, while mainly known for being Batman in the 1960s, also played opposite Chuck Connors in Geronimo (1962) and The Three Stooges in The Outlaws Is Coming (1965). He also appeared in the science fiction film Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), and performed voice work on The Fairly OddParents (2001), The Simpsons (1992, 2002), and Family Guy (2000–2017).
5	The Mummy (2017 film)		896,532	C Class	The 2017 American action-adventure film debuted to negative reviews. The film has grossed $295.6 million (up to June 19). While it was the largest global debut for Tom Cruise, the film was largely a flop in the United States. It only made $31.7 million of the originally projected $35–40 million (second behind Wonder Woman). In its second weekend, ticket sales dropped 56% to $13.9 million, and fourth place at the box office.
6	Grenfell Tower fire		836,550	B Class	The 24 storey building was struck by a fire on June 14. 79 people are presumed dead as a result of the fire, and all of the building's inhabitants are homeless. The fire burnt for around 24 hours and was fought by hundreds of firefighters and 45 firetrucks. The fire is the deadliest fire in mainland Britain since the start of the 20th century.
7	Darth Vader		778,261	B Class	There has lately been a revival of interest in this famed villain. The announcement (and subsequent release) of a new comic about Vader in late March (and early June) may be driving traffic.
8	Steve Scalise		747,127	C Class	Steve Scalise getting shot has a lot of people heading over to his Wikipedia page to figure out, "Who exactly is Steve Scalise?" The Republican current United States House of Representatives Majority Whip and representative for Louisiana's 1st congressional district, serving since 2008 (and as House Majority Whip since 2014). Before that, Scalise served for four months in the Louisiana State Senate and twelve years in the Louisiana House of Representatives. Scalise's condition has improved from "imminent risk of death" to "critical" with "vital signs stabilized." Scalise is still in intensive care and is likely to be in the hospital for weeks. On a brighter note, the Congressional Baseball Game was not cancelled due to the incident, and in fact attracted a larger crowd than usual, raising over $1 million for charity.
9	Deaths in 2017		689,172	List Class	The near-ever-present list of the deceased stayed in the same place this week while losing about 11,000 views in total.
10	List of NBA champions		675,034	Featured Class	For the third year in a row, the NBA Finals came down to the Golden State Warriors against the Cleveland Cavaliers, with the former winning.
11	LeBron James		643,575	Good Article	The professional basketball player was at the forefront of the Cavaliers' effort to win in the finals for the second time in a row. Despite scoring an average of 33.6 points per game, it was not enough this time for the Cavs to overcome the deficit and they lost, 1–4.
12	Tupac Shakur		610,200	B Class	Shakur is consistently ranked as one of the greatest and most influential rappers of all time, and occasionally one of the greatest artists of all time. The release of All Eyez on Me has spiked his popularity again, fittingly, just as he would have been nearing 46 years of age.
13	Otto Warmbier		607,175	B Class	The recent spike in popularity was driven in the earlier part of the week by the release – after eighteen months in captivity – of this 22 year old American by North Korea. However, Warmbier succumbed to his injuries after six days.
14	Dear Evan Hansen		578,312	Start Class	This musical, following a high school senior with social anxiety disorder in the turmoil that follows a classmate's death saw an increase in views following the 71st Tony Awards, in which it was nominated for nine awards, winning six including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Actor in a Musical for its lead Ben Platt.
15	Rafael Nadal		577,002	C Class	"The King of Clay" has proven his dominance yet again. He won the 2017 French Open, bringing his total French Open wins to an astounding 10. Only one player has ever topped that in a Grand Slam tournament, Margaret Court with 11 Australian Opens.
16	Earth		571,679	Featured Class	It's the Earth.
17	Stephen Curry		562,359	B Class	Oft considered the greatest shooter in history, Curry proved his dominance yet again, seizing the championship title, after narrowly being denied last year.
18	Donald Trump		526,315	C Class	Trump's back. Well he was never really gone. As it is, he appears on the list again, this time due to reversing the Cuban Thaw policies of Obama, his predecessor.
19	Orange Is the New Black		494,706	C-class	The release of the fifth season of the popular Netflix original about women in prison sent it up to #19.
20	ICC Champions Trophy		471,026	Start Class	When things are big in India, they are really big. Everywhere.
21	Golden State Warriors		449,547	B Class	The Warriors won their fifth championship against the Cavs. They took their lead early, and held on to it with the help of two players you may have heard of. Kevin Durant and Steph Curry.
22	Floyd Mayweather, Jr.		436,040	C Class	The undefeated five-division professional boxing world champion announced he has seen a contestant emerge from a whole different sport: MMA star Conor McGregor (#24), who will fight Mayweather in August.
23	Pound sterling	£	432,583	C Class	From Brexit to the snap election, this currency just can't seem to get a break. Regardless, most traffic is probably driven by... you guessed it, Reddit.
24	2017 ICC Champions Trophy		421,569	Start Class	The 2017 edition of this quadrennial cricket tournament was held in England and Wales. India returned to the final, held on June 17, but lost to neighbour/rival Pakistan.
25	2017 FIFA Confederations Cup		420,904	Start Class	In preparation for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Russia is receiving the continental champions, plus current world champion Germany, in a tournament that started on Saturday. Like in the previous edition, it is being held amidst nationwide protests – but not exactly tournament related, despite plenty of reasons they could be.

Reader comments

2017-06-23

Utopian bubbles: Can Wikipedians create value outside of the capitalist system?

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By Dorothy Howard, Simon Razniewski and Tilman Bayer

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

Arwid Lund

"Wikipedia, work, and capitalism. A realm of freedom?"

Review by Dorothy Howard

In his first book, Wikipedia, Work, and Capitalism. A Realm of Freedom?,^[1] Arwid Lund, lecturer in the program of Information Studies (ALM: Archives, Libraries and Museums) at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden investigates the ideologies that he believes are shared by participants in peer-production projects like Wikipedia. The author typologizes the ways that Wikipedians understand their activities, including “playing v. gaming” and “working v. labouring,” (113-115) to explore his hypothesis that “there is a link between how Wikipedians look upon their activities and how they look upon capitalism.” (117) Lund characterizes peer-production projects by their shared resistance to information capitalism—things like copyright and pay-walled publishing, which they see as limiting creativity and innovation. His thesis is provocative. He claims that the anti-corporatist ideologies intrinsic to peer production and to Wikipedia are unrealistic because capitalism always finds a way to monetize free content. Overall, the book touches on many issues not usually discussed within the Wikipedia community, but which might be a useful entry point for those who want to consider the social impacts of the project.

Lund uses a combination of social critique and qualitative interviews conducted in 2012 to provide supporting evidence for his thesis. One recurrent theme is that Wikipedia is part of a larger trend in gamification—a design technique developed in Human–computer interaction (HCI) to describe the process of using features associated with "play" to motivate interaction and engagement with an interface. One example he gives is that editors report that they find Wikipedia's competitive and confrontational elements to be game-like. (143-144) He also claims that Wikipedians' descriptions of their work and play balance changes as they take on more levels of responsibility and professionalism in the community, such as adminship. Still, it’s highly questionable whether the 8 interviews, which mainly focus on the Swedish Wikipedia, are a sufficient sample size to make his claims scalable.

The culture of Wikipedia valorizes altruism in its embrace of volunteering for the project to produce information for the greater good. Lund argues that Wikipedians' belief in the altruistic aspect of the project, makes it easy for them to depoliticize their work and to ignore the how Wikipedia participates in the corporate, information economy. To him, Wikipedia is symptomatic of the devaluation of digital work, when in past generations, making an encyclopedia might be a source of income and employment opportunities for contributors.

So, he argues, contributors believe that peer production represents a space of increased autonomy, democracy, and creativity in the production of ideas. But from his view, attempts at a “counter-economy,” “hacker communism,” or “gift economies” (239, 303) are prone to manipulation, because we can’t create utopian bubbles within capitalism that aren’t privy to its influence. Still, peer production projects operate as if creation of value outside of the capitalist system is possible. Lund argues that Wikipedia cannot avoid competition with proprietary companies which see Wikipedia as a threat, and have an interest in harvesting its content for their own benefit. (218) Yet it would be nice if he brought in more examples to make this claim. The reader is left wondering who these corporate interests are, and what exactly they derive from Wikipedia. Having this information would help us understand where Lund is coming from.

Marxist linguist V.N. Volosinov, one of the references for Lund's analysis

Although the word “work” in the title might suggest that Lund focuses on wage labour, the author’s aims are more broad, and he uses the word to connote a variety of aspects of social, value-producing activities. (20) Namely, the production of “use-value,” the Marxist term for the productive social activity of creating things which are deemed useful and thus of value to be bought and sold in the market (even if producers don’t consider their work to be commodities). He draws from Marxist thinkers and semioticians, among them V.N. Volosinov, Terry Eagleton, and Louis Althusser, to unpack different approaches to describing why Wikipedians might feel like they are playing when they are really working. (107-108) Marxists call such assumptions “false consciousness,” but the concept is difficult because it requires us to analyze manifest and latent (discursive and non-discursive) awareness. It would have been useful for Lund to look at how the fields of anthropology or psychology talk about ideology. Both fields have extensively researched the topic. More stringent ethnographic or qualitative methods might have also made his argument more convincing. But, based on the references he provides, it seems that the book's target audience may be media theorists and social scientists, people who already familiar with Marxist political economy.

Lund makes a compelling case that capitalism instrumentalizes freely-produced knowledge for its own monetary gains. Meanwhile, he says, Wikipedia's design and its heavily ideological agenda, make it difficult for the community to address the issue. The book is an interesting contribution to ongoing conversations about how Wikipedia and projects motivated by copyleft principles can be defined from a social perspective.

How does unemployment affect reading and editing Wikipedia ? The impact of the Great Recession

Review by Tilman Bayer

A discussion paper titled "Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?"^[2] investigates how "drastically increased unemployment" affects contribution to and readership of Wikipedia. To study this question statistically, the authors (three economists from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Germany) regarded the Great Recession that began in 2008 as an "exogeneous shock" that affected unemployment rates in different European countries differently and at different times. They relate these rates to five metrics for the language version of Wikipedia that corresponds to each country:

"(1) aggregate views per month, (2) the number of active Wikipedians with a modest number of monthly edits ranging from 5 to 100, (3) the number of active Wikipedians with more than 100 monthly edits, (4) edits per article, and (5) the content growth of a corresponding language edition of Wikipedia in terms of words"

For each of these, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes monthly numbers. Since the researchers did not have access to country-level breakdowns of this data (which is not published for every country/language combination due to privacy reasons, except for some monthly or quarterly overviews which the authors may have overlooked, but only start in 2009 anyway), "to study the relationship of country level unemployment on an entire Wikipedia, we need to focus on countries which have an (ideally) unique language". This excluded some of the European countries that were most heavily affected by the 2008 crisis, e.g. the UK, Spain or Portugal, but still left them with 22 different language versions of Wikipedia to study.

An additional analysis focuses on district-level (Kreise) employment data from Germany and the German Wikipedia, respectively. None of the five metrics are available with that geographical resolution, so the authors resorted to the geolocation data for the (public) IP addresses of anonymous edits (which for several large German ISPs is usually more precise than in many other countries).

In both parts of the analysis, the economic data is related to the Wikipedia participation metrics using a relatively simple statistical approach (difference in differences), whose robustness is however vetted using various means. Still, since in some cases the comparison only included 9 months before and after the start of the crisis (instead of an entire year or several years), this leaves open the question of seasonality (e.g. it is well-known that Wikipedia pageviews are generally down in the summer, possibly due to factors like vacationing that might differ depending on the economic situation).

Summarizing their results, the authors write:

"we find that increased unemployment is associated with higher participation of volunteers in Wikipedia and an increased rate of content generation. With higher unemployment, articles are read more frequently and the number of highly active users increases, suggesting that existing editors also increase their activity. Moreover, we find robust evidence that the number of edits per article increases, and slightly weaker support for an increased overall content growth. We find the overall effect to be rather positive than negative, which is reassuring news if the encyclopedia functions as an important knowledge base for the economy."

While leaving open the precise mechanism of these effects, the researchers speculate that "it seems that new editors begin to acquire new capabilities and devote their time to producing public goods. While we observe overall content growth, we could not find robust evidence for an increase in the number of new articles per day [...]. This suggests that the increased participation is focused on adding to the existing knowledge, rather than providing new topics or pages. Doing so requires less experience than creating new articles, which may be interpreted as a sign of learning by the new contributors."

The paper also includes an informative literature review summarizing interesting research results on unemployment, leisure time and volunteering in general. (For example, that "conditional on having Internet access, poorer people spend more time online than wealthy people as they have a lower opportunity cost of time." Also some gender-specific results that, combined with Wikipedia's well-known gender gap, might have suggested a negative effect of rising unemployment on editing activity: "Among men, working more hours is even positively correlated with participation in volunteering" and on the other hand "unemployment has a negative effect on men’s volunteering, which is not the case for women.")

It has long been observed how Wikipedia relies on the leisure time of educated people, in particular by Clay Shirky, who coined the term "cognitive surplus" for it, the title of his 2010 book. The present study provides important insights into a particular aspect of this (although the authors caution that economic crises do not uniformly increase spare time, e.g. "employed people may face larger pressure in their paid job", reducing their available time for editing Wikipedia). The paper might have benefited from including a look at the available demographic data about the life situations of Wikipedia editors (e.g. in the 2012 Wikipedia Editor survey, 60% of respondents were working full-time or part-time, and 39% were school or university students, with some overlap).

Briefly

How complete are Wikidata entries?

Author's summary by Simon Razniewski

While human-created knowledge bases (KBs) such as Wikidata provide usually high-quality data (precision), it is generally hard to understand their completeness. A conference paper titled "Assessing the Completeness of Entities in Knowledge Bases"^[3] proposes to assess the relative completeness of entities in knowledge bases, based on comparing the extent of information with other similar entities. It outlines building blocks of this approach, and present a prototypical implementation, which is available on Wikidata as Recoin (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Ls1g/Recoin).

"Cardinal Virtues: Extracting Relation Cardinalities from Text"

Author's summary by Simon Razniewski

Information extraction (IE) from text has largely focused on relations between individual entities, such as who has won which award. However, some facts are never fully mentioned, and no IE method has perfect recall. Thus, it is beneficial to also tap contents about the cardinalities of these relations, for example, how many awards someone has won. This paper^[4] introduces this novel problem of extracting cardinalities and discusses the specific challenges that set it apart from standard IE. It present a distant supervision method using conditional random fields. A preliminary evaluation that compares information extracted from Wikipedia with that available on Wikidata shows a precision between 3% and 55%, depending on the difficulty of relations.

Conferences and events

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

Other recent publications

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

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

"Learning by comparing with Wikipedia: the value to students’ learning"^[5] From the paper: "The main purpose of this research work is to describe and evaluate a learning technique that actively uses Wikipedia in an online master’s degree course in Statistics. It is based on the comparison between Wikipedia content and standard academic learning materials. We define this technique as ‘learning by comparing’. [...] The main result of the paper shows that [...] active use of Wikipedia in the learning process, through the learning-by-comparing technique, improves the students’ academic performance. [...] The main findings on the students’ perceived quality of Wikipedia indicate that they agree with the idea that the encyclopaedia is complete, reliable, current and useful. Although there is a positive perception of quality, there are some quality factors that obtain better scores than others. The most valued quality aspect was the currentness of the content, and the least valued was its completeness."
"Use and awareness of Wikipedia among the M.C.A students of C. D. Jain college of commerce, Shrirampur : A Study"^[6]
"Comparative assessment of three quality frameworks for statistics derived from big data: the cases of Wikipedia page views and Automatic Identification Systems"^[7] From the abstract: " We apply these three quality frameworks in the context of 'experimental' cultural statistics based on Wikipedia page views"
"Discovery and efficient reuse of technology pictures using Wikimedia infrastructures. A proposal"^[8] From the abstract: "With our proposal, we hope to serve a broad audience which looks up a scientific or technical term in a web search portal first. Until now, this audience has little chance to find an openly accessible and reusable image narrowly matching their search term on first try .."
"Extracting scientists from Wikipedia"^[9] From the abstract: "... we describe a system that gathers information from Wikipedia articles and existing data from Wikidata, which is then combined and put in a searchable database. This system is dedicated to making the process of finding scientists both quicker and easier."
"Where the streets have known names"^[10] From the abstract: "We present (1) a technique to establish a correspondence between street names and the entities that they refer to. The method is based on Wikidata, a knowledge base derived from Wikipedia. The accuracy of this mapping is evaluated on a sample of streets in Rome. As this approach reaches limited coverage, we propose to tap local knowledge with (2) a simple web platform. ... As a result, we design (3) an enriched OpenStreetMap web map where each street name can be explored in terms of the properties of its associated entity."

References

^ Lund, Arwid (2017). Wikipedia, Work, and Capitalism. Springer: Dynamics of Virtual Work. ISBN 9783319506890.
^ Kummer, Michael E.; Slivko, Olga; Zhang, Xiaoquan (Michael) (2015-11-01). Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
^ Ahmeti, Albin; Razniewski, Simon; Polleres, Axel (2017). Assessing the Completeness of Entities in Knowledge Bases. ESWC.
^ Mirza, Paramita; Razniewski, Simon; Darari, Fariz; Weikum, Gerhard (2017). Cardinal Virtues: Extracting Relation Cardinalities from Text. ACL.
^ Meseguer-Artola, Antoni (2014-05-26). "Aprenent mitjançant la comparació amb la Wikipedia: la seva importància en l'aprenentatge dels estudiants". RUSC. Universities and Knowledge Society Journal. 11 (2): 57–69. doi:10.7238/rusc.v11i2.2042. ISSN 1698-580X. ("Learning by comparing with Wikipedia: the value to students’ learning", in English with Catalan abstract)
^ Pathade, Prasad R. "Use and awareness of Wikipedia among the M.C.A students of C. D. Jain college of commerce, Shrirampur : A Study" (PDF). International Multidisciplinary e-Journal. ISSN 2277-4262.
^ Reis, Fernando; di Consiglio, Loredana; Kovachev, Bogomil; Wirthmann, Albrecht; Skaliotis, Michail (June 2016). Comparative assessment of three quality frameworks for statistics derived from big data: the cases of Wikipedia page views and Automatic Identification Systems (PDF). European Conference on Quality in Official Statistics (Q2016). Madrid. p. 16.
^ Heller; Blümel; Cartellieri; Wartena. "Discovery and efficient reuse of technology pictures using Wikimedia infrastructures. A proposal". Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.51562.
^ Ekenstierna, Gustaf Harari; Lam, Victor Shu-Ming (2016). "Extracting Scientists from Wikipedia". From Digitization to Knowledge 2016. p. 8.
^ Almeida, Paulo Dias; Rocha, Jorge Gustavo; Ballatore, Andrea; Zipf, Alexander (2016-07-04). "Where the Streets Have Known Names". In Osvaldo Gervasi; Beniamino Murgante; Sanjay Misra; Ana Maria A. C. Rocha; Carmelo M. Torre; David Taniar; Bernady O. Apduhan; Elena Stankova; Shangguang Wang (eds.). Computational Science and Its Applications -- ICCSA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing. pp. 1–12. ISBN 9783319420882.

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2017-06-23

Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all

Contribute —

By Evad37

Sister projects in search results

Sister project search results for "Brazil"

When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. They appear next to the search results. By introducing this feature, the Discovery department hopes to provide visitors with additional information, and reduce the likelihood of searches returning zero results. This also raises the visibility of sister projects, and may encourage visitors to explore these projects further, and potentially contribute to them. Some communities have already had similar functionality via custom JavaScript.

On English Wikipedia, a Village Pump RfC was held to determine which sister projects should be included. There were concerns that "content returned by some projects is too often irrelevant, problematic, outdated, spammy, or in some other way contradictory to the aims and purposes of [English Wikipedia] and not really what we want to send our readers to". The RfC resulted in the following projects being approved:

Wikisource
Wiktionary
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage (title matches only)

Commons multimedia, Wikinews, and Wikiversity results will not be shown. Wikidata and Wikispecies are not within the scope of this feature.

Results from Wikibooks are also currently displayed, in contrast to the RfC closure; a Phabricator task has been opened requesting their suppression.

Since the feature was enabled, there have been multiple requests for an opt-out option. A way to collapse the sister project results was suggested on a Village pump (technical) thread:

Here's a quick snippet you can add to your common.js to make it collapsible and collapsed by default:

	if ( mw.config.get( 'wgCanonicalSpecialPageName' ) === 'Search' ) {
		$.when(
			mw.loader.using( 'jquery.makeCollapsible' ),
			$.ready
		).done( function () {
			var $mwInterwikiResults = $( '#mw-interwiki-results' );
			
			$mwInterwikiResults.addClass( 'mw-collapsible mw-collapsed' )
				.find( '.iw-results' ).addClass( 'mw-collapsible-content' );
			$mwInterwikiResults.makeCollapsible();
		} );
	}

— User:Murph9000

While at a Village pump (proposals) discussion, code to remove those results was posted:

just add
div#mw-interwiki-results { display: none !important }
to your own common.css.
— User:Nemo bis

WMF data scientist answers the Internet's questions

Aaron Halfaker

Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail), a data scientist with WMF, conducted an Ask Me Anything session with Reddit contributors on 1 June (UTC). The question-and-answer session attracted 118 comments and covered Halfaker's ORES AI-based antivandal project and AI construction in general, Wikipedia editing for wider audiences, Reddit, and AIs for content generation, including automatic summarization for unseen Twin Peaks episodes. B.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

MoveToDraft^[1] (source) by User:Evad37 – move undersourced articles to draft space, including cleanup and author notification. Useful for New Page Reviewers.

Newly approved bot tasks

WugBot (task 2) – Moves (tentatively) approved hooks from the main DYK nomination page to the approved sub page.
Monkbot (task 12) – Removes/replaces {{London Gazette}} parameters that have been deprecated and/or are no longer supported
PrimeBOT (task 13) – Replaces magic words with templates
CensusBot (approval) – Checks total population and ranking values in U.S. State page infoboxes, and edits to add official values from U.S. Census Bureau API's

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #24 & #25. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Problems
- ORES had some problems on 13 June between 16:00 and 19:40 UTC. It has now been fixed. (Wikitech incident documentation)
Recent changes
- Some wikis have the larger and brighter OOjs UI edit page buttons. When you write an edit summary there you can now see how many bytes you have left before the summary is too long. (Phabricator task T165856)
- irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. (Phabricator task T167643)
- Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. (Phabricator task T163923)
Future changes
- You will soon be able to get a notification when someone tries to log in to your account. You can test this on the test wiki. This will only work if they fail to log in to your account. [1]
- Wikimedia wikis use OCG to create PDFs. The OCG code has a lot of problems and will stop working. It has to be replaced. An alternative is Electron. You can tell the developers what you need the PDF service to be able to do. Electron now works on all Wikimedia projects. (Phabricator task T165956)
- Administrators can soon search for deleted page titles and find results that are similar to what they searched for. Today the search only finds pages that are exactly the same as what you search for. This is to make it easier to find pages when you don't know the exact title. Administrators on Arabic, Catalan, English, Persian, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian Wikipedia and on mediawiki.org can test this by adding &fuzzy=1 to the end of the web address when looking at Special:Undelete. (MediaWiki.org page, Phabricator task T109561)
- CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how the TemplateStyles extension works on Beta Labs.

Installation code

^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
importScript( 'User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js

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