Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2020-01-27

From the editor
Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium

News and notes
Six million articles on the English language Wikipedia

Special report
The limits of volunteerism and the gatekeepers of Team Encarta

In the media
Turkey's back up, but what's happening with Dot-org and a new visual identity?

Arbitration report
Three cases at ArbCom

Traffic report
The most viewed articles of 2019

Gallery
Wiki Loves Monuments 2019, we're all winners

News from the WMF
Capacity Building: Top 5 Themes from Community Conversations

Community view
Our most important new article since November 1, 2015

In focus
Cryptos and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no!

Recent research
How useful is Wikipedia for novice programmers trying to learn computing concepts?

From the archives
A decade of The Signpost, 2005-2015

On the bright side
What's making you happy this month?

WikiProject report
WikiProject Japan: a wikiProject Report

Humour
Predicting the 6,000,000th article

Obituary
Remembering Wikipedia contributor Brian Boulton

 

2020-01-27

Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium

By Smallbones

Wikipedians should be proud of all our achievements

Wikipedia is the jewel of the internet. We're an educational website, an encyclopedia, designed to be free of advertisements and commercial influence, trying to provide every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. We should celebrate all of our achievements. The English language Wikipedia marked the creation of its six millionth article this week (see News and notes, Community view and Humour) and its 19th birthday this month. Wiki Loves Monuments has announced the winners of one of the world's largest photo competitions (see Gallery). My personal favorite achievement this month is the 15th anniversary of this newspaper, The Signpost.

But we need to stop the spam immediately

Commercial organizations and their undeclared paid editors are overrunning Wikipedia, using our educational content as camouflage for their hidden advertisements. The Wikimedia Foundation seems unable to do anything about it. It's time for the community to take action to protect our encyclopedia. Among other actions we can take is a moratorium on all new articles about businesses until the WMF takes action against the most notorious spammer, Status Labs, or until we can remove all the spam that is most dangerous to our readers.

Unequal financial power

The WMF has a difficult job. It supports the servers that provide over a billion people a month with immediate access to the encyclopedia, maintains and upgrades the software, and provides grants to editors' projects throughout the world. Their budget is about $100 million per year.

Taken together, the hundreds or thousands of businesses who commercially insert advertisements into the encyclopedia likely bring in many times that amount. Just one of the more notorious companies, Wiki-PR – now known as Status Labs – declared operating revenues of over $7 million for 2017, had 200 active clients in August 2018, and currently employs 48 staff members[1]. In 2014 CNBC reported that Status Labs was apparently a "small shop" and that one of CNBC's freelancers was solicited by email for payment by Status Labs to slip "a client's name into copy." If Status Labs will spam a large national cable news organization, they'll likely spam anywhere they think they can get away with.

Its clients pay high fees for their services. "Fees for reputation management can range from a few thousand dollars a year to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, depending on the clients and his or her needs," according to Status Lab CEO Darius Fisher. One of their clients, Jacob Gottlieb, was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal during a recent investigation, and said he paid $4,000 to $5,000 per month.

Status Labs was contacted for comment for this article but did not respond before publication.

A long-term problem

Related articles

Wiki-PR

Wiki-PR duo bulldoze a piñata store; Wifione arbitration case; French parliamentary plagiarism
1 April 2015

With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use
18 June 2014

WMF bites the bullet on affiliation and FDC funding, elevates Wikimedia user groups
12 February 2014

Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
29 January 2014

Foundation to Wiki-PR: cease and desist; Arbitration Committee elections starting
20 November 2013

The decline of Wikipedia; Sue Gardner releases statement on Wiki-PR; Australian minister relies on Wikipedia
23 October 2013

Vice on Wiki-PR's paid advocacy; Featured list elections begin
16 October 2013

Wiki-PR's extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy exposed
9 October 2013

More articles

Wiki-PR duo bulldoze a piñata store; Wifione arbitration case; French parliamentary plagiarism 1 April 2015 With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use 18 June 2014 WMF bites the bullet on affiliation and FDC funding, elevates Wikimedia user groups 12 February 2014 Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions 29 January 2014 Foundation to Wiki-PR: cease and desist; Arbitration Committee elections starting 20 November 2013 The decline of Wikipedia; Sue Gardner releases statement on Wiki-PR; Australian minister relies on Wikipedia 23 October 2013 Vice on Wiki-PR's paid advocacy; Featured list elections begin 16 October 2013 Wiki-PR's extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy exposed 9 October 2013

Paid editing has long been a problem on Wikipedia. The subject even has its own article Paid editing on Wikipedia citing dozens of well documented incidents. The Conflict of interest noticeboard used by Wikipedia editors to report ongoing problems, reports that many incidents per month. Many of the worst offenders have been questionable financial firms such as retail foreign exchange traders, or outright scam artists like binary options traders and some cryptocurrency firms.

Wiki-PR/Status Labs is likely the best known of the commercial paid editing firms among Wikipedians. They first came to light in 2013 when Wikipedias and the WMF blocked 250 accounts in the then-largest paid editing scandal in the history of Wikipedia. The community banned the firm – and not just the firm – in these terms:

Employees, contractors, owners, and anyone who derives financial benefit from editing the English Wikipedia on behalf of Wiki-PR.com or its founders are banned from editing the English Wikipedia. This ban has been enacted because Wiki-PR.com has, as an organization, proven themselves repeatedly unable or unwilling to adhere to our basic community standards.

The WMF later issued a cease-and-desist letter telling them not to edit Wikipedia, using the same language as the first sentence of the community ban. When Wiki-PR started advertising using the Status Labs name, the community ban was extended to Status Labs. When they began advertising under yet another name, that name was included in the ban.

The Wiki-PR scandal was widely covered in the mainstream press, including articles in the Daily Dot, Vice, Verge, the Independent, Ars Technica, AdAge, and many others.

Following Wiki-PR's activities, the WMF changed the Terms of Use stating that every paid editor must declare their paid editing status as well as their employers, clients, and other affiliations. This change was voted on by 1,389 Wikipedians, probably the largest such vote in Wikipedia's history and was supported by 79% of the voters.

You'd think they would have gotten the message

Darius Fisher's firm Status Labs, the successor firm of Wiki-PR, has continued editing for six years after they were all banned by the Wikipedia community. The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth investigation of Status Labs activities and documented their Wikipedia editing in the December 13, 2019 article titled "How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online".

The WSJ documented Status Labs "reputation management" for five firms and individuals including Jacob Gottlieb, former owner of the defunct hedge fund Visium Asset Management, billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, owner of Citadel LLC, Omeed Malik, Betsy DeVos – before she became U.S. Secretary of Education, and Theranos, a failed blood testing company, whose former CEO is now facing criminal charges.

Citadel LLC admitted Griffin's use of Status Labs to edit Wikipedia, according to the WSJ. Gottlieb and Theranos were directly tied by the WSJ to Wikipedia edits by banned sock puppet jppcap. DeVos's link to Wikipedia was not made explicit. Malik can be tied to editor Stevey7788 who was banned for "excessive involvement in reviewing articles created by" sock puppets. Stevey7788 reviewed the Malik article at WP:Articles for Creation and promoted it to article space. The article was later trimmed and redirected, apparently as part of an investigation by Wikipedia editors requested by the WMF.

An investigation by The Signpost, focusing on the accusations against Theranos, detailed the extensive editing by jppcap to that article.

Other than the redirected article, The Signpost could find no evidence that an investigation by Wikipedia editors had taken place before the WSJ article was published.

WMF response

When contacted by The Signpost this month, the WMF said they would continue to monitor the situation but that they were not planning on taking any action against Status Labs at this time. They received an inquiry from The Wall Street Journal reporter in October and sent that information to the community per the Paid editing policy.

All the information they got from the WSJ reporter was sent to volunteers as soon as they received it. The information was sent to the Arbitration Committee, the OTRS mailing list for monitoring paid editing (paid-en-wpwikipedia.org), and the volunteers who were speaking with the WSJ. In January they also provided it, when requested, to The Signpost.

This information provided to The Signpost on this particular matter is very short, 120 words long. Two arbitrators contacted by The Signpost did not remember receiving the information. When contacted at short notice, paid-en-wpwikipedia.org did not respond. Only one of the other volunteers who was sent the information could be identified by The Signpost, and she has not replied to an email request for comment.

The WMF does not expect to issue a report on the investigation.

Any community members who have information on this investigation are requested to contact The Signpost, or include the information in the Comments section below.

The WMF position is that they will only take action, based on requests made by the English Wikipedia community through its usual governing processes.

Proposed moratorium

Please understand that The Signpost is not accusing the WMF or any Wikipedia editor of intentional wrongdoing, but the current systems used to protect the encyclopedia against abusive undeclared paid editors clearly are not working.

Since Wikipedia volunteers are now overwhelmed with advertisements masquerading as encyclopedia articles, and since the WMF seems to be unable to take any action against even the most obvious purveyor of this dangerous material, the responsible path open to Wikipedia editors is to just stop publishing all new articles about businesses.

Make no mistake about it, Wikipedia's business articles are dangerous to the finances of any reader who might be persuaded to invest based on articles written by scam artists like binary options companies or some cryptocurrency companies. Our articles are dangerous to investors who might be persuaded by the unethical executives of companies like Theranos who used Status Labs to manipulate the article on the company. Since Theranos was a medical testing company, the paid edits by Status Labs might have even turned out to be dangerous to people's health. In an everyday sense, our articles are dangerous to readers who might base even a simple decision on article content.

If the WMF does not take swift action to protect Wikipedia from already banned firms like Status Labs, nobody should trust any business article on Wikipedia. I wouldn't base any decision – not even a $3 purchase of canned meat – on a Wikipedia business article. Rather than trust any business article, it would be better to delete them all. But we don't need to go quite that far, I propose that we place a moratorium on all new business-related articles until we have time to clean up the mess we already have.

Formally, a moratorium requires a request for comment that may take a month or more to complete. In the meantime there are actions that any editor can take. Don't promote abusive business articles from Articles for Creation. If you see a new business article, you can remove all of the promotional material, even if that is the entire content of the article. Taking the article to WP:Articles for deletion is the more common practice. And here are 24,164 old articles you can start with right now.

References

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Six million articles on the English language Wikipedia

By Smallbones and Pine

Time for some fireworks.

Congratulations to all editors

Maria Elise Turner Lauder

The article count on en-Wiki surpassed 6,000,000 at about 18:59 UTC on January 23. Due to the limitations of the software and the volume of article creations at about that time, it is impossible to determine exactly when the milestone was reached. The symbolic 6,000,000th article was decided by consensus to be Maria Elise Turner Lauder written by User:Rosiestep. She told The Signpost

Rosiestep

I woke up at about 3:30 AM the morning of January 23rd. Unable to go right back to sleep, I went into the living room. I opened up my laptop to Wikipedia and noticed we were a few hundred articles shy of the 6 millionth article. I decided to create an article about a woman writer, my preferred focus, on the chance that when I would be ready to click Save, it would miraculously be the right moment.

Why do I focus on women writers? Well, my grandmother and my mom were writers, and I've become one too – an encyclopedist. I founded WP:WikiProject Women writers. I'm a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University's Women Writers Project.

Without a particular article in mind, I reviewed this list for inspiration, and considered the redlinks. When I checked out Maria Elise Turner Lauder, I noticed that there was a substantial article about her on Wikisource, plus a photo. I googled her and found enough to create a decent article, what would become the first edit; but, I didn't Save it yet. If I had saved the article, I would have felt compelled to improve it before going back to sleep, but I was too tired. The article counter was moving up slowly, still a few hundred articles shy of 6,000,000.

I went back to sleep. When I got up, I checked the counter, and saw that we hadn't reached 6,000,000 yet. When it reached 5,999,996, I clicked Save on the Lauder article, but it didn't save, forcing me to click a second time. That was it. Then I went about my regular business of improving the article. Eventually, I knew, there would be an announcement on article #6,000,000. The Lauder article would be the lucky one, or it wouldn't. Of course, I was very happy with the news that it was the milestone article. Congratulations to you, Wikipedia, and to all the editors who contributed articles on January 23, 2020. Six million is a "drop in the bucket," there are many more articles still to write. I look forward to working with editors from everywhere as we write more, edit more, and collaborate more. Look out, article #7,000,000; we're headed in your direction.

Congratulations to Rosiestep and to all editors who contributed to the last million new articles.

Coffeeandcrumbs told The Signpost in detail how the symbolic article was chosen, saying it is impossible to exactly identify the 6,000,000th article. "We don't know if a redirect (with an old creation date) that was converted to an article or disambiguation page was what brought us over the threshold, or which of the new articles created that same minute was the one. Like in all things on Wikipedia, consensus should reign supreme and consensus determined that Rosiestep's article deserved recognition."

Fifteen articles which were created at 18:59 UTC on January were screened for quality. The entire decision process may be viewed at Wikipedia talk:Six million articles.

What does 6,000,000 articles really mean?

What can be said about six million articles? As usual, Wikipedia's editors provide the answer. A chance view of a user talk page told us:

"6 million is starting to get to be a serious figure, but only a tiny fraction of what is possible of course. A truly resourceful comprehensive encyclopedia in which every article is the highest possible quality is going to take hundreds of years without a doubt. I am certain that Wikipedia will still be around in 2100, even if this evolves into something like a 3D encyclopedia ... You never know!" –Dr. Blofeld

To which another editor responded:

"I keep marveling at how poor our coverage even of American topics is, and of course that's light-years better than our coverage of many other countries. If our American coverage is so spotty, imagine what that means for the rest of the world. We have a long way to go yet..." –Ser Amantio di Nicolao

Your answers and comments are requested in the comments section below.

CC-0 licence at Paris Musées

Fourteen heritage sites, known collectively as Paris Musées, announced that 100,000 digitized files in its collections are now licensed CC-0.

Paris Musées, which holds many masterpieces, is the first Parisian institution to so license its public domain files. They can be downloaded in High Definition via a dedicated API. Wikimedia France (in French) has a formal partnership with Paris Musées and will help import images and data to Wikimedia commons and Wikidata.

Creative Commons Global Summit

The Creative Commons annual summit will be held from May 14–16 in Lisbon, Portugal. Proposals for presentations are due February 12. The overlap of Wikipedia's goal with those of CC, which provides Wikipedia with our free content licenses, is shown by the tracks for the presentations: "Creators of the Commons; Powering the Commons" (about tools, technology and communities); "Open Education and Open Scholarship"; "Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums"; and "Policy and Advocacy promoting the Commons".

Citizendium may close

Citizendium, one of Larry Sanger's failed encyclopedia projects, may be officially closing. Two of its four active editors have agreed that Citizendium "is simply not going to be a viable project as an encyclopedia." They wish to "deliberately wrap up this project by exporting any useful content to Wikipedia, closing the wiki to editing, posting an archived copy to the Internet Archive and directing possible readers there, and use remaining funds to secure the domain name for a long time with some small hosting overhead for a single landing page."

The Signpost recommends care in importing Citizendium articles into Wikipedia. WikiProject Citizendium Porting may be useful in these imports, but the WikiProject has been mostly inactive since 2010.

Obituaries

Angusmclellan

Angus Merker McLellan was a Wikipedia administrator and long-term contributor to the project, known for his work on articles about related to Scotland, and about the Middle Ages. He passed away on November 15, 2019 after a brief battle with lymphoma.
— Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians

Brianboulton's obituary may be viewed here.

New administrators

The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's four newest administrators who passed RfA this month:

• Wugapodes
• QEDK
• Nick Moyes and
• Ergo Sum

Reader comments

2020-01-27

The limits of volunteerism and the gatekeepers of Team Encarta

By Robert Fernandez

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes - The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, No. 43 from Los Caprichos (1799)

Robert Fernandez contributed this essay to Wikipedia@20, a CC BY-NC 4.0 project collecting essays in anticipation of Wikipedia's twentieth anniversary. Robert graciously agreed to publish this piece (CC BY 4.0) on the 15th anniversary of The Signpost. Thanks to Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner at as well for assisting in the publishing arrangements. -S

As the largest and most successful online volunteer project, Wikipedia is rightfully celebrated as a triumph of crowdsourcing and volunteerism. However, Robert discusses the downsides of volunteerism and how volunteers can contribute to stifling innovation.-Editors of Wikipedia@20

At the turn of the millennium, the online encyclopedia, like hovercraft and jetpacks, was an unfulfilled promise of the future. Microsoft Encarta made it to the web in that year, and the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica had been on the web since 1994. Yet their subscription models, limited scope, and Web 1.0 functionality were not what people raised on Ford Prefect and Hari Seldon — touchstone characters of geek culture — had in mind. A real, universal online encyclopedia was an inevitability; the only question was what form this encyclopedia would take and how it would be created.

When Wikipedia appeared a year later on January 15, 2001, with its funny name and origins in a company otherwise dedicated to access to pictures of scantly-clad women and not open knowledge, its role as the world's encyclopedia was far from a fait accompli. In his PhD dissertation, Benjamin Mako Hill took a deep dive into the early workings of eight web encyclopedias. Wikipedia could have just as easily become a forgotten novelty of the dot com boom just as the other seven have become.

Interpedia was the oldest of the eight and was able to draw on the preexisting participant base and infrastructure of USENET. h2g2, with its famous branding from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and backing by the BBC, seemed an even more likely candidate for success. Everything2 was flush with money and attention from Slashdot, an early web driver of traffic and viral attention comparable to Reddit today. A teenage Aaron Swartz, now considered an open content legend and martyr, started The Info. Looking from the vantage point of 2001, who would have guessed that all these projects would be forgotten and Wikipedia would be a household name?

Wikipedia's accidental genius is its branding. The branding is not just name recognition and puzzle globes and big Ws and stroopwafels.

Hill concludes that Wikipedia succeeded in three key factors and none of the others succeeded at more than two of them. The first is the familiarity of the goal or product. Everyone knows what an encyclopedia is and should look like. (Though those born post-Wikipedia now have a different definition of encyclopedia.) But many of these projects were not quite encyclopedias, or not just an encyclopedia. Before I joined Wikipedia, I was an "editor" (the equivalent of a Wikipedia administrator) on Everything2, a project that seemed to encompass (almost) everything. This was a prospect that offered an intoxicating freedom but also served to confuse people unsure about how to contribute given a nearly unlimited choice of topic, format, and style.

This broadness of scope also served as an endless source of controversy and debate about how to define Everything. One of the site's longest-running controversies was a debate about the quality and appropriateness of a brilliantly incoherent and delightfully juvenile tone poem written about the Butterfinger McFlurry, a now-discontinued dessert product from McDonald's. More prosaically, the debate meant an ever-shifting series of goal posts as the site's possibilities narrowed, accompanied by lofty but vague rhetoric about quality and slogans like "a writer's site for writers." What could have been a rival to Wikipedia became the functional equivalent of a third-rate literary magazine.

If nothing else, Wikipedia's accidental genius is its branding. The branding is not just name recognition and puzzle globes and big Ws and stroopwafels. It's a shared goal that is specific enough and familiar enough that everyone can grasp and large enough that it can encompass everyone's individual interests and quirks. It's "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." What are we doing? Editing — a specific and familiar task, yet one that can accommodate anything from fussing over Oxford commas to writing lengthy essays. What are we editing? An encyclopedia — something specific that everyone can easily identify but something that can be literally about anything, from plants to trains to Pokémon.

The second factor cited by Hill was a relatively low barrier to entry. In order to achieve a critical mass of contributors, it needs to be easy to contribute. This includes all sorts of technological, social, psychological, and even aesthetic factors. Anyone who has watched a student wrestle with logging into a library proxy and try to search an unfamiliar database, then give up and just Google something knows that these barriers matter. Anyone who has given up halfway through the purchasing process on an e-commerce site has experienced the problem for themselves.

Wikipedia succeeded in lowering these barriers due to a number of factors. The innovative wiki software allowed essentially real-time collaboration. The markup language was simple enough to easily grasp, at least for the tech-savvy users of Web 1.0. The fact that you didn't even have to log in to edit meant you could quickly edit a typo with little learning curve and no commitment. Wikipedia had yet to develop the large thicket of policies and procedures that stymie new users today. Whether or not this is all still true has significant bearing on the future potential of Wikipedia, but it was true then, and was a large part of its explosive growth.

Deemphasizing the idea of authorship has served to emphasize the existence of Wikipedia as a common, shared good. It also made many people more willing to contribute due to the absence of territoriality and implied ownership of content.

The final factor was the low social ownership of content. Many sites assumed that some sort of social reward in the form of recognition would be an incentive for people to participate. On Everything2, for example, this took the form of a video-game like system of experience points and levels. At the top of each article (called "writeups" on E2), the name of its contributor was prominently featured and the contributors could be rewarded with points by other users in the form of voting.

Intuitively it seems the lack of recognition and control of your contributions on Wikipedia would be a disincentive, as it was for me at first. Wikipedia records the author of every single contribution, down to punctuation, but finding that information requires some knowledge and experience with wiki software, rendering the authorship essentially opaque. It didn't hurt that Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality has caused the writing to develop an emotionless tone largely bereft of an authorial voice.

However, deemphasizing the idea of authorship has served to emphasize the existence of Wikipedia as a common, shared good. It also made many people more willing to contribute due to the absence of territoriality and implied ownership of content. People are more willing to alter and improve writing if they don't perceive it as belonging to another person. "Ironically," Hill writes, "the fact that Wikipedia made authorship less scrutable opened the door to deeper and more widespread collaboration."

Why is all of this important? If Wikipedia is able to change to meet the challenges of our jetpack-less future, it must know how to change, and to know how to change you must know how you succeeded in the first place, whether you examine the matter through Hill's framework or some other lens. However, Hill's conclusions are largely unknown even among specialists, and certainly to most of the core editor base of Wikipedia. As Hill notes, it's common to attribute Wikipedia's success to some combination of luck, timing, and technological superiority, despite the lack of empirical data for these conclusions. Even Joseph Reagle, in Good Faith Collaboration, concludes his book-length examination of Wikipedia by writing that it was "born almost as a happy accident."

On Wikipedia, the solution is to throw volunteers at it until it is fixed, somehow, eventually. Wikipedia is the world's most successful example of a crowdsourced volunteer project, of course, but we forget that many crowdsourcing projects simply fail.

Besides, you can't empirically measure luck in any case, so if you conclude that Wikipedia succeeded through sheer luck, you are basically concluding that the matter is inscrutable or unexplainable. This has more significant implications than a mere academic debate. When confronting new challenges for the encyclopedia, it's a case of the classic problem having a hammer and treating every problem as if it were a nail. The temptation amongst Wikipedia editors is to simply do the same thing all over again, even if the solution has no relationship to the problem, and wasn't even the solution in the first place.

On Wikipedia, the solution is to throw volunteers at it until it is fixed, somehow, eventually. Wikipedia is the world's most successful example of a crowdsourced volunteer project, of course, but we forget that many crowdsourcing projects simply fail. Crowdsourcing isn't the reason Wikipedia succeeded and we can't simply throw it at every problem as if it were magic. It's very much like today's technological hucksters who claim adding blockchain to everything will somehow result in a more successful and innovative product. This has even spread to include, amusingly, a recent Wikipedia competitor called Everipedia, which hired Larry Sanger as its CIO in 2017 in one of his desperate bids for post-Wikipedia relevance.

Without volunteers, of course, Wikipedia would have been impossible. The largest and most sustained volunteer mobilization in human history has resulted in the largest and most widely used information resource in human history. It has been so successful that any attempt to accurately describe the scope of what has been achieved inevitably resembles hyperbole. The entire project (or more accurately, collection of projects) has been driven entirely by those who volunteer their labor to generate the content or money to keep the servers running.

Naturally and appropriately, much of the discussion about Wikipedia has revolved around the dedication, ingenuity, intelligence, and other positive traits of volunteers. What this discussion omits is that, often, volunteers are terrible. They act out of their own self-interest, their social and psychological needs, and their biases and grudges. Some of this is perfectly appropriate, as no act can be purely selfless, and many volunteer projects are successful precisely because they have found a way to harness volunteer energy and satisfy the healthy needs of volunteers, and these needs can serve as incentives to continued volunteer participation. In practice, however, many volunteers, consciously or not, put their own needs ahead of the mission they purport to be serving.

Jalt is a natural, understandable impulse. After all, if you're a pizza delivery guy or IT help desk employee who has contributed thousands of unpaid hours to Wikipedia, it's natural to get a little annoyed when Jimmy Wales gets to honeymoon on Richard Branson's private island.

The most widely cited example of a discussion of this problem is probably Yochai Benkler's seminal paper "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm." Benkler coined the word jalt to describe the combination of jealousy and altruism affecting those working on volunteer projects. Though it is seldom discussed in that context, jalt has become one of the most powerful factors shaping the behavior of a number of the most active participants on Wikipedia. Jalt is a natural, understandable impulse. After all, if you're a pizza delivery guy or IT help desk employee who has contributed thousands of unpaid hours to Wikipedia, it's natural to get a little annoyed when Jimmy Wales gets to honeymoon on Richard Branson's private island.

A little green-eyed jealousy is harmless, but real problems begin when that altruism blossoms into a sense of entitlement. In 2011, an episode of This American Life focused on Daniel H. Weiss, the former manager of the gift shops at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. (Weiss is now president and COO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City). The gift shops were staffed entirely with volunteers, and the Kennedy Center had some three hundred of them. "Many of them," Weiss noted, "simply wanted to be in the Kennedy Center to support the mission," an admirable, altruistic impulse.

The well-stocked and well-staffed gift shops were somehow not generating that much money for the Kennedy Center, and it was estimated that the shortfall was about 150 thousand dollars. Weiss was charged with getting to the bottom of the matter, taking him from investigating the books to undercover stakeouts with a United States Park Police detective. The cause was not one or two thieves or a ring of crooks, it was everyone. Despite (or as we will see, precisely because of) the altruism of all involved, theft of both cash and merchandize was rampant amongst the hundreds of volunteers who staffed the gift shops.

Weiss recalled that:

There were some volunteers who were taking money. There were some young employees who were taking money. There were lots of people who were taking merchandise, at every level. People were all stealing from this wonderful, uplifting organization because they could. Because it was easy and it was available.
— This American Life, 431, See no Evil, Act Three

According to This American Life:

...people weren't just grabbing t-shirts. Some had been taking cash-- mostly small amounts, like a cab fare home. After all, they'd just worked three hours for free. It's just a few dollars. What's the harm? But still, they put their hands in the cash box, took some bills out, and put the money in their pockets.
— This American Life, 431, See no Evil, Act Three

The altruism of these volunteers has grown beyond petty jealousies and grown into a sense of entitlement that provides a self-justification for acts that cause direct harm to the mission that they profess to be working to support. The harm need not be physical or monetary to directly impact the mission, it can be a harm to morale or harm that prompts volunteers to leave a project, or never engage with it in the first place.

Likely hundreds of examples of this kind of harm can be found a day on Wikipedia. The most common is what's referred to as "biting the newcomers," or hostile engagement with editors new to Wikipedia. This has been cautioned against since the earliest days of Wikipedia, but if anything the practice is accelerating as Wikipedia's policies, procedures, and the use of jargon and acronyms for both grow like kudzu. It's an easy enough practice to fall into even for well-meaning editors, who tire at having to deal with the same issue a hundredth time, and even easier for the many editors who proudly proclaim their abrasiveness and, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, imagine themselves paragons of frankness.

This is, of course, another example of entitlement promoting volunteers to place their own personal needs over the health of the project. For all the triumphant citing of metrics by proponents of Wikimedia projects, one unmeasurable metric that is never cited is the loss of the volunteers who depart or never engage in the first place because of the barriers to entry, one of the most cited of which is hostile editors.

As we've seen from Hill's framework, a low barrier to entry was a key factor in the explosive growth and success of Wikipedia. The editors needed to create, maintain, and update millions of articles will not continue to join the project if the existing ones are hostile. This is all the more critical as Wikipedia grows into a part of the online and information infrastructure and fewer people see it as a distinct project they can participate in themselves. Elsewhere I've called this problem the "conceptual barrier," the inability or resistance of people to seeing themselves as having the ability and capability to edit Wikipedia.

Paradoxically, the encyclopedia "anyone can edit" grew out of a community hostile to outsiders, where new participants were unwelcome because they were unaware of or thought not to share community norms and values.

Studies have shown that many readers see Wikipedia as one of many search engine results, not as a distinct resource they could search on their own. This problem will only grow as more people interact with information from Wikipedia in different ways: on mobile devices, through the Google Knowledge graph, read to them by an Alexa or other smart device. New editors cannot be recruited to volunteer on Wikipedia if they cannot overcome the barriers to entry, or even conceive of Wikipedia in the same way as its existing editors do.

Yet most of those existing editors, at least the most vocal ones, refuse to acknowledge dwindling volunteer recruitment as a problem. Much of this refusal is likely a result of the culture of Wikipedia itself. It's been well established that the culture of an organization is derived from its original participants and persists long after those individuals depart. Wikipedia grew out of early online and open-source communities, and undoubtedly this has contributed to its flexibility and dynamism. However it has also contributed to its exclusionism. Paradoxically, the encyclopedia "anyone can edit" grew out of a community hostile to outsiders, where new participants were unwelcome because they were unaware of or thought not to share community norms and values. Recall the concept of "eternal September" from USENET, when new users were perceived to swamp and disrupt online communities at the beginning of the fall semester when they regained internet access after returning to school.

This inherited culture has also influenced how decisions are made and who gets to make them on Wikipedia. Decision-making on Wikipedia revolves around "consensus," where those participating collaboratively come to a conclusion, through a process of voting and discussion. This is justifiably celebrated as transparent and democratic, but there's also a deliberate process to exclude people from the discussion. New editors arriving to participate in a discussion are rejected as "meat puppets" and even the opinions of established editors are rejected if they've been asked to participate or become aware of the discussion through certain channels, such as a social media post.

Effectively, Wikipedia decision-making has been ceded to a small group of obsessives whose hobby is Wikipedia governance.

The principle of decisions being made by those who are doing the work and supporting the mission grew out of those online communities that gave birth to Wikipedia's organizational culture, and the principle seems logical enough for an open-source software project. Can this kind of exclusion be justified by an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" and is the world's largest information resource? Why should decisions that affect how information is disseminated around the entire world be made by a handful of participants who are almost certainly English-speaking white males privileged by their access to computer literacy, free time, and awareness of a particular discussion?

In practice, to have a voice in a Wikipedia discussion requires a combination of stubbornness and privilege. It requires the knowledge and experience of how to monitor these discussions and the free time to participate in them before they conclude. Even well-established Wikipedia veteran editors don't have a voice in these discussions, because they don't constantly keep tabs on particular discussion forums. Effectively, Wikipedia decision-making has been ceded to a small group of obsessives whose hobby is Wikipedia governance.

In 2015, an article about a Wikipedia editor named Bryan Henderson was widely discussed in American media outlets, and Henderson was even interviewed for a brief profile on CBS News. Henderson, who edits Wikipedia under the user name Giraffedata, is obsessively focused on one thing, removing the words "comprised of" – a phrase he considers grammatically incorrect – from all Wikipedia articles. In the media and on Wikipedia, Henderson's quest has been largely treated with bemusement.

It's more serious when you realize this is the basic dynamic for Wikipedia decision making and control. The logical, sane response to disagreeing with Giraffedata is to shrug and move on. Since decisions are by those who participate in a localized discussion, leaving cedes the decision-making power to those willing to engage in the least logical and sane response. This incentivizes not just obsessive but also belligerent behavior and even harassment, and empowers those privileged with the time and resources to engage in this behavior. Minor quibbles about grammar is one thing, but these techniques are frequently used by political ideologues, ethnic nationalists, and conspiracy theorists. Professor Bryce Peake called this the "hegemony of the asshole consensus."

Even without a particular agenda, a potent sense of volunteer entitlement is a key driver of the asshole consensus. This is directed not just at new editors; in many cases the worst of it is directed at volunteers in key positions and employees of the Wikimedia Foundation. An exemplar is a comment unironically directed at a volunteer MediaWiki software developer: "We, the community are the souvereign [sic]."

A quote frequently deployed in this context is this: "We are here to build an encyclopedia, not to sing kumbaya, and this is a shop floor."

If it were only a matter of it being an unpleasant or even hostile experience for many contributors, that unpleasant reality could be arguably dismissed if it resulted in a successful encyclopedia for both volunteers and readers. This is exactly what the asshole consensus argues. A quote frequently deployed in this context is this: "We are here to build an encyclopedia, not to sing kumbaya, and this is a shop floor." The intellectual labor of encyclopedia creation is likened to a fetishized male, blue collar workplace, diminishing and dismissing other modes of contribution, styles of communication, and types of volunteers.

The framing of the asshole consensus rests on a priori assumptions that this behavior is necessary for a successful project, and actually results in one. By their standards, it is successful, successful for them. When measured against the publicly stated mission, norms, and principles of the project — "be bold," innovate, treat one another with civility — it is an utter failure.

Innovation in particular suffers from the established consensus. One infamous example is a notorious controversy in Wikipedia's recent history that revolved around something called "superprotect," briefly instituted in 2014. Wikipedia administrators have always been able to protect pages, everything from articles to pages containing programming code, from changes due to vandalism and other mischief. When the Wikimedia Foundation wanted to prevent administrators on the German Wikipedia from removing a new feature they had developed called Media Viewer, they created a new type of protection that even administrators could not override, only some WMF staffers.

As you might imagine, this created a gigantic uproar from not just the German Wikipedia, but the entire Wikimedia community. There's no question this was a serious misstep by the WMF. They acknowledged as much when they removed it a year later, with the then-executive director stating that it "set up a precedent of mistrust." To this day, superprotect is constantly invoked in response to a perceived threat of WMF overreach or to assert the privileges of established editors and administrators over the Foundation.

It is no accident that the text-heavy interface of today's Wikipedia looks much like it did in 2001 and is not geared towards today's internet users; it is a direct result of this resistance to change and innovation.

It's worth examining what this event illustrates about Wikipedia community dynamics. While it is framed as a triumph of the community over oppression, the reaction is part of a pattern that constantly reoccurs in situations that lack any oppressive acts by the WMF or other forces: An improvement that provides new functionality is introduced and it immediately faces hostile resistance from entrenched volunteers.

Not coincidentally, the innovations that bring the most vociferous resistance are ones designed to improve the reading and editing experience for those outside the established community: Media Viewer was designed to make viewing images and media on Wikimedia projects easier; Visual Editor introduced a WYSIWYG editor so new contributors didn't have to wrestle with confusing wiki markup text; the content translation tool was designed to make translating articles between different language Wikipedias far easier. It is no accident that the text-heavy interface of today's Wikipedia looks much like it did in 2001 and is not geared towards today's internet users; it is a direct result of this resistance to change and innovation.

Wikipedia's community has inherited an antipathy to new contributors from the early internet projects it grew out of. Sometimes that antipathy is expressed in the form of direct hostility towards the contributors themselves, other times it is in resistance to changes and improvements that improve the recruitment or experience of new contributors.

Even in the form of indifference the antipathy is not benign, as established contributors center their own experience over that of the new contributor or reader. The actual mission of the project is secondary, the sense of entitlement of the volunteer is paramount. The entitled volunteer resists improvement because it upsets their comfortable vision of how things should be done in a way that accommodates them, regardless of the harm this does to the project and mission they are supposedly volunteering on behalf of. They are indifferent to examinations like Benjamin Hill's of how and why Wikipedia succeeded; they prefer an explanation involving serendipity or inevitability because what matters is not the success of Wikipedia's mission, but their own gratification and entitlement.

Wikipedia was able to surpass projects like Microsoft Encarta and the Encyclopedia Britannica because it brushed aside the gatekeepers in favor of flexibility and innovation. Over the last two decades, however, Wikipedia's institutional culture has exchanged flexibility for bureaucracy and established volunteers have set themselves up as the new gatekeepers. Collectively they form a Team Encarta stifling innovation in favor of ossification.

Footnotes

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Turkey's back up, but what's happening with Dot-org and a new visual identity?

By Smallbones and Indy beetle

Dot-org to be owned by venture capitalists?

In November 2019, the nonprofit Internet Society announced that it had reached a $1.1 billion deal with a fledgling private equity investment firm, Ethos Capital, to sell the Public Interest Registry and thus its control of the .org web domain. Dot-org has been under the stewardship of the Internet Society since it was founded in 1985 for use by nonprofit organizations, and managed through the PIR since 2003. The domain has been available to for-profit enterprises in recent years. The sale blindsided many web leaders, while the Internet Society explained that it was focusing on other goals and was not keen on spending its time managing domains. Hundreds of nonprofits voiced their objection, raising fears that Ethos would raise prices or attempt to censor information or sell data gleaned from hosting their websites.

WMF Executive Director and potential director of a new cooperative, Katherine Maher

In 2013, wiki and open source websites made up the largest share of users of .org, holding 22% of the registered domains. According to Alexa Internet, as of the time of writing Wikipedia has the highest volume of traffic of any global website that uses the .org domain, ranking as the 13th most used website.

Reuters broke the news early this month that a group of concerned internet nonprofit leaders were appealing to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to block the sale, and had moved to create a nonprofit cooperative, the Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants, as an alternative buyer of the .org domain. Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Katherine Maher has offered herself to be one of seven directors of the new cooperative. She told Reuters, "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit." Maher also said that the organization was not offering a competing bid for .org, but wishes to obtain it to safeguard its integrity and ensure that the sites it hosts are not subject to censorship. The NonProfit Times added that a few members of the United States Congress have declared their opposition to the sale.

Turkish Wikipedia back up and running

Last month's Constitutional Court decision in Turkey did not have immediate effect, as pointed out by Wikipedian John Lubbock in the Ahval News story "Wikipedia is good for the Turkish economy and education sector - but it's still being blocked". Five days after Lubbock's article and three weeks after the Constitutional Court ruled against the ban "Turkey Lifts More Than 2-Year Block of Wikipedia" according to the Associated Press.

Other sites reporting on the ban being lifted include WMF News "Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years".

New Wikipedia visual design

Snøhetta Selected to Design the New Visual Identity for the Open-Source Platform Wikipedia: Snøhetta is a successful Norwegian architecture/design firm. Eight companies competed for the contract, according to Aftenposten (in Norwegian). A joint WMF-Snøhetta webpage has been set up. Community consultations will be held.

In brief

• Techcrunch is the first to notice that the English Wikipedia has six million articles, with their story soon translated into Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish. Other English-language media including The Economic Times of India covered the story.
• We're number 2 (we used to be number 1) YouTube's Organic Visibility Tops Wikipedia in Google SERPs. That's Search Engine Results Pages, meaning that YouTube now appears more often than Wikipedia on the first page of Google search results.
• Beware of malware: Gadget and some other outlets have reported on recent, unsettling findings by Kaspersky Lab researchers into Shlayer, a group of Trojan horse malware programs that target macOS. One method by which the malware was spread was through links which, when clicked by unsuspecting victims, downloaded the program. The researchers found that even Wikipedia had been affected, as "such links were hidden in the articles' references. Users that clicked on these links would also get redirected to the Shlayer download landing pages." The full report on the findings can be found here.
• The Sum of What? On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia: Author Kirsten Menger-Anderson reviews the number of women academics cited in Wikipedia articles on literature and mathematics on Undark. She finds that women are generally cited much less often than their male peers in both categories, and noted that Wikimedia's list of 31 writers essential for every language Wikipedia includes no women. Ultimately, she suggests that Wikipedia's gender bias is a product of both its own features and pre-existing disparities in the academic community.
• Fighting fake news: Omer Benjakob of Haaretz writes about Wikipedia cracking down on misinformation and blocking sources deemed untrustworthy, and thinks we do a whole lot better job of it than social media giant Facebook.
• Wikipedia caught up in Indian liability changes: Tech Crunch reports on proposed changes to Indian liability regulations that require web "intermediaries" to better identify content creators and filter what they produce to avoid legal liability. The move has generated an outcry from the tech community, including WMF general counsel Amanda Keton, who warned that such action could interfere with the functioning of Wikipedia.
• An Introduction to Python for SEO Pros Using Spreadsheets: An article on how Python can be used to manipulate data extracted from Wikipedia, another example of Wikipedia being used to teach programming. Cf. Recent Research: "Wikipedia as a learning resource (for programmers)".

• External audio
  The Story Behind Wikipedia, 23:37, Innovation Hub (WGBH and PRX)

  Wikipedia's Volunteer Army: Media expert Andrew Lih is interviewed by WGBH (FM) (Boston) on how Wikipedia works.
• Meet the 9 Wikipedia bots that make the world's largest encyclopedia possible (see also our earlier review of the underlying research paper: "First census of Wikipedia bots")
• Katherine Maher interviewed: The WMF Director shares her thoughts (in Spanish) on Wikipedia's usefulness and its future with artificial intelligence to The Clinic.

Political impropriety roundup

There were four main instances real-world politics and allegations coming up on Wikipedia this month in the form of vandalism or sharp content alterations, accompanied by an unusual enthusiasm for criminal investigations. The Signpost would like to advise political actors that Wikipedia is not a court of public opinion.

• Policing vandalism or ownership by the police? In a strange display of both vandalism and apparent government assertion of ownership of content, an IP editor "cyber criminal" inserted disparaging language into the Uttar Pradesh Police article, which the real-world department discovered and reverted, as reported by The Times of India. The apparent police editor account, User:Patroitwarrior, also took the chance to insert that the department is "one of the finest and technologically advanced police forces in the world". Director General of Police for technical services Asim Arun confirmed to the Times that the department was responsible for the reversions, saying "Within hours [of being notified], the department removed the objectionable content." Arun continued, "We value the Wiki principles of sharing of information, but will take steps to prevent such vandalism. We are trying to identify the culprit and will lodge an FIR." An admin stepped in to admonish Patroitwarrior to disclose any COIs and protected the Uttar Pradesh Police page to prevent further vandalism.
• "Sunda imperialism" or trolling overblown? CNN Indonesia and Tempo have reported on what appears to be an overblown incident of vandalism. An IP editor altered the article for the United Nations to say that the first session of the UN General Assembly was held in Indonesia instead of the United Kingdom. Though the vandalism was quickly reverted, politician and self-proclaimed internet "expert" Roy Suryo decided to bring it to the attention of the Jakarta Police, accusing a mysterious social media group known as the "Sunda Empire" of being responsible. Spreading fake news across electronic media is illegal in Indonesia, and police have opened an investigation.
• Aspersions against a Dutch politician lead to Maltese parliamentary inquiry: The Shift News reported that an IP address added information to the article for Pieter Omtzigt in October 2019, accusing him of paying bribes while investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to secure fake evidence that the plane's crash was Ukraine's fault and absolve Russia of suspicion. The IP address is used by a government ministry in Malta. Omtzigt suggested that this was related to his investigation into the death of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, which was not warmly received by the Maltese government. The accusation has since been removed from the Wikipedia article. Later, the Times of Malta wrote that the incident led to questions being raised in Parliament, following which the Ministry of Education declared that it had, after conducting a "technical investigation", located the responsible editor, a contract employee, and dismissed them. Maltese MP Jason Azzopardi took to Twitter to demand that the culprit's name be made public and that they be brought up on criminal charges. Minister for Home Affairs Byron Camilleri assured Parliament that police had concluded that no crime was committed. The Signpost surmises that Azzopardi might have to contact authorities in Uttar Pradesh or Indonesia to get his wish.
• British politician apparently COI edits out mentions of his financial conflicts of interest: According to an article in The Independent, British Member of Parliament Stuart Anderson "appears to have edited his own Wikipedia page". An account named "Stuart Anderson MP" removed "references to funding that one of his companies received from the EU and information about illegal dividends that he was paid". The account was warned about conflict of interest guidelines and then blocked pending a change of username or confirmation of identity. A Signpost request for information from Anderson's new parliamentary e-mail account received an automated response saying that since Anderson was newly elected, a response would be delayed.

Oddities

• The tax man says Strass: What do Australians and New Zealanders call a Boloney-like substance that before WWI was called "German sausage". According to the Wikipedia article it's "polony," "luncheon sausage," "Belgium," "devon," "Windsor sausage" and "fritz". "Bung Fritz" is incorrect because that delicacy includes sheep appendices. According to Gizmodo Australia on January 16 someone at the Australian Tax Office added another name variant that same day, "Strass". The ATO issued a gentle reminder that their employees should confine their use of office computers to official business. The article raises three important questions. Don't ATO employees have anything better to do than put "Strass" into Wikipedia articles? Don't Gizmodo journalists have anything better to write about than this? And what do Ozzies call salami?
• The tax man knows where all the skeletons are buried: In the latest incarnation of the meme "He doesn't have an article on Wikipedia, so he must not be very important," CNN announced Mikhail Mishustin didn't have an English Wikipedia page on Wednesday morning. A day later, he's Russia's prime minister. The Russian-language Wikipedia has had an article on Mishustin, the former head of the Russian Federal Tax Service, since 2010.
• Captain America thinks Wikipedia articles are too long: Chris Evans, who has played superhero Captain America in ten films, is founding a new website dedicated to showing one-minute videos of politicians explaining basic topics in the news such as DACA and NAFTA. According to Slate, Evans's motivations include the belief that people would rather get the information from politicians in a short video than in Wikipedia articles, which are too long to read. The Signpost suggests that he freely license the videos so that Wikipedia can put them in our articles if his website is taken down.
• Obsessed with Wikipedia 'personal life' entries? You're not alone. by Emily Yahr in The Washington Post. Did you know that Joe Pesci broke the same rib, 15 years apart, both times while filming a Martin Scorsese directed movie? And that Pesci's second wife was convicted of attempted murder-for-hire aimed at another of her ex-husbands. Wikipedia's personal life sections have got to be better than soap operas.
• We don't usually cite the crypto press here, but Decrypt's Do "no-coiners" gate-keep Crypto Wikipedia? send up of admin and crypto-skeptic David Gerard is almost as good as Gerard's Signpost contribution this month.

References

For a detailed compilation of news about Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Press coverage 2020
Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next months's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Three cases at ArbCom

By Smallbones

There are three open cases, all involving administrators, now in different phases at the Arbitration Committee.

RHaworth

A case against RHaworth, who has been an administrator for over 14 years, was proposed by Tony Ballioni for improperly unblocking an editor who had been blocked by a checkuser. The workshop phase has now closed, with the proposed decision set to open today.

Portals

The Proposed decision is progressing quickly. All 15 arbitrators are active on the case, including the newly elected arbs. The two participants are BrownHairedGirl, who argues strongly against portals, and Northamerica1000 who has been editing them. Votes for proposed remedies suggest that BrownHairedGirl could be desysopped and admonished for incivility. There are currently no proposed remedies targeting Northamerica1000.

Kudpung

A case against Kudpung has opened and is in the evidence phase. The original case was brought by Guerillero for alleged incivility by Kudpung. That matter appeared to have been solved by an apology, but as sometimes happens other editors made other complaints, including incivility and conduct unbecoming of an admin. Kudpung is a former editor-in-chief of The Signpost. Chris.sherlock cited the alleged incivility in the evidence phase. Recused arb GorillaWarfare contributed the longest section on the page. Four other arbs have recused themselves, Beeblebrox, Newyorkbrad, Worm That Turned, and DGG. The evidence phase is scheduled to close on January 28, 2020. The workshop is scheduled for a February 4 close, with the proposed decision to be posted by February 11.

Trainee clerk

Money emoji has been appointed as trainee clerk for ArbCom.

Correction: Guerillero proposed the case against Kudpung, rather than Chris.sherlock, as earlier reported.

Reader comments

2020-01-27

The most viewed articles of 2019

By Igordebraga, Serendipodous, Stormy clouds, A lad insane and Pythoncoder

This traffic report is adapted from the 2019 Top 50 Report, prepared with commentary by Stormy clouds, Serendipodous, Pythoncoder, Igordebraga and A lad insane.

Annual Top 50

Based on the raw data from West.andrew.g and prepared with commentary by:

•   Stormy clouds
•   Serendipodous
•   Pythoncoder
•   Igordebraga
•   A lad insane

Time Keeps On Slipping, Into the Past

The Top 25 Report, and by extension this yearly Top 50, is supposed to be the newest things that are capturing reader attention. So what a surprise that many entries of 2019 are actually people and events from many years ago, that got a viewer boost for being the subjects of shows and movies on Netflix, HBO, and Hulu, and even plain theatrical films! Or that the 2018 movies Bohemian Rhapsody and Aquaman managed to inspire more views than events such as the election of Boris Johnson or the Notre-Dame de Paris fire. Fitting of all this looking backwards is that the top article of the year is a movie featuring time travel, Avengers: Endgame, which broke box office records (#6) in a display of how dominant superhero adaptations have gotten: not even death (both the ever-present yearly list and four famous deceased people) could beat the Marvel Cinematic Universe! There are five more entries related to that franchise, including an actress; DC Comics at least got one movie in the top ten and two actors somewhere else. For those not pleased with so much old stuff, somehow the top 10 got a singer who turned 18 this year, and #29 is a website loved by young people. Otherwise, the subjects are many of the usual offenders: movies, television (and Star Wars releases in both!), politics, India, YouTube, and a few people who remain popular every year.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About	Peak
1	Avengers: Endgame		44,243,400		In the comics, Thanos is always wanting to court Death. Well, on Wikipedia he managed to conquer her, preventing the yearly death list from topping the Report (like Trump back in 2016) for three years straight, thanks to a three hour epic where all the Marvel Cinematic Universe heroes gang up to beat the Mad Titan – that's what you get for decimating half the life in the universe! For being the culmination of 21 movies – some of whom are revisited through time travel – and also serving to solve the aforementioned massacre that closed last year's Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame had a huge crowd waiting for it, and thus managed to break the $2.8 billion box office record set by Avatar nine years ago (for now), with positive reviews and fan reception, to boot.	Apr. 26 (released)
2	Deaths in 2019		38,793,582		Wikipedians have never been the type to shy away from death. Ever since the Top 25 came into being, this article's yearly equivalent has been on the list effectively every week (with a few exceptions) and its popularity carries over to the yearly report. Typically (but not always) the article serves as the list's lodestone, its position indicating the hotness of each week's news. This year's features included Doris Day, Carroll Spinney, and my sleep cycle.	Jul. 28
3	Ted Bundy		29,419,244		January 24, 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of the death one of America's most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy benefitted from the relatively lax law enforcement of the 1970s to torture, murder and sexually desecrate the corpses at least 20, possibly 30 and perhaps even more young women across seven states. To mark that anniversary, Netflix launched two events: Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, a multi-part documentary, and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, a biopic starring Zac Efron in the title role. Netflix later attempted to rein in what it had unleashed when comments by the thousand cried the call common even when he was alive, that he was "too good looking" to be a serial killer.	Jan. 26 (Netflix series)
4	Freddie Mercury		27,490,878		Since the release of Bohemian Rhapsody there has been a renewed race among denizens of Wikipedia to discover the magic that drove fans gaga for years. Many found that the poorly edited and effectively fictional mess deviated dramatically from reality upon doing so, but Rami Malek earned his Oscar by playing the game. If anything, the popularity of Mercury over the past two years shows that there truly was no one like him, and that in spite of his untimely demise, he still rocks us, and still lives in our perfect dream.	Feb. 25 (Bohemian Rhapsody wins 3 Oscars)
5	Chernobyl disaster		25,571,308		The second screen is back, as viewers of the highly acclaimed miniseries depended on Wikipedia to provide them with necessary background information for this horrifying and intensely confusing disaster. While the miniseries was the driving force behind the rise, Chernobyl had been echoing in our subconscious for some time, with video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Fallout 3, The Last Of Us and Metro: Exodus drawing clear inspiration from Pripyat, the eerie ghost town left behind by the meltdown.	May 28 (episode 4 of Chernobyl)
6	List of highest-grossing films		25,030,589		Avengers: Endgame closed out one chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on a high note, becoming the highest-grossing film of all time, though just barely—it only claimed the record following rereleases that featured deleted scenes. Endgame wasn't the only movie that made the top 50 list—Joker, The Lion King, Spider-Man: Far from Home, Toy Story 4, Joker, and Aladdin all entered the history books this year, with each grossing over $1 billion. Part of the reason why this list is dominated by recent releases is the effect of inflation. The inflation-adjusted list still shows an impressive result for Avengers: Endgame, but it’s nowhere near Gone with the Wind, which made $3.7 billion in 2019 dollars.	May 6 (Endgame grosses a billion dollars in a week)
7	Joker (2019 film)		23,014,723		Arthur Fleck got what he deserved, even if some people died in the way. Todd Phillips combined the Martin Scorsese movies Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy with the deranged sociopathic clown from DC Comics, featuring Joaquin Phoenix as a loony jester in early 80s not-New York who eventually snaps out. Even if there was some controversy regarding Joker’s plentiful violence, audiences flocked to see it, and the movie managed the feat of grossing $1 billion worldwide even with high content ratings. Having already won the Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival, Joker is also starting to get recognized by the awards circuit, particularly Phoenix's performance.	Oct. 4 (release)
8	List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films		21,971,962		The Marvel Cinematic Universe is certainly a convoluted one, with a plethora of fast-paced movies populating the category and defining its fact and fiction. Three of these movies was released this year – #1, #13, and #20 – and while I haven't seen them, or any of the movies, I do know people who are quite invested in the storyline, and that a lot of the plot is dependent on other movies. Perhaps many of the people driven here were family members of those who are acquainted with all the ins and outs of the Avengers, and arrived with intentions to figure out what was going on in this movie they were just dragged to watch.	Apr. 28 (release of Endgame)
9	Billie Eilish		20,883,098		2019 bore witness to the meteoric rise of Billie Eilish in the music scene, and the intense furore surrounding the singer and her fervent fans propel her to a lofty slot in the upper echelons of the Report, cementing her position as one of the foremost musical artists of the here-and-now. She has received acclaim for ostensible depth and maturity in her songs. More pertinently, however, it saw her ascend towards the top of the mental list I have compiled of musicians that I cannot for the life of me abide, joining the hallowed ranks of Ed Sheeran.	Sep. 29 (musical guest on Saturday Night Live)
10	Keanu Reeves		16,957,251		Every 10 years or so, we seem to collectively fall in love with Keanu Reeves. While he may not be the world's best actor, his boundless charisma and seemingly genuine niceness (a hard thing to fake in the viral era) have earned him the title "the Internet's boyfriend". Though news is he is now taken, having begun a relationship with artist Alexandra Grant. A slew of current projects, including John Wick: Chapter 3, Toy Story 4 and Cyberpunk 2077 (which led to the most memed heckle and response of the year) have led to talk of a "Keanissance"; here's hoping his upcoming projects, including a new Matrix, a new John Wick, and even, at long last, a new Bill and Ted, can keep the flame burning.	Jun. 12 (appeared on E3 panel for Cyberpunk 2077)
11	Jeffrey Epstein		16,186,956		As if the political culture in the USA weren't bizarre already, when the death of a convicted sex offender becomes an Internet meme something must be up. This financier was arrested on July 6 – again – on charges relating to child sex trafficking. A little more than a month later, he was dead by apparent suicide. The recurring sentence "Epstein didn't kill himself" worked its way onto beer cans, the snow at Niagara Falls, and plenty elsewhere. More recently, the lost camera footage from his first suicide attempt previously written off as lost allegedly resurfaced, provoking suspicion of a deepfake from the culprits.	Aug. 10 (died)
12	Elizabeth II		16,004,683		Her Majesty just can't leave the top 50. Even as all her Royal cohorts fled the field, she stands tall, like Jodhi May in The Witcher, only with less chance of dying. 2019 was not a banner year for the British Royal Family: Prince Philip was involved in a car crash that left two people injured; Prince Andrew, reportedly Liz's favourite son, stepped down from Royal duties after failing to clear his messy connections to Jeffrey Epstein (see #11), and Boris Johnson dragged her into a constitutional crisis by forcing her to agree to an illegal prorogation of Parliament. But hey! The Crown's good, right? I assume. I mean it must be, given that it's the only reason she's on here.	Nov. 18 (The Crown season 3 released)
13	Captain Marvel (film)		15,788,749		Like Wonder Woman two years ago, Captain Marvel proved that audiences can care for a superheroine movie ($1 billion dollars worldwide!) if it's well made, with the bonus that Marvel fans just had to see why the post-credits scene of Avengers: Infinity War alluded that Carol Danvers would be instrumental in the defeat of Thanos in our #1. And there, Brie Larson's heroine has a fairly minor role, if only for being a bit overpowered: after all, the solo movie shows that once her full strength is unleashed, no army or even armada can stand a chance against this seemingly extraterrestrial soldier that after crash-landing in 1995 Los Angeles, discovers she is actually a former Air Force pilot, and that her bosses were hiding many things about the war Danvers was fighting.	Mar. 9 (released)
14	Game of Thrones (season 8)		15,704,798		Sigh. Ah duh wan to talk about the vicious barrage of insults I hurled in vain at the television after the The Long Night's conclusion. Ah duh wan to talk about how, by the time the bells rang I felt nothing, how the entire experience had already been rendered completely hollow beyond the schadenfreude of enjoying the flurry of mocking memes spawned by it. And, tempting as it is, ah duh wan to laugh at the sheer, stark ineptitude of the summit of surviving named characters in the final episode, and the mind-boggling inconsistency of the choices made thereof. No, they can rest easy, and bask in how they turned a storied legacy and a truly decade-defining show into an irrelevancy and a punchline.	Apr. 15 (after season opener)
15	Game of Thrones		15,467,551			May 20 (after series finale)
16	Donald Trump		15,323,229		The President of the United States is not one to shy away from controversy. His most recent newsworthy event (of which there have been many) occurred a mere week or so ago as of my time of writing – the United States House of Representatives voted to impeach him on two counts. He has also drawn press – and thus Wikipedia views – relating to his controversial immigration policy. He also became the first president to set foot in North Korea for quite a while, shortly after setting records by presiding over the longest US government shutdown in history. And as though that wasn't enough, his personal Twitter continues to evoke outrage, praise, and not incredibly much in between. Whatever your personal views are on American politics, Trump has certainly been quite polarizing, and will no doubt likely continue to be even more so. For example, writing this was a fun exercise in NPOV.	Feb. 6 (State of the Union)
17	List of Bollywood films of 2019		14,937,541		India has the second biggest population, the second largest number of native English speakers... and the biggest film industry in the world, the Hindi language Bollywood. This all combines for both the movies to pile up on the crore, and the articles on them to warrant Top 25 Report entries through the year. This year, the biggest hit was the succinctly titled War, which apparently needs many more words to be described for those who've seen it.	Oct. 12 (War climbs the box office)
18	United States		14,683,053		The country where Wikipedia was created, and where I live. The country that, at risk of not presenting a worldly perspective, is the Texas of the globe. A country which has been racked by partisan politics and politicians, many of whom are elsewhere on this list. The populace of the United States, contrary to what its name may suggest, has a unified opinion on precious few topics. The legislative system installed many moons ago to ensure "checks and balances", consisting of two chambers, is as of now split between two very different parties. Each party is unwilling to compromise on anything more controversial than puppies, leading to a plethora of bills stuck between them and never to be seen again. The United States is by no means united – once again, my unofficial theorem that fancy grandiose things in a country's name tend to indicate the opposite in real life appears to demonstrate itself.	Jul. 27
19	Once Upon a Time in Hollywood		13,920,098		After a relatively weak beginning to the cinematic year, with few releases receiving critical acclaim, coupled with general apathy and dissatisfaction for the Oscar winners, the autumn and winter have provided us with many memorable cinematic journeys, setting up an incredibly competitive awards season to come. Arguably the film which bifurcates the year is Tarantino's ninth, released as the summer drew to a close to critical acclaim and adoration from audiences following the customary premiere at Cannes. Perhaps the best way to describe the film is as a reflective ode to the dying days of the Golden Age of Hollywood, revelling in its iconography and genre-hopping through Rick Dalton's roles with gleeful abandon, building to a cathartic, ultra-violent alternate history take on the infamous Manson murders in the vein of Inglorious Basterds. Anchored by enigmatic performances from Leo and Brad, a brilliant 60's soundtrack and rife with humorous dialogue laden with Tarantino's trademark wit, the film is incredibly enjoyable, and in a weaker year (2018, for instance) would comfortably sweep the awards. It still might.	Jul. 28 (released)
20	Spider-Man: Far From Home		13,655,578		The most popular character out of Marvel Comics just had to guarantee an entry, ensuring all MCU releases of the year are in (though not all movies based on the "House of Ideas" entered the list, as Dark Phoenix underwhelmed in pageviews too). After being brought back to life in our #1, Peter Parker traveled to Europe for a school trip, and unfortunately his leisure and attempts at romance had to fall back to donning Spider-Man's suit to discover what mysterio caused some monsters to appear in the Old Continent. That the Webhead entertained audiences worldwide and rode the Endgame wave to make a billion worldwide isn't surprising. Only that following all those profits, Spidey's parents, the one holding the film rights who distributes the movies, and the one related to the comics publisher who produces the films, decided to divorce regarding the child custody conditions, forcing poor Peter to step in and help them make things right before he could never get a trilogy closer for his 59th birthday.	Jul. 3 (released)
21	YouTube		13,642,305		It speaks to Youtube's unshakeable permanence in our daily lives that it can shrug off multiple scandals per year, any one of which would kill another company dead. Paragon of virtue Jake Paul was accused of selling gambling to minors; several Youtubers were accused or convicted of dealing in child pornography; its comment sections were accused of fostering paedophilia rings, and then, in what is likely going to be its most lasting debacle, Youtube claimed it didn't need to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, since it wasn't a children's website, whilst simultaneously bragging to advertisers that it was the number one platform among children. After paying out a $120 million settlement for, well, lying, Youtube did what it always does and foisted the responsiblity for its mistakes onto its content creators. Now, any channel that looks like it might appeal to children, even if it doesn't, will be immediately demonetised. Such is the life of a Youtuber.	Dec. 11 (expands its anti-harrassment rules)
22	The Mandalorian		12,035,150		People watch so much through streaming (just see all the entries for Netflix and Hulu shows) that all media conglomerates are creating their own services. And Disney+ took advantage from one of the franchises from our Mouse overlords in its launch, namely the first Star Wars live-action series. Pedro Pascal plays a bounty hunter raised by the race of Boba Fett, whose job is eventually distracted by an adorable detour. Unlike the Star Wars movie of the year, The Mandalorian got a positive reception and has already been renewed for a second season.	Nov. 13 (shortly after debut)
23	2019 in film		11,776,149		As in previous years, some of Wikipedia’s most viewed articles were about hit movies. In addition to articles like Avengers: Endgame, Joker (2019 film), and Captain Marvel (film) (as well as a few non-superhero movies), film releases generated views for their actors (such as Jason Momoa) and subjects (such as Freddie Mercury). A look at the report as well as the end-of-year box office statistics confirms that superheroes had another great year, as did Disney, whose releases accounted for about 30% of 2019 box-office receipts. 2019 was also a big year for streaming services, as high-profile directors like Martin Scorsese took their films to Netflix, while the franchise-based event films that Scorsese decried as "not cinema" continue to be the most effective strategy to get viewers into theaters.	Apr. 28 (release of Avengers: Endgame)
24	Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker		11,704,282		There's never been a time a Star Wars movie was released that Wikipedia didn't jump all over it. Each new movie released within Wikipedia's reign, of which there have been four including this one, immediately spiked views to its own article and many articles related to it (although Rogue One had some, uh, confounding factors) and spawned vivid debates, ranging from "should the spoiler be in the article" to "who should be on the starring list". This particular installment came with a split opinion – the critical response utterly lambasted the movie, while audiences loved it. Having seen the movie, that sums it up pretty well. I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone – this was the only one I managed to not have spoiled for me, aside from Rogue One – but what I'll say is this: if you know JJ Abrams' reputation for what he did to The Force Awakens and Star Trek Into Darkness, this movie has a lot of the same issues.	Dec. 19 (released)
25	Jason Momoa		11,555,910		Marvel's interconnected movies managed to top our Report, but the attempt at catch-up by their Distinguished Competition (of which our #7 isn't a part of) isn't so lucky, given their only release of the year, Shazam!, couldn't enter the Top 50. Though their movie from December 2018, Aquaman, was so successful that all the views for star Jason Momoa early in the year were enough to buoy him onto two straight lists, when his only acting gigs in 2019 were voicing Aquaman, voicing himself and an Apple+ show. Next year there's a new adaptation of Dune for him.	Feb. 25 (wore pink suit at Oscars)
26	India		11,480,861		As the largest country where English is a major language, Indian readers have a major effect on the Top 25 Report week-in and week-out. The pageviews for Wikipedia's article on India were no doubt increased by the general election that took place this year, where Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party strengthened its majority. Other major events that took place in India in 2019 include India's banning of triple talaq; the Citizenship Act, which has been accused of being discriminatory to Muslims and led to widespread protests; and the Indian government's repeal of the state of Jammu and Kashmir's special status (a review of the accompanying internet block was recently ordered by India's supreme court).	Oct. 2 (Gandhi Jayanti)
27	Nipsey Hussle		11,437,697		2019 had a big addition to the List of murdered hip hop musicians in 33 year old Ermias Joseph Asghedom, AKA Nipsey Hussle, who just one year after releasing an acclaimed debut album, was shot ten times outside a clothes store he owned.	Apr. 1 (died)
28	Cristiano Ronaldo		11,314,893		SIUUUUUU!!!!!! One of the perks of writing for the Report, especially in the year-end edition, is the implicit and unspoken fact that the vast majority of the readership is already familiar with the various entrants to the report. Such is the case with Cristiano Ronaldo, as for those football (fight me Yanks) aficionados, the Portuguese requires no introduction, and for the disinterested, there is nothing I can add, no sporting exploit of such monumental brilliance, that will alter this disinterest. Thus, I am completely unburdened – there are no strings on me. I could mention how the non-phenomenon dragged the Old Lady single-handedly to the quarter-finals of the UCL, only to be bested by Barça Babies, or how he was beaten by an ancient forward for the Golden Boot in his first season in Italy, or how he is still reportedly in low earth orbit following his leap against Sampdoria. Instead, I'm going to briefly sing the praises of the World Champions, Liverpool, who have taken 98 points from the 37 Premier League games they have played this calendar year, last suffering defeat in the competition almost exactly a year ago. In the same time, guided by the gegenpressing genius of Jurgen Klopp, the squad dramatically over-turned a deficit of three goals to dispatch Ronaldo's arch-nemesis from the Champions League en-route to a sixth European Cup, finally putting the historic club back upon their perch.	Mar. 13 (scored hat trick against Atlético Madrid)
29	TikTok		11,285,825		On the clock but the party don't stop. China already makes most of our electronics, so one app they made being embraced everywhere else is to be expected – although, like previous short video platform Vine (with the addition of Musical.ly's lip-synched music), it's hard to find people over 22 who understand TikTok. Not that it stopped a huge year for the app, where it broke the barrier of one billion downloads globally, and revealed the #1 song of the year, "Old Town Road". If you also believe there's no such thing as bad publicity, TikTok being briefly banned in India and being the target of investigations by the US Congress could also be counted as highlights.	Apr. 17 (pulled from stores from India)
30	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez		11,167,197		Note: more American politics ahead. Turn back now if you value your sanity The youngest woman ever to serve in the United States Congress, and currently the youngest serving congressperson in the House of Representatives (and as such would be the Baby of the House, if the U.S. used that term), Ocasio-Cortez is one of four members of said House unofficially known as the Squad, along with Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. The group is noted for their progressive politics and diverse composition. Ocasio-Cortez in particular is also famous for her prolific use of social media to promote her views and support her fellow colleagues. She is also acquainted with the more negative side of social media, and the media in general: she and her companions have been on the receiving end of several tweetstorms from President Donald Trump (#16), typically revolving around national origin but of several different topics. I'd say she isn't as polarizing as Trump by any means – she even tries not to be, from what I can tell – but then again, nothing that isn't cute puppies is entirely unpolarizing here, apparently.	Jan. 4 (assumed office)
31	Us (2019 film)		11,149,839		Some people don't understand the appeal of horror movies, yet they keep on warranting entries on the annual report. 2017 had three, all of whom got follow-ups of sorts this year – and while It Chapter Two and Glass didn't do enough for audiences to get a spot in the list, Jordan Peele, who won an Oscar for Get Out, managed to return. Not that Us is a sequel, to the surprise of those who think Hollywood only operates on franchises: Peele again shows that for a comedian he is really good at creating spooky stories, this time following a family during the unearthing of murderous doppelgängers clad in red carrying scissors. Critics were impressed, and audiences flocked to theaters for their share of scares, leading to Us grossing over 12 times its budget.	Mar. 23 (released)
32	Luke Perry		10,705,783		Stars are called stars for a reason. They're meant to be above us, shining down from their perfect lives; their perfect faces defying the ravages that beset our own, living until eccentric retirement, radiant even at their deaths. But sometimes the world reminds us that they are mortal. Luke Perry had every means to protect himself from the vicious happenstance that defines human life, but human life can be a sniper. Just as there's a reason stars are called stars, there's also a reason strokes are called strokes. They are sudden, and can strike out of nowhere, and take down anyone without warning. And when the former teen idol was so struck at the age of just 52, riding a surge of popularity thanks to a role in the cult series Riverdale, the shock was enough to propel him into this list. A posthumous appearance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (see #19) kept interest up for the remainder of the year.	Mar. 4 (died)
33	Elon Musk		10,643,849		The world's favourite weed-head had a slightly less eventful 2019 than his annus horribilis the year prior, something reflected in his somewhat diminished stature in the report. Nonetheless, the inventor of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX continues to captivate the perusers of Wikipedia, including himself, as people attempt to tell if he is Lex Luthor or Bruce Wayne. This year, he focused on the completion of his transition from respected tech mogul to even more respected memelord, releasing a rap tribute to Harambe, reviewing memes with Pewds, planning trips to Roswell, dropping a million on TeamTrees to evolve into Treelon, embracing Baby Yoda, and generally undergoing the singularity as man becomes meme. In terms of his companies, he also saved the precipitous and previously plummeting stock price of his electric car venture with yet more memes, this time in the stronk, blocky, PS1-era polygonal shape of a truck, and launching the Starlink satellite constellation using Falcon 9 rockets with SpaceX, a pioneering attempt to provide satellite internet across the world, allowing everyone to relish his dankness. Nice.	Nov. 23 (unveils Tesla Cybertruck)
34	Joaquin Phoenix		10,614,160		For many years, Joaquin Phoenix worked in the shadow of his late brother, River Phoenix, perhaps the single most promising young actor in the history of Hollywood, whose horrific death at the age of just 23 from a speedball overdose Joaquin not only suffered through, but witnessed personally. But an Academy Award nomination for Gladiator in 2000 and another for Walk the Line in 2005 established him as a great actor in his own right. Then, in 2008, he said he retired from acting. Then in 2010 started acting again, a feat only Marlon Brando had accomplished successfully. And then, this year, following a string of modest commercial and critical successes like Her and Inherent Vice, he was cast in Joker, Todd Phillips's attempt to sneak a thematic sequel to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy onto the superhero bandwagon. And boy did it work. The Joker might just join Vito Corleone in the pantheon of fictional characters portrated in Oscar-winning performances by two different actors. I'm willing to bet no one saw that coming in the 70s.	Oct. 6 (release of Joker)
35	Dwayne Johnson		10,540,703		People just love this guy. That's really the only reason he's on here. I mean yes, he got decent spikes for his marriage and for the premiere of Hobbs & Shaw and Jumanji: The Next Level, but other than that, it's just business as usual. Of course, for The Rock, "usual" means 20,000+ views a day. It's entirely possible that he still would have made this list without the spikes. Given the number of projects he has lined up next year, I doubt I'll have the opportunity to test that hypothesis.	Aug. 19 (married Lauren Hashian)
36	Elton John		10,533,279		The boy from England, Reginald Dwight, the bitch who is back with a certain sartorial eloquence about his razor face, appears on this list here today due to that movie which garnered positive reviews from critics earlier this year. Later in the year, John released his autobiography, titled Me, vividly recounting his life in a wild manner accurate to the times it tells of. He may never have reached the drug consumption of Keith Richards, but his collection of spectacles is certainly otherworldly.	Jun. 2 (shortly after release of Rocketman)
37	Lady Gaga		10,522,892		In 2008, a girl named Stefani Germanotta released her debut album, and more than a decade later, the singer who took her name from one song our #4 sang certainly had a career as varied and successful as that of her idol Madonna, and not just because she possibly ripped her off once. And now Gaga has one-upped Madonna by getting attention from the Academy Awards (while Madge only was recognized by the polar opposite), as A Star Is Born earned her a nomination for Best Actress and an eventual Best Song win for "Shallow", which not only added to her ever-growing list of awards but to Gaga's list of number one singles. And her unconventional work – "I Perform This Way-hey, I perform this way-hey, I'm always deviating from the norm this way-hey..." – might only resume in 2020, as she continues a residency in Vegas and is preparing her next album.	Feb. 25 (won Best Song Oscar)
38	Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard		10,345,847		Not to be outdone by Netflix, Hulu also makes acclaimed original programming based on true facts that subsequently drives viewers to Wikipedia. In this case, true crime series The Act, whose first season revolved around a case where arguably the victim had it coming: Dee Dee Blanchard (portrayed by Patricia Arquette, pictured) regularly abused her daughter Gypsy Rose (played by Joey King) by fabricating illness and disabilities onto her; after 24 years being controlled to appear disabled and chronically ill, down to being subjected to unnecessary surgery and medication, Gypsy Rose eventually had enough, and got together with an online boyfriend to plan her mother's death.	Mar. 21 (after release of The Act)
39	Queen (band)		10,179,484		The band of opera and hard rock, of waltz and ballad, Queen makes an appearance on this list in partnership with its late frontman Freddie Mercury (#4), most likely as a holdout from last year's motion picture featuring Rami Malek (#43) as Mercury. The film received praise for Malek's acting and its musical aspects, but criticism for the historical liberties taken in the screenplay and its portrayal of Mercury's sexuality. It received several awards and nominations, setting the all-time box office record for the biopic genre. With all that said, there's only one thing left to say: AYYY-OH!	Feb. 25 (performed at the Oscars)
40	Cameron Boyce		10,136,700		Celebrities die and get high views on Wikipedia, that's natural. Yet sometimes the attention is more for the death being unexpected and shocking than the person's body of work, such as with Cameron Boyce. A former child actor with mostly Disney Channel productions in his resume, he only broke into this list because epilepsy took his life at the meager age of 20. People like Rutger Hauer, Karl Lagerfeld, Ric Ocasek and Marie Fredriksson might've been more understandable entries, but go figure our readers.	Jul. 7 (died)
41	The Lion King (2019 film)		10,116,250		Everyone keeps saying they hate these Disney live-action remakes. So why do we keep paying to see them? The Lion King was soulless and creepy? Not enough, apparently, to keep it from earning nearly $1.7 billion worldwide. Will Smith's genie looked like an uncanny valley nightmare and was an insult to the legacy of Robin Williams? That movie cracked a billion worldwide too. Even Dumbo, which was considered a major flop, still made $350 million. And now there's a whole slew of pretenders in the pipeline. So get ready for a live-action Lilo and Stitch and Hunchback of Notre Dame. No I'm not kidding.	Jul. 20 (released)
42	Bonnie and Clyde		10,093,049		50 years after that classic movie with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, again the film industry brings attention to the outlaw couple from the 1930s. Only this time it wasn't in theaters and focusing on them: Netflix production The Highwaymen centered around Texas Rangers Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) during their manhunt. And given some long and slow stretches in the movie itself, it was all the more excuse for viewers to open their phones/tablets/laptops and discover what Bonnie and Clyde did before the ambush that riddled them with dozens of bullets.	Mar. 31 (sometime after The Highwaymen)
43	Rami Malek		10,052,003		Completing the entries boosted by the runaway success of Bohemian Rhapsody, main star Rami Malek, who was not intimidated in filling in the big shoes and teeth of Freddie and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his efforts. 2019 also served to finish off the series that gave Malek a breakout role, Mr. Robot, and for him to take part in the next James Bond movie, No Time to Die, where he'll be the villain.	Feb. 25 (won Oscar)
44	The Irishman		10,038,172		The director of the greatest mob movies not about the Corleones teaming up with the three foremost actors of the genre to tell a three-and-a-half hour epic about the infamous disappearance of union organiser Jimmy Hoffa by the hands of my eponymous infamous compatriot. What could possibly go wrong? As it transpires, not much. The film, distributed and streamed courtesy of Netflix worldwide lives up to the billing, and appears set to jostle with #7 and #20 for the bulk of the major awards in the forthcoming awards season, so rapturous is its reception. In the first half of the film, Scorsese presents a somewhat conventional, if expertly executed take, on the mob movie formula he helped popularise, recounting the intertwined tales of Sheeran, Hoffa, and Russell Bufalino, but it is towards the end of the film where the source of all the praise and poignancy of the film manifests itself, with the fabled director ruminating on aging and transforming an ostensibly straight-forward tale of organised crime into a powerful reflection on aging and the consequences of the lives we elect to lead. The characters are complex and captivating, the production design is stellar, the editing is effortless, and the much talked about de-aging technology, besides a few scenes, is implemented to impressive and adept effect, though to be fair the bar which must be exceeded by computer generated imagery is considerably lower in a post-Cats universe.	Nov. 28 (released on Netflix)
45	Marvel Cinematic Universe		9,972,924		It's been 12 years since Marvel Studios' unprecedented project began. I'd like to say it changed Hollywood, except that every other studio's attempt to replicate its success has so far either failed comically or underperformed. Unless it cohabits with Riverdale or stars Vera Farmiga. The Marvel Universe now stands at a crossroads; the great narrative it began in 2008 is over. Thanks to the decade's true entertainment revolution, much of the next phase will debut on Disney+, further blurring the line between cinema and television. The great climax to this next phase is currently under wraps. The next movie in the series is a prequel, and so could be seen as the last in the current line, rather than the first of the new era. We will have to wait until November to see how the next step is received. But even if it goes well, the real cliffhanger posed by its success isn't whether Thanos comes back, but whether cinema, at least in theatres, can survive as a medium.	Jul. 21 (San Diego Comic-Con)
46	Scarlett Johansson		9,936,524		After a striking breakthrough in Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson seemed to settle into a steady, somewhat one-note groove, establishing a career as the sexual fantasy of every acclaimed indie director in Hollywood. However, her public image never dimmed, and, thanks to a standing obligation as Black Widow in the MCU, she became the most lucrative actress in Hollywood history (and grabbed the single most tear-jerking moment in Avengers: Endgame). This year may be when she finally regains some of her acting cred, with a difficult turn in the dark comedy Jojo Rabbit and a Golden Globe nomination for Marriage Story. On top of that, this year she got engaged for the third time, to Saturday Night Live cast member Colin Jost, cementing an already longstanding connection to the show.	May 20 (announced engagement to Colin Jost)
47	Bradley Cooper		9,894,395		After years in supporting roles, Bradley Cooper broke out in 2009 with The Hangover, and a decade later is undeniably a big Hollywood star. While during 2019 his only role was a voice one, namely a furry psycho in our #1 (he also co-produced our #7, directed by the same Todd Phillips of The Hangover), Cooper owes his entry in this year's report due to his late 2018 directorial debut A Star Is Born, a smash hit which gave him Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Actor and Screenplay. He didn't win any, but still had a highlight of the Oscars by performing the movie's big hit "Shallow" alongside co-star Lady Gaga (#37), which eventually brought the song to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, and also later made Cooper a Grammy winner. On top of all this, Cooper split with the supermodel who gave him a son, raising rumors that he was about to re-enact the movie's couple with Gaga.	Feb. 25 (sang at the Oscars)
48	2019 Indian general election		9,862,551		The largest-ever election in the world, with over 67% of the 900 million people eligible to vote casting their ballots to choose the representatives in India's Parliament (or rather, one of its houses). Such big numbers led to an election lasting over a month, and 39 of the 650 contesting parties managed to get one of 545 seats of the Lok Sabha, the majority of which ended up with the Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi (pictured).	May 23 (counting ended)
49	Central Park jogger case		9,787,829		As you will surely be aware having made it this far into the Report, media consumption and the use of Wikipedia as a second screen whilst viewing digital content, especially through Netflix and especially concerning real-life affairs, is one of the primary drivers of traffic on Wikipedia. Such was the case with When They See Us, a poignant and powerful mini-series produced by Ava DuVernay revisiting the infamous rape of Trisha Meili in Central Park in 1989 from the perspective of the five teenage minorities wrongly prosecuted and sentenced for it. The four-part series drew critical acclaim and extended its clout with a flurry of Emmy nominations, especially the final episode focused on the plight of Korey Wise, who served additional time for his refusal to acquiesce and admit penance and remorse for a crime he was not culpable of, an episode which netted a statuette for Jharrel Jerome, and helped cement the show as a challenging, but undeniably important and ergo must-watch series. As for a brief synopsis of the case it drove such heavy traffic to: the "Central Park Five", as they would become known, were allegedly subject to abuse in lengthy police interrogations which did not follow protocol, then were convicted based on a confession extracted through coercion. They were sent to prison amidst a campaign for capital punishment led by Donald Trump, a campaign which in hindsight was frankly barbaric, and remained there until either parole was granted, or in Wise's case, until the true culprit – a seasoned serial rapist – confessed to the crime. The quintet received compensation for the racial discrimination and unlawful detention they suffered, despite the protestations of the victim that they were still involved in the heinous crime perpetrated against her.	Jun. 2 (shortly after When They See Us release)
50	Kamala Harris		9,758,582		As if this list wasn't already filled with American politics, here's one last politician to round it off. The Democratic field of candidates could easily be mistaken for a one-upping of the similarly ridiculous Republican collection of the last election, and this Senator from California populated said field until December 3, 2019. Harris's candidacy was somewhat of a long-shot – although the USA is theoretically filed with equal rights (although Britain has more hope and glory, unless you happen to be attending a school graduation), a glance at the historical presidents and their ranks' unfortunate plethora of white-maleness shows that a progressive African-American female didn't have too much of a chance. Harris did well in the debates, but alas, it was not to be – falling polling numbers and shrinking donations were the nails in the coffin.	Jun. 28 (first Democractic debate)

Exclusions

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

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Wiki Loves Monuments 2019, we're all winners

By Smallbones

Wiki Loves Monuments is a photo contest that has been run every year since 2010 on our sister project Wikimedia Commons. Since 2011, hundreds of thousands of photos have been uploaded each September for the contest. The project is dedicated to documenting the world's cultural heritage, and is one of the largest photo contests in the world. After judges award prizes in each country represented in the contest, an international jury picks the international winners. You can see the 2019 winners below or at Wiki Loves Monuments 2019 winners.

1st Place Abandoned Evangelical Church in Stawiszyn, Poland by Marian Naworski

2nd Place Ayyoub’s (Job’s) Cave, Shahr-e Babak, Iran by Morteza Salehi

3rd Place Chicago Baháʼí Temple in Wilmette, United States by Michael Stone

4th Place Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Thailand by Nawit Phongkhetkham

5th Place Christ the Redeemer statue, Brazil by Donatas Dabravolskas

6th Place Szombierki Power Plant, Poland by Marian Naworski

7th Place Auschwitz Fence, Poland by Jacek Daczyński

8th Place 201 Dome Mosque, Bangladesh by Md Shahanshah Bappy

9th Place Wat Arun (Temple of Dawn), Thailand by Kriengsak Jirasirirojanakorn

10th Place Castelmezzano, Italy by Paolo Santarsiero

11th Place Mission San Xavier del Bac, United States by Kyle Yang

12th Place Staircase in Schloss Drachenburg, Germany by Gunther Zagatta

13th Place The Warriors sculpture, Brasilia Brazil by Francisco Willian Saldanha

14th Place Tomb of Hafez, Iran by Mohammad Sadegh Hayati

15th Place Palace of Catalan Music, Spain by Hieu Duc Tram

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Capacity Building: Top 5 Themes from Community Conversations

By Kelsi Stine-Rowe

This article was first published at Wikimedia Space on January 15, 2020. Kelsi Stine-Rowe is the Community Relations Specialist for the Movement Strategy Core Team, at the Wikimedia Foundation. The movement strategy recommendations are available on meta. They include topics such as capacity building, governance, and resource allocation. You can add to the conversations there from late January to early March. Everybody is encouraged to review the recommendations and describe the impact the recommendations might have on them and their community. Other on-wiki discussions are happening many languages versions, in discussion groups on off-wiki platforms, and within movement-related groups. -S

Capacity building is the process by which a community or an individual acquires skills, knowledge or resources, allowing them to grow and thrive. As Wikimedia communities develop around the globe, our movement needs to ensure they are given the necessary tools and resources to be able to strengthen their capacities. Capacity building has hence been one of the 9 topics discussed in 2019 community conversations within the Wikimedia 2030 movement strategy process… and it turned out to be the most popular theme!

From Nigeria to Venezuela, from France to India and from Morocco to Macedonia, hundreds of comments and suggestions were shared across languages and cultures. This Top 5 gathers the main ideas discussed by communities, which insisted on the need for both efficient and contextualized tools and support, with a special hint at peer-learning.

1 Multilingual Online Learning The idea of online capacity building has been widely advocated for across numerous Wikimedian communities – most likely because our movement has a lot to do with online learning! Contributors from the French Wiktionary and the Arabic Wikipedia, for example, explained that they already work to create online resources like MOOCs or video tutorials.

Screenshot from the first Wiki-MOOC in Arabic, created by Wikimedia Algeria – Dreamart-prod

In addition to such resources, people have also suggested clarifying help pages or promoting online mentorship programs. The idea of a learning platform featuring multiple formats was often cited and supported. And systematically, people have emphasized the need for these resources to be localized in various languages and cultural contexts, so that people and communities from all over the world are equitably empowered to learn and thrive.

2 Capacity Building for Affiliates Just like people, organizations need to learn and grow. Our movement is composed of dozens of affiliate organizations, and they all need to build their capacities. How do you run an awareness campaign? How do you manage a project? How do you attract and retain volunteers? How do you obtain a legal status for your organization?

Meeting of the User Group Wikimedians of Nepal in 2013 – Ganesh Paudel

All of our affiliate communities broadly share these general questions, as well as some more specific concerns. For example, Arabic communities are especially keen on receiving governance and conflict resolution training, while South Asia communities are really eager for capacity building to help them apply for and receive grants.

Wikimedians have shared a number of ideas, some of which already exist to various extents, to improve organizations’ capacities. These include train-the-trainers programs, which are seen as an indispensable starting point, as well as specific training for leaders, not forgetting tailored, sustained support for organizations growth with the help of dedicated staff.

3 Peer-based capacity building Wikimedia is all about collaboration. No wonder, then, that peer-support and peer-learning are globally praised by Wikimedians. To them, horizontal learning is more efficient than vertical teaching, especially because it allows for more contextualisation.

Learning days at Wikimania 2017 in Montreal – María Cruz

Mentorship and exchange programs are seen as great ways to build capacities for individuals and organizations alike, as well as editathons or hackathons, where Wikimedians can learn from each other. Larger international events are also cited as a booster for participants and for hosting countries, as they allow communities and people to connect and share experiences and knowledge.

4 Movement Knowledge Accessibility Individuals’ and organizations’ capacity to take part in Wikimedia activities greatly depends on their access to knowledge about the movement itself. Are people aware that they can have access to grants? Can they easily find technical support if they need it?

Communities around the world feel that, as of now, a lot of this information can only be accessed through informal channels or in English only, creating inequities in our movement. Thus, they would like our internal knowledge to be better managed and more transparently, systematically shared, in multiple languages and formats, including through videos (for example about how WMF departments are organized, what is Wikimania, etc.), so that everyone is empowered to take part in our movement.

5 Motivation Across discussions, many communities have shared that, if we want to build people’s capacities, we need to keep them engaged and motivated. Both online and offline, rewards are seen as a great tool to boost motivation: it can be barnstarns rewarding on-wiki achievements, open badges to recognize skills, posts on social media to appreciate volunteers’ efforts.

Wiki Loves Earth launching in Nigeria, 2019 – Kaizenify

Contests and campaigns are also seen as a great way to motivate contributors to improve their skills, be it in Venezuela, France or Benin. Local groups also acknowledge that growing their members’ capacities works better when they plan regular offline events, focusing on various themes and with varied approaches, because it allows participants to keep motivated, connected, and to develop a wide range of skills.

And here we come to the end of this Top 5 about Capacity Building. Do you think these ideas are what the Wikimedia movement needs? Have you already tried some of these methods in your community? Or does this article inspire you to experiment with them in the future? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Kelsi Stine-Rowe wishes to thank Diane Ranville for her writing assistance in this piece.

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Our most important new article since November 1, 2015

By Smallbones, Staff, and Wikipedia editors

Wikipedia has now reached its 6,000,000th article, a symbolically important achievement. Congratulations to User:Rosiestep for creating the article Maria Elise Turner Lauder, but let's take a moment to recognize that this is not the only important new article out of the one million that have been created since November 1, 2015. Some might say that every article created since then is equally important. Others might argue that there is some article that really truly is the most important article out of the last million created. They might say that their favorite article is the most important, or even their favorite article from their own creations. In short, the most important article out of the last million is completely subjective. A collection of a couple of dozen or so of these articles may, however, show what we as a community consider to be important.

Note that the editors who added their most important article were not randomly selected. To get this started I invited the Signpost staff, folks who commented on previous Signpost articles, and a few others who haphazardly (not randomly) popped into view. To get a better sample of Signpost readers, please add your own most important article in the comments section. Just follow the format of the example, putting the name of an article created since November 1, 2015 and explain, in 110 words or less, why you think it is the most important. You may add a 180px photo if you wish, with a short caption.

With more examples we can view a wider range of what Signpost editors view as the most important article out of the last million new articles.

"Most important articles"

A Huron–Manistee National Forests employee holds a kangaroo joey.

2019–20 Australian bushfire season is as a globally significant page documenting a tangible and emotive result of climate change – Hell on Earth. Climate and fire experts agree climate change is a factor known to result in increased fire frequency and intensity in Australia, and although it should not be considered as the sole cause, it is considered very likely to have contributed to the unprecedented extent and severity of the fires. Articles such as this, plus news pictures, seen around the world, serve to highlight and educate on the danger of ignoring climate change. -G

Ship and Oil Rigs in the Gulf of Mexico

Taylor oil spill. You haven't had enough depressing news about the environment lately? There's an ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that's been polluting so long that if it were a person, it could drive an automobile in many countries. Standard news sources tend to focus attention on stories when they are new and ignore them when they are ongoing. Wikipedia articles have the potential to provide a stable and ongoing source of information about topics like the Taylor oil spill, less subject to the up-and-down news cycle. Someone just needs to care enough to regularly monitor and update the article.

Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish environmental activist on climate change whose campaigning has gained international recognition. Known for her assertive speaking manner, she urges governments to take immediate action to address world climate change. Her exposure to the masses has had a significant global impact on making younger people conscious of the pressing issue, described in some sources as the "Greta effect". In 2019 Time named Thunberg one of the 100 most influential people and the youngest individual Person of the Year. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.-DrB

"Ivy Mike", the first full-scale thermonuclear test, 1952

The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Swiss organization founded to stop the use of nuclear weapons. As in all years, but especially that year, the Nobel Peace Prize is one of the big important recognitions that are given to people who strive to promote peace and human welfare, and the 2017 Prizes were exceptional in my opinion. -P²

Jess Wade – scientist, communicator and UK Wikimedian of the Year, 2019

Jess Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London, researching organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

In 2018 she started a personal project to raise awareness of women scientists, creating one article every day about notable academics. She has now written over 850 new articles, and inspired others to do likewise. The Wikipedia article about her was created by a fellow academic in 2018. Wade was named UK Wikimedian of the Year in 2019.

As a science communicator, she has helped encourage a wider awareness of Wikipedia and of science. Sadly, she has also attracted more than her share of trolls, demonstrating how Wikipedia reflects society's blindspots and biases. In 2019 Wade was awarded the British Empire Medal for her services to gender diversity in science, and was listed amongst the top 50 'Most Influential Woman in UK Tech' by Computer Weekly Magazine. -NM

Donna Strickland at press conference in 2018

Donna Strickland is a Canadian optical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 for her research into chirped pulse amplification. This article was not created until after she won the Nobel Prize, a fact which generated an outcry now commonly dubbed the "Strickland Affair". The news coverage on the incident demonstrated the lack of knowledge the media has on the inner workings of Wikipedia, while also signifying the importance the public attaches to the existence of a topic on this encyclopedia. But the activity in the following hours exemplified the best of our community's abilities, as editors from around the world contributed to the creation of a Strickland article in 36 different languages. -Ib

Women in Red official logo

Women in Red is a group of Wikipedians dedicated to creating articles about women, and addressing the gender bias on Wikipedia. Project founder Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, alongside Emily Temple-Wood, earned the 2016 Wikimedian of the Year award for their efforts to address the "gender chasm" on Wikipedia. Women accounted for only 15.53% of biographies before WIR got started. Their hard work has increased that to 18.21%, but many women remain in red. Still, because of the efforts of WIR, many more of the last million articles were on women. With luck, even more of the next million will be too! -CE

Women's March on Washington, 2017

The 2017 Women's March pointed out that women exist, which is a little startling, considering that approximately half the world population of 7.7 billion people are women. In addition to being the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, there were marches worldwide. The march and its successors have emphasized the importance of uniting to address a broad range of the world's problems, including issues of human rights, the economy, inequality and justice, the environment and climate change. The march also enabled women to combine political advocacy and fashion by sporting Pussyhats with cat ears.-MMO

Khasi women in Meghalaya

Matrilineal society of Meghalaya is a recognised good article which ticks many boxes for topics under-represented due to Wikipedia's systemic biases. It's about sociology rather than politics or popular culture. It's about women rather than men. Instead of the bias to OECD nations, it's about a rural, lesser-developed part of a developing nation. It's a product of a 2016 collaboration between Women in Red, ArtAndFeminism, Women's History Month, WikiProject Women artists, a series of initiatives where women have developed new ways of working, recruiting and supporting women on Wikipedia. -BHG

The Me Too movement sends the message that powerful people are not immune to consequences for their actions. RAINN reports that, in the United States, only 5 out of every 1000 perpetrators of sexual assault are incarcerated. Where other systems are failing, the Me Too movement gives a voice to those who have been denied one. It also addresses small scale issues of harassment or unpleasant actions, including stories from people of every gender and culture. There is something we can all learn from the movement, whether it's realising that something we are doing might be hurtful, or realising that we have the power to stand up for ourselves. -B

Fanny Eckerlin

Fanny Eckerlin (1802–1842) was an Italian operatic mezzo-soprano of the nineteenth century. I've never found an entry for her in any of the standard operatic reference works; evidently well-regarded during her lifetime, she has been reduced, today, to a footnote in critical surveys of the work of Gaetano Donizetti and Gioacchino Rossini and histories of the bel canto era. To me, this article shows the potential Wikipedia has to go beyond standard reference works in its scope; figures like Eckerlin may have been marginalized in print, but we have the opportunity to reintroduce their stories into the historical conversation, at the same time expanding scholarship on all manner of specialist topics.-SAdN

Turkish Wikipedia logo with red censor bar reading "2 yıldır özlüyoruz" (English: "we miss you for 2 years")

It is not too strong to say Wikipedia is part of a broader ongoing war of information and disinformation. The Block of Wikipedia in Turkey was a period from 29 April 2017 to 15 January 2020 during which the Turkish government prevented access to Wikipedia. The Turkish government objected to content on the English Wikipedia's article State-sponsored terrorism which said that Turkey had supported ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Wikipedias in all languages were blocked provoking condemnation from Turkish politicians such as Eren Erdem. Many Wikimedia communities protested the censorship, and in 2019 the Wikimedia Foundation petitioned the European Court of Human Rights for redress. On 26 December 2019, the Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled that the block of Wikipedia violated human rights, and on its order the block was lifted on 15 January 2020. -W

The comet Ping pong restaurant during the fracas with its "we're still here" sign

The Pizzagate conspiracy theory article created in late 2016 had a rocky start, but now exemplifies the way that Wikipedia resists and shines light on fake news that pollutes much of the internet in this era. The allegations about nefarious activities in the nonexistent basement of the Comet Ping Pong Pizza restaurant even resulted in a gunman turning up and trying to find the basement. The first twenty edits, which are no longer available to view, were cleaned up by Ian.thomson with an edit summary that includes "this BLP-violating bollocks needs to change". Future generations will need to know that millions were duped into believing this fake news. Wikipedia's article will help people understand that. -WSC

Had it been created two days earlier, Wintertree (userspace copy) may have been Wikipedia's five-millionth article. Its sorry pattern will be familiar to many editors – an article promoting a product (a spellchecker "proudly serving ... in many Fortune 500 companies"), unreferenced beyond an official website, and created by an obviously biased single-purpose account, then over-tagged and left to rot in bottomless maintenance categories. We tell our readers "Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising", yet we're running 24,000 ads right now – and that's just the ones we know about. These articles remind us we must do much better to become a neutral, trusted encyclopedia. -T

16 June 2019 protest march in Hong Kong

2019–20 Hong Kong protests. With national populism on the rise worldwide, it would be tempting to point to articles on national elections in the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, or the Philippines as some Wikipedia's most indispensable up-to-date coverage. But despite the conflict it entails, the protests triggered by the 2019 Hong Kong extradition bill somehow seem like a more optimistic choice. This is an area in which Wikipedia must continue to strive to live up to its standards as an unbiased, uncensored source of essential information; and the article covers a topic that reinforces how people everywhere continue to question and challenge the conditions under which they live. -D

2017 Laurence Olivier Awards. The seven Harry Potter novels sold 100s of millions of copies, but Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – the so-called "eighth story" of HP – is absurdly and irreconcilably incompatible with the rules/plot of the books. That it received a record 11 nominations and record 9 wins reminds all on Wikipedia and beyond that the childhood dreams of countless millions about "what came next for the characters" can be shattered in absurd fashion to thunderous applause by those who look no deeper than flashy stage effects and the labels "Harry Potter" and "J.K. Rowling". How to grapple with realities far from what we imagined is a skill with which all who come to Wikipedia must learn to cope in life, since for good or ill, rightly or wrongly, life seldom turns out quite how we imagined it.-NH12

Students of Jamia Millia Islamia University protest against the Indian government's decision to implement CAA and NRC

The Indian Citizenship Amendment Act protests is one of the largest student-led protests of this decade. It is not often you would find students at the forefront of resistance, but they persist still. With a sitting right-wing government, and a country showing the earliest signs of a curbed democracy, the Human Rights Watch found that the police have used excessive force only against demonstrators protesting the law, including many students. All the deaths have occurred in states governed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which in itself is a huge blow to the values of equality and secularism India has always stood for. —Q

Unite to Remain. Several events in electoral reform history have shaped the United Kingdom – the Battle of Peterloo, the end of rotten boroughs in favor of urban boroughs, and the growth of suffrage to working-class men from the towns to the sticks, to women over 30 to 21, and eventually to everyone over 18 – but perhaps the next one could involve the end of first-past-the-post voting to join the rest of Europe in using proportional representation. In this year's election, the pact to Unite to Remain was a textbook example of escaping the problem of the spoiler effect associated with FPTP, even if it was not completely successful. —P

Wikipedia's article on the Impeachment of Donald Trump not only provides information about a significant current event, but also serves to demonstrate the success of Wikipedia's model and its openness. The article is not protected, though it has been in the past to prevent vandalism. The talk page is highly active, with multiple discussions between editors working toward a consensus. In short, it demonstrates that Wikipedia's vision of people from all over the world, often with diametrically opposed views, can work together to improve an article, no matter how controversial the subject. —D

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Cryptos and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no!

By David Gerard

As well as editing on Wikipedia since 2004, David Gerard wrote a book on why cryptocurrencies and blockchains are terrible — all of them — which he's too modest to link here. David apologises for the usage of the short form "crypto" in this article, which, sadly, is accepted finance jargon now. You can treat it as short for "cryptosporidium".

Bitcoin is the first example of a new form of magical Internet money: cryptocurrency. The idea is a form of currency that has no central controller — you can just trade it as digital cash, directly. And no-one can stop you.

Of course, it's all a lot more complicated than that: the crypto world has attracted an unholy melange of idiosyncratic economics, ultra-libertarian politics, bright-eyed naïve hopefuls ... and scammers, to prey upon them. So, so many scammers.

Whenever there's a whole new paradigm of money, and the old rules of finance just don't apply any more — the promoters show up on Wikipedia as well! And we delete their spam, and block the worst offenders. But there are always more.

Blockchain, as a buzzword, is the enterprise-friendly version of the Bitcoin idea — that a decentralised database something like this, with or without a central controller, could make business work better.

Enterprise "blockchain" has serious problems. The hype was literally copied from Bitcoin hype with the buzzword changed, the press releases don't distinguish "actually does" from "could hypothetically", there's still no real-world production systems where the blockchain bit actually does anything ... and its promoters are just as enthusiastic about getting their vapourware into Wikipedia.

I write about this stuff, go on TV as a public expert, and have strong opinions on the topic — but here, I'm just another Wikipedia editor who knows the area, would like it properly covered by Wikipedia, and has to cite his claims like anyone else.

I don't have any special powers to declare how a topic area should be edited — even one with floods of financially-conflicted drive-by editing. Many others on WikiProject Cryptocurrency will disagree with my opinions here! But we all want the area to be good, and not spammy.

This is a good worked example of a perennial Wikipedia issue: how can we properly cover an area with notable topics, but that has a massive spam problem?

The answer that worked for the cryptocurrency area: strong reliable sources.

Scams with real victims

Despite the past hype, cryptocurrency doesn't affect the real economy that much — and media interest is through the floor since the 2017 cryptocurrency bubble popped. (At least until Facebook foolishly thinks starting a crypto is a good idea.)

But covering it properly is actually important — because people look stuff up in Wikipedia, and they trust us, and assume we've done our best.

The usual way to do financial fraud is to make your target feel like they're more of a big shot than they are. They put their money into your ill-regulated financial scheme, where they could win big!! ... and they get burned, and lose everything.

The cryptocurrency world plays at doing finance — but it's pretty much unregulated, with none of the safety nets that most people assume any reasonable financial product would have. You can get rich from cryptocurrency! And you can also lose your shirt.

Some crypto disasters, like the collapse of Mt. Gox, seem to be from well-meaning individuals being seriously out of their depth. Quadriga seems to have been a money laundering chop shop run by a serial scammer who may have faked his own death. (It's sadly unsurprising how often crypto scammers turn out to be serial scammers.) Others, like OneCoin or Bitconnect, were straight-up Ponzi schemes. ICOs are unregulated, and frequently fraudulent, unregistered penny stocks that only work as long as the whole market is on the upslope of a bubble.

One of the reasons we have financial regulation for retail investors is that, without it, the mum-and-dad investors get skinned — every time.

User:MER-C notes that in a world with financial predators, "this is a topic that is almost as sensitive as medicine."

But you gotta hear about this one!!

The crypto bubble of 2017 brought such a stupendous flood of promotional rubbish that the administrators' noticeboard was flat-out dealing with the proponents. Even after the 2018 crash, the ongoing firehose of spam and spammers was such that the call for general sanctions on cryptocurrency and blockchain articles got unanimous support.

And so we have: General sanctions/Blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Look through these restrictions — where promotional or tendentious editing risks a general topic ban or even a year's ban from Wikipedia, and pages may be protected or semi-protected, or "any other reasonable measure that the enforcing administrator believes is necessary and proportionate".

Contemplate, for a moment, just how bad an area must have become to need that level of sanction.

Our entire crypto problem — and the reason the general sanctions for crypto articles exist — is a stupendous conflict of interest: how desperately these guys want to spam Wikipedia.

They'll even hire PR firms, expecting them to generate an article that sticks. (That agency was wise enough to demur — though they tried to blame a cabal of "no-coiners.")

There's good reason that "holding a cryptocurrency" is listed as a financial conflict of interest for Wikipedia editing about that currency.

Reliable sources are your best friend

But plenty of crypto and blockchain stuff is genuinely notable, and we should cover it properly. How do we hold off the flood of financially-interested spammers, while we try to write an encyclopedia?

Regular editors in the crypto area have come to a rough working consensus on sourcing — we stick to strong reliable sources (commonly abbreviated WP:RS) only. Mainstream press or peer-reviewed academic sources. Since the 2017 bubble, there's plenty of mainstream press coverage — the financial press is increasingly well-informed on the topic — and academics have always found the area interesting.

No crypto blogs, no crypto news sites — because these look like specialist trade press, but they're really about advocacy: promoting their hodlings. Many are blatantly pay for play, and very few ever saw a press release with "blockchain" in it that they wouldn't reprint.

This isn't a written sourcing rule — but the editors following crypto tend to enforce it in practice, and anything other than solid third-party RSes in an article is a death sentence at articles for deletion. But, solid sourcing means it'll live!

Off-wiki crypto advocates complain regularly, but the rule has stuck — because the Reliable Sources principle is solid, and what we're applying here is basic Wikipedia rules.

(I'm arguably speaking against my own personal interest there — I make some money as a crypto journalist, often publishing in these very sites. I know my stuff is good, and my editors are good, and my friends are good journalists! But I also know that if some subject or fact isn't noteworthy enough to make it into mainstream or peer-reviewed sources, it's probably not noteworthy enough for Wikipedia.)

Wikipedia also has many editors who are fans of cryptocurrency and blockchains, who have realised that WP:RS is an excellent and effective way to make our articles better! Because they're tired of the crypto spammers too.

If you love cryptos and I hate them, WP:RS lets us work together.

If your own favourite topic area has a spam problem, get strict on sourcing.

Scammers and spammers are eternal — but we don't have to let them ply their trade on Wikipedia. Neutral Point of View, informed by Reliable Sources, is — as always — our best protection against promotional nonsense.

Reader comments

2020-01-27

How useful is Wikipedia for novice programmers trying to learn computing concepts?

By Isaac Johnson, Tilman Bayer, and Miriam Redi

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

Wikipedia as a learning resource (for programmers)

Reviewed by Isaac Johnson

"Understanding Wikipedia as a Resource for Opportunistic Learning of Computing Concepts" by Martin P. Robillard and Christoph Treude of McGill University and University of Adelaide and published in SIGCSE 2020 examines the utility of Wikipedia articles about computing concepts for novice programmers. The researchers recruit 18 students with varying computer science backgrounds to read Wikipedia articles about computing concepts that are new to them. The authors use a sample of four Wikipedia articles that appear frequently in Stack Overflow posts (Dependency injection; Endianness; Levenshtein distance; Regular expression). Side note: in a sample of 44 million posts on Stack Overflow that the authors process, 360 thousand (0.8%) have a Wikipedia link, pointing to 40 thousand different Wikipedia articles in aggregate. They indicate that this rate of linking to Wikipedia is similar on the Reddit subreddit r/programming as well. The participants are instructed to use a think-aloud method where they talk through what they are doing and thinking as they try to learn about the concept. The authors then analyzed the transcripts from these interviews to determine what themes were consistent across the students.

The researchers identified the following challenges to learning from Wikipedia:

• Concept Confusion: if vocabulary or notation has a different meaning in other contexts, this can confuse those readers who think they know what they're reading (but don't).
• Need for Examples: explanations are not always enough. Examples are often desired.
• New Terminology: encountering too many unfamiliar terms can be frustrating for readers.
• Trivia Clutter: peripheral information that is not core to learning a concept can make it hard to find the most useful information, especially for non-native readers.
• Unfamiliar Notation: math notation and code in articles is generally not explained, which can create confusion for the reader if they are not familiar with it.

While the authors conclude that linking to more structured learning resources from Stack Overflow and related forums might be beneficial, this research clearly provokes some thought about how Wikipedia might be a more effective learning context. For instance, page previews are a clear improvement for readers who are not familiar with the concepts mentioned in an article. The other concepts emphasize the value of surfacing examples in articles, not relying on mathematical notation to explain a concept, and having a clear lede paragraph. Two other thoughts about this research:

• The authors describe how computer programmers often end up at Wikipedia by way of Stack Overflow posts that link Wikipedia as a means of better understanding concepts mentioned in an answer. The ability of these communities to build on Wikipedia is a really lovely example of beneficial re-use. It has been examined more widely in work by Vincent et al. (see this past write-up).
• As machine translation is explored as a means of supporting content creation (e.g., via the content translation tool) or of providing access to knowledge in other languages (e.g., automatic translations in search), it is useful to understand what articles are particularly difficult for novices to learn from, such as the computing concepts studied in this research. This is content that likely becomes even more confusing if imperfect machine translation leads to odd sentence structure or word choice. Perhaps it should be prioritized for cleanup by native speakers.

Briefly

• A new public dataset on active editors by country has been released by the Wikimedia Foundation. (See meta:Research:Data for other data sources available to researchers)

Other recent publications

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

Compiled by Tilman Bayer and Miriam Redi

"A systematic literature review on Wikidata"

From the abstract:

"Despite Wikidata’s potential and the notable rise in research activity, the field is still in the early stages of study. Most research is published in conferences, highlighting such immaturity, and provides little empirical evidence of real use cases. Only a few disciplines currently benefit from Wikidata’s applications and do so with a significant gap between research and practice. Studies are dominated by European researchers, mirroring Wikidata’s content distribution and limiting its Worldwide applications."

See also earlier coverage of a related paper by Piscopo et al.: "First literature survey of Wikidata quality research", and the following preprint

"Wikidata from a Research Perspective -- A Systematic Mapping Study of Wikidata"

From the abstract:

"[We conduct] a systematic mapping study in order to identify the current topical coverage of existing research [on Wikidata] as well as the white spots which need further investigation. [...] 67 peer-reviewed research from journals and conference proceedings were selected, and classified into meaningful categories. We describe this data set descriptively by showing the publication frequency, the publication venue and the origin of the authors and reveal current research focuses. These especially include aspects concerning data quality, including questions related to language coverage and data integrity. These results indicate a number of future research directions, such as, multilingualism and overcoming language gaps, the impact of plurality on the quality of Wikidata's data, Wikidata's potential in various disciplines, and usability of user interface."

"Example from Wikipedia with a correct and an incorrect example extracted, as well as non-matching literals marked in the abstract" (from "Extracting Literal Assertions ...")

"Extracting Literal Assertions for DBpedia from Wikipedia Abstracts"

From the abstract:

we present an approach for extracting numerical and date literal values from Wikipedia abstracts [apparently a reference to the lead section of Wikipedia articles or their first paragraph]. We show that our approach can add 643k additional literal values to DBpedia] at a precision of about 95%.

"Getting the Most out of Wikidata: Semantic Technology Usage in Wikipedia’s Knowledge Graph"

From the abstract and accompanying note:

"A major challenge for bringing Wikidata to its full potential was to provide reliable and powerful services for data sharing and query, and the WMF has chosen to rely on semantic technologies for this purpose. A live SPARQL endpoint, regular RDF dumps, and linked data APIs are now forming the backbone of many uses of Wikidata. We describe this influential use case and its underlying infrastructure [...] The data used in this publication is available in the form of anonymised Wikidata SPARQL query logs. [....] The paper has won the Best Paper Award in the In-Use Track of ISWC 2018."

"Who Models the World?: Collaborative Ontology Creation and User Roles in Wikidata"

From the abstract:

" we study the relationship between different Wikidata user roles and the quality of the Wikidata ontology. [...] Our analysis shows that the Wikidata ontology has uneven breadth and depth. We identified two user roles: contributors and leaders. The second category is positively associated to ontology depth, with no significant effect on other features. Further work should investigate other dimensions to define user profiles and their influence on the knowledge graph."

See also comments about the paper by Daniel Mietchen, and earlier coverage of a related paper: "Participation patterns on Wikidata"

"The Evolution of Power and Standard Wikidata Editors: Comparing Editing Behavior over Time to Predict Lifespan and Volume of Edits"

From the abstract:

"We ... study the evolution that [Wikidata] editors with different levels of engagement exhibit in their editing behaviour over time. We measure an editor’s engagement in terms of (i) the volume of edits provided by the editor and (ii) their lifespan (i.e. the length of time for which an editor is present at Wikidata). The large-scale longitudinal data analysis that we perform covers Wikidata edits over almost 4 years. We monitor evolution in a session-by-session- and monthly-basis, observing the way the participation, the volume and the diversity of edits done by Wikidata editors change. Using the findings in our exploratory analysis, we define and implement prediction models that use the multiple evolution indicators."

"Following the footsteps of giants: Modeling the mobility of historically notable individuals using Wikipedia"

This study found that the migration place for historically relevant people is limited to few locations, depending on discipline and opportunities.

"GeBioToolkit: Automatic Extraction of Gender-Balanced Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies"

This preprint presents a tool for extracting multilingual and gender-balanced parallel corpora at sentence level, with document and gender information.

"On the Relation of Edit Behavior, Link Structure, and Article Quality on Wikipedia"

This study found that on Wikipedia, controversial and high-quality articles articles differ from others, according to metrics quantifying editing and linking behavior.

"Learning to Retrieve Reasoning Paths over Wikipedia Graph for Question Answering"

This preprint presents a new graph-based recurrent retrieval approach to answer multi-hop open-domain questions through the Wikipedia link graph.

A photomontage currently used as the lead illustration in both the English and Spanish Wikipedia's articles about the Falklands War (Guerra de las Malvinas)

"Collectively biased representations of the past: Ingroup Bias in Wikipedia articles about intergroup conflicts"

From the abstract:

"we compared articles about the same intergroup conflicts (e.g., the Falklands War) in the corresponding language versions of Wikipedia (e.g., the Spanish and English Wikipedia articles about the Falklands War). Study 1 featured a content coding of translated Wikipedia articles by trained raters, which showed that articles systematically presented the ingroup in a more favourable way (e.g., Argentina in the Spanish article and the United Kingdom in the English article) and, in reverse, the outgroup as more immoral and more responsible for the conflict. These findings were replicated and extended in Study 2, which was limited to the lead sections of articles but included considerably more conflicts and many participants instead of a few trained coders. This procedure [identified] a stronger ingroup bias for (1) more recent conflicts and (2) conflicts in which the proportion of ingroup members among the top editors was larger. Finally, a third study ruled out that these effects were driven by translations or the raters’ own nationality. Therefore, this paper is the first to demonstrate ingroup bias in Wikipedia – a finding that is of practical as well as theoretical relevance as we outline in the discussion."

"People tend to do more when collaborating with more people" on Wikipedia

From the abstract:

"[We study] two planetary-scale collaborative systems: GitHub and Wikipedia. By analyzing the activity of over 2 million users on these platforms, we discover that the interplay between group size and productivity exhibits complex, previously-unobserved dynamics: the productivity of smaller groups scales super-linearly with group size, but saturates at larger sizes. This effect is not an artifact of the heterogeneity of productivity: the relation between group size and productivity holds at the individual level. People tend to do more when collaborating with more people. We propose a generative model of individual productivity that captures the non-linearity in collaboration effort. The proposed model is able to explain and predict group work dynamics in GitHub and Wikipedia by capturing their maximally informative behavioral features."

References

Reader comments

2020-01-27

A decade of The Signpost, 2005–2015

By Gamaliel

This article was written 5 years ago, by the then new-editor-in-chief Gamaliel covering the first 10 years of the history of The Signpost. Thanks to Michael Snow, Ral315, The ed17, and Adam Cuerden for their assistance in assembling this feature.

2005

John Seigenthaler

The Wikipedia Signpost was founded by Michael Snow, beginning with the publication of the January 10, 2005 issue. That issue contained ten articles, all written by Snow, beginning with his introduction "From the editor". It also contained the first Arbitration Report ("The Report On Lengthy Litigation", or TROLL), which would become a long-time staple of The Signpost. Snow headed up the Signpost until August, when Ral315 took over.

News reports in the Signpost discussed the growing pains of the early years of Wikipedia. In February, the main page was locked down after major vandalism and a power outage caused Wikipedia to crash for a day. In March, Wikipedia reached a half-million articles. While Wikipedia was the subject of hoaxes and misinformation, it was able to deftly respond to breaking news such as its article on the July London bombings.

One of Wikipedia's biggest challenges came with Wikipedia's first major public scandal, the Seigenthaler biography incident. The Signpost reported on the initial controversy and the identification of the hoaxer.

2006

Jordanhill railway station

In 2006, Wikipedia hit one million articles with its article Jordanhill railway station.

The Signpost conducted an interview with Jimmy Wales in February. In December, it featured the first installment of a comic strip called WikiWorld, created by cartoonist Greg Williams. WikiWorld, which ran intermittently until 2008, remains one of the most fondly remembered Signpost features.

In January, the Signpost reported that editors uncovered multiple instances of plagiarism of Wikipedia by a professional reporter. It covered the ongoing discussion of Wikimedia Foundation office actions and an incident where a veteran administrator was briefly stripped of administrative powers for undoing an office action. It discussed early efforts to address Wikipedia's gender gap, an issue that is still ongoing. It also reported on an editor for hire who was permanently blocked, an editor who remains a perennial Wikipedia critic.

2007

Jimmy Wales

Sue Gardner

The Signpost conducted another interview with Wales in September and an interview with incoming Wikimedia Foundation director Sue Gardner in December.

The Signpost covered several significant news stories in 2007. It reported on WikiScanner, a tool which matched edits made by anonymous IP editors to a number of organizations, resulting in revelations which proved embarrassing to numerous companies and media and political organizations. Embarrassing for Wikipedia was the Essjay controversy, where a well-regarded Wikipedia editor and Wikia employee was revealed to have lied about his academic credentials and background. And revelations that the article of a nutrition author was edited by his own public relations agent led to one of the most amusing headlines in Signpost history, "Nutritional beef cooks PR editor".

2008

One of the historical images of Muhammad which raised objections in 2008

Early in 2008, the Signpost reported on a controversy which erupted over a number of historical images depicting Muhammad. Visual depictions of Muhammad are offensive to many Muslims. The presence of the images on Wikipedia prompted a 100,000 signature petition demanding their removal, but Wikipedia editors ultimately decided to retain the images. Later in the year, the Signpost reported on another image controversy after an image of the cover of the Scorpions' album Virgin Killer prompted media complaints and even a brief blacklisting of Wikipedia by the Internet Watch Foundation.

In a year of sensitive and controversial news stories, perhaps the most difficult was the Signpost's two-part series on the relationship between Jimmy Wales and Canadian commentator Rachel Marsden. Their brief relationship was the subject of salacious stories in the news media, but unlike most news outlets the Signpost treated the matter seriously instead of as gossip. It reported on the relationship and the fallout from the scandal, investigating allegations of impropriety and exploring how the matter affected the encyclopedia.

2009

Church of Scientology building in Los Angeles

Ragesoss took the reins of the Signpost in February.

The Signpost covered a number of issues that year, including a series of stories about the community's adoption of the Creative Commons license for encyclopedia content. The conclusion of the Scientology Arbitration case made headlines when the Committee banned IP addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology. The National Portrait Gallery threatened a lawsuit over images used on Wikimedia projects they claimed were under copyright in the UK, but were clearly in the public domain in the US and elsewhere. A fabricated quote attributed to the late composer Maurice Jarre by a Wikipedia editor and a performance art project on the encyclopedia and related legal matters were also reported on by the Signpost.

2010

Larry Sanger

HaeB took over the Signpost in June. In August, the Wikipedia Signpost officially shortened its name to the Signpost to reflect its coverage of Wikimedia projects beyond the English Wikipedia.

The Signpost published a series of stories on Wikipedia's new user interface and reported on the encyclopedia's 3,000th Featured Article. It reported on serious allegations by Larry Sanger to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the Wikimedia Foundation was "knowingly distributing child pornography" by hosting some unspecified images on Wikimedia Commons. Sanger co-founded Wikipedia but has become a frequent critic of the project. The FBI was also in the news in 2010 in relation to Wikipedia when it demanded the removal of FBI seal from the encyclopedia, prompting a cutting public response from Wikimedia Foundation counsel Mike Godwin.

2011

In January, Wikipedia celebrated its tenth anniversary and the Signpost covered the commemorations both on and off the project. Later that month, the Signpost reported on a front page New York Times story about Wikipedia's gender gap and the ensuing discussion on Wikipedia. Later that year, the Signpost reported on the shutdown protest of the Italian Wikipedia in response to controversial legislation before the Italian Parliament and the creation of the Wikipedia Zero initiative. Also in the news were Wikipedia controversies involving reporter Johann Hari and former politician Sarah Palin.

2012

A bubble map of the global distribution of English Wikipedia edits on 10 May 2011

The ed17 became editor-in-chief of the Signpost in May.

The Signpost reported on the blackout of Wikipedia in January due to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act. Several other controversial issues arose that year. A scandal involving conflict of interest editing prompted the resignation of the chair of Wikimedia UK. The Signpost chronicled the difficulties surrounding the foundation of a new Wikimedia project called WikiVoyage. The Signpost's regular "WikiProject Report" published an in-depth investigation called "Where in the world is Wikipedia?" examining how editors successfully and not so successfully collaborate together on WikiProjects in different parts of the world.

2013

Aaron Swartz

The Signpost began the year with an interview with Sue Gardner and a report on the untimely death of activist and Wikipedia editor Aaron Swartz. It continued its reporting on the foundation of WikiVoyage, following that up with a controversial report about some aspects of that project. The Signpost also investigated the Funds Dissemination Committee and published a series of reports on a scandal involving widespread paid advocacy editing by Wiki-PR, a now-former public relations company, and the resulting fallout. One of the most popular features in the Signpost that year was a special report called "Examining the popularity of Wikipedia articles: catalysts, trends, and applications".

2014

Lila Tretikov

Adrianne Wadewitz

One of the most popular Signpost stories of 2014 was its June report on the US National Archives and Records Administration's inclusion of Wikipedia in its Open Government Plan, which encompasses efforts such as uploading over 100,000 images to Wikimedia Commons. A related report demonstrated how its initiatives made it easier for institutions like NARA to upload their holdings to Commons. Also in June, the Signpost interviewed incoming Wikimedia Foundation director Lila Tretikov.

The Signpost reported on a quickly withdrawn $10 million lawsuit against four Wikipedia editors and how a series of Twitter bots revealed widespread government editing of Wikipedia around the world. The Signpost also noted the unfortunate deaths of Wikipedians Adrianne Wadewitz and Ihor Kostenko.

Behind the scenes, in late May, the Signpost gained a bit more exposure when its featured content section became part of Portal:Featured content.

2015

Go Phightins! and Gamaliel will take over leadership of the Signpost towards the end of January.

Where will the Signpost go in 2015? Much of that depends on you. We'd like to expand our coverage in many ways, reviving "News and Notes" as a regular section and doing more to check in with other projects and initiatives on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. For us to be able to do that, we need you. Offer your ideas on our Suggestions page or visit our Newsroom to see where you can help.

Reader comments

2020-01-27

What's making you happy this month?

By Pine and Clovermoss

The content of this Signpost piece is adapted from email threads titled "What's making you happy this week?" that are sent to Wikimedia-l.

We encourage you to add your comments about what's making you happy this month to the talk page of this Signpost piece.

Week of 29 December 2019: Was macht dich diese Woche glücklich?

Moss on a small hiking path at the south edge of Fallätsche. The photo was taken by User:Domob.

From User:Clovermoss

This week, I'm thankful that I am going to start collaborating with Pine for On The Bright Side. I have been a fan of this Signpost feature for a long time and I'm excited to help make it happen. I'm also thankful for the photo displayed above. I find that photographs of nature have a tendency to appeal to me, and I think that this one is stunning. I like moss for its unique texture and just for being something that exists. I adore the leaves that can be seen every autumn where I live, and I miss seeing them everywhere I go. However, I'm also thankful for the comforting aspects of winter: hot chocolate, candy canes, and the warmth at home.

From User:Pine

I am grateful to Clovermoss for agreeing to collaborate. I think that readers will appreciate seeing a new perspective and a new writing style. Also, because I will spend less time writing WMYHTW, I think that I will be able to spend a little more time on the pilot phase of NavWiki. NavWiki is progressing slowly but well.

The topic of writing reminds me of a video clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this scene, Captain Jean-Luc Picard receives a visit from the alien "Q". Q is powerful and unpredictable. Here, he offers to help Picard with drafting a speech (Youtube link).

• 
  Patrick Stewart, the actor who portrays Captain Picard
• 
  John de Lancie, the actor who portrayed Q

Finally, some thoughts about listening. Listening can be done casually, aggressively, carefully, poorly, well, and any number of other ways. Clovermoss appears to invest a lot of time and effort in listening. Captain Picard did too.

"One of the things that I’ve come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is I’m talking about myself. There was a sort of double action that occurred. In one sense Picard was expanding like this and at the same time he was also growing closer and closer to me as well and in some respect I suppose even had some influence on me. I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean-Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well."
— Patrick Stewart, quoted in BBC America

From Amir E. Aharoni

I wrote a proposal to make it possible for templates on Wikimedia sites to be global. It's not a new idea; in fact, it has been requested since 2004, which, if I'm not mistaken, is also the year that templates became available in the first place. But I do think that my proposal to make the global is the most detailed ever.

Now, what makes me happy this week is that the short version of this proposal is now available in 12 languages, including the six official languages of the United Nations, which is nicely symbolic: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates/Proposed_specification,_short_version

Even though I wrote most of the original text, I really, really want this idea to be "owned" by the whole Wikimedia community and [not] just by myself, so I'm glad that people are helping with translations, corrections, and comments, including negative comments. It is an important thing, and the more people participate in it, the better.

Happy new year! Let's make 2020 the year in which the first global modules will finally start appearing, and make the development of various community tools easier and more efficient for everyone. Cheers!

Week of 5 January 2020: 今週の嬉しいことは何ですか？

From User:Clovermoss

I have smiled several times this week, and I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful for the start of another year and another decade. I have observed and participated in a lot of WikiLove between editors wishing each other a happy new year. I'm excited for what 2020 will bring, as I'm anticipating some important milestones being reached this year in my life.

I saw an interesting thread on the mailing list about an astronaut editing Wikipedia from the ISS, and I'm thankful that my curiousity about Earth and beyond has been piqued. I was one of those kids who used to dream about being an astronaut. I still think of that career path as fascinating, although not one I am likely to take myself. I admire people who follow their dreams, whatever those dreams happen to be.

From User:Pine

Announcement about the availability of statistics for media file requests:

Hi everybody,

Just in time for the holidays, we're announcing the addition of Media Requests to our metrics catalog. Over the last few months we've been working on a dataset offering request numbers for every single image, audio, video and document in the Wiki universe, since 2015.

This means we have 3 new metrics available in the Analytics Query Service:

• Media requests per referrer: e.g. how many images, audio, videos... have been accessed from English Wikipedia in the last month? 73 billion for November.
• Media requests per file: e.g. how many hits did this cool painting get in November? The answer is 483,791 hits.
• Top files by media requests: e.g. what was the most popular video yesterday, December 22nd? Fred Rogers testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications. Fun! You can check out the top 1000 media files for any month or day, for any media type.

Media requests is, in terms of absolute numbers, a huge dataset, so the per file and top metrics are still being loaded with data all the way to 2015. We expect this loading to finish in mid January.

You can read more about this in Wikitech. As usual if you have any questions about the dataset or the new metrics please send them our way here on the list or via Phabricator.

Happy holidays!

Francisco + the A team
--
Francisco Dans (él, he, 彼)
Software Engineer, Analytics Team
Wikimedia Foundation

— Email from the Analytics mailing list

Week of 12 January 2020: Qu’est-ce qui vous rend heureux cette semaine?

From User:Clovermoss

"The Inter-Allied Women's Conference (also known as the Suffragist Conference of the Allied Countries and the United States) opened in Paris on 10 February 1919. A parallel conference to the Paris Peace Conference, it was convened to introduce women's issues to the peace process following the end of the First World War." The English Wikipedia article about the conference is a featured article, and is listed in the Showcase for Wikiproject Women in Red.

I'm thankful this week for discovering an interesting task force: Wikipedia:Women in Green. The goals of this task force involve creating GA-class articles on women and women's works. One of the goals for this year is 20 new GAs. I've known about Wikipedia:Women in Red for a while now, and I'm thankful for the work everyone has put into both Women in Green and Women in Red. I'm amazed at the hard work that went into the creation of 14,480 articles for January–July 2019, and I'm looking forward to updated statistics for WiR for August-December 2019.

• 
  Logo for Women in Red
• 
  Logo for Women in Green

From User:Pine

A toast in Lisbon, Portugal

This week marks the 19th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia. I would like to highlight a 2019 editorial by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, that was published in The New York Times. The title of the editorial is, "I Invented the World Wide Web. Here's How We Can Fix It." Berners-Lee writes, "I wanted the web to serve humanity. It's not too late to live up to that promise... I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the world of open source software are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the web." Berners-Lee goes on to advocate for making improvements to the Web. I invite you to read the entire editorial.

Wikipedia is a high profile success story for the Internet and for humanity. Concidentally, next week English Wikipedia is likely to have its six millionth article. Here's a toast to honor those who have made this place be as amazing it is.

• 
  The world's first web server
• 
  A cluster diagram of websites' relations to Wikipedia in 2004
• 
  The current Wikipedia logo
• 
  The current OpenStreetMap logo
• 
  Tim Berners-Lee announcing the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation
• 
  Web servers of the Wikimedia Foundation

Week of 19 January 2020: Co sprawia, że jesteś szczęśliwy w tym tygodniu?

From User:Clovermoss

The 2019 winner of Wiki Loves Monuments, taken by Wikimedia Commons contributor Marian Naworski

This week, I learned about Wiki Loves Monuments. The wording kind of sounded familiar at first, but I wasn't sure why. I didn't really know what Wiki Loves Monuments was and now I'm thankful that I do. A lot goes into a good photograph and really good photographs have a way of striking me with awe in a way that's hard to describe with words.

There were 25 announcements for the top winners and the winner was announced on January 14th. I love the way the sunlight shines in through the windows – it seems surreal, and it's almost like I'm standing there myself. I don't know what the temperature would be like inside the church, but I felt slightly cold looking at it. I'd imagine there isn't any heating currently in the building because it's abandoned, although maybe I'm thinking too much about details like that?

From User:Pine

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The 15th of January is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a civil rights leader in the United States. Every year, the first Monday after his birthday is a U.S. national holiday. English Wikiquote selected a quote from him as its Quote of the Day for 15 January 2020. Although my memories of this are vague, I think that my elementary school used the holiday as an occasion for students to learn about history. I am thankful for my teachers who taught us civics and the responsibilities of citizenship in a republic.

Regarding translations

Skillful translations of the sentence "What's making you happy this week?" would be very much appreciated. If you see any inaccuracies in the translations in this article then please {{ping}} User:Pine in the discussion section of this page, or boldly make the correction to the text of the article. Thank you to everyone who has helped with translations so far.

Your turn

What's making you happy this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.

Reader comments

2020-01-27

WikiProject Japan: a wikiProject Report

By Puddleglum2.0

For the WikiProject Report this month, we interviewed WikiProject Japan, a quality collaboration focused on improving, you guessed it, Japan related articles. This interview serves as the first in a series of country-related interviews. This series will appear every other month, and by the end of it, we will have seen how five different Projects edit and conduct their improvement to country-related articles. for this issue, we interviewed 4 users, Nihonjoe, WhisperToMe, Hoary, and Lullabying.

Interview

What motivated you to join the Project? Do you have any experience covering/learning about Japan and its history?

Nihonjoe: I founded it back in March 2006 because there wasn't a WikiProject covering Japan at the time. I thought it would be helpful to organize the efforts of maintaining Japan-related articles. I've lived in Japan and studied Japanese, so I have some experience with the topic (though I'm not an expert on anything, really). I enjoy learning more about a culture and history that is different from mine. It helps me better understand the world, and helps me learn to see things from differing perspectives.

WhisperToMe: I had an interest in Japanese anime and manga from when I was around 10 (when Pokemon aired on TV in Houston), and it led to an interest in Japanese culture in particular and East Asian cultures in general

Hoary: I really don't remember what motivated me. I live in Japan, so it might be expected that in some sense or other I'm learning about it all the time. (Such an expectation would be wildly optimistic.)

Lullabying: I don't think myself as an "official" member, per se, but I guess I am now! I noticed a lot of Japanese pop music articles were outdated and in major need of clean-up/synthesis, so I started helping out by translating news reports/research to help aid a better understanding of music releases and careers as a whole while trying to bring them to meet Wikipedia standards.

Do you participate in any task forces/subprojects under the main Project? If so, Does this affect how you help the main Project?

Nihonjoe: Yes. I've probably helped in all of them at one point or another. It doesn't really affect how I help with the main project. I mainly edit where my interest takes me.

WhisperToMe: I helped start a Tokyo task force back in the day, and from time to time I still contribute to Tokyo-related articles

Hoary: No.

Lullabying: I am active on the Anime and Manga WikiProject.

Does working on articles relating to a country differ from covering something like biology or military history? If so, how?

Nihonjoe: Probably, because a country-specific topic can cover all of those things. I've worked on articles related to military history and Japan, animals and plants of Japan, and many other topics. It lets me dip my toe into many different topics, and gain a broad appreciation of the overall topic of Japan. As far as the technical aspect goes, however, it's very similar to working on any other topic. You have to make sure you have enough reliable sources to show the notability of the topic, you have to learn how to properly structure an article so the information is presented logically and clearly, you have to make sure the information is presented in a neutral manner. All of the things that make solid articles are the same across the board, really.

WhisperToMe: Each country and culture has its own conventions and foibles, and therefore country-specific projects have to take into account specific history, conventions, and cultural practices. With biology and hard sciences the subjects are often similar or the same no matter what country is involved.

Hoary: Somebody writing about biology really ought to have made a systematic study of it, in class, with critical teachers. (Bluntly, I want the material I read about biology to come from people with higher degrees in biology. And not from degree mills either.) Ditto for a great number of other subjects. And very likely ditto for articles in particular areas related to Japan. This isn't true for relatively humdrum stuff about Japan: an article about a particular city, for example. So in this sense, it's easier. Unsurprisingly, the huge majority of material about Japan is in Japanese. My own ability in Japanese is alas fossilized at an intermediate level. More surprisingly, there's little from Japan that's freely available on the web: look up a given subject, and typically all one sees are entries in anonymous blogs, PR puffs, or the first paragraphs of news articles whose full visibility costs money. If one wants the kind of material that might appear in a newspaper, one has to go to a major library and look it up in the databases of Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi....

Lullabying: I would say that the main issues I encountered really narrowed down to difference in culture and trying to see if the information I would include could match the formats standardized by other WikiProjects. For example, a lot of music releases are double A-side singles, which aren't a thing anymore in most countries... and there's also the general assumption that Japanese TV broadcasts make a set number of episodes for a show and don't announce if a series has been cancelled after its ending. There's also the fact that most in-depth coverage of Japanese media is usually in print, which makes sources difficult to access.

On a whole, are there any large problems that this Project faces right now? If there are, do you think they are possible to address? If not, are there any problems you see arising in the future?

Nihonjoe: I agree with WhisperToMe: the jawiki doesn't have as many good sources, so it makes it more difficult for us if we're trying to port information over from there. As most of the people on jawiki are living in Japan, they have much easier access to sources there than we do. There have been many articles on notable topics deleted here simply because we didn't have access to the sources in Japan. The deletion process here is extremely biased against non-English sources and topics. If it hasn't been discussed in an English-language source, there are a fair number of editors who have to be reminded that sources are not required to be in English, and that it is much more difficult to get sources from a country where there has been less effort at getting older sources online (or even more recent ones...some newspapers in Japan remove online articles after only a short period).

WhisperToMe: I haven't been involved in Japan-area articles as much now as I have been in the past. One issue is that JAwiki does not have as much referencing for articles and therefore if Japan-subject articles on ENwiki are put on AFD, it becomes harder to find supporting sources to keep the article. I think the JAwiki community should be asked to consider increasing general article sourcing. Getting familiarity with CiNii (Japanese research database) and having friends in Japan get scans of freely available materials in Japanese libraries (I took a trip to Tokyo in October of last year partly to get access to a document at a Tokyo library) really helps!

Lullabying: My experience with editing is mostly about Japanese music and film, so I'll talk about this part only. I don't think there's enough people agreeing how to synthesize the articles (i.e. member birthdates and official colors) -- because the majority of Japanese music is available in Japan services only, the articles are mostly only maintained by hardcore fans. I also think it's very difficult to get feedback because some music groups are niche and information outside of Japanese is often unavailable. I often find myself going to WikiProject Korea (because some groups cross over to that country) for advice because they are more active. I think it might be helpful if we had a list of reliable online sources even, because it would be resourceful as a starting point to weed out any websites with a dubious reputation (since some articles are listing gossip websites as a source

What are some of the Project's main goals? Do you think they will be met in the near future? If so, how? If not, why not?

Nihonjoe: The main goals have always been to:

• Increase coverage of Japan-related topics on the enwiki
• Create a body of articles that accurately depicts the history and culture of Japan and the Japanese people
• Bring as many articles to Good or Featured status as possible. As of 21 November 2024, there are 95,307 articles within the scope of WikiProject Japan, of which 185 are featured. This makes up 1.38% of the articles on Wikipedia and 1.66% of featured articles and lists. Including non-article pages, such as talk pages, redirects, categories, etcetera, there are 247,254 pages in the project.

WhisperToMe: I'm not and haven't been the main spiritus movens of the project, but I would assume that a big goal would be to increase knowledge about Japan in the English-speaking world and to make available information previously only known in Japanese.

Lullabying: The general goal of this WikiProject is to improve understanding of Japanese culture and to provide more information. I'm fairly certain that they will be met in the near future, especially as more Japanese sources are moving to web and making it easier to archive. Also, Japanese media is slowly but surely getting more accessible as they're now making the move to marketing themselves globally.

How can a newer user looking to help with the Project do so? What advice would you give to such editors?

Nihonjoe: Definitely learn how to properly source an article using verifiable and reliable sources. Once you know how to do that, we have a big list of items needing attention. Some are easy to do, and others will take a bit of work to fix. Any progress, however, is progress, so contributing in any positive manner is appreciated.

WhisperToMe: After becoming familiar with sourcing requirements, he/she can use Wikipedia:RX to get access to journal articles or book chapters that can be used to build content often seen in academic circles. Also I would suggest that if he/she has ample time and money as well as a keen interest, learning Japanese in order to access Japanese sources would be awesome!

Lullabying: Use archiving tools to archive your sources, especially since Japanese news outlets tend to not keep them online for very long!

Do you have any last words you would like to share with our readers?

Nihonjoe: Japan has been a passion of mine for decades now. I enjoy learning about its culture, people, history, language, and so on. I hope the work I do will be helpful to those just starting on a journey to learn more about Japan. I also hope people will join the project and help improve and expand the articles we have here on Wikipedia.

WhisperToMe: I'm very happy to support East Asian and Southeast Asian Wikipedia communities. In the Hong Kong area I've been looking for a core of Japanese expats who could serve as a bridge between the Japanese and Hong Kong communities, and I encourage more expats to get involved with Wikipedia in general.

Lullabying: I'm glad to have helped in making information about Japanese music, media, and pop culture more accessible to you! I hope it has sparked your interest in some way and inspired you to share your support!

---

Do you want to see a particular WikiProject interviewed? Any questions you want answered? I want your suggestions! Please feel more than welcome to post advice on the talk page!

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Predicting the 6,000,000th article

By Mercurywoodrose and Smallbones

Sooner or later every Wikipedian will enjoy their 15 minutes of Wiki-fame. Mercurywoodrose is now getting his, having won the 6,000,000 pool by most closely predicting when Wikipedia would record its 6,000,000th article. He predicted that the milestone would be reached on December 1, 2019. Second place goes to ϢereSpielChequers who predicted September 12, 2019. The Signpost proposed a serious interview with Mercurywoodrose. He did not cooperate. -S

• Signpost: What are you going to do with the $6,000,000 prize? (just kidding!)
• Mercurywoodrose: I don't know, but if i get in a catastrophic test plane accident and have my legs, one arm, and one eye destroyed, I know what I am doing with $6,000,000. Gentlepersons, they can rebuild me. They have the technology. They have the capability to build the world's first bionic Wikipedian. Mercurywoodrose will be that editor. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster, with more reliable sources.
• SP: Do you remember why you made the December 2019 prediction 6 years ago?
• MW: I figured I knew just enough about mathematics to make a somewhat accurate back of the napkin estimate for the date, factoring in a bit of the slowdown in new article creation, and believing that this downward trend in new articles would continue. I'm sure I must have done an actual calculation, but the methods I used would probably give an actual statistician apoplexy. It was a miseducated guess.
• SP: What's the biggest change you've seen in Wikipedia in that time (other than a couple of million articles)?
• MW: A team of editors with way too much time on their hands created an automation system for creating new Portals. What's a Portal, you ask? Exactly... On a side note, the biggest change that did NOT occur is that the Deletionists and the Inclusionists are still engaged in a Manichean struggle, with neither side winning. The proof of this is that the number of articles has not gone to zero, decreased by a factor of Thanos, or expanded to infinity and beyond.
• SP: How many articles have you created?
• MW: 310 using created by me, and adding up the total articles by HAND. Computers! Ha! Who needs them! I did get into the top 400 editors by edit count, which of course is a meaningless measure, but it was fun while it lasted.
• SP: What's your prediction for the 8,000,000th article? (the 7,000,000 pool is closed)
• MW: I cannot predict that, it's beyond my processing capacity as a quasi-quantum computer, but I know what i would LIKE it to be. An article about ME, of course. Hopefully for something worthwhile, not notorious. First Wikipedian to be shot into the Sun for being too sarcastic? Well, that's sort of both...
• SP: What's your favorite article out of the last million created (since November 1, 2015)?
• MW: Aside from my own articles created during this time, of which my favorite subject is Jen Bartel (she rocks), I don't know. How about new articles on things I like? My first thought, I really loved Joker. That article was created, oh, wow, on my birthday! I didn't expect that!.
• SP: Anything else you want to add? Feel free to be serious, philosophical, sentimental, humorous, thank your mother, etc.
• MW: I'm a little sad that new editors will be facing an ever more complete work, with fewer areas to expand without being an expert. Perhaps we should consider erasing Wikipedia every few decades, and recreating it from scratch, to give new editors that initial experience of joy and wonder that they can be part of this, not just an observer, by clicking that innocent little "edit" tab. But maybe there is hope, maybe that sense of wonder will persist into the future. I know I fell in love with Wikipedia, and while I'm no longer obsessed with editing, I may fall in love all over again.

Reader comments

2020-01-27

Remembering Wikipedia contributor Brian Boulton

By MJL

2014: Brian Boulton enjoys his holiday.

In December, Wikipedia lost one of the best editors in its history, Brian Boulton. With over 100 featured articles to his name and more than 14 years experience, Brian was certainly an editor to look out for. Today, we delve into his life and great contributions to this project.

The life of Brian

“ I cannot begin to say how sorry I am. I had the privilege of meeting Brian and his daughter in London once, and this news breaks my heart. Brian was an amazing man and a true scholar, and the world is a lesser place without him. If his family and friends are reading, please accept my heartfelt sympathy for your loss. He is a man I will truly never forget. ” — Kafka Liz, source.

Brian Boulton was born on 4 July 1937. When he was 7 years old, he and his brother David lived with their Aunt Ena in Liverpool. This was at the end of World War II, and that year in Liverpool would leave a profound impact on him. Despite only living there a short time, as recently as 2011 he still considered himself Liverpudlian.

He married his wife Barbara in 1958, and in 2018 they celebrated 60 years of marriage. Together they raised three children.

On Wikipedia

“ Brian Boulton, a retired academic, died on 9 December 2019. He joined Wikipedia as early as 2003, editing as an IP until late 2007. At first he worked mainly on polar history articles and biographies, but later branched into classical music, literature, politics and history, with a curious taste for marine disasters from time to time. He was responsible for getting more than 100 articles to FA, and at the same time was a tireless, patient and immensely helpful reviewer.

He was unfailingly courteous, even to the few editors who persistently irritated him: he had private nicknames for a few of the worst offenders, but never let his exasperation show in his contributions. A fair few London-based Wikipedians had the pleasure of meeting him, and he was as convivial in real life as he was kindly and wise on Wikipedia. "He was a mentor to us all", said one tribute on his talk page, and indeed he was.

” — SchroCat, source.

Before registering an account on Wikipedia, Brian Boulton made this edit to add some information to Kenneth Baker. Though, after suffering from a serious illness in real life, Brianboulton would soon register his username in November 2007. His first user page stated his intentions quite clearly.

It was not particularly long before Brian managed to get his first two articles to Featured article status; though he was not without guidance from SandyGeorgia.

The Epic Barnstar – Dutifully given by Pdebee

“ Dear Brian,
I want to thank you for all the most excellent work you have done recently to rewrite the article on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition; it was epic in its own right! I, for one, very much appreciate the many improvements you have brought to the article. Thank you for all your contributions to our encyclopedia.
With kind regards;
Patrick. ” — Pdebee, source.

Until the week of his death, Brian Boulton continued his long history of contributions to Wikipedia. On 30 November 2019, he received his last token of thanks from Pdebee: the Epic Barnstar (depicted above).

One of Brianboulton's long-term projects was trying to bring Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration to featured topic status. As of the time of writing, the following reflects the progress that has been made so far:

“ Not only was Brian an incredible writer and reviewer, but he had that amazing quality of being able to get more out of those around him. His work at FAC over countless years has vastly improved Wikipedia for the better, and I am deeply saddened to hear this news. ” — Harrias

Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration
Southern Cross Expedition Discovery Expedition Scottish National Antarctic Expedition Australasian Antarctic Expedition Swedish Antarctic Expedition	Nimrod Expedition Terra Nova Expedition Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition Second German Antarctic Expedition Belgian Antarctic Expedition French Antarctic Expedition	Ross Sea party Shackleton–Rowett Expedition Amundsen's South Pole expedition Japanese Antarctic Expedition Gauss expedition

Remembrance

Brianboulton's family has set up a memorial site dedicated to remembering his life. Those who feel inclined to do so, are encouraged to donate to Mission Aviation Fellowship in honor of Brian here.

Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to .

Want the latest Signpost delivered to your talk page each month?

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions