Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-11-06
Admin bewilderingly unmasks self as sockpuppet of other admin who was extremely banned in 2015
| “ | What?????? What the hell??? | ” |
| — arbitrator Moneytrees, arbitration request for Lourdes | ||
A 2015 arbitration report in this very periodical said "it was a matter of deep concern" that an abusive editor who had obtained administrator privileges "was able to fool the community for so long". At that time, they were banned by the Arbitration Committee following a long case. We are sad to report that, not only did the abuse not stop in 2015, but the same person managed to obtain a second administrator account, and was just discovered a few days ago.
November 1 case request and startling admission
Beeblebrox opened a request for arbitration against administrator Lourdes on 1 November, claiming misdeeds including administrative blackmail
— bullying other less-privileged editors over their votes during a recent request for adminship. With the case request around one day old, on 2 November, the respondent suddenly stated that they are the site-banned former admin Wifione. The case request was closed as moot following Lourdes' admission.
One of the contributors to the case, Kurtis, asked "Is this an ArbCom case request or an M. Night Shyamalan movie?" Others, like arbitrator Moneytrees in the quote above, were more to-the-point.
Wifione background
If you have read our prior coverage of how the Wifione siteban came to be, amidst allegations of paid editing while holding the admin bit, you can probably skip over this section.
According to the 2015 Arbcom case, the oldest known account used by the individual also known as Wifione was created in 2006. They created dozens of sock accounts, which were revealed by a 2008 checkuser request.
That prior account was later linked to another account called Wifione, which was created in 2009 and that had become a Wikipedia admin in 2010. The Arbitration committee case found that Wifione was engaging in search engine optimization related to an Indian educational firm. Wifione was sitebanned as part of the case resolution.
An admin called "Lourdes"
This long-term abuser created the Lourdes account in late 2015, initially under a different name. In 2016 they renamed the account. They were most active in 2016–17, and ran an unsuccessful, self-nominated request for adminship in early 2017; a second attempt in 2018 was successful with 207 in favor and 3 opposed. The account went mostly unused for 2020 through 2022, with many months of total editorial inactivity, although it continued to perform admin actions. In 2023, they returned to regularly editing the English Wikipedia.
Throughout their tenure, they made 2,282 admin actions, according to User:JamesR/AdminStats.
The arbitration case request filed this month alleged that Lourdes engaged in egregious abuse of their administrator status during a recent request for adminship, including the following:
Because I remember having acted on your complaints at ANI a few times, and on the basis of that connect and support that I gave you, I am requesting you to reconsider your stand
— Lourdes, at the case request
This kind of pressuring (there were other examples) was described by one of the contributors to the case request as "the kind of thinly veiled threat you'd expect to hear in The Godfather". In response, Lourdes gave an admission nobody expected:
I am User:Wifione, the admin who got blocked years ago.
My RL identity has nothing to do with any celebrity or anyone like that. I am not writing this to have any final laugh. It's just that I feel it appropriate to place it here specially for Beeblebrox, who I almost emotionally traumatised over the years with the aforementioned double sleight -- aka, pulling him around for revealing my so-called identity. It also required double-doxxing myself on at least one external project, namely Wikipediocracy, which even placed mentions of my name in the private section to protect my identity.
— Lourdes, at the case request
And blocked themselves indefinitely:
2023-11-01T22:47:55 User:Lourdes (talk | contribs) blocked User:Lourdes (talk | contribs) with an expiration time of indefinite (account creation blocked, email disabled) (Abusing multiple accounts)
All of the details of the request and the statements made there — which arbitrators voted to decline as pointless soon after the revelations and the self-block — can be seen at its last revision link.
Aftermath
Nobody is quite sure what to make of this. How did they get away with this for so long? How did they conceal it this well? How did nobody notice? What was the point of spending years as a productive administrator, making tens of thousands of edits and logging thousands of actions, to implode the whole thing over a pointless argument on an RfA talk page?
The Signpost's sources have confirmed that the particular BADSITE mentioned in Lourdes' final message has indeed discussed this issue, and that both Beeblebrox and the disgraced LTA have posted more about the events, but the thread over there doesn't make a whole lot of sense either.
In short: what?
UK shad cab bigwig accused of ripping off WP articles for book, Wikipedians accused of being dicks by a rich man
U.K. Shadow Chancellor accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in her new book
The Financial Times, in "New book from UK shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves lifts from Wikipedia", accuses Rachel Reeves of wholesale plagiarizing from Wikipedia in The Women Who Made Modern Economics. There were lesser amounts of unattributed copying from The Guardian and several other sources. The Guardian reported that
Basic Books, the publisher, said some sentences should have been "rewritten and properly referenced" and pledged to review all sources in the book, but added that "at no point did Rachel seek to present these facts as original research".
Reeves told the BBC that some sentences "were not properly referenced", but would be corrected in future reprints. She also told the BBC:
I'm the author of that book, I hold my hands up and say, I should have done better .... Obviously, I had research assistants on the book, but I take responsibility for everything that is in that book.
But for me, what I wanted to do is to bring together the stories of these women. And if I'm guilty of copying and pasting some facts about some amazing women and turning it into a book that gets read, then I'm really proud of that
Both The Guardian and the Financial Times highlighted the irony "that one of the themes of the book was the failure to properly acknowledge the work of female economists."
Other media covering the story include The Telegraph, The Independent, The Times, and i. – S, H
Rich guy and Wikipedia: Who is offended by what?
- See also: this issue's Opinion.
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A tweet, from the world's richest man and leading tweeter, said that Wikipedia should change its name to "Dickipedia," offering Wikipedia a billion dollars to do so, "in the interests of accuracy". The tweet mockingly referred to a screenshot of a Wikipedia fundraising banner ("Wikipedia is not for sale. A personal appeal from Jimmy Wales"). Perhaps this check was slated to be cut right after his cage match with Zuckerberg.
An explosion of press articles followed:
- The Guardian opines that Wikipedia's very existence offends him and compares the "good internet" (Wikipedia) to the "bad internet" (Facebook and X, née Twitter).
- Rolling Stone writes that the rich man "Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia", referring to how he paid $44 billion for Twitter a year ago and renamed it X, which is now valued at about $19 billion. Wikipedian Annie Rauwerda is quoted at length, saying for example "Frankly, I have been sick of thinking about [the rich man] for years and I do not think his tweets about Wikipedia are all that novel. I mean, 'Dickipedia' isn't even the first disparaging nickname for Wikipedia he's touted this year." Rolling Stone also mentions Stephen Harrison's May 2022 article in Slate, about how the article about the rich man had become controversial and difficult to edit.
- In a new article for Slate, Wikipedia Is Covering the War in Israel and Gaza Better Than X, Harrison focuses on how people are spreading misinformation about the war on X (née Twitter) and how his changes have made matters worse. The rich man has been focusing more on criticism from Wales and "trolling" him rather than addressing his specific points.
- Noam Cohen is the dean of the small group of journalists who specialize in covering Wikipedia. His opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Elon Musk's hate for Wikipedia reveals his true views on free speech focuses on the weaknesses of the rich man's arguments against Wikipedia's accuracy. His main tool is ridicule. Wikipedia's main tool is good-faith collaboration. Wikipedia is now on his "roster of A-list enemies".
- The Hill added context by describing a back-and-forth Tweet-fest between the rich man, Jimmy Wales and others. It highlights how a tweet where the rich man questioned Wikipedia's fundraising propriety ("Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn't needed to operate Wikipedia [...]") was augmented by X's own "Community Notes", initially undercutting his arguments by providing facts about Wikipedia's large usage numbers.
Wikipedians can be grateful for the support of all these journalists when we are getting roasted by the world's richest man (who, less than three years ago, had expressed a very different opinion on occasion of Wikipedia's 20th anniversary: "Happy birthday Wikipedia! So glad you exist"). They all, in their own way, attest to the quality of our website and the power of collaborative editing. The number and strength of their responses also reflect on him.
In fact, the "Wikipedia is not for sale" fundraising banner that the rich man mocked in his tweet had itself already been inspired by an earlier richest-man-related Twitter controversy and the observation that it had generated a lot of public support for Wikipedia. As detailed by Jimmy Wales when he proposed using the "not for sale" wording in fundraising appeals back in December 2022:
I saw a tweet from a New York Post journalist saying to [the rich man] (who had complained to his fans creating a silly "scandal" about a routine deletion debate) "I wonder how much Wikipedia would cost?" I responded in a quote tweet with a dry "Not for sale". [see also Signpost coverage] This got an extremely positive response (at this moment over 220,000 likes!) from people including many who said that they hadn't donated before but would donate now. I paid close attention to the negative responses but they were mostly from the sorts of people who claim that that community is basically full of CIA agents, etc.
This gave me an idea – people do love it about us that we are not like other websites. Wikimedia is a nonprofit, a charity, and therefore isn't subject to the kinds of risks and pressures that other major websites have. [...] So I propose this banner message, and welcome open testing of variants. [...] --Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:17, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
In the aftermath of the posts, outlets such as Vice have (contrariwise vis-a-vis the rich man) claimed that the Wikimedia Foundation is "obviously spending money on servers to keep things stable". In this case, it should be noted that the Wikimedia Foundation's spending, and its funding priorities, have been criticized sharply by Wikipedians themselves for many years, and indeed criticized in the pages of this very publication. Indeed, we would be remiss to let our readers go away thinking that some rich guy from online invented criticizing the Wikimedia Foundation in 2022 — Wikimedians invented that the same day they invented the WMF!
Other news outlets that have covered this story include NDTV, PC Magazine, Livemint, Bloomberg, euro.news and Yahoo!.
Reports have tentatively identified the rich man as a South African businessman and investor named "Elon Musk". – S, H, J
Websites are music
The New Yorker cartoonist Triana Muñoz draws websites (here) as if they were musical styles and gives the styles names in the captions. Not to ruin your viewing pleasure, we list the websites and give music to fit the captions.
- Google [1]
- Rotten Tomatoes [2]
- Yahoo [3]
- Buzzfeed [4]
- Weather Channel [5]
- Wikipedia [6]
- Miscellaneous sites [7]
- Neither X nor Twitter made the cut – No cartoon, no caption – bonus track – S
Does Wikipedia's Gaza coverage show an anti-Israel bias?
The Spectator Australia, a conservative magazine, criticizes the English Wikipedia's coverage of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war as biased. The (paywalled) article examines two existing articles that recently were thrust into the news limelight by the conflict, focusing in particular on the neutrality of their lead sections ("when read time is primarily the first two to three paragraphs on any page, those paragraphs need to include a variety of sources"):
[In the article Gaza Strip,] the initial two paragraphs would lead the reader to think that Israel occupies Gaza since 1967, that Hamas are not a terrorist organisation, and that Israel blocks Gazan land, sea, and air space for no reason at all. To find any mention of the word terrorist (of which there are only two mentions) the reader needs to navigate through over 11,000 words down to near bottom of the page. The word terrorism is not mentioned once despite reference to Hamas control of Gaza since 2007, and sources are predominately from the United Nations which is known for its anti-Israel bias or from the post-Zionist writings of the 'New Israeli Historians' [see New Historians].
(It may seem reasonable to ask whether this Wikipedia article – as it looked like around the Spectator article's publication time – creates a misleading impression for readers without any background knowledge about Hamas. However, the author does not seem to be aware of Wikipedia's general guidelines discouraging the use of terms like "terrorist", and also doesn't mention that the article about Hamas itself contains ample mention of it being described as a terrorist organization by various entities.)
The author's second "timely example of Wikipedia distortion" is the article about Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi (which has had Good Article status since 2019):
The introductory section gives three references about Ahed portraying her as a Palestinian activist, two sources from Haaretz, and one from The Guardian. Haaretz is an Israeli news source known for its left-wing and liberal stances as is The Guardian – even a search on Wikipedia itself tells you this. There is no counter stance provided about Ahed's alleged family connection to terror. In the section "Early life" there is no mention about her parents encouraging Palestinians to throw stones at Israeli soldiers and berate them. There is no mention of her unrepentant aunt, Ahlam Tamimi, one of the convicted masterminds behind the 2001 Sbarro Pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed and wounded hundreds of Israeli civilians.
[... T]he page is seriously lacking in context and sourcing and is a detriment to the reader. The recent vanishing of Ahed Tamimi's Instagram account following her alleged post stating Israeli settlers should be slaughtered and referencing the Holocaust and Hitler, is nowhere to be mentioned (to date). It is not known if she deleted the Instagram account or if it was suspended. In fact, since I have recently become a Wikipedia editor, here is the discussion on why it is not included [excerpting this talk page section]. [...] The battle between editors over arguments of sources on Ahed's page is illustrative of the dominance some editors have over others.
The author, who identifies as "an advocate for the 'Deleting their Lies' campaign – a group dedicated to tracking and reporting hate speech on social media", concludes: "With growing anti-Semitism worldwide, Wikipedia has become an increasingly risky source on these topics as readers cannot exercise critical thinking with the limited information presented. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one such area highlighting this. Currently, it is unwise to blindly trust the Wiki crowd and it should be paramount for Wikipedia editors, new and old, to note all sides of the debate [...]."
The article also contains some general remarks about Wikipedia's importance and alleged ideological bias. As evidence for the latter, it cites two somewhat dated studies by Greenstein and Zhu (see our previous coverage in Recent research: 2015, 2012), Wikipedia's own article Ideological bias on Wikipedia, and criticism by Larry Sanger that had attained media attention in 2021 ("Sanger highlighted the Covid vaccine and the Hunter Biden scandal as examples of topics with left-leaning bias and little debate", see also our own coverage at the time: "Larry Sanger on bias in Wikipedia – with opinion orthodoxy, truth becomes more elusive"). – H
In brief
- Who is Mike Johnson?: Johnson (R-LA) is the newly elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Not just another candidate for the post, but the actually elected Speaker, second in the line of succession for the presidency. Politico asked European and Canadian politicos, who they diplomatically granted anonymity, who he is. They were at an embarrassing loss for words until an Irish government advisor was found. He had looked up Johnson on Wikipedia.
- Maher steps up: Al Jazeera reports that former WMF CEO Katherine Maher replaced Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave, who had spoken too much about the Israeli-Gaza conflict, according to some of the conference's corporate sponsors. "In recent weeks Web Summit has been at the centre of the conversation, rather than the host. Its purpose was overshadowed by the personal comments of the event's founder and former CEO, Paddy Cosgrave," according to Maher.
- Alleged antisemitism on Wikipedia: In February, Dr. Shira Klein will present a lecture on this subject at the USC Shoah Foundation (Shoah is Hebrew for The Holocaust). Earlier this year, Klein, together with Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski, published an academic paper titled "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", causing a significant amount of media coverage and on-wiki controversy, and prompting a re-opening of the long running arbitration case on "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland". See previous Signpost coverage in In the media (February 20, March 9, April 26, May 22), Recent research (March 9) and Arbitration report (May 22).
- Wikipedia pages can be used to deliver malware via Slack: Security Week describes a new "Wiki-Slack attack" that exploits a formatting glitch in Slack as "essentially a numbers game, meaning that the attacker needs to modify as many Wikipedia pages as they can and register domains for them, to ensure they can eventually infect a target of interest." TechRadar said that "sharing a Wikipedia link on Slack could be a serious security no-no".
The reports are based on findings by security firm eSentire, who published a blog post with further details, including a "sample of organic occurrences of Slack's mishandling of Wikipedia links." For example, in the article South African insolvency law, the end of the first paragraph and the beginning of the second paragraph read:
Insolvency is also of benefit to the insolvent, in that it grants him relief in certain respects.1
In broad and everyday terms, a person is insolvent [...]
- When previewing the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_insolvency_law, Slack will mangle this text so that it contains a link to the website respects.in.
- Sport records are "only interesting for Wikipedia" ... says race team CEO: Mercedes' Formula One team boss Toto Wolff said team records are "only interesting for Wikipedia, which nobody reads anyway". Three-time Formula One world champion driver Max Verstappen (not driving for Mercedes) had other opinions. (ESPN)
Board candidacy process posted, editors protest WMF privacy measure, sweet meetups
Candidacy process for 2024 board elections posted on Meta-Wiki
The Wikimedia Foundation's RamzyM (WMF) last month posted the proposed candidacy process for the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation board election on Meta-Wiki.
Shortlisting candidates (if necessary)
The benchmark is a shortlist of 12 candidates (since there are 4 open seats). After the confirmation of the candidates’ eligibility, the following process would take place.
- If there are more than 15 candidates, trigger an affiliate process that will help to shortlist the candidates using the qualification criteria. This would be how affiliates are involved in a process for “community-and-affiliate seats.” Elections Committee and Affiliates to design the process, and the support team will be responsible for managing and implementing the process.
- PROPOSAL: Iterate the process we used in 2022 for the affiliate process: request 1 representative for each affiliate to provide endorsements (or alternatively, the default contact point from each affiliate can provide endorsements); they could endorse a maximum of 12 candidates and at the end. The top 12 candidates with the most endorsements from affiliates would make up the shortlisted candidates.
- Note: the reason the proposal uses the threshold of 15 candidates to trigger this shortlisting process even though the ideal number is 12 candidates is because the 1-3 candidates that are removed might feel ostracized and it would be a lot of work for affiliates to carry out to only eliminate 1-3 candidates from the candidate list.
- Community questions for candidates
- The Elections Committee can select from the community questions for the candidates to answer (suggested number of questions should be 5-7 total to ensure equity).
- Note: in 2022, there were two separate sets of questions: one from the affiliates, one from the community. In this proposal, there would only be one call for questions (to be shared alongside the call for candidates) whereby anyone – from communities, projects, affiliates, etc. – can suggest questions to ask the candidates.
- The Elections Committee will finalize the list of questions, which will be shared with the shortlisted candidates.
Candidates will provide written responses in English within a specific timeframe. Support staff will coordinate the translation of these responses and upload the English and translated responses to Meta at a designated time.
- “Meet the Candidates” Panel
- Host a panel interview with all shortlisted candidates. This panel will be available virtually with interpretation; and recorded for those who can’t attend live.
- To ensure equity, the questions will be shared with candidates ahead of time so they can prepare. Support staff will facilitate to make sure there is equal airtime for every candidate.
This shortlist method is similar to the procedure used in 2022 to fill two seats that were historically "affiliate seats" (the difference is that the shortlist will now be longer than in 2022). The four seats up for grabs in 2024, however, were historically "community seats" before the Wikimedia Foundation board abolished the distinction between the two types of seats. If the proposed shortlist method is implemented, this will mark the first time that "community seats" will not be subject to a free vote by the volunteer community. – AK
The key to a successful adminship is a lowercase "x", or perhaps ...
- Disclosure: JPxG is the editor-in-chief of this publication. He did not participate in this writeup.
Not quite 3,735,928,559 votes were cast for two recent admin candidates, JPxG and 0xDeadbeef but attendance at the requests was sufficient for both to be listed now at Wikipedia:Times that 200 Wikipedians supported an RFX.
Both nominations had a certain amount of attention on their technical qualifications: both do advanced technical Wiki-stuff such as operating bots, creating edit filters, or script wrangling. And, of course, they both have "x" in their user names.
But Ganesha811 passed his RfA on November 3, breaking the "x" trend and only getting 153 supports (that's a 99% support ratio). They may have also created a new trend. Along with JPxG he is a Signposter, having contributed over a dozen articles to this newspaper before this year. Don't worry, we don't expect this trend to continue – but who knows?
The Signpost congratulates and welcomes the English Wikipedia's three newest administrators.
Editors of Russian Wikipedia protest Foundation's privacy measure intended to protect them
WikiStats is hiding the number of Russian, Belorussian, and Kazakh contributors by policy because WMF does not release aggregations of sensitive data in countries identified by independent organizations as potentially dangerous for journalists or internet freedom.
In an RfC on Meta, many editors from the affected region objected to this "protection" by a count of 30 to 2:
We, ruwiki contributors, believe that this policy does a lot of harm and no good: Russian Internet users tend to believe that ruwiki is an alien resource, and Russia/Belarus/Kazakhstan has so many ruwiki contributors that it's impossible to get any information about certain user from that generalized statistics.
Remarkably, the first !vote in favor of rescinding the policy reads "Support. Statistics were not needed to put me in prison," by Pessimist2006 (for context, see this Wikipedia article and our own previous coverage). The issue had already been raised back back in May by another editor who related how they frequently "had to explain to my opponents, who showed me this, that no, the Russian Wikipedia is not written only by foreign authors" - apparently without a reaction by the Foundation.
On October 21, WMF Trustee Victoria Doronina (herself a longtime member of the Russian Wikipedia community) stated that "The WMF staff is aware of the RfC and is working on a reply. I know that it doesn't solve the problem, but in the meantime here's some data for Russia in 2022 - 23."
Until around 2013 or 2014, the Foundation regularly published data on the number of edits (rather than editors) by country for each language Wikipedia, but these statistics are no longer being updated.
Brief notes
- Longest editing streak: Johnny Au sets the record for most consecutive days of editing. The streak of over 5,700 days started way back on November 11, 2007. He is passionate about Wikipedia, telling Diff "Never give up. Fight the good fight. We must fight against misinformation and disinformation".
- New WMF Trustee: Kathy Collins has been appointed to the WMF Board of Trustees. Collins was Vice President of Finance at Rice University for 20 years before her recent retirement. She will replace Tanya Capuan, both as trustee and Audit Committee chair effective in December, but will attend the WikiConference North America which starts this Thursday, November 9, in Toronto.
- CEE gathering: Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe gathered in Tbilisi on September 15 for a sweet meeting. Out of 140 participants, over 100 showed up for the group photo. The sweetest part was that Wikipedians from most of the countries in the region could meet and discuss peacefully in a region where war rages. Among other great presentations a WMF Board member from Belarus, Victoria Doronina, presented Russia: Editing Wikipedia projects in the time of cholera (slides).
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Severe weather, followed by Play (theatre) (beginning 6 November 2023). Please be bold in helping improve this article!
- Some highlights from the WMF's weekly Tech News from the past month:
- The Growth team is upgrading its Impact module, which is designed to help editors "know their impact on wiki", by showing metrics such as pageviews for recently edited articles. While primarily intended for newcomers, it is available to any logged-in user at Special:Impact.
- A new "safe mode" user preference "will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets."
- The Wikimedia Foundation's Language team has launched a new "Language and internationalization newsletter".
- The Foundation invites input on a proposed plan for re-enabling the Graph Extension (which had been removed earlier this year from all wikis due to security issues, thus leaving lots of pages bereft of graphs - cf. our previous coverage: Graph extension disabled).
An open letter to Elon Musk
- The following open letter to Elon Musk contains the opinions of its author Smallbones. These opinions do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost, its editors or staff, or those of other Wikipedia editors or of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Dear Elon,
Try as I might to assume good faith, it's impossible to do so for your tweets of October 22: "I will give them a billion dollars if they (Wikipedia) change their name to Dickipedia" which was followed up by two tweets "(Please add that to the 🐄💩 on my wiki page)" and "In the interests of accuracy".
The only way to interpret those tweets is that they are intentional insults to all Wikipedians. You are effectively calling me and all Wikipedia editors "dicks" on a platform that you control where millions of people can view the insult within hours. Ten days later the tweets had been viewed 18.5 million times.
And you start with a reminder of your wealth "I will give them a billion dollars", letting us know that you are a big shot. In fact, you are now the richest man in the world, according to both Forbes and Bloomberg. Most people don't like it when some rich person insults them and uses their money to justify the insult.
Some basic Wikipedia rules
A fundamental tenet of Wikipedia, known as "assume good faith" or AGF, instructs us to assume good faith on your part, but that's just not possible in this case. As the saying goes "AGF is not a suicide pact". But there are other fundamental policies that you should know about. First you need to know what you have done wrong, what rules you've broken. That's pretty simple here — the flip side of AGF, "don't be a jerk" is the basis of all of our behavioral rules. Originally this rule was known as "don't be a dick", which might seem more appropriate in this case. But the rule's name was changed after a few years, because naming this policy in a discussion was considered calling someone a dick: a "dickish move" as the argument for changing the title went. You can see the quandary this can cause. It's difficult to even talk about the problem with your tweets. So let's just use the new name: "don't be a jerk". The idea behind that policy is easy to explain. Just view the video shown at the top of this page, that's been included in the policy since March 2018.
Another standard rule that you have violated regards inappropriate canvassing. It simply says that if you have a disagreement about Wikipedia, don't call out to everybody you know who agrees with you to change the disputed article. And don't even think about telling them to put 🐄💩 into an article. You are not the first person to try canvassing like this. Soon after Wikipedia was founded, radio talk show hosts would run out of anything interesting to say, so they would talk about something they disagreed with on Wikipedia. Then they would call on their listeners to vandalize one of our articles. So we were forced to create the "inappropriate canvassing" rule.
I shouldn't pile on by naming all the rules that you may have broken, but your phrase "my wiki page" particularly irks me. The policy you have broken prohibits article ownership. We edit collaboratively. It is not your wiki page — you don't own it. It is Wikipedia's article about you.
There is also a rule about autobiography that you should know about, which contains a literary quote as a perfect explanation about why we need it.
It is said that Zaphod Beeblebrox's birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighbouring stars, and, shortly afterwards, by the issuing of over six and three quarter million writs for damages from all of the major landowners in his Galactic sector. However, the only person by whom this is said is Beeblebrox himself, and there are several possible theories to explain this.
— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Fit the Ninth
First, the good news
Wikipedians are accustomed to dealing with people who act like jerks and don't follow our rules. The first time you break the rules, you'll usually be let off with a warning. Consider this letter to be a warning.
In fact, there is an interpretation of the rules — and people who will argue this interpretation — that you haven't broken any rules at all. It is implicit in every rule that you have to edit Wikipedia to break the rules. But Wikipedians interpret the rules on a case-by-case basis, and ultimately look to the spirit of any rule, rather than any technicalities. Nothing "implicit" need apply.
There is only one case that I know of where a person who hadn't been proved to have edited Wikipedia has been blocked. This is the case of the paid editing company Wiki-PR, which used hundreds of undeclared paid sockpuppets to insert bias and advertising into articles.
While we blocked all the paid socks, as is normal, we also blocked the company as a whole, including the owners who might not have done any actual editing, and most people associated with the company.
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.
— WP:ANI on October 13, 2013 and The Wall Street Journal
In addition, when the company changed its name to Status Labs the ban still applied to the "new company".
What can you do now?
The most irksome part of your behavior is that you didn't need to do any of it. If you want to influence how an article is presented in our encyclopedia, all you have to do is start editing, while following a few of the basic rules as stated above. Anybody in the world can try to influence how an article is edited if they follow the rules. But please remember that your preferences are not any more important than anybody else's, per "no ownership" and "don't be a jerk".
It's best to create an account first so that people can't track your IP address and so that you can get messages on your own talk page. If you want the username User:ElonMusk, there are some minor procedures to go through so that people won't impersonate you. It's a bit like that blue checkmark as it used to apply on Twitter.
At this point you should read our policies on conflict of interest and paid-editing. If you want to edit the article about yourself, or about the companies you own, you will need to comply with the conflict-of-interest guideline and likely the paid-editing policy, which is also part of the site's terms-of-use.
In short, you should not edit the affected pages. Rather you can just edit the talk page, identify yourself as an editor with a conflict of interest, and make a polite and detailed request of how you want to have the article changed.
You'll likely not want to do this yourself. After all, your time is worth a lot of money. So you are allowed to hire a paid editor to do the same thing for you. There's really only one strict requirement — the paid editor must declare that you are paying them, or that you are the client (or both). There's no anonymity for the employer or the client. Also, it's best that you only hire one paid editor at a time. If they work together, or make another editing mistake, or engage in any type of deception, they'll both likely be blocked as sockpuppets. And please make sure that they realize that they have no special privileges on Wikipedia. They must follow all Wikipedia rules in addition to the paid editing rule.
Review
There's a lot of material covered here, so let's do a quick review. You need to respect the following rules if you want to influence article editing on Wikipedia:
- Assume good faith
- Don't be a jerk
- Neutral point of view
- inappropriate canvassing
- no ownership
- autobiography
- sockpuppets
- no advertising
- conflict of interest and
- paid-editing
It's really not that hard to understand. I hope you'll join us in improving Wikipedia, while following the rules that apply to everybody.
Sincerely,
- P.S. – I forgot to thank you for your contribution to the endowment a few years ago. I know how important encyclopedias are to you. Of course your monetary contribution doesn't buy you any special influence in editing.
The WikiCup 2023
After ten months of creating, expanding and reviewing articles, the 2023 edition of the WikiCup, the English Wikipedia's annual editing competition, has concluded.
The new champion of Wikipedia is ... (drum roll) ... myself? I never saw that one coming — especially considering that I was the last person to qualify in Round 3, as well as the last in Round 4[1] — but yes. I, BeanieFan11, am now the 14th champion in the WikiCup's history; second place honors went to Thebiguglyalien, followed by Epicgenius in third.
Over the course of the competition,[2] editors achieved 60 featured articles, 15 featured lists, six featured pictures, 397 good articles, over 300 Did you know entries, and 120 In the news articles; the competition also led to 545 good article reviews and 298 featured article reviews, so clearly this resulted in great improvement to the encyclopedia!
A brief history
The WikiCup 2023
6 November 2023
The WikiCup 2021
29 November 2021
Lee Vilenski wins the 2020 WikiCup
29 November 2020
Reviewer of the year, WikiCup winner, and the 2019 Wikimedia Summit
1 December 2018
2017 WikiCup round 4 wrap-up
6 September 2017
WikiCup report
4 November 2016
That's it for WikiCup Round 2!
17 May 2016
First round of the WikiCup finishes
9 March 2016
The amorous android and the horsebreeder; WikiCup round two concludes
6 May 2015
Wikicup's third round sees money, space, battleships and more
9 July 2014
2014 WikiCup enters round three
7 May 2014
Full speed ahead for the WikiCup
5 March 2014
WikiCup competition beginning a new year
8 January 2014
Wrestling with featured content
30 October 2013
WikiCup update, and the gardens of Finland
28 August 2013
WikiCup update: full speed ahead!
6 May 2013
2012 WikiCup comes to an end
5 November 2012
Fundraiser ends, content contests, image donation, and more
4 January 2010
Durova wins 2009 WikiCup
2 November 2009
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The WikiCup 2023 |
- See also: The WikiCup 2021.
The WikiCup began humbly in 2007 with 12 competitors, scoring being based primarily on edit counts and unique page edits. The competition adopted its present form in 2009, with points awarded for featured articles, lists and pictures, along with good articles, In the news and Did you know. There were 60 contestants that year and 120 the next, and the contest has taken place annually ever since.
The finalists
BeanieFan11 – Specializing in sports (specifically American football), I achieved a total of 2,586 points in the final round, scoring from one featured article (C. O. Brocato), 21 Did you know items, 61 good articles (the most points achieved in a final in that category since 2010), four In the news items as well as a small amount of bonus points. In previous rounds, I was 35th (Round 1, with 55 points off DYKs), 16th (Round 2, with 161 points from DYKs and ITNs), 16th (Round 3, with 175 points from DYKs and ITNs) and 8th (Round 4, with 673 points from GAs, DYKs and ITNs). I finished as the overall leader in good articles achieved (75).
Thebiguglyalien – Thebiguglyalien placed second with a total of 1,615 points, having earned them from a featured article on Barbara Bush, 11 good articles on various topics including Iron Man, U.S. first ladies and Greek philosophers, several reviews, a pair of DYKs and ITNs, along with a mass of bonus points. In prior rounds, Thebiguglyalien was 7th (Round 1, 455 points from GAs and reviews), 7th (Round 2, 415 points from five categories), 1st (Round 3, 919 points in five categories, including an FA on Frances Cleveland) and 3rd (Round 4, 1,535 points including an FA on Lou Henry Hoover).
Epicgenius – Focusing on New York buildings, Epicgenius took third place with 1,518 points, having done in the final round two featured articles (Lever House, 550 Madison Avenue), several reviews, a good topic of 41 articles, 11 good articles and eight DYKs. Previously, Epicgenius had come in 2nd (Round 1, 789 points in four categories), 3rd (Round 2, 636 points in three categories), 5th (Round 3, 526 points in four categories) and 1st (Round 4, 2,173 points in four categories). He was the only person to have a featured article in every round and finished as the overall leader in DYKs and good topic articles.
MyCatIsAChonk – Fourth place was MyCatIsAChonk, who had 1,012 points in the finals, from two FAs (Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, Appalachian Spring), several featured lists, many reviews and three DYKs. MyCatIsAChonk had previously placed 22nd (Round 1, 118 points in three categories), 8th (Round 2, 364 points, four categories), 5th (Round 3, 460 points, four categories including an FA) and 4th (Round 4, 1,116 points in seven categories including an FA). MyCatIsAChonk finished as the overall leader in featured lists, featured pictures, and featured article reviews.
BennyOnTheLoose – With 974 points in the finals, BennyOnTheLoose was fifth place. He worked on articles relating to songs and snooker, having two FAs (Terry Griffiths, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands), FLs, several reviews, five GAs and a DYK. In previous rounds, he was 15th (Round 1, 313 points), 4th (Round 2, 553 points), 7th (Round 3, 423 points) and 5th (1,073 points). He had six featured articles achieved throughout the competition, tied with Epicgenius and Iazyges for second-most.
AirshipJungleman29 – In sixth came AirshipJungleman29, who totaled 673 points in the final round from an FA on Tolui, two reviews and a GA on Hö'elün. Previously, he had come in 23rd (Round 1, 116 points), 10th (Round 2, 334 points), 13th (Round 3, 306 points) and 6th (Round 4, 761 points). He achieved a total of four featured articles in the competition.
Sammi Brie – Mainly working on articles relating to radio and television stations, Sammi Brie took seventh with 520 points, with a featured article on KCPQ, several GA/FAC reviews, five GAs and six DYKs. In previous rounds, Sammi Brie placed 8th (Round 1, 407 points), 6th (Round 2, 459 points), 12th (Round 3, 538 points) and 2nd (Round, 1,575 points). This user achieved two featured articles in the competition and finished as the overall leader in GA reviews with 115.
Unlimitedlead – Although only achieving five points with a FAC review in the final round, Unlimitedlead was active in prior rounds. Working on historical topics, Unlimitedlead was the overall leader in points in Round 1 (1,205 points), was second in Round 2 (847 points), second in Round 3 (862 points) and seventh in Round 4 (676 points). Despite having none in the finals, this user finished as the overall leader in featured articles achieved with seven, additionally being one of only two (Iazyges) to have three in one round.
Eliminated in Round 4
PCN02WPS – ninth place went to PCN02WPS, who had 525 points in Round 4. He had featured articles in Rounds 2, 3 and 4.
Harrias – 374 points in Round 4 including an FA; achieved an FA in Round 3 as well with 400 points total.
LunaEatsTuna – 370 points in Round 4 including an FA; achieved one in Round 2 as well, while having a top performance of 502 points in Round 1; was top GA reviewer in Rounds 1 and 3.
Lee Vilenski – Winner of last year's competition, as well as the one in 2020, and runner-up in 2021 and 2019, Lee Vilenski came in 12th with 276 points in Round 4. His top score came in Round 1 with 365 points including an FA, good enough for 10th in that round. He also was the only participant to score any points from a featured topic, having done so in Round 4.
Kusma – 184 points in Round 4; best score was 435 (including an FA) and a 6th-place finish in Round 3.
Muboshgu – 149 points, mainly from ITN items, in Round 4; best performance was 196 and a 15th-place finish in Round 3; was the competition's overall leader in ITN items with 46.
Iazyges – No points in Round 4, but was 3rd in Round 3 with 560 points, 1st in Round 2 with 1,040 points, and 5th in Round 1 with 532 points; achieved sixth featured articles in the first three rounds, tied for second-best, and was one of two to have three in one round.
Trainsandotherthings – Withdrew in Round 4; best performance was 384 points in Round 1; had two featured articles.
Eliminated in Round 3
Sarrail (now Tails Wx) – 164 points from ITN and DYK items in Round 3; one more ITN would have knocked out the eventual WikiCup champion.
Riley1012 – 119 points in Round 3.
Nomader – 81 points in Round 3; best total was 113 in Round 2.
Juxlos – 72 points in Round 3; 11th in Round 1 with 331 points including an FA.
Tamzin – 70 points in Round 3; best score was 145 in Round 1.
The C of E – The first person to sign up for the competition; 69 points in Round 3 was top score.
SounderBruce – 67 points in Round 3; was 13th in Round 1 with 326 points including an FA.
Steelkamp – 67 points in Round 3; was 13th with 215 points including an FA in Round 2.
Kingsif – 60 points in Round 3; 104 in Round 2 was top performance.
Newtothisedit – 45 points in Round 3; best was 129 points in Round 1.
Z1720 – 45 points in Round 3; had 70 points in Round 2.
Guerillero – 40 points in Round 3; 205 points including an FA in Round 2.
Red-tailed hawk – 17 points in Round 3; 89 points in Round 1 was best.- John M Wolfson – Zero points in Round 3; 205 in Round 1 was top performance.
- Ceranthor – Zero points in Round 3; 60 points in Round 2 was top score, being the last qualifier in that round.
FrB.TG – Withdrew in Round 3; was previously 5th place in Round 2 (525 points including an FA) and 3rd in Round 1 (625 points including an FA).
Eliminated in Round 2
Tayi Arajakate – The last person to sign up for the competition; 55 points in Round 2, 5 in Round 1 to be the final qualifier (along with Casualdejekyll).- theleekycauldron – 52 points in Round 2; scored 65 in Round 1.
Oltrepier – 47 points in Round 2; 52 in Round 1.
Unexpectedlydian – 35 points in Round 2; was 12th with 330 points in Round 1.
magiciandude – 35 points in Round 2; 105 in Round 1.
Ffranc – 32 points in Round 2; 35 in Round 1.
HickoryOughtShirt?4 – 30 points in Round 2; 21 in Round 1.
Ealdgyth – 30 points in Round 2; 55 in Round 1.
Bilorv – 25 points in Round 2; 50 in Round 1.- Ktin – 12 points in Round 2; 114 in Round 1.
Modussiccandi – 10 points in Round 2; same score in Round 1.- TheJoebro64 – 10 points in Round 2, after having scored 600, including two FAs, for a 4th-place total in Round 1.
ezlev – 5 points in Round 2; 80 in Round 1.
Kosack – No points in Round 2; was 14th place with 316 points, including an FA, in Round 1.
X750 – No points in Round 2; scored 101 in Round 1.
czar – No points in Round 2; 105 in Round 1.
Dr Salvus (now Wikipediæ philosophia) – Zero points in Round 2; 47 in Round 1.- Max263 – Zero points in Round 2; 10 in Round 1.
Amakuru – No points in Round 2; 24 in Round 1.
Mucube – No points in Round 2; Six points in Round 1.
SL93 – Zero points in Round 2; 93 in Round 1.
casualdejekyll – Withdrew in Round 2 after having been the last qualifier (with Tayi Arajakate) in Round 1 with five points.
Eliminated in Round 1
- 34 of the 89 entrants were eliminated in Round 1, after having scored no points; you can find their names here.
Concluding notes
A thank you goes out to all of the participants of the 2023 WikiCup for their hard work, and the benefit it has had on the encyclopedia. Signups for the 2024 competition are open; you can enter here. Note that judge Cwmhiraeth is retiring after this contest. We thank her for her contributions to the WikiCup, and hope that someone else will be willing to lead the competition.
Notes
- Note: For some reason
Helloheart was listed in Round 2 with zero points when they had scored zero points in Round 1 and thus did not advance.
- ^ Note that after each round, the point totals are brought back down to zero and participants have to start over again.
- ^ WikiCup stats
Equity lists on Wikipedia
- Will Kent (User:Will (Wiki Ed)) is the Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program Manager as well as the Wikidata Program Manager for the Wiki Education Foundation.
Do you ever wonder where Wikipedia articles come from? With a world of knowledge to represent, it’s a big question. In my role at Wiki Education, I am especially concerned with Wikipedia being an equitable and representative resource. Whether it’s a museum of paintings, a library full of volumes of books, or an online encyclopedia, systematic bias is inherent in every collection. And Wikipedia is not immune to it. So when we think about where Wikipedia articles come from, another question we must answer is how do we ensure Wikipedia has articles to make it a more representative resource?
With support from the Nielsen Foundation's Data for Good grants program, I have been developing a Wikipedia resource that encourages editors to create articles to improve representation of diverse groups and topics on Wikipedia. We have been inspired by some of the amazing projects that are already working to address this issue on Wikipedia — Women in Red, Art + Feminism, and Black Lunch Table, to name a few. It's our hope that this tool can complement the work of these projects.
Specifically, Women in Red uses Wikidata, the linked data knowledge base that connects all Wikimedia projects, to generate lists of articles that could exist in English Wikipedia, but don't yet. Building on their efforts, we are creating a resource that allows community members to do the same thing, but with a broader scope of demographic variables. In addition to individuals who identify as women, we have constructed pages that list thousands of potential articles based around sexual orientation, nationality, disability status, and ethnicity.
These lists query the other language versions of Wikipedia and pull only the results that don’t have English language articles. From there, community members can select individuals and generate English language versions of the articles. Since these articles exist in other language versions of Wikipedia, the idea is they already pass notability and have references. The article writing process will still take time, but it saves some effort in not starting from scratch. Check out our the lists here.
I know what you’re thinking — can this get any cooler? And the answer is yes! Wiki Education has been developing and maintaining the Dashboard for the past few years. The Dashboard allows instructors and individuals to create courses that are scoped to a set of students, Wikipedians, edit-a-thon attendees, and so on — basically any set of individuals that want to participate in whatever the course is. Another feature is the ability to frame a course around a list of articles. Using the same query from our resource, anyone using a Dashboard can scope it to one of the lists we’ve developed. The idea here is to encourage Dashboard users to select articles about underrepresented groups or individuals, and write them for English Wikipedia. Follow this link for an example of an article-scoped Dashboard. Heads up — clicking the PSID list will take some time to load, because it is large.
And this, dear readers, is one place where Wikipedia articles come from.
The main idea is we’re building a tool that encourages community members to write articles to increase the visibility of diverse groups and topics on Wikipedia. We’re doing this using Wikidata, queries, a list tool called Listeria, articles scoping on the Dashboard, and the hard work of anyone taking a Dashboard course or attending an event that uses the Dashboard. Although systemic bias and underrepresentation will remain a significant problem on Wikipedia and beyond, we hope this tool can push new and old users alike to edit in a way that helps to improve representation on the platform. As the community and these tools mature, we also hope others can refine and adapt it to their specific needs. An amazing thing about pulling from Wikidata is that users can narrow and expand queries to generate new lists. These lists are configured to improve English Wikipedia, but in a snap they can point to other language versions.
We're still tinkering and ironing out the wrinkles, but we hope you can start taking advantage of it now! Get ready to make some edits.
This post was originally published on the Wiki Education blog on August 31st, 2023.
How English Wikipedia drove out fringe editors over two decades
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet" – by reinterpreting NPOV and driving out pro-fringe editors
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A paper[1] in the American Political Science Review (considered a flagship journal in political science), titled "Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet"
[...] shows that the English Wikipedia transformed its content over time through a gradual reinterpretation of its ambiguous Neutral Point of View (NPOV) guideline, the core rule regarding content on Wikipedia. This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse. There are several steps to the transformation. First, Wikipedians disputed how to apply the NPOV rule in specific instances in various corners of the encyclopedia. Second, the earliest contentious disputes were resolved against Wikipedians who were more supportive of or lenient toward conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism, and in favor of Wikipedians whose understandings of the NPOV guideline were decisively anti-fringe. Third, the resolutions of these disputes enhanced the institutional power of the latter Wikipedians, whereas it led to the demobilization and exit of the pro-fringe Wikipedians. A power imbalance early on deepened over time due to disproportionate exits of demotivated, unsuccessful pro-fringe Wikipedia editors. Fourth, this meant that the remaining Wikipedia editor population, freed from pushback, increasingly interpreted and implemented the NPOV guideline in an anti-fringe manner. This endogenous process led to a gradual but highly consequential reinterpretation of the NPOV guideline throughout the encyclopedia.
The author provides ample empirical evidence supporting this description.
Content changes over time
First, "to document a transformation in Wikipedia's content," the study examined 63 articles "on topics that have been linked to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, extremism, and fringe rhetoric in public discourse", across different areas ("health, climate, gender, sexuality, race, abortion, religion, politics, international relations, and history"). Their lead sections were coded according to a 5-category scheme "reflect[ing] varying degrees of neutrality":
- "Fringe normalization" ("The fringe position/entity is normalized and legitimized. There is an absence of criticism")
- "Teach the controversy"
- "False balance"
- "Identification of the fringe view"
- "Proactive fringe busting" ("Space is only given to the anti-fringe side whose position is stated as fact in Wikipedia’s own voice")
The results of these evaluations, tracking changes over time from 2001 to 2020, are detailed in a 110-page supplement, and summarized in the paper itself for nine of the articles (Table 1) - all of which moved over time in the anti-fringe direction (see illustration above for the article homeopathy).
Editor population changes over time
To explain these changes in Wikipedia's content over the years, the author used a process tracing approach to show
[...] that early outcomes of disputes over rule interpretations in different corners of the encyclopedia demobilized certain types of editors (while mobilizing others) and strengthened certain understandings of Wikipedia’s ambiguous rules (while weakening others). Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted.
Specifically, the author "classif[ied] editors into the Anti-Fringe camp (AF) and the Pro-Fringe camp (PF)". The AF camp is described as "editors who were anti-conspiracy theories, anti-pseudoscience, and liberal", whereas the PF camp consists of "Editors who were more supportive of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism."
To classify editors into these two camps, the paper uses a variety of data sources, including the talk pages of the 63 articles and related discussions on noticeboards such as those about the NPOV and BLP (biographies of living persons) policies, the administrator's noticeboard, and "lists of editors brought up in arbitration committee rulings." This article-specific data was augmented by "a sample of referenda where editors are implicitly asked whether they support a pro- or anti-fringe interpretation of the NPOV guideline."
(Unfortunately, the paper's replication data does not include this editor-level classification data – in contrast to the content classifications data, which, as mentioned is rather thoroughly documented in the supplementary material. One might suspect IRB concerns, but the author "affirms this research did not involve human subjects" and it was therefore presumably not subject to IRB review.)
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Tracking the contribution histories of these editors, the paper finds
The key piece of evidence is that PF members disappear over time in the wake of losses, both voluntarily and involuntarily. PF members are those who vote affirmatively for policies that normalize or lend credence to fringe viewpoints, who edit such content into articles, and who vote to defend fellow members of PF when there are debates as to whether they engaged in wrongdoing. Members of AF do the opposite.
The paper states that pro-fringe editors resorted to three choices: "fight back", "withdraw" and "acquiesce" (similar to the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty framework).
The mechanism underlying these changes
The author hypothesizes that
The causal mechanism for the gradual disappearance is that early losses demotivated members from PF or led to their sanctioning, whereas members of AF were empowered by early victories. As exits of PF members mount across the encyclopedia, the community increasingly adopts AF’s viewpoints as the way that the NPOV guideline should be understood.
To support this interpretation, the paper presents a more qualitative analysis of the English Wikipedia's trajectory over time:
- "Step 1: Rule Ambiguity" of the NPOV policy, which initially "allowed for inclusion of lower-quality sources, so long as they were attributed"
- "Step 2: Clashes between Camps over Rule Interpretations"
- "Step 3: Formation of a Power Asymmetry"
- "Over the course of years, AF successfully shaped how to understand the practical application of Wikipedia’s NPOV guideline. These early victories gave AF an upper hand in editing disputes ..." Here, the author highlights the role of ArbCom: "Two particularly important early arbitration rulings in the early years were the arbitration committee cases on climate change (2005) and pseudoscience (2006), which largely reaffirmed some viewpoints held by AF in those specific disputes and led to sanctions that primarily targeted prolific PF editors [...]"
- "Step 4: Reinterpretation of Wikipedia’s Rules". Here, the author details various aspects, e.g.
- an increased ability of "experienced editors [...] to drive disruptive 'newcomers' away from Wikipedia and instill in newcomers’ certain understandings of how rules should be interpreted." Also
- Also, "the gradual development of a sourcing hierarchy—whereby some sources were deemed reliable, and others were deemed unreliable—created advantages for AF editors." The 2017 ban of the Daily Mail is highlighted as a milestone, followed by deprecations of various other sources (Table 2).
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The author also discusses and rejects various alternative explanations for "why content on the English Wikipedia transformed drastically over time." For example, he argues that while "Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the emergence of 'fake news' websites" around that time may have impacted Wikipedia editors' stances, this would not explain the more gradual changes over two decades that the paper identifies.
Fringe and politics
As readers might have noticed above, the author includes political coordinates in his conception of "fringe" ("more supportive of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism") and "anti-fringe" ("anti-conspiracy theories, anti-pseudoscience, and liberal"). This is introduced rather casually in the paper without much justification. (It also puts the finding of a general move towards "anti-fringe" somewhat into contrast with some older research by Greenstein and Zhu. They had concluded back in 2012 that the bias of Wikipedia's articles about US politics was moving from left to right, although this effect was mainly driven by creation of new articles with a pro-Republican bias. In a later paper, the same authors confirmed that on an individual level, "most articles change only mildly from their initial slant."[2])
Even if one takes into account that the present paper was published in the American Political Science Review, and accepts that in the current US political environment, support for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience might be much more prevalent on the right, that would still raise the question how much these results generalize to other countries, time periods or language Wikipedias – or indeed topics of English Wikipedia that are less prominent in American culture wars.
Indeed, in the "Conclusion" section where the author argues that his Wikipedia-based results "can plausibly help to explain institutional change in other contexts", he himself brings up several examples where the political coordinates are reversed and the "anti-fringe" side that gradually gains dominance is situated further to the right. These include the US Republican Party in itself, where "Trump critics [i.e. the "pro-Fringe" side in this context] have opted to retire rather than use their position to steer the movement in a direction that they find more palatable", and "illiberal regimes within the European Union have gradually been strengthened as dissatisfied citizens migrate from authoritarian states to liberal states."
As these examples show, the consolidation mechanism described by the paper may not be an unambiguously good thing, regardless of one's political views. For Wikipedians, this raises the question of how to balance these dynamics with important values such as inclusivity and openness. But also, the paper reminds one that inclusivity and openness are not unambiguously beneficial either, by demonstrating how by reducing these in some aspects, the English Wikipedia succeeded in becoming the "last good place on the internet."
See also a short presentation about this paper at this year's Wikimania (where Benjamin Mako Hill called it a "great example of how political scientists are increasingly learning from us [Wikipedia]")
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
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.
"It’s not an encyclopedia, it’s a market of agendas: Decentralized agenda networks between Wikipedia and global news media from 2015 to 2020"
From the abstract:[3]
"[...] this study collected comprehensive global news coverage and Wikipedia coverage of top US political news events from 2015 to 2020. Time series analysis found that none of the media types (Wikipedia, elite media, and non-elite media) exhibited dominant agenda-setting power, while each of them can lead the agenda in certain circumstances. [...] This article proposed a multi-agent and multidirectional network architecture to describe agenda-setting relationships. We also highlighted four unique characteristics of Wikipedia that matter for digital journalism."
"Stigmergy in Open Collaboration: An Empirical Investigation Based on Wikipedia"
From the abstract:[4]
This study builds on the theory of stigmergy, wherein actions performed by a participant leave traces on a knowledge artifact and stimulate succeeding actions. We find that stigmergy involves two intertwined processes: collective modification and collective excitation. We propose a new measure of stigmergy based on the spatial and temporal clustering of contributions. By analyzing thousands of Wikipedia articles, we find that the degree of stigmergy is positively associated with community members’ participation and the quality of the knowledge produced.
"The Wikipedia imaginaire: a new media history beyond Wikipedia.org (2001–2022)"
From the abstract:[5]
"This paper presents a media biography of Wikipedia’s data that focuses on the interpretative flexibility of Wikipedia and digital knowledge between the years 2001 and 2022. [....] Through an eclectic corpus of project websites, new articles, press releases, and blogs, I demonstrate the unexpected ways the online encyclopedia has permeated throughout digital culture over the past twenty years through projects like the Citizendium, Everipedia, Google Search and AI software. As a result of this analysis, I explain how this array of meanings and materials constitutes the Wikipedia imaginaire: a collective activity of sociotechnical development that is fundamental to understanding the ideological and utopian meaning of knowledge with digital culture."
References
- ^ Steinsson, Sverrir (2023-03-09). "Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet". American Political Science Review: 1–17. doi:10.1017/S0003055423000138. ISSN 0003-0554.
- ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (2016-08-09). "Open Content, Linus' Law, and Neutral Point of View". Information SystemsResearch. doi:10.1287/isre.2016.0643. ISSN 1047-7047.
Author's copy
- ^ Ren, Ruqin; Xu, Jian (2023-01-28). "It's not an encyclopedia, it's a market of agendas: Decentralized agenda networks between Wikipedia and global news media from 2015 to 2020". New Media & Society: 146144482211496. doi:10.1177/14614448221149641. ISSN 1461-4448.
- ^ Zheng, Lei (Nico); Mai, Feng; Yan, Bei; Nickerson, Jeffrey V. (2023-07-03). "Stigmergy in Open Collaboration: An Empirical Investigation Based on Wikipedia". Journal of Management Information Systems. 40 (3): 983–1008. doi:10.1080/07421222.2023.2229119. ISSN 0742-1222.
- ^ Jankowski, Steve (2023-08-12). "The Wikipedia imaginaire: a new media history beyond Wikipedia.org (2001–2022)". Internet Histories: 1–21. doi:10.1080/24701475.2023.2246261. ISSN 2470-1475.
Like putting a golf course in a historic site.
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-
Hyochang Park during the Japanese colonial period by Government of Seoul, restored by Adam Cuerden, one of this fortnight's featured pictures. Seen on the fairway is a very special obstacle: The tombs of the Korean royal family.
For once, we've managed a complete featured content, everything described, including the lists. Which I may have guaranteed by doing lists first, but must thank Quicole and JPxG for their work in helping me finish this. It's been a rough week.
Featured articles
Fifteen featured articles were promoted this period.
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- Mark Baldwin (baseball), nominated by Therapyisgood
- He still has the recond for single-season wild pitches;
- After playing baseball he started giving people stitches.—QJR
- Irere (Alexander McQueen collection), nominated by Premeditated Chaos (a.k.a. PMC)
- Pirates, conquistadors, and birds, and oysters
- This fashion week lure you to their cloisters.—AC
- Theodore II Laskaris, nominated by Borsoka
- A Nicaean emperor, he upset his peers
- And then he reigned less than four years.—AC
- Foreign volunteers in the Rhodesian Security Forces, nominated by Nick-D
- They recruited others in order to fight,
- For the rule of their minority (white).—AC
- "Open Arms" (SZA song), nominated by Your Power (a.k.a. Elias)
- Open Arms parenthesis SZA song close parenthesis;
- Only a few more of these to write until the end of this.—J
- Yugoslav torpedo boat T2, nominated by Peacemaker67
- T2 was a Yugoslav torpedo boat;
- between '14 and '39 did it float.—J
- 1912–13 Gillingham F.C. season, nominated by ChrisTheDude
- The season began poor, got better, then went bad again, it's said;
- But, oh well! Everyone who was a fan back then is dead.
- Doom (1993 video game), nominated by PresN
- The tale of a marine this game does tell;
- A space marine who kills demons in Hell.—QJR
- October 1 (film), nominated by voorts
- In this movie, a man investigates the killings of women;
- Just before his country gained independence from Great Britain.—QJR
- Temple of Apollo Palatinus, nominated by UndercoverClassicist
- The decorations aren't all about Apollo exactly, um...
- A lot of them celebrate its commissioner, Augustus's victory at Actium.—AC
- Philadelphia Athletics 18, Cleveland Indians 17 (1932), nominated by Wehwalt
- There once was a team from Cleveland,
- whose name is now thought evil and,
- though they tried to play well, the Philly boys played swell,
- and eighteen innings saw no reprieve land.—J
- "Treat Myself", nominated by MaranoFan (a.k.a. NØ)
- A studio album by American singer-songwriter Meghan Trainor
- Now that's something we've never seen before on the Pager of Mainer!—J
- Non-editor note: ...I hope that's sarcastic. See this issue's Featured Topic.—AC
- Editor note: Really? I thought it was a pretty obscure subject, like tropical storms and state highways.—J
- Mimodactylus, nominated by FunkMonk
- An istiodactyliform pterosaur,
- with its specimen found near ol' Hjoula.—J
- American logistics in the Western Allied invasion of Germany, nominated by Hawkeye7
- Another fantastic article, one could buy
- Worse books than the articles by the seventh Hawkeye.—AC
- Barbara Bush, nominated by Thebiguglyalien
- Besides Abigail Adams, she was the only one;
- To have as President both her husband and her son.—QJR
Featured pictures
Eleven featured pictures were promoted this period, including the ones at the top and bottom of this article.
-
-
Falka poster by David Allen & Sons, restored by Adam Cuerden -
-
-
-
-
-
Hendrick Goltzius by himself -
General Map of Switzerland by Swiss Federal Office of Topography
,_Parque_natural_de_la_Arr%C3%A1bida,_Portugal,_2022-07-20,_DD_49.jpg)
_Caldas.jpg)
.jpg)
Featured topics
One featured topic was promoted this period, nominated by MaranoFan (a.k.a. NØ).
.jpg)
Featured lists
Thirteen featured lists were promoted this period.
- Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (season 3), nominated by MyCatIsAChonk
- Watch the show whose host would date
- Surprising things! A cabbage, a plate!—AC
- List of accolades received by Avengers: Infinity War, nominated by Chompy Ace
- For all the things this films has done,
- It was nominated often (and sometimes won).—AC
- List of books bound in human skin, nominated by Vaticidalprophet
- You probably shouldn't seek them out, but just in case you do,
- This list will form a veritable getting-cursed how-to.—AC
- List of hominoids, nominated by PresN
- Gorillas and chimpanzees are on this shelf,
- But also, as Linnaeus said, "Know yourself."—AC
- List of World Heritage Sites in Latvia, nominated by Tone
- Striga and Riga get in for historic aptitude
- And the monuments that allowed us to measure a latitude.—AC
- Coretta Scott King Award, nominated by Barkeep49
- A celebration of African-American authors who write or draw a thing
- For children or for young adults, named for MLK's wife, Coretta Scott King
- List of songs recorded by Basshunter, nominated by Eurohunter
- Let us cast our line, and wish — er,
- Wait, this is a band, not a fisher.—AC
- Bart Starr Award, nominated by Gonzo fan2007
- Character and leadership will serve you well
- If you want this award, and play in N-F-L.—AC
- List of accolades received by No Time to Die, nominated by Chompy Ace
- If I have no time to give,
- I guess I have no choice but "live".—AC
- List of Hot Soul Singles number ones of 1976 and List of Hot Soul Singles number ones of 1977, nominated by ChrisTheDude
- If you find your soul is hot,
- Within Heaven it's probably not.—AC
- List of songs recorded by Alessia Cara, nominated by MaranoFan (a.k.a. NØ)
- A former child prodigy, she composes and sings,
- With a song in Moana, amongst other things.—AC
- List of tarsiiformes, nominated by PresN
- They're mostly endangered, so let's be far-seers
- And assure that our progeny still have tarsiers.
- Well, that rhyme almost works. —AC
-
Red-tailed squirrel by Charles J. Sharp, another of our newest featured pictures.
_male_Caldas.jpg)
Evaluating qualitative systemic bias in large article sets on Wikipedia
The presence of systemic bias on Wikipedia has been well-established by several studies.[1][2][3][4] Most studies demonstrate simple quantitative bias by noting that a particular class of articles has fewer instances than another similar class (e.g. there are more biographies about men than women, and there are more articles about Paris than all of Africa[5]).
Qualitative bias in article content (i.e. biased information in existing articles) is more difficult to assess. Creation of new articles helps address simple quantitative bias in the number of articles, but it does not independently remedy bias in the encyclopedia if those articles are orphaned or poorly interlinked. Integration of missing topics requires an assessment of due weight to determine where, for example, a new biography about a female mathematician should be linked from articles about her area of expertise, awards she won, or other mathematicians she may have influenced. It's also possible that some of her works would meet notability guidelines (WP:BK) and are also missing. The complexity of this situation means that assessing qualitative bias on the basis of even a limited class of articles (e.g. 1,000 women mathematicians) quickly implicates many thousands of other articles outside that class.
I propose a systematic approach for assessing bias by using Wikidata to create an ontological map of related articles. This approach generates a set of statements that could potentially be missing from the encyclopedia, and is intended to be a step toward assessing qualitative bias in large sets of articles. In combination with a separate assessment of sources to determine due weight (only marginally developed here) this approach could lay a foundation for identifying and integrating missing information from large sets of articles and help counter systemic bias (WP:CSB).
Environmental justice on Wikipedia
For this exercise, I examined articles related to environmental conflicts and environmental justice. Wikipedia is overwhelmingly created by white males in Europe and North America[6] – a demographic that generally benefits from environmental injustice. Information about Indigenous people and the Global South is notably absent,[7][8] creating gaps in knowledge about those portions of the world that bear the burdens of environmental injustice. There are about 4,000 environmental conflicts currently listed in the Environmental Justice Atlas, and the number is growing. Given the complexity discussed above, these 4,000 conflicts could have implications for tens of thousands of articles (some existing, and some missing) about environmental justice campaigns, resource extraction projects (e.g. mines, pipelines, gas fields), notable environmental defenders (individuals and organizations), corporations, commodities, disasters and other events, threatened ecosystems, and more.
Method
For this exercise, I examined 800 environmental conflicts from the EJAtlas to determine how they were represented on Wikipedia and Wikidata. I used script-aided matching to iteratively sort the conflicts and establish an ontological structure comprising statements that define relationships between entities. Wikidata statements have a subject-predicate-object format: for example the relationship, "The Escobal mine protests oppose the Escobal mine" is represented as: Q106830477 Escobal mine protests — P5004 in opposition to — Q16957078 Escobal mine. That statement does not exist in Wikidata at the time of this writing.
After compiling the list of conflict titles, I queried them in the English Wikipedia, returning the two most relevant matches. Of these conflicts, 488 returned at least one proposed matching entity (61%). I then sorted through the conflicts, to remove false positives and confirm that the proposed matches clearly related to the EJAtlas conflict title. This process confirmed the match for about 20% of the EJAtlas conflicts; two thirds of the initial 488 results were potentially false positives.
Following this initial matching, I reduced the size of the set to the first 250 conflicts (including unmatched conflicts), and developed a second script that enabled matching of multiple entities to a single conflict and placement of the matched entities into one of several categories:
- Conflict (protest, social movement; directly corresponds to EJAtlas entry)
- Project (eg: mine, pipeline)
- Resource (eg: lake, protected area)
- Company
- Environmental organization
- Disaster
To aid accurate and detailed matching, this script also provided a text input and one-click querying to retrieve additional information about the conflicts: up to five relevant Wikipedia entities, the lead paragraph of a Wikipedia article, the lead paragraph of an EJAtlas description, or the company name from a Wikipedia infobox.[a]
I was able to match 161 entities to 113 conflicts (from the reduced set of 250, so 45% of conflicts were matched with at least one entity, up from 20% in the first iteration.) Forty-eight conflicts (20% of the set) were matched to more than one entity. Most of the 161 entities were projects (45%) or companies (26%).
I used these matches to generate a partial ontology for 250 conflicts consisting of 481 relationships, including 250 general statements establishing the conflicts themselves. Very few of these statements are presently included on Wikidata, although a few were added during the activity. Many of the conflicts remain undefined, and some properties that seem integral to environmental conflict ontologies do not exist.
| Partial ontology for 250 conflicts | |||
| Entity
Example |
Property | Entity
Example |
Number of statements |
| Conflict
Q106830477 Escobal mine protests |
in opposition to P5004 | Project
Q16957078 Escobal mine Company Q7675621 Tahoe Resources |
70
|
| Organization
Q4807540 Asociación pola defensa da ría |
advocates for P2650 interested in
participant in P1344 |
Resource
Q3326808 Ria de Pontevedra
EJAtlas ID 76,(Pontevedra industrial complex) |
1
|
| Resource
Q945954 Penobscot River |
polluted by (property does not exist) | Project
Old Town paper mill Q122334386 |
9 |
| Project
Q5101849 Chirano gold mine |
owned by P127 | Company
Q546880 Kinross Gold |
21 |
| Company
Q455484 Areva |
participant in P1344 | Conflict
EJAtlas ID 172 (Uranium in Gabon) |
42 |
| Project
Q2219131 Paraguaná Refinery Complex |
caused P1536
or significant event P793 |
Disaster
Q5803217 Amuay tragedy |
4 |
| Conflict
EJAtlas ID 120 (Demeter International Katondo Farm) |
has location P276
or advocates for P2650 |
Resource
Q3364406 Bwabwata National Park |
29 |
| Disaster
Q115812365 Earlimart pesticide poisoning |
facet of
P1268 |
Conflict
Q109968152 Pesticide incidents in the San Joaquin Valley (EJAtlas ID 140) |
8 |
| General statements:
Conflict is an instance of (P31) environmental conflict (Q5683226). |
250 | ||
These statements are a small portion of all possible relationships that could comprise environmental conflict ontologies; they were chosen to illustrate the process and to (mostly) make use of existing Wikidata relationships more than to recommend a particular ontological structure. Obviously, a different set of relationships would have to be derived for a different set of articles (such as that for female mathematicians discussed above).
Suggestions for further work
The low matching rate found in this activity limits possible statements, and is at least partially due to poor coverage of environmental conflicts on Wikimedia platforms.[b] Although this experiment did not systematically determine what proportion of missing conflicts would meet general notability guidelines (GNG), only seven articles about a conflict were found in the final set of 250 conflicts for which an ontology was generated (7/250 = 3%).[c] Given that the EJAtlas is a moderated platform that requires secondary sourcing, and that conflicts in general are frequently newsworthy topics of discussion in academic literature, this rate seems absurdly low. I did identify several missing entities that met GNG and worked with another editor to create articles for them.[d] Since notability requirements for Wikidata are lower, presence of a conflict in the EJAtlas is sufficient to establish a conflict entity as an instance of (P31) environmental conflict (Q5683226). The statements proposed above assume that these entities would be created on the basis of the EJAtlas entry.
This examination suggests that Wikipedia's coverage of environmental conflict is poor. It also suggests that without further script development, it would take a little over fifty hours of work to accurately match about half of the conflicts listed in the EJAtlas to at least one existing Wikidata entity. Accurate and efficient matching of the remaining 50% (and more complete matching in general) would probably require additional development. These matches could be used to facilitate an information exchange between the EJAtlas and Wikipedia that has potential to improve the quality of information on both platforms.[e]
This work could set a foundation for correction of bias in coverage of environmental conflicts in Wikipedia by identifying entities that are missing entirely, or articles that may lack information about environmental conflict. The structured relationships also provide a framework that should facilitate script-aided editing to establish the missing information (in combination with further development to identify supporting sources).
Sources and due weight
In order to evaluate whether a missing entity meets GNG, relevant sources would have to be assessed. That assessment is mostly beyond the scope of this exercise, but I did develop a script to extract sources from an EJAtlas entry about a conflict. Similar scripts could be developed to identify relevant sources on Google Scholar or other databases, and these tools should make it relatively easy to establish whether a particular entity meets GNG — although that assessment is frequently subjective, as evidenced by many impassioned debates at AFD! Assessing due weight for inclusion of a conflict (or any concept) in other related articles is much more difficult, though tools could and should be developed to aid that assessment.
Implications and questions
It would be possible to extend this methodology to any class of articles likely to suffer from systemic bias in its representation on the encyclopedia. Our earlier example of women mathematicians could be represented as an ontology consisting of biographies that are related by statements about mathematical concepts, other biographies, places, awards, books, and technologies. In the case of environmental conflicts, the EJAtlas makes it easier to organise this information and provides a resource for identifying many of the related entities. For other sets, a similar resource would be helpful.
In the case of environmental conflict, some care is warranted to ensure that we develop an ontological structure that minimises harm. The central question is which categories should be differentiated and which should remain ambiguous. Within the platforms explored here, conflicts and conflictive projects are frequently conflated. My initial experiment conflated conflicts and disasters (in the single category of events), though I differentiated these categories in the final iteration. Any structure will erase certain distinctions while preserving others, and this erasure has the potential to do harm.
In view of the ongoing violence of environmental injustice and the possibility that this work could reduce harm by making information about that violence more accessible—as well as the reality that some of this ontology is already implicit in the existing structure of Wikidata, Wikipedia, and the EJAtlas—continued development of this approach seems worthwhile; but it will require additional attention to details about the ontological structure. I doubt quandaries about how to structure these relationships will have clear and unambiguous answers.
It is also true that sorting through large sets of articles is a lot of work; and perhaps a more organic and less systematic approach could eventually address systemic bias. But given how little attention this problem seems to get (WP:CSB has struggled to remain viable for years, and it teeters on the edge of inactivity); and given the scale of the problem, some organised and systematic approach carried out by a small number of editors seems advisable. This approach is intended to save labour in the long run by facilitating script-aided editing.
Notes
- ^ The script displays two conflicts per page and my matching rate is about 1 conflict/minute (including negative matches). Scripts available on request.
- ^ Other factors that reduced the matching rate were limitation of queries to the English Wikipedia; inconsistent formatting of conflict titles and descriptions in the EJAtlas, and relatively unsophisticated scripts. Improved scripts could match multiple articles in a single operation or potentially use artificial intelligence as a tool for confirming matches.
- ^ At this writing there are only about 165 instances of environmental conflicts on Wikidata (about 25 of which are statements added to existing entities as part of this exercise. Those 25 instances were identified from the 800 matches confirmed in the first iteration of the exercise, and represent 25/800 = 3% of that set being instances with preexisting articles about conflicts. This includes articles about environmental disasters).
- ^ These include Curipamba project (EJID 776), Detriot waste incinerator (EJID 136), Old Town paper mill (EJID 16), Christmas massacre (Bolivia) (EJID 752), Collum coal mine (EJID 1915), El dorado gold mine (El Salvador) (EJID 781), Bajo la alumbrera mine (EJID 729), Mapithel dam (EJID 943), Mandena mine (expanded) (EJID 1058)
- ^ This exchange already exists of course. Some EJAtlas cases clearly take information directly from Wikipedia, and EJAtlas cases are routinely cited on Wikipedia.
References
- ^ Hube, Christoph (2017-04-03). "Bias in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion. WWW '17 Companion. Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee: 717–721. doi:10.1145/3041021.3053375. ISBN 978-1-4503-4914-7.
- ^ Graham, Mark (12 November 2009). "Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content". Mark Graham: Blog. ZeroGeography. Archived from the original on 8 December 2009. Retrieved 16 November 2009.
- ^ Livingstone, Randall M. (2010-11-23). "Let's Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality". M/C Journal. 13 (6). doi:10.5204/mcj.315. ISSN 1441-2616.
- ^ Bjork-James, Carwil (2021-07-03). "New maps for an inclusive Wikipedia: decolonial scholarship and strategies to counter systemic bias". New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. 27 (3): 207–228. doi:10.1080/13614568.2020.1865463. ISSN 1361-4568.
- ^ Greig, Jonathan (16 April 2021). "For Wikipedia's 20th anniversary, students across Africa add vital information to site". TechRepublic. Archived from the original on 2021-04-19. Retrieved 11 May 2021.
- ^ Vrana, Adele Godoy; Sengupta, Anasuya; Bouterse, Siko (2020-10-13), "Toward a Wikipedia For and From Us All", Wikipedia @ 20, The MIT Press, pp. 239–258, ISBN 978-0-262-36059-3, retrieved 2023-10-14
- ^ Sethuraman, Manasvini; Grinter, Rebecca E.; Zegura, Ellen (2020-06-15). "Approaches to Understanding Indigenous Content Production on Wikipedia". COMPASS. ACM: 327–328. doi:10.1145/3378393.3402249. ISBN 978-1-4503-7129-2.
- ^ Duncan, Alexandra (2020). "Towards an activist research: Is Wikipedia the problem or the solution?". Art Libraries Journal. 45 (4): 155–161. doi:10.1017/alj.2020.24. ISSN 0307-4722.
Cricket jumpscare
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, Ollieisanerd, Death Editor 2, CAWylie, Rajan51, GeorgeBailey and Ltbdl.
War for territory (October 15 to 21)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2023 Cricket World Cup | 
|
3,937,866 | _during_the_2015_Cricket_World_Cup.jpg)
|
It may have taken three weeks, but the latest edition of the premier cricket tournament finally made it to the top of this list. Last week witnessed some big upsets, with Afghanistan beating the reigning champions England, and South Africa losing to the Netherlands. On the other hand, India and New Zealand have remain unbeaten after four games each, but one of them will lose that streak when the two teams face each other on Sunday. |
| 2 | Suzanne Somers |
|
2,539,567 | 
|
'Had Somers died in 1993, her achievements would have been immortal. Had she died in 2003 she would still have been a great actress but flawed. But she died in 2023. Alas, what can one say?' Paraphrases about Chairman Mao aside, actress and health and wellness businesswoman Suzanne Somers died at 76 of cancer. |
| 3 | Leo (2023 Indian film) |
|
2,458,805 | .jpg)
|
Kollywood returns with another action film. This one stars Vijay, and is directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj, whose previous film topped this list last year, and this one would have probably done the same if not for sports and deaths. A sequel is already in the works. |
| 4 | Cricket World Cup |
|
2,358,550 | .jpg)
|
Brought to this list by #1. |
| 5 | 2023 Israel–Hamas war |
|
1,759,278 | 
|
The latest Middle Eastern conflict continues, with rockets flying, thousands of civilians dying, both sides accused of committing war crimes by the other side and being called out for their misdeeds (the extremist group who rules the Gaza Strip and struck first for terrorism, Israel for continuous occupation of territories recognized as Palestinian that tends to turn violent). |
| 6 | Gaza Strip | 
|
1,539,801 | 
| |
| 7 | Israel |
|
1,522,213 | 
| |
| 8 | State of Palestine |
|
1,495,597 | ||
| 9 | The Fall of the House of Usher (miniseries) | 
|
1,457,045 | 
|
A Netflix miniseries based on The Fall of the House of Usher and other works by the Gothic fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe was released on October 12. |
| 10 | David Beckham |
|
1,453,522 | 
|
One more week for the footballer chronicled in Netflix's Beckham. And it's nice that the miniseries features a clip from the hilarious interview Posh and Becks gave to Ali G. |
And the violence caused such silence (October 22 to 28)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2023 Cricket World Cup |
|
4,201,290 | 
|
One more week of India receiving the world championship of its national pastime. The hosts have won all their games so far, and surprisingly defending champions England have only one win in six matches! |
| 2 | Cricket World Cup |
|
2,927,565 | ||
| 3 | Leo (2023 Indian film) |
|
2,595,951 | 
|
Still in India, a Kollywood action thriller based on A History of Violence starring Vijay, that is also a sequel to last year's Vikram and part of a franchise known as the "Lokiverse" (a name which Hollywood's Loki would probably want for himself and his show). Leo is the fifth highest-grossing Indian film of the year so far, and who knows if it can take fourth from another movie that spent a while in this list, Jailer. |
| 4 | Mike Johnson (politician) |
|
1,753,392 | 
|
The new Speaker of the U.S. House, and the first from the state of Louisiana, was elected on the fourth ballot. He is the most junior representative to be elected speaker since 1883. |
| 5 | Killers of the Flower Moon (film) |
|
1,716,626 | 
|
Martin Scorsese made his third 3-hour movie in a decade, an adaptation of a novel that itself was inspired by the true story of the Osage Indian murders that happened in 1920s Oklahoma after oil was found on the Osage Nation's land. While big chunks of Killers of the Flower Moon could be cut with no loss, it's a worthwile watch, helped by an exceptional cast led by Marty's two favorite actors: Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. The studio arm of the biggest company in the world could easily spend $200 million in the picture, and while it might not make as much in theaters between its length and competition with among others #9, the praise received by Killers of the Flower Moon makes it a certain awards contender. |
| 6 | Five Nights at Freddy's (film) |
|
1,225,895 | .jpg)
|
Coming in at number 6 is a heartwarming (if you ignore all of the murder and jumpscares) movie about an older brother (played by Josh Hutcherson) reconnecting with his younger sister (played by Piper Rubio) while fighting ghost robots and Shaggy Afton. MatPat appears in a cameo role, having made numerous videos about the FNAF franchise at the height of its popularity. Markiplier was also supposed to have a cameo as a security guard, but he had to decline due to scheduling conflicts. |
| 7 | 2023 Israel–Hamas war |
|
968,300 | 
|
The latest Middle Eastern war sadly continues, with thousands of civilians dying in bombings and many more being displaced, and now Israel has sent ground troops and tanks into Gaza to rescue its hostages. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2023 | 
|
938,672 | .jpg)
|
And it's true that you've reached the better place Still, I'd give the world to see your face And be right here next to you But it's like you've gone too soon and the hardest thing to do is say bye |
| 9 | Taylor Swift | 
|
859,140 | .jpg)
|
Along with wrecking the box office with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (which has led in North America for two straight weeks and also surpassed $186 million worldwide), the singer released her fifth re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor's Version) (even if there's nothing less necessary than extra versions of "Shake It Off" and "Bad Blood"), which soon broke streaming records, while her viral 2019 track "Cruel Summer" currently occupies the top spot on the Billboard charts. |
| 10 | David Beckham |
|
856,673 | 
|
Netflix's documentary miniseries Beckham keeps its subject one more week. The footballer was a fan of someone who'll rank highly next week. |
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.
Most edited articles
For the September 30 – October 30 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 Israel–Hamas war | 7495[1] | As if it could've been anything else but the latest flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, that needs constant updates regarding military developments and international reactions. |
| Deaths in 2023 | 2319 | Among the deceased of October were the aforementioned Suzanne Somers, and also Bobby Charlton, Dick Butkus, Tim Wakefield and Richard Roundtree. |
| October 2023 Speaker of the United States House of Representatives election | 2261 | After Kevin McCarthy was removed from his post, an emergency election was held, eventually promoting Mike Johnson of Louisiana. |
| India at the 2022 Asian Games | 2259 | India had its performance at the continental games, with over 100 medals and ranking fourth overall. |
| Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion | 1528 | One of the worst moments of the current war in the Holy Land, as a hospital already damaged by a Israeli rocket was hit head-on by a missile of undetermined origin (Hamas blamed Israel, who in turn said it was a Gaza rocket that malfunctioned and fell), causing hundreds of deaths. |
| Legalism (Chinese philosophy) | 1381 | FourLights continues to expand and clean up this page. |
| United States at the 2023 Pan American Games | 1283 | Santiago, Chile is taking in sports from all the Americas in the 2023 Pan American Games. The sports potencies of North (even if the USA mostly brought B-list athletes) and South (in fact, the hosts are one of the only two nations in the continent that Brazil doesn't border) America lead the medal count. |
| Brazil at the 2023 Pan American Games | 1242 | |
| Bigg Boss (Tamil season 7) | 1179 | The latest edition of India's version of Big Brother, airing on Star Vijay. |
| 2023 Lewiston shootings | 1107 | 40-year-old Robert Card was the lone gunman that killed 18 and injured 13 in a bowling alley and a restaurant on October 25. A intensive manhunt soon followed, and Card was found dead in an apparent suicide in Lisbon, Maine two days later. |
| Mike Johnson (politician) | 1085 | The latest Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and a fairly minor politician before, with Senator Susan Collins downright telling a CNN reporter that she doesn't know Johnson and was going to Google him. |
| List of Cricket World Cup records | 965 | The 2023 Cricket World Cup inspires updates on these lists. |
| 2023 Cricket World Cup statistics | 953 | |
| Leo (2023 Indian film) | 925 | Kollywood fans update as the latest in the Lokesh Cinematic Universe picks up the crore. |
| List of NBA regular season records | 811 | As the 2023-24 NBA season starts, BeFriendlyGoodSir decided to expand this list of basketball achievements. |
- ^ 2359 under the original name October 2023 Gaza−Israel conflict.