Plagiarism and vandalism dominate Wikipedia news
Wikipedia plagiarism allegations leveled at another journalist
In July, Buzzfeed fired editor Benny Johnson after discovering more than 40 instances of plagiarism in his articles for the website, including many which took material from Wikipedia (see previous Signpost coverage). The plagiarism initially came to light due to two anonymous Twitter accounts – @blippoblappo and @crushingbort, and their WordPress blog, Our Bad Media. Now the anonymous duo has labeled a much bigger target as a plagiarist: the prominent American journalist and author Fareed Zakaria, whose résumé includes Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and CNN.
Back in 2012, a Zakaria article on gun control was found to have portions closely resembling a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore. Zakaria was briefly suspended and an examination of his work was conducted by Time, CNN, and the Post, none of which publicly identified any further instances of plagiarism. On August 18, 2014, the Twitter duo listed on their blog 12 instances of what they alleged to be plagiarism in Zakaria's work for those three employers from 2011 to 2012, all of which predated the gun control article and thus would have been included in the 2012 review of his work. The examples range from close paraphrasing to word for word matches of sources including the New York Times, The Nation, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Businessweek, a report from the Center for American Progress, and Wikipedia. In a 2011 Time article called "The Debt Deal’s Failure", Zakaria wrote about US President Ronald Reagan:
Spending under Reagan averaged 22.4% of GDP, well above the 1971 – 2009 average of 20.6% ... The national debt tripled, from $712 billion in 1980 to $2 trillion in 1988.
In 2011, the Wikipedia article Reaganomics stated:
Spending during Reagan's two terms (FY 1981–88) averaged 22.4% GDP, well above the 20.6% GDP average from 1971 to 2009...the public debt rose from $712 billion in 1980 to $2,052 billion in 1988, a roughly three-fold increase.
In an email to Dylan Byers of Politico, Zakaria disputed the new charges of plagiarism:
Two anonymous bloggers today have alleged that there are 11 cases in my writing where I have cited a statistic that also appeared somewhere else. These are all facts, not someone else's writing or opinions or expressions. For example, in one column, I note that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan. The bloggers point out that this is also in Wikipedia's Reagan entry. But it is also in hundreds of other articles, studies, and reports – just Google the phrase. Until today, I had never read the Wikipedia entry for Ronald Reagan. As it happens, it is incorrect. (There is a difference between "public debt" – Wikipedia's words – and national debt.)
Zakaria writes that many of these examples are statistics he learned of from sources other than those from which he is alleged to have plagiarized. The 12th instance is a quote from Richard Holbrook that Zakaria writes he drew directly from Holbrook himself.
Politico reported that CNN, Time, and the Washington Post expressed satisfaction with the previous 2012 review of Zakaria's work, though a Time spokesperson said "We will be reviewing these new allegations carefully." Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt defended Zakaria in statements to numerous news outlets, including Talking Points Memo, which quoted him as saying "I honestly think it is reckless even to suggest this is plagiarism." Byers noted that "The accusations against Zakaria ... don't seem to be gaining nearly as much steam as those that brought down BuzzFeed editor Benny Johnson."
On August 20, Our Bad Media responded to Zakaria and Hiatt. The anonymous duo wrote "Just because another journalist’s phrases happen to include statistics does not mean they are free game for cribbing without attribution." Highlighting the alleged plagiarism from Wikipedia, they wrote:
Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article had the idea to take the spending under Reagan and compare it to spending from 1971 to 2009, and next, take the public debt in 1980 and compare it to the public debt in 1988. In that order. Zakaria's article presents the exact same idea in a very similar presentation. That's subtle, but nevertheless textbook, plagiarism.
Two days later, they followed that up with further allegations that passages in Zakaria's 2011 book The Post-American World 2.0 were plagiarized from the work of Professor Fawaz Gerges and journalist Karl E. Meyer. Zakaria's book does not cite Gerges, though Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics, told Talking Points Memo that he has had a 13 year professional relationship with Zakaria and that "I feel delighted that he has borrowed heavily from my work."
Wikipedia and the US Congress
The Washington Post was among the media outlets that reported on an August 18 Cato Institute panel in the Rayburn House Office Building called Transparency Time: Wikipedia Editing for Congress, including two members of Cato who are active Wikipedia editors, Jim Harper ( User:JimHarperDC) and Michelle Newby ( User:HistoricMN44), and Jim Hayes ( User:Slowking4), from the Wikimedia DC Public Policy Committee. The panel urged Congressional staffers to create and edit Wikipedia articles on pending bills in the US Congress as a means to "deliver government transparency on a grand scale". Vice responded by pleading "Let's please not encourage congress to actively edit Wikipedia", pointing to previous incidents where Congressional staffers removed potentially scandalous information from Wikipedia articles.
While the Cato panel encouraged Congressional staffers to edit Wikipedia in a positive way, Wikipedia vandalism originating from the US House of Representatives made news again. User:143.231.249.138, an IP address assigned to the House, made headlines in July when a series of edits, mostly focused on conspiracy theories but also on more mundane topics like the Choco Taco, were noticed by the media after they were tweeted by the Twitter bot CongressEdits. The address was blocked for ten days for disruptive editing, leading to more headlines about the blocking (see previous Signpost coverage).
In August, more edits from that IP address prompted coverage in Mediaite, Ars Technica, Business Insider, The Hill and other media outlets. A series of transphobic edits and comments, including an edit to the article for the television show Orange is the New Black calling transgender actress Laverne Cox a "man pretending to be a woman", prompted a one-month block by User:Fran Rogers.
Outraged editors called for a permanent block on the IP address, while the IP editor shot back "Blocked because I disagreed with the trans-lobby? These days, If I complain about a man using the womyn's restroom then I'm cosidered [ sic] transphobic...This has been happening a lot lately here in the halls of Congerss [sic] ... People need to understand that transgenderism is being promoted by the Patriarchy to diminish the experiences of real womyn." The Hill reports that the Human Rights Campaign has asked House Speaker John Boehner to investigate and identify the user responsible for the Wikipedia edits.
People and their Wikipedia articles
During an August 29 interview with Yahoo! TV, American actress Kristen Connolly ( House of Cards, Houdini) complained about a long-standing, inaccurate, unsourced claim in her Wikipedia article that she was a former professional tennis player. She said: "I'm not even a good tennis player, let alone a former professional one. And I don't know how to take it off, because it's very hard to change a Wikipedia entry ... they won't let you change your own." The claim was inserted into the article in June 2012 in the first and only edit of a new account and it appears to have remained in the article until shortly after the publication of the interview. An editor added a citation needed tag in December 2012, but the tag was removed by an IP editor in February 2013.
Pitchfork and other music websites reported on an August 17 Tumblr post by the Canadian musician Claire Elise Boucher, who performs under the stage name Grimes. Grimes complained about a quote in her Wikipedia article taken from a 2012 interview with CMJ. Describing the creation of her 2012 album Visions, she told the interviewer "I blacked out the windows and did tons of amphetamines and stayed up for three weeks and didn't eat anything." The quote appears to have been first added to the article in October 2013, and has been removed and re-added by different editors several times since then.
Grimes objected to the inclusion of her quote because she has lost people to drugs and alcohol, and fears the statement conveys a pro-drug message. She wrote: "Editing a website that people take seriously and reference all the time so that it looks like i think amphetamines are cool is incredibly irresponsible, people might read that and think its a cool thing to emulate. I hope you know you are doing the world a disservice."
On August 15, the Washington City Paper suggested that User:Evansjack1 is Washington DC councilman Jack Evans. The user of the account, which has only edited the Evans article and various talk pages, has referred to himself as Evans, including an edit summary which complained "I have been on the city council for 23 years. I am the longest serving Council member in dc history. I have been a leader in revitalizing our city and have great accomplishment [sic], none of which are mentioned. Just a lot of inaccurate accusations." The account also posted Evans' real phone number in a comment to another editor and requested that editor call Evans.
However, according to Washington City Paper, Evans' spokesperson refuses to confirm or deny that the account belongs to Evans himself. The account is less than a month old and has already been blocked twice for edit warring while attempting to remove sections of the article unfavorable to Evans, including material about a 2013 Office of Campaign Finance probe, political action committee spending, conflicts with a journalist, and his vote against a censure of former DC mayor Marion Barry. The account continued to edit the article and its talk page after the publication of the story.
Channel 4 News reports (August 13) on an edit war from July 2013 at the Wikipedia article for Lynton Crosby, an Australian political strategist who has been called a "master of the dark political arts", "the Australian Karl Rove", and "one of the most powerful and influential figures in the nation". IP addresses belonging to the Crosby Textor Group, a consultancy firm co-founded by Crosby, removed material involving Crosby's political tactics, a political controversy involving cigarette packaging, and a call from an MP to sack Crosby. The edit war was continued by a number of accounts that were permanently blocked following a sockpuppet investigation.
Crowdsourcing pre-teen aircraft construction
On August 27, neuroscientist and author Daniel Levitin, a professor at McGill University, was interviewed about his 2014 book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload on WBEZ. Levitin was asked about an analogy in his book where he compared Wikipedia to a group of children attempting to build a plane via crowdsourcing. Levitin replied:
Well, to begin with, Wikipedia has done amazing things. It has become the de facto information source for most of us and it's changed the world dramatically for the better in that research that used to take anywhere from minutes to months and phone calls and trips to libraries or far-flung archives, all of that is now available in a second. The problem is that the Wikipedia model, as it was stated by its founders, is that they don't consider that expertise exists, effectively. Anybody can edit. And an expert has no greater standing on Wikipedia than a non-expert. So, the problem is for any given entry, an 11-year-old can go in and change it, and it could be about something really important, like aircraft design, or a particular medication. I know that formulas that some engineers use have been defaced and it took a couple of weeks for them to be fixed. Now Wikipedia says, "sooner or later, somebody will set it right," but that's not always true. The idea is the 11-year old, maybe not maliciously, but just because he or she has an imperfect understanding of something, they may change the article to reflect their non-expert understanding. Eventually, an expert might come along and fix it, but if the 11-year-old is relentless enough with the edit key, the 11-year-old is going to win the battle of attrition because the expert will just give up, the expert's got more important things to do. So, the problem with Wikipedia is that the information can be quite unreliable, and there's no way for the average user to know. You don't know by looking at it whether you're reading an entry from an expert or a non-expert.
Jimmy Wales responded to Levitin's comments on his user talk page "I will try to contact Prof. Levitin to correct his misunderstanding. It is simply not true that I believe that expertise does not exist. And it is obvious that in Wikipedia that the model he describes of the editing process is wrong."
In brief
- Half-baked Alaska: The Independent (August 28) reports on the outcry, including Wikipedia vandalism, following a controversial incident on the August 27 episode UK reality show The Great British Bake-Off. A contestant who was eliminated from the show that evening alleged his baked Alaska was sabotaged by another contestant, who became the target of malicious edits by outraged viewers.
- Bragging rights: The New York Post reports on American basketball player J. R. Smith's response to critics. On August 28, as part of a series of images and comments on his Instagram page, Smith posted an image of his appearance at number 30 on Wikipedia's List of National Basketball Association career 3-point scoring leaders.
- Ice bucket vandalism: The Wire noted some vandalism to the article for the popular viral Ice Bucket Challenge, intended to promote awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The August 25 edit by User talk:Die Mannschaft5 delivered a critique of the effectiveness and appropriateness of using the Challenge to raise money for ALS while employing various forms of the word " fuck" twelve times. The Wire reported the vandalism remained in the article for fourteen minutes, but the edit history shows that it was immediately removed by User:ClueBot NG.
- Spotted giant flying squirrel!: The August 25th installment of the popular webcomic xkcd explores which Wikipedia article titles can be sung to the tune of the theme song from the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, including Single payer health insurance, Asian Human Rights Commission, and Women science fiction authors.
- Australian Senator plagiarizes Wikipedia: On August 21, The Courier Mail reported that the personal website of Glenn Lazarus, who represents Queensland in the Australian Senate, appeared to have taken over 450 words from the Wikipedia article on Queensland, along with content from a state government website and the website of Senator Nick Xenophon, and reused a photograph of a whale. Lazarus' subsequent August 25 interview with 4BC radio was widely reported on in the Australian press. During the interview, he dismissed the matter as a "non-issue."
- Did NIU ban Wikipedia?: A widely circulated August 20 Betabeat story discusses a claim posted on the social media website Reddit that Northern Illinois University was banning access to a broad range of websites, including Wikipedia. According to the Reddit discussion, a student newly arrived at his or her dormitory was attempting to access the article Westboro Baptist Church when he or she was presented with a "Web Page Access Warning" citing the university's Acceptable Use Policy. That policy apparently prohibits access to many activities which a typical college student may engage in, including “political activities” and social media. The Huffington Post quoted a university spokesman as saying the claim was "ridiculous". The spokesman said the policy "only applies to employees. I think that's where the confusion is." The spokesman did not explain how a student in a dormitory might have received a warning intended for university employees.
- Wikipedia geography: Oxford Internet Institute professor Mark Graham discussed his research into the geographic distribution of Wikipedia articles in The Conversation (August 18). Graham examined Wikipedia articles that have been "geotagged" with geographical coordinates. He found a striking geographic imbalance, with 84% of them being located in North America or Europe. He also found an imbalance in the languages used to write those articles, with more articles in English about a particular country than in the dominant language of that country, especially in the Middle East. Graham writes "Wikipedia might not just be reflecting the world, but also reproducing new, uneven, geographies of information."
- WikiQueer: On August 18, The Advocate profiled LGBT activist Gregory Varnum ( User:Varnent), founder of the LGBT encyclopedia WikiQueer (see previous Signpost coverage). Like Wikipedia, WikiQueer is a wiki-based encyclopedia that is free to read and edit. Varnum founded WikiQueer in 2012 because he thought Wikipedia's coverage of LGBT history was inadequate. He felt "the need for a truly comprehensive wiki by and for the LGBT communities, free of any community politics."
- Brand Bihar on Wikipedia: The
Press Trust of India
reported on August 16 that
Nitish Kumar, former
Chief Minister of the Indian state of
Bihar, has used social media to launch a "Bihar on Wikipedia" campaign to encourage internet users, especially younger ones, to write about topics related to Bihar on Wikipedia. "We know much about Bihar's golden history, culture, great personalities, traditions and astonishing stories, but the world connected to the Internet doesn't. We are launching the 'Bihar on Wikipedia' campaign for them to strengthen Brand Bihar," Kumar wrote.
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Media Viewer—Wikimedia's emotional roller-coaster
- "... we cannot fulfill our responsibilities as the site operator when users take it upon themselves to disable functionality by editing site-wide JavaScript that is executed for all users." Lila Tretikov, executive director, WMF
- "We have to move away from the idea that voting is the right way to decide software issues—voting doesn't lead to good software and it doesn't give rise to consensus—it gives rise to bad and unusable software such as what we put up with every day around here." Jimmy Wales, co-founder, Wikipedia
- "I'm just not ready to save the project by knuckling down before the WMF. I want victory over the WMF, or at least a very good compromise. I want the WMF to shudder when they remember this case ... . I want respect for the community. I want the WMF to see itself as a servant. I want an apology to the community, I want honest assurances that they understand [their errors], I want their pledges for a better future." User:DaB., administrator, German Wikipedia
The Wikimedia Foundation has withdrawn the temporary "superprotect" it had created and invoked on 10 August to prevent DaB., an administrator on the German Wikipedia, from continuing to wheel-war to disable the new software feature, Media Viewer. In her announcement, the Foundation's executive director, Lila Tretikov, made it clear that the WMF "needs to be able to make an ultimate determination after receiving community feedback regarding production changes that impact all users." The superprotect action has brought to a head a steadily rising drama on three WMF content sites: the German and English Wikipedias, and Commons (the last significantly driven by German-speakers).
The wording in the English Wikipedia article on Media Viewer belies the storm that has engulfed parts of the Wikimedia movement. It states simply that "this multimedia browser displays images in larger size when you click on their thumbnails, as an overlay on the current page. To reduce visual clutter, all information is shown below the image, and can be expanded at a click of a button." The commotion from the launching of this product on the last three projects—perhaps those with editors who feel the greatest investment in their now well-established workflows—has ricocheted around a confusing array of issues. On the surface, there are two flashpoints: one is the superprotect itself, and how it might have impacted on the relationship between the Foundation and the editing communities—especially the German-language community, which has a long-standing and justifiable pride in its achievements and an aversion to US-based centralisation. The other is the timing of the opt-out launching of Media Viewer, and whether the software should have been opt-in by default until editors' concerns about certain features were resolved. However, the drama reaches into yet more complicated and sensitive matters, with implications for the technical and social aspects of the Foundation's software development and release, and the status of local community RFCs in relation to software development.
Aside from the Foundation's history of less-than-ideal product launches, there are several important precursors to the current technical–social polemics. One occurred after the Foundation's launching of Visual Editor in mid-2013 (now generally conceded as premature, and still in development more than a year later). On 23 September, English Wikipedian Kww edited MediaWiki:Common.js to disable the newly rolled-out software. The action—which was at least consistent with the results of an RFC on the English Wikipedia—broke what had been an implicit taboo against community administrators injecting code into the MediaWiki namespace, unilaterally modifying the interface for all users of a project. This appeared to establish a precedent: in November 2013, DaB. edited the German Wikipedia's site-wide CSS to disable the link to the newly introduced Beta Features, a program that allows users to test new features on WMF sites. His intrusion, without RFC support, has only just been reversed.
DaB. is a longtime Wikimedia Germany functionary who gained wide respect for his almost single-handed technical stewardship of the chapter's Toolserver (2005–14); that suite of servers, physically located in Amsterdam, gave the whole WM movement access to a range of functionalities developed by the volunteer technical community. When the Foundation decided to displace Toolserver two years ago with the WMF-run WikiLabs, DaB. spearheaded an unsuccessful push to keep the existing infrastructure.
The putative justification for DaB.'s edit to MediaWiki code to disable Media Viewer was an RFC on the German Wikipedia that gained majority support for two actions: to switch off Media Viewer, and then to insert code that would make it opt-in rather than opt-out. There were entreaties to DaB. by several editors that he not execute just the first without the critical second of these RFC votes. After a Bugzilla request was closed as "wontfix" by the WMF, DaB. injected code into the JavaScript that not only disabled Media Viewer on the German Wikipedia, but according to one complaint broke the design of file description pages. While DaB contended that he was looking for a fix to make opt-in possible, the question arises why he had not prepared both actions in advance and performed them in quick succession. The change was reverted by a German Wikipedia administrator, Raymond, and further wheel-warring with the WMF led to the now hugely controversial superprotect.
What has probably caught most Wikimedians off-balance has been the emotional ferocity that now swirls around both the temporary superprotection and the Media Viewer release—sometimes in ways that make the intercultural and the technical hard to disentangle. DaB., for example, has written: "my action has shown how mendacious and power-mad the WMF is". Co-founder Jimmy Wales was sufficiently concerned that he wrote on his talkpage, inter alia:
| “ | MV is not going away. If it is "presently" a nuisance for editors, then the solution is to fix it, not to have some religious opposition to it for no reason. "Keeping face" is not a factor here at all—what is a factor is that modernizing what happens when you click on an image to provide a better experience for both readers and editors is going to happen. ... We have to move away from this model of panicky rights battles and mass petitions in a tone of adversary, and move to a position of remembering that we are all there for the same reason: to build something amazing. ... The Foundation under Lila's direction is committed to radically ramping up investment in engineering and product. So yes, I am confident that things in the future will be different from things in the past. | ” |
Among the first-day responses to Jimmy's call for "constructive dialogue" on addressing editorial concerns about Media Viewer were: "you are completly blind to the facts", "Your autocratic vision will destroy Wikipedia", "all the new garbage the foundation is introducing ... The foundation only gets more abusive as their software gets worse", "throwing dust in the eyes of the fools", and "ditch Möller [vice-president, Engineering and Products]". Despite the invective, Wales persisted in his attempts to persuade participants that dialogue between the engineering and editorial sides is the way to go—marred only by a less-than-diplomatic reference to "climbing the Reichstag".
Pete Forsyth—whom Erik Möller threatened to desysop when he tried to disable Media Viewer on the English Wikipedia—has authored and promoted an anti-superprotect petition (now the subject of an application for a banner advertisement). But in a clear separation of the superprotect and software-development issues, he wrote on Jimmy's page:
| “ | I would very much like to see something very similar to the Media Viewer deployed as the default option; and I know this to be true of many (but not all) of the other people who signed the letter. But it must be a mature product first. At present, I have misgivings about the processes the WMF has created and maintains for evaluating the maturity of the product. Permitting local communities to roll back the default state, at present, would be a practical and clear acknowledgment that the present state of the software may not be sufficient, even if WMF is not (yet) capable of fully grasping what is needed. | ” |
Notably, Jimmy doesn't support "superprotect as it is currently implemented (particularly not as a "staff-only" right—that kind of thing just introduces unnecessary divisiveness)". However, he endorses the principle: "that there is no reason to allow admins to disrupt Wikipedia to make a point by editing the sitewide javascript. I think there can be reasons for technically proficient admins to edit sitewide javascript but it is a major security risk and potential point of conflict and so in general I don't think there is any valid objection to shrinking the group who has that right."
He continued: "It makes no sense in the long run for us to have a situation where hundreds of wikis each have a completely different configuration based on local voting. That is not a viable process and we already have huge problems to the extent that it has happened. ... We need to be pushing hard for reunification of software features across the projects."
User:Pine told the Signpost that "the WMF is not the only big organisation that has products blow up on the launching pad: just look at Microsofts's Vista, Windows Me, and Office 2007 for Windows." Nevertheless, the Foundation and its new executive director, software expert Lila Tretikov, face a challenge to the cohesion of the international movement and the ongoing credibility of the WMF's software development program. There is now evidence of a flurry of activity among staff to consult with editors. Among this is the suddenly more obvious presence of the Community Engagement (Product) staff, who were assembled on a temporary basis to assist with the roll-out of Visual Editor in mid-2013. These staff now appear to have longer-term presence, and late last year were transferred to the "Product" part of Engineering and Products. Rachel diCerbo took up the senior position to run CE (P) in May, and if this group of staff succeeds in their mission, the Media Viewer dispute might be the last time matters get out of control. On 29 August, the staff set up a page specifically for Media Viewer consultation, although regrettably the talkpage seems to be dominated by broadsides; and a draft of a process ideas page for community–engineering discourse appeared to mark the arrival of the new senior staff member, "inviting users to brainstorm ideas to improve how software components get build [sic] and delivered to communities".
The Signpost will provide future coverage of how the WMF intends to revamp its software development process, including its liaison with editorial communities, and whether attempts at user requirement documentation such as the Media Viewer roundtable last year can be vastly improved. Among the issues that may become important are the WMF's unique situation as a technology organisation that has little control over "local innovation space" such as templates, which appear to be nothing short of an international mess; a proposal to create a WMF Board volunteer technical committee; and the ways in which engineering documentation and testing might serve to deliver products more smoothly to the movement, including an examination of the relationship of the WMF's software product engineering to models such as Agile and Waterfall.
Editorial note: The author interviewed
Pine, a regular Signpost writer, along with three other Wikimedians, to gather background information for this article. Pine had no role in drafting the text.
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Viral
This was a week when an actual virus, Ebola, competed for attention with several viral social phenomena; most notably the Ice Bucket Challenge, a charitable dare that spread largely on social media, and a spontaneous online debate over the nature of rock music, sparked by Lorde's surprise win at the VMAs. This week also saw the return of that oldest of viral social phenomena, the riot, as tensions exploded over the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri. That most social media-savvy of all terror groups, the Islamic State, increased its notoriety by posting its execution of James Foley on Twitter. This was also a bumper week for that prime viral knowledge vector, Reddit, with four topics in the top 25.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of August 17 to 23, 2014, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the
5,000 most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Ice Bucket Challenge 
2,902,018 
Surprisingly, this global viral phenomenon, in which celebrities, YouTubers and everyday members of the public pour icewater over their heads, post their ordeals online and then dare others to do the same in the name of raising awareness for motor neurone disease, was not launched by any particular charity, but seems to have grown on its own. While it certainly has achieved its goal of raising awareness of motor neurone disease (see below) many have criticised it as a frivolous wet T-shirt contest that has had no tangible effect except to waste water at at time when many areas of the planet are in drought. 2 Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis 
1,856,817 
The purpose of the Ice Bucket Challenge was to draw attention to the disease made famous by Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking, and it's hard to argue it didn't work – people flocked to the page to learn more about it, though you could argue that if it had truly succeeded, this page would be first, the Challenge second. 3 Robin Williams
864,859 
The unexpected death by suicide of this iconic comic on August 11 led to one of the highest spikes in views since this project began; this week's numbers may be down by more than 90 percent, but they're still impressive. 4 Ebola virus disease
616,334 
The 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, whose death toll has now passed 1400, continues to draw attention to this horrific disease. 5 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant 
607,641 
Numbers are up for this almost absurdly brutal jihadist group, which proudly posts mass executions it carries out on Twitter and has been disowned even by al-Qaeda. The surge is likely due to the fallout from Barack Obama's decision to take US troops into Iraq (despite having campaigned on the promise of troop withdrawal from the country), including the execution of journalist James Foley. 6 Rock music 
536,500 
Disclaimer: with a topic this broad, there is no way to determine a precise reason for its popularity, and its view count is suspiciously even, so if it remains high next week it may be removed. That said, the surge did occur shortly before the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, which have sparked a minor controversy about the precise definition of rock music with the nomination, and subsequent win, for Lorde's video for " Royals", an electronic song better defined as art pop. Even Lorde's fans have been somewhat bewildered by this, as you'd think MTV would have a better grasp on what rock music is. 7 Mona Lisa
494,140 
Arguably the most famous painting in the world, and one of the few that the legendarily distractible Leonardo da Vinci completed himself, the Mona Lisa did, in fact, once possess eyelashes and eyebrows, but they have been worn away over the years by careless cleaning, according to a thread on Reddit this week. 8 SummerSlam (2014) Unassessed 384,478 The WWE's latest pay-per-view pantomime was staged on 17 August. 9 Deaths in 2014 
382,940 
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. 10 Guardians of the Galaxy (film)
380,140 
Marvel Studio's cheerily bonkers space opera crowd pleaser has regained the top spot at the US box office in its fourth weekend and, to the sure delight of many, has overtaken Michael Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction as America's biggest movie of the summer, though it has done less well internationally, where audiences are apparently more trepidatious about this unknown and unashamedly odd property.
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Cheats at Featured Pictures!
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Featured articles
Sixteen featured articles were promoted this week.
- Noye's Fludde ( nominated by Brianboulton & Alfietucker) is a one-act opera by the British composer Benjamin Britten, which tells the story of the Biblical character Noah and his ark. The multi-FA writer Brianboulton teamed up with first-time FA-er Alfietucker for this delightful article and we can only hope for more top-notch stuff from both, either singly or in future collaborations.
- Harry Glicken ( nominated by ceranthor) was an American volcanologist killed by a lava flow on Mount Unzen, Japan at the age of 33. Described by the nominator Ceranthor as "a first-rate scientist and one strange dude", Glicken was an acknowledged expert in the field of volcanic debris avalanches.
- Frédéric Chopin ( nominated by Smerus) was a Polish composer and pianist, who is also listed as one of the level 3 vital articles; he was one of the leading musicians of the Romantic era. Another excellently written and beautifully presented article, one of three FAs promoted this week from the classical music sphere.
- The Boat Race 2012 ( nominated by The Rambling Man) Part of The Rambling Man's drive to put as many articles about the annual Boat Race, the article on the 2012 race is the first to reach featured status. The race—between crews from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge along the River Thames—was won by Cambridge in a controversial year for the contest, which saw the race stopped because of a protester who swam in front of the boats.
- Thief II: The Metal Age ( nominated by JimmyBlackwing) is a 2000 computer game featuring Garrett, a master thief who works in and around a steampunk metropolis called the City. The game was a commercial success, but it didn't save its publisher, Looking Glass Studios, who closed down within a couple of months of the release.
- George Formby ( nominated by SchroCat & Cassianto) was a music hall star, singer-songwriter, comedian and film star—and an unlikely one at that. While still trying to find his place on screen, one film producer thought him "too stupid to play the bad guy and too ugly to play the hero". The producer reckoned without the cheeky grin and the ingrained need of the British to have double entendre and smut in its cultural output, not forgetting the ukulele, of which he was a maestro, his playing still revered by amateurs and professionals alike.
- John Gielgud ( nominated by Tim riley & SchroCat) was one of the true greats of the British stage—and one of our level 4 vital articles to boot. A member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, he enjoyed a career that spanned eight decades. Tim riley—notching up the first of two FAs in two days—led an overhaul, with co-nom SchroCat going one better with two FAs in one day.
- The Bread-Winners ( nominated by Wehwalt) is an 1883 novel by John Hay, former secretary to Abraham Lincoln, although published anonymously. It was controversial when published, as it presented a hostile view of organised labour; less contentious now, it is the latest FA from the hugely prodigious Wehwalt.
- Sonic: After the Sequel ( nominated by Tezero) is a 2013 video game based on the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Created by a Brazilian student it is an unofficial work that is set between the official games Sonic 2 and Sonic 3.
- 1998 FA Charity Shield ( nominated by Lemonade51) 3–0 to the Arsenal, and against Manchester United too ... glory days!
- Katy Perry ( nominated by SNUGGUMS & Samjohnzon) is an American singer, songwriter and actress who started her career singing gospel music before moving into pop. As is compulsory for modern celebrities, Perry has also released her own brand of perfume and gone through a short-lived and public marriage and divorce.
- Jules Massenet ( nominated by Cg2p0B0u8m & Tim riley) was a French composer of over thirty operas, who came to embody French opera of the Belle Époque. His two most frequently staged operas are Manon (1884) and Werther (1892), although "he also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music".
- Nagato-class battleship ( nominated by Sturmvogel 66) The Nagato-class battleships were a pair of dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy during the First World War, although not finished until after the war's end. Both were ineffectual during the Second World War, with one destroyed in a magazine explosion, and one was a target for US nuclear weapon tests during Operation Crossroads in mid-1946. She survived the first test with little damage, but was sunk by the second test.
- Secret of Mana ( nominated by PresN) is the third video game FA of the week. This one is a 1993 action role-playing game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. "Set in a high fantasy universe, the game follows three heroes as they attempt to prevent an empire from conquering the world with the power of an ancient flying warship"; this is PresN's twelfth FA.
- Freedom from Want (painting) ( nominated by TonyTheTiger) is a 1943 oil painting by the American artist Norman Rockwell. It is the third of the Four Freedoms series, based on the " Four Freedoms" goals enunciated by the US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his 1941 State of the Union Address. The series of paintings has subsequently become part of the Featured Topic Four Freedoms, (see below).
- John Plagis ( nominated by Cliftonian) was a Southern Rhodesian flying ace in the RAF during the Second World War, particularly as "part of the multinational group of Allied pilots that successfully defended the strategically important island ... [ of Malta] against numerically superior Axis forces". Plagis ended the war having been awarded the DSO, DFC & Bar.
Featured lists
Five featured lists were promoted this week.
- List of local nature reserves in Greater London ( nominated by Dudley Miles) London is one of the largest urban areas in Europe, but almost two-thirds of it consists of green space and wetlands. Dudley Miles has provided us with a fantastic list of the 142 official Local Nature Reserves in the 607 square miles (1,570 km2) of the capital.
- List of works by W. Somerset Maugham ( nominated by SchroCat) W. Somerset Maugham was one of the most prolific and high-profile English writers of the 20th century, whose influence was acknowledged by writers that included George Orwell, Ian Fleming and Anthony Burgess. A curmudgeonly soul, he was the most commercially successful and gifted writers of his time.
- List of accolades received by Her (film) ( nominated by Sock & Cowlibob) Her, the 2013 comedy-drama film, earned 110 nominations from mainstream sources, and garnered 46 awards. Receiving particular praise was the script by Spike Jonze, which described the life of a man who develops a relationship with a female voice produced by an intelligent computer operating system.
- Aishwarya Rai Bachchan filmography ( nominated by Krimuk90) The screen career of the Indian actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan began in 1997, with her appearance in Iruvar, a Tamil-language political drama. Since then she has gone on to appear in over forty films in five different languages: Krimuk90 has catalogued the lot—his fifth filmography nomination on an Indian celebrity.
- List of Billboard Hot Rap Songs number-one hits of the 2010s ( nominated by Holiday56) The specialist Hot Rap Songs chart, produced by Billboard, the music industry magazine, ranks the most popular hip hop songs in the US. Holiday56 has built on a previous FL (covering the 1980s and 90s) with this 21st Century addition.
Featured pictures
Five featured pictures were promoted this week.
- Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (created by Thomas Gainsborough, nominated by Sagaciousphil) Mrs. S, or Elizabeth Ann Linley, as she was also known, was the first daughter of the composer Thomas Linley, and wife of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. This was painted by Gainsborough in around 1785–1786.
- The Washington Family (created by Edward Savage, nominated by Armbrust) is a portrait of US President George Washington, First Lady Martha Washington, two of her grandchildren and an enslaved servant. Savage painted this between 1789 and 1796.
- Soldiers Playing Cards and Dice (The Cheats) (created by Valentin de Boulogne nominated by Adam Cuerden) de Boulogne painted this c. 1618–1620, oil on canvas, it is our third classical painting to be featured this week, and the first of two from the always-active Adam Cuerden.
- Strandherd-Armstrong Bridge (created by Saffron Blaze, nominated by Tomer T) Great image of Ottawa's Strandherd-Armstrong Bridge, a 143-metre (469 ft) construction across the Rideau River that has eight lanes for vehicles, two bicycle paths and two pavements.
- SMS Gazelle (created by Hugo Graf, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) Part of a series of featured images of Imperial German Navy ships, the SMS Gazelle entered service in 1901; it was painted by the German artist Hugo Graf in 1899.
Featured topics
One featured topic was promoted this week.
- Four Freedoms ( nominated by TonyTheTiger) With the promotion this week of Freedom from Want, the series of Four Freedoms paintings by the American artist Norman Rockwell becomes a Featured Topic. The nominator, TonyTheTiger, describes the four works as an important "series of works that served as illustrations for a series of essays in response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's human rights declaration, Four Freedoms".
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