Coverage of gender gap initiatives, banner fundraising, and more

In brief

The Christmas edition

Featured articles

Twenty-three featured articles were promoted.

• Aries ( nominated by Magiciandude) is the ninth studio album by Mexican recording artist Luis Miguel. It was released by WEA Latina in 1993. After attaining commercial success in 1991 with his previous album, Romance, Miguel decided to return to a style similar to his earlier work, featuring pop ballads and dance numbers with R&B influences. The record was produced by Miguel, who was assisted by Kiko Cibrian, Rudy Pérez, David Foster, and Juan Luis Guerra. It peaked at number one on the US Billboard Latin Pop Albums, where it stayed for 19 weeks. Internationally, the album was certified triple platinum in Mexico, and was certified diamond in Argentina. Aries sold over two million copies worldwide through 2000. Upon its release, the album received mixed reviews from music critics; they were divided on the dance tunes and ballads, although Miguel's vocals and the album's arrangements garnered positive reactions. Miguel received several accolades, including a Grammy Award for Best Latin Pop Album.
• Northampton War Memorial ( nominated by HJ Mitchell) is a First World War memorial on Wood Hill in the centre of Northampton, the county town of Northamptonshire. Designed by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, it is a Stone of Remembrance flanked by twin obelisks draped with painted stone flags standing in a small garden in what was once part of the churchyard of All Saints' Church. Today it is a Grade I listed building.
• The 2015 Formula One season ( nominated by Tvx1) was the 66th season of the Formula One World Championship, a motor racing championship for Formula One cars, recognised by the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, as the highest class of competition for open-wheel racing cars. Twenty-two drivers representing ten teams contested nineteen Grands Prix, starting in Australia and ending in Abu Dhabi as they competed for the World Drivers' and World Constructors' championships. Lewis Hamilton secured his third Drivers' Championship with three races left in the season. The runner-up was his teammate Nico Rosberg, with Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel third. Mercedes clinched the 2015 Constructors' title at the Russian Grand Prix, ahead of Ferrari and Williams, and ended the season with a record 703 points.
• Giganotosaurus ( nominated by FunkMonk) is a genus of theropod dinosaur that lived in what is now Argentina, during the early Cenomanian age of the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 99.6 to 97 million years ago. The holotype specimen was discovered in the Candeleros Formation of Patagonia in 1993, and is almost 70% complete. The animal was named G. carolinii in 1995; the genus name translates as "giant southern lizard" and the specific name honours the discoverer, Rubén D. Carolini. A dentary bone, a tooth and some tracks, discovered before the holotype, were later assigned to this animal. The genus attracted much interest and became part of a scientific debate about the maximum sizes of theropod dinosaurs.
• First Tennessee Park ( nominated by NatureBoyMD) is a minor league baseball park in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. The home of the Triple-A Nashville Sounds of the Pacific Coast League, it opened in 2015, and can seat up to 10,000 people. It replaced the Sounds' former home, Herschel Greer Stadium, where the team played from its founding in 1978 until 2014. The design of the park incorporates Nashville's musical and baseball heritage and the use of imagery inspired by country music, Sulphur Dell, and Nashville's former baseball players and teams. The ballpark's wide concourse wraps entirely around the stadium and provides views of the field from every location. The greenway section connects with two other greenways in the city.
• Turbinellus floccosus ( nominated by Casliber) is a cantharelloid mushroom of the family Gomphaceae native to Asia and North America. The orange-capped vase- or trumpet-shaped fruiting bodies may reach 30 cm (12 in) high and 30 cm (12 in) wide. The lower surface, the hymenium, is covered in wrinkles and ridges, and is pale buff or yellowish to whitish. T. floccosus forms symbiotic relationships with various types of conifer, growing in coniferous woodlands. Though mild-tasting, they generally cause gastrointestinal symptoms of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea when consumed.
• Crucifix ( nominated by Ceoil and Kafka Liz) is a wooden crucifix, painted in distemper, attributed to the Florentine painter and mosaicist Cimabue. The work was commissioned by the Franciscan friars of Santa Croce and is built from a complex arrangement of five main and eight ancillary timber boards. It is one the first Italian artworks to break from the late medieval Byzantine style and is renowned for its technical innovations and humanistic iconography. The work was in the Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence, since the late thirteenth century, and at the Museo dell'Opera Santa Croce since restoration following the flooding of Arno in 1966. It remains in poor condition despite conservation efforts.
• Night of January 16th ( nominated by RL0919) is a theatrical play by Russian-American author Ayn Rand, inspired by the death of the "Match King", Ivar Kreuger. Set in a courtroom during a murder trial, an unusual feature of the play is that members of the audience are chosen to play the jury. The court hears the case of Karen Andre, a former secretary and lover of businessman Bjorn Faulkner, of whose murder she is accused. The play does not directly portray the events leading to Faulkner's death; instead the jury must rely on character testimony to decide whether Andre is guilty. The play's ending depends on the verdict. Rand's intention was to dramatize a conflict between individualism and conformity, with the jury's verdict revealing which viewpoint they preferred.
• SMS Mecklenburg ( nominated by Parsecboy) was the fifth ship of the Wittelsbach class of pre-dreadnought battleships of the German Imperial Navy. Laid down in 1900 at the AG Vulcan shipyard in Stettin, she was finished in 1903. Mecklenburg was armed with a main battery of four 24 cm (9.4 in) guns and had a top speed of 18 kn (33 km/h; 21 mph). It spent the early period of her career in the I Squadron of the German fleet, participating in the peacetime routine of training cruises and exercises. After World War I began in 1914, the ship was mobilized with her sisters as the IV Battle Squadron. She saw limited duty in the Baltic Sea against Russian naval forces, and as a guard ship in the North Sea. The German High Command withdrew the ship from active service in 1916 due to a threat from submarines and naval mines, together with severe shortages in personnel. For the remainder of her career, Mecklenburg served as a prison ship and as a barracks ship based in Kiel. She was stricken from the navy list in 1920 and sold for scrapping the following year.
• State Route 76 ( nominated by Rschen7754) is a 52.63 mi (84.70 km) long state highway in the U.S. state of California. It is a much used east–west route in the North County region of San Diego County. A route along the corridor has existed since the early 20th century, as has the bridge over the San Luis Rey River near Bonsall. The route was added to the state highway system in 1933, and was officially designated by the California State Legislature as SR 76 in the 1964 state highway renumbering.
• Super Mario Galaxy ( nominated by Jaguar) is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Wii worldwide in 2007. It is the third 3D game in the Super Mario series and the eighth main instalment overall. The game was re-released as a Nintendo Selects title in 2011, and as a download via the Wii U's eShop in 2015. The story revolves around the protagonist, Mario, who is on a quest to rescue Princess Peach whilst simultaneously saving the universe from Bowser. The levels in the game consist of galaxies filled with minor planets and worlds, with different variations of gravity, the central element of gameplay. It was a critical and commercial success, hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time. Critics praised the game's graphics, gravity mechanics, and setting.
• Ike Altgens ( nominated by ATS) (1919–1995) was an American photojournalist, photo editor, and field reporter for the Associated Press (AP) based in Dallas, Texas, who became known for his photographic work during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was 19 when he began his AP career, which was interrupted by military service during World War II. When his service time ended, Altgens returned to Dallas and got married, then went back to work for the local AP bureau and eventually earned a position as a senior editor. Altgens appeared briefly as a film actor and model during his 40-year career with the AP, which ended in 1979. He spent his later years working in display advertising, and answering letters and other requests made by assassination researchers. Altgens and his wife died in 1995 at about the same time in their Dallas home.
• After the Deluge ( nominated by Iridescent) is a Symbolist oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, first exhibited as The Sun in an incomplete form in 1886 and completed in 1891. It shows a scene from the story of Noah's Flood, in which after 40 days of rain Noah opens the window of his Ark to see that the rain has stopped. Watts felt that modern society was in decline owing to a lack of moral values, and he often painted works on the topic of the Flood and its cleansing of the unworthy from the world. The painting takes the form of a stylised seascape, dominated by a bright sunburst breaking through clouds. Although this was a theme Watts had depicted previously in The Genius of Greek Poetry in 1878, After the Deluge took a radically different approach. With this painting he intended to evoke a monotheistic God in the act of creation, but avoid depicting the Creator directly.
• Bradley Cooper ( nominated by FrB.TG) (born 1975) is an American actor and producer. His career began with a guest role in the television series Sex and the City in 1999 and his film debut came two years later in Wet Hot American Summer. He first gained recognition as Will Tippin in the spy-action television show Alias (2001–2006), and achieved minor success with a supporting part in the comedy film Wedding Crashers (2005). His breakthrough role came in 2009 with The Hangover, a commercially successful comedy which spawned two sequels in 2011 and 2013. In 2011, Cooper was named International Man of the Year by GQ and Sexiest Man Alive by People. He is one of the highest-paid actors in the world, and has been nominated for several accolades, including four Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015.
• The Pale Emperor ( nominated by Homeostasis07) is the ninth studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released in 2015, through Marilyn Manson's Hell, etc. label, and was distributed in the US by Loma Vista Recordings and internationally by Cooking Vinyl. The album was released in standard and deluxe editions on CD and 2×LP vinyl, and as a limited edition box set. The standard version of the album contains ten tracks; the deluxe edition includes three acoustic versions as bonus tracks. The album was released to generally positive reviews from music critics. Several writers referred to it as the band's best album in over a decade, and multiple publications ranked it as one of the best albums of 2015. It was also a commercial success, debuting at number eight on the Billboard 200 with the band's highest opening week sales since Eat Me, Drink Me in 2007. It topped Billboard's Hard Rock Albums chart, as well as the national albums chart in Switzerland, and peaked within the top ten in fifteen other countries.
• Seri Rambai ( nominated by Singora) is a 17th-century Dutch cannon displayed at Fort Cornwallis in George Town. It is the largest bronze gun in Malaysia, a fertility symbol and the subject of legends and prophecy.
• Gottlob Berger ( nominated by Peacemaker67) (1896–1975) was a senior German Nazi official who held the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS, and was the chief of the SS Main Office responsible for Schutzstaffel recruiting during World War II. He had a key role in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories from mid-1942. In this role he proposed a plan to kidnap and enslave 50,000 Eastern European children between the ages of 10 and 14, under the codename Heuaktion, a plan that was subsequently carried out. He surrendered to U.S. troops near Berchtesgaden, and was promptly arrested. He was tried and convicted in the Ministries Trial of the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals for war crimes, and was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment. His sentence was soon reduced to 10 years, and he was released after serving six and a half years.
• Dick Cresswell ( nominated by Ian Rose) (1920–2006) was an officer and pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). He held command of No. 77 (Fighter) Squadron twice during World War II, and again during the Korean War. Cresswell was credited with being the first RAAF pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft at night over Australian soil, the only man to serve as commanding officer of an RAAF squadron on three occasions during wartime, and the first officer to lead a jet-equipped Australian squadron in combat. His performance in Korea earned him both the Commonwealth and the US Distinguished Flying Crosses.
• The Montreal Laboratory ( nominated by Hawkeye7) was established by the National Research Council of Canada during World War II to undertake nuclear research in collaboration with the United Kingdom, and to absorb some of the scientists and work of the Tube Alloys nuclear project in Britain. It became part of the Manhattan Project, and designed and built some of the world's first nuclear reactors.
• The bee-eaters ( nominated by Sabine's Sunbird and Jimfbleak) are a group of near-passerine birds in the family Meropidae containing three genera and 27 species. Most species are found in Africa and Asia, with a few in southern Europe, Australia, and New Guinea. They are characterised by richly coloured plumage, slender bodies, and usually elongated central tail feathers. All have long down-turned bills and medium to long wings, which may be pointed or round. Male and female plumages are usually similar.
• The Tahiti rail ( nominated by FunkMonk) is an extinct species of rail that lived on Tahiti. It was first recorded during James Cook's second voyage around the world (1772–1775), on which it was illustrated by Georg Forster and described by Johann Reinhold Forster. The Tahiti rail was 9 in (23 cm) long, and its colouration was unusual for a rail. The Tahiti rail was supposedly flightless, and nested on the ground. It is said to have been seen in open areas, marshes, and in coconut plantations.
• Love, Inc. ( nominated by Aoba47) is an American television sitcom, created by Andrew Secunda, which originally aired for one season on United Paramount Network. The show revolves around five matchmakers working at a dating agency. Despite being set in New York, filming took place at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles and other locations in California. It was canceled following UPN's merger with the WB to launch the CW in 2006. Critical response to Love, Inc. was mixed: some critics praised its multi-ethnic cast, while others felt that the storylines and characters were unoriginal and Philipps' portrayal of her character as unsympathetic.
• The Alabama Centennial half dollar ( nominated by Wehwalt) was a commemorative fifty-cent coin struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1921 as a belated acknowledgement of the 100th anniversary of Alabama's admission to the Union in 1819. The coin was created by Laura Gardin Fraser, who became the first woman designer of a coin. To boost sales, a symbol, 2X2 (recognizing Alabama as the 22nd state) was included in the design for a minority of the coins; these are generally more expensive today.

Featured lists

Ten featured lists were promoted.

• Ipswich Town F.C. is an English association football club founded in 1878. In 2007, the club created a hall of fame ( nominated by The Rambling Man) into which a number of personnel associated with the club are inducted every year. The inaugural members, Ray Crawford, Mick Mills, Ted Phillips and John Wark, were selected in 2007 by a ballot of former Ipswich players. As of 2016, forty-six people have been inducted into the hall of fame.
• The Masters Tournament Par-3 contest ( nominated by The Rambling Man) is a golf competition which precedes the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. The first Par-3 contest was held in 1960, and was won by three-time Masters champion Sam Snead. The contest takes place in a single round on a nine-hole, par-27 course in the northeast corner of Augusta National Grounds, which was designed in 1958 by George Cobb and club founder Clifford Roberts. Traditionally the golfers playing in the contest have invited family members onto the course to caddy for them, sometimes allowing them to play shots on their behalf. Numerous holes in one have been made during the history of the tournament, including nine in the 2016 tournament. No winner of the Par-3 contest has gone on to win the Masters in the same year.
• Ravichandran Ashwin (born 1986) is a Test, One Day International and Twenty20 International cricketer who represents the India national cricket team. As of December 2016, Ashwin has taken 24 five-wicket hauls in international cricket ( nominated by Vensatry); he ranks joint 13th in the all-time list, and joint third among his countrymen. He is one of only 45 bowlers who have taken 15 or more five-wicket hauls at international level in their cricketing careers.
• Michael Fassbender (born 1977) is a German-Irish actor. His filmography ( nominated by Cowlibob) includes thirty-two films, seven television films and thirty-six television episodes. He also voiced Logan in the 2010 video game Fable III.
• A One Day International (ODI) is a 50 over cricket match between two representative teams, each having ODI status, as determined by the International Cricket Council (ICC). As of November 2016, 50 players have represented the Kenyan national team in ODIs ( nominated by Yellow Dingo), since its debut in 1996. Thomas Odoyo and Steve Tikolo have played the most ODIs for Kenya with 131 each. Tikolo has scored the most runs with 3369 for the team, while Odoyo has taken the most wickets with 141.
• Shannen Doherty (born 1971) is an American actress, producer, author, and television director. She has appeared in numerous television programs and motion pictures. ( nominated by Aoba47) She has appeared in sixteen films (with currently four of them being in post-production), in forty-eight television films and numerous television episodes (being a series regular on seven television shows).
• Rajinikanth (born 1950) is an Indian actor who predominantly works in Tamil cinema. He began his film career ( nominated by Kailash29792 and Vensatry) by playing antagonistic and supporting roles before graduating to a lead actor. After starring in numerous commercially successful films throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he has continued to hold a matinée idol status in the popular culture of Tamil Nadu. Writing for Slate, Grady Hendrix called him the "biggest movie star you've probably never heard of." Rajinikanth has also worked in other Indian film industries such as Bollywood, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Bengali. As of 2016, he has appeared in over 150 films.
• Maryland is a state located in the Southern United States. According to the 2010 United States Census, Maryland is the 19th most populous state with 5,773,785 inhabitants but the 9th smallest by land area spanning 9,707.24 sq mi (25,141.6 km²) of land. Maryland is divided into 23 counties and contains 157 incorporated municipalities ( nominated by Mattximus) consisting of cities, towns, or villages. Incorporated municipalities cover only 4.4% of the state's land mass but are home to 26.2% of its population.
• Cardiff City F.C., a professional association football club based in Cardiff, Wales, was founded in 1899. As of the end of the 2015–16 season, the club had spent 11 seasons in the top tier of English football, 47 in the second, 22 in the third and 5 in the fourth. This list ( nominated by Kosack) details their achievements in first-team competitions, and records their top goalscorer, for each completed season since their first appearance in the English football pyramid as members of the Southern Football League in 1910–11. Due to the unavailability of complete statistics, seasons prior to 1910 in the amateur Welsh leagues are not included.
• Essex is a county in the east of England. It has an area of 1,420 sq mi (3,700 km²), with a coastline of 400 mi (640 km), and a population of 1,393,600 according to the 2011 census. As of August 2016 there are forty-nine Local Nature Reserves (LNRs) in Essex ( nominated by Dudley Miles). Nine are also Sites of Special Scientific Interest, three are also Scheduled Monuments and four are managed by the Essex Wildlife Trust. LNRs are designated by local authorities under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. The local authority must have a legal control over the site, by owning or leasing it or having an agreement with the owner. LNRs are sites which have a special local interest either biologically or geologically, and local authorities have a duty to care for them. They can apply local bye-laws to manage and protect LNRs.

Featured pictures

Twenty-one featured pictures were promoted.

• 
  Palace of Fine Arts
  (created and nominated by King of Hearts)
• 
  The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
  (created by Rembrandt; nominated by Brandmeister)
• 
  The Immaculate Conception
  (created by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; nominated by Armbrust)
• 
  Peter and Paul Fortress
  (created and nominated by Godot13)
• 
  Glory of Florentine Saints
  (created by Vincenzo Meucci; photographed and nominated by Livioandronico2013)
• 
  Amalia de Llano
  (created by Federico de Madrazo; nominated by EtienneDolet)
• 
  Tiger from the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Project
  (created by Stephenekka; nominated by Yann)
• 
  Fountain of Qayt Bay
  (created and nominated by Godot13)
• 
  Peter Tatchell
  (created and nominated by Colin)
• 
  Rifling
  (created and nominated by PetarM)
• 
  Self-Portrait
  (created by Marie-Gabrielle Capet; nominated by EtienneDolet)
• 
  Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels
  (created by Clara Peeters; nominated by MurielMary)
• 
  Odds and Ends
  (created by Emily Carr; nominated by MurielMary)
• 
  Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné
  (created by Alexander Roslin; nominated by EtienneDolet)
• 
  Saints John and Paul basilica al Celio
  (created and nominated by Livioandronico2013)
• 
  Joseph F. Ambrose
  (created by Mickey Sanborn; nominated by Pine)
• 
  Masked lovers at the Carnival of Venice
  (created by Frank Kovalchek; nominated by EtienneDolet)
• 
  Shag Rocks
  (created and nominated by Godot13)
• 
  Chapel Royal
  (created by Diliff; nominated by Armbrust)
• 
  The Child's Bath
  (created by Mary Cassatt; nominated by MurielMary)
• 
  Dome of Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
  (created and nominated by Livioandronico2013)

Reader comments

2016-12-22

Labs improvements impact 2016 Tool Labs survey results

Contribute  —  

Share this

•   E-mail
•   Facebook
•   Twitter
•   LinkedIn
•   Reddit
•   Digg

By Legoktm and Evad37

In 2015, the Wikimedia Labs team ran a survey of Tool Labs developers to further understand how they feel about the service, what they like, and what they want to see improved. This year, Bryan Davis, a senior software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation providing Tool Labs support as part of Community Tech, ran the survey again, and announced the results on the Labs-l mailing list in late November.

The survey showed that developers' opinion of the reliability of the Tool Labs platform has increased from 64% last year to 87%, and is likely to be the main aspect that users of tools hosted on Tool Labs care about. Davis attributed this to infrastructure work performed by members of the Labs Operations team.

Users' responses about reliability, split into cohorts based on how many years they've used Tool Labs/Toolserver (first four bars), how many tools they've developed and actively maintain (next eight bars), and how many hours a week they spend maintaining tools. There were 175 participants in the survey.

He specifically highlighted Chase Pettet and Madhumitha Viswanathan’s work on improving the underlying Network File System (NFS) servers for performance and stability, Andrew Bogott’s work on the OpenStack cloud that powers the servers that run Tool Labs. YuviPanda is leading the effort to migrate from the unsupported Open Grid Engine (OGE) to the newer and more stable Kubernetes platform, which has led to cleaning up and improving the web server related code.

“Moving to a codebase that is about 20 years newer and supported by an active community can do a lot to improve things”, said Davis. He noted that there may be some recency bias, since the period immediately before the 2016 survey was relatively stable, while there was instability in the months before the 2015 one.

The Labs team monitors uptime as well, explained Davis. For the months of October and November, the combined availability (all services being up) was 99.669%, or about two and a half hours of downtime per month on average. They are currently aiming for 99.9% availability, or 45 minutes of downtime per month.

Davis also shared some of the planned improvements in 2017 that should help with stability and reliability.

Servers in the Virginia datacenter

“We have a new database cluster coming online soon", said Davis. “Rather than just setting up the same old system on bigger hardware the database administration team has taken a deep look at the problem of replication with filtering and made configuration and architecture changes to improve the whole stack.”

Another goal is to improve the OpenStack networking system by upgrading it to “Neutron”. This would allow the Labs team to distribute servers better in the datacenter, ensuring that a power outage for a single row of servers won’t take down all of Labs (as it currently would).

And as mentioned earlier, work on transitioning away from OGE will continue. Davis is currently working on evaluation criteria for the OGE replacement system, and expects to do actual testing next quarter.

89% of Tool Labs developers found the support to be as good as or better than the support they received while using the Toolserver, compared with 71% last year. Davis credited the community for coming together and helping each other more, citing the number of people answering questions on IRC and improving documentation on wikis.

He also saw a lot of room for improvement, noting that documentation was the most mentioned problem in the free form comment section of the survey.

“We have pretty good coverage of highly technical topics on the Wikitech wiki, but there are very few start to finish tutorials on how to create an account, upload your code, and see your app running”, said Davis. “It would be nice to see "my first X" tutorials for different basic projects (web service, editing bot, IRC bot, etc) for various languages.”

Usage of the three main services of Tool Labs, LabsDB, cron jobs, and web services, were all down from last year; but the number of respondents who don’t actively maintain any tools went up from 16% to 22%. Davis had a few hypotheses as to why, such as people switching to Quarry for database queries instead of direct access, or people signing up, finding it difficult, and then losing interest.

“I'd love to hear more from the Tool Labs community on the 'why' here”, said Davis. He can be contacted on his Wikitech talk page.

Davis expects the survey results to affect planning for the Labs team in 2017–2018 and the longer term.

“The single biggest take away for us early on is that the documentation needs to be improved”, said Pettet. “We need to update it, curate it, and make sure our users understand it.” He added that it's heartening that users are seeing the benefits of all of their efforts working on uptime and availability.

Stealing some of Wikimedia's Principles to Democratize Programming

“I've got this vision that I think a few others share of a world where making a technical contribution to the movement has a really low barrier of entry”, said Davis. “Ideally manipulating the data we have about what is happening in the wikis should be as easy as editing an article. Sure there will always be a few rules and local conventions that you need to follow, but you shouldn't have to learn a lot of new technology before you can get some work done.” He pointed to YuviPanda’s talk on “Stealing some of Wikimedia's Principles to Democratize Programming” that discusses the same kind of world, using the popular Quarry and relatively new PAWS tools as examples of lowering barriers to technical tasks.

“We are never going to get everyone to freely share in the sum of all knowledge if there are arbitrary silos that large numbers of people are locked out of just because they don't use the right computer operating system or understand the technical difference between an array and a vector”, said Davis.

The full survey results are available on Meta-Wiki. L

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

• Page Curation ^[1] ( source) by User:Lourdes – Adds a "Page Curation" link to the top toolbar, primarily designed for new page reviewers.
• Special:NewPages ^[2] ( source) by User:Lourdes – Adds a "Special:NewPages" link to the top toolbar, primarily designed for new page reviewers.
• TFA History Link ^[3] ( source) by User:Lourdes – Adds a "TFA History" link to the top toolbar, primarily designed to track recent changes to today's featured article.
• centralAuthLink ^[4] ( source) by User:The Voidwalker – Adds links to the Central Auth for a user from in their: userspace, contributions, or logs.
• lastEdit ^[5] ( source) by User:Opencooper – Shows the last person to edit the page and the relative time of the edit under the page title.

Newly approved bot tasks

• DatBot ( task 3) – Reports users who have either tripped 5 filters quickly in a list, a filter that is in an "immediate report" list, or a very suspicious username-related filter.
• MusikBot II ( approval) – Maintains the AWB CheckPage and counts the number of users with access.
• Bender the Bot ( task 3, task 4) – replace http:// with https:// for YouTube, and for selected domains.
• Monkbot ( task 11) – Fix cs1|2 author/editor parameters in articles listed in Category:CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list and Category:CS1 maint: Multiple names: editors list.
• Dexbot ( task 9) – Adding quotation marks to ref names containing special characters.
• PrimeBOT ( task 5) – Add autosubst coding to wrapper templates in order to replace them.
• WugBot ( approval) – Reads WP:GAN and posts the oldest nominations on Wikipedia:Good article nominations/Report.
• ZackBot ( task 5) – Rename deprecated parameters in transclusions of {{ Infobox NFL biography}}

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2016 #49 & #50. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

• Recent changes
  • You can choose to see users from specific user groups in Special:ActiveUsers. ( Phabricator task T116354)
  • Everyone can now see Special:UserRights. Previously only those who could change user rights could. Other users got an error message. ( Phabricator task T27319)
  • ORES can now show how likely an edit is to be damaging to the wiki with different colours. This only works for languages that have trained ORES to recognize damaging edits. ( Phabricator task T144922)
  • You will now see categories with 0 pages in Special:Categories. Previously you did not see empty categories there. ( Phabricator task T12915)
  • Users who have Yahoo email addresses could not use Special:EmailUser to send emails. This has now been fixed. Emails will now come from a @wikimedia.org address. Users who get an email from you will still reply to your email address and be able to see it. ( Phabricator task T66795)
  • You can now see how many categories and pages there are in the categories (only the ones automatically populated by the MediaWiki software) in Special:TrackingCategories. This is to help you find pages that could need attention. ( Gerrit code review)
  • Markup colours for reviewed and pending revisions in the page history and recent changes and logs now match Wikimedia standard colours. The "You have a new message on your talk page" notification will have a slightly different colour. ( Wikitech email list)
• Problems
  • Because of work on cross-wiki watchlists global renaming is not working. The plan is to turn it on again on 16 December. Global renaming was turned off for a while in late November and early December as well. ( Phabricator task T148242)
• Future changes
  • The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey will decide what the Community Tech team will work on next year. Voting for wishes on the survey page concluded on 12 December. You can see what has happened to last year's wishes on the 2015 results page.

Installation code

Further information: Wikipedia:User scripts § How to install user scripts

1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
   importScript( 'User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js]]
2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
   importScript( 'User:Lourdes/SpecialNewPages.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Lourdes/SpecialNewPages.js]]
3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
   importScript( 'User:Lourdes/TFAhistorylink.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Lourdes/TFAhistorylink.js]]
4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
   importScript( 'User:The Voidwalker/centralAuthLink.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:The Voidwalker/centralAuthLink.js]]
5. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
   importScript( 'User:Opencooper/lastEdit.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Opencooper/lastEdit.js]]

Reader comments

2016-12-22

Post-election traffic blues

Contribute  —  

Share this

•   E-mail
•   Facebook
•   Twitter
•   LinkedIn
•   Reddit
•   Digg

By Serendipodous and Milowent

Traffic reports of the most-viewed articles of the week for the past four weeks.

For the full top-25 lists, see WP:TOP25. Please also see our archives for weekly lists going back to January 2013, as well as recently added archives of the most popular articles in Wikipedia's earliest years: 2001–2004, see, e.g., Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/October 2001.

November 13–19

Waiting to exhale: We are still coming down from election, which saw the highest average numbers we've ever recorded, and numbers, while down from last week's ludicrous levels, are still not near normal. This list is very similar to last week's, with only a small number of new entries. It's almost as if last week's list breathed in a swarm of numbers and is slowly now breathing them out. – Serendipodous

For the week of November 13–19, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Donald Trump		3,321,262		Numbers are slowly returning to normal for America's 45th president. Would that his country could.
2	Steven Bannon		2,746,898		Apparently, the nation of America was shocked to the core when it learned that the head of the racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic Breitbart News, who had acted for months as Donald Trump's chief strategist, would continue to act as Donald Trump's chief strategist. What? You elect someone specifically to disrupt the status quo and you're surprised when the status quo is disrupted?
3	United States presidential election, 2016		1,693,874		Views peaked at 2.36 million on November 9.
4	Melania Trump		1,422,580		Mrs. Trump will be the first foreign-born First Lady of the United States since Louisa Adams in the 1820s. Louisa was British, so Melania will be the first non-native speaker of English to hold the title, which is a bit bizarre considering Trump's rhetoric on immigration. Though her English is not perfect, she does speak six languages – a feat few people, and fewer native English-speakers, can claim.
5	Elizabeth II		1,354,307		For the third consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
6	UFC 205		1,215,708		The latest Ultimate Fighting Championship was held on November 12, 2016 at Madison Square Garden. The headline match was won by Conor McGregor who defeated Eddie Alvarez in a technical knockout in the second round.
7	Frederick Banting		1,203,940		The discoverer of insulin got a Google Doodle on his 125th birthday on November 14.
8	Ivanka Trump		1,148,947		No doubt the most liked Trump outside core Trump-fandom. Her views regularly exceeded those of her siblings. In the report for the July 2016 week of the Republican National Convention, Ivanka placed #4, ahead of her three adult siblings. (Trump's youngest child Barron Trump is only 10 years old and should not have his own article here, if the precedent set for Malia and Sasha Obama is applied. ETA: And he no longer does after an AfD closed. - MW)
9	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film)		1,137,420		This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (it currently has a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening.
10	Conor McGregor		1,107,299		See #6.

November 20–26

A Holiday Week, and Some Oldies: The death of Fidel Castro (#1) was the most-viewed topic of the week, followed by the Harry Potter universe film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And the popular British TV series The Crown continues to push British royalty into the chart. The American Thanksgiving holiday (#3) and consumer holiday of Black Friday (#5) returned for another annual appearance, as United States politics continues to recede a bit in popularity, and view counts return to more normal ranges.

In other news, The Top 25 report's archives are slowing expanding to include data on article popularity from long ago, to the extent we can track it down. See, for example, the most popular article list for October 2003. Wikipedia was a much smaller place 13 years ago. While Fidel Castro got 1.76 million views last week, in October 2003, the most viewed page (after the Main Page), was " Current events" with a mere 26,838 views for the entire month. Back then, however, traditional encyclopedic topics could compete for top spots, and Mathematics was #5 for the month with 13,796 views. Last week it only placed #3685 (31,637 views). – Milowent

For the week of November 20–26, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Fidel Castro		1,760,389		Somebody had to knock Donald Trump (#4) out of the top spot. The strongman ruler of Cuba, though out of the spotlight the last few years due to his poor health, died on November 25 at age 90.
2	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film)		1,617,874		Up from #9 last week, with almost 500,000 more views. This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening.
3	Thanksgiving		1,279,737		Off about 100,000 views from last year, but that's fairly consistent. This beloved North American holiday has, in the past, been very ill-used by Wikipedia viewers. Every year, when it came around, immediately money-spinning spammers started flooding Wikipedia with fake views for this article, thus forcing us to remove what should have been a perfectly acceptable annual addition to this list. For the second year, however, it appears that the article has been included entirely on its own merits without any, ahem, stuffing.
4	Donald Trump		1,249,878		Numbers continue to drop since the November 8 United States presidential election, 2016 (#8), but they can be expected to rebound in January. Also, Trump continues to tweet.
5	Black Friday (shopping)		1,149,155		The day after Thanksgiving is also the day that retailers have earned enough to cover their debts from the previous year, and are thus "in the black" (at least, that's what they say; in truth it probably originated as a reaction to the traffic). In recent years it has become a major day on the shopping calendar and the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season, though Cyber Monday is increasing in popularity every year, allowing the spirit of consumerism to continue to expand.
6	Survivor Series (2016)		1,096,605		Pay-per-view wrestling event held on November 20. Goldberg (#22) was among the match winners.
7	Elizabeth II		1,050,072		For the fourth consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
8	United States presidential election, 2016		940,657		Still popular as people refresh their screens occasionally to make sure Wikipedia was not vandalized.
9	Betsy DeVos		901,852		The billionaire and education activist for school voucher programs has been nominated to be president Trump's secretary of education.
10	Westworld (TV series)		806,567		To be clear: this is not based on a novel by Michael Crichton: Crichton was a filmmaker as well as a novelist, and Westworld was a film he both wrote and directed back in the 1970s. But whereas that was a straightforward "monsters on the loose" movie, about a Western-themed amusement park staffed by hyperrealistic robots who go insane and start murdering the guests ( sound familiar?), this series looks like it will be taking a more thoughtful, hard scifi approach, with the robots' gradual evolution from programming to quasi-consciousness forming the main plot thread. With a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ratings of just under 2 million (roughly what Game of Thrones received when it began), it's off to a solid start, though whether it will be the show to carry HBO past Game of Thrones's end remains to be seen.

November 27 – December 3

Breathe steady: What's this? A two-million view cap? A ~400,000 entry? Television shows? Movies? Reddit threads? Google Doodles? Recently dead people? Could it be that Wikipedia has finally returned to normal? Well not exactly. There's a remarkably shallow curve at the top, meaning viewership is still up on previous weeks, mostly due to news events such as the appointment of James Mattis as US Secretary of Defense, or the tragic crash of LaMia Airlines Flight 2933. But if things keep going the way they are, this job might just get boring again. – Serendipodous

For the week of November 27 to December 3, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Fidel Castro		2,401,418		Numbers are up by nearly a million on last week, so obviously people still cry for la revolucion to vivir, even though el revolucionario está muerto.
2	Associação Chapecoense de Futebol		1,406,474		The football team that tragically lost most of its members in the crash of LaMia Airlines Flight 2933 (see #11)
3	Jagadish Chandra Bose		1,385,705		The Indian biologist who invented the crescograph received a Google Doodle on his 158th birthday on November 30.
4	James Mattis		1,059,661		Amid a string of controversial Trump appointments, the former general's appointment as secretary of defense feels almost normal. About the only thing controversial about him is a mildly hawkish stance on Iran.
5	Louisa May Alcott		1,047,171		The author of Little Women and Little Men got a Google Doodle on her 184th birthday on November 29.
6	Westworld (TV series)		920,398		Numbers are up for the penultimate episode of the season, which saw the realisation of a number of long-held fan theories and bodes well for next week's 90-minute season finale. A second season has been greenlit, so expect even more water cooler moments next year.
7	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film)		830,774		Down from #2 last week. This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening.
8	Elizabeth II		825,747		For the fifth consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
9	Deaths in 2016		773,350		The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. That said, we may have to recalibrate our mathematics, since its numbers have been slowly going up over the last few weeks.
10	Donald Trump		717,438		Numbers continue to drop since the November 8 United States presidential election, 2016 (#11), but they can be expected to rebound in January. Also, Trump continues to tweet.

December 4–10

India rising: Topics from India, usually films, often make this chart. But the death of Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, is notable for rising to #1 and over 4 million views, though never before appearing on the chart. Former minister M. G. Ramachandran also placed #5. It took 678K views to hit the Top 10, the lowest threshold since the slow week of October 16-22. – Milowent

For the week of December 4–10, the 10 most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Jayalalithaa		4,067,619		Jayalalithaa Jayaram was an Indian actress and politician who served five terms as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, for over 14 years between 1991 and 2016. She fell ill in September 2016, and died on December 5 after a long hospitalization. India declared a day of national mourning, while the state of Tamil Nadu declared seven days of mourning.
2	John Glenn		1,280,797		The first American astronaut to orbit Earth in 1962, and later a United States Senator. With all the notable deaths this year, it makes me think that the 20th century itself really died in 2016. Yes, the icons of every century linger into the next, but if you want to draw a line, this year seems like a good one.
3	Westworld (TV series)		1,272,033		The season finale episode, The Bicameral Mind, aired on December 4.
4	Rømer's determination of the speed of light		997,296		Has to be Reddit. Also an interesting article on a topic I knew nothing about.
5	M. G. Ramachandran		861,766		Indian actor who was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu from 1977-87, so no doubt popular due to #1.
6	Junaid Jamshed		861,766		This popular Pakistani recording artist died on December 7 in the crash of Pakistan International Airlines Flight 661.
7	Deaths in 2016		761,247		The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. That said, we may have to recalibrate our mathematics, since its numbers have been slowly going up over the past few weeks, and continued this week.
8	Kirk Douglas		759,816		This American actor turned 100 on December 9.
9	Attack on Pearl Harbor		694,555		The 75th anniversary of Japan's attack on the United States, which led to the entry of the U.S. into World War II, occurred on December 7. The memorial services held for the event will likely be the last major gathering of living survivors of the attack.
10	Last Tango in Paris		678,802		Details about the infamous rape scene in this 1972 movie caused controversy this week.

Reader comments

2016-12-22

Winning photos in world's largest photography contest reveal a world of monuments—and the volunteers who love them

Contribute  —  

Share this

•   E-mail
•   Facebook
•   Twitter
•   LinkedIn
•   Reddit
•   Digg

By Jeff Elder

The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. Any views expressed in this piece are not necessarily shared by the Signpost; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. For more information on this partnership, see our content guidelines.

 

A lawyer carefully studied the arches and staircases of the Berlin district courthouse as he came and went for work, “not always liking the place”. One afternoon the crowds disappeared, the light from the towering windows softened, and Ansgar Koreng captured its elaborate elegance for first place in the contest.

 

Colin, from Britain, waited for Open House London to take a photo of Royal Albert Hall. He hauled a tripod to the central box of the grand tier, and set to work, hoping the light wouldn’t change as he pieced together a high-resolution composite image, giving music lovers a glowing view of the legendary venue. The photo took second place.

 

Tahsin Shah, a Pakistani police chief, drove 500 kilometers pursuing the “romance and decaying glory” of the ninth century Derawar Fort. He captured a camel caravan strung along its bastions, a scene that could have taken place 1,000 years ago, for tenth place.

Beginning photographer Vladimír Ruček likes to hike the mountains of his homeland, Slovakia, sleeping in “a million-star hotel”, alone under the night sky. He photographed the old stone Čachtice Castle greeting the morning sun and took thirteenth place.

Welcome to the largest photo competition in the world – by the world and for the world. Wiki Loves Monuments drew 277,365 entries from 10,748 participants this year, the largest pool of submissions of any photo competition. Volunteers go through all of those, first on the national level, then for the global finals. Above are some of the stories behind the top 15 photos—winnowed all the way down from the more than a quarter-million—and announced on December 15.

Lawyer Ansgar Koreng placed first, winning a €1000 prize, Colin’s Royal Albert Hall photo placed second, Pakistani police chief Tahsin Shah placed tenth, and Slovakian hiker Vladimír Ruček placed thirteenth.

Like Wikipedia, Wiki Loves Monuments is a sprawling enterprise filled with fascinating diversity. Winners represent the world’s best photos of the cultural heritage in 42 nations. Museums and observatories, old mills and modern architecture. If Wikipedia is the story of the world, Wiki Loves Monuments could well be its most beautiful slide show.

The contest, started in 2010, judges photos submitted via Wikimedia Commons, the 36 million-file free media repository for the Wikimedia movement. The photos help illustrate articles about countries’ national monuments on Wikipedia, and are freely licensed for everyone to appreciate. In fact, one of the main criteria for judging is “Usefulness of the image on Wikipedia”.

Wiki Loves Monuments also introduces some contributors to the collaborative Wikimedia culture. This year around 8,500 people used a new Wikimedia account to submit photos to the competition, something that generally correlates to having never before contributed to Wikimedia projects.

Every nation has its own 10 winners who compete at the global level. One German photographer, the Wikimedia Commons user Tilman2007, submitted 16,507 photos this year, and has submitted 46,352 to Wiki Loves Monuments since 2011 and 102,875 to Wikimedia Commons in total with the help of uploading tools. Another participant, Francesca, submitted one-half of a photo, and was a finalist in Italy. Francesca submitted a glowing photo of the Church of Santa Maria De’ Armeni in Matera, which she took with a collaborator, her boyfriend. She only submits photos taken with her boyfriend; it is entirely a labor of love.

One thing is true about all of them, and all contributors to Wikimedia projects. As the photographers capture national treasures, they invest something of themselves.

Albrecht Landgraf of Germany took a roadtrip with his family in Saxony where one side of his family is from. “All our relatives in this area passed away years ago, and the remaining family is spread out all over Germany.” They drove back in through family history to a park in Gablenz. “That’s when we found this little gem”, he said, “in a small village.”

 

His fourteenth place photo is an emerald, a quiet photograph of a serene lake garlanded with lush greenery with the arc of a bridge perfectly meeting its reflection in the water. His family may have long since left Saxony, but Albrecht returned to rediscover his roots—and left the region a gift.

For more information on the winning photos and the 2016 competition, go to wikilovesmonuments.org/ or the Wikimedia Blog.

Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

Reader comments

2016-12-22

Privacy risks as perceived by Tor users and Wikipedians

Contribute  —  

Share this

•   E-mail
•   Facebook
•   Twitter
•   LinkedIn
•   Reddit
•   Digg

By Tilman Bayer

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

"Privacy, anonymity, and perceived risk in open collaboration: a study of Tor users and Wikipedians"

This qualitative study, ^[1] based on interviews with privacy-conscious Wikipedia editors and users of the Tor anonymization software, is an informative examination of the privacy issues that are particular to the work on the radically transparent online encyclopedia. It also tries (largely unsuccessfully, in this reviewer's opinion) to make the case that Wikipedia should relax its restrictions on editing via Tor.

The three authors from Drexel University carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with two groups:

• 12 "Tor users who have also contributed to “online projects." (recruited e.g. on the mailing list of the Tor project)
• 11 "Wikipedia editors who have considered their privacy while editing", including some administrators and Wikimedia Foundation employees

In both groups, the majority (8 in each case) was male.

The goal was "to examine the threats that people perceive when contributing to open collaboration projects and how they maintain their safety and privacy". Interview responses examined using thematic analysis, to identify the most important concepts.

As first part of their findings, the authors group the types of threats described by the participants into five areas:

• "Surveillance/Loss of privacy", i.e. the general "fear that their online communication or activities may be accessed or logged by parties without their knowledge or consent". This more abstract concern was more prevalent in the Tor users group than among the privacy-conscious Wikipedians interviewed for the study.
• "Loss of employment/opportunity", such as when a potential employer decides against a particular job candidate because she derived certain kinds of negative information from his online activity, or a transphobic boss learning that a particular employee is a transgender person.
• "Safety of self/loved ones". Some of the Wikipedians reported "threats of rape, physical assault, and death as reprisals for their contributions to the project".
• "Harassment/Intimidation", which was brought up far more often by the Wikipedians (8) than among the Tor users (1). In particular "Editors who took central positions like administrator or arbitration committee member found that additional authority and responsibility brought with it publicity and vulnerability", including rape and death threats in case of a female administrator.
• "Reputation loss" in general. One participant related that often Wikipedians edits anonymously (i.e. only identified by their IP address) because "they don't want someone to go on a vendetta against them and what's a volunteer hobby for them suddenly turns into something that affects their professional career".

The researchers seem to have struggled a bit to clearly delineate these five threat areas. For instance, there appears to be quite a bit of similarity between the intimidation and safety concerns, and as the authors point out themselves, "the potential for contributions to controversial topics to be misinterpreted and result in lost opportunities" - the second area - is also related to the more general concern about reputation loss. Nevertheless, for those interested in the privacy threats editors associate with the activity of contributing Wikipedia, this is a very worthwhile read. A thematically related document is the Wikimedia Foundation's 2015 Harassment survey 2015 ( Signpost summary) - unfortunately not mentioned in the paper. The WMF survey, while also not designed to be completely representative, covered some of the same ground with vastly more respondents (3,845) than the 23 interviewees in the present study.

Turning to the strategies that the interviewees employ to mitigate these perceived risks, the study identifies "two broad overlapping categories of activities: modifying participation in projects and enacting anonymity." Modifying participation can include refraining from editing certain topics. Under "enacting anonymity", the researchers subsume both "operational approaches that limit others’ ability to connect activities with participants real identities (e.g. maintaining multiple accounts [ also known as sockpuppets on Wikipedia])", and technical means such as Tor (for "participating anonymously on the Internet" in general). It is in this section that the paper becomes a bit muddied about the distinction between privacy threats on the internet in general and on Wikipedia in particular. This is particularly unfortunate as it seems to have been at least partly motivated by the longstanding discussions about the restrictions on editing Wikipedia via Tor (demands from the Tor community to lift these go back at least a decade), with the authors making the case that Wikipedia is incurring a significant loss of contributions because of these restrictions. There is no doubt that the public edit histories can reveal a lot about a Wikipedian's interests etc. (Or as this reviewer concluded in in a 2008 Wikimania talk that presented several real-life examples of conclusions that can be drawn from a Wikipedia user's editing patterns: "Wikipedia contributors don't just give their time to the project, but pay with their privacy, too.") But the obfuscation of IP addresses that Tor provides is largely irrelevant for this, because editors' IP addresses are not made public anyway, if they don't choose to edit under an IP. In an early presentation about the study at the 2015 Chaos Communication Congress (32C3) (slide 33), the authors themselves alluded to this :

"According to Wikipedians most deanonymization is done based on contextual cues. Tor won’t help with this"

But this kind of caveat is missing from the present paper.

(Interestingly though, Wikipedians in the study reported using Tor-like tools outside of Wikipedia, to avoid "being targeted by groups with a history of harassing Wikipedians:": "when I'm reading Wikipediocracy or one of the Wikipedia criticism sites, because I know that they scoop up IP addresses, I use an IP obfuscator for that.")

Briefly

Conferences and events

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

Other recent publications

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

• "A method for predicting Wikipedia editors' editing interest: based on a factor graph model" ^[2] From the abstract: "Recruiting or recommending appropriate potential Wikipedia editors to edit a specific Wikipedia entry (or article) can play an important role in improving the quality and credibility of Wikipedia. ... this paper proposes an interest prediction factor graph (IPFG) model, which is characterized by editor's social properties, hyperlinks between Wikipedia entries, the categories of an entry and other important features, to predict an editor's editing interest in types of Wikipedia entries. ... An experiment on a Wikipedia dataset (with different frequencies of data collection) shows that the average prediction accuracy (F1 score) of the IPFG model for data collected quarterly could be up to 0.875, which is about 0.49 higher than that of a collaborative filtering approach."
• "Stationarity of the inter-event power-law distributions" ^[3] From the abstract: "We show that even though the probability to start [Wikipedia] editing is conditioned by the circadian 24 hour cycle, the conditional probability for the time interval between successive edits at a given time of the day is independent from the latter. We confirm our findings with the activity of posting on the social network Twitter. Our result suggests there is an intrinsic humankind scheduling pattern: after overcoming the encumbrance to start an activity, there is a robust distribution of new related actions, which does not depend on the time of day."
• "Controversy detection in Wikipedia using collective classification" ^[4] From the abstract: "We hypothesize that intensities of controversy among related pages are not independent; thus, we propose a stacked model which exploits the dependencies among related pages. Our approach improves classification of controversial web pages when compared to a model that examines each page in isolation, demonstrating that controversial topics exhibit homophily."
• "WIKIREADING: a novel large scale language understanding task over Wikipedia" ^[5] From the abstract: "We present WIKIREADING, a large-scale natural language understanding task and publicly-available dataset with 18 million instances. The task is to predict textual values from the structured knowledge base Wikidata by reading the text of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. ... We compare various state-of-the-art DNN [deep neural networks]-based architectures for document classification, information extraction, and question answering."
• "A contingency view of transferring and adapting best practices within online communities" ^[6] From the abstract: "Empirical research on the transfer of a quality-improvement practice between projects within Wikipedia shows that modifications are more helpful if they are introduced after the receiving project has had experience with the imported practice. Furthermore, modifications are more effective if they are introduced by members who have experience in a variety of other projects." From the paper: "We collected the history of CotW [Collaboration of the Week] in 146 Wikiprojects and measured how different types of modifications influenced their success, in terms of the length of time the CotW continued to be used in a project, the amount of work they elicited from project members and the number of unique editors who contributed to them."
• "Centrality and content creation in networks – the case of economic topics on German Wikipedia" ^[7] From the abstract: "We analyze the role of local and global network positions for content contributions to articles belonging to the category “Economy” on the German Wikipedia. Observing a sample of 7635 articles over a period of 153 weeks we measure their centrality both within this category and in the network of over one million Wikipedia articles. Our analysis reveals that an additional link from the observed category is associated with around 140 bytes of additional content and with an increase in the number of authors by 0.5. The relation of links from outside the category to content creation is much weaker. ... We find non-neoclassical themes to be highly prevalent among the top articles."
• "A platform for visually exploring the development of Wikipedia articles" ^[8] From the abstract: "... associated to each [Wikipedia] article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points." (Also see previous coverage: "Contropedia" tool identifies controversial issues within articles", http://www.contropedia.net/ and the following paper:)
• "Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia" ^[9] From the abstract: "... we study how the affordances of Wikipedia are deployed in the production of encyclopedic knowledge and how this can be used to study controversies. The analysis shows how Wikipedia affords unstable encyclopedic knowledge by having mechanisms in place that suggest the continuous (re)negotiation of existing knowledge. We furthermore showcase the use of our open-source software, Contropedia, which can be utilized to study knowledge production on Wikipedia."

References

1. ^ Forte, Andrea; Andalibi, Nazanin; Greenstadt, Rachel (2017-03-25). "Privacy, anonymity, and perceived risk in open collaboration: a study of Tor users and Wikipedians" (PDF). Proceedings of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). Portland, OR. CSCW '17. College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University Philadelphia, PA, USA. p. 12.
2. ^ Zhang, Haisu; Zhang, Sheng; Wu, Zhaolin; Huang, Liwei; Ma, Yutao (July 2016). "A method for predicting Wikipedia editors' editing interest: based on a factor graph model". International Journal of Web Services Research. 13 (3): 1–25. doi: 10.4018/IJWSR.2016070101. ISSN  1545-7362.
3. ^ Gandica, Yerali; Carvalho, Joao; Aidos, Fernando Sampaio Dos; Lambiotte, Renaud; Carletti, and Timoteo (2016). "Stationarity of the inter-event power-law distributions". arXiv: 1607.05004 [ physics.soc-ph].
4. ^ Dori-Hacohen, Shiri; Jensen, David; Allan, James (2016). "Controversy detection in Wikipedia using collective classification". Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. SIGIR '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 797–800. doi: 10.1145/2911451.2914745. ISBN  9781450340694.
5. ^ Hewlett, Daniel; Lacoste, Alexandre; Jones, Llion; Polosukhin, Illia; Fandrianto, Andrew; Han, Jay; Kelcey, Matthew; Berthelot, David (2016-08-07). "WIKIREADING: a novel large scale language understanding task over Wikipedia" (PDF). 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Berlin, Germany: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 1535–1545., see also Paper notes and dataset
6. ^ Zhu, Haiyi; Kraut, Robert E.; Kittur, Aniket (2016). "A contingency view of transferring and adapting best practices within online communities". Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. CSCW '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 729–743. doi: 10.1145/2818048.2819976. ISBN  9781450335928. , Author's copy
7. ^ Kummer, Michael E.; Saam, Marianne; Halatchliyski, Iassen; Giorgidze, George (2016). "Centrality and content creation in networks – the case of economic topics on German Wikipedia". Information Economics and Policy. 36: 36. doi: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2016.06.002. ISSN  0167-6245.
8. ^ Borra, Erik; Laniado, David; Weltevrede, Esther; Mauri, Michele; Magni, Giovanni; Venturini, Tommaso; Ciuccarelli, Paolo; Rogers, Richard; Kaltenbrunner, Andreas. "A platform for visually exploring the development of Wikipedia articles" (PDF). ICWSM 2015. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. p. 2.
9. ^ Weltevrede, Esther; Borra, Erik (2016-06-01). "Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia". Big Data & Society. 3 (1): 2053951716653418. doi: 10.1177/2053951716653418. ISSN  2053-9517.

Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.

Keep up with The Signpost on Twitter, Facebook or Mastodon.

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions