Wikipedia's gender identity MOS section and its effect on Chelsea Manning was both praised and emulated in the media this week. The controversy over moving the article from her former name, Bradley Manning, came in the wake of the soldier's announcement of her gender identity after her trial had concluded. The acrimonious debate and move request at Talk:Chelsea Manning was covered. Slate praised Wikipedia's quick shift from the outdated male pronouns and name to her current pronouns and name. The story was also covered by El Comercio, the New Statesman, and TruthDig.
On 21 August 2013, the open access journal PLoS One published the article "Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data". The authors analyzed data about 312 movies that were released in the United States in 2010. They limited their sample to movies listed in Category:2009 films and Category:2010 films and used Box Office Mojo for information on the box office success of the films. They concluded that, even one month before a movie is released domestically, Wikipedia editing activity could accurately predict its success. The paper was covered in myriad news outlets, including The Australian, The Descrier, Gizmodo, The International Business Times, Livescience, Motherboard, the Oxford Mail, Discover Magazine's D-brief, and LifeHacker Australia. Similar research had been published in 2012, and was covered when Forbes expressed concern that the findings could encourage filmmakers to engage in astroturfing and edit articles for their movies in hopes of raising expectations.
Coverage of the distributed open collaborative course called "Storming Wikipedia" continued this week. Influenced by Jimmy Wales' speech at Wikimania 2013, where he showed that 87 percent of contributors to Wikipedia are men, the effort aims to increase women's participation and coverage on Wikipedia by engaging a network of feminist philosophy and women's studies classes. It is run by FemTechNet, which describes itself on its FAQ page as "an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology".
Researchers have found that Wikipedia's coverage of feminism and issues faced by women is abysmal and that there is a gender gap in both biographies and contributors. The course, run by FemTechNet, will run at 15 institutions and is designed to bridge the gender gap in several ways, including recruiting women to contribute, writing articles about women, and correcting systemic bias by writing about feminist viewpoints and scholarship. The story broke into major news outlets this week, receiving favorable attention for its goals. It was covered by the CBC, Bustle, the Huffington Post, Truthdig, Jezebel, MediaBistro, and Mother Jones.
Following from FemTechNet's idea, OCAD University introduced a new course for this fall called Dialogues on Feminism and Technology, as reported by the CBC. Described as "a first-of-its-kind collaborative digital course for credit in 16 universities all over the world", students will "collaboratively write feminist thinking" into Wikipedia, according to organizers.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Ninety-eight registered participants attended the annual WikiSym+OpenSym conference from August 5-7 at Hong Kong's Cyberport facility. The event preceded the annual global Wikimania conference of the Wikimedia movement in the same city.
WikiSym was started in 2005 as the "International Symposium on Wikis", and its scope has since been broadened to include the study of other forms of " open collaboration" (such as free software development, or open data), reflected in the adoption of the separate "OpenSym" label. The proceedings, published online at the start of the conference, contain 22 full papers (out of 43 submissions), in addition to short papers, posters, abstracts for research-in-progress presentations, etc. The coverage below reflects the scope of this research report, and complements the pre-conference reviews of some papers in the previous issue.
Episode 96 of the "Wikipedia Weekly" podcast contains some coverage of WikiSym 2013 (from around 10:30-20:00), and some images and media from the event can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
Next year's WikiSym+OpenSym conference will be held in Berlin, on August 27-29, 2014, and call for papers is already out. Conference chair Dirk Riehle announced that the proceedings will continue to be published with ACM, now under its new open access policy.
In reflection of the conference's broadened scope, only one of the three keynotes focused on research about wikis and open collaboration: In his presentation "Descending Mount Everest: Steps towards applied Wikipedia research," [9] Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation (and co-editor of this research report) made the case for Wikipedia research that has the potential to have a positive impact on Wikipedia itself, citing e.g. the opportunities opened by the ongoing user interface development work at the Foundation, and pointing to the ample data resources it offers researchers. (The title alluded to the metaphor of Wikipedia as the Mount Everest of online collaboration researchers, as put forth in the title of a session at last year's CSCW conference: "Scaling our Everest".)
Surveying the existing body of research, he identified the study of Wikipedia's gender gap and of its breaking news collaborations as relatively new research areas, and "Wikipedia and higher education" as a fast-growing topic, while papers which use Wikipedia as a corpus (from the field of Natural language processing, in particular) continue to see steady growth. Areas which have seen successful existing examples of actionable research include:
Two research-in-progress presentations by Oxford-based Taiwanese researcher Han-Teng Liao compared the Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike, providing interesting insights from one of the few languages where Wikipedia has serious competition as a user-generated encyclopedia:
Researchers Michela Ferron and Paolo Massa expand on their previous work [14] analyzing collective memories on Wikipedia to find statistical evidence that commemorative editing of traumatic events differentiates these articles from other article and talk page contribution patterns. [15] For major recent events such as the 9/11 attacks as well as more historical events such as the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II, there is a significant increase in editing activity on these articles and talk pages (in the English Wikipedia) on the anniversaries of these events compared to the normal day-to-day editing patterns. Qualitative examination of the content of talk page discussions on these dates likewise reveals editors' attempts to make sense of and commemorate traumatic cultural events on their anniversaries. The implications of this research are important because Wikipedia is a commons on which different perspectives about traumatic and historic events are interpreted, co-constructed, and revisited by users. The data used in this analysis was also released by the authors and is available here.
This week, we secured free admission for WikiProject Amusement Parks, the project dedicated to amusement rides, roller coasters, theme parks, traveling carnivals, and funfairs. First opened in January 2007, the project has grown to include 8 pieces of featured material and 72 good articles. The project recently completed a push to assess all articles under the project's scope, although Importance ratings remain under-utilized. The project has several task forces covering roller coasters and an assortment of large amusement park chains. WikiProject Amusement Parks began circulating a quarterly newsletter this year and is experimenting with a collaboration called Operation B&M. We interviewed Dom497, Astros4477, and McDoobAU93.
Next week, we'll delve deep into the human mind. Until then, search for your inner demons in the
archive.
Reader comments
The debt that Wikipedia owes sites like Reddit or Google often goes unacknowledged around here. If the purpose of Wikipedia is to bring knowledge to the world, then it is sites like these that are actually doing it. Whenever a great artist, scientist or humanitarian suddenly becomes an object of public interest, you can bet a Google Doodle was responsible; whenever an obscure event, individual or idea suddenly rises in public awareness, you can bet a thread on Reddit is the reason why. This week saw three such articles in the top 25 (and two in the top 10); the highest since the monitoring project was begun at the year's start. It might raise the issue of how we actually promote our content to our readers.
For a list of the top 25 articles, including exclusions, see: WP:TOP25
For the week of August 18 – 24, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Lee Thompson Young | 709,809 | The tragic suicide of this young, up-and-coming actor (he was 29) and star of Friday Night Lights and The Famous Jett Jackson unsurprisingly became the prime talking point of the week. | ||
2 | 675,478 | A perennially popular article | |||
3 | Claude Debussy | 619,684 | With the possible exception of suicide, nothing guarantees a high Wikipedia view count like an interactive Google Doodle, and this French composer of "Oh yeah, that!" classical pieces like Clair de Lune got one for his 151st birthday on August 22. | ||
4 | Breaking Bad | 547,047 | The final season of this acclaimed chemistry teacher-turned-Scarface TV series began on August 11. | ||
5 | Chennai Express | 531,746 | This Bollywood action-romance has broken records at the Indian box office, becoming the first film to make 1 billion ($16.3 million) in four days. | ||
6 | I Am Rich | 447,963 | A $1000 iPhone app that did nothing except remind its users that they could afford it stimulated a discussion on Reddit this week. | ||
7 | Pseudofolliculitis barbae | 397,403 | Another Reddit discussion was stimulated by this skin affliction, commonly referred to as "shave bumps", because Domino's Pizza was declared in violation of the 1991 Civil Rights Act when it demanded its male employees be clean-shaven, even though roughly a quarter of African Americans are unable to shave without incurring it. | ||
8 | Deaths in 2013 | List | 389,605 | The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. | |
9 | List of Bollywood films of 2013 | List | 376,515 | An established staple of the top 10. | |
10 | The Conjuring (film) | 371,391 | James Wan's latest ghost story (reportedly based on true events, take that as you will) stormed the US, taking $70 million in its first week, and is now closing in on $200 million worldwide. |
The 2013 WikiCup competition is entering its final round. The finalists and information about them are copied here from the longer WikiCup 2013 August newsletter by competition judges J Milburn and The ed17, with assistance from Rschen7754. You can sign up for the newsletter by adding your username to Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.
Eleven featured articles were promoted this week.
Nine featured pictures were promoted this week.
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), Wikimedia's annual volunteer-driven and the world's largest photo contest, is gearing up to be conducted throughout September 2013. The event, originally developed in the Netherlands in 2010, has gone global with 34 countries taking part last and over 50 this year.
In 2012, India—participating for the first time—won the global competition with a new user's photo featuring the tomb of Safdarjung, a prominent 18th-century official of the Mughal Empire. 1,989 WLM files from 2012 have been recognized as "quality images" on Commons, with an additional 62 being "valued", and 57 "featured". In quantitative terms, Europeans were still leading the pack last round. Poland submitted more than 51,000 files, followed by Spain (39,500), Germany (34,000), and Ukraine (33,000). France, with 27,000 submissions, came in fifth place before the first non-European country, the US, with 27,000 files. Taken together, volunteers taking part in WLM 2012 uploaded more than 350,000 photos. Last years' goal to use WLM as a device promoting new user engagement mid term looks less strong. While participation peaked in September 2012 with 4,655 new users and 13,607 contributors with 5+ edits on Commons, numbers returned to normal the following months.
The most notable newcomer to this year's contest is Antarctica, on board thanks to organizational coordination by Wikimedia Argentina and supported by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, located in Buenos Aires. Other notable first-time participants include China, Cameroon, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom; 51 total countries will at this time be participating. Monica Mora, a member of the international coordination committee, told the Signpost the team has high expectations as the community has the opportunity to outdo the last two Guinness World Records recognitions of WLM with even more and better submissions, and the extensive technical infrastructure (including a mobile app, statistics tools, and a jury-judging tool) is complete and ready for use.
To participate in the contest, volunteers must upload their submissions, featuring a monument in a participating country, during September 2013. The six basic rules are listed on Commons. On October first, submissions start going through the national contests, each picking out up to 10 photos for the global round. An international jury of five will select the final winner.
Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the <gallery>
markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.
Now, the gallery markup has been enhanced with the addition of several new display modes. For example, changing <gallery>
to <gallery mode=packed>
produces a gallery with significantly less wasted space around each image, as shown below.
In addition, the heights
parameter becomes very easy to use with the new gallery mode. For example. <gallery mode=packed heights=200px>
gives
Five modes are available: "traditional", which reproduces the classic gallery format; "nolines", which behaves identically to "traditional" but removes the box overlays for each image; "packed"; "packed-hover", which is similar to "packed" but with captions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the image; and "packed-overlay", in which the captions are placed atop each image. Some examples of these modes can be seen below.
It is expected that the "packed" mode will eventually become the preferred layout for article-space galleries on Wikipedia. The "packed-hover" and "packed-overlay" modes are not expected to see significant use in articles, but will probably appear heavily in non-article spaces, such as user pages.
Wikipedia's gender identity MOS section and its effect on Chelsea Manning was both praised and emulated in the media this week. The controversy over moving the article from her former name, Bradley Manning, came in the wake of the soldier's announcement of her gender identity after her trial had concluded. The acrimonious debate and move request at Talk:Chelsea Manning was covered. Slate praised Wikipedia's quick shift from the outdated male pronouns and name to her current pronouns and name. The story was also covered by El Comercio, the New Statesman, and TruthDig.
On 21 August 2013, the open access journal PLoS One published the article "Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data". The authors analyzed data about 312 movies that were released in the United States in 2010. They limited their sample to movies listed in Category:2009 films and Category:2010 films and used Box Office Mojo for information on the box office success of the films. They concluded that, even one month before a movie is released domestically, Wikipedia editing activity could accurately predict its success. The paper was covered in myriad news outlets, including The Australian, The Descrier, Gizmodo, The International Business Times, Livescience, Motherboard, the Oxford Mail, Discover Magazine's D-brief, and LifeHacker Australia. Similar research had been published in 2012, and was covered when Forbes expressed concern that the findings could encourage filmmakers to engage in astroturfing and edit articles for their movies in hopes of raising expectations.
Coverage of the distributed open collaborative course called "Storming Wikipedia" continued this week. Influenced by Jimmy Wales' speech at Wikimania 2013, where he showed that 87 percent of contributors to Wikipedia are men, the effort aims to increase women's participation and coverage on Wikipedia by engaging a network of feminist philosophy and women's studies classes. It is run by FemTechNet, which describes itself on its FAQ page as "an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology".
Researchers have found that Wikipedia's coverage of feminism and issues faced by women is abysmal and that there is a gender gap in both biographies and contributors. The course, run by FemTechNet, will run at 15 institutions and is designed to bridge the gender gap in several ways, including recruiting women to contribute, writing articles about women, and correcting systemic bias by writing about feminist viewpoints and scholarship. The story broke into major news outlets this week, receiving favorable attention for its goals. It was covered by the CBC, Bustle, the Huffington Post, Truthdig, Jezebel, MediaBistro, and Mother Jones.
Following from FemTechNet's idea, OCAD University introduced a new course for this fall called Dialogues on Feminism and Technology, as reported by the CBC. Described as "a first-of-its-kind collaborative digital course for credit in 16 universities all over the world", students will "collaboratively write feminist thinking" into Wikipedia, according to organizers.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Ninety-eight registered participants attended the annual WikiSym+OpenSym conference from August 5-7 at Hong Kong's Cyberport facility. The event preceded the annual global Wikimania conference of the Wikimedia movement in the same city.
WikiSym was started in 2005 as the "International Symposium on Wikis", and its scope has since been broadened to include the study of other forms of " open collaboration" (such as free software development, or open data), reflected in the adoption of the separate "OpenSym" label. The proceedings, published online at the start of the conference, contain 22 full papers (out of 43 submissions), in addition to short papers, posters, abstracts for research-in-progress presentations, etc. The coverage below reflects the scope of this research report, and complements the pre-conference reviews of some papers in the previous issue.
Episode 96 of the "Wikipedia Weekly" podcast contains some coverage of WikiSym 2013 (from around 10:30-20:00), and some images and media from the event can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
Next year's WikiSym+OpenSym conference will be held in Berlin, on August 27-29, 2014, and call for papers is already out. Conference chair Dirk Riehle announced that the proceedings will continue to be published with ACM, now under its new open access policy.
In reflection of the conference's broadened scope, only one of the three keynotes focused on research about wikis and open collaboration: In his presentation "Descending Mount Everest: Steps towards applied Wikipedia research," [9] Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation (and co-editor of this research report) made the case for Wikipedia research that has the potential to have a positive impact on Wikipedia itself, citing e.g. the opportunities opened by the ongoing user interface development work at the Foundation, and pointing to the ample data resources it offers researchers. (The title alluded to the metaphor of Wikipedia as the Mount Everest of online collaboration researchers, as put forth in the title of a session at last year's CSCW conference: "Scaling our Everest".)
Surveying the existing body of research, he identified the study of Wikipedia's gender gap and of its breaking news collaborations as relatively new research areas, and "Wikipedia and higher education" as a fast-growing topic, while papers which use Wikipedia as a corpus (from the field of Natural language processing, in particular) continue to see steady growth. Areas which have seen successful existing examples of actionable research include:
Two research-in-progress presentations by Oxford-based Taiwanese researcher Han-Teng Liao compared the Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike, providing interesting insights from one of the few languages where Wikipedia has serious competition as a user-generated encyclopedia:
Researchers Michela Ferron and Paolo Massa expand on their previous work [14] analyzing collective memories on Wikipedia to find statistical evidence that commemorative editing of traumatic events differentiates these articles from other article and talk page contribution patterns. [15] For major recent events such as the 9/11 attacks as well as more historical events such as the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II, there is a significant increase in editing activity on these articles and talk pages (in the English Wikipedia) on the anniversaries of these events compared to the normal day-to-day editing patterns. Qualitative examination of the content of talk page discussions on these dates likewise reveals editors' attempts to make sense of and commemorate traumatic cultural events on their anniversaries. The implications of this research are important because Wikipedia is a commons on which different perspectives about traumatic and historic events are interpreted, co-constructed, and revisited by users. The data used in this analysis was also released by the authors and is available here.
This week, we secured free admission for WikiProject Amusement Parks, the project dedicated to amusement rides, roller coasters, theme parks, traveling carnivals, and funfairs. First opened in January 2007, the project has grown to include 8 pieces of featured material and 72 good articles. The project recently completed a push to assess all articles under the project's scope, although Importance ratings remain under-utilized. The project has several task forces covering roller coasters and an assortment of large amusement park chains. WikiProject Amusement Parks began circulating a quarterly newsletter this year and is experimenting with a collaboration called Operation B&M. We interviewed Dom497, Astros4477, and McDoobAU93.
Next week, we'll delve deep into the human mind. Until then, search for your inner demons in the
archive.
Reader comments
The debt that Wikipedia owes sites like Reddit or Google often goes unacknowledged around here. If the purpose of Wikipedia is to bring knowledge to the world, then it is sites like these that are actually doing it. Whenever a great artist, scientist or humanitarian suddenly becomes an object of public interest, you can bet a Google Doodle was responsible; whenever an obscure event, individual or idea suddenly rises in public awareness, you can bet a thread on Reddit is the reason why. This week saw three such articles in the top 25 (and two in the top 10); the highest since the monitoring project was begun at the year's start. It might raise the issue of how we actually promote our content to our readers.
For a list of the top 25 articles, including exclusions, see: WP:TOP25
For the week of August 18 – 24, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Lee Thompson Young | 709,809 | The tragic suicide of this young, up-and-coming actor (he was 29) and star of Friday Night Lights and The Famous Jett Jackson unsurprisingly became the prime talking point of the week. | ||
2 | 675,478 | A perennially popular article | |||
3 | Claude Debussy | 619,684 | With the possible exception of suicide, nothing guarantees a high Wikipedia view count like an interactive Google Doodle, and this French composer of "Oh yeah, that!" classical pieces like Clair de Lune got one for his 151st birthday on August 22. | ||
4 | Breaking Bad | 547,047 | The final season of this acclaimed chemistry teacher-turned-Scarface TV series began on August 11. | ||
5 | Chennai Express | 531,746 | This Bollywood action-romance has broken records at the Indian box office, becoming the first film to make 1 billion ($16.3 million) in four days. | ||
6 | I Am Rich | 447,963 | A $1000 iPhone app that did nothing except remind its users that they could afford it stimulated a discussion on Reddit this week. | ||
7 | Pseudofolliculitis barbae | 397,403 | Another Reddit discussion was stimulated by this skin affliction, commonly referred to as "shave bumps", because Domino's Pizza was declared in violation of the 1991 Civil Rights Act when it demanded its male employees be clean-shaven, even though roughly a quarter of African Americans are unable to shave without incurring it. | ||
8 | Deaths in 2013 | List | 389,605 | The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. | |
9 | List of Bollywood films of 2013 | List | 376,515 | An established staple of the top 10. | |
10 | The Conjuring (film) | 371,391 | James Wan's latest ghost story (reportedly based on true events, take that as you will) stormed the US, taking $70 million in its first week, and is now closing in on $200 million worldwide. |
The 2013 WikiCup competition is entering its final round. The finalists and information about them are copied here from the longer WikiCup 2013 August newsletter by competition judges J Milburn and The ed17, with assistance from Rschen7754. You can sign up for the newsletter by adding your username to Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.
Eleven featured articles were promoted this week.
Nine featured pictures were promoted this week.
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), Wikimedia's annual volunteer-driven and the world's largest photo contest, is gearing up to be conducted throughout September 2013. The event, originally developed in the Netherlands in 2010, has gone global with 34 countries taking part last and over 50 this year.
In 2012, India—participating for the first time—won the global competition with a new user's photo featuring the tomb of Safdarjung, a prominent 18th-century official of the Mughal Empire. 1,989 WLM files from 2012 have been recognized as "quality images" on Commons, with an additional 62 being "valued", and 57 "featured". In quantitative terms, Europeans were still leading the pack last round. Poland submitted more than 51,000 files, followed by Spain (39,500), Germany (34,000), and Ukraine (33,000). France, with 27,000 submissions, came in fifth place before the first non-European country, the US, with 27,000 files. Taken together, volunteers taking part in WLM 2012 uploaded more than 350,000 photos. Last years' goal to use WLM as a device promoting new user engagement mid term looks less strong. While participation peaked in September 2012 with 4,655 new users and 13,607 contributors with 5+ edits on Commons, numbers returned to normal the following months.
The most notable newcomer to this year's contest is Antarctica, on board thanks to organizational coordination by Wikimedia Argentina and supported by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, located in Buenos Aires. Other notable first-time participants include China, Cameroon, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom; 51 total countries will at this time be participating. Monica Mora, a member of the international coordination committee, told the Signpost the team has high expectations as the community has the opportunity to outdo the last two Guinness World Records recognitions of WLM with even more and better submissions, and the extensive technical infrastructure (including a mobile app, statistics tools, and a jury-judging tool) is complete and ready for use.
To participate in the contest, volunteers must upload their submissions, featuring a monument in a participating country, during September 2013. The six basic rules are listed on Commons. On October first, submissions start going through the national contests, each picking out up to 10 photos for the global round. An international jury of five will select the final winner.
Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the <gallery>
markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.
Now, the gallery markup has been enhanced with the addition of several new display modes. For example, changing <gallery>
to <gallery mode=packed>
produces a gallery with significantly less wasted space around each image, as shown below.
In addition, the heights
parameter becomes very easy to use with the new gallery mode. For example. <gallery mode=packed heights=200px>
gives
Five modes are available: "traditional", which reproduces the classic gallery format; "nolines", which behaves identically to "traditional" but removes the box overlays for each image; "packed"; "packed-hover", which is similar to "packed" but with captions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the image; and "packed-overlay", in which the captions are placed atop each image. Some examples of these modes can be seen below.
It is expected that the "packed" mode will eventually become the preferred layout for article-space galleries on Wikipedia. The "packed-hover" and "packed-overlay" modes are not expected to see significant use in articles, but will probably appear heavily in non-article spaces, such as user pages.