April Fools' Day is rapidly approaching. Every year, members of the community pull pranks and make (or attempt to make) humorous edits to pages across the project. Every year, the community follows April Fools' Day with a contentious debate about what whether or not it is necessary to impose limits on April Fools' Day jokes for future years. It is a polarizing issue. On one side, people view the levity that April Fools' Day edits bring as a key component to community building and editor retention. Others view April Fools' Day edits as an embarrassment that undermines Wikipedia's professionalism and thus its credibility. While most people fall somewhere between those two extremes, April Fools-related discussions have a propensity to become heated.
Last year a request for comment was held on the issue, which Salvidrim and I closed. The result was a fair compromise; those that wish to partake in April Fools' Day festivities are free to do so, however restrictions are in place that address most of the concerns of those opposed to April Fools' Day edits. In the interest of making April Fools' Day as fun as possible for participants, while also preserving community sanity, I would ask that those interested in pulling pranks on April 1 follow the consensus of that RfC. I have summarized the key points of the RfC below, and also provided some guidance of my own. Being a responsible fool is the best way to ensure that the tradition is allowed to continue in future years.
April Fools jokes must stay out of article space
Of all of the proposals in the RfC, this had the largest margin of support. To quote Kilopi, "First rule of April foolery: Do no harm. Pranks interfering with readers ability to use this site as an encyclopedia aren't funny." The main page is specifically excluded from this prohibition, but all other pages in the article namespace are off limits. While there was a proposal at the RfC to treat April Fools' Day jokes harshly, it was unsuccessful. Instead, joke edits in the article space will be treated as they are treated on all other days; they will be reverted as disruption, a talk page warning will be issued, and after four such warnings, the offending editor will be blocked.
It's worth noting that this does not prohibit filing fake Articles for Deletion (AfD) requests, but it does require that you remove the red box announcing the AfD from the top of the article. For editors that are not familiar with the navigating Articles for Deletion pages and want to view the festivities, all AfDs filed on April Fools' Day will be listed on this page. While not addressed by the RfC, it is also a good idea to remove the deletion notice from the talk page of the article's original creator. If you're using Twinkle, you can uncheck the "Notify page creator if possible" box to prevent a message from being sent in the first place.
You must tag your jokes with a humor template
While it should be obvious that putting Earth up for deletion is a joke, not every joke that is made is immediately obvious as such. The use of the {{ Humor}} or {{ April fools}} templates makes jokers' intentions clear. While this may seem like unnecessary bureaucracy, it's what the community wants. Since all of the processes that serve as forums for jokes do still have serve their intended functions on April Fools' Day (there are legitimate AfDs filed that day, for example), drawing a clear line as to what is and is not a joke saves everyone time comes April 2, when all the jokes have to be cleaned up.
Be lighthearted and original
Please do not nominate Earth for deletion. It's been done eight times already, and the sixth was the last time that anyone even bothered joining in on the "debate". Additionally, the community has shown that it has run out of patience for poop jokes and similar low-brow humor. Misdirection, cleverness, and wit will get you much more acclaim and appreciation than rehashing old jokes, be they AfD traditions or jokes of the scatological variety.
Additionally, it should go without saying that April Fools' Day is not an excuse to attack other people or their beliefs. Nominating Russia or Barack Obama or Christianity for deletion and then claiming that it was only a joke isn't going to go over well, especially if the deletion rationale carries political or social undertones. If it would be insulting on March 31, it's still going to be insulting on April 1. Likewise, vandalizing another user's user page and then claiming that it was a prank is also not going to be viewed kindly. If you're leaving silly messages for friends, no one is going to bat an eye. If, however, a reasonable person would view your edits as malicious, the date on the calendar isn't going to save you from a block. In short, the user conduct guidelines don't go away just because it's April Fools.
Tolerate the madness
Not everyone that pulls April Fools' Day pranks on Wikipedia is going to be a regular editor. Not every regular editor is going to abide by the resolution of the RfC or heed my advice above. There will be non-constructive edits (jokes to some, vandalism to others) in the article space, and some of those edits will come from longtime editors. Historically, some vandalism fighters have viewed April Fools' Day jokes by established editors as tantamount to a betrayal, and have responded with vitriol. Conversely, some longtime editors have responded poorly to having their jokes reverted or deleted by other users. In short, for a day of levity, April 1 can often be stressful for those involved.
To those making jokes: First, please keep in mind that if your jokes are removed, it's not meant to be a personal affront against you. You are not editing in a vacuum; most of the people that will be reverting edits on April Fools' Day will be reverting a lot of edits, the vast majority from throwaway accounts and IPs. Alternatively, it could just be that the joke you thought was hilarious ... wasn't, and someone else cleared it out to make room for other attempts. Either way, take it in stride; there's always next year. Secondly, please clean up after yourself. One of the major issues that opponents of April Fools' Day jokes complain about is the amount of time that the community has to waste cleaning up after said jokes. While closing a few dozen joke deletion nominations and a half dozen fake requests for adminiship isn't a terrible burden, especially now that the cleanup no longer involves removing deletion notices from articles, removing your jokes once April Fools' Day is over is still the responsible thing to do. Finally, if an editor expresses a desire to be left out of the festivities, or to have their user and user talk pages left out of the festivities, respect that choice.
To those reverting jokes: First, please keep in mind that many of the people that are making joke edits on April 1 aren't doing it out of malice. If you see an established editor making non-constructive edits in the article space, drop them a polite talk page message linking to
the section on the RfC that addresses this. Secondly, as tempting as it might be to do so, don't rush off to shut down all of the jokes the moment that the clock strikes 00:00, April 2, 2014 (UTC). It will still be April Fools' Day for a substantial number of editors for several hours after the day changes over in UTC. On that note, dropping the hammer on someone that makes a joke edit an hour or two into April 2 UTC isn't constructive. Finally, if an editor wants to have their fun on April 1, don't give them a hard time about it, or hold it against them in the future, unless they are truly disruptive. Ultimately, comes April 2 these are people that you will have to go back to working with, and this is not something worth burning bridges over.
Reader comments
After a flood of traumatic, perplexing and complex events, users took time to digest the material confronting them, with topics such as the 2014 Crimea crisis or the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 easing down the list, making way for such traditional topics as St Patrick's Day, Reddit threads and even Google Doodles, which have reappeared after a long absence.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 16 to 22 March, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Saint Patrick's Day |
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1,604,355 | ![]() |
Sometimes I have to admit making a mistake, and my previous assumption that people weren't interested in arguably the world's most popular saint's day turned out to be due to mistiming; as it happens, people are very interested in it – on the day itself. Interest wanes pretty quickly in the days leading up to and from it. Given the long association of this holiday with binge drinking, perhaps there's a reason it fades in the memory so quickly. |
2 | Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 |
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1,075,269 | ![]() |
We still don't know precisely what happened to this flight, or to its 239 passengers and crew, but, gradually, a drip of hard facts is beginning to replace occasionally wild speculation. The most significant development (the Malaysian government's declaration that the plane was lost in the southern Indian Ocean) occurred after this time period, but even before then, leads had already begun to coalesce around that isolated, violent region of the sea off the coast of Australia. |
3 | Crimea |
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949,876 | ![]() |
In recent decades, the map of the world has only changed to reflect the rise of new independent nations. One country deliberately annexing part of another is not something our generation is used to. Case in point: over the last few days, Wikipedia's maps of Russia first absorbed this fragment of Ukraine, then excluded it, then finally included it in an indecisive shade of mint green, indicating it is in dispute. Given the nature of Wikipedia, that is likely as far as the argument will go; other organizations (such as Russia Today) have not been nearly as accommodating. |
4 | Spite house |
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863,608 | ![]() |
This unique form of architecture, in which usual considerations such as aesthetics, functionality or even livability are abandoned in favour of annoying the neighbors, usually by blocking sunlight, became a topic of interest on Reddit this week. |
5 | L'Wren Scott |
![]() |
658,411 | The tragic suicide of this famously tall former model (she was 6'3''), stylist and fashion designer at just 49 caused a great deal of lurid coverage in the British tabloids, particularly regarding her longterm relationship with Mick Jagger. | |
6 | Agnes Martin |
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457,187 | The Canadian abstract painter got a Google Doodle for what would have been her 102nd birthday on 22 March. | |
7 | Deaths in 2014 |
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448,266 | ![]() |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
8 | Saint Patrick |
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443,567 | ![]() |
The man himself naturally drew interest on his day. |
9 |
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443,413 | A perennially popular article. | ||
10 | Fred Phelps |
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433,520 | ![]() |
It is either ironic or fitting, depending on your point of view, that a man who achieved fame in life by leading pickets of innocent people's funerals would receive so much attention upon his own death. For all his fury and "GOD HATES FAGS" bombast, there is tragedy in a man beginning his career as a civil rights lawyer yet ending it in a morass of bigotry and hate. |
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Have you wondered about differences in the articles on Crimea in the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions of Wikipedia? A newly published article entitled "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia" [1] doesn't address Crimea, but nonetheless offers insight into the editing of contentious articles in multiple language editions through a heavy qualitative examination of Wikipedia articles about Kosovo in the Serbian, Croatian, and English editions.
The authors, Pasko Bilic and Luka Bulian from the University of Zagreb, found the main drivers of conflict and consensus were different group identities in relation to the topic (Kosovo) and to Wikipedia in general. Happily, the authors found the dominant identity among users in all three editions was the "encyclopedic identity," which closely mirrored the rules and policies of Wikipedia (e.g., NPOV) even if the users didn't cite such policies explicitly. (This echoes the result of a similar study regarding political identities of US editors, see previous coverage: " Being Wikipedian is more important than the political affiliation".) Other identities were based largely on language and territorial identity. These identities, however, did not sort cleanly into the different language editions: "language and territory [did] not produce coherent and homogeneous wiki communities in any of the language editions."
The English Wikipedia was seen by many users as providing greater visibility and thus "seem[ed] to offer a forum for both Pro-Serbian and Pro-Albanian viewpoints making it difficult to negotiate a middle path between all of the existing identities and viewpoints." The Arbitration Committee, present in the English edition but not in the Serbian or Croatian editions, may have helped prevent even greater conflict. Enforcement of its decisions seemed generally to lead to greater caution in the edition process.
In line with previous work showing some users move between language editions, the authors found a significant amount of coordination work between the language editions. One central focus centered around whether other editions would follow the English edition in breaking the article into two separate articles ( Republic of Kosovo and Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija).
review by Kim Osman
Another paper by Bilic, published in New Media & Society [2] looks at the logic behind networked societies and the myth perpetuated by media institutions that there is a center of the social world (as opposed to distributed nodes). The paper goes on to investigate the social processes that contribute to the creation of “mediated centers”, by analyzing the talk pages of English Wikipedia’s In The News (ITN) section.
Undertaking an ethnographic content analysis of ITN talk pages from 2004–2012, Bilic found three issues that were disputed among Wikipedians in their efforts to construct a necessarily temporal section of the encyclopedia. First, that editors differentiate between mass media and Wikipedia as a digital encyclopedia, however what constitutes the border between the two is often contested. Second, there was debate between inclusionists and deletionists regarding the criteria for stories making the ITN section. Third, conflict and discussion occurred regarding English Wikipedia’s relevance to a global audience.
The paper provides a good insight into how editors construct the ITN section and how it is positioned on the “thin line between mass media agenda and digital encyclopedia.” It would be interesting to see further research on the tensions between the Wikipedia policies mentioned in the paper (e.g. WP:NOTNEWS, NPOV) and mainstream media trends in light of other studies about Wikipedia’s approach to breaking news coverage.
If you were to make an org chart of English Wikipedia, what would it look like? A recent study [3] presented at the 2014 European Conference on Information Systems examines whether the organizational hierarchy of Wikipedia is as flat and egalitarian as previous research and popular media have claimed in the past. The researchers point out that the degree to which Wikipedia’s actual governance model (and those of other peer production communities) reflect egalitarian principles has seldom been comprehensively examined. Furthermore, a growing body of research has shown that Wikipedia has become increasingly bureaucratic along many dimensions, often in response to new community needs. This suggests that Wikipedia has grown more hierarchical, and less flat, over time.
The researchers develop a taxonomy based on technical user rights and the quality assurance, coordination, and conflict resolution tasks commonly associated with those user rights. They use exploratory factor analysis, least square analysis, and qualitative examination of the user right description pages to distill 19 user rights down to 8 social roles. They assemble these roles into a hierarchy according to their Scope, Granting, Access, and Promotion relationships. For example, in this hierarchy, editors in the Security Force role ( checkusers and oversighters) have more power than administrators (sysops and bureaucrats) because being a sysop is an informal prerequisite for checkuser rights, and because oversighters can use the RevisionDelete extension in suppressor mode, blocking access to the content from administrators.
The paper does an excellent job of distilling the complex matrix of technologically mediated power relationships within and across Wikimedia wikis into a relatively simple organizational chart (presented on manuscript page 11). However, other mappings are certainly possible. For example, this analysis excludes the role of bots (and therefore, bot wranglers) within the role ecology. It also does not address the soft power that well-respected veteran community members may wield in some situations.
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Results for the two-stage 2013 Commons Picture of the Year (PotY) have been announced. This year's winning photograph (above) shows a lightbulb that has been cracked, allowing inert gas to escape—and oxygen to enter, so that the tungsten filament burns. From the flames rise elegant curls of blue smoke.
The picture of the year gained 157 votes in the second round. Filament burns through is by Stefan Krause ( home page). The dramatic visual potential of lighbulbs is a subject he has been exploring for some time; readers may remember last year's competition where Stefan's picture Exploding lightbulb, involving an airsoft pistol, won third place.
The Signpost asked Stefan whether his intention was entirely artistic or included a scientific rationale:
Second by a very close margin (with 155 votes) was Gentle morning light. Taken in the Holy Mountains National Park in Ukraine's Donetsk Province, just north of Crimea, the tranquillity belies recent traumatic events in the region, including the death of a Wikimedian. Photographer Balkhovitin told the Signpost: "When I took this shot I particularly liked the direct sunlight that's shining through the autumn leaves, and the light mist over the water that obscures the opposite shore."
The scene could have been a thousand years away—but for the trace of a hillside roadway on the right, behind a tree.
French Wikipedian Nicholas Sanchez won third place with an extraordinary split-second shot of a swallow in full flight, gliding open-mouthed to drink from the water's surface. Sharp geometries in the bird—a square throat and angled wings—contrast with a subtle layering of background colours. In a mirrored effect, the rippled motion of flight is reflected in the underside of the wings and in the surface ruffles below.
The organisers expressed their delight that more unique editors voted than ever before—4070 in both rounds. 2852 voters participated in the first round, which presented a record 962 images; and 2919 voted for one of the 50 finalists (to rank the top 30 overall and the top two in each of 10 categories, with an average vote per candidate of 58).
Two persistent features of PotY are its domination by continental European photographers and the small proportion of entries that feature people. One highly ranked image embodies both human and global south elements: Varanasi green peas, by Argentinian photographer Jorge Royan, is of a streetseller in that iconic Indian city. Richly symbolic, the composition is lush in its use of colour and texture. This picture is perhaps a reminder of what jurist Heta Pandit said of the field of entries in last year's Wiki Loves Monuments: "I would have also liked to see some more human element. The relationship between monuments, nature and people is so important. ... A lot of the pictures were like tourist brochures."
The Signpost asked Adam Cuerden, a veteran contributor to the English Wikipedia's featured picture forum, to comment on this year's PotY competition. He first raised the matter of "encyclopedic value", which though required at that forum is not a criterion for Commons featured pictures:
Sue Gardner, the outgoing executive director, stated that "Her experiences advocating for the rights of ordinary internet users and communicating with a large global volunteer community are both rare and directly relevant. She's got a solid understanding of internet technologies. She's a crisp, clear communicator, and an experienced spokesperson." The process to replace Gardner, which has now lasted for more than a year, is still plodding forward; the last update from the transition team gave May 2014 as a possible date: "We are at a point where we have three candidates that we all feel are great. We hope to speak to them in the coming week or two and hope to go into the final process (reference checking, terms negotiation etc.) after that."
“ | With a little coding, I had a data set of more than 150,000 Americans deemed by Wikipedia’s editors to be notable. The data set included county of birth, date of birth, occupation and gender. I merged it with county-level birth data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics. For every county in the United States, I calculated the odds of making it to Wikipedia if you were born there. | ” |
Four articles were promoted to featured status this week.
Two lists were promoted to featured status this week.
Twelve pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
On 3 April, we will roll out some changes to the typography of Wikipedia's default Vector skin, to increase readability for users on all devices and platforms. After five months of testing and four major iterations and through close collaboration with the global Wikimedia community, who provided more than 100 threads of feedback, we've arrived at a solution which improves the primary reading and editing experience for all users.
First, you'll notice a serif typeface is now used for headers, to more clearly differentiate them from body content. Main body content is displayed in a sans-serif typeface using a very dark grey on true white background, which decreases eye strain for people reading long blocks of text. You also may notice increased leading (the vertical space between lines in a paragraph), to improve readability and create a clean break for the scanning eye.
Text is our core visual element of Wikimedia projects, whether it's an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, or a smaller project like Wikisource and Wikibooks. We want our users to sense accuracy, reliability, and clarity from our design. We also want to avoid overly flashy typography that detracts from the content. Prior to this typography update, we had more than 20 arbitrarily defined type sizes on desktop alone, which appeared inconsistent for our users. The type size was too small for many readers, and the line height could make reading long form content difficult. We often observed users with visual impairments using text zooming to increase text size, for instance. For headings, these should act as entry points in long pages of text and were styled accordingly to aid readability. We sought to achieve better balance and cohesiveness for users to efficiently scan the page or engage in long form reading.
These changes will be familiar if you have accessed the mobile version of any Wikimedia project, as most of the changes were first trialled there in 2012. Later, with the release of the new Beta Features system for desktop, these changes have been available to desktop users on an opt-in basis since November 2013. We have used Wikimedia mobile as a place to experiment with new features and designs which we continuously migrate to desktop version of our sites. We have extended that process to the desktop beta features to further refine these changes to be appropriate for larger screens. With this typography update, we are taking another step towards a consistent visual experience across desktop and mobile.
We are extremely pleased about how well this collaborative process has gone and we look forward to you sharing your experience with the update. The following pieces of documentation may be useful if you have further questions or comments:
As you have probably read on this week's op-ed, or via various other channels of announcement, 3 April will see the introduction of the Typography refresh (or update) for the Vector skin on all Wikipedias. Other projects like Commons will have this update rolled out a few days before. You may also have tested the beta option. Basically, this means you will see some, and may see other changes on Wikipedia. In short:
Other features that were in the beta but were not strictly typography-related, such as the restyled table of contents, thumbnail and blockquote styling, have been removed.
For most Windows readers, this means the headers will show in Georgia and the body text will stay in Arial, albeit slightly larger. For most Mac users this will be the same, but where the pages would normally show in Helvetica, it will now show in Helvetica Neue (it may be hard to see any difference).
On Linux, effects may vary. Where several distros and browsers all had their own default font settings, resulting in many different looks, the new typography should equalize them all to use Liberation Sans for body text. The headers may show in Linux Libertine, Georgia or Times, in that order of preference, depending on which of them are installed.
Georgia may look familiar; the Signpost has used it for its headers for some time now. And that is why...
VisualEditor news
Future software changes
This week, the Signpost interviewed Skookum1 from the Mountains WikiProject.
April Fools' Day is rapidly approaching. Every year, members of the community pull pranks and make (or attempt to make) humorous edits to pages across the project. Every year, the community follows April Fools' Day with a contentious debate about what whether or not it is necessary to impose limits on April Fools' Day jokes for future years. It is a polarizing issue. On one side, people view the levity that April Fools' Day edits bring as a key component to community building and editor retention. Others view April Fools' Day edits as an embarrassment that undermines Wikipedia's professionalism and thus its credibility. While most people fall somewhere between those two extremes, April Fools-related discussions have a propensity to become heated.
Last year a request for comment was held on the issue, which Salvidrim and I closed. The result was a fair compromise; those that wish to partake in April Fools' Day festivities are free to do so, however restrictions are in place that address most of the concerns of those opposed to April Fools' Day edits. In the interest of making April Fools' Day as fun as possible for participants, while also preserving community sanity, I would ask that those interested in pulling pranks on April 1 follow the consensus of that RfC. I have summarized the key points of the RfC below, and also provided some guidance of my own. Being a responsible fool is the best way to ensure that the tradition is allowed to continue in future years.
April Fools jokes must stay out of article space
Of all of the proposals in the RfC, this had the largest margin of support. To quote Kilopi, "First rule of April foolery: Do no harm. Pranks interfering with readers ability to use this site as an encyclopedia aren't funny." The main page is specifically excluded from this prohibition, but all other pages in the article namespace are off limits. While there was a proposal at the RfC to treat April Fools' Day jokes harshly, it was unsuccessful. Instead, joke edits in the article space will be treated as they are treated on all other days; they will be reverted as disruption, a talk page warning will be issued, and after four such warnings, the offending editor will be blocked.
It's worth noting that this does not prohibit filing fake Articles for Deletion (AfD) requests, but it does require that you remove the red box announcing the AfD from the top of the article. For editors that are not familiar with the navigating Articles for Deletion pages and want to view the festivities, all AfDs filed on April Fools' Day will be listed on this page. While not addressed by the RfC, it is also a good idea to remove the deletion notice from the talk page of the article's original creator. If you're using Twinkle, you can uncheck the "Notify page creator if possible" box to prevent a message from being sent in the first place.
You must tag your jokes with a humor template
While it should be obvious that putting Earth up for deletion is a joke, not every joke that is made is immediately obvious as such. The use of the {{ Humor}} or {{ April fools}} templates makes jokers' intentions clear. While this may seem like unnecessary bureaucracy, it's what the community wants. Since all of the processes that serve as forums for jokes do still have serve their intended functions on April Fools' Day (there are legitimate AfDs filed that day, for example), drawing a clear line as to what is and is not a joke saves everyone time comes April 2, when all the jokes have to be cleaned up.
Be lighthearted and original
Please do not nominate Earth for deletion. It's been done eight times already, and the sixth was the last time that anyone even bothered joining in on the "debate". Additionally, the community has shown that it has run out of patience for poop jokes and similar low-brow humor. Misdirection, cleverness, and wit will get you much more acclaim and appreciation than rehashing old jokes, be they AfD traditions or jokes of the scatological variety.
Additionally, it should go without saying that April Fools' Day is not an excuse to attack other people or their beliefs. Nominating Russia or Barack Obama or Christianity for deletion and then claiming that it was only a joke isn't going to go over well, especially if the deletion rationale carries political or social undertones. If it would be insulting on March 31, it's still going to be insulting on April 1. Likewise, vandalizing another user's user page and then claiming that it was a prank is also not going to be viewed kindly. If you're leaving silly messages for friends, no one is going to bat an eye. If, however, a reasonable person would view your edits as malicious, the date on the calendar isn't going to save you from a block. In short, the user conduct guidelines don't go away just because it's April Fools.
Tolerate the madness
Not everyone that pulls April Fools' Day pranks on Wikipedia is going to be a regular editor. Not every regular editor is going to abide by the resolution of the RfC or heed my advice above. There will be non-constructive edits (jokes to some, vandalism to others) in the article space, and some of those edits will come from longtime editors. Historically, some vandalism fighters have viewed April Fools' Day jokes by established editors as tantamount to a betrayal, and have responded with vitriol. Conversely, some longtime editors have responded poorly to having their jokes reverted or deleted by other users. In short, for a day of levity, April 1 can often be stressful for those involved.
To those making jokes: First, please keep in mind that if your jokes are removed, it's not meant to be a personal affront against you. You are not editing in a vacuum; most of the people that will be reverting edits on April Fools' Day will be reverting a lot of edits, the vast majority from throwaway accounts and IPs. Alternatively, it could just be that the joke you thought was hilarious ... wasn't, and someone else cleared it out to make room for other attempts. Either way, take it in stride; there's always next year. Secondly, please clean up after yourself. One of the major issues that opponents of April Fools' Day jokes complain about is the amount of time that the community has to waste cleaning up after said jokes. While closing a few dozen joke deletion nominations and a half dozen fake requests for adminiship isn't a terrible burden, especially now that the cleanup no longer involves removing deletion notices from articles, removing your jokes once April Fools' Day is over is still the responsible thing to do. Finally, if an editor expresses a desire to be left out of the festivities, or to have their user and user talk pages left out of the festivities, respect that choice.
To those reverting jokes: First, please keep in mind that many of the people that are making joke edits on April 1 aren't doing it out of malice. If you see an established editor making non-constructive edits in the article space, drop them a polite talk page message linking to
the section on the RfC that addresses this. Secondly, as tempting as it might be to do so, don't rush off to shut down all of the jokes the moment that the clock strikes 00:00, April 2, 2014 (UTC). It will still be April Fools' Day for a substantial number of editors for several hours after the day changes over in UTC. On that note, dropping the hammer on someone that makes a joke edit an hour or two into April 2 UTC isn't constructive. Finally, if an editor wants to have their fun on April 1, don't give them a hard time about it, or hold it against them in the future, unless they are truly disruptive. Ultimately, comes April 2 these are people that you will have to go back to working with, and this is not something worth burning bridges over.
Reader comments
After a flood of traumatic, perplexing and complex events, users took time to digest the material confronting them, with topics such as the 2014 Crimea crisis or the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 easing down the list, making way for such traditional topics as St Patrick's Day, Reddit threads and even Google Doodles, which have reappeared after a long absence.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 16 to 22 March, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Saint Patrick's Day |
![]() |
1,604,355 | ![]() |
Sometimes I have to admit making a mistake, and my previous assumption that people weren't interested in arguably the world's most popular saint's day turned out to be due to mistiming; as it happens, people are very interested in it – on the day itself. Interest wanes pretty quickly in the days leading up to and from it. Given the long association of this holiday with binge drinking, perhaps there's a reason it fades in the memory so quickly. |
2 | Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 |
![]() |
1,075,269 | ![]() |
We still don't know precisely what happened to this flight, or to its 239 passengers and crew, but, gradually, a drip of hard facts is beginning to replace occasionally wild speculation. The most significant development (the Malaysian government's declaration that the plane was lost in the southern Indian Ocean) occurred after this time period, but even before then, leads had already begun to coalesce around that isolated, violent region of the sea off the coast of Australia. |
3 | Crimea |
![]() |
949,876 | ![]() |
In recent decades, the map of the world has only changed to reflect the rise of new independent nations. One country deliberately annexing part of another is not something our generation is used to. Case in point: over the last few days, Wikipedia's maps of Russia first absorbed this fragment of Ukraine, then excluded it, then finally included it in an indecisive shade of mint green, indicating it is in dispute. Given the nature of Wikipedia, that is likely as far as the argument will go; other organizations (such as Russia Today) have not been nearly as accommodating. |
4 | Spite house |
![]() |
863,608 | ![]() |
This unique form of architecture, in which usual considerations such as aesthetics, functionality or even livability are abandoned in favour of annoying the neighbors, usually by blocking sunlight, became a topic of interest on Reddit this week. |
5 | L'Wren Scott |
![]() |
658,411 | The tragic suicide of this famously tall former model (she was 6'3''), stylist and fashion designer at just 49 caused a great deal of lurid coverage in the British tabloids, particularly regarding her longterm relationship with Mick Jagger. | |
6 | Agnes Martin |
![]() |
457,187 | The Canadian abstract painter got a Google Doodle for what would have been her 102nd birthday on 22 March. | |
7 | Deaths in 2014 |
![]() |
448,266 | ![]() |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
8 | Saint Patrick |
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The man himself naturally drew interest on his day. |
9 |
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443,413 | A perennially popular article. | ||
10 | Fred Phelps |
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It is either ironic or fitting, depending on your point of view, that a man who achieved fame in life by leading pickets of innocent people's funerals would receive so much attention upon his own death. For all his fury and "GOD HATES FAGS" bombast, there is tragedy in a man beginning his career as a civil rights lawyer yet ending it in a morass of bigotry and hate. |
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Have you wondered about differences in the articles on Crimea in the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions of Wikipedia? A newly published article entitled "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia" [1] doesn't address Crimea, but nonetheless offers insight into the editing of contentious articles in multiple language editions through a heavy qualitative examination of Wikipedia articles about Kosovo in the Serbian, Croatian, and English editions.
The authors, Pasko Bilic and Luka Bulian from the University of Zagreb, found the main drivers of conflict and consensus were different group identities in relation to the topic (Kosovo) and to Wikipedia in general. Happily, the authors found the dominant identity among users in all three editions was the "encyclopedic identity," which closely mirrored the rules and policies of Wikipedia (e.g., NPOV) even if the users didn't cite such policies explicitly. (This echoes the result of a similar study regarding political identities of US editors, see previous coverage: " Being Wikipedian is more important than the political affiliation".) Other identities were based largely on language and territorial identity. These identities, however, did not sort cleanly into the different language editions: "language and territory [did] not produce coherent and homogeneous wiki communities in any of the language editions."
The English Wikipedia was seen by many users as providing greater visibility and thus "seem[ed] to offer a forum for both Pro-Serbian and Pro-Albanian viewpoints making it difficult to negotiate a middle path between all of the existing identities and viewpoints." The Arbitration Committee, present in the English edition but not in the Serbian or Croatian editions, may have helped prevent even greater conflict. Enforcement of its decisions seemed generally to lead to greater caution in the edition process.
In line with previous work showing some users move between language editions, the authors found a significant amount of coordination work between the language editions. One central focus centered around whether other editions would follow the English edition in breaking the article into two separate articles ( Republic of Kosovo and Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija).
review by Kim Osman
Another paper by Bilic, published in New Media & Society [2] looks at the logic behind networked societies and the myth perpetuated by media institutions that there is a center of the social world (as opposed to distributed nodes). The paper goes on to investigate the social processes that contribute to the creation of “mediated centers”, by analyzing the talk pages of English Wikipedia’s In The News (ITN) section.
Undertaking an ethnographic content analysis of ITN talk pages from 2004–2012, Bilic found three issues that were disputed among Wikipedians in their efforts to construct a necessarily temporal section of the encyclopedia. First, that editors differentiate between mass media and Wikipedia as a digital encyclopedia, however what constitutes the border between the two is often contested. Second, there was debate between inclusionists and deletionists regarding the criteria for stories making the ITN section. Third, conflict and discussion occurred regarding English Wikipedia’s relevance to a global audience.
The paper provides a good insight into how editors construct the ITN section and how it is positioned on the “thin line between mass media agenda and digital encyclopedia.” It would be interesting to see further research on the tensions between the Wikipedia policies mentioned in the paper (e.g. WP:NOTNEWS, NPOV) and mainstream media trends in light of other studies about Wikipedia’s approach to breaking news coverage.
If you were to make an org chart of English Wikipedia, what would it look like? A recent study [3] presented at the 2014 European Conference on Information Systems examines whether the organizational hierarchy of Wikipedia is as flat and egalitarian as previous research and popular media have claimed in the past. The researchers point out that the degree to which Wikipedia’s actual governance model (and those of other peer production communities) reflect egalitarian principles has seldom been comprehensively examined. Furthermore, a growing body of research has shown that Wikipedia has become increasingly bureaucratic along many dimensions, often in response to new community needs. This suggests that Wikipedia has grown more hierarchical, and less flat, over time.
The researchers develop a taxonomy based on technical user rights and the quality assurance, coordination, and conflict resolution tasks commonly associated with those user rights. They use exploratory factor analysis, least square analysis, and qualitative examination of the user right description pages to distill 19 user rights down to 8 social roles. They assemble these roles into a hierarchy according to their Scope, Granting, Access, and Promotion relationships. For example, in this hierarchy, editors in the Security Force role ( checkusers and oversighters) have more power than administrators (sysops and bureaucrats) because being a sysop is an informal prerequisite for checkuser rights, and because oversighters can use the RevisionDelete extension in suppressor mode, blocking access to the content from administrators.
The paper does an excellent job of distilling the complex matrix of technologically mediated power relationships within and across Wikimedia wikis into a relatively simple organizational chart (presented on manuscript page 11). However, other mappings are certainly possible. For example, this analysis excludes the role of bots (and therefore, bot wranglers) within the role ecology. It also does not address the soft power that well-respected veteran community members may wield in some situations.
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Results for the two-stage 2013 Commons Picture of the Year (PotY) have been announced. This year's winning photograph (above) shows a lightbulb that has been cracked, allowing inert gas to escape—and oxygen to enter, so that the tungsten filament burns. From the flames rise elegant curls of blue smoke.
The picture of the year gained 157 votes in the second round. Filament burns through is by Stefan Krause ( home page). The dramatic visual potential of lighbulbs is a subject he has been exploring for some time; readers may remember last year's competition where Stefan's picture Exploding lightbulb, involving an airsoft pistol, won third place.
The Signpost asked Stefan whether his intention was entirely artistic or included a scientific rationale:
Second by a very close margin (with 155 votes) was Gentle morning light. Taken in the Holy Mountains National Park in Ukraine's Donetsk Province, just north of Crimea, the tranquillity belies recent traumatic events in the region, including the death of a Wikimedian. Photographer Balkhovitin told the Signpost: "When I took this shot I particularly liked the direct sunlight that's shining through the autumn leaves, and the light mist over the water that obscures the opposite shore."
The scene could have been a thousand years away—but for the trace of a hillside roadway on the right, behind a tree.
French Wikipedian Nicholas Sanchez won third place with an extraordinary split-second shot of a swallow in full flight, gliding open-mouthed to drink from the water's surface. Sharp geometries in the bird—a square throat and angled wings—contrast with a subtle layering of background colours. In a mirrored effect, the rippled motion of flight is reflected in the underside of the wings and in the surface ruffles below.
The organisers expressed their delight that more unique editors voted than ever before—4070 in both rounds. 2852 voters participated in the first round, which presented a record 962 images; and 2919 voted for one of the 50 finalists (to rank the top 30 overall and the top two in each of 10 categories, with an average vote per candidate of 58).
Two persistent features of PotY are its domination by continental European photographers and the small proportion of entries that feature people. One highly ranked image embodies both human and global south elements: Varanasi green peas, by Argentinian photographer Jorge Royan, is of a streetseller in that iconic Indian city. Richly symbolic, the composition is lush in its use of colour and texture. This picture is perhaps a reminder of what jurist Heta Pandit said of the field of entries in last year's Wiki Loves Monuments: "I would have also liked to see some more human element. The relationship between monuments, nature and people is so important. ... A lot of the pictures were like tourist brochures."
The Signpost asked Adam Cuerden, a veteran contributor to the English Wikipedia's featured picture forum, to comment on this year's PotY competition. He first raised the matter of "encyclopedic value", which though required at that forum is not a criterion for Commons featured pictures:
Sue Gardner, the outgoing executive director, stated that "Her experiences advocating for the rights of ordinary internet users and communicating with a large global volunteer community are both rare and directly relevant. She's got a solid understanding of internet technologies. She's a crisp, clear communicator, and an experienced spokesperson." The process to replace Gardner, which has now lasted for more than a year, is still plodding forward; the last update from the transition team gave May 2014 as a possible date: "We are at a point where we have three candidates that we all feel are great. We hope to speak to them in the coming week or two and hope to go into the final process (reference checking, terms negotiation etc.) after that."
“ | With a little coding, I had a data set of more than 150,000 Americans deemed by Wikipedia’s editors to be notable. The data set included county of birth, date of birth, occupation and gender. I merged it with county-level birth data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics. For every county in the United States, I calculated the odds of making it to Wikipedia if you were born there. | ” |
Four articles were promoted to featured status this week.
Two lists were promoted to featured status this week.
Twelve pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
On 3 April, we will roll out some changes to the typography of Wikipedia's default Vector skin, to increase readability for users on all devices and platforms. After five months of testing and four major iterations and through close collaboration with the global Wikimedia community, who provided more than 100 threads of feedback, we've arrived at a solution which improves the primary reading and editing experience for all users.
First, you'll notice a serif typeface is now used for headers, to more clearly differentiate them from body content. Main body content is displayed in a sans-serif typeface using a very dark grey on true white background, which decreases eye strain for people reading long blocks of text. You also may notice increased leading (the vertical space between lines in a paragraph), to improve readability and create a clean break for the scanning eye.
Text is our core visual element of Wikimedia projects, whether it's an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, or a smaller project like Wikisource and Wikibooks. We want our users to sense accuracy, reliability, and clarity from our design. We also want to avoid overly flashy typography that detracts from the content. Prior to this typography update, we had more than 20 arbitrarily defined type sizes on desktop alone, which appeared inconsistent for our users. The type size was too small for many readers, and the line height could make reading long form content difficult. We often observed users with visual impairments using text zooming to increase text size, for instance. For headings, these should act as entry points in long pages of text and were styled accordingly to aid readability. We sought to achieve better balance and cohesiveness for users to efficiently scan the page or engage in long form reading.
These changes will be familiar if you have accessed the mobile version of any Wikimedia project, as most of the changes were first trialled there in 2012. Later, with the release of the new Beta Features system for desktop, these changes have been available to desktop users on an opt-in basis since November 2013. We have used Wikimedia mobile as a place to experiment with new features and designs which we continuously migrate to desktop version of our sites. We have extended that process to the desktop beta features to further refine these changes to be appropriate for larger screens. With this typography update, we are taking another step towards a consistent visual experience across desktop and mobile.
We are extremely pleased about how well this collaborative process has gone and we look forward to you sharing your experience with the update. The following pieces of documentation may be useful if you have further questions or comments:
As you have probably read on this week's op-ed, or via various other channels of announcement, 3 April will see the introduction of the Typography refresh (or update) for the Vector skin on all Wikipedias. Other projects like Commons will have this update rolled out a few days before. You may also have tested the beta option. Basically, this means you will see some, and may see other changes on Wikipedia. In short:
Other features that were in the beta but were not strictly typography-related, such as the restyled table of contents, thumbnail and blockquote styling, have been removed.
For most Windows readers, this means the headers will show in Georgia and the body text will stay in Arial, albeit slightly larger. For most Mac users this will be the same, but where the pages would normally show in Helvetica, it will now show in Helvetica Neue (it may be hard to see any difference).
On Linux, effects may vary. Where several distros and browsers all had their own default font settings, resulting in many different looks, the new typography should equalize them all to use Liberation Sans for body text. The headers may show in Linux Libertine, Georgia or Times, in that order of preference, depending on which of them are installed.
Georgia may look familiar; the Signpost has used it for its headers for some time now. And that is why...
VisualEditor news
Future software changes
This week, the Signpost interviewed Skookum1 from the Mountains WikiProject.