Round 2 of FDC funding open to public comments
Community review is open for the four applications in the second and final round of applications to the WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee for 2013–14. Three eligible organisations have applied for funding under the newly named "annual program grants": Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Norway, and the India-based Centre for Internet and Society, which last November was recognised as eligible to apply for FDC funding.
Wikimedia France has presented an extensive case amounting to almost 28,000 words, with a 2014–15 plan that revolves around six "axes": increasing contributor numbers, including target audiences for editor training; increasing chapter member involvement and creativity; encouraging international liaisons; improving wiki tools; increasing WMFR's scope; and improving the environment for WMF projects. The portfolio of projects will include activities spanning sports, local authorities, rural community centres, community and high-school and tertiary education, the professional research community, and a four-pronged GLAM strategy.
The chapter's total projected budget is US$1.32m, with a bid for $826k from the FDC; there are several queries on the talkpage, inter alia, concerning the chapter's anticipated growth in expenditure. However, the chapter's vice-chair, Christophe Henner, has posted a message on the Wikimedia mailing list announcing that "we will need a period of time with as much stability as possible. To ensure that stability, we are going to try to cap our budget growth to 6% for the next 24 months. ... But the goal will be to force us to make choices between the programs we could do and focus on the most efficient ones regarding our evaluation matrix."
From a population of about 5 million, Wikimedia Norway has a membership of 70–80 (of whom half are estimated to be 100+ per month editors of a WMF project). The chapter now has three staff members (full-time equivalent 1.6). The application points to systemic challenges, such as the long north–south distances, the high cost of living, and the costs of supporting three language communities, of which one is indigenous".
The chapter's plan is based on five priorities, four of which revolve directly around WMF site projects: to (i) promote a collaborative culture on Norwegian Wikipedias; (ii) increase thematic scope in article coverage, including women's topics, and a general promise to release "public imagery deposits in free licenses", and facilitate 10 Wikimedians in residence; (iii) enhance article quality with a bold claim to offer the "best Norwegian encyclopedia in all relevant fields of knowledge", to have user-friendly interfaces on mobile and fixed platforms, and to forge collaborations with one or two universities; (iv) to support a viable editing community on the (indigenous) Northern Saami Wikipedia (referred to as "Saami Thing" in the budget); and (v) to professionalise, with stronger communication, membership recruitment, and funding. Some of the predicted achievements were expressed as raw numbers without reference to current baselines. The plan is to increase staff expenses by 61.5%, with the FDC funding $432k (up threefold from $140k last year) of a total budget of $521k. There are also questions from WMF grantmaking on the talkpage concerning the large growth in budget and staffing.
India's Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has 21 plans across six overarching themes: (i) Strengthening engagement with the four language areas developed over the past year ( Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu) and the expansion of activities to three more large Indic-language Wikipedias ( Bangla, Hindi and Marathi); (ii) strengthening the growth of Indic WMF projects and their associated communities; (iii) stand-alone projects, including an image-based Med GLAM project with a prominent medical school, a public art photography competition, Wikisource projects in two languages; an Urdu Wikipedia education project for tertiary students, bringing two new language Wikipedias online, and a "wiki bus" project modelled on the Google bus program, in the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra Pradesh; (iv) a program connected with intellectual property rights and openness of knowledge; (v) more effort in publicity, research and documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India; and (vi) quicker and better general support and service to the movement. CIS is asking for a 23% increase in WMF funding, a total of $298k, up from $242k last year.
Community comments, discussion, and questioning of applicants is open until the end of April.
- Editor's note: in response to a public request for copy-editing, the author made surface edits to the first few sections of Wikimedia France's application.
In brief
- A second passing-away: Cynthia Ashley-Nelson, who edited as "Cindamuse" on the Wikimedia projects and was the new vice-chair of the WMF's Affiliations Committee, died on 11 April at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin. The news comes after the death of Adrianne Wadewitz in the past week. A longer obituary will appear in next week's edition. Condolences may be left at her talkpage.
- Can Wikipedia woo women editors?: The BBC News magazine asked this question on 7 April with a comprehensive article on Wikimedia's gender gap. With men making up 91% of the Wikimedia projects' editors, the BBC (which mistook "Wikipedia" for all of the Wikimedia sites) quoted Adrianne Wadewitz as saying "That [the gender gap] disparity means that a lot of perspectives are being left out." While this was her only direct quotation in the article, she also related that "the list of pornographic actresses from the 1950s to the present is more than three times longer than the list of notable Native American women. It also has more names on it than the list of female poets and 'sports women' combined."
- Oxford University Press offers free access: The OUP has announced that its online resources will be free to access during National Library Week (13–19 April).
- The Belfer controversy: Responses to a Wikipedian-in-residence hosted by Harvard University in 2012 continued this week with a blog post from Pete Forsyth, who was a major opposition voice when the Wikimedia Foundation was considering the position (see Signpost coverage from 19 March and 2 April). Forsyth sharply criticized the Foundation's post-mortem report, saying "What were the goals that drove the WMF to dedicate staff time to this project, and attach its valuable trademarks to the job posting? ... what is the impact on the effectiveness of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization whose central purpose is to support the work of a huge and deeply passionate community? These are the kinds of questions the Wikimedia Foundation rightly expects its grantees, program staff, and chapter organizations to consider. But they have not been addressed in the Wikimedia Foundation’s own report of the Belfer Center Wikipedian in Residence program."
- Affcom: The Affiliations Committee has announced that it has selected a new chairman. Carlos Colina, who formerly served as the vice chair, is the new chair. He will serve until April 2015.
- Arbitration delays continue: Delays continued to plague both open arbitration cases, Austrian economics and Gun control, with the former now more than one month behind schedule and the latter more than two months so. In response to community inquiries, the Arbitration Committee cited several reasons for the delays, but did not provide an updated schedule.
- Jimmy Wales headlines "Head to Head": A recent "Head to Head" from
Al Jazeera
featured Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales, talking about Internet freedoms, the NSA, Internet addiction, and Wikipedia.
Reader comments
WikiProject Law
This week, we're making a case for WikiProject Law. Started in April 2005, the project has grown to include 70 pieces of Featured material and 265 Good Articles. We interviewed Ironholds and Int21h.
- What motivated you to join WikiProject Law? Are you currently studying or practicing law? Do you focus on a specific area of the legal field?
- Ironholds: I was already writing legal articles, so it seemed to make sense. I'm neither currently studying or practicing law, although I was a law student (and am now a law graduate), but it was definitely that studying that got me interested. What this question seems to be asking, though, is "why do you work in this area?" The actual answer is pretty selfish - I hate studying for exams. I really hate studying for exams. If you were to design a system for utterly obliterating my motivation to do something, it would consist of sticking a pile of books in front of me and saying 'this will be useful in six months'. What I found, though was that I really love writing articles, so I decided to put sugar in the revision poison by writing about whatever I was studying on Wikipedia. The Occupiers' Liability Act 1957 is the result of my tort law exams, Royal prerogative in the United Kingdom my constitutional law exams, and my dissertation was partly based on Edward Coke (which led to an awkward conversation with my supervisor about how I'd somehow plagiarised from Wikipedia and expected to get away with it. We cleared that up.) Mostly I focus on legal history, because it's my area of specialty and actually why I started studying law in the first place - the people and the institutions that built the system we rely on.
- Int21h: Because law is more important than most other topics. Law will get your head chopped of and your house taken, without further recourse, which can't really be said about many other topics. I am neither studying or practicing law, although one is not able to genuinely say they do not "practice" law in their everyday lives. I am currently focused on state law, because it is so much more relevant to the average person than national or international law, yet by its very nature has less editors working on it.
- Have you contributed to any of WikiProject Law's Featured or Good Articles? What are the toughest challenges face by editors who work on improving legal articles to GA or FA status?
- Ironholds: A disturbing percentage of them (I used to play a game called 'hit F5 on the law portal, and see how many times you have to do it before one of your articles isn't listed'). There are a few major challenges. One, which I think is internal to how legal articles and legal writers work, is the sources we rely on. There's a tendency for a lot of Wikipedians in this field to rely on primary sources, treating the article as if it were a case writeup, with full case citations and references aimed at the judgment. I've noticed that this approach interacts with the GA and FA processes in much the same way a moth interacts with a blowtorch. It's absolutely understandable, of course, because if you're a student or practitioner you're taught that There Is No Higher Authority Than Case Or Statute Citations, but it doesn't work here on Wikipedia.
- Do you participate in any of WikiProject Law's subprojects? Are some subprojects more active than others? What can be done to revitalize these specialized legal communities on Wikipedia?
- Int21h: WP Law has subprojects?
- Are the legal traditions and precedents of some countries and localities better represented on Wikipedia than others? How well is international law covered by Wikipedia? What can be done to improve neglected legal subjects?
- Ironholds: Absolutely, particularly the traditions of the United States and the Commonwealth; many of our generalised law articles substantially underrepresent the civil law tradition, which is understandable given the bias of our project base towards ESL people - which tends to mean 'United States or Commonwealth'.
- Int21h: Foreign (non-US) jurisdictions are notoriously difficult to reliably document. US and UK legal fields are so much better represented because the US and UK legal systems are just so much better at documenting practical law in a free and open manner (US federal works, not to mention law, are not eligible for copyright and are significantly digitized), versus the civil law style that lacks any freely accessible superior court decisions (that provide so much insight into, for example, what "freedom of speech" means in that country versus what it means to an American) and relies so heavily on "book smarts" to learn the law (which will just tell you that there is "freedom of speech" in that country, which is often an outright lie). Language and lack of digitization is also a huge obstacle. There was a Spanish legal decision recently that banned a Basque political rally, and the court decision was a scanned PDF, found on a random news site, which I had to manually OCR and translate, and these several weeks later I still have still not finished, and in the end the decision has minimal use beyond elucidation of the Spanish legal system for me personally. The EU Court of Justice is the only court besides the UK courts that are probably "binding" enough or of enough persuasive value to deserve their own articles. And the reality is that we will need the native language Wikipedias to "step up to the plate" on this. If it can be said America is a nation of lawyers, it can equally be said that all other countries are nations of people who do not know their own legal systems.
- Does WikiProject Law collaborate with any other WikiProjects? Has the project taken advantage of Wikipedia's sister projects, like WikiSource or the Commons?
- Int21h: Not really AFAIK. Wikisource and Commons, maybe, but that is largely going to depend on whether or not a country's authorities (e.g., the US GPO) are publishing digital versions of their law.
- Is it difficult to find images to illustrate legal articles? What topics are most in need of diagrams and photography?
- Ironholds: Actually relatively easy, in the field I work in.
- Int21h: Images are the least of my concerns. Actual articles are so much more important.
- What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- Ironholds: People from other legal traditions would be good. As said above, we're mostly common law people; more people with an understanding of the civil and Islamic law traditions would be great to have.
- Int21h: Spanish law, Russian law, and an as-yet-unknown major Arabic country's law, (and maybe Chinese law) as they are replicated across much of the world. Sub-national law, such as state law in the US, also is more important to a typical reader than national and international law. We don't even have really useful templates for state laws akin to the US legislation infobox.
Until next week, check out our previous reports in the
archive.
Reader comments
Community mourns passing of Adrianne Wadewitz
The Wikimedia community has been shocked by the death of Adrianne Wadewitz on 8 April from injuries suffered during a rock-climbing fall on 28 March. Adrianne was a well-known and popular editor on the English Wikipedia, where she authored 36 featured articles and organized edit-a-thons in Los Angeles. She served on the board of the Wiki Education Foundation, and was a vocal public Wikipedia advocate on HASTAC, an online group that works with scholars in the humanities, arts, and sciences on innovative collaborations on new modes of learning and research in higher education.
Adrianne was born on 6 January 1977, and graduated from high school in North Platte, Nebraska, a railroad town of about 25,000 people. She attended college at Columbia University, a prestigious institution in the heart of New York City, and graduated in English with the honor of magna cum laude. After receiving a PhD in British literature from Indiana University, in 2013 she took up a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She had recently accepted a position at nearby Whittier College where she was recruited to help "develop their digital liberal arts program".
Adrianne took up rock climbing last summer, and she blogged about how it changed her:
| “ | For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer 'Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian'. I am now 'Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber'. This was brought home most vividly to me one day when I was climbing outdoors here in Los Angeles and people on the beach were marveling at those of us climbing. Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience—that radical switch and growth. It is an enormous goal and I would love to hear how others work at achieving it with their students. | ” |
A memorial service in Adrianne's honor will take place at Occidental College on 14 April, and in Indiana on 26 April.
On the English Wikipedia
On Wikipedia, Adrianne was one of the early editors; she registered on 18 July 2004 as " Awadewit" when she was attending graduate school. She wrote quite a few articles, but zeroed in on her favorite, Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century English writer and women's rights advocate. Over the course of a year, Adrianne wrote most of the entry and shepherded it through several reviews until it became one of Wikipedia's then 1700 featured articles. She worked on an entire series about the author, including all of Wollstonecraft's major works and a timeline of her life. In 2008, Adrianne spoke to the Signpost about Wollstonecraft: "When I first looked at the Mary Wollstonecraft article on Wikipedia, one of the subjects of my dissertation, it looked something like this. I was appalled! One of the first feminists! Dissertations tend to make a person think a topic is the most important thing ever, so, of course, I thought it was a travesty that Wollstonecraft's biography was reduced to this bland recitation of a few facts. I resolved to change that."
Adrianne received high praise from Wikipedia editors for her work on the article. Qp10qp, for example, wrote: "It adds up to a colossal achievement—I mean, what we have here is the equivalent of a book. The thoroughness, attention to detail and discerning study of the best sources simply takes my breath away. Any student of Wollstonecraft who clicks Wikipedia will hardly believe their luck in striking this treasure trove. Wikipedia at its finest." More recently, Liam Wyatt related his belief that the Wollstonecraft articles made Adrianne "the single most cited/read Wollstonecraft scholar ever".
Shortly after Wollstonecraft received its featured status, she agreed to be interviewed on episode 35 of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast by Liam Wyatt. It was titled "Secretly Famous", as it described her as an editor "who has to hide her activities [on Wikipedia] for fear of jeopardizing her career":
- Wyatt: So you're worried that if you publicize ... your interest and experience on Wikipedia, that you won't get a job because you'll be laughed out of town?
- Wadewitz: I'm very concerned, actually. ... I'm concerned that people will think that perhaps I've wasted time that I could have spent on my dissertation, time I could have spent publishing articles.
- Wyatt: That's truly sad.
- Wadewitz: It is, because I really view that the time I have spent working on things for Wikipedia, which is really just what I'm studying, as sort of public service, as part of being a public intellectual, because I'm often engaged in conversations with people on Wikipedia where I feel like I'm explaining what it means to be a scholar, and I'm explaining even down to the level of well, here's how you write a paragraph, or here where you write a sentence. Right? Is that a waste of time? No. I don't think so. Because that's what I do all the time.
- —Liam Wyatt and Adrianne Wadewitz, Wikipedia Weekly, episode 35, 8:33 (condensed)
It was after this interview that Adrianne became a high-profile member and advocate for Wikipedia in scholarly circles. Liam Wyatt reflected on the 2007 interview in a tribute on Adrianne's talk page, reminiscing that "Not long after [the interview,] you 'came out' and made your wiki-work a core part of your career—using it ... to bolster your academic CV." She would later attend Wikimania 2008 to give a presentation about her use of Wikipedia in the classroom.
In her time on Wikipedia, Adrianne wrote several articles for the Signpost, focusing on how to find reliable sources, a review of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia, reviewing featured pictures, the 2009 Wikipedia Academy at the National Institute of Health, the 2010 Museums and the web conference, and a controversial article titled " Let's get serious about plagiarism", a problem Wikipedia still wrestles with today.
Beyond editing
Aside from her prolific article writing, Adrianne was a champion for Wikipedia's use in the digital humanities, believing it offers one of the best places for research that will have an impact on the public.
Adrianne became a prominent voice in the academic community. The Wiki Education Foundation said in a statement that "Her pathbreaking essay on teaching with Wikipedia, " Wiki-hacking: Opening up the academy with Wikipedia", served as the basis for the preliminary pilot of the program", the Public Policy Initiative. They continued: "Adrianne was one of the first people to volunteer to help support university instructors looking to incorporate Wikipedia as a teaching tool in their classrooms; over the last four years, Adrianne has supported more than 20 courses as a Wikipedia Ambassador as well as teaching two courses herself." She later became a founding board member for the fledgling WEF.
Perhaps even more importantly, she became the face of Wikipedia editing (literally) when her photo was featured on the cover of the first printed "Editing Wikipedia" brochure put out by the Wikimedia Foundation.
She related how her Wikipedia work had benefits in the classroom: "My 'coolness factor' as a teacher has risen. I frequently use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in an effort to explain what a reliable web source is and to teach basic copyediting skills. While discussing these rather mundane topics, I often tell little Wikipedia stories. That I write Wikipedia articles is apparently 'awesome'. I also dramatically rose in my students' estimation when Mary Shelley appeared on the main page on 30 October 2008."
Adrianne's HASTAC blog became a prominent voice in communicating and encouraging academic involvement in Wikipedia. An example of her work there comes from just under a year ago, when she responded to the sexist "American Novelists" category: "If only there were more women on Wikipedia, the argument goes, this would not have happened. But no one has talked to the women who actually are on Wikipedia." In addition to the active public voice she offered, she actively researched the place of humanities method and process within Wikipedia, a product of her extensive collaborations with a number of Wikimedians and academics. Indeed, this underlines the fact that Adrianne was one of the strongest proponents of Wikipedia's efforts to attract more female editors—her wish to enable better communication of underrepresented minority-related content.
Tributes
| “ | I toast you tonight. I will toast you in LA. And I will toast you in Bloomington. I will toast you on mountain high and every time I write a new women's biography.
Climb high and climb wild, climb proud and climb free. Oh, Adrianne. |
” |
| — Sarah Stierch | ||
As befitting the large number of people she touched both on- and off-wiki, tributes to Adrianne poured in from around the world. Sage Ross blogged: "I remember, for a long time before I met her, wondering what “a wade wit” meant. I remember a Skype conversation, years ago. Adrianne, Phoebe, SJ and I talked for probably three hours about the gender gap on Wikipedia, late into the night. Then and always, she was relentlessly thoughtful and incredibly sharp. As superb as she was in writing, she was even better in live conversation and debate. ... I remember her unfailing kindness and generosity, indomitable work ethic, and voracious appetite for knowledge. She made me proud to call myself a fellow Wikipedian."
On Facebook, Wikipedian and personal friend Sarah Stierch wrote "My heart hurts. Adrianne was a leading voice—and her legacy still is—in the work we have been doing to get more women and more diverse peoples contributing to Wikipedia. ... [She was a] sarcastic, feminist, smart, brilliant, to the point delivery type of academic genius". LiAnna Davis, who worked with Adrianne in the various education programs, commented that "If you've ever read a well-written article about 18th century British literature on Wikipedia, chances are it was that high of quality thanks to Adrianne Wadewitz."
Many users have left thoughts on her English Wikipedia talk page. jbmurray worked with Adrianne on several education-related Wikipedia projects, including the smashing success that was his 2008 " Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation" course at the University of British Columbia. He wrote that "I was pleased to meet her a few years ago in Bloomington. And I last saw her a couple of weeks back in LA, where she came across town to have lunch with me ... Adrianne was smart, thoughtful, funny, and a delight to know and work with in every way. She touched many people in many different contexts: teaching, online, rock-climbing ... This is a great loss."
Former Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote: "Adrianne was one of the best contributors to and speakers about the projects, and her writing on and off the projects was among the best. I was always impressed with her ability to be sharply critical without losing motivation, and to be sharply insightful and intelligent while being approachable. This is a huge loss to all of us—and as a friend who did not see her nearly often enough, I will miss her."
Moni3, making her first edit in 2014, logged in to note how Adrianne made her a better writer: "I was a proficient writer when I wrote my first article here, Ann Bannon. Awadewit reviewed it, encouraged me to make it a Featured Article, then proceeded to block me at every turn so the article eventually became the most informative, authoritative account of Bannon's life available anywhere, in print or online. Awadewit blocked my first attempt to get To Kill A Mockingbird to FA status because the article just was not good enough. Harper Lee outlived Awadewit. Who could wrap their mind around such a thing?"
Wikimedian Alex Stinson, who considered Adrianne his mentor in thinking about Wikipedia's role in the digital humanities and co-wrote an academic paper with her, stated on his blog that "All day I have been shaking from the loss ... the common mission we shared bridging Wikipedia and Digital Humanities community has gotten unimaginably harder. Her contribution was tireless and compelling and finding anyone to fill her shoes will be nigh impossible. This loss seems keen for me: as an aspiring communicator of that space, Adrianne was an incredible mentor and model. She had incredible energy and voice, travelling across the United States and the World to spread that vision. She actively delivered incisive critiques of Wikipedia, the general response of scholars in shaping that space, and the need to place women, the humanities and the underprivileged into our public knowledge record."
HASTAC published an article from Cathy Davidson, a professor at The City University of New York:
| “ | I woke up this morning to an email from HASTAC Scholars Director Fiona Barnett asking if I would write a blog about the incredibly generous, helpful, always useful blogs by former HASTAC Scholar Adrianne Wadewitz. I said of course. Without hesitation. It's the least I can do for this amazing human being—even though I've met her only briefly. I feel like I know her well.
Inevitably her posts on the HASTAC site are featured, as is one currently, on our homepage, because she has the incredible gift of not just pushing the boundaries of "the way we teach and learn" but communicating those ways in the most eloquent, humble, generous, useful way so that others can learn from her. She is a natural leader, an inspiration to us all. Just yesterday I had said she would be the ideal former HASTAC Scholar to be nominated to the Steering Committee of our organization. Adrianne Wadewitz exemplifies the early-career professional HASTAC Scholars is designed to mentor ... because she represents the best of academe. Adrianne Wadewitz is a model of the future we all want for our profession, for our students, for our society. It was only then reading through the rest of the morning's emails on my phone that I found the crushed earlier email from Fiona informing me that this amazing person, our wonderful Adrianne Wadewitz, had died in a climbing accident. I hadn't realized that Fiona had been asking me to perform the very sad and necessary task of writing a memorial. It does not seem possible. |
” |
Reader comments
Conquest of the Couch Potatoes
Summary: Television has always been a topic of choice on this site, but it exploded this week. Fully six slots were devoted to television shows, as the final episode of
How I Met Your Mother, one of the most popular Wikipedia searches of the last few years, coincided with the season finale of
The Walking Dead and the upcoming
fourth season of
Game of Thrones. The number rises to eight if movies released on video and new TV tech are included. This leads me to ponder: if television is the principal concern of our readership, perhaps a more TV-friendly Wikipedia spinoff is in order? We could call it WikiTiVi.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 30 March to 5 April, 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 How I Met Your Mother 
931,180 
This hugely popular sitcom has always been a popular search on this site, and it creeps back into the top 25 in the week of its final episode on March 31. 2 April Fools' Day
920,853 
The first day of April, perennial party for practical jokers and pranksters, continues to amuse the cynical and infuriate the gullible. 3 How I Met Your Mother (season 9)
654,840 Obviously, people wanted to know when the series finale aired. 4 The Walking Dead (TV series) 
615,592 
The show's fourth season finale fell on 30 March. 5 Amazon.com 
500,321 
This article has been veering wildly (and suspiciously) around the view graph for several weeks, but at least now its presence on the list has a reason: Amazon Fire TV, announced this week, is a digital streaming device to watch online content on an HDTV. How it distinguishes itself from the three or four other such devices currently on the market is a matter of some dispute. 6 Game of Thrones
453,199 
This TV show's previous season, not to be glib, owned this list. I expect its upcoming season, due to commence on 6 April, to do no less. 7 " Last Forever" 
435,595 How I Met Your Mother, one of the most popular shows among our readership, drew 13.3 million viewers to its finale on March 31; its highest ratings ever. That said, when you hinge a show's entire plot on its final event (just look at the title) you better pull off that event with aplomb, and from the looks of things, the risky, problematic ending the writers chose (and actually filmed six seasons ago) has polarised critics and diehard fans alike. 8 Deaths in 2014 
419,505 
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. 9 The Walking Dead (season 4)
297,540 People are undoubtedly using this page to look up the finale's air date. 10 Frozen (2013 film)
412,808 Disney's Oscar-winning juggernaut got a shot in the arm thanks to its release on DVD on March 18. Despite this, it has already overtaken Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest as Disney's highest-grossing film in theatres.
Reader comments
Snow heater and ash sweep
Due to an editor being away on holiday, this Featured Content was only partially completed. Any assistance is appreciated.
Featured articles
- Tjioeng Wanara ( nominated by Crisco 1492) was a 1941 film made in the Dutch East Indies, or present-day Indonesia. Given the film's obscurity, the nominator believes that this is now the "most comprehensive discussion of this film yet published."
- Musca ( nominated by Casliber) is a small constellation in the southern sky. It is also the only official constellation to depict an insect.
- The D'Oliveira affair ( nominated by Cliftonian and Sarastro1) was sparked by the controversial selection of a mixed-race South African (D'Oliveira) to England's cricket team just before a tour of South Africa. D'Oliveira had lived in the UK for six years, having moved there when cricket opportunities in his native country dried up on account of his race. The eventual cancellation of the tour was one of the first major international sporting boycotts to affect South Africa; the boycotts lasted more or less intact until 1991, when apartheid was abolished.
- Imogen Holst ( nominated by Brianboulton) was a multi-talented woman: the article notes that she was an "English composer, arranger, conductor, teacher and festival administrator." She was the director of the classical music-focused Aldeburgh Festival for over 20 years, and while her own compositions are mostly unpublished and unperformed, those that have been publicized have been well-regarded by critics.
- The Peru national football team ( nominated by MarshalN20) has represented the country in international football since 1927. Its most success came in the 1930s and 70s, but it has been stuck in a prolonged slump since 1982. The article itself had a torturous journey to becoming a featured article; it succeeded only on its fourth attempt.
Featured lists
.jpg)
- List of lighthouses in Connecticut
- Lorde discography
- List of songs recorded by Sky Ferreira
- Timeline of the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season
- Rani Mukerji filmography
Featured pictures
- Siproeta stelenes
- Paysandisia archon
- Man sweeping volcanic ash
- Ratification of the Peace of Münster
- Delphinus, Sagitta, Aquila, and Antinous
- Capricornus
- Psalterium Georgii, Fluvius Eridanus, Cetus, Officina Sculptoris, Fornax Chemica, and Machina Electrica
- Noctua, Corvus, Crater, Sextans Uraniæ, Hydra, Felis, Lupus, Centaurus, Antlia Pneumatica, Argo Navis, and Pyxis Nautica
- Diagram of Jupiter
- Evening Snow on the Heater
Reader comments
Round 2 of FDC funding open to public comments
Community review is open for the four applications in the second and final round of applications to the WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee for 2013–14. Three eligible organisations have applied for funding under the newly named "annual program grants": Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Norway, and the India-based Centre for Internet and Society, which last November was recognised as eligible to apply for FDC funding.
Wikimedia France has presented an extensive case amounting to almost 28,000 words, with a 2014–15 plan that revolves around six "axes": increasing contributor numbers, including target audiences for editor training; increasing chapter member involvement and creativity; encouraging international liaisons; improving wiki tools; increasing WMFR's scope; and improving the environment for WMF projects. The portfolio of projects will include activities spanning sports, local authorities, rural community centres, community and high-school and tertiary education, the professional research community, and a four-pronged GLAM strategy.
The chapter's total projected budget is US$1.32m, with a bid for $826k from the FDC; there are several queries on the talkpage, inter alia, concerning the chapter's anticipated growth in expenditure. However, the chapter's vice-chair, Christophe Henner, has posted a message on the Wikimedia mailing list announcing that "we will need a period of time with as much stability as possible. To ensure that stability, we are going to try to cap our budget growth to 6% for the next 24 months. ... But the goal will be to force us to make choices between the programs we could do and focus on the most efficient ones regarding our evaluation matrix."
From a population of about 5 million, Wikimedia Norway has a membership of 70–80 (of whom half are estimated to be 100+ per month editors of a WMF project). The chapter now has three staff members (full-time equivalent 1.6). The application points to systemic challenges, such as the long north–south distances, the high cost of living, and the costs of supporting three language communities, of which one is indigenous".
The chapter's plan is based on five priorities, four of which revolve directly around WMF site projects: to (i) promote a collaborative culture on Norwegian Wikipedias; (ii) increase thematic scope in article coverage, including women's topics, and a general promise to release "public imagery deposits in free licenses", and facilitate 10 Wikimedians in residence; (iii) enhance article quality with a bold claim to offer the "best Norwegian encyclopedia in all relevant fields of knowledge", to have user-friendly interfaces on mobile and fixed platforms, and to forge collaborations with one or two universities; (iv) to support a viable editing community on the (indigenous) Northern Saami Wikipedia (referred to as "Saami Thing" in the budget); and (v) to professionalise, with stronger communication, membership recruitment, and funding. Some of the predicted achievements were expressed as raw numbers without reference to current baselines. The plan is to increase staff expenses by 61.5%, with the FDC funding $432k (up threefold from $140k last year) of a total budget of $521k. There are also questions from WMF grantmaking on the talkpage concerning the large growth in budget and staffing.
India's Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has 21 plans across six overarching themes: (i) Strengthening engagement with the four language areas developed over the past year ( Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu) and the expansion of activities to three more large Indic-language Wikipedias ( Bangla, Hindi and Marathi); (ii) strengthening the growth of Indic WMF projects and their associated communities; (iii) stand-alone projects, including an image-based Med GLAM project with a prominent medical school, a public art photography competition, Wikisource projects in two languages; an Urdu Wikipedia education project for tertiary students, bringing two new language Wikipedias online, and a "wiki bus" project modelled on the Google bus program, in the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra Pradesh; (iv) a program connected with intellectual property rights and openness of knowledge; (v) more effort in publicity, research and documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India; and (vi) quicker and better general support and service to the movement. CIS is asking for a 23% increase in WMF funding, a total of $298k, up from $242k last year.
Community comments, discussion, and questioning of applicants is open until the end of April.
- Editor's note: in response to a public request for copy-editing, the author made surface edits to the first few sections of Wikimedia France's application.
In brief
- A second passing-away: Cynthia Ashley-Nelson, who edited as "Cindamuse" on the Wikimedia projects and was the new vice-chair of the WMF's Affiliations Committee, died on 11 April at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin. The news comes after the death of Adrianne Wadewitz in the past week. A longer obituary will appear in next week's edition. Condolences may be left at her talkpage.
- Can Wikipedia woo women editors?: The BBC News magazine asked this question on 7 April with a comprehensive article on Wikimedia's gender gap. With men making up 91% of the Wikimedia projects' editors, the BBC (which mistook "Wikipedia" for all of the Wikimedia sites) quoted Adrianne Wadewitz as saying "That [the gender gap] disparity means that a lot of perspectives are being left out." While this was her only direct quotation in the article, she also related that "the list of pornographic actresses from the 1950s to the present is more than three times longer than the list of notable Native American women. It also has more names on it than the list of female poets and 'sports women' combined."
- Oxford University Press offers free access: The OUP has announced that its online resources will be free to access during National Library Week (13–19 April).
- The Belfer controversy: Responses to a Wikipedian-in-residence hosted by Harvard University in 2012 continued this week with a blog post from Pete Forsyth, who was a major opposition voice when the Wikimedia Foundation was considering the position (see Signpost coverage from 19 March and 2 April). Forsyth sharply criticized the Foundation's post-mortem report, saying "What were the goals that drove the WMF to dedicate staff time to this project, and attach its valuable trademarks to the job posting? ... what is the impact on the effectiveness of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization whose central purpose is to support the work of a huge and deeply passionate community? These are the kinds of questions the Wikimedia Foundation rightly expects its grantees, program staff, and chapter organizations to consider. But they have not been addressed in the Wikimedia Foundation’s own report of the Belfer Center Wikipedian in Residence program."
- Affcom: The Affiliations Committee has announced that it has selected a new chairman. Carlos Colina, who formerly served as the vice chair, is the new chair. He will serve until April 2015.
- Arbitration delays continue: Delays continued to plague both open arbitration cases, Austrian economics and Gun control, with the former now more than one month behind schedule and the latter more than two months so. In response to community inquiries, the Arbitration Committee cited several reasons for the delays, but did not provide an updated schedule.
- Jimmy Wales headlines "Head to Head": A recent "Head to Head" from
Al Jazeera
featured Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales, talking about Internet freedoms, the NSA, Internet addiction, and Wikipedia.
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WikiProject Law
This week, we're making a case for WikiProject Law. Started in April 2005, the project has grown to include 70 pieces of Featured material and 265 Good Articles. We interviewed Ironholds and Int21h.
- What motivated you to join WikiProject Law? Are you currently studying or practicing law? Do you focus on a specific area of the legal field?
- Ironholds: I was already writing legal articles, so it seemed to make sense. I'm neither currently studying or practicing law, although I was a law student (and am now a law graduate), but it was definitely that studying that got me interested. What this question seems to be asking, though, is "why do you work in this area?" The actual answer is pretty selfish - I hate studying for exams. I really hate studying for exams. If you were to design a system for utterly obliterating my motivation to do something, it would consist of sticking a pile of books in front of me and saying 'this will be useful in six months'. What I found, though was that I really love writing articles, so I decided to put sugar in the revision poison by writing about whatever I was studying on Wikipedia. The Occupiers' Liability Act 1957 is the result of my tort law exams, Royal prerogative in the United Kingdom my constitutional law exams, and my dissertation was partly based on Edward Coke (which led to an awkward conversation with my supervisor about how I'd somehow plagiarised from Wikipedia and expected to get away with it. We cleared that up.) Mostly I focus on legal history, because it's my area of specialty and actually why I started studying law in the first place - the people and the institutions that built the system we rely on.
- Int21h: Because law is more important than most other topics. Law will get your head chopped of and your house taken, without further recourse, which can't really be said about many other topics. I am neither studying or practicing law, although one is not able to genuinely say they do not "practice" law in their everyday lives. I am currently focused on state law, because it is so much more relevant to the average person than national or international law, yet by its very nature has less editors working on it.
- Have you contributed to any of WikiProject Law's Featured or Good Articles? What are the toughest challenges face by editors who work on improving legal articles to GA or FA status?
- Ironholds: A disturbing percentage of them (I used to play a game called 'hit F5 on the law portal, and see how many times you have to do it before one of your articles isn't listed'). There are a few major challenges. One, which I think is internal to how legal articles and legal writers work, is the sources we rely on. There's a tendency for a lot of Wikipedians in this field to rely on primary sources, treating the article as if it were a case writeup, with full case citations and references aimed at the judgment. I've noticed that this approach interacts with the GA and FA processes in much the same way a moth interacts with a blowtorch. It's absolutely understandable, of course, because if you're a student or practitioner you're taught that There Is No Higher Authority Than Case Or Statute Citations, but it doesn't work here on Wikipedia.
- Do you participate in any of WikiProject Law's subprojects? Are some subprojects more active than others? What can be done to revitalize these specialized legal communities on Wikipedia?
- Int21h: WP Law has subprojects?
- Are the legal traditions and precedents of some countries and localities better represented on Wikipedia than others? How well is international law covered by Wikipedia? What can be done to improve neglected legal subjects?
- Ironholds: Absolutely, particularly the traditions of the United States and the Commonwealth; many of our generalised law articles substantially underrepresent the civil law tradition, which is understandable given the bias of our project base towards ESL people - which tends to mean 'United States or Commonwealth'.
- Int21h: Foreign (non-US) jurisdictions are notoriously difficult to reliably document. US and UK legal fields are so much better represented because the US and UK legal systems are just so much better at documenting practical law in a free and open manner (US federal works, not to mention law, are not eligible for copyright and are significantly digitized), versus the civil law style that lacks any freely accessible superior court decisions (that provide so much insight into, for example, what "freedom of speech" means in that country versus what it means to an American) and relies so heavily on "book smarts" to learn the law (which will just tell you that there is "freedom of speech" in that country, which is often an outright lie). Language and lack of digitization is also a huge obstacle. There was a Spanish legal decision recently that banned a Basque political rally, and the court decision was a scanned PDF, found on a random news site, which I had to manually OCR and translate, and these several weeks later I still have still not finished, and in the end the decision has minimal use beyond elucidation of the Spanish legal system for me personally. The EU Court of Justice is the only court besides the UK courts that are probably "binding" enough or of enough persuasive value to deserve their own articles. And the reality is that we will need the native language Wikipedias to "step up to the plate" on this. If it can be said America is a nation of lawyers, it can equally be said that all other countries are nations of people who do not know their own legal systems.
- Does WikiProject Law collaborate with any other WikiProjects? Has the project taken advantage of Wikipedia's sister projects, like WikiSource or the Commons?
- Int21h: Not really AFAIK. Wikisource and Commons, maybe, but that is largely going to depend on whether or not a country's authorities (e.g., the US GPO) are publishing digital versions of their law.
- Is it difficult to find images to illustrate legal articles? What topics are most in need of diagrams and photography?
- Ironholds: Actually relatively easy, in the field I work in.
- Int21h: Images are the least of my concerns. Actual articles are so much more important.
- What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- Ironholds: People from other legal traditions would be good. As said above, we're mostly common law people; more people with an understanding of the civil and Islamic law traditions would be great to have.
- Int21h: Spanish law, Russian law, and an as-yet-unknown major Arabic country's law, (and maybe Chinese law) as they are replicated across much of the world. Sub-national law, such as state law in the US, also is more important to a typical reader than national and international law. We don't even have really useful templates for state laws akin to the US legislation infobox.
Until next week, check out our previous reports in the
archive.
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Community mourns passing of Adrianne Wadewitz
The Wikimedia community has been shocked by the death of Adrianne Wadewitz on 8 April from injuries suffered during a rock-climbing fall on 28 March. Adrianne was a well-known and popular editor on the English Wikipedia, where she authored 36 featured articles and organized edit-a-thons in Los Angeles. She served on the board of the Wiki Education Foundation, and was a vocal public Wikipedia advocate on HASTAC, an online group that works with scholars in the humanities, arts, and sciences on innovative collaborations on new modes of learning and research in higher education.
Adrianne was born on 6 January 1977, and graduated from high school in North Platte, Nebraska, a railroad town of about 25,000 people. She attended college at Columbia University, a prestigious institution in the heart of New York City, and graduated in English with the honor of magna cum laude. After receiving a PhD in British literature from Indiana University, in 2013 she took up a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She had recently accepted a position at nearby Whittier College where she was recruited to help "develop their digital liberal arts program".
Adrianne took up rock climbing last summer, and she blogged about how it changed her:
| “ | For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer 'Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian'. I am now 'Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber'. This was brought home most vividly to me one day when I was climbing outdoors here in Los Angeles and people on the beach were marveling at those of us climbing. Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience—that radical switch and growth. It is an enormous goal and I would love to hear how others work at achieving it with their students. | ” |
A memorial service in Adrianne's honor will take place at Occidental College on 14 April, and in Indiana on 26 April.
On the English Wikipedia
On Wikipedia, Adrianne was one of the early editors; she registered on 18 July 2004 as " Awadewit" when she was attending graduate school. She wrote quite a few articles, but zeroed in on her favorite, Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th-century English writer and women's rights advocate. Over the course of a year, Adrianne wrote most of the entry and shepherded it through several reviews until it became one of Wikipedia's then 1700 featured articles. She worked on an entire series about the author, including all of Wollstonecraft's major works and a timeline of her life. In 2008, Adrianne spoke to the Signpost about Wollstonecraft: "When I first looked at the Mary Wollstonecraft article on Wikipedia, one of the subjects of my dissertation, it looked something like this. I was appalled! One of the first feminists! Dissertations tend to make a person think a topic is the most important thing ever, so, of course, I thought it was a travesty that Wollstonecraft's biography was reduced to this bland recitation of a few facts. I resolved to change that."
Adrianne received high praise from Wikipedia editors for her work on the article. Qp10qp, for example, wrote: "It adds up to a colossal achievement—I mean, what we have here is the equivalent of a book. The thoroughness, attention to detail and discerning study of the best sources simply takes my breath away. Any student of Wollstonecraft who clicks Wikipedia will hardly believe their luck in striking this treasure trove. Wikipedia at its finest." More recently, Liam Wyatt related his belief that the Wollstonecraft articles made Adrianne "the single most cited/read Wollstonecraft scholar ever".
Shortly after Wollstonecraft received its featured status, she agreed to be interviewed on episode 35 of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast by Liam Wyatt. It was titled "Secretly Famous", as it described her as an editor "who has to hide her activities [on Wikipedia] for fear of jeopardizing her career":
- Wyatt: So you're worried that if you publicize ... your interest and experience on Wikipedia, that you won't get a job because you'll be laughed out of town?
- Wadewitz: I'm very concerned, actually. ... I'm concerned that people will think that perhaps I've wasted time that I could have spent on my dissertation, time I could have spent publishing articles.
- Wyatt: That's truly sad.
- Wadewitz: It is, because I really view that the time I have spent working on things for Wikipedia, which is really just what I'm studying, as sort of public service, as part of being a public intellectual, because I'm often engaged in conversations with people on Wikipedia where I feel like I'm explaining what it means to be a scholar, and I'm explaining even down to the level of well, here's how you write a paragraph, or here where you write a sentence. Right? Is that a waste of time? No. I don't think so. Because that's what I do all the time.
- —Liam Wyatt and Adrianne Wadewitz, Wikipedia Weekly, episode 35, 8:33 (condensed)
It was after this interview that Adrianne became a high-profile member and advocate for Wikipedia in scholarly circles. Liam Wyatt reflected on the 2007 interview in a tribute on Adrianne's talk page, reminiscing that "Not long after [the interview,] you 'came out' and made your wiki-work a core part of your career—using it ... to bolster your academic CV." She would later attend Wikimania 2008 to give a presentation about her use of Wikipedia in the classroom.
In her time on Wikipedia, Adrianne wrote several articles for the Signpost, focusing on how to find reliable sources, a review of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia, reviewing featured pictures, the 2009 Wikipedia Academy at the National Institute of Health, the 2010 Museums and the web conference, and a controversial article titled " Let's get serious about plagiarism", a problem Wikipedia still wrestles with today.
Beyond editing
Aside from her prolific article writing, Adrianne was a champion for Wikipedia's use in the digital humanities, believing it offers one of the best places for research that will have an impact on the public.
Adrianne became a prominent voice in the academic community. The Wiki Education Foundation said in a statement that "Her pathbreaking essay on teaching with Wikipedia, " Wiki-hacking: Opening up the academy with Wikipedia", served as the basis for the preliminary pilot of the program", the Public Policy Initiative. They continued: "Adrianne was one of the first people to volunteer to help support university instructors looking to incorporate Wikipedia as a teaching tool in their classrooms; over the last four years, Adrianne has supported more than 20 courses as a Wikipedia Ambassador as well as teaching two courses herself." She later became a founding board member for the fledgling WEF.
Perhaps even more importantly, she became the face of Wikipedia editing (literally) when her photo was featured on the cover of the first printed "Editing Wikipedia" brochure put out by the Wikimedia Foundation.
She related how her Wikipedia work had benefits in the classroom: "My 'coolness factor' as a teacher has risen. I frequently use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in an effort to explain what a reliable web source is and to teach basic copyediting skills. While discussing these rather mundane topics, I often tell little Wikipedia stories. That I write Wikipedia articles is apparently 'awesome'. I also dramatically rose in my students' estimation when Mary Shelley appeared on the main page on 30 October 2008."
Adrianne's HASTAC blog became a prominent voice in communicating and encouraging academic involvement in Wikipedia. An example of her work there comes from just under a year ago, when she responded to the sexist "American Novelists" category: "If only there were more women on Wikipedia, the argument goes, this would not have happened. But no one has talked to the women who actually are on Wikipedia." In addition to the active public voice she offered, she actively researched the place of humanities method and process within Wikipedia, a product of her extensive collaborations with a number of Wikimedians and academics. Indeed, this underlines the fact that Adrianne was one of the strongest proponents of Wikipedia's efforts to attract more female editors—her wish to enable better communication of underrepresented minority-related content.
Tributes
| “ | I toast you tonight. I will toast you in LA. And I will toast you in Bloomington. I will toast you on mountain high and every time I write a new women's biography.
Climb high and climb wild, climb proud and climb free. Oh, Adrianne. |
” |
| — Sarah Stierch | ||
As befitting the large number of people she touched both on- and off-wiki, tributes to Adrianne poured in from around the world. Sage Ross blogged: "I remember, for a long time before I met her, wondering what “a wade wit” meant. I remember a Skype conversation, years ago. Adrianne, Phoebe, SJ and I talked for probably three hours about the gender gap on Wikipedia, late into the night. Then and always, she was relentlessly thoughtful and incredibly sharp. As superb as she was in writing, she was even better in live conversation and debate. ... I remember her unfailing kindness and generosity, indomitable work ethic, and voracious appetite for knowledge. She made me proud to call myself a fellow Wikipedian."
On Facebook, Wikipedian and personal friend Sarah Stierch wrote "My heart hurts. Adrianne was a leading voice—and her legacy still is—in the work we have been doing to get more women and more diverse peoples contributing to Wikipedia. ... [She was a] sarcastic, feminist, smart, brilliant, to the point delivery type of academic genius". LiAnna Davis, who worked with Adrianne in the various education programs, commented that "If you've ever read a well-written article about 18th century British literature on Wikipedia, chances are it was that high of quality thanks to Adrianne Wadewitz."
Many users have left thoughts on her English Wikipedia talk page. jbmurray worked with Adrianne on several education-related Wikipedia projects, including the smashing success that was his 2008 " Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation" course at the University of British Columbia. He wrote that "I was pleased to meet her a few years ago in Bloomington. And I last saw her a couple of weeks back in LA, where she came across town to have lunch with me ... Adrianne was smart, thoughtful, funny, and a delight to know and work with in every way. She touched many people in many different contexts: teaching, online, rock-climbing ... This is a great loss."
Former Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote: "Adrianne was one of the best contributors to and speakers about the projects, and her writing on and off the projects was among the best. I was always impressed with her ability to be sharply critical without losing motivation, and to be sharply insightful and intelligent while being approachable. This is a huge loss to all of us—and as a friend who did not see her nearly often enough, I will miss her."
Moni3, making her first edit in 2014, logged in to note how Adrianne made her a better writer: "I was a proficient writer when I wrote my first article here, Ann Bannon. Awadewit reviewed it, encouraged me to make it a Featured Article, then proceeded to block me at every turn so the article eventually became the most informative, authoritative account of Bannon's life available anywhere, in print or online. Awadewit blocked my first attempt to get To Kill A Mockingbird to FA status because the article just was not good enough. Harper Lee outlived Awadewit. Who could wrap their mind around such a thing?"
Wikimedian Alex Stinson, who considered Adrianne his mentor in thinking about Wikipedia's role in the digital humanities and co-wrote an academic paper with her, stated on his blog that "All day I have been shaking from the loss ... the common mission we shared bridging Wikipedia and Digital Humanities community has gotten unimaginably harder. Her contribution was tireless and compelling and finding anyone to fill her shoes will be nigh impossible. This loss seems keen for me: as an aspiring communicator of that space, Adrianne was an incredible mentor and model. She had incredible energy and voice, travelling across the United States and the World to spread that vision. She actively delivered incisive critiques of Wikipedia, the general response of scholars in shaping that space, and the need to place women, the humanities and the underprivileged into our public knowledge record."
HASTAC published an article from Cathy Davidson, a professor at The City University of New York:
| “ | I woke up this morning to an email from HASTAC Scholars Director Fiona Barnett asking if I would write a blog about the incredibly generous, helpful, always useful blogs by former HASTAC Scholar Adrianne Wadewitz. I said of course. Without hesitation. It's the least I can do for this amazing human being—even though I've met her only briefly. I feel like I know her well.
Inevitably her posts on the HASTAC site are featured, as is one currently, on our homepage, because she has the incredible gift of not just pushing the boundaries of "the way we teach and learn" but communicating those ways in the most eloquent, humble, generous, useful way so that others can learn from her. She is a natural leader, an inspiration to us all. Just yesterday I had said she would be the ideal former HASTAC Scholar to be nominated to the Steering Committee of our organization. Adrianne Wadewitz exemplifies the early-career professional HASTAC Scholars is designed to mentor ... because she represents the best of academe. Adrianne Wadewitz is a model of the future we all want for our profession, for our students, for our society. It was only then reading through the rest of the morning's emails on my phone that I found the crushed earlier email from Fiona informing me that this amazing person, our wonderful Adrianne Wadewitz, had died in a climbing accident. I hadn't realized that Fiona had been asking me to perform the very sad and necessary task of writing a memorial. It does not seem possible. |
” |
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Conquest of the Couch Potatoes
Summary: Television has always been a topic of choice on this site, but it exploded this week. Fully six slots were devoted to television shows, as the final episode of
How I Met Your Mother, one of the most popular Wikipedia searches of the last few years, coincided with the season finale of
The Walking Dead and the upcoming
fourth season of
Game of Thrones. The number rises to eight if movies released on video and new TV tech are included. This leads me to ponder: if television is the principal concern of our readership, perhaps a more TV-friendly Wikipedia spinoff is in order? We could call it WikiTiVi.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 30 March to 5 April, 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 How I Met Your Mother
931,180 This hugely popular sitcom has always been a popular search on this site, and it creeps back into the top 25 in the week of its final episode on March 31. 2 April Fools' Day
920,853 The first day of April, perennial party for practical jokers and pranksters, continues to amuse the cynical and infuriate the gullible. 3 How I Met Your Mother (season 9)
654,840 Obviously, people wanted to know when the series finale aired. 4 The Walking Dead (TV series)
615,592 The show's fourth season finale fell on 30 March. 5 Amazon.com
500,321 This article has been veering wildly (and suspiciously) around the view graph for several weeks, but at least now its presence on the list has a reason: Amazon Fire TV, announced this week, is a digital streaming device to watch online content on an HDTV. How it distinguishes itself from the three or four other such devices currently on the market is a matter of some dispute. 6 Game of Thrones
453,199 This TV show's previous season, not to be glib, owned this list. I expect its upcoming season, due to commence on 6 April, to do no less. 7 " Last Forever"
435,595 How I Met Your Mother, one of the most popular shows among our readership, drew 13.3 million viewers to its finale on March 31; its highest ratings ever. That said, when you hinge a show's entire plot on its final event (just look at the title) you better pull off that event with aplomb, and from the looks of things, the risky, problematic ending the writers chose (and actually filmed six seasons ago) has polarised critics and diehard fans alike. 8 Deaths in 2014
419,505 The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. 9 The Walking Dead (season 4)
297,540 People are undoubtedly using this page to look up the finale's air date. 10 Frozen (2013 film)
412,808 Disney's Oscar-winning juggernaut got a shot in the arm thanks to its release on DVD on March 18. Despite this, it has already overtaken Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest as Disney's highest-grossing film in theatres.
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Snow heater and ash sweep
Due to an editor being away on holiday, this Featured Content was only partially completed. Any assistance is appreciated.
Featured articles
- Tjioeng Wanara ( nominated by Crisco 1492) was a 1941 film made in the Dutch East Indies, or present-day Indonesia. Given the film's obscurity, the nominator believes that this is now the "most comprehensive discussion of this film yet published."
- Musca ( nominated by Casliber) is a small constellation in the southern sky. It is also the only official constellation to depict an insect.
- The D'Oliveira affair ( nominated by Cliftonian and Sarastro1) was sparked by the controversial selection of a mixed-race South African (D'Oliveira) to England's cricket team just before a tour of South Africa. D'Oliveira had lived in the UK for six years, having moved there when cricket opportunities in his native country dried up on account of his race. The eventual cancellation of the tour was one of the first major international sporting boycotts to affect South Africa; the boycotts lasted more or less intact until 1991, when apartheid was abolished.
- Imogen Holst ( nominated by Brianboulton) was a multi-talented woman: the article notes that she was an "English composer, arranger, conductor, teacher and festival administrator." She was the director of the classical music-focused Aldeburgh Festival for over 20 years, and while her own compositions are mostly unpublished and unperformed, those that have been publicized have been well-regarded by critics.
- The Peru national football team ( nominated by MarshalN20) has represented the country in international football since 1927. Its most success came in the 1930s and 70s, but it has been stuck in a prolonged slump since 1982. The article itself had a torturous journey to becoming a featured article; it succeeded only on its fourth attempt.
Featured lists
- List of lighthouses in Connecticut
- Lorde discography
- List of songs recorded by Sky Ferreira
- Timeline of the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season
- Rani Mukerji filmography
Featured pictures
- Siproeta stelenes
- Paysandisia archon
- Man sweeping volcanic ash
- Ratification of the Peace of Münster
- Delphinus, Sagitta, Aquila, and Antinous
- Capricornus
- Psalterium Georgii, Fluvius Eridanus, Cetus, Officina Sculptoris, Fornax Chemica, and Machina Electrica
- Noctua, Corvus, Crater, Sextans Uraniæ, Hydra, Felis, Lupus, Centaurus, Antlia Pneumatica, Argo Navis, and Pyxis Nautica
- Diagram of Jupiter
- Evening Snow on the Heater
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