The Wikimedia Foundation gave the Signpost an advance copy of the results of a survey of English Wikipedia readers regarding Wikimedia fundraising, due for official release today, and shared details that do not appear in the final report. The survey, conducted by Lake Research Partners in February, asked a number of questions about readers' attitudes towards the WMF's fundraising to gauge the awareness and effectiveness of those efforts.
This is not the first WMF fundraising survey. After contributing to Wikipedia, donors are able to complete a survey if they wish; more than 250,000 of them did so in December 2014. Professional surveys are also done, such as the 2011 readership survey, which included questions about fundraising—but Lisa Gruwell, the Foundation's chief revenue officer, told the Signpost that "this is the first professional, randomized survey of Wikipedia fundraising to include donors and non-donors."
Country | Number of readers surveyed (% of respondents) | % of total English Wikipedia page views, December 2014 |
---|---|---|
United States | 1000 (41.7%) | 36.4 % |
United Kingdom | 500 (20.8%) | 9.7 % |
Canada | 400 (16.7%) | 5.8 % |
India | 0 | 5.8 % |
Australia/New Zealand | 400 (16.7%) | 3.4 % |
Germany | 0 | 2.0 % |
Philippines | 0 | 1.5 % |
France | 0 | 1.2 % |
China | 0 | 1.2 % |
Ireland | 0 | 0.7 % |
The survey questioned a sample of 2,300 people who said they used Wikipedia at least once a month. They were from five primarily English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with the last two countries combined into one sample group. Celinda Lake of Lake Research told the Signpost that "the sample was stratified geographically by region and the data were weighted by gender, age, region, and race where appropriate to reflect the population of internet users in each country."
Lake said "Respondents for the survey were drawn from an international panel of over 2 million Internet users in the target countries who have agreed to participate in online surveys, supplied by GMI", a market research company that specializes in selecting participants for surveys. The selection bias is unclear for people who apparently had previously agreed to GMI's request that they participate in unspecified online surveys.
Lake Research did not survey readers in countries where English is not the primary language, but nevertheless have significant populations of readers of the English Wikipedia, such as India, Germany, the Philippines, France, and China. Gruwell said that they chose to focus only on five English-speaking countries for a number of reasons, including making the survey more manageable and achieving more comparable results.
The 2,300 participants ranged from daily users of the encyclopedia to casual visitors, with most responding that they use the encyclopedia several times a week (27–35%, depending on the country) or several times a month (21–24%). Those who indicated they use Wikipedia less than once a month were not included in the survey.
Surprisingly, up to 40% of people are not aware that Wikipedia is a non-profit operation. While this is an improvement on the 2011 Readership Survey – which reported that about half of Wikipedia readers were unaware of this – it is troubling given the importance attached within the community and the Foundation to its non-profit status.
Wikipedia's revenue source was similarly not well understood. UK readers were the only group in which a majority identified reader donations as Wikipedia's primary funding source. Significant numbers of respondents in all countries surveyed have no idea where the money comes from, or identified it as a mix of sources including government funding. A disturbing percentage (13–20%) thought that Wikipedia is supported by advertising.
Perhaps respondents were confusing fundraising appeals with paid advertising. Lake told the Signpost that "They may be confusing other online ads they see in close proximity to their use of Wikipedia pages. They are also possibly making an assumption that since many major websites are supported by ads, Wikipedia must be also." Lake noted the survey also asked if they had seen commercial advertising on Wikipedia. While 56–60% said no, some 20% either thought they had seen ads on the encyclopedia or were unsure.
The result may point to a lack of awareness of Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality and independence. Gruwell said: "This is a fairly consistent misunderstanding about Wikipedia that we see across the board and we have seen it for years, and it's an ongoing challenge for the movement. We think it is important to communicate the non-profit or non-commercial message in banners and other communications to help better educate readers about this."
Depending on the country, 55–63% of respondents recalled seeing a fundraising appeal on Wikipedia. When asked about how many they remembered, around one-third said two or three, and slightly fewer said four to nine. Despite some vocal complaints about the frequency of the banners last year, only 4–5% regard the appeals as "too intrusive".
Perhaps the most surprising results were respondents' primary reason for donating to Wikipedia. By overwhelming numbers, they stated that their motivation was their frequent use of Wikipedia. Given that support of Wikipedia is often expressed in terms of a strong commitment towards free and open access and dissemination of knowledge, it is surprising that relatively few donors cited this. Perhaps those who have those principles are already avid users of Wikipedia, or perhaps it is indicative of the widespread use of Wikipedia – as the sixth-most-used website in the world for so long, it may have simply become part of the furniture for most people. This may be a reason for donating, but it may also lead to apathy or indifference in those who do not donate, something the survey was not designed to explore.
It is important to know why readers donate to Wikipedia, but other questions need to be asked to reach people who do not donate. The survey identified about a quarter of respondents as "donor targets": people who donate elsewhere but not to the encyclopedia.
The survey examined which types of causes were favored among both donors and non-donors. In most of the countries, those who donate to Wikipedia appear to be generally more altruistic than non-donors, in that they are more likely to donate to other charitable causes too. Popular charities among those who did not donate to Wikipedia were those related to poverty, health and medicine, and, in the US, religion, causes which are generally perceived to have little to do with Wikipedia's mission of encyclopedia building and the free dissemination of knowledge.
Given the nature of these causes, specialized appeals may be needed to reach these donor target groups, as they may be unlikely to be swayed by typical fundraising banners or testimonials featuring sad-eyed Wikipedia editors. Targeted banners including statements that Wikipedia is perhaps the world's most frequently consulted medical resource or touting the ability of free access to information to help alleviate poverty may be effective. Gruwell said "It is an interesting finding and we may explore how to talk about this area of work with those who care most about certain kinds of information in Wikipedia."
The survey concludes that "Users are not turned off by Wikipedia's fundraising messages", and the survey results appear to bear that out. Despite vocal dissenters voicing criticism of the campaign, these sentiments don't appear to be shared among the respondents. More than half of respondents generally feel that Wikipedia asks for less money than other organizations and that fundraising messages do not appear "very often".
When asked about the statement "I don't mind the fundraising messages on Wikipedia because I know the fundraising is necessary", up to 70% in each country indicated agreement. The suggested cause in this statement might be considered a loaded question. When asked about whether the response would have been different had the last seven words been omitted, Gruwell replied: "It's possible. I don't think we should try to guess how readers would have answered a different question."
Similar questions worded differently yielded smaller majorities, though still indicate a generally positive attitude towards fundraising appeals. For example, 42–51% indicated they "enjoyed learning" about Wikipedia from the fundraising campaign (another potentially loaded question compared with what might have been more neutral wording – "learned" rather than "enjoyed learning"). Fundraising messages "annoyed" 19–31% of people; this might seem to conflict with the results of the "I don't mind" option, or it might indicate that while they are personally annoyed by the messages, they also saw the need for them.
Up to half of the respondents said the more the fundraising messages appear, the less they notice them. However, 34–46% said they pay attention to the messages. This may indicate a widespread concern among Wikipedia readers about desensitization and overexposure, even if those readers don't feel they are personally susceptible.
The size of the banner ads was the focus of some of the questions. Readers think the larger banner ads are clearer and more convincing, but only by slight margins. When asked about the intrusiveness of the different sized banners, readers rate them about the same irrespective of size.
Gruwell said: "This survey helps us understand reader's opinions of the banners. We pair this with what we know about what readers do when they see the banners through our donation rates." She pointed to results that appear in the Foundation's latest
quarterly review of fundraising which indicate that in December 2014, the large banners produced a donation rate five times that of the smaller ones. Those results speak for themselves, so it appears the large banners are here to stay.
Reader comments
March is international Women's History Month and March 8 is International Women's Day. The community has arranged a number of commemorative initiatives focused on the gender gap, under the banner " WikiWomen's History Month". The first such effort was organized in 2012: in the Signpost, then-community fellow Sarah Stierch said: "while I believe every day should be women's history day, I also feel we should take advantage of the month of March to bring awareness to the lack of coverage about women's history on Wikipedia, and concerns about the gender gap in Wikipedia: only 9% of our active contributors are women." A number of sizable community events and editathons are scheduled in March in support of this year's effort (though more than half of them will be in the United States) under the banner. An even larger number of events are clustered around March 7 and 8 were organized by the ArtAndFeminism campaign, including 50 meetups in the US alone and a main event at the MoMA in New York City.
Concurrently, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced that this month's Foundation blog is focusing on gender diversity in the Wikimedia movement. The communications team is asking for community suggestions on "your favorite, high-quality Wikipedia articles about notable women ... we're looking for factual, well-written and insightful articles, from the wiki of your choice." The winning articles, selected by the communications team, will be written into a report to be posted in the Foundation blog sometime after March 15. The blog will also be publishing profiles, research overviews, program reports, and best practices during the month.
Most significantly, the WMF rolled out their "Inspire" grantmaking campaign on March 4, an open invitation to the community for thoughts and opinions on possible ways to address the gap. The best of the ideas, drawn from the IdeaLab and endorsed by community, will be matched to long-term advisors. When necessary, funding is also available, and is likely to be disseminated by a new committee of existing committee members from the two grantmaking volunteer bodies, the IEG and GAC. If the pilot project is successful (signs so far indicate a high level of activity) it is likely to be broken off entirely into a new, third grantmaking scheme, Inspire Grants. The two next major dates will be April 1–15, when the funding committee will make its final recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation, and April 30, when winning grantees will be announced by WMF staff. The hope is for 20 new grant-supported gender gap-focused projects and an (ambitious) five- to ten-fold increase in IdeaLab traffic; as of writing the project has attracted some 200 participants and 40 IdeaLab submissions.
The maximum budget for the campaign is US$250,000, funded by withdrawals from the IEG and PEG programs, currently on hold for non-time-sensitive proposals for the three months from February to April. This, and the timing of the announcement, has been a source of controversy. In communications on the community mailing list, the director of community resources Siko Bouterse stated in January that the campaign is an experiment in proactive grantmaking, "to see if we can provide meaningful community support and significantly increase impact on Wikimedia projects in a single strategic area". If successful, she said, the campaign will serve as a pilot for other single-issue campaigns. Experimental thematic campaigns are a new organizational theme that was included in this year's annual plan (albeit see previous Signpost coverage) and planning for the Inspire campaign has been in progress since last December. The event is the first such experiment by the WMF. It is likely to be a part of the recent Foundation pivot towards a grantmaking focus on more and smaller projects than in the past. R
For more Signpost coverage on the gender gap see our Gender gap series.
An article was deleted on March 3 this week which is ostensibly the longest-lasting hoax article found on Wikipedia to date. The article, Jar'Edo Wens, was created on May 29, 2005 by an IP address originating in Australia. At its creation, the article, in its entirety, read "In Australian Aboriginal mythology, Jar'Edo Wens is a god of earthly knowledge and physical might, created by Altjira to oversee that the people did not get too big-headed, associated with victory and intelligence." It remained largely unchanged until its deletion; the same editor also added a link to Jar'Edo Wens to the article Australian Aboriginal mythology.
The link was removed from that higher-traffic page in 2007, though the original hoax article remained. In November 2014, an IP editor added a hoax template to the article, which automatically placed it in Category:Wikipedia suspected hoax articles. Snowager told the Signpost that he regularly patrols that category and found this article there. On March 1, Snowager submitted the article to Articles for Deletion. In the resulting discussion, Calamondin12 noted that Jar'Edo Wens was "perhaps derived from the actual English name Jared Owens". The article was speedy deleted by Newyorkbrad "as a blatant and indisputable hoax", making it, as of time of writing, the longest-lived discovered hoax on Wikipedia: nine years and nine months, a half month longer than the previous record-holder, Pikes on Cliffs, a fake historical structure in Spain.
Though this may now be the longest-lived hoax ever in the pages of Wikipedia, it is not the highest profile one, since the article was orphaned throughout much of its existence. G, R
For more Signpost coverage on hoaxes see our Hoaxes series.
ThinkProgress tech reporter Lauren C. Williams wrote a long article (March 6) on how the Gamergate controversy has spilled over onto Wikipedia. Disputes regarding this video game controversy have raged for months on Wikipedia, culminating in a contentious Arbitration case which involved numerous editors and administrators, including this author. This has already received heavy media coverage, but Williams has produced what appears to be the most thorough piece of journalism about the Wikipedia controversy, including a number of original interviews.
“ | There is no reason why anybody, regardless of gender or political beliefs, should have to go onto a website about sharing knowledge and writing an encyclopedia — which is pretty damn geeky — and get harassed while doing it. It’s absurd. | ” |
— Sarah Stierch |
Williams corrected the widely-reported misconception that the "Five Horsemen", the Wikipedia editors targeted by Gamergate, were feminists, noting that only one of the five was female and edited articles related to feminism, while the others were "longtime Wikipedia editors aiming to return normalcy and factual accuracy to the Gamergate pages". Williams interviewed one of them, NorthBySouthBaranof, who was topic banned by the Arbitration Committee, as well as Mark Bernstein, whose vocal blog posts about Gamergate made him a target of their ire as well. Both discussed the harassment they and others received at the hands of Gamergate. NorthbySouthBaronof complained that “I haven’t seen one note of sympathy about the harassment from anyone in ArbCom, which says, ‘We don’t care about what happens off Wikipedia.'" Williams also spoke with GorillaWarfare, noting that she was the only member of ArbCom who openly identified as female. She said "The Arbitration Committee rules only on user conduct, which is a fact that outside observers have been missing. We do not, have not, and cannot make rulings on the content of articles or the validity of users’ ideologies.”
Williams interviewed two female longtime Wikipedia editors, Amy Senger ( ASenger) and Sarah Stierch ( Missvain), about larger issues on the encyclopedia, including systemic bias and the gender gap. Senger said that the ArbCom decision was evidence of the former and that “the people who are more vocal and combative tend to prevail in disputes” before the Committee. Stierch spoke of "a history of hostility" on the website and said "The fact that I have to go to my volunteer ‘job’ and fear that I’m going to get yelled at by somebody and get called a nasty name...You shouldn’t have to worry about what happens in your personal life...There is no reason why anybody, regardless of gender or political beliefs, should have to go onto a website about sharing knowledge and writing an encyclopedia — which is pretty damn geeky — and get harassed while doing it. It’s absurd.” She is among those who feel that the Wikimedia Foundation is not doing enough about these issues. "They’re the hospital administrator and the lunatics are running the asylum," Stierch said.
At Slate, Amanda Marcotte responded to Williams' article by writing " On Wikipedia, Gamergate Refuses to Die" (March 6). Marcotte wrote: "In an effort to stick to Wikipedia’s touted belief in 'neutrality,' the committee decided to hand out banishments on both sides of the equation: both to people for injecting the harassing claims into pages and for the people who were trying to clean it up...Wikipedia lost the very people who were trying to guard the gates in the first place. What happens to the next victim of a Wikipedia harassment campaign if the defenders are getting squeezed out through this pox-on-both-your-houses system?" G
For more Signpost coverage on Gamergate see our Gamergate series.
At Medium, Gilad Lotan, chief data scientist at Betaworks, examines (March 7) last September's Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax. The hoax, whose perpetrators are still unknown but who may be Russian, involved fake accounts on Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other services. Lotan identified AmandaGray91 as the source of a hoax article on Wikipedia attributing the fake explosion to a terrorist attack. The account, created only eight days earlier, had made previous edits to articles about Russian author Alexander Asov, the Aditya Birla Group, owner of the chemical plant, and carbon black, which is manufactured there. Lotan wrote "Wikipedia editors are a global community that has very clear rules of conduct as well as an internal authority rank. As a completely new Wikipedia editor, it is very difficult to simply add a page, especially one depicting an ISIS terror attack on US territory, and expect it to stick around for long. The page was taken down quite rapidly, as users who were led to it from tweets flagged it as potentially problematic." G
For more Signpost coverage on hoaxes see our Hoaxes series.
The Daily Beast profiles (March 4) Brian Connelly, owner of the domain loser.com, which made headlines (and a traffic spike for Wikipedia) last week when Connelly redirected it to the Wikipedia article for Kanye West, after West nearly interrupted Beck on stage at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards. (Beck first became famous in 1993 with the single " Loser".) Connelly has owned the domain since 1995 and in the past he redirected it to other targets, including sites for Governor Jim Hodges, Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks, Google, and Reddit. Some of Connelly's ire is based on seeing West perform at the Bonnaroo Music Festival last year:
“ | Kanye got up onstage and just started bitching at the audience because I think someone had spray painted "F--- Kanye" on a porta-potty or something. Then he started yelling, "Where the press at? Point out the press!" and started going crazy and yelling at everybody about how they didn’t respect his genius. Then he started naming names of people he should be compared to— George Washington, Henry Ford, etc. My wife was really enjoying it, but I wasn’t. We’re a paying audience showing him respect, and he launches into us with this egocentric f---ing bull---- rant, and it was insane. And he didn’t even play " Gold Digger. G | ” |
In an effort to protect and maintain the privacy of Wikipedia's thousands of editors, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has filed a lawsuit against the United States' National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Attorney General. This action takes aim at the so-called "upstream surveillance" practiced by the NSA, whose broad scope can include the communications between and edits made by Wikipedia users. The WMF has been joined by eight other organizations, including Amnesty International USA, Global Fund for Women, and Human Rights Watch. They are all being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is supplying much of the lawsuit's financial backing.
The move comes as the latest chapter in the WMF's long-standing opposition to government intrusion on the Internet, including the unprecedented one-day SOPA blackout in 2012 and Jimmy Wales' high-profile Wikimania speech in 2013.
The lawsuit states that "seizing and searching Wikimedia's communications is akin to seizing and searching the patron records of the largest library in the world—except that Wikimedia's communications provide a more comprehensive and detailed picture of its users' interests than any previous set of library records ever could have offered" (clause 67). It asserts that confidential communications among Wikipedia volunteers and staffers are being intercepted, and that "there is a substantial likelihood that the NSA retains, reads, and disseminates Wikimedia's international communications because Wikimedia is communicating with or about persons the government has targeted" (clause 71).
The upstream surveillance targeted by the WMF includes four different processes, laid out in clause 43 of the lawsuit: copying, filtering, content review, and retention and use. As alleged by the WMF, this means, respectively, that
Moreover, the lawsuit states that there are few restrictions on the use of the information from (4):
“ | Upstream surveillance is not limited to communications sent or received by the NSA's targets. Rather, it involves the surveillance of essentially everyone's communications. The NSA systematically examines the full content of substantially all international text-based communications (and many domestic ones) for references to its search terms. In other words, the NSA copies and reviews the communications of millions of innocent people to determine whether they are discussing or reading anything containing the NSA's search terms. [clause 44; emphasis in source] | ” |
The NSA's legal justification for this is in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, 50 U.S.C. § 1881a.
The WMF's standing rests in the Edward Snowden leaks. On a PowerPoint slide detailing the NSA's interest in HTTP, Wikipedia is listed; it also remarks that "nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet uses HTTP." This was a major factor in hurrying the deployment of HTTP Secure (https) by default to all Wikimedia projects. Beyond this solitary slide, the lawsuit declares that Wikimedia communications "are intercepted, copied, and reviewed" by the NSA. Katherine Maher, the WMF's chief communications officer, wrote in an email to the Signpost that this line was "based on what we know about how the NSA has interpreted FAA and the breadth of the surveillance practices the NSA implemented under the authority of the FAA. The slide helped confirm that conclusion. We will present further information as the case moves forward."
The WMF claims that such intelligence gathering is harmful to their mission, such as in countering systemic bias—the tilt of focus when, for instance, a broadly white, educated, middle-to-upper class male group writes an encyclopedia. In the Foundation's view, non-US editors could justifiably fear that their Wikimedia-related contributions, emails, and even page views will be intercepted by the NSA and shared with their own governments. In a related New York Times op-ed, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and WMF executive director Lila Tretikov contend that given the long-standing links between American and Egyptian intelligence, a hypothetical Egyptian editor would "surely be less likely to add her knowledge or have that conversation, for fear of reprisal." Maher echoed these points, writing that these "dragnet mass surveillance practices create a chilling effect on free expression and association."
The lawsuit rhetorically echoes the idea that the NSA "undermines" the plaintiffs:
“ | Upstream surveillance undermines Wikimedia's ability to conduct its work. Wikimedia depends on its ability to ensure anonymity for individuals abroad who view, edit, or otherwise use Wikimedia projects and related web pages. The ability to read, research, and write anonymously is essential to the freedoms of expression and inquiry. Upstream surveillance harms the ability of Wikimedia's staff to engage in communications essential to their work and compromises Wikimedia's organizational mission by making online access to knowledge a vehicle for U.S. government monitoring. [clause 74; related clauses include 2, 83, 88, 93, 98, 103, 108, 113, and 118] | ” |
In the New York Times op-ed, titled "Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users," Wales and Tretikov assert that Wikimedia editors should be free to edit and email without fear of government oversight: "Privacy is an essential right. It makes freedom of expression possible, and sustains freedom of inquiry and association. It empowers us to read, write and communicate in confidence, without fear of persecution. Knowledge flourishes where privacy is protected."
In a similar vein, the WMF published a blog post emphasizing privacy as "the bedrock of individual freedom" and "a universal right that sustains the freedoms of expression and association." The post decried the NSA's activities, which they said "rightfully alarmed" the Wikipedia community when disclosed (see previous Signpost coverage). At the conclusion of the post, the WMF legal team answered many frequently asked questions, which were reproduced on Meta for convenience. Of note, however, is that while the WMF correctly identifies that individuals can register anonymous accounts—"we don't require real names, email addresses, or any other personally identifying information, and we never sell your data"—they do not mention that those who edit without one are publicly identified, in on-wiki records, with their individual IP address.
The ACLU is representing the plaintiffs pro bono, so no Wikimedia donor funds will be devoted to the lawsuit beyond those already budgeted for the legal team and regular staff time. This is significant, given that a similarly scoped case, Clapper v. Amnesty, took years to wind its way through the US legal system before it was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2013. We asked Maher if the WMF was prepared to fight a case that could last just as long:
"The Foundation is prepared and committed for the duration."
The net punking of Kanye West, which redirected the web address "loser.com" to his Wiki page, shot him to the top of the list and got Wikipedia in the news again. Other than that, a dull week, with only three new entries in the top 10: a UFC champion, a Google Doodle and a Hindu festival involving people throwing powder at each other (though that does sound fun).
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. See here for a list of the most edited articles of the week.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of 1 to 7 March 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Kanye West | 4,291,451 | The rapper/ entrepreneur is, it is fair to say, a polarising figure. Whether he's campaigning against other artists' award wins during their acceptance speeches, comparing himself to God and Picasso, or naming his daughter North West, it seems the 21-time Grammy winner just can't stop throwing the media for a loop. But it seems his most persistent recent gaffe has been his ill-judged tirade against Beck, winner of this year's Grammy for album of the year, which has apparently earned him the undying enmity of Beck fans. This enmity has manifested itself in many ways, but this week, the web address "loser.com", which just happens to share a name with Beck's best known single, was redirected to his Wikipedia page. This redirect has led, naturally, to a spike in views to said page. The perpetrator of this egregious offence eventually made himself known as Brian Connelly, a 44-year-old systems analyst from South Carolina, whose reasons are apparently deep-seated. "I went to Bonnaroo last year," he told The Daily Beast, "He started yelling, 'Where the press at? Point out the press!' and started going crazy and yelling at everybody about how they didn't respect his genius. Then he started naming names of people he should be compared to—George Washington, Henry Ford, etc ... And he didn't even play ' Gold Digger'." | ||
2 | Momofuku Ando | 1,705,988 | A Google doodle for the noodle guru occurred on his would-have-been 105th birthday on 5 March. | ||
3 | House of Cards (U.S. TV series) | 885,920 | The third season of this political thriller TV series debuted in its entirety on Netflix on 27 February. | ||
4 | Leonard Nimoy | 873,806 | The death on 27 February of this beloved actor, best known for playing the role of Mr. Spock in the Star Trek franchise, led to widespread tributes. Spock's Vulcan salute bade us to "live long and prosper," as Nimoy did himself. | ||
5 | Stephen Hawking | 841,024 | The former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon makes his 18th straight appearance in the Top 25 this week. And at the Oscars, Eddie Redmayne won Best Actor for portraying him in The Theory of Everything. | ||
6 | Ronda Rousey | 788,398 | The UFC women's bantamweight champion beat Cat Zingano in a record-breaking 14 seconds during UFC 184 on 28 February. | ||
7 | Fifty Shades of Grey | 736,594 | The release of the film adaptation of this onetime Twilight fanfic continues to draw fans, though a 74% drop in views on the second weekend and a 56% drop on the third weekend suggest that everyone who was going to see it has done so. | ||
8 | House of Cards (season 3) | 554,178 | see #3 | ||
9 | Holi | 591,417 | This fun Hindu festival of colours and love, notable for people throwing coloured powder on the streets, fell on 6 March this year. | ||
10 | Fifty Shades of Grey (film) | 585,927 | See #7. |
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Six featured articles were promoted this week.
Three featured lists were promoted this week.
Forty (!!!) featured pictures were promoted this week.
Probably not since Henry VIII tried in vain to get an annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon has a matrimonial case been so long in the courts of the Roman Catholic Church as that on which nine Cardinals have just handed down a final decision. The male in this case is the son of one of France's most historic houses − Le Comte Boni de Castellane. The female is the daughter of a United States stockbroker, the late Jay Gould − the present Anna, Marquise de Talleyrand Périgord, Duchesse de Sagan. On March 14, 1895, Anna became La Comtesse de Castellane by a marriage solemnized in Manhattan by the late Archbishop Corrigan. After three children were born, La Comtesse obtained a civil divorce from Le Comte on grounds of infidelity. In 1908, she married Le Marquis de Talleyrand Périgord, Duc de Sagan. Thereupon, Le Comte asked the Vatican to annul the marriage, apparently that he might be free to marry again, within the Church.
Wikipedia was in many ways a very different place a decade ago, but in some important ways it was also very much the same. In October 2004, user Danny created the page for the first of three eponymous " Danny's contests", one of Wikipedia's very earliest organized content drives. The three iterations of Danny's contest—focusing, in turn, on creating new articles, destubbing, and featured content—would see editors rewarded for their work in key areas of Wikipedia by hundreds of dollars in Amazon vouchers. The third contest, held in September–October 2006, was the most innovative of these, focusing on improving the quality of established broad articles and in particular on trying to correct or influence the flow of featured content. In introducing the contest, Danny presaged many of the changes that Wikipedia would undergo, stating:
“ | We have to start changing the focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, we need 100,000 Feature-quality articles. | ” |
It was on these principles that the contests' spiritual successor, the first English Wikipedia Core Contest, was organized in November 2007. Running from November 25 to December 9, 2007, the Core Contest presented its rationale in its introduction, stating that "we all acknowledge the ideals of quality over quantity and the vital importance of core topics - yet how many really key articles do we each know of in really poor shape? ...so to improve [on] this situation we are announcing a two-week-long contest focusing on Wikipedia's most important articles." Danny and several other users had begun development on Veropedia at the time, an early Wikipedia content scraper which solicited recommendations on high-quality Wikipedia articles from editors for the purposes of static re-hosting, a motivating factor in their assistance in organizing this newer, broader effort. Mirroring the negotiations that still take place with broad community initiatives today, the project generated extensive discussion in late 2007, with the greatest topic of concern in particular being sourcing the monetary reward. This was at first to be fulfilled by Danny again, but after a delay in sourcing it (according to speculation, due to the condition of the success of Veropedia) the winners were finally announced and their prize money awarded on November 25, 2008, with the prize money supplied by Proteins. But despite the success of this first iteration of the contest, the bumpiness of actually awarding the winners discouraged future versions, and so the project went on an indefinite—and seemingly final—hiatus.
I have been interested in contests and games as a way of promoting content-building on Wikipedia for as long as I've been an editor here, and in a particularly glib moment in 2008, I started drafting the Flaming Joel-wiki award, a wiki-award offered to editors who improve one of the many subjects mentioned in Billy Joel's eclectic song " We Didn't Start the Fire". When I stumbled across relics of the Core Contest page in late 2011, I immediately saw value in this project and began the process of reviving it. The community scaffold that keeps Wikipedia running had gone through quite a bit of changes and improvements in the intervening time, so I was able to solve the funding issues which were so problematic in the first effort through application to the Wikimedia UK's microgrants program, which provided enough for a modest but sizable prize.
I decided to use vouchers to steer away from a direct cash incentive, hoping that that would lead to more scholarly and Wikipedia-related purchases on the part of the prize-winners, and I chose Amazon again because I suspect that any winner of such a contest could find something of use to purchase through them. I think that a prize on hand as an incentive is an important thing to have: they are a nice concrete gesture for the hours of work that some folks put into the place and a way to move away from sticks and towards carrots in steering featured content quality and focus.
I have run the competition on four occasions since then: March 10 to March 31 2012, which saw £250 in Amazon vouchers shared by six editors; August 2012, which saw the same prize shared by seven editors; April 2013, with the prize shared by three editors; and 10 February to 9 March 2014, with the prize shared by five. Each time the prizes have come from a WM UK microgrant, and buoyed by the success of this program, I resurrected the Stub Contest as well. Each time the contest has run, I have been impressed by the work that has been done, with the top 2 to 3 entries of each contest being particularly memorable. I almost hate singling out a favorite article, as that would mean omitting others I see as being just as important and enjoyable, and I invite readers to take a look at the diffs in the entries section of the contests to see first-hand what it is that I find so exciting about this program.
The
featured article process is becoming ever more rigorous, but while this rigour is improving the quality of the articles we generate though the process, it is at the same time leaning heavily in favor of smaller, more esoteric, and more narrowly-focus articles more easily navigable through the straits of featured article candidacy. I continue to be excited about the Core Contest because I see it as a way of encouraging the expansion of broad articles that are typically neglected by our article improvement incentives, a problem that, though it first emerged in Danny's time, has only become more and more stark today. In examining the edit histories of many of the articles brought before the contest, I notice that the majority of our coverage of broadly-constructed topics, those most critical to our success as an encyclopedia, have seen little in the way of substantive community improvement over the years; except in the cases where specific editors make focused drives to bring an article to good or featured status, our core articles as they appear today were mostly written long ago, their content having changed for the most part only cosmetically in recent years. Though the times and the context we edit in have changed, the central principles of the Core Contest remain the same as they were when the contest first ran: to improve the encyclopedia where it matters most yet sees it the least. I see Wikipedia as being at a crossroads: the novelty of being newfangled is wearing off, replaced by the rigour of guidelines, restrictions, and rules that have proven essential in the evolution of Wikipedia.
I believe that Wikipedia is traversing a grey area, where the goal is status as an established and reliable online encyclopedia, and we need to strive to ensure our core content is being improved along the way.
Reader comments
The Wikimedia Foundation gave the Signpost an advance copy of the results of a survey of English Wikipedia readers regarding Wikimedia fundraising, due for official release today, and shared details that do not appear in the final report. The survey, conducted by Lake Research Partners in February, asked a number of questions about readers' attitudes towards the WMF's fundraising to gauge the awareness and effectiveness of those efforts.
This is not the first WMF fundraising survey. After contributing to Wikipedia, donors are able to complete a survey if they wish; more than 250,000 of them did so in December 2014. Professional surveys are also done, such as the 2011 readership survey, which included questions about fundraising—but Lisa Gruwell, the Foundation's chief revenue officer, told the Signpost that "this is the first professional, randomized survey of Wikipedia fundraising to include donors and non-donors."
Country | Number of readers surveyed (% of respondents) | % of total English Wikipedia page views, December 2014 |
---|---|---|
United States | 1000 (41.7%) | 36.4 % |
United Kingdom | 500 (20.8%) | 9.7 % |
Canada | 400 (16.7%) | 5.8 % |
India | 0 | 5.8 % |
Australia/New Zealand | 400 (16.7%) | 3.4 % |
Germany | 0 | 2.0 % |
Philippines | 0 | 1.5 % |
France | 0 | 1.2 % |
China | 0 | 1.2 % |
Ireland | 0 | 0.7 % |
The survey questioned a sample of 2,300 people who said they used Wikipedia at least once a month. They were from five primarily English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with the last two countries combined into one sample group. Celinda Lake of Lake Research told the Signpost that "the sample was stratified geographically by region and the data were weighted by gender, age, region, and race where appropriate to reflect the population of internet users in each country."
Lake said "Respondents for the survey were drawn from an international panel of over 2 million Internet users in the target countries who have agreed to participate in online surveys, supplied by GMI", a market research company that specializes in selecting participants for surveys. The selection bias is unclear for people who apparently had previously agreed to GMI's request that they participate in unspecified online surveys.
Lake Research did not survey readers in countries where English is not the primary language, but nevertheless have significant populations of readers of the English Wikipedia, such as India, Germany, the Philippines, France, and China. Gruwell said that they chose to focus only on five English-speaking countries for a number of reasons, including making the survey more manageable and achieving more comparable results.
The 2,300 participants ranged from daily users of the encyclopedia to casual visitors, with most responding that they use the encyclopedia several times a week (27–35%, depending on the country) or several times a month (21–24%). Those who indicated they use Wikipedia less than once a month were not included in the survey.
Surprisingly, up to 40% of people are not aware that Wikipedia is a non-profit operation. While this is an improvement on the 2011 Readership Survey – which reported that about half of Wikipedia readers were unaware of this – it is troubling given the importance attached within the community and the Foundation to its non-profit status.
Wikipedia's revenue source was similarly not well understood. UK readers were the only group in which a majority identified reader donations as Wikipedia's primary funding source. Significant numbers of respondents in all countries surveyed have no idea where the money comes from, or identified it as a mix of sources including government funding. A disturbing percentage (13–20%) thought that Wikipedia is supported by advertising.
Perhaps respondents were confusing fundraising appeals with paid advertising. Lake told the Signpost that "They may be confusing other online ads they see in close proximity to their use of Wikipedia pages. They are also possibly making an assumption that since many major websites are supported by ads, Wikipedia must be also." Lake noted the survey also asked if they had seen commercial advertising on Wikipedia. While 56–60% said no, some 20% either thought they had seen ads on the encyclopedia or were unsure.
The result may point to a lack of awareness of Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality and independence. Gruwell said: "This is a fairly consistent misunderstanding about Wikipedia that we see across the board and we have seen it for years, and it's an ongoing challenge for the movement. We think it is important to communicate the non-profit or non-commercial message in banners and other communications to help better educate readers about this."
Depending on the country, 55–63% of respondents recalled seeing a fundraising appeal on Wikipedia. When asked about how many they remembered, around one-third said two or three, and slightly fewer said four to nine. Despite some vocal complaints about the frequency of the banners last year, only 4–5% regard the appeals as "too intrusive".
Perhaps the most surprising results were respondents' primary reason for donating to Wikipedia. By overwhelming numbers, they stated that their motivation was their frequent use of Wikipedia. Given that support of Wikipedia is often expressed in terms of a strong commitment towards free and open access and dissemination of knowledge, it is surprising that relatively few donors cited this. Perhaps those who have those principles are already avid users of Wikipedia, or perhaps it is indicative of the widespread use of Wikipedia – as the sixth-most-used website in the world for so long, it may have simply become part of the furniture for most people. This may be a reason for donating, but it may also lead to apathy or indifference in those who do not donate, something the survey was not designed to explore.
It is important to know why readers donate to Wikipedia, but other questions need to be asked to reach people who do not donate. The survey identified about a quarter of respondents as "donor targets": people who donate elsewhere but not to the encyclopedia.
The survey examined which types of causes were favored among both donors and non-donors. In most of the countries, those who donate to Wikipedia appear to be generally more altruistic than non-donors, in that they are more likely to donate to other charitable causes too. Popular charities among those who did not donate to Wikipedia were those related to poverty, health and medicine, and, in the US, religion, causes which are generally perceived to have little to do with Wikipedia's mission of encyclopedia building and the free dissemination of knowledge.
Given the nature of these causes, specialized appeals may be needed to reach these donor target groups, as they may be unlikely to be swayed by typical fundraising banners or testimonials featuring sad-eyed Wikipedia editors. Targeted banners including statements that Wikipedia is perhaps the world's most frequently consulted medical resource or touting the ability of free access to information to help alleviate poverty may be effective. Gruwell said "It is an interesting finding and we may explore how to talk about this area of work with those who care most about certain kinds of information in Wikipedia."
The survey concludes that "Users are not turned off by Wikipedia's fundraising messages", and the survey results appear to bear that out. Despite vocal dissenters voicing criticism of the campaign, these sentiments don't appear to be shared among the respondents. More than half of respondents generally feel that Wikipedia asks for less money than other organizations and that fundraising messages do not appear "very often".
When asked about the statement "I don't mind the fundraising messages on Wikipedia because I know the fundraising is necessary", up to 70% in each country indicated agreement. The suggested cause in this statement might be considered a loaded question. When asked about whether the response would have been different had the last seven words been omitted, Gruwell replied: "It's possible. I don't think we should try to guess how readers would have answered a different question."
Similar questions worded differently yielded smaller majorities, though still indicate a generally positive attitude towards fundraising appeals. For example, 42–51% indicated they "enjoyed learning" about Wikipedia from the fundraising campaign (another potentially loaded question compared with what might have been more neutral wording – "learned" rather than "enjoyed learning"). Fundraising messages "annoyed" 19–31% of people; this might seem to conflict with the results of the "I don't mind" option, or it might indicate that while they are personally annoyed by the messages, they also saw the need for them.
Up to half of the respondents said the more the fundraising messages appear, the less they notice them. However, 34–46% said they pay attention to the messages. This may indicate a widespread concern among Wikipedia readers about desensitization and overexposure, even if those readers don't feel they are personally susceptible.
The size of the banner ads was the focus of some of the questions. Readers think the larger banner ads are clearer and more convincing, but only by slight margins. When asked about the intrusiveness of the different sized banners, readers rate them about the same irrespective of size.
Gruwell said: "This survey helps us understand reader's opinions of the banners. We pair this with what we know about what readers do when they see the banners through our donation rates." She pointed to results that appear in the Foundation's latest
quarterly review of fundraising which indicate that in December 2014, the large banners produced a donation rate five times that of the smaller ones. Those results speak for themselves, so it appears the large banners are here to stay.
Reader comments
March is international Women's History Month and March 8 is International Women's Day. The community has arranged a number of commemorative initiatives focused on the gender gap, under the banner " WikiWomen's History Month". The first such effort was organized in 2012: in the Signpost, then-community fellow Sarah Stierch said: "while I believe every day should be women's history day, I also feel we should take advantage of the month of March to bring awareness to the lack of coverage about women's history on Wikipedia, and concerns about the gender gap in Wikipedia: only 9% of our active contributors are women." A number of sizable community events and editathons are scheduled in March in support of this year's effort (though more than half of them will be in the United States) under the banner. An even larger number of events are clustered around March 7 and 8 were organized by the ArtAndFeminism campaign, including 50 meetups in the US alone and a main event at the MoMA in New York City.
Concurrently, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced that this month's Foundation blog is focusing on gender diversity in the Wikimedia movement. The communications team is asking for community suggestions on "your favorite, high-quality Wikipedia articles about notable women ... we're looking for factual, well-written and insightful articles, from the wiki of your choice." The winning articles, selected by the communications team, will be written into a report to be posted in the Foundation blog sometime after March 15. The blog will also be publishing profiles, research overviews, program reports, and best practices during the month.
Most significantly, the WMF rolled out their "Inspire" grantmaking campaign on March 4, an open invitation to the community for thoughts and opinions on possible ways to address the gap. The best of the ideas, drawn from the IdeaLab and endorsed by community, will be matched to long-term advisors. When necessary, funding is also available, and is likely to be disseminated by a new committee of existing committee members from the two grantmaking volunteer bodies, the IEG and GAC. If the pilot project is successful (signs so far indicate a high level of activity) it is likely to be broken off entirely into a new, third grantmaking scheme, Inspire Grants. The two next major dates will be April 1–15, when the funding committee will make its final recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation, and April 30, when winning grantees will be announced by WMF staff. The hope is for 20 new grant-supported gender gap-focused projects and an (ambitious) five- to ten-fold increase in IdeaLab traffic; as of writing the project has attracted some 200 participants and 40 IdeaLab submissions.
The maximum budget for the campaign is US$250,000, funded by withdrawals from the IEG and PEG programs, currently on hold for non-time-sensitive proposals for the three months from February to April. This, and the timing of the announcement, has been a source of controversy. In communications on the community mailing list, the director of community resources Siko Bouterse stated in January that the campaign is an experiment in proactive grantmaking, "to see if we can provide meaningful community support and significantly increase impact on Wikimedia projects in a single strategic area". If successful, she said, the campaign will serve as a pilot for other single-issue campaigns. Experimental thematic campaigns are a new organizational theme that was included in this year's annual plan (albeit see previous Signpost coverage) and planning for the Inspire campaign has been in progress since last December. The event is the first such experiment by the WMF. It is likely to be a part of the recent Foundation pivot towards a grantmaking focus on more and smaller projects than in the past. R
For more Signpost coverage on the gender gap see our Gender gap series.
An article was deleted on March 3 this week which is ostensibly the longest-lasting hoax article found on Wikipedia to date. The article, Jar'Edo Wens, was created on May 29, 2005 by an IP address originating in Australia. At its creation, the article, in its entirety, read "In Australian Aboriginal mythology, Jar'Edo Wens is a god of earthly knowledge and physical might, created by Altjira to oversee that the people did not get too big-headed, associated with victory and intelligence." It remained largely unchanged until its deletion; the same editor also added a link to Jar'Edo Wens to the article Australian Aboriginal mythology.
The link was removed from that higher-traffic page in 2007, though the original hoax article remained. In November 2014, an IP editor added a hoax template to the article, which automatically placed it in Category:Wikipedia suspected hoax articles. Snowager told the Signpost that he regularly patrols that category and found this article there. On March 1, Snowager submitted the article to Articles for Deletion. In the resulting discussion, Calamondin12 noted that Jar'Edo Wens was "perhaps derived from the actual English name Jared Owens". The article was speedy deleted by Newyorkbrad "as a blatant and indisputable hoax", making it, as of time of writing, the longest-lived discovered hoax on Wikipedia: nine years and nine months, a half month longer than the previous record-holder, Pikes on Cliffs, a fake historical structure in Spain.
Though this may now be the longest-lived hoax ever in the pages of Wikipedia, it is not the highest profile one, since the article was orphaned throughout much of its existence. G, R
For more Signpost coverage on hoaxes see our Hoaxes series.
ThinkProgress tech reporter Lauren C. Williams wrote a long article (March 6) on how the Gamergate controversy has spilled over onto Wikipedia. Disputes regarding this video game controversy have raged for months on Wikipedia, culminating in a contentious Arbitration case which involved numerous editors and administrators, including this author. This has already received heavy media coverage, but Williams has produced what appears to be the most thorough piece of journalism about the Wikipedia controversy, including a number of original interviews.
“ | There is no reason why anybody, regardless of gender or political beliefs, should have to go onto a website about sharing knowledge and writing an encyclopedia — which is pretty damn geeky — and get harassed while doing it. It’s absurd. | ” |
— Sarah Stierch |
Williams corrected the widely-reported misconception that the "Five Horsemen", the Wikipedia editors targeted by Gamergate, were feminists, noting that only one of the five was female and edited articles related to feminism, while the others were "longtime Wikipedia editors aiming to return normalcy and factual accuracy to the Gamergate pages". Williams interviewed one of them, NorthBySouthBaranof, who was topic banned by the Arbitration Committee, as well as Mark Bernstein, whose vocal blog posts about Gamergate made him a target of their ire as well. Both discussed the harassment they and others received at the hands of Gamergate. NorthbySouthBaronof complained that “I haven’t seen one note of sympathy about the harassment from anyone in ArbCom, which says, ‘We don’t care about what happens off Wikipedia.'" Williams also spoke with GorillaWarfare, noting that she was the only member of ArbCom who openly identified as female. She said "The Arbitration Committee rules only on user conduct, which is a fact that outside observers have been missing. We do not, have not, and cannot make rulings on the content of articles or the validity of users’ ideologies.”
Williams interviewed two female longtime Wikipedia editors, Amy Senger ( ASenger) and Sarah Stierch ( Missvain), about larger issues on the encyclopedia, including systemic bias and the gender gap. Senger said that the ArbCom decision was evidence of the former and that “the people who are more vocal and combative tend to prevail in disputes” before the Committee. Stierch spoke of "a history of hostility" on the website and said "The fact that I have to go to my volunteer ‘job’ and fear that I’m going to get yelled at by somebody and get called a nasty name...You shouldn’t have to worry about what happens in your personal life...There is no reason why anybody, regardless of gender or political beliefs, should have to go onto a website about sharing knowledge and writing an encyclopedia — which is pretty damn geeky — and get harassed while doing it. It’s absurd.” She is among those who feel that the Wikimedia Foundation is not doing enough about these issues. "They’re the hospital administrator and the lunatics are running the asylum," Stierch said.
At Slate, Amanda Marcotte responded to Williams' article by writing " On Wikipedia, Gamergate Refuses to Die" (March 6). Marcotte wrote: "In an effort to stick to Wikipedia’s touted belief in 'neutrality,' the committee decided to hand out banishments on both sides of the equation: both to people for injecting the harassing claims into pages and for the people who were trying to clean it up...Wikipedia lost the very people who were trying to guard the gates in the first place. What happens to the next victim of a Wikipedia harassment campaign if the defenders are getting squeezed out through this pox-on-both-your-houses system?" G
For more Signpost coverage on Gamergate see our Gamergate series.
At Medium, Gilad Lotan, chief data scientist at Betaworks, examines (March 7) last September's Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax. The hoax, whose perpetrators are still unknown but who may be Russian, involved fake accounts on Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other services. Lotan identified AmandaGray91 as the source of a hoax article on Wikipedia attributing the fake explosion to a terrorist attack. The account, created only eight days earlier, had made previous edits to articles about Russian author Alexander Asov, the Aditya Birla Group, owner of the chemical plant, and carbon black, which is manufactured there. Lotan wrote "Wikipedia editors are a global community that has very clear rules of conduct as well as an internal authority rank. As a completely new Wikipedia editor, it is very difficult to simply add a page, especially one depicting an ISIS terror attack on US territory, and expect it to stick around for long. The page was taken down quite rapidly, as users who were led to it from tweets flagged it as potentially problematic." G
For more Signpost coverage on hoaxes see our Hoaxes series.
The Daily Beast profiles (March 4) Brian Connelly, owner of the domain loser.com, which made headlines (and a traffic spike for Wikipedia) last week when Connelly redirected it to the Wikipedia article for Kanye West, after West nearly interrupted Beck on stage at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards. (Beck first became famous in 1993 with the single " Loser".) Connelly has owned the domain since 1995 and in the past he redirected it to other targets, including sites for Governor Jim Hodges, Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks, Google, and Reddit. Some of Connelly's ire is based on seeing West perform at the Bonnaroo Music Festival last year:
“ | Kanye got up onstage and just started bitching at the audience because I think someone had spray painted "F--- Kanye" on a porta-potty or something. Then he started yelling, "Where the press at? Point out the press!" and started going crazy and yelling at everybody about how they didn’t respect his genius. Then he started naming names of people he should be compared to— George Washington, Henry Ford, etc. My wife was really enjoying it, but I wasn’t. We’re a paying audience showing him respect, and he launches into us with this egocentric f---ing bull---- rant, and it was insane. And he didn’t even play " Gold Digger. G | ” |
In an effort to protect and maintain the privacy of Wikipedia's thousands of editors, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has filed a lawsuit against the United States' National Security Agency (NSA), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Attorney General. This action takes aim at the so-called "upstream surveillance" practiced by the NSA, whose broad scope can include the communications between and edits made by Wikipedia users. The WMF has been joined by eight other organizations, including Amnesty International USA, Global Fund for Women, and Human Rights Watch. They are all being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is supplying much of the lawsuit's financial backing.
The move comes as the latest chapter in the WMF's long-standing opposition to government intrusion on the Internet, including the unprecedented one-day SOPA blackout in 2012 and Jimmy Wales' high-profile Wikimania speech in 2013.
The lawsuit states that "seizing and searching Wikimedia's communications is akin to seizing and searching the patron records of the largest library in the world—except that Wikimedia's communications provide a more comprehensive and detailed picture of its users' interests than any previous set of library records ever could have offered" (clause 67). It asserts that confidential communications among Wikipedia volunteers and staffers are being intercepted, and that "there is a substantial likelihood that the NSA retains, reads, and disseminates Wikimedia's international communications because Wikimedia is communicating with or about persons the government has targeted" (clause 71).
The upstream surveillance targeted by the WMF includes four different processes, laid out in clause 43 of the lawsuit: copying, filtering, content review, and retention and use. As alleged by the WMF, this means, respectively, that
Moreover, the lawsuit states that there are few restrictions on the use of the information from (4):
“ | Upstream surveillance is not limited to communications sent or received by the NSA's targets. Rather, it involves the surveillance of essentially everyone's communications. The NSA systematically examines the full content of substantially all international text-based communications (and many domestic ones) for references to its search terms. In other words, the NSA copies and reviews the communications of millions of innocent people to determine whether they are discussing or reading anything containing the NSA's search terms. [clause 44; emphasis in source] | ” |
The NSA's legal justification for this is in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, 50 U.S.C. § 1881a.
The WMF's standing rests in the Edward Snowden leaks. On a PowerPoint slide detailing the NSA's interest in HTTP, Wikipedia is listed; it also remarks that "nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet uses HTTP." This was a major factor in hurrying the deployment of HTTP Secure (https) by default to all Wikimedia projects. Beyond this solitary slide, the lawsuit declares that Wikimedia communications "are intercepted, copied, and reviewed" by the NSA. Katherine Maher, the WMF's chief communications officer, wrote in an email to the Signpost that this line was "based on what we know about how the NSA has interpreted FAA and the breadth of the surveillance practices the NSA implemented under the authority of the FAA. The slide helped confirm that conclusion. We will present further information as the case moves forward."
The WMF claims that such intelligence gathering is harmful to their mission, such as in countering systemic bias—the tilt of focus when, for instance, a broadly white, educated, middle-to-upper class male group writes an encyclopedia. In the Foundation's view, non-US editors could justifiably fear that their Wikimedia-related contributions, emails, and even page views will be intercepted by the NSA and shared with their own governments. In a related New York Times op-ed, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and WMF executive director Lila Tretikov contend that given the long-standing links between American and Egyptian intelligence, a hypothetical Egyptian editor would "surely be less likely to add her knowledge or have that conversation, for fear of reprisal." Maher echoed these points, writing that these "dragnet mass surveillance practices create a chilling effect on free expression and association."
The lawsuit rhetorically echoes the idea that the NSA "undermines" the plaintiffs:
“ | Upstream surveillance undermines Wikimedia's ability to conduct its work. Wikimedia depends on its ability to ensure anonymity for individuals abroad who view, edit, or otherwise use Wikimedia projects and related web pages. The ability to read, research, and write anonymously is essential to the freedoms of expression and inquiry. Upstream surveillance harms the ability of Wikimedia's staff to engage in communications essential to their work and compromises Wikimedia's organizational mission by making online access to knowledge a vehicle for U.S. government monitoring. [clause 74; related clauses include 2, 83, 88, 93, 98, 103, 108, 113, and 118] | ” |
In the New York Times op-ed, titled "Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users," Wales and Tretikov assert that Wikimedia editors should be free to edit and email without fear of government oversight: "Privacy is an essential right. It makes freedom of expression possible, and sustains freedom of inquiry and association. It empowers us to read, write and communicate in confidence, without fear of persecution. Knowledge flourishes where privacy is protected."
In a similar vein, the WMF published a blog post emphasizing privacy as "the bedrock of individual freedom" and "a universal right that sustains the freedoms of expression and association." The post decried the NSA's activities, which they said "rightfully alarmed" the Wikipedia community when disclosed (see previous Signpost coverage). At the conclusion of the post, the WMF legal team answered many frequently asked questions, which were reproduced on Meta for convenience. Of note, however, is that while the WMF correctly identifies that individuals can register anonymous accounts—"we don't require real names, email addresses, or any other personally identifying information, and we never sell your data"—they do not mention that those who edit without one are publicly identified, in on-wiki records, with their individual IP address.
The ACLU is representing the plaintiffs pro bono, so no Wikimedia donor funds will be devoted to the lawsuit beyond those already budgeted for the legal team and regular staff time. This is significant, given that a similarly scoped case, Clapper v. Amnesty, took years to wind its way through the US legal system before it was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2013. We asked Maher if the WMF was prepared to fight a case that could last just as long:
"The Foundation is prepared and committed for the duration."
The net punking of Kanye West, which redirected the web address "loser.com" to his Wiki page, shot him to the top of the list and got Wikipedia in the news again. Other than that, a dull week, with only three new entries in the top 10: a UFC champion, a Google Doodle and a Hindu festival involving people throwing powder at each other (though that does sound fun).
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. See here for a list of the most edited articles of the week.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of 1 to 7 March 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Kanye West | 4,291,451 | The rapper/ entrepreneur is, it is fair to say, a polarising figure. Whether he's campaigning against other artists' award wins during their acceptance speeches, comparing himself to God and Picasso, or naming his daughter North West, it seems the 21-time Grammy winner just can't stop throwing the media for a loop. But it seems his most persistent recent gaffe has been his ill-judged tirade against Beck, winner of this year's Grammy for album of the year, which has apparently earned him the undying enmity of Beck fans. This enmity has manifested itself in many ways, but this week, the web address "loser.com", which just happens to share a name with Beck's best known single, was redirected to his Wikipedia page. This redirect has led, naturally, to a spike in views to said page. The perpetrator of this egregious offence eventually made himself known as Brian Connelly, a 44-year-old systems analyst from South Carolina, whose reasons are apparently deep-seated. "I went to Bonnaroo last year," he told The Daily Beast, "He started yelling, 'Where the press at? Point out the press!' and started going crazy and yelling at everybody about how they didn't respect his genius. Then he started naming names of people he should be compared to—George Washington, Henry Ford, etc ... And he didn't even play ' Gold Digger'." | ||
2 | Momofuku Ando | 1,705,988 | A Google doodle for the noodle guru occurred on his would-have-been 105th birthday on 5 March. | ||
3 | House of Cards (U.S. TV series) | 885,920 | The third season of this political thriller TV series debuted in its entirety on Netflix on 27 February. | ||
4 | Leonard Nimoy | 873,806 | The death on 27 February of this beloved actor, best known for playing the role of Mr. Spock in the Star Trek franchise, led to widespread tributes. Spock's Vulcan salute bade us to "live long and prosper," as Nimoy did himself. | ||
5 | Stephen Hawking | 841,024 | The former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon makes his 18th straight appearance in the Top 25 this week. And at the Oscars, Eddie Redmayne won Best Actor for portraying him in The Theory of Everything. | ||
6 | Ronda Rousey | 788,398 | The UFC women's bantamweight champion beat Cat Zingano in a record-breaking 14 seconds during UFC 184 on 28 February. | ||
7 | Fifty Shades of Grey | 736,594 | The release of the film adaptation of this onetime Twilight fanfic continues to draw fans, though a 74% drop in views on the second weekend and a 56% drop on the third weekend suggest that everyone who was going to see it has done so. | ||
8 | House of Cards (season 3) | 554,178 | see #3 | ||
9 | Holi | 591,417 | This fun Hindu festival of colours and love, notable for people throwing coloured powder on the streets, fell on 6 March this year. | ||
10 | Fifty Shades of Grey (film) | 585,927 | See #7. |
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Six featured articles were promoted this week.
Three featured lists were promoted this week.
Forty (!!!) featured pictures were promoted this week.
Probably not since Henry VIII tried in vain to get an annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon has a matrimonial case been so long in the courts of the Roman Catholic Church as that on which nine Cardinals have just handed down a final decision. The male in this case is the son of one of France's most historic houses − Le Comte Boni de Castellane. The female is the daughter of a United States stockbroker, the late Jay Gould − the present Anna, Marquise de Talleyrand Périgord, Duchesse de Sagan. On March 14, 1895, Anna became La Comtesse de Castellane by a marriage solemnized in Manhattan by the late Archbishop Corrigan. After three children were born, La Comtesse obtained a civil divorce from Le Comte on grounds of infidelity. In 1908, she married Le Marquis de Talleyrand Périgord, Duc de Sagan. Thereupon, Le Comte asked the Vatican to annul the marriage, apparently that he might be free to marry again, within the Church.
Wikipedia was in many ways a very different place a decade ago, but in some important ways it was also very much the same. In October 2004, user Danny created the page for the first of three eponymous " Danny's contests", one of Wikipedia's very earliest organized content drives. The three iterations of Danny's contest—focusing, in turn, on creating new articles, destubbing, and featured content—would see editors rewarded for their work in key areas of Wikipedia by hundreds of dollars in Amazon vouchers. The third contest, held in September–October 2006, was the most innovative of these, focusing on improving the quality of established broad articles and in particular on trying to correct or influence the flow of featured content. In introducing the contest, Danny presaged many of the changes that Wikipedia would undergo, stating:
“ | We have to start changing the focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, we need 100,000 Feature-quality articles. | ” |
It was on these principles that the contests' spiritual successor, the first English Wikipedia Core Contest, was organized in November 2007. Running from November 25 to December 9, 2007, the Core Contest presented its rationale in its introduction, stating that "we all acknowledge the ideals of quality over quantity and the vital importance of core topics - yet how many really key articles do we each know of in really poor shape? ...so to improve [on] this situation we are announcing a two-week-long contest focusing on Wikipedia's most important articles." Danny and several other users had begun development on Veropedia at the time, an early Wikipedia content scraper which solicited recommendations on high-quality Wikipedia articles from editors for the purposes of static re-hosting, a motivating factor in their assistance in organizing this newer, broader effort. Mirroring the negotiations that still take place with broad community initiatives today, the project generated extensive discussion in late 2007, with the greatest topic of concern in particular being sourcing the monetary reward. This was at first to be fulfilled by Danny again, but after a delay in sourcing it (according to speculation, due to the condition of the success of Veropedia) the winners were finally announced and their prize money awarded on November 25, 2008, with the prize money supplied by Proteins. But despite the success of this first iteration of the contest, the bumpiness of actually awarding the winners discouraged future versions, and so the project went on an indefinite—and seemingly final—hiatus.
I have been interested in contests and games as a way of promoting content-building on Wikipedia for as long as I've been an editor here, and in a particularly glib moment in 2008, I started drafting the Flaming Joel-wiki award, a wiki-award offered to editors who improve one of the many subjects mentioned in Billy Joel's eclectic song " We Didn't Start the Fire". When I stumbled across relics of the Core Contest page in late 2011, I immediately saw value in this project and began the process of reviving it. The community scaffold that keeps Wikipedia running had gone through quite a bit of changes and improvements in the intervening time, so I was able to solve the funding issues which were so problematic in the first effort through application to the Wikimedia UK's microgrants program, which provided enough for a modest but sizable prize.
I decided to use vouchers to steer away from a direct cash incentive, hoping that that would lead to more scholarly and Wikipedia-related purchases on the part of the prize-winners, and I chose Amazon again because I suspect that any winner of such a contest could find something of use to purchase through them. I think that a prize on hand as an incentive is an important thing to have: they are a nice concrete gesture for the hours of work that some folks put into the place and a way to move away from sticks and towards carrots in steering featured content quality and focus.
I have run the competition on four occasions since then: March 10 to March 31 2012, which saw £250 in Amazon vouchers shared by six editors; August 2012, which saw the same prize shared by seven editors; April 2013, with the prize shared by three editors; and 10 February to 9 March 2014, with the prize shared by five. Each time the prizes have come from a WM UK microgrant, and buoyed by the success of this program, I resurrected the Stub Contest as well. Each time the contest has run, I have been impressed by the work that has been done, with the top 2 to 3 entries of each contest being particularly memorable. I almost hate singling out a favorite article, as that would mean omitting others I see as being just as important and enjoyable, and I invite readers to take a look at the diffs in the entries section of the contests to see first-hand what it is that I find so exciting about this program.
The
featured article process is becoming ever more rigorous, but while this rigour is improving the quality of the articles we generate though the process, it is at the same time leaning heavily in favor of smaller, more esoteric, and more narrowly-focus articles more easily navigable through the straits of featured article candidacy. I continue to be excited about the Core Contest because I see it as a way of encouraging the expansion of broad articles that are typically neglected by our article improvement incentives, a problem that, though it first emerged in Danny's time, has only become more and more stark today. In examining the edit histories of many of the articles brought before the contest, I notice that the majority of our coverage of broadly-constructed topics, those most critical to our success as an encyclopedia, have seen little in the way of substantive community improvement over the years; except in the cases where specific editors make focused drives to bring an article to good or featured status, our core articles as they appear today were mostly written long ago, their content having changed for the most part only cosmetically in recent years. Though the times and the context we edit in have changed, the central principles of the Core Contest remain the same as they were when the contest first ran: to improve the encyclopedia where it matters most yet sees it the least. I see Wikipedia as being at a crossroads: the novelty of being newfangled is wearing off, replaced by the rigour of guidelines, restrictions, and rules that have proven essential in the evolution of Wikipedia.
I believe that Wikipedia is traversing a grey area, where the goal is status as an established and reliable online encyclopedia, and we need to strive to ensure our core content is being improved along the way.
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