Affiliates' nomination of WMF trustees announced; FDC's straight talking to WMF
Since 2008, Wikimedia chapters (additionally, since 2013, the single thematic organisation) have been permitted to select two of the 10 board trustees for two-year terms that start in even-numbered years. Despite the widespread use of the term "affiliate-selected" on Meta and in announcements, user groups, which number 58 of the 90 affiliates, are still not part of the process.
On 9 May, facilitators Chris Keating, Lorenzo Losa, and Lane Rasberry announced that the successful candidates in this year's election are Christophe Henner and Nataliia Tymkiv. In this election, 40 of the 42 eligible affiliates voted, a marked turnaround from the 2014 election, in which only 27 of 41 voted, a poor showing that almost certainly affected the outcome. The voting of each affiliate is concealed from Wikimedians, except those who can log in to the chapters wiki. The election is conducted using a single transferable vote system, in which the participating organisations number each candidate in order of their preference; these preferences are then exhaustively redistributed in rounds (nine in this election). The first preferences received by each candidate are published, but the final distributions are posted only on the secret chapters wiki. Curiously, the facilitators stated that "it is the closest ASBS result for some time", while at the same time revealing that the second-highest vote was "between Nataliia (16.09) and Siska (9.91)", figures that do not appear to be close.
The numbers of first preferences received by each candidate were: Christophe Henner (9.00); Siska Doviana (6.75); Jan Ainali (5.50); Osmar Valdebenito (5.50); Nataliia Tymkiv (4.75); Susanna Mkrtchyan (3.25); Lodewijk Gelauff (2.50); Maarten Deneckere (1.50); Kunal Mehta (1.25); and Leigh Thelmadatter (0.00).
Christophe Henner ( candidate statement and résumé) is deputy CEO of Webedia ( google translation, website), the digital division of Fimalac. He has been a Wikimedian volunteer for 12 years, and has been a board member of Wikimedia France for 10 years.
Nataliia Tymkiv ( candidate statement and résumé) is from western Ukraine. She has masters degrees in information management and public administration. Her career has involved the role of executive director and chief accountant in the private sector, and since 2010 she has worked for the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law, a think-tank and lobby group of media lawyers and experts specialising in media policy and human rights. Nataliia has been a member of the Ukrainian chapter since 2012 and a board member since 2013, with responsibilities for financial matters and programmatic work.
We asked Christophe and Nataliia a series of questions related to their nomination (which still has to be approved by the board itself). Are they concerned at the lack of consistency and transparency in how each voting organisation conducted its selection process? (The Signpost knows of only four affiliates that have publicised their votes: Germany, France, the UK, and Ukraine.) Nataliia believes the process "can be organised better and in a more transparent way", and described Wikimedia Ukraine's detailed and open process. "I think that WMFR was very bold and brave to share their reasoning first. ... Personally I believe that voting should be public ... though it seems to have its drawbacks", linking to a Meta discussion on the question. For Christophe, consistency is not such an issue, but he would opt for publishing the detailed results of each affiliate on Meta.
James Heilman has declared that he is happy to return to the WMF board. We asked the nominees whether they are in favour of appointing him to the recently vacated community-selected seat on the board. Christophe wrote:
| “ | I am actually not in favour of appointing him. Whoever is right or wrong, in the coming month the board of trustees will have to reshape itself, to rebuild trust within the board, with the staff, with community, to build a vision and to lead us through change. Appointing someone that left the board a few weeks ago will make all of that harder. I do understand the reasoning behind that question. And even if it is felt as unfair, we must all focus on what we need to do to get better. We need to act always in favor of moving forward and build the movement we strive for. Right now we are in a mending process, having James appointed or selected during that process could reopen wounds. I'd [rather the board avoided] that for the coming month. Focus on the future, and learn from the past, not focusing on it. | ” |
Nataliia's attitude was different: "I do not have full information about the removal, but based on what I know I would say yes, it is his place by right. But it seems to me that maybe a healthy new community-selection process is needed. To confirm."
Our final question concerned the tension surrounding communications between WMF staff and the board during the upheavals of the past months. "Based on your considerable experience as a Wikimedia affiliate board member, how are you going to address what appears to be an institutional problem of how this communication should occur?" Readers may be interested in the considered responses of both nominees. Nataliia wrote:
| “ | First of all I am going to learn more about how the current system works. It is almost impossible to improve something, if you did not investigate it. There was a discussion about it during [the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin], and one of the things I would suggest is creating an Ombudsperson position (probably an advisory role to the Board), so that staff could discuss issues with ED and C-levels with him/her instead of discussing them with ED and C-levels. | ” |
Christophe, similarly, said he needs to gain a better understanding of where the failures were on a board level.
| “ | That actually is a first step for the board, to assess and own its own failures and build on it. This kind of failures are actually quite common in organisations. This is not a unique situation, to some extent we went through a similar one few years ago within Wikimedia France. It has happened before to many organisations, and will happen again. The question really is to learn from that and build a structure with the right people and the right processes. From the challenges I can foresee as a trustee, this one is actually one of the easiest one to tackle. | ” |
FDC recommendations
The WMF's volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee has announced its recommendations to the Board for funding the annual plans of applicant affiliates, with a total of US$1.138M. For the India-based Centre for Internet and Society, $153k is recommended (100% of the ask, 12.5% down on last year's funding for this applicant); Wikimedia Armenia $180k (93% of the ask, 50% up on last year); Wikimedia France, $620k (89%, 5% up on last year); and Wikimedia Norway, $185k (87%, 31% up on last year).
The FDC's review of the submitted WMF 2016–17 annual plan mentions "the extended period of turmoil within the Wikimedia Foundation, at the Board, executive, and staff levels ... The organizational stabilization phase has now begun and the FDC applauds the professionalism and passion for Wikimedia’s values shown by Foundation staff, executives and Board of Trustees." The FDC repeated its call for an external assessment of WMF governance—both the internal organisation of the Board and its relationships to other parts of the movement. In particular: Board composition, including selection processes, recruitment and diversity; the relationship between the Board and the ED; communication channels between the Board and the staff, community, and affiliates; the selection process and criteria, and onboarding, for appointed Board members; advisory board constituents, roles, and duties; and resources allocated to the Board to fulfil their duties/responsibilities.
The FDC pointed to the Foundation's short-term strategic plan that has been developed, on which the annual plan has been based: "The lack of clarity in strategic direction since 2014 has caused significant waste of time, money, talent, goodwill, and momentum."
On staffing, the FDC noted that: "while staff numbers are only increasing by 5 FTE in the forthcoming financial year, in the last 3 months of this year the plan is to hire 15 people—which sounds like a rush to fill positions before the year end, after a year with significant staff turnover. The FDC encourages the WMF to not rush hires, particularly given that C-level staff positions need to be filled. It is also not clear whether staffing matches the stated goals in this annual plan or in the strategic plan as a whole." The WMF, it advised, "might want to evaluate how the size of its staff and its staffing structure are organized" to meet the organisation's set goals, and pointed out that "the rationale for the new staff is missing from this proposal."
For the FDC's review of individual WMF departments there was trenchant criticism, including:
- an unexplained decrease in the results for key performance indicators for grantmaking and the Wikipedia Library;
- too few product programs dedicated to editing and little coordination on analysis and research on product. "The FDC expects the Product department (and the WMF in general) to improve the use of organizational memory, avoiding redundancies and focusing on more tangible activities that can lead to impact."
- "Communications’ plans are unclear and unfocused. The plan does not make clear when the communication team plans to promote the Wikipedia/Wikimedia movement brand vs. the Foundation brand. The programs and the goals are repeated, sometimes in an inconsistent way (e.g., blog readership target is "increased by 10%" in Goal 1 and "increase by 5%" in Goal 2). Moreover, most of the goals seem very functional / operational, and very focused on social media." (A comms staffer has replied to one of these points on the talkpage.)
- "The Talent and Culture (Human Resources) team has been chronically understaffed and has not had a permanent C-level representation for over a year." T
Brief notes
- Picture of the year: Voting for round 2 of the Picture of the Year contest has started on Wikimedia Commons. Round 2 will end on May 28, 2016. AK
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Maile66 and Amakuru. AK
- WMF staff departures: May 13 saw a further three senior staffers removed from the Foundation's list of staff and contractors: Kevin Leduc, manager of special projects; Rachel diCerbo, director of community engagement (product); and Sara Benson, senior learning and development manager. This follows another eight departures over the past six weeks (not including an intern and a volunteer): Moiz Syed, design manager; Kaity Hammerstein, user experience designer; Rosemary Rein, director of program capacity and learning; Yana Welinder, legal director; May Galloway, visual experience designer; S Page, technical writer; Floor Koudijs, senior manager, Wikipedia Education Program; and Michael Guss, research analyst. The Foundation's total staff numbers have dropped to 274, from a high of more than 290 a few months ago. T, AK
- Board minutes: The minutes for the March 21, 2016 WMF board meeting have been published. The main topic of the meeting was a governance discussion, followed by a closed executive session. AK
- Endowment: The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that venture capitalist Annette Campbell-White has joined the new Wikimedia Endowment Advisory Board as its second founding member, after Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. AK
- Cross-wiki notifications: The Wikimedia Foundation's Collaboration team has developed "cross-wiki notifications", a tool that allows users to get updates from all of the projects they contribute to, regardless of which project they're currently working in. AK
- The Core Contest: It's on again—a 30-day competition to improve Wikipedia's most important and most viewed articles, with prizes in the form of electronic store vouchers. The competition lasts from 15 May until 30 June. Enter the competition here. T
- RFC on creating page-mover permission: Discussion and supporting/opposing is well underway in an RFC on a proposal for page-moving permissions, which might include some or all of the following rights: suppressing redirect (moving a page without creating a redirect); moving subpages (moving a page and all its subpages in a single action); overriding title blacklist (moving a page to a title on the title blacklist; and overriding page-move throttle (moving a larger number of pages in a short time). T
Swiss chapter in turmoil
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| “ | "Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world." ( wikimedia.org front page) | ” |
Most of this "free educational content" that we proudly announce on the front page has been added, a few bits at a time, by countless volunteers who just want to share their knowledge and are gratified to take part in the largest encyclopedia project ever. Sadly, this wonderful online world risks being overrun by all sorts of commercial interests and government controls. If Wikipedia is to continue as a free and participatory movement we must continually do more to constrain undisclosed paid editing.
The Swiss chapter (WMCH) is going through some rough spots right now, as described in the Signpost's piece on May 2, "Wikimedia Switzerland's board and paid-editing firm". Contrary to what readers of the previous piece may believe, the chapter has not yet engaged in substantial deliberations around paid editing or whether it is acceptable for a Board member to do paid editing. Nor was the disclosure of the paid-editing activities of the board members "spontaneous".
A number of reasons lie behind this apparent lag. The Swiss chapter was made aware of this issue at its General Assembly only very recently, on April 2. People need time to form their opinion in a complicated linguistic, cultural, and social environment. Switzerland has three language-communities (German, French and Italian), and there are also significant contributions to the English Wikipedia. Chapter members contribute on their respective language-Wikipedias, according to those sites' different rules, sensibilities, and cultural traditions. The official communication language used in the chapter is English. The current paid-editing issue came up in the French-speaking community, but that doesn't mean that there are not similar issues in the German- or Italian-speaking communities, or among English-language contributors. A further complication is that quite a few Swiss Wikipedians belong to Wikimedia France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, but not to the Swiss chapter. We therefore tend to let each language community operate with relative independence.
I repeatedly added an initiative to the board meeting agenda that formal research on paid editing in Switzerland should be carried out, taking advantage of the Swiss federal election in 2015 to do an in-depth study of the edits on the candidates' Wikipedia pages across all Swiss languages. This had the potential to determine whether paid editing is being conducted on behalf of politicians, or even directly by them. Now that two board members have admitted their involvement in paid editing, we can understand why these repeated proposals received a lukewarm reception.
The Swiss board's reluctance to address the issue of paid editing is just an indicator of deeper problems in the chapter. Lack of transparency, confusion of roles, and conflicts of interest have all contributed to shifting the focus of the chapter's activities away from its core mission, which should be to support local volunteer editors. If editors start being paid instead of doing volunteer work, will that not affect how volunteer work is perceived? This attitude goes directly against Wikipedia's values and culture.
Out of the woodwork
Two new contributors, "Nattes à chat" and "LaMèreVeille", set up a gender gap workshop to write and improve articles on notable Swiss women. They sought support for their project, being relatively new in the movement. It was in Paris that Nattes à chat was informed about the August 2015 Festicabales event in Geneva. The theme of their future workshop was well received by Wikipedians from France, whereas some of the Swiss-based Wikipedians were uncomfortable with what they saw as the "feminisation" of the encyclopedia. Once the workshop started, the participants started to receive a lot of negative feedback from a very active Swiss contributor, and this got them looking into his background.
Their sleuthing first turned up the name of Racosch Sàrl, a PR firm that advertises "Wikipedia by Wikipedians"; then they discovered that two chapter board members were partners in this company, and finally that the third partner was precisely the contributor who was giving their project such a hard time. When asked about how they manage to separate volunteer and paid activities, one of these board members said that he just switches hats depending on whom he is talking to. That answer was very unsettling for Nattes à chat and LaMèreVeille, and both contributors also felt that there was a definite conflict of interest (COI).
Nattes à chat then asked a contributor to the French Wikipedia, Jules78120, for advice. She attended the chapter's general assembly along with LaMèreVeille to get answers concerning the undisclosed paid-editing activities and COI of certain board members. Two of the three partners of the Racosch PR company, vice-president Frédéric Schütz and former interim executive director Stéphane Coillet-Matillon, acknowledged their involvement. The third partner, Nicolas Ray, was also mentioned but was not present. In spite of this coming out, their paid-editing activities were not fully disclosed and transparent on Wikipedia, and this prompted Jules to publish a piece on the French Wikipedia's Bistro (analogous to en.WP's Village Pump), on April 6.
I commend Nattes à chat and LaMèreVeille for their dogged investigation, which flushed some of the paid contributors out of the woodwork. Part of the board was unaware of either these paid-editing activities or the potential COI of the other board members until it struck them in the face during the April 2 general assembly.
During the general assembly, paid editing and the need for the chapter to investigate the issue were brought up several times. Once the board elections were over, a chapter member present extracted a promise from the new board that they would seriously look into this paid-editing issue, even if the person proposing these investigations is no longer on the board (documented in the draft assembly minutes, but available only to chapter members). Frédéric was re-elected by a comfortable margin, and Stéphane would have been re-elected as well had he not withdrawn, nevertheless this should not be construed as an approval of their paid-editing activities.
Lessons learned
The fact that a consulting firm does paid editing per se is not a breach of the WMF's terms of use (TOU); [1] but the non-disclosure, the organizational conflicts of interest, and the consequent rift between chapter board members who were privy to inside information and those who were not—these are major issues. The defence of the board members who were involved boils down to their saying that they knew what they were doing and steered clear of any situation that would constitute a COI, so there was never a reason to inform the rest of the board. As the French would say: “Circulez, il n'y a rien à voir" (just move on, there's nothing to see).
What is disturbing is that two chapter officials and the spouse of a staffer they oversee had absolutely no qualms about violating the TOU and were prompted to become more transparent only when the pressure was turned up. The TOU are a good start, but after seeing what's been going on in Switzerland, in my view those terms need to be expressed in greater detail, and I strongly believe that the Foundation should devote more resources to help affiliates to tackle this problem.
What future for Wikimedia Switzerland?
Quite a few chapter members, and even a few board members, complain that their local community is not receiving the support they need for their programmatic work. The feeling is that the chapter spends a lot of its staff resources raising funds to pay for the staff itself, for independent external consultants and project managers. It has now gone so far as to hire a freelance project manager of fundraising! Increasingly, paid staff have been doing the work in such offline activities as photo competitions, wiki expeditions, GLAM, and the main focus of the chapter activities appears to have no need of a local community.
Volunteers from Wikimedia France, Austria, Germany, and Italy sometimes provide much-needed support to local projects in Switzerland, and there's a strong temptation for some communities to abandon WMCH and join forces with a neighbouring chapter. Swiss organisations operating at national level often have to fight against similar temptations. I don't yet see attempts to rebuild the mutual trust and confidence which are necessary for the smooth functioning of our multicultural Swiss chapter.
Let's just hope that our new board will take the hard road and steer WMCH in the right direction, providing the help and support that the Swiss communities need.
Gabriel Thullen is a Swiss Wikipedian and a board member of Wikimedia Switzerland. Pete Forsyth, Nattes à chat, and LaMèreVeille assisted in the preparation of this story.
- ^ English-language Wikipedian Pete Forsyth noted, in his February 2014 Signpost op-ed, that confusion between what is necessary and what is sufficient could lead to this kind of problem.
Wikimedia's Dario Taraborelli quoted on Google's Knowledge Graph in The Washington Post
In The Washington Post, resident digital culture critic Caitlin Dewey surmises (May 11) that the Post's readers "probably haven't even noticed Google's sketchy quest to control the world's knowledge":
Google's "knowledge panels" materialize at random, as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God:
Betty White is 94 years old.
The Honda Civic is 2016’s best car.
Taipei is the capital of—ahem—the "small island nation" of Taiwan.
The problem, Dewey argues, is that the information snippets arrive on Google users' screens without any indication of their source, yet by their placement gain an unearned air of authority. She quotes the Wikimedia Foundation's Dario Taraborelli in support of her thesis:
... to skeptics, of whom there are a growing number, it's a looming public literacy threat—one that arguably dwarfs the recent revelations that Facebook's trending topics are curated by humans.
"It undermines people's ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions," said Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation and a social computing researcher who studies knowledge production online. "And that is something I think we really need to study and process as a society."
For Taraborelli, the primary issue with Google's knowledge panels is that they aren't terribly knowledgeable: They provide information but often leave out any context on where that information came from. That makes it difficult for readers to evaluate the accuracy of the statement or whether it's the best and most complete of the available options.
Google's knowledge panels regularly, if inadvertently, make rather important decisions for us: Taiwan, you'll remember, is described as if it were an independent nation, when only 22 countries actually recognize it as such. Meanwhile, Google corrects searches for "Londonderry," Ireland's fourth-largest city, to "Derry," the (unofficial) term favored by Irish nationalists.
Since Google frequently does not cite its sources—a ploy, Taraborelli says, to make it seem more authoritative—there's no way for users to double-check "answers" for bias or error, which doubtlessly exist.
Dewey's article ends with a hopeful reference to Wikidata, described as
an open-license, machine-readable knowledge base that will both source all of its statements and accommodate conflicting sources. The hope is that Google will begin pulling from that database and citing its sources, instead of dumbing down Wikipedia.
It's a fond hope. Bearing in mind that Wikidata is published under a no-attribution-required CC-0 licence and itself lacks sources for many of its statements, it seems quite possible that many other commercial re-users will jump at the opportunity to use Wikidata content without attribution in order to follow Google's lead and build their own aura of omniscience, replicating and broadening the problem Dewey and Taraborelli lament.
In brief
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- Editor retention study: In a guest blog post on Scientific American, Sarah Guminski wonders "What makes Wikipedia's volunteer editors volunteer?" Apparently, it's all about community: in an experiment run on the German-language Wikipedia, researchers found that giving new contributors an award during their first month of participation increased retention by 20 per cent. The "symbolic recognition ... made editors feel like they were part of an exclusive group ... the key takeaway is not how to attract volunteers, but how to keep them." (May 12)
- Wikipedia remains popular: The Atlantic finds that "Wikipedia remains the most popular informational site around." (May 11)
- Nigerian vandals: igberetvnews.com and nigeriannewspapers.today write about vandalism to the biography of Muhammadu Buhari. The article was semi-protected on May 11 after a spate of vandalism edits. (May 11)
- Unloved picture: Seventeen.com chronicles Ansel Elgort's Twitter-based efforts to have his Wikipedia image changed. So far, Elgort seems to have been unsuccessful. (May 10)
- Death and taxes: Death and Taxes looks at edits to the biography of Tim Moore (North Carolina politician). (May 5)
- Popular reptiles: ScienceDaily, Australian Network News, home.bt.com and others report on a study by Oxford University and Tel Aviv University to identify the world's most popular reptiles, ranked according to page views on the English Wikipedia. The Komodo dragon came top, followed by the black mamba and the saltwater crocodile. (May 4–5)
- Celebrity deaths: Gizmodo UK relies on Wikipedia to establish that 2016 is truly a "bizarrely bad year for celebrity deaths", in a piece also picked up by The Daily Mail. (May 4)
Two weeks for the prize of one
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.
Featured articles
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Nine featured articles were promoted these weeks.
- U.S. Route 16 ( nominated by Imzadi1979), also called Grand River Avenue was one of the principal pre-Interstate roads in Michigan. The modern route of Grand River Avenue cuts across the Lower Peninsula in a northwest–southeast fashion from near Grand Rapids to Detroit. In the years immediately preceding the creation of the Interstate Highway System, US 16 was shifted from older roads to newer freeways. When the gap in the freeway was filled in around Lansing, the US 16 designation was decommissioned in the state. The freeway was then solely designated Interstate 96 east of Grand Rapids and Interstate 196 west of that city.
- Boise National Forest ( nominated by Fredlyfish4) is a federally protected area covering 2,203,703 acres (8,918.07 km2) of Idaho as part of the national forest system. Created in 1908 from part of Sawtooth National Forest, it is managed by the United States Forest Service as four units.
- During the last weeks of World War II, warships of the United States Navy, the British Royal Navy, and the Royal New Zealand Navy bombarded industrial and military facilities in Japan ( nominated by Nick-D). Most of these bombardments involved battleships and caused heavy damage to several of the factories targeted, as well as nearby civilian areas. A major goal of the attacks was to provoke the Japanese military into committing some of its reserve force of aircraft into battle. However, the Japanese did not attempt to attack the Allied bombardment forces, and none of the involved warships suffered any damage.
- From Russia, with Love ( nominated by SchroCat) is the fifth novel by the English author Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. Fleming wrote the story in early 1956 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, and published in the United Kingdom one year later. The story centres on a plot by SMERSH to assassinate Bond in such a way as to discredit both him and his organisation. As bait, the Russians use a beautiful cipher clerk and the Spektor, a Soviet decoding machine. Much of the action takes place in Istanbul and on the Orient Express. The novel deals with the East–West tensions of the Cold War, and the decline of British power and influence in the post-Second World War era.
- S. O. Davies ( nominated by Brianboulton) (died 1972) was a Welsh miner, trade union official and Labour Party politician, who served as the Member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil from 1934 to 1972. Most official records show Davies's birth date as November 1886, but he is widely thought to have been born at least four years earlier.
- The teleost ( nominated by LittleJerry, Chiswick Chap and Cwmhiraeth) is the largest infraclass in the class Actinopterygii, the ray-finned fishes, and make up 96 percent of all fish. This diverse group arose in the Triassic period and members are arranged in about 40 orders and 448 families. Teleosts dominate the seas from pole to pole and inhabit the ocean depths, estuaries, rivers, lakes and even swamps.
- The springbok ( nominated by Sainsf) is a medium-sized antelope found mainly in southern and southwestern Africa. The sole member of the genus Antidorcas, this bovid was first described by Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann in 1780. It reaches 71 to 86 cm (28 to 34 in) at the shoulder and weighs between 27 and 42 kg (60 and 93 lb). Both sexes have a pair of black, 35 to 50 cm (14 to 20 in) long horns that curve backward.
- The Lesser Antillean macaw ( nominated by FunkMonk) is a hypothetical extinct species of macaw that is thought to have been endemic to the Lesser Antillean island region of Guadeloupe. In spite of the absence of conserved specimens, many details about the species are known from several contemporary accounts, and the bird is the subject of some illustrations. According to contemporary descriptions, the body of the Lesser Antillean macaw was red and the wings were red, blue and yellow. The tail feathers were between 38 and 51 cm (15 and 20 in) long. Apart from the smaller size and the all-red coloration of the tail feathers, it resembled the scarlet macaw and may therefore have been a close relative of that species.
- Ficus rubiginosa ( nominated by Casliber) is a species of flowering plant native to eastern Australia in the genus Ficus. Beginning as a seedling that grows on other plants or rocks, it matures into a tree 30 m (98 ft) high and nearly as wide with a yellow-brown buttressed trunk. The leaves are oval and glossy green and measure from 4 to 19.3 cm (1+1⁄2 to 7+1⁄2 in) long and 1.25 to 13.2 cm (1⁄2 to 5+1⁄4 in) wide. The fruits are small, round and yellow, and can ripen and turn red at any time of year, peaking in spring and summer.
Featured lists
Eight featured lists were promoted these weeks.
- Elmore James (1918–1963) was an American blues slide guitarist and singer. Most of his discography ( nominated by Ojorojo) consists of two-song record singles. In 1960, James released a compilation, Blues After Hours, which was the only album released during his career. (Although over 100 James compilation albums have been released since his death.)
- Emma Stone (born 1988) is an American actress. She has won 28 awards from 84 nominations ( nominated by FrB.TG) for her film work. She has been nominated for an AACTA International Award, an Academy Award, two British Academy Film Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. She has also won an MTV Movie Award, a People's Choice Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and three Teen Choice Awards.
- Catherine Zeta-Jones (born 1969) is a Welsh actress. As of 2016, she has appeared in 27 films, 7 television productions and 8 theatre productions, and is the recipient of 16 awards from 33 nominations ( nominated by Krimuk90).
- Mahanoy Creek is a 51-mile (82 km) long tributary of the Susquehanna River in Schuylkill County and Northumberland County in Pennsylvania. It has eleven officially named tributaries ( nominated by Jakec), of which six are direct tributaries and five are sub-tributaries. These include seven creeks and four runs.
- Sussex County Cricket Club is one of the 18 member clubs of the English County Championship, representing the historic county of Sussex. Although Sussex representative sides had been playing cricket since the mid-eighteenth century and had also played first-class cricket matches since 1815, the County Cricket Club was established in 1839. Unlike most professional sports county cricket clubs have traditionally used different grounds in various towns and cities within the county for home matches, although the use of minor "out grounds" away from the club's main headquarters has diminished since the 1980s. In total, Sussex have played first-class, List A and Twenty20 cricket at 17 different grounds ( nominated by Joseph2302) across the county.
- Inna (born 1986) is a Romanian singer, dancer and philanthropist. Her discography ( nominated by Cartoon network freak) consists of four studio albums, thirty-three singles and fifteen promotional singles. Twelve of her songs reached the top ten in Romania, with "Amazing" and "Diggy Down", topping the chart in 2009 and 2015, respectively.
- Guitar Hero Live is a 2015 music video game developed by FreeStyleGames and published by Activision. It was the first title in the Guitar Hero series since its hiatus after 2011, and the first game in the series available for 8th generation video game consoles. The game includes 42 songs ( nominated by Masem) on the game's disc, presented in sets using full motion video taken from the first-person perspective of the lead guitarist as the background visuals to create an immersive experience. The game includes the online Guitar Hero TV mode, which contains 425 more songs. Game reviewers found the on-disc soundtrack to be weak as it focused too much on more recent musical acts, while praising the wider variety across a larger time period that GHTV offered.
- The Padma Bhushan is the third highest civilian award of India. Instituted in 1954, the award is given for "distinguished service of a high order", without distinction of race, occupation, position, or sex. The recipients receive a certificate signed by the President of India and a circular-shaped medallion with no monetary association. The recipients are announced every year on Republic Day and registered in The Gazette of India. A total of two hundred awards were presented in the 1960s ( nominated by Dharmadhyaksha), including five foreign recipients.
Featured pictures
Six featured pictures were promoted these weeks.
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Magazine advertisement for Ratna Moetoe Manikam
(created by Java Industrial Film; restored and nominated by Crisco 1492)
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Oh behave, Beyhive / Underdogs
Your Traffic Reports for the weeks of April 24-30 and May 1-7.
Oh behave, Beyhive (April 24-30)
I would never pride myself on being unusual; however, I think it can be safely stated that I and my fellow native Wikipedians share few priorities with the general public. I have already mentioned in my previous post that I do not get spectator sports, and our viewers' unending obsession with the non-sport of professional wrestling remains to me an eternal source of mystification. But to those you could add any number of public obsessions completely outside my proverbial wheelhouse. Bikini bodies. Probiotic yoghurt. Singers and/or dancers below US drinking age. Pictures of genitalia posted on social media. Inexplicably popular Armenian-American families. But on the summit of that pile of mentally-erased files must perch the private lives of famous people. As an intensely private person myself, I do not believe that the lives of those who happen to attain a certain level of public regard are in the public domain, any more than their bodies are. So it always shocks me when a celebrity (like, say, Beyoncé) uses the travails of her private life as a means of viral marketing, as appears to have happened in the release of her latest album Lemonade. Her fans, known as the "Beyhive", have been sent into a predictable swarm, and are searching for blood. It is interesting to note that, while she supposedly used her album to castigate her husband Jay-Z for cheating on her, she still released it exclusively on his download service, Tidal.
For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED.
For the week of April 24 to 30, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from WMF's TopViews, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Prince (musician) 
3,994,635 
Down nearly 80% in views from the previous week, when his death managed to garner a staggering 13 million views in just three days, the Purple One still managed to retain the top spot. It is sobering to realise that we are now seeing that generation of popular musicians pass away, in many cases before those in the previous generation, which was itself no stranger to tragic and premature death. One wonders if in 30 years, a centenarian Bob Dylan or Keith Richards will be the last one standing. 2 Claude Shannon
1,536,831 
The World War II cryptographer widely regarded as the father of information theory and the digital circuit got a Google Doodle to celebrate his 100th birthday on April 30th. 3 Captain America: Civil War 
1,384,304 
With the relative disappointment of Dawn of Justice, all eyes are turning to the next big comic blockbuster released this year which, despite the Captain America headline, is being marketed as another Avengers movie (with Spider-Man!). Whether this will see it over the $1 billion hurdle remains to be seen, but omens are good, with it having already earned $84 million internationally ahead of its US première. When that hits, expect view numbers to skyrocket. 4 Hertha Marks Ayrton
1,314,001 
The Hughes Medal-winning physicist and inventor, who investigated the mathematics behind electric arcs and sand ripples, and invented a fan for clearing trenches of poisoned gas, got a Google Doodle on her 162nd birthday on 28 April. 5 Game of Thrones (season 6) 
1,097,105 
The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. There was a time when such an event would have crushed this list. But the movie world has reclaimed its place in the public's heart from TV and music in the last few years, and so now it is just one event among many. 6 Hillsborough disaster
1,094,036 
Topics of purely British interest almost never make the Top 25, let alone the Top 10, so when they do, you know they're significant. On the 15 April 1989, during a 1988–89 FA Cup semi-final match at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, a human crush caused the deaths of 96 people; the highest recorded toll in the history of British sport. More than the toll itself however, what has kept memories of the event alive for many was the reaction of the conservative press, many of which shifted the blame from the police to the fans themselves, despite an inquiry stating that the main cause of the disaster had been failure of police control and bad stadium design. On 26 April 2016, an inquest stated that the 96 victims had been unlawfully killed due to gross negligence on the part of the police, raising the possibility of new prosecutions. 7 Lemonade (Beyoncé album)
1,014,970 
The latest album from Beyoncé, released exclusively on her husband Jay-Z's streaming service, Tidal, has been something of a marketing masterstroke- drawing mainstream attention via an accompanying 60-minute film release on HBO (ala Michael Jackson's Thriller) but also triggering a viral storm with an insinuation that her husband had cheated on her with "a Becky with good hair" (supposed code for a white woman). 8 Rachel Roy
970,266 
The Indian American fashion designer and ex-wife of Jay-Z partner Damon Dash, who had long been suspected of being more than friends with the married-to-Beyoncé Jay-Z, made what can only be described as a catastrophically ill-judged post on Instagram in the wake of Beyoncé's cryptic "Becky with the good hair" lyric: "Good hair don’t care, but we will take good lighting, for selfies, or self truths, always. live in the light #nodramaqueens." You can imagine what happened next. Beyoncé's fans, known as the Beyhive, swarmed onto Roy's online identity, vandalising her Wikipedia page and flooding her Instagram with the usual poorly-spelled death threats. Casualties of this stinging attack included Roy's 11-year-old daughter, who received comments on social media like “Yo mom needs to drink bleach,” and even celebrity chef Rachael Ray, who has absolutely nothing in common with Roy save eight letters of her name. 9 Game of Thrones
827,670 See #5. 10 Beyoncé 
781,212 A mark of the uncontrollable force the Madonna of her generation unleashed when she included coded references to her husband's infidelity in her latest album was that people appear less interested in her than they are in the woman they decided she was referring to. See #7 and #8.
Underdogs (May 1-7)
The triumph of Captain America: Civil War at the box office and #1 on the chart this week is not surprising, but otherwise our top 10 has a number of improbable entries, all things considered. Donald Trump (#3) returns to the Top 10 (though he's remained solidly in the Top 25 in the past few weeks), having now essentially clinched the Republican nomination for U.S. President. Anyone who says they honestly predicted this when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower last June to announce his candidacy is simply lying. Even more improbable and happy news, however, comes from the world of English football, where Leicester City F.C. (#4) won the Premier League after starting the season with 5000 to 1 odds. Meanwhile, citizens of London may not see their new mayor Sadiq Khan (#9) as an underdog, but becoming the first Muslim mayor of a major Western capital is not something much of the world would have predicted.
For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see here.
For the week of May 1 to 7, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages (WP:5000), were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Captain America: Civil War
2,303,444 The United States premiere of this movie finally came on May 6, and had the fifth-largest opening weekened all-time in that country. With the relative disappointment of Dawn of Justice, the film industry's eyes are turned to this big comic blockbuster which, despite the Captain America headline, is being marketed as another Avengers movie (with Spider-Man!). Whether this will see it over the $1 billion hurdle remains to be seen, but its box office has now already exceeded $678 million. 2 Cinco de Mayo
2,114,216 
One of our annual most self-explanatory article spikes on Wikipedia returns, a celebration of Mexican-American culture originally meant to commemorate a Mexican victory over the French. Among those taking advantage of the holiday was this Report's dear friend and constant companion Donald Trump (#3), who stirred controversy by tweeting a photograph of himself eating a taco bowl with the exclamation "I love Hispanics!" 3 Donald Trump
992,406 
On Tuesday May 3, Trump handily scored a big win in the Indiana primary, leading his last opponents for the Republican nomination for U.S. president, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, to suspend their campaigns. This means that the real-estate mogul and reality-show star is really now slated to go head-to-head against Hillary Clinton in November (though technically Bernie Sanders has not yet conceded to Clinton) in the election for the Presidency of the United States. What a time to be alive. 4 Leicester City F.C.
930,859 
The world loves a good underdog sports story, and this week may have seen the most improbable triumph in all of sports history. Coming from 5,000 to 1 odds at the start of the season, this club won the Premier League on May 2, bringing global attention to the team. Jamie Vardy (pictured), one of team's stars, was also named FWA Footballer of the Year. When it comes to rising up against the odds, the promotion and relegation rules of the English football league system has a lot going for it. And speaking of underdog stories, though I don't watch a lot of English football, many are also rooting for AFC Wimbledon (which started in the ninth tier of English football in 2002) to get promoted to Football League One (the third tier) this year, which they can do if they prevail in their playoffs. 5 Sigmund Freud
856,399 
A Google Doogle celebrated the birthday of the famous father of psychoanalysis. 6 Prince (musician)
799,673 After two weeks in the top slot, Prince's recent death remains a subject of news coverage. 7 Payback (2016)
733,920 This wrestling event was held on May 1. 8 Jane Jacobs
713,542 
A Google Doogle celebrated the 100th birthday of the urban studies activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 9 Sadiq Khan
705,457 
In the long history of London, it is now a fact that one-third of all its mayors have been Muslim. That's because Khan is only the third mayor of London (a position created in 2000), and he's Muslim. And just when you think a subject couldn't be infected by Donald Trump (#3), some of the coverage of the election in England suggested that Khan wouldn't be able to travel to the United States if Trump is elected, a reference to Trump's suggestion that Muslims should be barred from entry. 10 Game of Thrones (season 6)
675,351 The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April.
"Wikicology" ends in site ban; evidence and workshop phases concluded for "Gamaliel and others"
Wikicology
The Wikicology case closed on May 13, ending in a site-ban for Wikicology. In addition to reiterating standard principles that have appeared in many past cases, the final decision included two specific principles:
- Collegiality and self-representation:
8) While Wikipedia editors are under no obligation to reveal personal information about themselves, and therefore are also under no obligation to actively take steps to correct others' mistaken impressions, it is uncollegial behavior to deliberately take advantage of mistaken impressions for the purpose of personal benefit.
- Limitations of arbitration:
9) The jurisdiction of the Arbitration Committee is limited to the English Wikipedia. The Committee is unable and unwilling to conduct investigations of editors' outside activities in order to shed light on editors' on-wiki self-representations. The Committee is also unable to direct the decisions made by other projects, programs, and affiliates within the Wikimedia Foundation umbrella. However, best efforts may be made to ensure that these groups are aware of Committee decisions that potentially impact them.
The findings of fact were that Wikicology:
- used sockpuppets in the early days of his participation;
- engaged in autobiographical editing;
- gave the impression of self-promotion;
- introduced numerous errors to articles, introduced copyright-violating text, and uploaded copyright-violating images;
- received feedback on his editing, and has held volunteer positions in other WMF-affiliated projects, and was not a novice editor; and
- was harassed in the course of the case (one account was blocked during the case for this behavior).
The remedies were:
- a topic ban from biomedical content;
- a topic ban from images;
- a site ban—as usual, Wikicology may request reconsideration of the ban 12 months hence, and every six months thereafter;
- encouragement for the community to make use of the material presented in the case evidence and analysis of evidence sections to organize a systematic clean-up for Wikicology's past problematic contributions; and
- an undertaking by the Committee, on a best-effort basis, to inform representatives of WMF-affiliated projects with which Wikicology has been involved of the outcome of the case.
The case pages have been blanked as a courtesy.
Gamaliel and others
The evidence phase of the "Gamaliel and others" case closed on May 6, shortly after arbitrator Opabinia regalis posted evidence from Gamaliel, who has not edited Wikipedia in the past month, submitting his evidence by email instead.
The case then entered the workshop phase, which generated more than 50,000 words of discussion. Much of this related to how BLP policy should be applied to Signpost pages, which are hosted in project space. Editors—including arbitrators—offered widely divergent opinions on whether the Signpost's publication of an April Fools' piece lampooning Donald Trump and Jimmy Wales, complete with some dummy pages to populate a Trump-themed sidebar in the article (one of which was deleted by community consensus), constituted a BLP violation.
The workshop phase closed on May 14; the proposed decision is due to be posted on May 23.
Other arbitration news
On May 4, the Committee passed a motion on oversight block appeals:
Appeals of blocks that have been marked by an oversighter as oversight blocks should be sent to the oversight team via email (Oversight-l
lists.wikimedia.org) to be decided by the English Wikipedia oversighters, or to the Arbitration Committee. Blocks may still be marked by the blocking oversighter as appealable only to the Arbitration Committee, per the 2010 statement, in which case appeals must only be directed to the Arbitration Committee.
On May 11, this was followed by a Doncram amendment motion:
The Doncram arbitration case is amended as follows:
- Remedy 2.1—General editor probation is rescinded.
- Remedy 2.3—Article creation restriction is rescinded
- The topic ban imposed by Seraphimblade is rescinded. For clarity, this means that Doncram is permitted to edit existing articles but not create new articles that are related to the National Register of Historic Places, broadly construed.
- The following remedy is added to the case: Doncram is indefinitely restricted from creating new pages, except for redirects, in article space which are related to the National Register of Historic Places, broadly construed.
That's it for WikiCup Round 2!
Round 2 is over and 35 competitors have moved on to Round 3.
Round 2 saw three FAs (two by
Cas Liber (
submissions) and one by
Montanabw (
submissions)), four Featured Lists (with three by
Calvin999 (
submissions)), and 53 Good Articles (six by
Worm That Turned (
submissions) and five each by
Hurricanehink (
submissions),
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions), and
MPJ-DK (
submissions)). Eleven Featured Pictures were promoted (six by
Adam Cuerden (
submissions) and five by
Godot13 (
submissions)). One Featured Portal, Featured Topic and Good Topic were also promoted. The DYK base point total was 1,135.
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions) scored 265 base points, while
The C of E (
submissions) and
MPJ-DK (
submissions) each scored 150 base points. Eleven ITN were promoted and 131 Good Article Reviews were conducted with
MPJ-DK (
submissions) completing a staggering 61 reviews. Two contestants,
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions) and
Cas Liber (
submissions), broke the 700 point mark for Round 2.
Thanks to everyone for participating, and good luck to those moving into round 3. Sturmvogel 66 ( talk · contribs · email), Figureskatingfan ( talk · contribs · email), and Godot13 ( talk · contribs · email)
Gallery of contestants' work
As always, these are meant as a sample of the work done by the contestant. For complete lists of the work submitted in this round for each person listed, check the "submissions" link in their write-up. This list includes the top twenty contestants by points, since it gets far more difficult to illustrate contestants when the number of submissions is fewer.
-
The Australian shrub Isopogon anemonifolius was one of two featured articles that helped catapult
Cas Liber (
submissions) to first place. -
Second-place
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions) worked largely on articles related to Wales and animals this round, such as the Welsh county
Ceredigion (formerly Cardiganshire), one of Cwmhiraeth's five good articles.
( Aberystwyth Castle shown) -
MPJ-DK (
submissions) gained third place largely through his incredible work on
luchadors.
(Mephisto, part of the team that won the Mexican National Trios Championship, shown.) -
Welsh harpist Elizabeth Randles was one of six good articles by fourth-place
Worm That Turned (
submissions) -
Thunder, mascot of the Denver Broncos American football team was brought to featured article status by fifth-place
Montanabw (
submissions). -
A 12-6 elbow is one of
The C of E (
submissions) two good articles this round. He also had a Did You Know? submission for
sheep shagger. Just thought I'd mention that. There's a story behind it. -
-
And
Cyclonebiskit (
submissions) worked on hurricanes, such as
Hurricane Patricia (precursor weather system shown) -
One of the gorgeous featured pictures by
Godot13 (
submissions), specifically,
Christ Church Cathedral in the
Falkland Islands. -
Katy Perry is the subject of the first featured topic of the competition thanks to
Calvin999 (
submissions) -
The Māori Battalion performing a haka was part of a celebration of ANZAC Day on Wikipedia's mainpage thanks to
Adam Cuerden (
submissions) -
-
2016 Australian Grand Prix was one of three racing articles brought to good article status by
Zwerg Nase (
submissions). -
12george1 (
submissions) raised three hurricane-related articles to good article status. (Hurricane Fred of the
2015 Atlantic hurricane season shown.) -
Captain Assassin! (
submissions) raised the thriller film
The Boy Next Door from new article to good article status. (Star
Jennifer Lopez pictured). -
![Fossil eggs are given their own classifications, as identifying what laid them is very difficult. Ashorocetus (submissions) has been hard at work writing articles on these oogenera, to help explain them to all. (Two examples of Gobioolithus ["Stone egg from the Gobi desert"] pictured.)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/GobioolithusComparison.jpg)
Fossil eggs are given their own classifications, as identifying what laid them is very difficult.
Ashorocetus (
submissions) has been hard at work writing articles on these
oogenera, to help explain them to all. (Two examples of
Gobioolithus ["Stone egg from the
Gobi desert"] pictured.) -
Ernest Deane, rugby player and later British Indian Army medical officer gained good article status thanks to
FunkyCanute (
submissions) -
Coemgenus (
submissions) raised Prohibitionist
Henry Adams Thompson to good article status, then possibly had a drink to celebrate? -
-
![Fossil eggs are given their own classifications, as identifying what laid them is very difficult. Ashorocetus (submissions) has been hard at work writing articles on these oogenera, to help explain them to all. (Two examples of Gobioolithus ["Stone egg from the Gobi desert"] pictured.)](/info/en/?search=File:GobioolithusComparison.jpg)
Affiliates' nomination of WMF trustees announced; FDC's straight talking to WMF
Since 2008, Wikimedia chapters (additionally, since 2013, the single thematic organisation) have been permitted to select two of the 10 board trustees for two-year terms that start in even-numbered years. Despite the widespread use of the term "affiliate-selected" on Meta and in announcements, user groups, which number 58 of the 90 affiliates, are still not part of the process.
On 9 May, facilitators Chris Keating, Lorenzo Losa, and Lane Rasberry announced that the successful candidates in this year's election are Christophe Henner and Nataliia Tymkiv. In this election, 40 of the 42 eligible affiliates voted, a marked turnaround from the 2014 election, in which only 27 of 41 voted, a poor showing that almost certainly affected the outcome. The voting of each affiliate is concealed from Wikimedians, except those who can log in to the chapters wiki. The election is conducted using a single transferable vote system, in which the participating organisations number each candidate in order of their preference; these preferences are then exhaustively redistributed in rounds (nine in this election). The first preferences received by each candidate are published, but the final distributions are posted only on the secret chapters wiki. Curiously, the facilitators stated that "it is the closest ASBS result for some time", while at the same time revealing that the second-highest vote was "between Nataliia (16.09) and Siska (9.91)", figures that do not appear to be close.
The numbers of first preferences received by each candidate were: Christophe Henner (9.00); Siska Doviana (6.75); Jan Ainali (5.50); Osmar Valdebenito (5.50); Nataliia Tymkiv (4.75); Susanna Mkrtchyan (3.25); Lodewijk Gelauff (2.50); Maarten Deneckere (1.50); Kunal Mehta (1.25); and Leigh Thelmadatter (0.00).
Christophe Henner ( candidate statement and résumé) is deputy CEO of Webedia ( google translation, website), the digital division of Fimalac. He has been a Wikimedian volunteer for 12 years, and has been a board member of Wikimedia France for 10 years.
Nataliia Tymkiv ( candidate statement and résumé) is from western Ukraine. She has masters degrees in information management and public administration. Her career has involved the role of executive director and chief accountant in the private sector, and since 2010 she has worked for the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law, a think-tank and lobby group of media lawyers and experts specialising in media policy and human rights. Nataliia has been a member of the Ukrainian chapter since 2012 and a board member since 2013, with responsibilities for financial matters and programmatic work.
We asked Christophe and Nataliia a series of questions related to their nomination (which still has to be approved by the board itself). Are they concerned at the lack of consistency and transparency in how each voting organisation conducted its selection process? (The Signpost knows of only four affiliates that have publicised their votes: Germany, France, the UK, and Ukraine.) Nataliia believes the process "can be organised better and in a more transparent way", and described Wikimedia Ukraine's detailed and open process. "I think that WMFR was very bold and brave to share their reasoning first. ... Personally I believe that voting should be public ... though it seems to have its drawbacks", linking to a Meta discussion on the question. For Christophe, consistency is not such an issue, but he would opt for publishing the detailed results of each affiliate on Meta.
James Heilman has declared that he is happy to return to the WMF board. We asked the nominees whether they are in favour of appointing him to the recently vacated community-selected seat on the board. Christophe wrote:
| “ | I am actually not in favour of appointing him. Whoever is right or wrong, in the coming month the board of trustees will have to reshape itself, to rebuild trust within the board, with the staff, with community, to build a vision and to lead us through change. Appointing someone that left the board a few weeks ago will make all of that harder. I do understand the reasoning behind that question. And even if it is felt as unfair, we must all focus on what we need to do to get better. We need to act always in favor of moving forward and build the movement we strive for. Right now we are in a mending process, having James appointed or selected during that process could reopen wounds. I'd [rather the board avoided] that for the coming month. Focus on the future, and learn from the past, not focusing on it. | ” |
Nataliia's attitude was different: "I do not have full information about the removal, but based on what I know I would say yes, it is his place by right. But it seems to me that maybe a healthy new community-selection process is needed. To confirm."
Our final question concerned the tension surrounding communications between WMF staff and the board during the upheavals of the past months. "Based on your considerable experience as a Wikimedia affiliate board member, how are you going to address what appears to be an institutional problem of how this communication should occur?" Readers may be interested in the considered responses of both nominees. Nataliia wrote:
| “ | First of all I am going to learn more about how the current system works. It is almost impossible to improve something, if you did not investigate it. There was a discussion about it during [the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin], and one of the things I would suggest is creating an Ombudsperson position (probably an advisory role to the Board), so that staff could discuss issues with ED and C-levels with him/her instead of discussing them with ED and C-levels. | ” |
Christophe, similarly, said he needs to gain a better understanding of where the failures were on a board level.
| “ | That actually is a first step for the board, to assess and own its own failures and build on it. This kind of failures are actually quite common in organisations. This is not a unique situation, to some extent we went through a similar one few years ago within Wikimedia France. It has happened before to many organisations, and will happen again. The question really is to learn from that and build a structure with the right people and the right processes. From the challenges I can foresee as a trustee, this one is actually one of the easiest one to tackle. | ” |
FDC recommendations
The WMF's volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee has announced its recommendations to the Board for funding the annual plans of applicant affiliates, with a total of US$1.138M. For the India-based Centre for Internet and Society, $153k is recommended (100% of the ask, 12.5% down on last year's funding for this applicant); Wikimedia Armenia $180k (93% of the ask, 50% up on last year); Wikimedia France, $620k (89%, 5% up on last year); and Wikimedia Norway, $185k (87%, 31% up on last year).
The FDC's review of the submitted WMF 2016–17 annual plan mentions "the extended period of turmoil within the Wikimedia Foundation, at the Board, executive, and staff levels ... The organizational stabilization phase has now begun and the FDC applauds the professionalism and passion for Wikimedia’s values shown by Foundation staff, executives and Board of Trustees." The FDC repeated its call for an external assessment of WMF governance—both the internal organisation of the Board and its relationships to other parts of the movement. In particular: Board composition, including selection processes, recruitment and diversity; the relationship between the Board and the ED; communication channels between the Board and the staff, community, and affiliates; the selection process and criteria, and onboarding, for appointed Board members; advisory board constituents, roles, and duties; and resources allocated to the Board to fulfil their duties/responsibilities.
The FDC pointed to the Foundation's short-term strategic plan that has been developed, on which the annual plan has been based: "The lack of clarity in strategic direction since 2014 has caused significant waste of time, money, talent, goodwill, and momentum."
On staffing, the FDC noted that: "while staff numbers are only increasing by 5 FTE in the forthcoming financial year, in the last 3 months of this year the plan is to hire 15 people—which sounds like a rush to fill positions before the year end, after a year with significant staff turnover. The FDC encourages the WMF to not rush hires, particularly given that C-level staff positions need to be filled. It is also not clear whether staffing matches the stated goals in this annual plan or in the strategic plan as a whole." The WMF, it advised, "might want to evaluate how the size of its staff and its staffing structure are organized" to meet the organisation's set goals, and pointed out that "the rationale for the new staff is missing from this proposal."
For the FDC's review of individual WMF departments there was trenchant criticism, including:
- an unexplained decrease in the results for key performance indicators for grantmaking and the Wikipedia Library;
- too few product programs dedicated to editing and little coordination on analysis and research on product. "The FDC expects the Product department (and the WMF in general) to improve the use of organizational memory, avoiding redundancies and focusing on more tangible activities that can lead to impact."
- "Communications’ plans are unclear and unfocused. The plan does not make clear when the communication team plans to promote the Wikipedia/Wikimedia movement brand vs. the Foundation brand. The programs and the goals are repeated, sometimes in an inconsistent way (e.g., blog readership target is "increased by 10%" in Goal 1 and "increase by 5%" in Goal 2). Moreover, most of the goals seem very functional / operational, and very focused on social media." (A comms staffer has replied to one of these points on the talkpage.)
- "The Talent and Culture (Human Resources) team has been chronically understaffed and has not had a permanent C-level representation for over a year." T
Brief notes
- Picture of the year: Voting for round 2 of the Picture of the Year contest has started on Wikimedia Commons. Round 2 will end on May 28, 2016. AK
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Maile66 and Amakuru. AK
- WMF staff departures: May 13 saw a further three senior staffers removed from the Foundation's list of staff and contractors: Kevin Leduc, manager of special projects; Rachel diCerbo, director of community engagement (product); and Sara Benson, senior learning and development manager. This follows another eight departures over the past six weeks (not including an intern and a volunteer): Moiz Syed, design manager; Kaity Hammerstein, user experience designer; Rosemary Rein, director of program capacity and learning; Yana Welinder, legal director; May Galloway, visual experience designer; S Page, technical writer; Floor Koudijs, senior manager, Wikipedia Education Program; and Michael Guss, research analyst. The Foundation's total staff numbers have dropped to 274, from a high of more than 290 a few months ago. T, AK
- Board minutes: The minutes for the March 21, 2016 WMF board meeting have been published. The main topic of the meeting was a governance discussion, followed by a closed executive session. AK
- Endowment: The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that venture capitalist Annette Campbell-White has joined the new Wikimedia Endowment Advisory Board as its second founding member, after Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. AK
- Cross-wiki notifications: The Wikimedia Foundation's Collaboration team has developed "cross-wiki notifications", a tool that allows users to get updates from all of the projects they contribute to, regardless of which project they're currently working in. AK
- The Core Contest: It's on again—a 30-day competition to improve Wikipedia's most important and most viewed articles, with prizes in the form of electronic store vouchers. The competition lasts from 15 May until 30 June. Enter the competition here. T
- RFC on creating page-mover permission: Discussion and supporting/opposing is well underway in an RFC on a proposal for page-moving permissions, which might include some or all of the following rights: suppressing redirect (moving a page without creating a redirect); moving subpages (moving a page and all its subpages in a single action); overriding title blacklist (moving a page to a title on the title blacklist; and overriding page-move throttle (moving a larger number of pages in a short time). T
Swiss chapter in turmoil
| “ | "Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world." ( wikimedia.org front page) | ” |
Most of this "free educational content" that we proudly announce on the front page has been added, a few bits at a time, by countless volunteers who just want to share their knowledge and are gratified to take part in the largest encyclopedia project ever. Sadly, this wonderful online world risks being overrun by all sorts of commercial interests and government controls. If Wikipedia is to continue as a free and participatory movement we must continually do more to constrain undisclosed paid editing.
The Swiss chapter (WMCH) is going through some rough spots right now, as described in the Signpost's piece on May 2, "Wikimedia Switzerland's board and paid-editing firm". Contrary to what readers of the previous piece may believe, the chapter has not yet engaged in substantial deliberations around paid editing or whether it is acceptable for a Board member to do paid editing. Nor was the disclosure of the paid-editing activities of the board members "spontaneous".
A number of reasons lie behind this apparent lag. The Swiss chapter was made aware of this issue at its General Assembly only very recently, on April 2. People need time to form their opinion in a complicated linguistic, cultural, and social environment. Switzerland has three language-communities (German, French and Italian), and there are also significant contributions to the English Wikipedia. Chapter members contribute on their respective language-Wikipedias, according to those sites' different rules, sensibilities, and cultural traditions. The official communication language used in the chapter is English. The current paid-editing issue came up in the French-speaking community, but that doesn't mean that there are not similar issues in the German- or Italian-speaking communities, or among English-language contributors. A further complication is that quite a few Swiss Wikipedians belong to Wikimedia France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, but not to the Swiss chapter. We therefore tend to let each language community operate with relative independence.
I repeatedly added an initiative to the board meeting agenda that formal research on paid editing in Switzerland should be carried out, taking advantage of the Swiss federal election in 2015 to do an in-depth study of the edits on the candidates' Wikipedia pages across all Swiss languages. This had the potential to determine whether paid editing is being conducted on behalf of politicians, or even directly by them. Now that two board members have admitted their involvement in paid editing, we can understand why these repeated proposals received a lukewarm reception.
The Swiss board's reluctance to address the issue of paid editing is just an indicator of deeper problems in the chapter. Lack of transparency, confusion of roles, and conflicts of interest have all contributed to shifting the focus of the chapter's activities away from its core mission, which should be to support local volunteer editors. If editors start being paid instead of doing volunteer work, will that not affect how volunteer work is perceived? This attitude goes directly against Wikipedia's values and culture.
Out of the woodwork
Two new contributors, "Nattes à chat" and "LaMèreVeille", set up a gender gap workshop to write and improve articles on notable Swiss women. They sought support for their project, being relatively new in the movement. It was in Paris that Nattes à chat was informed about the August 2015 Festicabales event in Geneva. The theme of their future workshop was well received by Wikipedians from France, whereas some of the Swiss-based Wikipedians were uncomfortable with what they saw as the "feminisation" of the encyclopedia. Once the workshop started, the participants started to receive a lot of negative feedback from a very active Swiss contributor, and this got them looking into his background.
Their sleuthing first turned up the name of Racosch Sàrl, a PR firm that advertises "Wikipedia by Wikipedians"; then they discovered that two chapter board members were partners in this company, and finally that the third partner was precisely the contributor who was giving their project such a hard time. When asked about how they manage to separate volunteer and paid activities, one of these board members said that he just switches hats depending on whom he is talking to. That answer was very unsettling for Nattes à chat and LaMèreVeille, and both contributors also felt that there was a definite conflict of interest (COI).
Nattes à chat then asked a contributor to the French Wikipedia, Jules78120, for advice. She attended the chapter's general assembly along with LaMèreVeille to get answers concerning the undisclosed paid-editing activities and COI of certain board members. Two of the three partners of the Racosch PR company, vice-president Frédéric Schütz and former interim executive director Stéphane Coillet-Matillon, acknowledged their involvement. The third partner, Nicolas Ray, was also mentioned but was not present. In spite of this coming out, their paid-editing activities were not fully disclosed and transparent on Wikipedia, and this prompted Jules to publish a piece on the French Wikipedia's Bistro (analogous to en.WP's Village Pump), on April 6.
I commend Nattes à chat and LaMèreVeille for their dogged investigation, which flushed some of the paid contributors out of the woodwork. Part of the board was unaware of either these paid-editing activities or the potential COI of the other board members until it struck them in the face during the April 2 general assembly.
During the general assembly, paid editing and the need for the chapter to investigate the issue were brought up several times. Once the board elections were over, a chapter member present extracted a promise from the new board that they would seriously look into this paid-editing issue, even if the person proposing these investigations is no longer on the board (documented in the draft assembly minutes, but available only to chapter members). Frédéric was re-elected by a comfortable margin, and Stéphane would have been re-elected as well had he not withdrawn, nevertheless this should not be construed as an approval of their paid-editing activities.
Lessons learned
The fact that a consulting firm does paid editing per se is not a breach of the WMF's terms of use (TOU); [1] but the non-disclosure, the organizational conflicts of interest, and the consequent rift between chapter board members who were privy to inside information and those who were not—these are major issues. The defence of the board members who were involved boils down to their saying that they knew what they were doing and steered clear of any situation that would constitute a COI, so there was never a reason to inform the rest of the board. As the French would say: “Circulez, il n'y a rien à voir" (just move on, there's nothing to see).
What is disturbing is that two chapter officials and the spouse of a staffer they oversee had absolutely no qualms about violating the TOU and were prompted to become more transparent only when the pressure was turned up. The TOU are a good start, but after seeing what's been going on in Switzerland, in my view those terms need to be expressed in greater detail, and I strongly believe that the Foundation should devote more resources to help affiliates to tackle this problem.
What future for Wikimedia Switzerland?
Quite a few chapter members, and even a few board members, complain that their local community is not receiving the support they need for their programmatic work. The feeling is that the chapter spends a lot of its staff resources raising funds to pay for the staff itself, for independent external consultants and project managers. It has now gone so far as to hire a freelance project manager of fundraising! Increasingly, paid staff have been doing the work in such offline activities as photo competitions, wiki expeditions, GLAM, and the main focus of the chapter activities appears to have no need of a local community.
Volunteers from Wikimedia France, Austria, Germany, and Italy sometimes provide much-needed support to local projects in Switzerland, and there's a strong temptation for some communities to abandon WMCH and join forces with a neighbouring chapter. Swiss organisations operating at national level often have to fight against similar temptations. I don't yet see attempts to rebuild the mutual trust and confidence which are necessary for the smooth functioning of our multicultural Swiss chapter.
Let's just hope that our new board will take the hard road and steer WMCH in the right direction, providing the help and support that the Swiss communities need.
Gabriel Thullen is a Swiss Wikipedian and a board member of Wikimedia Switzerland. Pete Forsyth, Nattes à chat, and LaMèreVeille assisted in the preparation of this story.
- ^ English-language Wikipedian Pete Forsyth noted, in his February 2014 Signpost op-ed, that confusion between what is necessary and what is sufficient could lead to this kind of problem.
Wikimedia's Dario Taraborelli quoted on Google's Knowledge Graph in The Washington Post
In The Washington Post, resident digital culture critic Caitlin Dewey surmises (May 11) that the Post's readers "probably haven't even noticed Google's sketchy quest to control the world's knowledge":
Google's "knowledge panels" materialize at random, as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God:
Betty White is 94 years old.
The Honda Civic is 2016’s best car.
Taipei is the capital of—ahem—the "small island nation" of Taiwan.
The problem, Dewey argues, is that the information snippets arrive on Google users' screens without any indication of their source, yet by their placement gain an unearned air of authority. She quotes the Wikimedia Foundation's Dario Taraborelli in support of her thesis:
... to skeptics, of whom there are a growing number, it's a looming public literacy threat—one that arguably dwarfs the recent revelations that Facebook's trending topics are curated by humans.
"It undermines people's ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions," said Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation and a social computing researcher who studies knowledge production online. "And that is something I think we really need to study and process as a society."
For Taraborelli, the primary issue with Google's knowledge panels is that they aren't terribly knowledgeable: They provide information but often leave out any context on where that information came from. That makes it difficult for readers to evaluate the accuracy of the statement or whether it's the best and most complete of the available options.
Google's knowledge panels regularly, if inadvertently, make rather important decisions for us: Taiwan, you'll remember, is described as if it were an independent nation, when only 22 countries actually recognize it as such. Meanwhile, Google corrects searches for "Londonderry," Ireland's fourth-largest city, to "Derry," the (unofficial) term favored by Irish nationalists.
Since Google frequently does not cite its sources—a ploy, Taraborelli says, to make it seem more authoritative—there's no way for users to double-check "answers" for bias or error, which doubtlessly exist.
Dewey's article ends with a hopeful reference to Wikidata, described as
an open-license, machine-readable knowledge base that will both source all of its statements and accommodate conflicting sources. The hope is that Google will begin pulling from that database and citing its sources, instead of dumbing down Wikipedia.
It's a fond hope. Bearing in mind that Wikidata is published under a no-attribution-required CC-0 licence and itself lacks sources for many of its statements, it seems quite possible that many other commercial re-users will jump at the opportunity to use Wikidata content without attribution in order to follow Google's lead and build their own aura of omniscience, replicating and broadening the problem Dewey and Taraborelli lament.
In brief
- Editor retention study: In a guest blog post on Scientific American, Sarah Guminski wonders "What makes Wikipedia's volunteer editors volunteer?" Apparently, it's all about community: in an experiment run on the German-language Wikipedia, researchers found that giving new contributors an award during their first month of participation increased retention by 20 per cent. The "symbolic recognition ... made editors feel like they were part of an exclusive group ... the key takeaway is not how to attract volunteers, but how to keep them." (May 12)
- Wikipedia remains popular: The Atlantic finds that "Wikipedia remains the most popular informational site around." (May 11)
- Nigerian vandals: igberetvnews.com and nigeriannewspapers.today write about vandalism to the biography of Muhammadu Buhari. The article was semi-protected on May 11 after a spate of vandalism edits. (May 11)
- Unloved picture: Seventeen.com chronicles Ansel Elgort's Twitter-based efforts to have his Wikipedia image changed. So far, Elgort seems to have been unsuccessful. (May 10)
- Death and taxes: Death and Taxes looks at edits to the biography of Tim Moore (North Carolina politician). (May 5)
- Popular reptiles: ScienceDaily, Australian Network News, home.bt.com and others report on a study by Oxford University and Tel Aviv University to identify the world's most popular reptiles, ranked according to page views on the English Wikipedia. The Komodo dragon came top, followed by the black mamba and the saltwater crocodile. (May 4–5)
- Celebrity deaths: Gizmodo UK relies on Wikipedia to establish that 2016 is truly a "bizarrely bad year for celebrity deaths", in a piece also picked up by The Daily Mail. (May 4)
Two weeks for the prize of one
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.
Featured articles
Nine featured articles were promoted these weeks.
- U.S. Route 16 ( nominated by Imzadi1979), also called Grand River Avenue was one of the principal pre-Interstate roads in Michigan. The modern route of Grand River Avenue cuts across the Lower Peninsula in a northwest–southeast fashion from near Grand Rapids to Detroit. In the years immediately preceding the creation of the Interstate Highway System, US 16 was shifted from older roads to newer freeways. When the gap in the freeway was filled in around Lansing, the US 16 designation was decommissioned in the state. The freeway was then solely designated Interstate 96 east of Grand Rapids and Interstate 196 west of that city.
- Boise National Forest ( nominated by Fredlyfish4) is a federally protected area covering 2,203,703 acres (8,918.07 km2) of Idaho as part of the national forest system. Created in 1908 from part of Sawtooth National Forest, it is managed by the United States Forest Service as four units.
- During the last weeks of World War II, warships of the United States Navy, the British Royal Navy, and the Royal New Zealand Navy bombarded industrial and military facilities in Japan ( nominated by Nick-D). Most of these bombardments involved battleships and caused heavy damage to several of the factories targeted, as well as nearby civilian areas. A major goal of the attacks was to provoke the Japanese military into committing some of its reserve force of aircraft into battle. However, the Japanese did not attempt to attack the Allied bombardment forces, and none of the involved warships suffered any damage.
- From Russia, with Love ( nominated by SchroCat) is the fifth novel by the English author Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. Fleming wrote the story in early 1956 at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, and published in the United Kingdom one year later. The story centres on a plot by SMERSH to assassinate Bond in such a way as to discredit both him and his organisation. As bait, the Russians use a beautiful cipher clerk and the Spektor, a Soviet decoding machine. Much of the action takes place in Istanbul and on the Orient Express. The novel deals with the East–West tensions of the Cold War, and the decline of British power and influence in the post-Second World War era.
- S. O. Davies ( nominated by Brianboulton) (died 1972) was a Welsh miner, trade union official and Labour Party politician, who served as the Member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil from 1934 to 1972. Most official records show Davies's birth date as November 1886, but he is widely thought to have been born at least four years earlier.
- The teleost ( nominated by LittleJerry, Chiswick Chap and Cwmhiraeth) is the largest infraclass in the class Actinopterygii, the ray-finned fishes, and make up 96 percent of all fish. This diverse group arose in the Triassic period and members are arranged in about 40 orders and 448 families. Teleosts dominate the seas from pole to pole and inhabit the ocean depths, estuaries, rivers, lakes and even swamps.
- The springbok ( nominated by Sainsf) is a medium-sized antelope found mainly in southern and southwestern Africa. The sole member of the genus Antidorcas, this bovid was first described by Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann in 1780. It reaches 71 to 86 cm (28 to 34 in) at the shoulder and weighs between 27 and 42 kg (60 and 93 lb). Both sexes have a pair of black, 35 to 50 cm (14 to 20 in) long horns that curve backward.
- The Lesser Antillean macaw ( nominated by FunkMonk) is a hypothetical extinct species of macaw that is thought to have been endemic to the Lesser Antillean island region of Guadeloupe. In spite of the absence of conserved specimens, many details about the species are known from several contemporary accounts, and the bird is the subject of some illustrations. According to contemporary descriptions, the body of the Lesser Antillean macaw was red and the wings were red, blue and yellow. The tail feathers were between 38 and 51 cm (15 and 20 in) long. Apart from the smaller size and the all-red coloration of the tail feathers, it resembled the scarlet macaw and may therefore have been a close relative of that species.
- Ficus rubiginosa ( nominated by Casliber) is a species of flowering plant native to eastern Australia in the genus Ficus. Beginning as a seedling that grows on other plants or rocks, it matures into a tree 30 m (98 ft) high and nearly as wide with a yellow-brown buttressed trunk. The leaves are oval and glossy green and measure from 4 to 19.3 cm (1+1⁄2 to 7+1⁄2 in) long and 1.25 to 13.2 cm (1⁄2 to 5+1⁄4 in) wide. The fruits are small, round and yellow, and can ripen and turn red at any time of year, peaking in spring and summer.
Featured lists
Eight featured lists were promoted these weeks.
- Elmore James (1918–1963) was an American blues slide guitarist and singer. Most of his discography ( nominated by Ojorojo) consists of two-song record singles. In 1960, James released a compilation, Blues After Hours, which was the only album released during his career. (Although over 100 James compilation albums have been released since his death.)
- Emma Stone (born 1988) is an American actress. She has won 28 awards from 84 nominations ( nominated by FrB.TG) for her film work. She has been nominated for an AACTA International Award, an Academy Award, two British Academy Film Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. She has also won an MTV Movie Award, a People's Choice Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and three Teen Choice Awards.
- Catherine Zeta-Jones (born 1969) is a Welsh actress. As of 2016, she has appeared in 27 films, 7 television productions and 8 theatre productions, and is the recipient of 16 awards from 33 nominations ( nominated by Krimuk90).
- Mahanoy Creek is a 51-mile (82 km) long tributary of the Susquehanna River in Schuylkill County and Northumberland County in Pennsylvania. It has eleven officially named tributaries ( nominated by Jakec), of which six are direct tributaries and five are sub-tributaries. These include seven creeks and four runs.
- Sussex County Cricket Club is one of the 18 member clubs of the English County Championship, representing the historic county of Sussex. Although Sussex representative sides had been playing cricket since the mid-eighteenth century and had also played first-class cricket matches since 1815, the County Cricket Club was established in 1839. Unlike most professional sports county cricket clubs have traditionally used different grounds in various towns and cities within the county for home matches, although the use of minor "out grounds" away from the club's main headquarters has diminished since the 1980s. In total, Sussex have played first-class, List A and Twenty20 cricket at 17 different grounds ( nominated by Joseph2302) across the county.
- Inna (born 1986) is a Romanian singer, dancer and philanthropist. Her discography ( nominated by Cartoon network freak) consists of four studio albums, thirty-three singles and fifteen promotional singles. Twelve of her songs reached the top ten in Romania, with "Amazing" and "Diggy Down", topping the chart in 2009 and 2015, respectively.
- Guitar Hero Live is a 2015 music video game developed by FreeStyleGames and published by Activision. It was the first title in the Guitar Hero series since its hiatus after 2011, and the first game in the series available for 8th generation video game consoles. The game includes 42 songs ( nominated by Masem) on the game's disc, presented in sets using full motion video taken from the first-person perspective of the lead guitarist as the background visuals to create an immersive experience. The game includes the online Guitar Hero TV mode, which contains 425 more songs. Game reviewers found the on-disc soundtrack to be weak as it focused too much on more recent musical acts, while praising the wider variety across a larger time period that GHTV offered.
- The Padma Bhushan is the third highest civilian award of India. Instituted in 1954, the award is given for "distinguished service of a high order", without distinction of race, occupation, position, or sex. The recipients receive a certificate signed by the President of India and a circular-shaped medallion with no monetary association. The recipients are announced every year on Republic Day and registered in The Gazette of India. A total of two hundred awards were presented in the 1960s ( nominated by Dharmadhyaksha), including five foreign recipients.
Featured pictures
Six featured pictures were promoted these weeks.
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Magazine advertisement for Ratna Moetoe Manikam
(created by Java Industrial Film; restored and nominated by Crisco 1492)
Oh behave, Beyhive / Underdogs
Your Traffic Reports for the weeks of April 24-30 and May 1-7.
Oh behave, Beyhive (April 24-30)
I would never pride myself on being unusual; however, I think it can be safely stated that I and my fellow native Wikipedians share few priorities with the general public. I have already mentioned in my previous post that I do not get spectator sports, and our viewers' unending obsession with the non-sport of professional wrestling remains to me an eternal source of mystification. But to those you could add any number of public obsessions completely outside my proverbial wheelhouse. Bikini bodies. Probiotic yoghurt. Singers and/or dancers below US drinking age. Pictures of genitalia posted on social media. Inexplicably popular Armenian-American families. But on the summit of that pile of mentally-erased files must perch the private lives of famous people. As an intensely private person myself, I do not believe that the lives of those who happen to attain a certain level of public regard are in the public domain, any more than their bodies are. So it always shocks me when a celebrity (like, say, Beyoncé) uses the travails of her private life as a means of viral marketing, as appears to have happened in the release of her latest album Lemonade. Her fans, known as the "Beyhive", have been sent into a predictable swarm, and are searching for blood. It is interesting to note that, while she supposedly used her album to castigate her husband Jay-Z for cheating on her, she still released it exclusively on his download service, Tidal.
For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED.
For the week of April 24 to 30, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from WMF's TopViews, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Prince (musician)
3,994,635 Down nearly 80% in views from the previous week, when his death managed to garner a staggering 13 million views in just three days, the Purple One still managed to retain the top spot. It is sobering to realise that we are now seeing that generation of popular musicians pass away, in many cases before those in the previous generation, which was itself no stranger to tragic and premature death. One wonders if in 30 years, a centenarian Bob Dylan or Keith Richards will be the last one standing. 2 Claude Shannon
1,536,831 The World War II cryptographer widely regarded as the father of information theory and the digital circuit got a Google Doodle to celebrate his 100th birthday on April 30th. 3 Captain America: Civil War
1,384,304 With the relative disappointment of Dawn of Justice, all eyes are turning to the next big comic blockbuster released this year which, despite the Captain America headline, is being marketed as another Avengers movie (with Spider-Man!). Whether this will see it over the $1 billion hurdle remains to be seen, but omens are good, with it having already earned $84 million internationally ahead of its US première. When that hits, expect view numbers to skyrocket. 4 Hertha Marks Ayrton
1,314,001 The Hughes Medal-winning physicist and inventor, who investigated the mathematics behind electric arcs and sand ripples, and invented a fan for clearing trenches of poisoned gas, got a Google Doodle on her 162nd birthday on 28 April. 5 Game of Thrones (season 6)
1,097,105 The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. There was a time when such an event would have crushed this list. But the movie world has reclaimed its place in the public's heart from TV and music in the last few years, and so now it is just one event among many. 6 Hillsborough disaster
1,094,036 Topics of purely British interest almost never make the Top 25, let alone the Top 10, so when they do, you know they're significant. On the 15 April 1989, during a 1988–89 FA Cup semi-final match at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, a human crush caused the deaths of 96 people; the highest recorded toll in the history of British sport. More than the toll itself however, what has kept memories of the event alive for many was the reaction of the conservative press, many of which shifted the blame from the police to the fans themselves, despite an inquiry stating that the main cause of the disaster had been failure of police control and bad stadium design. On 26 April 2016, an inquest stated that the 96 victims had been unlawfully killed due to gross negligence on the part of the police, raising the possibility of new prosecutions. 7 Lemonade (Beyoncé album)
1,014,970 The latest album from Beyoncé, released exclusively on her husband Jay-Z's streaming service, Tidal, has been something of a marketing masterstroke- drawing mainstream attention via an accompanying 60-minute film release on HBO (ala Michael Jackson's Thriller) but also triggering a viral storm with an insinuation that her husband had cheated on her with "a Becky with good hair" (supposed code for a white woman). 8 Rachel Roy
970,266 The Indian American fashion designer and ex-wife of Jay-Z partner Damon Dash, who had long been suspected of being more than friends with the married-to-Beyoncé Jay-Z, made what can only be described as a catastrophically ill-judged post on Instagram in the wake of Beyoncé's cryptic "Becky with the good hair" lyric: "Good hair don’t care, but we will take good lighting, for selfies, or self truths, always. live in the light #nodramaqueens." You can imagine what happened next. Beyoncé's fans, known as the Beyhive, swarmed onto Roy's online identity, vandalising her Wikipedia page and flooding her Instagram with the usual poorly-spelled death threats. Casualties of this stinging attack included Roy's 11-year-old daughter, who received comments on social media like “Yo mom needs to drink bleach,” and even celebrity chef Rachael Ray, who has absolutely nothing in common with Roy save eight letters of her name. 9 Game of Thrones
827,670 See #5. 10 Beyoncé
781,212 A mark of the uncontrollable force the Madonna of her generation unleashed when she included coded references to her husband's infidelity in her latest album was that people appear less interested in her than they are in the woman they decided she was referring to. See #7 and #8.
Underdogs (May 1-7)
The triumph of Captain America: Civil War at the box office and #1 on the chart this week is not surprising, but otherwise our top 10 has a number of improbable entries, all things considered. Donald Trump (#3) returns to the Top 10 (though he's remained solidly in the Top 25 in the past few weeks), having now essentially clinched the Republican nomination for U.S. President. Anyone who says they honestly predicted this when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower last June to announce his candidacy is simply lying. Even more improbable and happy news, however, comes from the world of English football, where Leicester City F.C. (#4) won the Premier League after starting the season with 5000 to 1 odds. Meanwhile, citizens of London may not see their new mayor Sadiq Khan (#9) as an underdog, but becoming the first Muslim mayor of a major Western capital is not something much of the world would have predicted.
For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see here.
For the week of May 1 to 7, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages (WP:5000), were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Captain America: Civil War
2,303,444 The United States premiere of this movie finally came on May 6, and had the fifth-largest opening weekened all-time in that country. With the relative disappointment of Dawn of Justice, the film industry's eyes are turned to this big comic blockbuster which, despite the Captain America headline, is being marketed as another Avengers movie (with Spider-Man!). Whether this will see it over the $1 billion hurdle remains to be seen, but its box office has now already exceeded $678 million. 2 Cinco de Mayo
2,114,216 One of our annual most self-explanatory article spikes on Wikipedia returns, a celebration of Mexican-American culture originally meant to commemorate a Mexican victory over the French. Among those taking advantage of the holiday was this Report's dear friend and constant companion Donald Trump (#3), who stirred controversy by tweeting a photograph of himself eating a taco bowl with the exclamation "I love Hispanics!" 3 Donald Trump
992,406 On Tuesday May 3, Trump handily scored a big win in the Indiana primary, leading his last opponents for the Republican nomination for U.S. president, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, to suspend their campaigns. This means that the real-estate mogul and reality-show star is really now slated to go head-to-head against Hillary Clinton in November (though technically Bernie Sanders has not yet conceded to Clinton) in the election for the Presidency of the United States. What a time to be alive. 4 Leicester City F.C.
930,859 The world loves a good underdog sports story, and this week may have seen the most improbable triumph in all of sports history. Coming from 5,000 to 1 odds at the start of the season, this club won the Premier League on May 2, bringing global attention to the team. Jamie Vardy (pictured), one of team's stars, was also named FWA Footballer of the Year. When it comes to rising up against the odds, the promotion and relegation rules of the English football league system has a lot going for it. And speaking of underdog stories, though I don't watch a lot of English football, many are also rooting for AFC Wimbledon (which started in the ninth tier of English football in 2002) to get promoted to Football League One (the third tier) this year, which they can do if they prevail in their playoffs. 5 Sigmund Freud
856,399 A Google Doogle celebrated the birthday of the famous father of psychoanalysis. 6 Prince (musician)
799,673 After two weeks in the top slot, Prince's recent death remains a subject of news coverage. 7 Payback (2016)
733,920 This wrestling event was held on May 1. 8 Jane Jacobs
713,542 A Google Doogle celebrated the 100th birthday of the urban studies activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 9 Sadiq Khan
705,457 In the long history of London, it is now a fact that one-third of all its mayors have been Muslim. That's because Khan is only the third mayor of London (a position created in 2000), and he's Muslim. And just when you think a subject couldn't be infected by Donald Trump (#3), some of the coverage of the election in England suggested that Khan wouldn't be able to travel to the United States if Trump is elected, a reference to Trump's suggestion that Muslims should be barred from entry. 10 Game of Thrones (season 6)
675,351 The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April.
"Wikicology" ends in site ban; evidence and workshop phases concluded for "Gamaliel and others"
Wikicology
The Wikicology case closed on May 13, ending in a site-ban for Wikicology. In addition to reiterating standard principles that have appeared in many past cases, the final decision included two specific principles:
- Collegiality and self-representation:
8) While Wikipedia editors are under no obligation to reveal personal information about themselves, and therefore are also under no obligation to actively take steps to correct others' mistaken impressions, it is uncollegial behavior to deliberately take advantage of mistaken impressions for the purpose of personal benefit.
- Limitations of arbitration:
9) The jurisdiction of the Arbitration Committee is limited to the English Wikipedia. The Committee is unable and unwilling to conduct investigations of editors' outside activities in order to shed light on editors' on-wiki self-representations. The Committee is also unable to direct the decisions made by other projects, programs, and affiliates within the Wikimedia Foundation umbrella. However, best efforts may be made to ensure that these groups are aware of Committee decisions that potentially impact them.
The findings of fact were that Wikicology:
- used sockpuppets in the early days of his participation;
- engaged in autobiographical editing;
- gave the impression of self-promotion;
- introduced numerous errors to articles, introduced copyright-violating text, and uploaded copyright-violating images;
- received feedback on his editing, and has held volunteer positions in other WMF-affiliated projects, and was not a novice editor; and
- was harassed in the course of the case (one account was blocked during the case for this behavior).
The remedies were:
- a topic ban from biomedical content;
- a topic ban from images;
- a site ban—as usual, Wikicology may request reconsideration of the ban 12 months hence, and every six months thereafter;
- encouragement for the community to make use of the material presented in the case evidence and analysis of evidence sections to organize a systematic clean-up for Wikicology's past problematic contributions; and
- an undertaking by the Committee, on a best-effort basis, to inform representatives of WMF-affiliated projects with which Wikicology has been involved of the outcome of the case.
The case pages have been blanked as a courtesy.
Gamaliel and others
The evidence phase of the "Gamaliel and others" case closed on May 6, shortly after arbitrator Opabinia regalis posted evidence from Gamaliel, who has not edited Wikipedia in the past month, submitting his evidence by email instead.
The case then entered the workshop phase, which generated more than 50,000 words of discussion. Much of this related to how BLP policy should be applied to Signpost pages, which are hosted in project space. Editors—including arbitrators—offered widely divergent opinions on whether the Signpost's publication of an April Fools' piece lampooning Donald Trump and Jimmy Wales, complete with some dummy pages to populate a Trump-themed sidebar in the article (one of which was deleted by community consensus), constituted a BLP violation.
The workshop phase closed on May 14; the proposed decision is due to be posted on May 23.
Other arbitration news
On May 4, the Committee passed a motion on oversight block appeals:
Appeals of blocks that have been marked by an oversighter as oversight blocks should be sent to the oversight team via email (Oversight-l
On May 11, this was followed by a Doncram amendment motion:
The Doncram arbitration case is amended as follows:
- Remedy 2.1—General editor probation is rescinded.
- Remedy 2.3—Article creation restriction is rescinded
- The topic ban imposed by Seraphimblade is rescinded. For clarity, this means that Doncram is permitted to edit existing articles but not create new articles that are related to the National Register of Historic Places, broadly construed.
- The following remedy is added to the case: Doncram is indefinitely restricted from creating new pages, except for redirects, in article space which are related to the National Register of Historic Places, broadly construed.
That's it for WikiCup Round 2!
Round 2 is over and 35 competitors have moved on to Round 3.
Round 2 saw three FAs (two by
Cas Liber (
submissions) and one by
Montanabw (
submissions)), four Featured Lists (with three by
Calvin999 (
submissions)), and 53 Good Articles (six by
Worm That Turned (
submissions) and five each by
Hurricanehink (
submissions),
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions), and
MPJ-DK (
submissions)). Eleven Featured Pictures were promoted (six by
Adam Cuerden (
submissions) and five by
Godot13 (
submissions)). One Featured Portal, Featured Topic and Good Topic were also promoted. The DYK base point total was 1,135.
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions) scored 265 base points, while
The C of E (
submissions) and
MPJ-DK (
submissions) each scored 150 base points. Eleven ITN were promoted and 131 Good Article Reviews were conducted with
MPJ-DK (
submissions) completing a staggering 61 reviews. Two contestants,
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions) and
Cas Liber (
submissions), broke the 700 point mark for Round 2.
Thanks to everyone for participating, and good luck to those moving into round 3. Sturmvogel 66 ( talk · contribs · email), Figureskatingfan ( talk · contribs · email), and Godot13 ( talk · contribs · email)
Gallery of contestants' work
As always, these are meant as a sample of the work done by the contestant. For complete lists of the work submitted in this round for each person listed, check the "submissions" link in their write-up. This list includes the top twenty contestants by points, since it gets far more difficult to illustrate contestants when the number of submissions is fewer.
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The Australian shrub Isopogon anemonifolius was one of two featured articles that helped catapult
Cas Liber (
submissions) to first place.
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Second-place
Cwmhiraeth (
submissions) worked largely on articles related to Wales and animals this round, such as the Welsh county
Ceredigion (formerly Cardiganshire), one of Cwmhiraeth's five good articles.
( Aberystwyth Castle shown) -
MPJ-DK (
submissions) gained third place largely through his incredible work on
luchadors.
(Mephisto, part of the team that won the Mexican National Trios Championship, shown.) -
Welsh harpist Elizabeth Randles was one of six good articles by fourth-place
Worm That Turned (
submissions)
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Thunder, mascot of the Denver Broncos American football team was brought to featured article status by fifth-place
Montanabw (
submissions).
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A 12-6 elbow is one of
The C of E (
submissions) two good articles this round. He also had a Did You Know? submission for
sheep shagger. Just thought I'd mention that. There's a story behind it.
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And
Cyclonebiskit (
submissions) worked on hurricanes, such as
Hurricane Patricia (precursor weather system shown)
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One of the gorgeous featured pictures by
Godot13 (
submissions), specifically,
Christ Church Cathedral in the
Falkland Islands.
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Katy Perry is the subject of the first featured topic of the competition thanks to
Calvin999 (
submissions)
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The Māori Battalion performing a haka was part of a celebration of ANZAC Day on Wikipedia's mainpage thanks to
Adam Cuerden (
submissions)
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2016 Australian Grand Prix was one of three racing articles brought to good article status by
Zwerg Nase (
submissions).
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12george1 (
submissions) raised three hurricane-related articles to good article status. (Hurricane Fred of the
2015 Atlantic hurricane season shown.)
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Captain Assassin! (
submissions) raised the thriller film
The Boy Next Door from new article to good article status. (Star
Jennifer Lopez pictured).
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Fossil eggs are given their own classifications, as identifying what laid them is very difficult.
Ashorocetus (
submissions) has been hard at work writing articles on these
oogenera, to help explain them to all. (Two examples of
Gobioolithus ["Stone egg from the
Gobi desert"] pictured.)
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Ernest Deane, rugby player and later British Indian Army medical officer gained good article status thanks to
FunkyCanute (
submissions)
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Coemgenus (
submissions) raised Prohibitionist
Henry Adams Thompson to good article status, then possibly had a drink to celebrate?
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