Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2016-11-26

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26 November 2016

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President-elect Trump
 

2016-11-26

Arbitration Committee elections underway



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2016-11-26

Roundup of news related to U.S. presidential election and more

Glenn Greenwald

There has been much discussion about the role of "fake news websites", and their distribution through social media sites like Facebook and promotion via online advertising platforms. As calls for the social media titan to evaluate news stories mounted, journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that: "People are (rightly) skeptical of the state censoring "bad" viewpoints but (dangerously) eager for unaccountable tech billionaires to do it.”

In “Facebook Doesn’t Need One Editor, It Needs 1,000 of Them”, Mathew Ingram of Fortune advised Facebook to look to Wikipedia for a solution. Ingram cited Wikimedia adviser Craig Newmark’s June 2016 blog post about Wikipedia’s role in journalism. The Harvard Business School paper (discussed in our previous edition’s In the media section, and noted below) might have offered an additional dimension to Ingram’s analysis.

A Wall Street Journal story, Most students don’t know when news is fake, Stanford study finds, pointed to media literacy as a key skill-set in countering fake news.

Melissa Zimdars, a communications professor at Merrimack College, published (under a free license) a list of questionable websites, annotated with suggestions for how to evaluate their contents. The list itself was widely shared, and was covered by a number of news outlets. Zimdars then penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, noting, “with some concern, that the same techniques that get people to click on fake or overhyped stories are also being used to get people to read about my own list.” She said: “I’m not convinced that a majority of people who shared my list actually read my list, much as I’m not convinced that many people who share or comment on news articles posted to Facebook have actually read those articles”, and concluded that “while we think about fake news, we need to start thinking about how to make our actual news better, too.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which advocates for individual rights, was highly critical of Trump on election day, and highlighted threats it felt he might pose to the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, among others.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which advocates for digital rights, “wrote that 'the results of the U.S. presidential election have put the tech industry in a risky position”, urging technology companies to address several issues before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Issues raised include permitting pseudonymous access, curtailing behavioral analysis, keeping minimal logs of user behavior, and encrypting data. The Wikimedia Foundation, and standard Wikipedia practices, already perform better than most tech companies on all these issues; in the EFF's 2015 "Who Has Your Back" report, which evaluates tech companies on their data and privacy practices, Wikimedia earned a perfect five out of five stars. A related EFF post highlighted relevant grassroots efforts, while another urged President Obama to "boost transparency [and] accountability" in his final days in office. PF


Wikipedia may be better at dealing with arguments than the internet at large.
  • Murder evidence: At the opening of the trial of Thomas Mair for the killing of British Member of Parliament Jo Cox, it was reported by media that Mair reviewed the Wikipedia pages of Cox, far right publication Occidental Observer, and also Ian Gow, the last MP to be murdered (in 1990).
  • More murder: A&E's new documentary series The Killing Season examines unsolved murder cases. In its first episode noted evidence from a Wikipedia edit history, in which an unidentified editor made an edit that changed the phrase "Gilgo Beach Killer" to the name of a person. The IP address in the edit history was that of the Suffolk County Police. Personnel from the show followed up on the named person by visiting his house, calling him, recording him, and playing his voice for someone who was presumably called by the serial killer. The episode first aired on November 12, 2016; the Wikipedia segment began at about 3 minutes into the episode.
  • And even more murder: The second episode explained in more depth (beginning at 39:00) how producers used Wikipedia editing history, and presented screenshots reflecting the edit in question.
  • Fact or fiction: The Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction video series on Loudwire, where artists discuss the accuracy of the information listed on their own Wikipedia biographies, celebrated its 100th episode.
  • Model Internet citizens: Wikipedia researchers Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu reported in the Harvard Business Review on their recent Wikipedia research. (The Signpost reported on the Washington Post's coverage of the study in our Nov. 4 edition.) The study explores how contributors with different political viewpoints interact, and suggests that we have a "remarkable record" of dealing with differing opinions "without it descending into hate speech and loutish behavior." Compared to the rest of the internet, at least?
  • Wikipedia Records: Reports note that experimental musician Dedekind Cut released the B-side to his latest offering, Successor, on Wikipedia.
  • Wikimedia is officially "a thing": Open education advocate Lorna Campbell blogged about the addition of Wikimedia to the University of Edinburgh’s "23 Things for Digital Knowledge" list, which "aims to expose you to a range of digital tools for your personal and professional development as a researcher, academic, student, or professional."



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



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2016-11-26

The top fifteen winning photos from Wiki Loves Earth

The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. Any views expressed in this piece are not necessarily shared by the Signpost; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. For more information on this partnership, see our content guidelines.



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2016-11-26

Around the world with Wiki Loves Monuments 2016



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2016-11-26

Featured mix

The World Before the Flood, an 1828 oil painting by William Etty, depicts a scene from John Milton's Paradise Lost in which, among a series of visions of the future shown to Adam, he sees the world immediately before the Great Flood. The painting illustrates the stages of courtship as described by Milton; a group of men select wives from a group of dancing women, drag their chosen woman from the group, and settle down to married life. Behind the courting group, an oncoming storm looms, a symbol of the destruction which the dancers and lovers are about to bring upon themselves.

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 30 October to 12 November.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

1907 illustration of Eurasian rock pipits by Henrik Grönvold
Taylor Swift performing during a The 1989 World Tour show in Detroit, Michigan in May 2015.
Tina Maze is one of the two most decorated post-independence Slovenian Olympians, with four medals.

Eight featured articles were promoted.

  • The Eurasian rock pipit (nominated by Jimfbleak) is a small species of passerine bird that breeds in western Europe on rocky coasts. It has streaked greyish-brown upperparts and buff underparts, and is similar in appearance to other European pipits. It is territorial at least in the breeding season, and year-round where it is resident. Eurasian rock pipits construct a cup nest under coastal vegetation or in cliff crevices and lay four to six speckled pale grey eggs which hatch in about two weeks with a further 16 days to fledging. Although insects are occasionally caught in flight, the pipits feed mainly on small invertebrates picked off the rocks or from shallow water. It is evaluated as a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
  • Allen Walker (nominated by Tintor2) is a fictional character who appears as the protagonist of the manga D.Gray-man by Katsura Hoshino. In the series, set on 19th-century Earth, Allen Walker is a teenager who joins the Black Order, a group of soldiers known as Exorcists. As an Exorcist, Allen is able to use a mysterious object known as Innocence to fight demons known as Akuma. Allen's Innocence takes the form of a giant left arm initially, but evolves over time and gives him new abilities. Over the course of the series, Allen uses these powers to fight the Millennium Earl, who created the army of Akuma to destroy the world, and his super-human followers, the Noah Family. During his adventures, Allen learns he is connected to the Noah and might turn into one of them. Allen has been very popular with D.Gray-man readers, usually ranking in the top three in the series' popularity polls. Reactions to him have also been generally positive in manga and anime publications and other media. His character design has been highly praised, critics noting characteristics atypical of a shōnen protagonist, such as his calm demeanor and mysterious origin.
  • O. G. S. Crawford (nominated by Midnightblueowl) (1886–1957) was a British archaeologist who specialised in the study of prehistoric Britain and the archaeology of Sudan. Working for most of his career as the archaeological officer of the Ordnance Survey, he wrote a range of books on archaeological subjects and was a keen proponent of aerial archaeology.
  • The World Before the Flood (nominated by Iridescent) is an oil painting on canvas by English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1828 and currently in the Southampton City Art Gallery. When first exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the painting attracted large crowds, and strongly divided critical opinion. It was greatly praised by many critics, who counted it among the finest works of art in the country. Other reviewers condemned it as crude, tasteless, offensive and poorly executed.
  • Taylor Swift (nominated by FrB.TG and IndianBio) (born 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. One of the most popular contemporary female recording artists, she is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which has received much media attention.
  • Sabrina Sidney (nominated by Worm That Turned and Staceydolxx) (1757–1843) was a British foundling girl taken in when she was twelve by author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. Day had been struggling to find a wife who would share his ideology and had been rejected by several women. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile, or On Education, he decided to educate two girls without any frivolities, using his own concepts.
  • Hands Across Hawthorne (nominated by Another Believer) was a rally held at the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Oregon, in 2011, in response to an attack on a gay male couple one week earlier for holding hands while walking across the bridge. The assault was condemned by Portland's gay mayor, Sam Adams, and its police chief, Mike Reese, and news of the attack spread throughout the United States. The attack prompted volunteers from the Q Center to form street patrols as a means of monitoring Portland's downtown area. Several LGBT and human rights organizations sponsored Hands Across Hawthorne in response to the attack, with the purpose of linking hands across the entire span of the Hawthorne Bridge to show solidarity. More than 4,000 people attended the rally, which had been publicized on a single Facebook page 72 hours previously. The event received attention throughout the United States.
  • Ghost Stories (nominated by Mike Christie) was an American pulp magazine that published 64 issues between 1926 and 1932. It was one of the earliest competitors to Weird Tales, and a companion magazine to True Story and True Detective Stories, and focused almost entirely on stories about ghosts, many of which were written by staff writers but presented under pseudonyms as true confessions. These were often accompanied by faked photographs to make the stories appear more believable. The magazine was initially successful, but began to lose readers, and in 1930 was sold to Harold Hersey. Hersey was unable to reverse the magazine's decline, and Ghost Stories ceased publication at the start of 1932.

Two featured lists were promoted.

  • Ben Affleck (born 1972) is an American actor and filmmaker. His filming career (nominated by Renamed user henga2423) began in 1981 with a minor part in the independent film The Dark End of the Street. Since then, he has appeared in 47 further films, 2 television films and 39 television episodes. Affleck has also directed six films and wrote the screenplay for four films and a television series.
  • Slovenia first participated as an independent nation at the Olympic Games (nominated by Tone) at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, and the country has sent athletes to compete at every Games since then. The Slovenian Olympic Committee was established in 1991 and was recognised by the International Olympic Committee in 1992. Athletes representing Slovenia have won a total of 23 medals at the Summer Olympic Games and another 15 at the Winter Olympic Games. Slovenia's most successful Summer Olympics as of 2016 have been the 2000 Summer Olympics where they won two gold medals and the 2008 Summer Olympics where they won five medals overall, including one gold. The most successful winter games were the 2014 Winter Olympics, where Slovenian athletes won a record eight medals, including two gold.

Nine featured pictures were promoted.



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2016-11-26

Taking stock of the Good Article backlog

The GA Trophy awarded at the end of a Good Article Cup
Wugapodes is a two-time GA Cup participant and WikiCup finalist. Their academic work focuses on the linguistic impacts of group behavior.

Before an English Wikipedia article can achieve good article status (the entry grade among the higher-quality article rankings), it must undergo review by an uninvolved editor. However, the number of articles nominated for review at any given time has outstripped the number of available reviewers for almost as long as the good article nominations process has existed creating a backlog of unreviewed articles. The resulting backlog in the queue of articles waiting to be reviewed has been a perennial concern. Nevertheless, the backlog at Good Article Nominations (GAN) reached its lowest point in two years on 2 July 2016. The culprit was the third annual Good Article Cup, which ended on 30 June 2016; the 2016-2017 GA Cup, its fourth iteration, began on 1 November and is ongoing. The GA Cup is the GA WikiProject's most successful backlog reduction initiative to date, but there is a problem that plagues this and all other backlog elimination drives: editor fatigue.

The backlog at GAN has been growing ever since the process was created, with fluctuations and trends along the way. If the GA Cup, or any elimination drive, is going to be successful, it must at some point begin to treat the cause not simply the symptom. While the GA Cup has done a remarkable job in reducing the backlog, for long term success the cause of the backlog needs to be understood. The cause appears to be editor fatigue, with boom and bust reviewing periods where the core group of reviewers try to reduce the backlog and then tire out, causing the backlog to rebound. This is the chief benefit of the GA Cup: its format helps counteract the cycle of fatigue with a long term motivational structure.

The GA Cup is a multi-round competition modeled on the older and broader-purpose WikiCup (which has run annually since 2007 and concluded this year on 31 October). Members of the GA WikiProject created the GA Cup as a way to encourage editors to review nominations and reduce the backlog through good-natured competition. Participants are awarded points for reviewing good article nominations, with more points being awarded the longer a nomination has languished in the queue. Each GA Cup sees a significant reduction in the number of nominations awaiting review. On this metric alone the GA Cup is a success; but counting raw articles awaiting review only gives insight into what happens while the GA Cup is running, ignoring the origin of the backlog and masking ways in which the GA Cup can be further improved.

The GA Cup's predecessors, backlog elimination drives, only lasted a month, while the GA Cup lasts four. While the time commitment alone can be a source of fatigue, the mismatch between the time taken to review and the ease of nomination can lead to an unmanageable workload. A good article review nominally takes 7 days, so if the rate of closing reviews is less than the rate of nominations added, the backlog will not only increase, but the number of reviews being done by a given reviewer will balloon, causing them to burn out by the end of the competition. Well-known post-cup backlog spikes demonstrate the oft temporary nature of GA Cup efforts.

With proper information and planning, the GA Cup can begin to treat the cause of the backlog rather than the symptom and succeed in sustaining backlog reductions after its conclusion.


A history of the Good Article project

Good articles can be identified by a green plus symbol. The plus-minus motif was not the first suggested; other ideas included a thumbs up, check mark, or ribbon.

The Good Article project was created on 11 October 2005 "to identify good content that is not likely to become featured". The criteria were similar to those we have now:



At first, the project was largely a list of articles individual editors believed to be good: any editor could add an article to the list, and any other editor could remove it. This received significant pushback, with core templates {{GA}} and {{DelistedGA}} receiving nominations for deletion on 2 December 2005 as "label creep" and a suggestion that the then-guideline should be deleted as well. They were kept, but, after discussions, the GA process received a slight tweak: while editors could still freely add articles they did not write as GAs, those wishing to self-nominate their work were referred to a newly created good article nomination page.

While the first version of the Good Article page told editors to nominate all potential Good Articles at Wikipedia:Good article candidates (now Good Article Nominations), that requirement was removed 10 hours later. The current process was not adopted until a few months later. In March 2006 another suggestion was made:


The next day the GA page was updated to reflect this new assessment process, and the nominations procedure was extended to all nominations, not just self-nominations.

From there on the nomination page continued to grow. The first concerns over the backlog were raised in late 2006 and early 2007, when the nomination queue hovered around 140 unreviewed nominations. In May, the first backlog elimination drive was held, lasting three weeks. The drive saw a reduction in the backlog from 168 to just 77 articles. This did not last, however, with the backlog jumping back up to 124 a week later. The next backlog drive was held the next month, from 10 July to 14 August, with 406 reviews completed—but a net backlog reduction of just 50, leaving 73 articles still needing reviewed. Another drive planned for September was canceled due to perceived editor fatigue. Backlog elimination drives have been held at irregular intervals ever since then, with the most recent during August 2016. These drives were "moderately successful", to quote a 2015 Signpost op-ed by Figureskatingfan:



With a looming backlog of more than 450 unreviewed articles by August 2014, a new solution was sought: the GA cup. Figureskatingfan, who co-founded the cup with Dom497, writes of its creation:

I was in Washington, D.C., at the Wikipedia Workshop Facilitator Training in late August 2014. While I was there, I was communicating through Messenger with another editor, Dom497. We were discussing a long-standing challenge for WikiProject Good Articles—the traditionally long queue at GAN. Dom was a long-time member of the GA WikiProject. This impressive young man created several projects to encourage the reviewing of GAs, most of which I supported and participated in, but they all failed. I shared this dilemma with some of my fellow participants at the training, and in the course of the discussion, it occurred to me: Why not follow the example of the wildly successful and popular WikiCup, and create a tournament-based competition encouraging the review of GAs, but on a smaller scale, at least to start?

I was literally on the way to the airport on my way home, discussing the logistics of setting up such a competition with Dom. By the time I got home, we had set up a preliminary scoring system and Dom had created the pages necessary. We brought up our idea at the WikiProject, and most expressed their enthusiastic support. We recruited two more judges, and conducted our first competition beginning in October 2014.


— Figureskatingfan


A history of the backlog

The GAN backlog, 10 May 2007 to 25 June 2016.

Over the last nine years, the GAN backlog has grown by about three nominations per month on average—the solid blue line above. Backlog levels are almost never stable. Large trends cause the backlog to fluctuate above and below the regressive average often. These trends though also have their own fluctuations with local peaks and valleys along an otherwise upward or downward trend. What causes these fluctuations? For the three declines after 2014, the answer is relatively simple: the GA Cup. But what about the earlier declines?

The most obvious hypothesis is that the drops coincide with the backlog elimination drives, but this is not sufficient. While most backlog drives coincide with steep drops in the backlog, the ones that do are clustered towards the early years of GAN before it was as popular as it is now. It is easier to make significant dents in the backlog when only a couple nominations are coming in per day than when ten or more are coming in. Indeed, the last three backlog drives had a marginal impact, if any. More obviously, not all drops in the backlog stem from backlog elimination drives. Take, for instance, the reduction in the backlog in mid 2008—a reduction of 100 nominations without any backlog drive taking place. Similar reductions occurred thrice in 2013. In fact, the opposite effect has also been seen: the two most recent backlog drives seemingly occurred during natural backlog reductions, and didn't accelerate things by much. If elimination drives are not, taken together, the sole cause at play there must be some more fundamental cause that accounts for all the reductions seen.

A better explanation comes from the field of finance: the idea of support and resistance in stock prices. For a stock, there is a price that is hard to rise above—a line of resistance—and a price that it is hard to fall below—a line of support. These phenomena are caused by the behavior of investors. When a stock price rises above a certain point, investors sell, causing the price to fall; conversely, when the price falls to a certain point, investors buy, causing the price to rise.

Does this apply to good article reviews as well? By analogy, imagine GA reviewers as investors and the backlog as a stock price. When the backlog rises to a certain point, GA reviewers collectively think the backlog is too large and so begin reviewing at a higher pace to lower it—a line of resistance. When the backlog falls to a certain point, reviewers slow down their pace or get burned out, causing the backlog to grow—a line of support. This makes intuitive sense. The impetus behind most backlog elimination drives is a group of reviewers thinking the backlog has grown too large. The backlog elimination drives then are just a more organized example of reviewers picking up their pace.

If this hypothesis is correct, then backlog reduction initiatives should be held during the low tide, encouraging weary reviewers, rather than during the high, when they are more likely to review nominations anyway, initiatives notwithstanding. But how can we tell where these lines of support exist and when the backlog is likely to bounce back? Economists and investors have found the moving average to be a useful tool in describing the lines of support and resistance in stock prices, so perhaps it can be useful here. In the graph above, the dashed, red line represents a 90-day simple moving average. It seems to capture the lines of support and resistance for the backlog well, as most local peaks tend to bounce off of it, but major trend changes pass through it.

An example of the utility of this theory can be seen in early 2009. The backlog began to fall naturally in January, but was about to hit a line of resistance that may have caused the upward trend to continue. However, a backlog drive took place in February, causing an even steeper decline in the backlog, pushing it past the line of resistance. Unfortunately, the full impact of this cannot be understood as the data for April to November 2009 were never recorded by the GA Bot.


The impact of the GA Cup

The backlog over the last three years.

After almost a year of no backlog drives in 2013, followed by two rather unsuccessful ones, the GA Cup was started. Over the past two years, three GA Cups have been run, all with robust participation and significant reductions in nominations outstanding. But is the cup succeeding? To answer that question I looked at the daily rates of new nominations, closed nominations, nominations passed, and nominations failed during each of the GA Cups and compared them to the rates before and after the first GA Cup.

The presence of a reduction in the backlog is obvious: each cup correlates with a steep drop in the number of nominations, the most effective being the third GA Cup, which concluded on June 30 this year. The most recent GA Cup reduced the backlog by about two nominations per day, 92 more nominations completed than during the first GA Cup—despite the third Cup being significantly shorter than the first. The third GA Cup was lauded a success.

Yet in late April, the backlog reduction began to stagnate. The number of nominations added remained relatively stable over this period, but this period coincided with a drop in the number of nominations being completed. In early May the backlog began to rise, crossing over the line of resistance in the process, and so beginning to shrink again towards the end of May, with a distinct downward trend by June.

Backlog during the third GA Cup with a 15-day simple moving average

Ultimately, the best way to conceptualize the GA review backlog is as a mismatch between the "supply" of reviewers and the "demand" for reviews. To borrow another concept from finance, it is simply a mismatch in supply and demand. The number of nominations—the demand—is relatively consistent, at about 10 nominations per day. There is a mild decrease in the rate of nominations—the daily rate decreases by one nomination every two years—but, all-in-all, relatively stable.

Measuring supply is more difficult. The change in the backlog is equal to the number of nominations added minus the number of reviews opened, so if the average demand is 10 nominations, and the average supply of reviews is 0, then the backlog would grow by 10 nominations each day; if the supply were 5, it would grow by 5. That means the average number of nominations minus the average number of reviews equals the average change in the backlog. Since the average change in the backlog, the linear regression, and the average number of nominations are both known, the average supply can easily be calculated. It turns out to be about six per day. Taken in combination with the aforementioned demand, shows a net daily increase in the backlog by four nominations each day. And since this analysis includes the GA cup time period, the backlog is actually increasing at an even higher rate whenever a Cup isn't active!

Backlog from the end of the Second GA Cup to the end of the Third GA Cup. The blue line indicates when the Third GA cup was announced and the green line when the Third Cup began.

The number of open reviews does not inspire much confidence either. Reviews open drops dramatically after each GA cup, likely due to participant burnt-out. Interestingly, the number of open reviews also drops before the GA Cup causing a counterproductive uptick in the backlog. In fact, the drop just before this year's cup coincided with the announcement of the event's competition date a month prior to its start. This development came at a time when the number of reviews was increasing and the backlog naturally starting to decline.

All told, these are not fatal flaws, as the GA Cup is succeeding despite them in other ways. Most obviously, the backlog has been decreasing during cups, and review quality doesn't seem to decline, qualitatively, either. Comparing five months before with the four months during the first GA Cup, there is no significant difference between the pass rates during or before the GA Cup ( t(504.97)=-1.788, p=0.07 ). In fact, may have actually decreased slightly, from 85% beforehand to 82% during the cup and because the p-value is close to significance, the idea that GA Cup reviewers are more stringent may be worth examining further.

This is not to say that there is no other way to examine review quality. Reasonable minds can disagree on how well this metric describes the quality of reviews, and concerns of the quality of reviews have been raised a number of times, but this is the preferable starting point for this analysis. We now know that the GA Cup does not lead to "drive-by" passes, and that any problems with unfit articles passing or fit articles failing are occurring at about the same rate as normal. Hopefully, then, those solutions can be more general, improving all reviews' qualities, rather than specific to the GA Cup.

Conclusions

The GA Cups have been effective at encouraging editors completing GA reviews. Its effect on the cause of the backlog, on the other hand, is less clear. Long-lasting backlog reductions require a nuanced approach: recruiting more reviewers, finding the correct timing, and giving proper encouragement. The GA Cup is arguably already successful at encouragement, but that does not mean the former aspects cannot be improved as well.

The GA Cup has so far been executed at times when reviewers were already increasing their efforts to reduce the backlog, and the announcement of the third GA Cup, for instance, caused these efforts to stagnate. By allowing these natural reductions to take place, and then holding the GA Cup when editors get burnt out, we can leverage GA cups' morale boost to help reduce backlogs even further.

Furthermore, while there was no good way to analyze how well the GA Cup recruits new reviewers, anecdotally it seems to do so. Bringing in new reviewers when the regulars are getting burnt out would reduce the backlog rebound in the short term, and may lead to an increase in the number of regular reviewers in the long term.


The organizers of the GA Cup understand that what is most needed is more reviews and more reviewers, which and whom the GA Cup has done an admirable job recruiting. The Third GA Cup has been the most successful so far, and hopefully the next cup will surpass it in all metrics.



Reader comments

2016-11-26

Fundraising data should be more transparent



Reader comments

2016-11-26

President-elect Trump

Week of October 30 – November 5, 2016: Asleep at the wheel

Despite facing what could very well be the most important election since the civil rights era, Americans seem to want to think about anything but politics. Obviously the 2016 election is on people's minds, but not as much as macabre holidays, improbable wins by oft-ridiculed baseball teams, comic book sorcerers and, most tellingly of all perhaps, a melodrama about royalty. Given the responsibility they're about to take on, it's not surprising that democracy isn't a priority for readers at the moment. Still, get in gear guys. It's not like we're not all watching you or anything.

For the full top-25 lists (and 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.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 30 to November 5, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Day of the Dead B-class 1,889,902
Mexico's carnival of the cadaverous, the living dream of any kid who ever wished Halloween could last three days, is the beneficiary of Wikipedia's incurable interest in those holidays not routinely celebrated in the US. It's the same reason Boxing Day always charts higher than Christmas on this list. Despite the list covering both these holidays' dates, and despite Halloween being boosted by that greatest of Wikipedia flypapers, an interactive Google Doodle, the Day of the Dead's grim fandango still beat latter's monster mash. It only just loses even if we had added in Halloween's numbers from last week to that holiday's total.
2 Halloween B-class 1,558,776
Whatever happened to the Transylvania Twist?
3 Doctor Strange (film) C-Class 1,077,855
Marvel Studios continue their roll. Their attempt to bring their unashamedly psychedelic superhero into the earthier realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has apparently paid off, with a 90% RT rating and an $84 million opening, no doubt aided by the international star power of a certain Benedict Cumberbatch (pictured).
4 Chicago Cubs C-Class 1,030,619
The American baseball team has not won a World Series since 1908, but managed it this year, beating the Cleveland Indians 8–7. Turns out Back to the Future II was only off by a year.
5 Huma Abedin C-Class 1,021,942
A top adviser to Hillary Clinton, views started to rise on October 28, and remained high for most of the week. This probably is related to Clinton-related emails allegedly being found on the laptop of her estranged husband Anthony Weiner; a subject of much sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing.
6 Ae Dil Hai Mushkil Start-Class 994,767
This Indian romantic film whose cast includes Aishwarya Rai (pictured) had its debut on October 28 (Diwali weekend).
7 Donald Trump C-Class 949,709
For someone in imminent danger of becoming the next President of the United States, you'd think numbers would be higher. But they're not significantly up from last week, and significantly DOWN from two weeks ago. Is this a sign? I don't know.
8 Curse of the Billy Goat Start-Class 949,092
Apparently, legend has it that in 1945 the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern was asked to leave Wrigley Field because his pet goat's smell was bothering fans, and proclaimed that "Them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more." And that's why the Cubs didn't win a World Series until this week. The moral of the story, children, is that people will make up any piece of boondoggle to rationalise a bad situation.
9 Meghan Markle Start-Class 864,425
The fact that this American mixed-race actress may be dating the fifth in line to the British throne has raised some fairly awkward questions in the British press, like whether the situation would be the same if she'd dated Prince William. Keep in mind this is the same Royal Family that nearly collapsed because the heir to the throne wanted to marry an American divorcee. Personally, I think the whole lot's an outdated anachronism anyway, so I couldn't care less.
10 Elizabeth II Featured Article 822,254
The longest-reigning British monarch in history is bound to draw attention whenever the British Royal Family becomes a topic of interest, but this week she gets an additional boost from her portrayal in The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.

Week of November 6–12, 2016: President-elect Trump

See also our Special Traffic Report: The U.S. Presidential Election analyzing election related traffic from June 2015-November 2016
I'll be taking a permanent spot on the charts, thank you.

In the early morning of November 9, news reports announced that Donald Trump (#1) had won election as the 45th President of the United States, in one of the most oddball political victories of all time. And of course, he leads the chart this week with 12.3 million views, compared to only 2.64 million for his opponent, Hillary Clinton (#6). Trump's numbers are second-highest seen since we started the Top 25 in 2013 (the record was set in April 2016 when Prince died).

Clearly this is a momentous event in United States politics, at least in the Age of Wikipedia. In comparison, when Barack Obama was first elected in November 2008, his article received only 4.99 million views on the week of the election, compared to 1.08 million to his opponent John McCain. (Although mobile viewcounts were not captured then, mobile views were not a very large portion of traffic in 2008.) This 5-1 view ratio is similar to the Trump-Hillary ratio we see in this week's report. See also User:Andrew Gray/Election statistics for an in-depth analysis of 2008 statistics done shortly after that election. In 2012 (when mobile viewcounts were a larger portion of traffic than in 2008 but still not captured by stats.grok.se), Obama beat Mitt Romney in election week views by 2.04 million to 1.78 million.

2008, 2012, 2016, week before and week of views.

Nine of the top 10 slots this week are election-related, with only Queen Elizabeth II (#8) breaking the run, based on the great success of The Crown television series. The Crown also propelled other British royal figures into the Top 25 with impressive view numbers. But nineteen of the Top 25 articles are election-related, a new record for single-topic related articles in a week.

The most notable death, which would have probably been #1 in any other week, was that of cult songwriter Leonard Cohen (#13). This week's chart is also astounding because every article in the Top 25 exceeded one million views -- we have never even come close to that level of traffic before among the top viewed articles. Usually a few of the top articles in a given week get to that level. And for the first time since we began this report in January 2013, Deaths in (Year) was knocked out of the Top 25, placing at #34. So we've provided an extended list for #26-35 this week at the bottom of the chart, many of which are also election-related.

Please note that this report refrains from making any strong editorial comments about Donald Trump; no conclusions should be drawn from that decision. The press in the United States and around the world is reporting heavily on the meaning and effect of Trump's election. Just don't get your news and commentary from fake news sites posted to Facebook.

Also, please see our SPECIAL REPORT on the U.S. Presidential election — tracking the popularity of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's articles for the whole campaign cycle, from June 2015 to November 2016. As detailed there, attention and enthusiasm for Donald Trump far exceeded that of Clinton across the board. Perhaps this was an overlooked indicator of Trump's chances of success.

For the full top-25 lists (and 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.

As prepared by Milowent, for the week of November 6 to 12, 2016, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Donald Trump C-Class 12,331,880
Trump won the November 8 election to become President-Elect of the United States, and his article got the second-most views ever for this chart. 6.1 million of these views were on November 9. As our daily data from the WP:5000 is based on UTC hours, no doubt views increased in the early hours of November 9 as it became clear that Trump could, and then would, win the election.
2 United States presidential election, 2016 B-Class 5,414,267
Views peaked at 2.36 million on November 9.
3 Electoral College (United States) B-Class 4,496,355
In the United States, the president is not elected by the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won, but by the "electoral college," which consists of 538 votes spread out over the 50 states and District of Columbia, and where the winner of the popular vote in each state (with the exception of two states which distribute electors by Congressional district) receives all the electoral votes for that state. This is the fifth time that the winner of the popular vote lost the election, the last being in 2000. When the counts are final, it is clear that the popular vote count between Clinton and Trump will be largest gap ever in this situation. Trump threaded the needle by winning in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan even though losing the popular vote by a large margin in populous states like California and New York.
4 Melania Trump C-Class 4,198,183
Mrs. Trump will be the first foreign-born First Lady of the United States since Louisa Adams in the 1820s. Louisa was born in Britain to an American father and a British mother, so Melania will be the first non-native speaker of English to hold the title, which is a bit bizarre considering Trump's rhetoric on immigration. Though her English is accented, she does speak six languages, which is very uncommon for Americans.
5 United States presidential election, 2012 B-Class 2,854,744
No doubt this article was popular as readers tried to figure out how Obama won so handily in 2012 over Mitt Romney, and what changed. One thing that changed is that Donald Trump did not run a campaign that resembled that of prior Republican candidates.
6 Hillary Clinton Featured Article 2,644,676
Throughout the campaign, Clinton's article was less popular than Trump's. See our SPECIAL REPORT. Often we ascribed this to Trump's tendency to say outrageous things and dominate media coverage, but maybe this was also evidence of more enthusiasm among Americans for Trump than for Clinton.
7 Ivanka Trump Start class 2,163,529
No doubt the most liked Trump outside core Trump-fandom. Her views regularly exceeded those of her siblings. In the report for the July 2016 week of the Republican National Convention, Ivanka placed #4, ahead of her three adult siblings. (Trump's youngest child, Barron Trump, is only 10 years old and should not yet have his own article here, if the precedent set for Malia and Sasha Obama is applied.)
8 Elizabeth II Featured Article 2,053,702
The longest-reigning British monarch in history is bound to draw attention whenever the British Royal Family becomes a topic of interest. For the second consecutive week she gets an additional boost from her appearance in The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
9 Barack Obama Featured List 2,014,336
The outgoing president campaigned hard in favor of Hillary Clinton (#6) in the closing weeks of the campaign. Now he has to turn over power to the person who championed the awful lie of birtherism. There really is no way to sugarcoat this.
10 List of Presidents of the United States B-Class 1,868,016
Trump will be the first U.S. president not to hold a previous governmental office or military command.




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