Last week's issue of theSignpost was the best issue yet during my tenure as editor-in-chief. We published a lot of strong material that readers responded to positively — and sometimes negatively! My thanks to our goes to our contributors, includingAndreas Kolbe,Armbrust,GamerPro64,Thibbs,Serendipodous, and the work behind the scenes of people likeTony1,Resident Mario, and others.
When people look at the quality of the issue we published and the number of contributors, I can understand why they might think theSignpost is doing just fine—but we're in trouble. During much of this year, we had a strong core of four to five editorial board members and a number of other regular contributors. More recently, however, we've lost some of those contributors, and board members either left or had to drastically reduce the time they spent on theSignpost due to real-life commitments. This includes my co-editor-in-chief,Go Phightins!, who is currently inactive but will continue to contribute sporadically. We barely have time to publish what we do publish, which is usually many days late.
The time demands are so many that we wanted to publish this piece you’re reading right now several weeks ago, but I didn’t have the time to organize and write it until now.
Some of our regular contributors create self-contained sections that can be published with little effort by others. For example, Serendipodous andMilowent create Traffic on their own—probably the most consistently high-quality section in theSignpost—and most weeks we publish it without changing anything except the occasional stray comma.
Other sections require significant work. For example, take last week'sspecial report on GamerGate. It was originally published in theWikiProject Video Games Newsletter, so all we had to do was slap it in a page of our own, right? Not really. Let's consider how much time it took to get that piece to our readers.
As you can see, in addition to the hard work of the writers who produce our features, a lot of work goes into publishing theSignpost that goes unseen and unnoticed by our readers. But they would surely notice its absence, and as those tasks fall to fewer and fewer people, we struggle to keep the quality of the publication high.
Currently we have a very fluid organizational structure, which is a charitable way of saying we are unorganized. It has its advantages, being flexible and adaptable, but many regular tasks are not getting done and we don't have the opportunity to take on new ones. When someone brings us an exciting new idea for theSignpost, again and again our response has to be "We love it, but who’s going to do it?"
With that in mind, three members of the editorial board met at WikiConference and hammered out a reorganization plan. "Compartmentalization" is the key word; we want to take regular tasks and distribute them among more people so they get done regularly and don't fall on just a few people, prompting them to burn out and leave. We've sketched out a structure and we'd like to find people to fill these roles. We still want to be flexible; more than one person could share the duties of a single role, or, more likely, one person could take on more than one role.
Under this plan, theSignpost will still be coordinated by an editor-in-chief. They will also help fill in whatever roles are needed temporarily. The new editorial board will consist of the EIC and eight associate editors. Four of them will be responsible for coordinating and publishing (but not writing) each week's edition. This includes coordinating with contributors, copyediting, and making sure that their sections are publication-ready, with images and conforming to theSignpoststyle guide.
They will be assisted by four others:
Of course, none of these people would have any work to do if it weren't for our contributors. There has traditionally been an overlap between the roles of editor and contributor, but we and our readers don't want the same people writing everything every week.
Even if you don't want to commit to a weekly role on theSignpost, we need your help writing the content for these sections, even if you only contribute an occasional small piece to a section like In the Media or Featured Content. Feel free to contactthe editor for the section you are interested in, or justdive into a draft article and start writing.
We realize this is an ambitious plan, but we don't have any choice but to try. The alternatives mean, at minimum, a lower-quality and less-frequentSignpost. If we don't get more help soon, the next step will be to permanently cancel regular sections and make theSignpost a bi-weekly or monthly publication.
We don't want to fall silent like our sibling publications on theFrench andPortuguese Wikipedias. Thank you for reading and supporting Wikipedia's weekly newspaper.
—Gamaliel,Signpost editor-in-chief
WMF enacts reforms at Wikimania; main page redesign; 4 millionth article milestone
16 July 2012
Three million articles, Chen, Walsh and Klein win board election, and more
17 August 2009
News and notes: 2,000,000, Finnish ArbCom, statistics, milestones
10 September 2007
English Wikipedia hits one million articles
6 March 2006
 | There are currently7,081,100 articles on Wikipedia. |
The English Wikipedia reached five million articles on November 1 with the articlePersoonia terminalis, a shrub native to eastern Australia. The article was created byCas Liber, an Australian Wikipedian who has been editing since 2006. He has created and edited a number ofFeatured Articles on similar topics and is active in projects likeWikiProject Fungi andWikiProject Plants. Liber was one of a number of editors submitting articles around the same time to try to hit the milestone. He wrote "I tried to pick articles I could get to FA status at some point...to show the world that we couldFAC the 5000000th." No free image ofPersoonia terminalis is currently available, but a number of Wikipedians have independently contacted an Australian photographer who posted copyrighted images of the shrub's two subspecies toFlickr.
The event has been marked by aWikimedia blog post and aletter from the community, which isreproduced here.
| Previous milestones | Date | Article |
|---|---|---|
| 1 million | 1 March 2006 | Jordanhill railway station |
| 2 million | 9 September 2007 | El Hormiguero |
| 3 million | 17 August 2009 | Beate Eriksen |
| 4 million | 13 July 2012 | Ezbet el-Borg |
GOOD magazinereports (Oct. 27) on the inferior quality and much smaller contributor pool of other language versions of Wikipedia. The article's author, Mark Hay, begins his discussion with an article from theZulu Wikipedia that was highlighted onReddit some weeks ago:
| “ | Last month, a South African Redditor going by the handlelovethebacon took to the site's r/southafrica forum to share a weird experience he had while surfing Wikipedia recently. He noticed that the Zulu-language page for Nkandla, a town of 3,557 people in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa's second-largest (and fairly well-developed) province, ended with the following phrase: "Nazo isintandane ziningi lengculazi. Iyidolobha impofu." Roughly translated, lovethebacon explained, this means: "Orphans [here] have HIV. [This is the] capital of the poor." That's a broad statement, both uncouth and untrue, so it's understandable that the Wikipedia entry would raise a hackle or two. But given the size of this crowdsourced, philosophically anarchic digital encyclopedia, we in the West are accustomed to the notion that we'll come across a stinker or two while browsing around. Thesite itself even acknowledges this, cautioning that there are only so many airtight, authoritative articles in its database. Many of us believe that once we point out offensive blips and glitches, dutiful editors will come along and fix them. Yet in the case of the Zulu Wikipedia and many others, that belief may be unfounded. Not only are non-English Wikipedias on par smaller, but they also tend to have fewer editors, meaning they run a greater risk of perpetuating questionable information within a society – a situation that doesn't seem about to change anytime soon. | ” |
A decade ago,Nkandla was thesetting of an award-winningdocumentary,The Orphans of Nkandla, whichresulted in the creation ofThe Africa Project. It is a matter ofrecord that AIDS and poverty have ravaged many children's lives inKwaZulu-Natal. But Hay's observation about minor language versions of Wikipedia remains broadly correct. Indeed, aslide shown atWikimania 2014 indicated that of Wikipedia's then-284 (today:291) language versions,
The implications for quality are obvious.
Deploring Wikipedia's "cumbersome self-created bureaucracy and inter-editor sniping", Hay suggests that these global imbalances are unlikely to right themselves: while it may be tempting to think that the more established Wikipedias are bigger and more developed merely because they had several years' head start on smaller language versions, the smaller language versions show no sign of replicating the extraordinary boom the English Wikipedia underwent in its early years. In fact, Hay argues, the global volunteer base shrank by a third between 2007 and 2013.
| “ | The whole situation can feel a little futile – a depressing reaffirmation of entrenched inequalities born out of what was supposed to be an accessible, egalitarian, and idealistic site. | ” |
Hay then proceeds to place his hopes in auto-translation apps, and reviews two multilingual projects:
Hay suggests that "complementary data from across all the world's Wikipedias" could be mined and translated "back to your native language site, thus attaining the online encyclopedia's egalitarian ideal". This is an overly optimistic view, given the present day's appalling, practically unreadable quality of many machine translations, which would leave prospective readers of Wikipedias stocked with machine translations profoundly frustrated – a point that can be verified by looking at some of Manypedia's article translations.
The English translation of the Persian article on "Third World" for example (enterhttp://www.manypedia.com/#!|en|Third_World|fa as the URL and click "Translate" in the right-hand panel) includes gems like
| “ | Definition In academic circles, the term South, developed and underdeveloped third world countries used to refer to. | ” |
Imagine a Zulu reader trying to learn about physics or chemistry from a text that is as proficiently authored inZulu as the above passage is clear and concise English.
There is little reason to argue with Hay's conclusion, however:
| “ | At the very least, if these initiatives gain a bit of traction, they can start a serious conversation about continued shortcomings and differences between Wikipedias, driving us toward more systematic changes and tactics that can fill the world's glaring content gaps once and for all. | ” |
AK
Breitbartaccuses (Oct. 27) Wikipedia and Google of having prominently linked the name ofBen Carson, an acclaimedpediatricneurosurgeon and a Republicancandidate for President of the United States in the2016 presidential election, to a pedophile advocacy group, theNorth American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).
As evidenceBreitbart shows a screenshot of a Google search results page, which lists Carson's Wikipedia biography as the top result (below the sponsored link and the "In the news" section), with "North American Man-Boy Love", "Seventh-day Adventist Church" and "Craniopagus twins" highlighted as hyperlinked key points in blue.
A Carson campaign spokesperson toldBreitbart,
| “ | We've complained to Google and filled out requests to take it down that have been ignored. | ” |
The spokesman blamed "pranksters" for the inappropriate highlight.
NAMBLA is mentioned in Wikipedia's biography of Carson because the term occurs in a 2013 comment of Carson's that is quoted verbatim in the article, and in which Carson said, "Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition." (Carson subsequently apologized for the remark.) The acronym NAMBLA in the quotation has from time to time been hyperlinked in the Wikipedia article.
While the Carson team's frustration with the Google entry is understandable, it seems speculative to suggest that the hyperlink must have been placed so as to increase the term's chances of appearing in the Google snippet, or that Google staff specifically selected the term to appear in its snippet from the many available.
It bears mention though that according to Wikipedia'smanual of style, quotations should generally remain free of hyperlinks. At the time of writing, the Google snippet no longer references NAMBLA.AK
Gangs of bullies and trolls rove the internet and make life difficult for the rest of us. We get our share of them on Wikipedia. As a website that invites everybody to edit as long as they follow our rules, there’s little we can do to prevent them from coming here. Last week’s article inThe Atlantic by Emma Paling, "Wikipedia's Hostility to Women”, shows that incivility and harassment of women has become common here. But we don’t have to accept that state of affairs.
How can we stop this incivility and harassment? A key role has to be played by theArbitration Committee, who can ban or otherwise sanction the harassers. Unfortunately they have not done so. The three arbitration cases on theGender Gap Task Force (GGTF),Gamergate, andLightbreather show that heavier sanctions are given to women and men who stand up to the harasser than to the actual harasser. The problem now is less the fault of the bullies than with ArbCom.
I’ve never really considered myself to be a feminist – it just hasn’t been my personal fight. But I do strongly believe that everybody should be able to contribute to Wikipedia without being harassed, regardless of their nationality, race, religion, or gender. And maybe I’m just a bit old-fashioned. Bandying about the word “cunt” in a mixed conversation, as one well-known editor has done, insults not only the woman targeted, but every woman who sees the discussion. Indeed it insults the entire community. Most importantly, I just hate seeing people being bullied.
Fortunately, there is one direct way that we can change ArbCom and make a change in how we handle the bullying problem. In a few weeks elections for two-year terms will be held for eight out of the fifteen arbitrators.
First there needs to be at least eight candidates standing for election who are solidly committed to stopping the bullying. Theydon’t need to all be women, although that would send a loud and clear message to all concerned. They don’t need to all be feminists. All they need is to be committed to stopping the bullying.
Theformal requirements to be a candidate are few. You need to be at least 18 years old, have registered for a Wikipedia account before November 1 and have at least 500 mainspace edits before then. You’ll need to disclose your identity to the Wikimedia Foundation and sign a confidentiality agreement if you win. You donot need to be an administrator. You can nominate yourself from November 8 to November 17.
Finding good candidates is the most important step. If at least eight candidates don’t nominate themselves, we can’t elect them. Nobody should worry about there being too many good candidates; the election mechanics simply do not disadvantage those viewpoints with “extra candidates”. It’s time for you to step up to the plate.
Theformal requirements to vote are also fairly minimal. You need to have an account by October 28 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits by November 1. You cannot be currently blocked. Voting takes place from November 23 to December 6.
How can you tell who to vote for? All candidates are asked questions before the election and they all have editing histories. The first thing you should check is whether they fully commit to stopping the bullying, or just say a few fluffy phrases about it. Otherwise you might have to read and investigate for a long time. There will be voter guides to help you decide, put out by whoever thinks voters will listen to them. There may actually be more voter guides than candidates, so I’ll suggest just finding one guide written by an editor you know and trust, if you can’t sort through all the information on your own.
The mechanics of the election are unusual. You can support as many of the candidates as you like, oppose as many as you like, or vote “neutral.” Please don’t vote neutral, it is just throwing away your vote. But please do support every candidate who meets your standards, and oppose every candidate who does not.
After throwing away the neutral votes, the eight winners are those who have the highest percentage of support votes. Taking last year as a guide, the winners will need about 60% supports. That’s somewhere between 210 and 250 support votes. In short, a couple hundred well placed votes can decide the election. It’s a sure thing that ArbCom’s decisions have offended that many editors. And it is almost as easy to elect 8 arbitrators as it is to elect one.
ArbCom can be changed, Wikipedia can be changed. The bullying can be stopped.
Smallbones has been an editor on the English Wikipedia since 2005. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in thecomments section.
Another week, another case being accepted by the Arbitration Committee. This time we return to a topic that is still relatively new as asecond Arbitration enforcement case is now open. And like before this is focused onEric Corbett and his actions.
Eric Corbett has been a named party in multiple cases in Arbcom, including thefirst Arbitration enforcement case back in August and theGender Gap Task Force (GGTF) case from December 2014. The latter case resulted in two remedies implemented on Corbett: the first beingtopic banned from the Gender Gap topic, and the second having him prohibited from"shouting at, swearing at, insulting and/or belittling other editors."
On 21 October,The Atlantic published a piece titled "How Wikipedia is Hostile to Women". The piece referenced the controversialLightbreather case which sawLightbreather site-banned indefinitely back in July. The article also mentions Eric Corbett, quoting him saying to Lightbreather, "The easiest way to avoid being called a cunt is not to act like one." This quote was made back inJuly 2014, before he was prohibited from swearing at other editors. Due to the controversial topic of sexism on Wikipedia (and in general), this article was brought up at Wikipedia's co-founderJimmy Wales' talk page. In the discussion editors talked about the article's inaccuracies, including the article's erroneously calling Corbett an administrator on the site. Corbett went onto the thread to defend himself but was blocked for a month byKirill Lokshin due to violating his topic ban from the Gender Gap topic after making comments on the gender gap on Wikipedia. (It should be noted that Lightbreather was also amember of GGTF). This block was lifted byYngvadottir a few days later, resulting in her beingLevel II desysopped by the Arbitration Committee "For reversing an arbitration enforcement block out of process". Corbett himself stated that he didn't want to be unblocked.
And that brings us to where we are now, with adminBlack Kite being the filing party of the case. Black Kite was a named party in the first Arbitration enforcement case. In that case it was found that they found no grounds to block Corbett for a different incident but had the decision overruled byGorillaWarfare, who blocked Corbett for a month without discussion. GorillaWarfare, an Arbitrator, has recused herself from the current case. The remedy to that case was to delegate the drafters of the case to amend and clarify bothWP:ACDS andWP:AE. This remedy doesn't seem to have been implemented yet, with theDiscretionary sanctions page having little changed. With five open cases currently ongoing we may have to continue waiting for any action on the amendments.
Elsewhere on the chart, the coming ofStar Wars: The Force Awakens, which still doesn't happen until December, took up two slots in the Top 10. A new age-titled album from singerAdele placed #7, and the Top 10 was rounded out by aReddit thread about a rare disease, and the stalwartDeaths in 2015.
For the full top-25 list, seeWP:TOP25. Seethis section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, seehere.
For the week of October 18 to 24, 2015, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of themost viewed pages, were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Justin Trudeau |  | 2,709,956 |  | Trudeau is expected to soon take over asPrime Minister of Canada following the success of hisLiberal Party in the recentCanadian federal election. Trudeau's fatherPierre Trudeau (#4) served in that role from 1968-1984 (with a brief break in 1979-80). With over 2.7 million views for the week, this was quite a popular event. To some unknown extent, the article's views were inflated by widespread press coverage about the subject's attractiveness, bothpro andcon. |
| 2 | Star Wars: The Force Awakens | | 1,271,270 |  | If you've caught the press coverage about this upcoming movie here and there, you may be asking yourself, is this thing ever coming out? A poster and new trailer was released last week, which apparently caused a frenzy on the part of the internet not ogling the force ofJustin Trudeau. And for those us not that closely involved, the answer is that it rolls out in parts of Europe on December 16, the U.K. on December 17, and North America on December 18. |
| 3 | Michael J. Fox |  | 933,448 | .jpg) | October 21, 2015 was "Back to the Future Day" – the day in the future thatMarty McFly (played by Fox) traveled to in the 1989 filmBack to the Future Part II. And though we don't have truehoverboards or aJaws 19 movie, and theChicago Cubs just missed their chance to make it to theWorld Series, the Internet nostalgia engine was running out of control. And with fathers and son Trudeau, the appearance of the Canadian born Fox means thatCanada, the37th most populated country in the world, has placed three of the top five articles this week, a feat unlikely to ever be repeated. |
| 4 | Pierre Trudeau |  | 860,884 | .jpg) | Ranked by scholars as one of the greatest Canadian prime minsters, and also theslightly less attractive forebear of this week's #1. |
| 5 | Back to the Future | | 767,683 |  | See #3, # 11, and #15. |
| 6 | Black hole | | 612,175 |  | Up from #13 last week, but a debatable entry. The first entry without 1970/80s roots, as the 1979 Disney filmThe Black Hole simply does not generate that much warm nostalgia. Though aReddit thread could lift an article like this into the Top 10 on any given week, we do not see any such thread. Stats.grok.seshows a jump in views starting on October 13 from a few thousand per day to over 40,000 per day. It has 25% mobile views (not the either 0% or 99% typical of bot-view popularity), but we may drop this from the list if these steady views continue and a human-based explanation cannot be found. |
| 7 | Adele | | 581,472 | _cropped.jpg) | The popular singer's new album25 will be released on November 20. The first single, "Hello", debuted on October 23. As of this writing, thevideo for "Hello" already has 73 million views. |
| 8 | Star Wars | | 567,518 | | See #2. |
| 9 | Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva |  | 545,423 | October 24 saw the most interest in this article, generated by aRedditthread that stated "[today I learned] that there is a disease that makes the body repair injuries using bone, over the course of many years, this leads to the victim becoming more and more like a statue." Non-sensational headlines like this actually can get attention on Reddit; they don't need to useclickbait thread titles like "Feeling lethargic today? Find out if rare disease may be turning you into stone!" | |
| 10 | Deaths in 2015 |  | 535,526 |  | The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550 thousand on average, apparently heedless of who actually died. Deaths this week includedNASA specialistRobert W. Farquhar whose projects included thefirst probe to intercept a comet in 1985 (October 18);Miss Austria 2013Ena Kadić, who died from injuries sustained from falling off a mountain (October 19); Polish-Austrian economistKazimierz Łaski, a leading proponent ofPost-Keynesian economics (October 20, pictured); Pakistani cricket managerYawar Saeed (October 21); FormerMexican senatorTomás Torres Mercado, who died in a plane crash (October 22); Croatian chess grandmasterKrunoslav Hulak (October 23); and 20-year-old British charity fundraiserKirsty Howard (October 24). |
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as theWikimedia Research Newsletter.
This paper[1] reports findings from a survey of Norwegian secondary school students about their use of Wikipedia in the context of their coursework. The survey of 168 students between the ages of 18 and 19 consisted of 33Likert scale questions and two free response questions. The goal was to assess how Wikipedia figured into students'literacy practices, a concept that encompasses students' and teachers' attitudes towards the resources they use to learn and the social context in which they engage with those resources, as well as the process by which they read, remember, and understand the information provided by each resource.
The main finding of the study is that students' attitudes towards Wikipedia are overwhelmingly positive, but they find the information presented in Wikipedia less trustworthy than their official course materials. Although 90% of respondents rated their textbooks as more trustworthy, they cited the ease of finding factual information (such as dates, names, etc) as a key reason for preferring Wikipedia. They also reported that Wikipedia was better than their textbooks at explaining the "big picture" of a given topic, as well as facilitating more in-depth exploration. In the words of one survey respondent: "If you need to, you can read elaborations about a given topic, or you can just read the summary if that is what you need."
These findings suggest that the primary advantage that Wikipedia offers to students is its flexibility: it allows students to find quick answers and more detailed accounts with equal ease. The findings also suggest that both students and teachers would benefit from a better understanding of how to critically evaluate the quality of information presented in Wikipedia and other open online information resources.
The study also confirmed findings from previous studies: that the vast majority of students use Wikipedia to supplement their official course resources (textbooks, etc), that most of them access Wikipedia via Google search, and that English-speaking students tend to seek information on the English-language Wikipedia first, regardless of their first language or national origin.
A (conference?) paper titled "Beyond Friendships and Followers: The Wikipedia Social Network"[2] appliessocial network theory to the analysis of relationship between subjects of Wikipedia biographical articles. UsingWikidata and Wikipedia metadata, the authors produce a number of findings. Some of them will not be unexpected to readers, such as that "By far the largest occupational groups are politicians and football players", or "The page with the most mentions of persons isRosters of the top basketball teams in European club competitions" (with 4,694 mentions of 1,761 different persons). The most referenced persons areJesus andNapoleon, followed byBarack Obama,Muhammad,Shakespeare,Adolf Hitler, andGeorge W. Bush. Over four fifths of the links in Wikipedia are to male persons, which roughly reflects the gender distribution of Wikipedia biographies; a similar distribution confirms that most of the biographies focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors, however, do not dwell on the social science implications of their findings, but merely suggest that their tool can be used to refine Wikipedia categories and disambiguation tools. The findings are interesting from the perspective of alternate approaches to categorization, as it may suggest possible new categories that haven't yet been created by human editors, and perhaps provides a mathematical model of how Wikipedia categories can be created.
This paper[3] also usessocial network theory, as well as theHofstede'scultural dimensions theory,Schwartz'sTheory of Basic Human Values, andMcCrae'sFive factor model of personality to ask research questions about the concept ofonline culture; in particular whether it is universal or differs for various national cultures. It focused on 72Featured Articles in 12 languages (unfortunately, the authors do not explain any reasons for choosing those particular 12 languages over the others); discounting bots, the authors analyzed more than 150,000 editors and 250,000 edits. The authors find that most Wikipedia edits are what they call self-loops, or individual editors making edits to the same articles they have edited before, without their editing being interrupted by edits by another editor. They fail to make any comment on what that really means for the vision of Wikipedia as a collaborative environment. The authors find significant differences in editing patterns between certain Wikipedia projects, thoughthis reviewer finds the description of said differences (focusing on a case study of one Japanese and one Russian article) rather curt. Similarly, their discussion of how the results fit (or don't) with the established theories of Hofstede and others is interesting, but rather short; that unsatisfying brevity may however be due to editorial requirements (the entire paper is only 3.5k words long, instead of the more common average of about 8k). The authors conclude that "new dimensions of online culture can be explored from directly observed online behavior", something that one hopes they'll revisit themselves, together with their dataset, in a longer paper that will do proper justice to it.
A paper at the 19th International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers (CSCC)[4] provides an overview of research on vandalism detection in Wikipedia, with a focus on the usage of machine learning. One of the paper's conclusions is that future research should aim for language-independency, as little progress has been made outside of the English, German, French, and Spanish Wikipedia editions.
"Measuring Article Quality in Wikipedia Using the Collaboration Network"[5] is a paper that proposes an improved model of co-authorship to be used in predicting the quality of Wikipedia articles. Trained on a stratified sample of articles from the English Wikipedia, it is shown to outperform several baselines. Unfortunately, the dataset used for evaluation omitsStart-class articles for no apparent reason, and used the latest revision of an article, which might differ considerably from when an article received its quality rating.
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue –contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
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Latesttech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.Translations are available.
Changes this week
Thenew version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in
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$wgContentNamespaces.[8]
Tech news prepared bytech ambassadors and posted bybot •Contribute •Translate •Get help •Give feedback •Subscribe or unsubscribe.
The English Wikipedia has reached5,000,000 articles with
Persoonia terminalis (a type of shrub),
created by Australian contributorCas Liber on 1 November 2015 at 12:27 UTC.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
— Jimmy Wales, co-founder
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 as a project to build an online,free-access,free-content encyclopedia entirely from scratch. Since then, it has grown to be the largest encyclopedia ever created, comprising more than five million articles in English, while still relying on the contributions of volunteers. TheEnglish Wikipedia community thanks the millions of users whose edits over the past fourteen-plus years have made this remarkable accomplishment possible.
Wikipediaofficially launched on 15 January 2001, withJimmy Wales andLarry Sanger as its leaders, on a single computer server as the successor toNupedia. Its first major mainstream media coverage was inThe New York Times on 20 September 2001. In the first year of its existence, more than 20,000 encyclopedia entries were created – a rate exceeding 1,500 articles per month. Today, there are Wikipedia editions in more than 200 languages, accompanied by a dozen additional free-content projects, such asWikimedia Commons. In March 2006, the English Wikipedia reachedone million articles. According toAlexa, Wikipedia is currently the world's sixth mostpopular website, receiving approximatelyeight billion pageviews per month. We reached five million articles on 1 November 2015.
While Wikipedia is an incredible success, it remainsa work in progress. There are stillgreat gaps in its coverage with millions ofimportant topics missing from its pages. Many articles – evenvital ones – are not yet considered high-quality. Of ourfive million articles, only a few tens of thousands have passed a vetting process forgood orfeatured status, and more than half areshort stubs orstart-class articles. There are also more than200 non-English-language editions of Wikipedia that need volunteers. In other words, there is still much work to be done –and you can help!
Wikipedia iswritten by the people who use it. Anyone, regardless of background, can contribute to building the encyclopedia. You don't even have to register an account (thoughthere are good reasons to do so). If you find an article you can improve,edit the article to make it more accurate and useful for others. Each page contains edit buttons for you to make those changes immediately. Any improvement, whether it's fixing a typo ordrafting a brand new article, is greatly appreciated.
Wikipedia valuesboldness and the pursuit ofconsensus. Don't be afraid or disillusioned if your first contributions are undone – Wikipedia is acollaborative project, which means that sometimes we disagree.That's okay. Each page on Wikipedia hasa talk page dedicated to discussing improvements, and fellow editors have a talk page where you can contact them individually.
If you're new here, firstly:welcome. We sincerely hope you like it here and decide to stay. Below are some helpful links to get you started:
If you want to find an article to improve, here are some pointers and areas to contribute:
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