Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-04-08
We are drowning in promotional artspam
I used to think of myself as an inclusionist. I used to write articles. I still do, certainly. However, I recently came to a sad realization that I am spending less and less time creating new content, and more and more deleting things.[1] Let me tell you a slightly worrisome story of how this came to be. From 2007 I have been regularly monitoring the list of new articles related to WikiProject Poland. This started as a (moderately successful) attempt to recruit people for WikiProjects I am involved in. Over time I sought to automate this process (reviewing all of those articles and reacting to them can take several hours each week). To this end I developed a few templates. At first, they were only invitations – to WikiProjects, DYKing, such. But looking at them now, a big chunk of my tools are paste-in prods for "ARTicles that are merely SPAM" (aka "advertisements masquerading as articles", ADMASQ), most commonly in the categories for biographies and companies/products. It is a sad testament of what I thought I would need (rewards and words of encouragement) and what I ended up needing (in essence, words of discouragement). I haven't kept specific numbers, but for the past few years, at least, each week I have to prod/AfD articles, whereas I use my WikiProject/DYK invitations maybe once or twice.
Not all of my deletion nominations come from the new article reports. In fact, if I was just limiting myself to those, I would not be here, calling for your attention. Few year ago I started to realize that many of the articles I prod/AfD share similar topics. What's common? Biographies (primarily artists failing WP:CREATIVE). Music bands, songs, and tours failing WP:MUSIC. But I can stomach them, perhaps it's what remains of my inclusionist sentiment – I will prod those articles with no mercy, but the poor fame-starved artists are not whom I want to draw your attention to. No, we have a bigger problem, or – perhaps, a fatter, juicier and more problematic target. Those of you following The Signpost for a while know well the recurring theme of paid editors and promotional advertising of products and companies. I personally don't have a problem with paid editing if our policies and guidelines are respected. Unfortunately, they – namely, Wikipedia:Notability and its child-guidelines- are not. I would go as far as to say that in fact they are rampantly disregarded. They are disregarded by WP:VANITY-seeking individuals, but even more so, by those creating articles about products and companies (and here I sadly have to concede that majority of such articles are almost certainly a work of people who were paid to create them).
What I am looking at right now are several categories: Category:Business software, Category:Websites, Category:Law firms, Category:Internet marketing companies, Category:E-commerce. They are gateways to many related categories, and I estimate that they are filled with lots of spammy articles. Let me now define spam in the context of this op-ed as advertisements masquerading as articles (in short, artspam) rather than external links spamming. The latter is more easily identifiable through automated tools, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam and others seem to be managing it well enough, as far as I can tell. What I am concerned with is the former: articles that fail notability criteria, aiming to promote a certain topic, not (only) through biased wording, but through their very existence ("I/we/our product is/are on Wikipedia, hence we are important/respectable/famous/encyclopedic").
I said, now, that those categories are filled with lots of artspam. By that I estimate that between 25% to 75% of entries in them would not survive PROD/AfD. And those are not the worst categories; I am afraid they represent an average of hundreds of categories related to companies and certain types of products (websites, software, etc.). After a while – having reviewed hundreds of such articles – you learn to recognize patterns. Few are created by editors active across numerous topics. Most are the work of single purpose accounts; either ones focused on a single article, or a group of them. A small percentage are so bad they classify for near-speedy deletion (zero references, for example) – but those are rare, as the proverbial low-hanging fruit of deletionists they don't survive long. Through just few days ago I stumbled upon an unreferenced product stub from 2005, so... Distressingly, in the last year or so I have noticed a significant proportion (<20%) of problematic entries as having passed through Articles for Creation process or similar.
This leads me to conclusion that (as observed by some prior research on the subject) many Wikipedians (even myself) often pass quick assessments of articles by looking at the reference list. If there are many references (bonus points for being formatted), we check the article as "probably ok" and move on. This is a problem, because while understandable (we are all busy), many sources fail the reliability requirements, while others mention the company just in passing (notability requires in-depth coverage) and this is a trick that artspammers have learned to use against us – and it appears, very successfully. Most of companies and product pages I nominate for deletion have several, if not dozens of inline references. Many are to their own pages (in other words – self-published), but quite a few are masked better. It is quite common for slightly smarter artspammers to use other websites – such services are cheaply offered by various PR companies, who maintain extensive portals filled with dime-a-dozen press releases such as PRWeb, many of them are distributed through news sites and appear in search engine results, giving them a surface appearance of legitimacy.
Here's a case study. "www.reuters.com/article/" looks nice, until you notice the literal small print: "Reuters is not responsible for the content in this press release". The article about the associated product, Faircoin, had been deleted twice so far. Those articles are often rich mines of bad sources: I have seen everything from twitter, youtube, facebook, irrelevant awards (another PR trick), to numerous blogs and the myriad of low-key promotional websites masquerading as professional press. Such websites might sport names that imply reliability, but usually are quite WP:QUESTIONABLE. Those, at some point, transition into reputable sources (magazines maintained by professional associations), but with tens of thousands of websites out there, it's a pain to figure out which are good and which are bad (i.e. ones that do fact checking and have editorial oversight from ones that will publish anything for few dollars); we desperately need more initiative like the few found in Category:WikiProject lists of online sources. For now, however, thousands of articles about organizations or products linger in the mainspace, sustained by nothing but false appearance of being well referenced, well defined as nothing but numerous. Even worse, we have even worse articles – ones that clearly sport no reliable references (usually referencing their own websites), or ones with no references at all. Notability may be "just" a guideline, but Wikipedia:Verifiability is a policy. Yet it is a policy with patchy enforcement, and numerous artspam entries survive happily with no reference to speak of.
What's the scope of this problem? Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability has about 63,000 entries, but less than 20% (and that's a generous estimate) of articles I prod/AfD have it; ditto for the nearly 18,000 of articles with a promotional tone. Of course, not all categories have similar levels of artspam, but I am afraid that we are looking at a number of up to, maybe, 300,000 such articles. Now, this is a napkin type calculation, based on extrapolating from the few, very rough, statistics presented here ("if out of five artspam articles, only one is tagged as such, and we have about 60,000 tagged ..."). Yes, I am well aware not everything with a notability tag on it will fail notability once some research is done, but if, let's say, just about a half will, then the napkin equation ends up with 150,000. That's something like 3% of our total articles. Even if I am grossly exaggerating this, and we just have few thousand entries to clean up, this is a significant number – and there's no way the few of us working on this can make any sizeable dent in this amount of artspam. Worse, I am afraid we are losing – our backlog in just notability topics goes seven years and the one for promotional tone is about the same. If you think that we are doing better with unreferenced content, the backlog for Category:Articles lacking sources goes back to 2006 and lists over 200,000 entries (including over 2,000 in Category:All unreferenced BLPs)![2]
This shouldn't come as a surprise. Artspam, by its very definition, is about things nobody else cares about; it is advertising. Neither experienced editors nor newbies visit such pages often. They are underlinked, hidden in the dusty corners of our project, with the scope of the issue only visible on few cleanup backlogs, or during category reviews. Many die early, when they are spotted by a recent change patrollers, but those that survive the first few weeks can feel pretty secure, particularly if (counter-intuitively) they were created by a SPA whose further actions won't draw scrutiny to their prior creations. In short, by their lack of encyclopedic value and obscurity they become the proverbial bugs not seen by many eyeballs. And so they linger, bloating numerous categories which are quietly becoming little but business and product listings with little concern for notability.
Enough is enough, I say. It is spring of 2015. Wikipedia has been gravitating towards a vehicle for business and product promotion for too long. We need a major artspam cleanup drive, a literal purge of promotional articles, and a push for development of tools and frameworks to stem the tide of such articles in the future. Perhaps something similar to Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons, an effort which a few years back cut down the number of unreferenced BLPs from 50,000 or so by more than a tenfold.
Either way, it is high time for some spring cleaning. Please help out, go to a category for a business type or product of your choice, and start enforcing notability, with fire. Prod an artspam each day, and save this project, before we become a Yellow Pages clone, with a small encyclopedia attached to it.
- Piotr Konieczny is a Polish sociologist at Hanyang University in South Korea, specializing in Internet studies and wikis. He edits Wikipedia as Piotrus.
- The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should look at our opinion desk.
Notes
- ^ In my last 500 edits to Wikipedia namespace, over 70% are in the AfD space. Going back in time, those numbers are 50% for 2014, 45% for 2013, 12.5% in 2012, 11% in 2011, 10% in 2010... well, that's enough, the trend should be clear, and few care about my editing patterns.
- ^ And no, it's not just from the recent weeks – I saw at least one dated to 2012 – but that failing or WP:BLP enforcement is probably a topic for its own opinion piece...
Reader comments
Advancement department to be created at the Foundation, milestone fixes
More changes at the Foundation: VP of strategic partnerships and creation of Advancement department
March saw a number of high-level hirings and executive reorganizations in the Wikimedia Foundation. First there was the departure of chief talent and technology officer Gayle Karen Young and simultaneous onboarding of chief operating officer and interim CTCO Terry Gilbey. Gilbey, serving in a newly created executive position, is now in charge of the combined Finance, Administration, and Human Resources, formerly three separate entities. A week later there was the onboarding of technology evangelist and author Guy Kawasaki as the latest member of the Board of Trustees. Then, on March 27, the WMF announced the hiring of Kourosh Karimkhany in another newly created role, as VP of strategic partnerships, and another newly restructured Advancement department. In a post on the WM blog, Lisa Gruwell, currently chief revenue officer, stated that Karimkhany "will initiate, maintain, and grow strategic relationships and partnerships that advance the Wikimedia mission, support the community, and increase access to knowledge globally ... Kourosh joins us in this senior leadership role to craft a partnership strategy and create long-term value for Wikimedia projects through partnerships, projects, and relationships."
Before joining the WMF, Karimkhany was head of corporate development at Conde Nast; in that role he served a leadership role in the team behind the company's acquisitions of Wired.com, Ars Technica, and Reddit. Prior to serving as a "digital media executive", first as a senior producer at Yahoo! News, Karimkhany had functioned as a Silicon Valley–based technology journalist reporting for Bloomberg, Reuters, and Wired.com. Speaking of the role he will play in his capacity of managing Advancement, Gruwell states that "Kourosh will oversee the Wikimedia Foundation’s partnership strategy ... the partnerships group will help us identify the strategic initiatives we must take on at the WMF and increase our ability to support the movement and mission." A new organizational scheme remains to be drafted: according to a complimentary just-released WMF partnerships FAQ (whose existence reflects the scale of the change), Karimkhany will "work with Lisa [Gruwell] and the executive team to build a partnerships plan [that] will inform planning for the 2015–16 fiscal year, and will be the basis for Kourosh’s team building." The Fundraising team will be joined under the new "partnerships" team under Gruwell's purview, and Karimkhany will report directly to her in her newly retitled position as chief advancement officer. The combined team will be retitled the "Advancement department"; the Wikipedia Zero team will now report to Karimkhany. Though he started on March 30, as of the time of writing Karimkhany has not yet joined the Foundation's staff and contractors page—nor has outgoing Gayle Karen Young left it.
In the context of last week's release of the State of the WMF 2015 report, covered by the Signpost, Karimkhany will occupy an important position at the head of two pressing concerns for the WMF. In his capacity as the new lead of the Wikipedia Zero team he is tasked with addressing the Zero program's penetration concerns: the team admitted in last week's report that "our own data on pageviews by language version show roughly 90% usage in English throughout South Asia, indicating the program is actually reaching more privileged segments of society ... making Wikipedia free of data charges is not driving usage in underserved segments." This challenge is significant enough that in executive director Lila Tretikov's mailing list hiring announcement, the customary welcome from the community was eventually buried by a drawn-out and conscientious discussion on the existential merits of the program.
One of the questions asked in the FAQ is whether or not Karimkhany, working closely with the fundraising team, will be "focused primarily on revenue". The FAQ answers that "the new role is focused on creating value for the Wikimedia movement ... value can be understood in many different ways. We believe that it can be about relationships with people, relationships with organizations, or in some cases, additional financial resources." Asked about the role that the re-organization will play, in this month's metrics meeting, Gruwell stated that the reorganization will be an "expansion of scope" for her, but that the work of the fundraising team will remain as its own initiative. In being tasked with "creating value", Karimkhany and his new team plan to increase the WMF's initiative and organizational prominence in a time when the WMF sees itself as being in an "identity crisis"—and hopefully, by doing so, to help address ongoing concerns from Fundraising as to how structural changes in readership will affect the Foundation's ability to raise adequate funding. R
Milestone counts
Major changes in the article counts for the Wikimedia projects were observed last week after a maintenance script was run to recount the articles on most Wikimedia content-wikis (all language editions of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and so forth, but excluding Wikibooks). Sixty-five wikis have fallen below milestones tracked at the Wikimedia News Meta page, and three increased to new milestones. Among these wikis, the largest absolute changes were a decrease of 281,624 articles in the English Wikisource (a 27% drop) and an increase of 4421 entries in the Persian Wiktionary (an 8% rise). The most extreme relative changes were a 98% decrease in Sindhi Wikinews articles (749 to 13), and a 23% increase in Bengali Wiktionary entries (920 to 1134). These changes are not the result of any particular recent bug fix; rather, they are reflective of many bugs related to article counting that have existed over the years, as well as other changes made to the MediaWiki software, which collectively have caused the "live" article counts to get out of sync with their true values. Periodic running of the same maintenance script on the 29th day of each month should ensure that the counts are more accurate from now on.
The fix calls into question many of the milestones the Signpost itself has reported over the past few years, most of which were sourced from this list. Though the most pervasive such change in recent memory, it is not the first time that recounting has significantly shifted the measured size of a Wikimedia project: for instance, when the Spanish Wikipedia became the seventh project to pass the million-article milestone in 2013, the precise "millionth article" could not be determined; this was because the milestone arose from a change in the way pages were counted, causing the project to immediately jump from approximately 990,000 to 1.017 million articles. More details on the recent changes will be forthcoming in a future report. D, R
Brief notes
- Call for election committee volunteers: The Board of Trustees this week released an initial call for candidates to sit on the election committee. The trustees are "the ultimate corporate authority" of the Foundation, and to support the election to the Board's three community-elected seats—which last took place in August 2013—the Board sets up a volunteer election committee, an independent body tasked with planning voting criteria, checking candidacies, drafting organizational documents, and auditing votes. These volunteers will also be on call for this year's separately held Funds Dissemination Committee election. The call for candidates is coming soon and the Board hopes to have some coordinator candidates sitting by April 10, the prospective first meeting date. The deadline for volunteers is April 17. Board member Alice Wiegard is this year's Board liaison. Interested and eligible parties are directed to email James Alexander of Community and Legal Advocacy with "a small summary of why you think you would be able to help out with this process." R
- Wikimania 2015: The Wikimania 2015 team have released a pair of small updates about the work going into the preparations for the yearly conference, the largest of its kind, to be held this year in Mexico City. The first, titled "Quick stats about our volunteers", speaks of the workload (more than 40% of volunteers dedicate 40 hours or more of work per week) and age range (from 67 to, with parental permission, 16) of the volunteers. The second, titled "Sleepless nights", speaks of the workload of the coordinators: "We have rearranged our schedules and priorities to meet in unorthodox places and times to make Wikimania possible."
- Wikimania scholarship awards and rejections have been sent out, occasioning complaints at the way they were handled: those who received awards were given notice a full day before those who were rejected. Individuals who did not receive a scholarship were left to stare at emails and social media notifications from those who did, wondering whether they should have received an email or not. Stuart Prior, chair of the Wikimania Scholarship Committee, wrote on Facebook that "Phase 2 applicants that have been granted a scholarship will have received an email asking them to accept or decline by 14th April. Once that process has been gone through the Foundation will be able to notify anyone that didn't pass phase 2." Wikimania is scheduled to take place on July 15–19 this year. R, E
- Copy-vio bot efforts continue: EranBot, a copy-paste copyright violation detection bot, is being rolled out for general use by the community via a reporting page. The bot has been running on a trial basis, organized by WikiProject Medicine. The result of a collaboration with TurnItIn, an Internet-based academic anti-plagiarism tool, this bot is the latest in a long line of anti-copyvio bots to have been developed: MadmanBot and CorenSearchBot, two older bots, rely on a web search API from Yahoo! that appears to have recently become a paid service. More information is here. R
- Share-a-fact: The WMF's mobile development team this week unveiled the "share-a-fact" feature: users can highlight text in an article, and then, via a "share" button, create an attractive info card useful for sharing with others. The feature, just made available on the official Wikipedia Android app, is in the process of being ported over to iOS. R
- Small "Wikitriathlon" held in Finland: Wikimedia Suomi, the Finnish Wikimedia chapter posted a blog post about "a new-kind-of editathon event": a "wikitriathlon". The event was held at the Kiasma, a contemporary art museum in Helsinki; it consisted of writing, editing, and then adding links to articles. With a certain amount of cheek it was declared that "everybody was awarded the 'first prize'". R
- February Board minutes: The minutes for the February 6–7 board of trustees meeting were posted this week. Topics under discussion included strategic planning and this year's annual plan, board composition and the candidate search, engineering practices, and a continuing conversation on the possibility and organization of a long-term endowment. Aside from confirming the addition of technology evangelist Guy Kawasaki to the Board (the result of a tendered candidate search), the trustees have as yet approved no resolutions that are unrelated to the procedural confirmation of Board meeting minutes this year. R
- New administrators: We welcome a new English Wikipedia administrator, Jakec. R
- New Wikipedian in residence: Martin Poulter is this week's newest GLAM fellow. Poulter, a member of Wikimedia UK, will be attached to the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University from April 2015 to March 2016. R
- Monthly metrics and activities meeting: The monthly metrics and activities was on April 8.R
- Adrianne: Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz, who tragically died last year while rock climbing, was honored on the English Wikipedia's main page on the first anniversary of her death with Fanny Bullock Workman. Workman was a mountaineer and rock climber; Adam Cuerden wrote in his featured article nomination that this "was one of the last articles being worked on by Adrianne Wadewitz before her untimely death ... we'd like to raise this up in her memory." E
Reader comments
Wikipedia on 60 Minutes, Kickstarter, and in the classroom
60 Minutes profiles Wikipedia
A segment called "Wikimania" on the April 5th episode of the venerable CBS news program 60 Minutes profiled Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community. The segment attempted to answer for viewers unfamiliar with Wikipedia or Wikipedia editors the questions "Who are they? And how does it all work?" Correspondent Morley Safer interviewed Jimmy Wales and former and current Wikimedia Foundation executive directors Sue Gardner and Lila Tretikov and visited Wikimania 2014 in London.
Much of the segment was focused on the personalities of Wikipedia editors, with numerous crowd shots from Wikimania. Safer focused on their eccentricities, at one point describing them by saying "Some are buttoned-down. Some are rock and roll." He asked Gardner about who edited Wikipedia:
| “ | Gardner: It's about 100,000 people around the world, every political persuasion, every religion, no religion. You know, from seven years old to 75 years old. The one characteristic all Wikipedians have in common is that they are all incredibly smart. They are really, really smart.
Safer: Smart and passionate. Gardner: Yeah, and persnickety, right? They're fussy people. They are a little OCD. They're careful and they're cautious and they're serious. And it matters to them that things are right. They're persnickety people. |
” |
The segment also focused on two individual editors. Amanda Levendowski (Levendowski), a lawyer and a vice-president of Wikimedia NYC, told Safer that the "reward" for editing Wikipedia was that "You have the satisfaction of feeling like you've participated in some thing, but for Wikipedia in particular there's another whole benefit because you have the opportunity to help other people find information about stuff you're into." 60 Minutes also spoke with Dumisani Ndubane (Thuvack), former President of Wikimedia South Africa, and discussed his work editing articles on South African history and his efforts to encouraged students to translate Wikipedia articles into native African languages.
60 Minutes also visited the San Francisco headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation, with Safer describing it as a "typically laid-back techie style" workplace. Safer delved into Wales' background, even showing the infamous photo of Wales and a pair of Bomis models, and expressed surprise that Wales wasn't an "Internet zillionaire". He told Wales "You created one of the most successful websites in the world and yet you chose to make it the least profitable." Wales replied:
| “ | It just felt right that we should be a charity, free knowledge for everyone. So that's always been our philosophy...If we were ad supported, we would always be thinking about, well, gee, look at all these people reading about Elizabethan poetry. There's nothing to sell them. Let's try to get them to read about hotels in Las Vegas, or something like this. And we don't. We just don't care. | ” |
Other Wikipedia issues were briefly mentioned, such as fact-checking and vandalism. Wales brought up the controversy over the article Wedding dress of Kate Middleton while discussing gender bias on Wikipedia. He also noted
| “ | Our biggest problem with bias, and things that are wrong that stay for a long time are actually on very obscure topics. You know, a topic that not many people are interested in and not many people are looking at. And so if something's wrong, it can persist for quite some time. | ” |
Wikipedians would quibble about some vague quantitative claims or the description of Gardner as Wales' "lieutenant", but the overall depiction of the movement was positive. On the Wikimedia-l mailing list, Wikimedia Foundation employees suggested sending messages of thanks to CBS, Safer, and producer Jonathan Schienberg.
Alternative medicine author seeks $67K for anti-Wikipedia book
At ScienceBlogs, David Gorski discussed what he called a "Quack Attack on Wikipedia" (April 7). Gorksi highlights a campaign on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter by Mike Bundrant, co-founder of the iNLP Center, a training center for practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Bundrant is seeking $67,100 to publish a book called Unbiased: The Truth about the Healing Arts on Wikipedia, to be created by Bundrant and a paid "PhD level research team".
According to Bundrant, "Wikipedia is on a misinformation campaign against alternative health and the healing arts...Natural health deserves fair representation." Bundrant highlights a number of Wikipedia articles he claims contain "flagrant bias and academic errors or omissions", such as the articles for homeopathy, naturopathy, and NLP, all of which are identified as pseudosciences. Alternative medicine advocates have long complained about how Wikipedia represents such topics, complaining that it violates the neutral point of view policy. Community editing practices involving these topics conform with the 2006 Pseudoscience arbitration case, which found that NPOV "requires fair representation of significant alternatives to scientific orthodoxy. Significant alternatives, in this case, refers to legitimate scientific disagreement, as opposed to pseudoscience." Many alternative medicine practices are deemed to fall in the latter category, such as NLP. Gorski writes "The last 40 years have taught us...that NLP is pseudoscience that has failed every test of its core precepts."
In March 2014, Jimmy Wales responded to a petition from alternative medicine advocates by writing
| “ | Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals—that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.
What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of “true scientific discourse”. It isn't. |
” |
Academics on Wikipedia in the classroom
The Harvard Crimson examines (April 2) changing attitudes among Harvard University faculty concerning Wikipedia. Professor Sean Gilsdorf said "My attitude has turned into one [of], rather than complaining about it, why don’t we try to do good things with it." For his course "Charlemagne: Histories, Stories, Myths", he has students edit Wikipedia articles "on some theme, place, or individual critical to Carolingian society", such as Emma of Normandy, Adeliza of Louvain, and Pepin the Hunchback. In The Conversation, College of the Holy Cross Professor Ellis Jones discusses (April 3) his use of Wikipedia in the classroom by having his students "adopt a Wikipedia page" of a notable sociological theorist, such as Max Horkheimer.
Another victim of notability?
On his blog, journalist Glenn Fleishman wrote that he was "Not Notable Enough For Wikipedia" (April 7). Fleishman, a veteran journalist who wrote a 2013 article for The Economist about the encyclopedia, had a Wikipedia article since June 2005. Fleishman's article was deleted on April 5 following a deletion discussion. Another blogger, Andy Baio, tweeted "I guess publishing a magazine, writing 20+ books, and winning Jeopardy twice doesn't make you 'notable'." At the time of its deletion, Fleishman's article had about 200 words and ten references, though only one was to a third-party secondary source. Fleishman wrote:
| “ | My entry was deleted ostensibly because there weren't enough references to stuff I've done that weren't things on my site or that I've written about stuff I've done. But Wikipedia prohibits one from editing one's own entry, so I can't improve it. You're ostensibly not supposed to recruit people you know. So you have to be "important" enough that unrelated third parties find you interesting enough to research and footnote your accomplishments. | ” |
He did note in the comments that "A couple of Wikipedians who I don't really know are annoyed enough that I was deleted that they are going to re-source and get me restored. The system works!"
Fleishman, a critic of Gamergate, claimed on Twitter that "my article was targeted for deletion b/c of my outspokenness on online harassment", linking to a March 22 thread on the Reddit forum r/WikiInAction, a pro-Gamergate forum about "the corruption and issues with Wikipedia". The thread claimed that Fleishman had created and edited his own Wikipedia article. That same day, a Wikipedia editor active on the Gamergate article submitted the article for deletion.
In brief
- Conflict of interest department: BuzzFeed reports (April 7) that IP addresses belonging to CBS have been editing articles on topics related to CBS and its employees.
- Meet our editors: Haaretz profiles (April 5) Wikipedia editor Abraham Amir, a 73-year old lawyer in Afula. Israel who has been contributing to the Hebrew Wikipedia since 2003.
- Hoaxing Wikipedia: Stephen Hutcheon, technology editor for the Sydney Morning Herald, appeared on the April 1 episode of Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio to discuss the Jar’edo Wens hoax (See previous Signpost coverage). Hutcheon had previously written about the hoax for the Herald.
- "Death Awaits": The Week reports that the article on Action Park, with colorful descriptions of the amusement park's hazardous rides, "may be the most hilarious article on Wikipedia" (April 1). The Week quotes numerous hilarious and hair-raising anecdotes about the rides. On the waterslide, for example, the article notes that it had "a complete vertical loop of the kind more commonly associated with roller coasters. Employees have reported they were offered hundred-dollar bills to test it. Tom Fergus, who described himself as 'one of the idiots' who took the offer, said '$100 did not buy enough booze to drown out that memory.'"
Reader comments
Resurrection week
How appropriate that the theme of Easter week would be resurrection from the dead. The dominant thread this week was the release of Furious 7, a film which already looks to be one of the most profitable of the year, and stars Paul Walker in the role he was playing when he died. Not since The Crow have we had a more emphatic demonstration of the power of film to preserve the essence of the living after death. The TV series The Walking Dead had its season finale this week, allowing many people to make what I am sure was a copious amount of Zombie Jesus jokes.
For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of March 28 to April 4, 2015, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Furious 7 
1,832,224 
The seventh installment of this long-running series, whose grip on sanity has decreased as its profitability has increased, opened on 3 April. In keeping with tradition, this movie is so insane it shook off the death of its lead actor midway through and kept on trucking. And, again in keeping with tradition, it has outgrossed its predecessors, taking $67 million on its first day—more than The Fast and the Furious 3 earned in its entire run. 2 WrestleMania 31 
1,490,998 
Our readers love their WWE, and everyone seems to be slathering over this latest event, which aired on 29 March. Critically praised, the show was watched live by 76,976 fans, drew in 1.3 million online subscribers, and generated $3.3 million in merchandising, all WWE records. It is expected to break records again when the pay-per-view results come in. It apparently struck a chord in the Zeitgeist, since it also generated 10 #1 Twitter trends. 3 April Fools' Day
1,398,363 
The first day of April, the perennial party for practical jokers and pranksters, continues to amuse the cynical and infuriate the gullible, and this year seems particularly popular, as numbers are up by over a third from last year. 4 Good Friday 
1,004,089 
The dark bit of Easter, this commemorates (despite its name, "celebrates" isn't really the right word) the torture and crucifixion (Passion) of Jesus Christ, as opposed to Easter Sunday, which celebrates his resurrection. 5 Paul Walker
874,563 
Furious 7, the last, and arguably biggest, film of Paul Walker's career, was released this week, despite his tragic death midway through production. How much of the film's current record grosses was in memoriam to a fallen star is impossible to say. 6 The Fast and the Furious
748,318 See #1 7 Easter
718,373 
It's hard to remember these days, under the onslaught of bunnies, chocolate eggs, and marshmallow peeps, that Easter, not Christmas, is the most sacred date of the Christian calendar. Doubtless a lot of people learned that this week, along with some fairly eye-raising information about the events it actually celebrates. 8 The Walking Dead (TV series) 
659,125 
The season finale of this popular TV series premièred on 29 March. 9 The Walking Dead (season 5)
586,354 See above 10 Interstellar (film)
586,354 
The polarising blockbuster was released on home video on 31 March.
Reader comments
Partisan arrangements, dodgy dollars, a mysterious union of strings, and a hole that became a monument
Featured articles
Four featured articles were promoted this week.
.jpg)
- German–Yugoslav Partisan negotiations (nominated by Peacemaker67) During the redeployment of Josip Broz Tito's headquarters and his partisans across the Nazi puppet state of Croatia in August 1942, a group of Germans from the Organisation Todt were captured. The leader of the group had been tasked by the German Abwehr with making contact with the partisans, and a series of prisoner swaps were initiated. By March 1943, the partisans' military situation had deteriorated, and to forestall continuing German attacks, they again entered into tentative negotiations regarding prisoner swaps and a possible truce. The Germans saw a possibility that the partisans might oppose a British landing, which would have given support to the Royalist Chetniks. There was an exchange of "between 600 to 800 partisans in total" by 1945. Tito stated in 1978 that the objective of the negotiations was "solely to obtain German recognition of belligerent status for the Partisans".
- 1804 dollar (nominated by RHM22) The 1804 dollar is an odd bird. Despite the date, none with this date were minted until the 1830s; although some silver dollars had actually been minted in 1804, they were dated 1803. Large silver coins, such as the Maria Theresa thaler, were used worldwide as standard trade coins. The introduction of the US silver dollar in 1794 added another coin to the trade, and large numbers of dollars were exported by traders. From 1806, the production of silver dollars was officially halted (none had been struck since March 1804) in favour of the minting of smaller denominations; this meant that there was small change available to the US economy but that the exporting of coins stopped. The "1804" dollars were struck when Edmund Roberts, who headed a trade mission to the Far East, requested sets of coinage to be presented to kings and sultans as gifts. The date may have been chosen because the Chief Coiner thought that there had been coins minted with that date; he was anxious to avoid angering coin collectors!
- Deinocheirus (nominated by FunkMonk and IJReid) Deinocheirus is a genus of ostrich dinosaur, so called for their superficial resemblance to the bird. Living about 70 million years ago, they were big – one specimen was about 11 m (36 ft) long and weighed 6.36 t (224,000 oz).
- M-theory (nominated by Polytope24) M-theory is a unification of "all consistent versions of superstring theory". It's not yet been completely formulated, but it's reckoned that the theory "should describe two- and five-dimensional objects called branes and should be approximated by eleven-dimensional supergravity at low energies" (that's exactly what we were about to say...). M-theory was introduced by Edward Witten, whose "proposal was based on the observation that the five string theories can be mapped to one another by certain rules called dualities and are identified by these dualities".
Featured lists
Seven featured lists were promoted this week.
- List of Navy Midshipmen head football coaches (nominated by A Texas Historian) The United States Naval Academy is represented in college football by the Navy Midshipmen football team. Since 1882, the team has had 36 head coaches. The present coach is Ken Niumatalolo.
- List of Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order appointed by King Edward VII (nominated by Noswall59) Admission to the Royal Victorian Order is the personal gift of the "reigning monarch of the United Kingdom and several Commonwealth realms"; it recognises "distinguished personal service to the order's Sovereign" (the monarch), their family, and their viceroys. This list is of those men given the Knight Grand Cross of that order by King Edward VII.
- List of York City F.C. players (25–99 appearances) (nominated by Mattythewhite) York City Football Club was formed in May 1922. Since then, "more than 300 players [have] completed their York career after playing in at least 25 and fewer than 100 senior competitive matches". The list includes Charlie Lemons, Len Butt, Fred Laycock, Andy Leaning, and Michael Gash.
- World Fantasy Award for Best Artist (nominated by PresN) The World Fantasy Award for Best Artist is an annual award given to the "artists of works related to fantasy released in the preceding calendar year". It is awarded at the World Fantasy Convention; the winners are decided by a selection process which starts with an attendee ballot to select two finalists, followed by a nomination of three more by a panel of fantasy authors, who then vote on the overall winner. The winner receives a caricature bust of H. P. Lovecraft.
- List of scheduled monuments in Sedgemoor (nominated by Rodw) They do say that if you walk through the ankle-high mist on the levels, you'll be dead within the fortnight. While you are awaiting your inevitable demise, you can spend the fortnight visiting these marvellous monuments. You'll have probably seen Brent Knoll, a flat-topped hill close to the M5 motorway. The hole that became a monument? There's several on the list, but our favourite's not on it. That's Fox's Hole at Crook Peak, which is great if you like confined spaces and spiders.
- 63rd Academy Awards (nominated by Birdienest81) The 63rd Academy Awards were held in March 1991. Dances with Wolves won Best Picture and six other awards. Unfortunately, the wolves could not make the show, as they had a previous engagement with ghosts, mobsters, and dopa.
- List of cricketers who have carried the bat in international cricket (nominated by Vensatry) In the game of cricket, when an opening batsman remains not out at the end of the
fortnightgame, they are said to have "carried the bat". The expression refers back to a time when batsmen shared bats, and the outgoing batsman would leave his bat on the field to be used by the incoming player. An equivalent expression, "carrying the box", fell out of use after an outbreak of crabs.
Featured pictures
23 featured pictures were promoted this week.
.jpg)
- 1804 dollar (created by the U.S. Mint, photographed by Heritage Auctions, nominated by Godot13) A Class III 1804 dollar, created specifically for collectors years after the "originals" were struck as diplomatic gifts. Although not actually minted in 1804, they're still valuable; this one sold for $2.3 million in 2009. (This image was promoted on 13 March, but the feature was held back to coincide with the above article on the same subject.)
- Audi e-tron (created by Thomas Wolf (Der Wolf im Wald), retouched by: LiveChocolate, nominated by Crisco 1492) The Audi e-tron is a series of cars by Audi, using either one or more electric motors or a combination of an internal combustion engine and electric motors in the same car (hybrids). This photograph shows an e-tron concept car, shown at the 2009 International Motor Show in Frankfurt. It is powered by four electric motors, providing four-wheel drive.
- Eight Bells (created by Winslow Homer, nominated by Crisco 1492) Eight Bells is an oil painting by Winslow Homer of two fishermen holding sextants. The "eight bells" refers to the nautical time, which is noon; the fishermen are using their sextants to determine the highest position of the sun, and hence local apparent noon. They can then calculate their longitude.
- Garden at Sainte-Adresse (created by Claude Monet, nominated by Crisco 1492) A woman and man are in conversation on a terrace overlooking La Manche at Sainte-Adresse. This peaceful but banal scene is miles away from the dramatic landscapes and scenes predominant in Western art; it is part of the revolution in painting forged by the Impressionists.
- Clanculus corallinus (created by Llez, nominated by Armbrust) You knew right away that these whorls were convex, spirally granose-lirate, but you had forgotten what a globose-conic shape with an acute spire looks like. Now you remember.
- Embryonic stem cells (created by Ryddragyn, nominated by The Herald) The blob in the centre of this photograph is a colony of human embryonic stem cells. They have been taken from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst stage of a human embryo, five days after fertilisation. Their importance lies in the fact that they are pluripotent, that is, they can differentiate into any kind of cell found in the human body. The first clinical trial using stem cells was on patients with spinal-cord injuries. Started in 2009, it was halted in 2011 for financial reasons.
- [[:|Alison Bechdel]] (created by Riccardo De Luca for the MacArthur Foundation, nominated by Crisco 1492) Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist, is here seen drawing a self-portrait, using the image on the screen of a digital camera as an aide-memoire. The eponymous Bechdel test is applied to works of fiction; they pass if they have two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.
- Descent of the Soyuz TMA-14M (created by NASA, nominated by The Herald) On March 12, 2015, shortly after local sunrise over central Asia, this Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft floated over a sea of golden clouds during its descent by parachute through Earth's dense atmosphere. TMA-14M was the 123rd flight of a Soyuz spacecraft, the first flight launching in 1967. The Soyuz remained docked to the space station for the Expedition 42 increment to serve as an emergency escape vehicle until undocking and landing as scheduled in March 2015.
- Dishes with Oysters, Fruit, and Wine (created by Osias Beert the Elder, nominated by Hafspajen) Osias Beert was a Flemish painter who specialised in breakfasts. His paintings were built up using glazes of semi-transparent oil colour to give depth and a wide range of colours. Beert's paintings of food are called in Dutch ontbijtjes, or "little breakfasts" – here there are oysters, honey, chestnuts, raisins, sugared almonds, bread, and meringues, with a glass of Madeira wine.
- Étienne Maurice Gérard (created by Jacques-Louis David, nominated by Crisco 1492) Étienne Maurice Gérard had a military and political career stretching from 1791 to his death in 1852. He must have been remarkably adaptable, as the only hiatus in his career was between 1815 and 1817, when he was hiding out in Brussels after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. Gérard also managed to survive the retreat from Moscow.
- Frida Kahlo (created by Toni Frissell, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) This photograph of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was part of a 1937 photo shoot by Toni Frissell for fashion and lifestyle magazine Vogue. Kahlo was being photographed for an article entitled "Señoras of Mexico", published in the US edition of 1 October 1937. The photograph used in the magazine was of Kahlo standing upright against the agave, holding her rebozo above her head; the photo was colourised. She was referred to as "Mrs Diego Rivera", as she often was at the time – besides a 1939 purchase by the Louvre, she was largely ignored by the mainstream art world during her lifetime, and wouldn't gain widespread recognition until decades after her death.
- Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, and Annette Duvivier, Comtesse de Vergennes (created by Antoine de Favray, nominated (1 2) by P. S. Burton and Hafspajen respectively) Such a cute couple. Excellent portraits of the diplomat Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes and wife, by Antoine de Favray. A good example of French orientalist art and turquerie. Gravier played an important role in Franco-Ottoman relations, both as ambassador and later as French Minister for Foreign Affairs. He commissioned the work from Favray while in Constantinople. Favray was a French painter known for his portraits of personalities of the Ottoman Empire, as well as paintings of Grand Masters in Malta.
- Religion saved by Spain (created by Titian, nominated by Alborzagros) Religion saved by Spain is a painting by Titian completed in 1575. It's a mix of allegory and political propaganda, depicting the defeat of a Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto.
- Mariana (created by John Everett Millais, nominated by Hafspajen) With the painting technique of an angel and the imagination of a Hackney barmaid, John Everett Millais combined "precision, attention to detail, and stellar ability as a colorist" with ponderous didacticism to produce works of art that told a moral story. In the stained glass windows, the portrayal of the Annunciation promises a virgin birth, but the broken snowdrop in the coat of arms symbolises a loss of virginity; it is already too late. The motto In coelo quies (In Heaven there is rest) was the motto of Cardinal Wiseman. Millais had a certain non-committal fascination with the pomp and ceremony of the Roman Catholic church, to which attitude John Ruskin referred when he drew attention to Mariana's boredom with her "idolatrous toilet table". Mariana is based on a poem by Alfred comma Lord Tennyson: "With blackest moss the flower-plots / Were thickly crusted, one and all / The rusted nails fell from the knots / That held the pear to the gable-wall. dah dah dah The sparrow's chirrup on the roof / The slow clock ticking, and the sound / Which to the wooing wind aloof / The poplar made, did all confound". What's it all about, Alfie?
- François-Henri d'Harcourt (created by Jean Honoré Fragonard, nominated by Alborzagros) This oil on canvas portrait of François-Henri d'Harcourt by Jean Honoré Fragonard is one of four of the "Fantastical Portraits", a series of portraits by the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, mostly dating to 1769. It is said they were executed in a single hour, from which they gained the Italian name fa' presto (made quickly). François-Henri d'Harcourt was Count Lillebonne, a French general, duke and peer of France, He emigrated during the French Revolution, and he became a representative of Louis XVIII of France to the British government (1792–1800).
- The Stolen Kiss (created by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, nominated by Alborzagros) Jean-Honoré Fragonard's works display the kind of eroticism and voluptuousness and the liking for romantic folly that was popular before the French Revolution among French aristocrats. The Stolen Kiss was no different. Fragonard includes scenes of voyeurism in his paintings. This scene depicts a stolen kiss in lavish surroundings, containing luxurious details of textures, silks, and lace, like the rug with flower pattern, silk draperies, her shawl on the chair, and the elegantly clad ladies visible through the open door. For half a century or more, Fragonard was so completely ignored that Wilhelm Lübke's 1873 art history volume omits the very mention of his name. (Of course, Lübke was an anti-Semite and also omitted Jews, so there is that.) On December 5, 2013, Bonhams sold the Fragonard portrait of François-Henri duc d'Harcourt for $28,058,081 – setting a world record price for the artist at auction.
- Stitching the Standard (created by Edmund Leighton, nominated by Brandmeister) Painted in 1911, this canvas by Edmund Blair Leighton depicts a woman stitching an Austro-Hungarian military flag, with its crowned two-headed black eagle on a gold field. The painting was sold at Christie's in 1928 under the title Preparing the flag to the art dealer W. W. Sampson, who was the leader of an illegal knockout ring of dealers. The inebriated Sampson drowned in a bathtub in Brighton in 1929, leaving an estate worth £10. The painting seems to have gone out of sight until art dealer Richard Green bought it at a Phillips auction in 1977 under the title Awaiting his Return. Green sold it to a private collector, and it re-appeared as Stitching the Standard at a Sotheby's auction a year later. In 2011, the painting went back to Sotheby's, where it was sold for an eye-watering £373,250. Leighton reworked the subject in his Hostage of 1912 using the same model, this time with blonde hair, sitting on the ramparts doing embroidery. Paula Rego, in her 1987 painting The Policeman's Daughter, subverts the whole genre; the daughter sits by a window through which moonlight streams, polishing her father's jackboots.
- Blue petrel (created by JJ Harrison, nominated by JJ Harrison) The word "petrel" is derived from Saint Peter and the story of his walking on water. This is in reference to the petrel's habit of appearing to run on the water to take off. This wonderful photo of a blue petrel from our longtime contributor of fine work in the nature field, JJ Harrison, is a fine example of one of nature's more fortunate creatures using its most precious skill. And the bird looks good as well. Leaves us to ask, if you could fly, would you? Silly question, contact ground control on 121.8, have a good flight ....
- Papilio machaon (created by Zeynel Cebeci, nominated by Crisco 1492) A wonderful macro photo of a butterfly, this is the wing underside view of a swallowtail Papilio machaon in Erdemli, Turkey. In some countries, P. machaon and its subspecies are protected by law. Papilio machaon machaon is protected by law in six provinces of Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. The species is protected in the United Kingdom, and subsp. verityi is protected in India.
- Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 (created by Rembrandt, nominated by SchroCat) Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 is a self-portrait by the Dutch artist Rembrandt, now in the National Gallery, London. Dating to 1669, it was the last in his long series of self-portraits, but it is not currently on display. Rembrandt created nearly one hundred self-portraits during his lifetime, including approximately fifty paintings, thirty-two etchings, and seven drawings. The self-portraits create a visual diary of the artist over a span of forty years. "Hmm, I think I will paint me, again. Hand me the canvas please!"
- The Kiss (created by Gustav Klimt, nominated by Crisco 1492) A golden Kiss? Gustav Klimt's "Golden Phase" was marked by positive critical reaction and financial success. Many of his paintings from this period include gold leaf. Klimt had previously used gold in his Pallas Athene (1898) and Judith I (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and this wonderful work of art, The Kiss (1907–08).
- A Virgin with a Unicorn (created by Domenichino and Annibale Carracci, nominated by Hafspajen) A Virgin with a Unicorn is a painting by Domenico Zampieri on display at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Domenico Zampieri (or Domenichino) (1581–1641) was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese School, a rather talented one. This school flourished in Bologna between the 16th and 17th centuries, and rivaled Florence and Rome as the center of painting in the Italian Baroque era. The painting depicts Giulia Farnese, mistress to Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). The Pope fell in love with Giulia and decided to make her his mistress.... Well, so much for that unicorn.
- The Mystical Nativity (created by Sandro Botticelli, nominated by SchroCat) The Mystical Nativity by Sandro Botticelli is on display at the National Gallery in London and depicts a scene of joy and celebration, of earthly and heavenly delight, with angels dancing at the top of the painting. The Greek inscription at the top translates as: "This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three-and-a-half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture". Alrighty then.
- Dorf in den Berner Alpen (created by Adolf Mosengel, nominated by Hafspajen) Are the people next door getting under your skin? We have the perfect place for you: the Alps. Et voilà, Dorf in den Berner Alpen by German painter Adolf Mosengel (1837–1885) – only 68 by 50 centimetres (27 in × 20 in), but never mind the width, feel the quality. Mosengel was a landscape painter from Hamburg, Germany. He had built a reputation painting Alpine scenes, like this one, and he later turned to scenes from Westphalia.
Good articles
This is a new feature, including a list of all the good articles promoted during the week covered in this report (22–28 March 2015). Please tell us what you think! This week, thirty-five good articles were promoted.
.jpg){kind=link}
Reader comments
WikiProject Christianity
With the Christian Holy Week having recently drawn to a close, it is an apt time to examine WikiProject Christianity, which was created in 2006, and boasts over 200 active members. However, in a time when Christianity is in decline in the Global North (where a majority of contributors to the English Wikipedia reside),[1][2] how is the project faring? We spoke to three of its contributors to find out.
- What interests you about WikiProject Christianity? Do you have a real world connection to the religion?
- A: John Carter: Yeah, I'm an active Catholic, who also has studied a fair amount of religion in general in school.
- Article development seems to be a primary focus of the project, which boasts an impressive 138 featured articles, but at the same time, there are 16 top importance articles currently rated as stubs. Quite simply, is improvement of these articles a priority, and how does the project go about doing so?
- A: Carter: Improvement is, but sometimes finding out how to do so can be difficult. There is at least one current estimate of there existing 20,000 distinct Christian denominations, broadly defined, out there today. That's not counting the untold number of older groups that have faded away over the years. Finding ways to fairly and neutrally develop the core topics can be problematic. There are a few editors, including me, working on developing material from old reference works over at Wikisource, which, theoretically, barring any changes in academic views in the interim as found in more recent sources, could be used to develop a lot of the related content here. While the sheer breadth of extant and yet-to-be-created articles can be problematic we are at least in the early stages of maybe getting the structure of the content here more fully fleshed out.
- Recently, the challenges of working in this topic area have been revealed to the entire community with arbitration cases such as Historicity of Jesus and Christianity and Sexuality. Do the issues in these cases typify general challenges, or are these extreme cases? More broadly, as religion is such a personal topic, how difficult is it to maintain a neutral point of view, and what strategies does the project use in seeking to achieve one?
- A: Mugsalot: I feel that it is much easier to maintain a NPOV when one has access to both sides of the argument, as not only does this allow me to clarify historical debates but it also prevents me from hearing only one side of the argument so that I can accurately record historical events without bias.
- A: Carter: There have been particularly in the west since the 1960s really serious changes in the popular and academic views regarding religion in general. Particular attention has seemingly been given to topics which might, in the eyes of some, be able to "disprove" core beliefs of Christianity and other religions, particularly in the secularism and new atheism communities. Some of these recent changes have gotten widespread academic support, others have received less support. The significant cultural changes brought about by contraceptives and other developments have brought about quite a few changes in all sorts of groups, including some specifically Christian groups and some others. Finding ways to keep the content NPOV, particularly when some editors on both sides might reasonably be seen as having serious POV difficulties, can be and like in those cases sometimes is really problematic. Luckily, there aren't that many such topics that are subject to particular controversy at any given time.
- A: Astynax: A related problem is that a popular literature has developed (sometimes authored by academics making their mark in this or that well-studied niche and sometimes advanced by people with no credentials in the field) that exploits a textual or archaeological interpretation to advance sensationalistic, book-selling hype or revisionist premises. I can think of several instances where editors have latched on to such fringe statements, mistaking them as being widely accepted; ignoring the mainstream view of scholarship in the field and often also missing any subtle qualifiers that the author may have inserted. When an idea is intriguing, however unsupported by other evidence or scholarship, some editors have insisted on inserting fringey material into articles (or making them the subject of entire articles). On rare occasions, a novel thesis will eventually receive enough backing that it makes a dent in the mainstream scholarly view, at which point it deserves inclusion in articles. It can be difficult to convince editors, however, that policy requires that we await the academic process to work itself out before the encyclopedia can report such material as even a notable minority view within an article. As in other little-watched areas of Wikipedia, this type of questionable material is extremely difficult to keep out of articles per policy. It often takes only one or two advocates of inserting a purely speculative and otherwise unsupported marginal or fringe material to dominate discussion and "consensus" in little-watched areas. Dispute resolution processes largely ignores content, so this sort of situation can be extremely frustrating to the few editors who may be attempting to keep an article reflecting the weight of the significant reporting in reliable sources. For those articles where a large enough segment of the community is not watching to provide balance, the encyclopedia often ends up reporting unencyclopedic information, and because there is no ready recourse when someone challenges fringey information, such disputes sometimes result in the loss of valuable editors, and the repetitive walls of text and frustrated attempts at correction are off-putting to new editors, even scholars, who come to such pages. Lack of content oversight and avenues for resolving content disputes is a Wikipedia-wide problem for largely unwatched topics, but as the religion projects have many such articles, it is particularly noticeable here.
- Personally, what has been your most rewarding experience with WikiProject Christianity?
- A: Carter: I'm a bit of a history buff myself, and finding out about some of the now smaller groups, like the Assyrian Church of the East, Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Syriac Orthodox Church, and Armenian Apostolic Church, and how they have influenced, sometimes in very big ways, our current culture has been fascinating. Particularly when for some of these topics the available English language sources can be rather weak or hard to access. One of the biggest examples that comes to mind is the Ethiopian Meqabyan, which so far as I can tell have become available in English only since 2008 in a vanity press translation.
- I noticed you have a project newsletter. What does it cover, and is it effective in recruiting and engaging members?
- A: Carter: I regret to say that the newsletter has been inactive for some time now. I would love to see it reactivated, if anyone wanted to, but I myself haven't had the time to do so lately.
- The project has a lengthy to do list, which looks rather overwhelming, quite frankly. What are the most important tasks for the project right now, and how can new contributors help?
- A: Carter: Like I said, there are about 20,000 extant Christian denominations of all sorts out there, and an untold number of now defunct groups. Probably the biggest priority is getting the more core articles up to a decent level of development so we can know what is to be included in those articles, and what material would best be included in some spinout article. From the standpoint of building construction, as it were, we've got a few good walls up but still have some serious questions with the foundations and basement. Getting the more central articles up to good status, along with those articles which, for whatever reason, get the more short-term attention, is probably our core need right now, pretty much like it is with most other projects.
- Editor's note: Our regular WikiProject report writer Rcsprinter123 is currently on a break due to real-life demands. Would you be interested in helping write the section, even if just one time? We have detailed instructions and resources to make it as easy as possible. If so, please contact us.
References
- ^ Grant, Tobin (January 27, 2014). "The Great Decline: 60 years of religion in one graph". Religion News Service. Religion News. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
- ^ Kumar, Anugrah (July 20, 2013). "Study: World Is Turning More Religious; Atheism Declining". The Christian Post. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
Reader comments
New functionary appointments
The Committee has voted on the 2015 appointments to the functionary team. Two users, Callanecc and Mike V, were granted both checkuser and oversight powers. Callanecc is also serving as an arbitration clerk. Bbb23 was appointed as a checkuser and six other users were appointed oversighters: GB fan, HJ Mitchell, Keilana, Kelapstick, Lankiveil, and Ronhjones. HJ Mitchell is the regular author of the Signpost's Arbitration report.
Of the candidates appointed, none received any oppose votes from the Committee. The arbitrators, however, were evenly split on two other candidates: HJ Mitchell was denied checkuser rights, though he received significant support in the community discussion and on the Committee, one of them writing: "I don't find the opposes convincing." Bbb23 wrote in their nomination statement "I don’t think I’ll use the oversight tool much" and those on the Committee opposing the nomination unanimously cited this as the cause for denying them oversight rights.
One question dominating the community discussion was exactly how many votes from the Committee were needed to appoint a Functionary, whether it was a mere majority or an 80% threshold. This ended up being a moot point since all the candidates either received exactly 50% or 100% of the vote.
The Committee also offered their thanks to J.delanoy "for his years of service" as a checkuser. J.delanoy resigned from his Wikipedia and Wikimedia posts in January, citing demands from his professional life. He became an administrator in 2008, a checkuser in 2009, and a steward in 2010.
In brief
- Dreadstar desysopped: By motion, the Arbitration Committee removed the administrative privileges of Dreadstar for "conduct unbecoming of an administrator." Subsequently, he blocked himself, and retired.
- Liz appointed as trainee clerk: On March 27, the committee approved Liz as a new trainee clerk. She is the third recently appointed trainee clerk, joining L235 and Robert McClenon; ArbCom requested additional help in January, and with three new trainee clerks, it appears they have found that for which they were looking.
Reader comments
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Editors can join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [1]
- Read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. Current work is on the roadmap. [2] [3]
- The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [4]
- Editors can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [5]
Problems
- The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. Please delete and import pages again if necessary. [6]
- Labs was broken several times this week. [7] [8] [9] [10]
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
- It is now possible to add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [11]
- Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [12] [13]
- Editors can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [14]
Meetings
- You can join the next weekly meeting with the editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Reader comments