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1 April 2016

News and notes
Trump/Wales 2016

In the media
Saskatoon police delete Wikipedia content about police brutality

WikiProject report
Why should the Devil have all the good music? An interview with WikiProject Christian music

Traffic report
Donald v Daredevil

Trump/Wales 2016

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By Gamaliel, Montanabw, and Andreas Kolbe

This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous.
Such material is not meant to be taken seriously.

Trumpedia?

Brief notes

Virtual reality fundraising campaign: The Wikimedia Foundation has announced on Meta that it will conduct a virtual reality fundraising campaign in the 2016–2017 financial year. The new technology is believed to offer significant advantages over a static monitor setting, as the Foundation's Advancement Associate (Community Engagement), Joseph Seddon, explains: "With Virtual Reality we can have banners following people around the room, sitting in their peripherals all the time or even simply taking up their whole field of vision."

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2016-04-01

Saskatoon police delete Wikipedia content about police brutality

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By Andreas Kolbe

Saskatoon in winter

Saskatoon police delete Wikipedia content about police brutality

Saskatoon Police Service in 1910

CBC News reports (March 31) that someone using a Saskatoon police computer blanked information on the infamous "starlight tours" from the article on the Saskatoon Police Service. The "starlight tours" involved "police taking aboriginal men and women to the edge of the city in the winter and abandoning them". The practice has been linked to several deaths; a report published in 2004 after a government inquiry advocated adding aboriginal officers to the force.

The deletions (e.g. [1], [2], [3]) were spotted by university student Addison Herman:

The deletion came to light when Herman started to research the Saskatoon police as part of a history class.
He went to the Wikipedia page on the Saskatoon Police Service.
"I noticed there was no section on the starlight tours. So I looked in the article history and there was an IP address that took it off the page," he said in an interview.
"I looked at the info for the registration on the IP address, and that IP address pretty much is registered to Saskatoon Police Service, which means that a computer from their office went on Wikipedia and took it off."
And it happened more than once. The section was deleted, added back and then deleted again between 2012 and 2013.

A Saskatoon police spokeswoman confirmed deletions were made from one of their computers, but said it would be impossible to identify the person who made the edits, as server logs are only kept for 30 days. The story has also been picked up by CTV News.

In brief

The Angola Wikipedia Zero story has remained in the news.

Best deleted articles: Gawker's Ashley Feinberg has another round-up of "the best articles Wikipedia deleted this week". (March 31)
Gender gap: The Huffington Post and Verily Magazine cover the gender gap. (March 29, 31)
Wikipedia editing replaces "unappealing essays": Times Higher Education reports on University of Sydney assessments asking students to edit and write Wikipedia articles. (March 31)
Mustaine: Loudwire has the second second installment of its Dave Mustaine interview. (March 30)
Angola: The Angola Wikipedia Zero story (see detailed report in last week's "In the media") has attracted further coverage in Forbes, Tech Times, PC Magazine, Firstpost and Engadget. (March 27–30)

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2016-04-01

Why should the Devil have all the good music? An interview with WikiProject Christian music

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By 3family6

Christian music has been written to express either personal or a communal belief regarding Christian life and faith.

Christian music is truly unique in the world of music. Sonically, its characteristics encompass the entire spectrum of music, with only the faith-based nature of the genre connecting the disparate array of styles. Even the faith-based aspect proves difficult to pin down, with artists ranging from the rock bands U2 and Switchfoot, to singer-songwriter Derek Webb, to the rapper Lecrae refusing to be pigeon-holed by the "Christian" label, arguing that Christianity is a faith, not a genre. Regardless of these debates as to exactly who is and who is not included among its ranks, Christian music continues to thrive. And as the genre embodies all sonic variations of music as a whole, it allows for each and all tastes, whether classical or jazz, hip hop or heavy metal.

WikiProject Christian music began around 2008. Its stated goal is to "help assemble editors interested in Christian music" and "standardize and improve articles related to Christian music and its sub-genres, as well as to create missing articles." Some 3,460 articles are listed as falling under the WikiProject, though many more articles fall under its child projects and task forces and many others could potentially fall under the WikiProject banner but are uncategorized. WikiProject Christian music itself falls under several parent projects, specifically WikiProject Christianity and its parent, WikiProject Religion; WikiProject Music genres and its parent WikiProject Music; WikiProject Arts, and WikiProject Culture.

When I started editing Wikipedia in the latter half of 2010, I cut my teeth on Christian music-related articles, beginning mainly with Christian metal but branching out from there. Over the course of five and a half years, I’ve had the privilege of working with many different editors at improving the coverage of Christian music on Wikipedia. Desiring to highlight their contributions, I approached four of these editors and asked if they would consent to an interview, and they each agreed. Allow me to introduce them:

The Cross Bearer began editing Wikipedia in early January 2015 under two different consecutive user names, which they soon abandoned. They adopted their current user name in late January of that year. An extremely prolific editor, in the year and a quarter since they joined, they have created almost 1,000 articles! Ilovechristianmusic started editing Wikipedia in April 2014. Since then they have created 16 articles and helped develop numerous others, logging over 1,800 edits. Royalbroil is an administrator on Wikipedia, and first contributed in June 2005. They have logged over 52,000 edits. They were promoted to administrator in November 26, 2007. Walter Görlitz has been active as an editor on the English Wikipedia since October 2004 and has made over 138,000 contributions in that time.

Thank you all four of you for taking the time to do this.

What prompted you to become a Wikipedia editor?

RB: I thought that building an online encyclopedia was a worthwhile endeavor. Wikipedia was pretty new in 2005 and there was a lot that I could do to help build and organize it. I keep contributing because I want to make the world a better place.

ILCM: The amount of incorrect information on Wikipedia. One day I pulled up Wiki to look up some information on a song, and the information supplied was unreliable, so I thought I would create an account to help better music articles.

TCB: The lack of coverage about many musicians and bands that are Christian music or even Christian music leaning on this encyclopedia. I went through a whole encyclopedia [Uncloudy Days by Bil Carpenter] on mainly black gospel musicians and found well over 60 articles that were not done [on Wikipedia].

WG: I saw a segment on The Colbert Report and began to investigate. I realized that Wikipedia allowed people to disseminate information and that has been a goal of mine since I graduated high school and so I started digging in. I edited articles on topics I understood a bit about, and then I became hooked on the process.

Royalbroil, you are an administrator on Wikipedia. How did that come about? Do the extra tools help you contribute to this project specifically?

RB: I wasn't aiming to become an admin. After I was here for several years, I was asked if I'd like to become an admin and I agreed to try. My biggest use of the tools is to delete images that I move over to Commons. I rarely use them on Christian music articles.

What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Christian music? What kind of Christian music-related articles do you like to work on?

TobyMac

RB: I saw that Christian music articles were overlooked or non-existent. Overall, I enjoy working on articles that are more on the fringe of popular culture but are notable yet less interesting to many people. I rarely work on core topics. The Christian music articles that I edit the most are artists' articles.

ILCM: I saw the lack of detail and coverage under so many Christian music articles. I enjoy working on the WOW series, and popular artists at the moment such as TobyMac, Francesca Battistelli, UNITED, etc.

TCB: Well, it just simply goes hand-and-hand with my faith, and is something where it would naturally coincide with my beliefs. I am not nitpicky with regards to articles in the Christian music sector that merit articles on this encyclopedia. I am a lover of all music especially with messages about God and Jesus Christ.

WG: I was a DJ for a Christian music rollerskate from 1982 until 1998. I wanted to reach people with the gospel through Christian music. I had a lot of information in my head and wanted to share that information. I like to work on articles of bands I grew-up listening to, Daniel Amos (and other bands associated with Terry Scott Taylor), Larry Norman, Randy Stonehill (and other Solid Rock artists), early Christian hard rock and metal bands (Resurrection Band, Petra, Stryper, etc.) and Christian pop acts. I also work on genres that don’t have a lot of oversight: Christian hip hop and rap, CCM and worship music. I have a collection of about 5000 albums, and it’s growing. I usually have the articles of the albums I own on my watch list and also the artists. Some articles tend to attract more vandalism than others. I also watch them.

Do you contribute to any other subject areas on Wikipedia?

RB: I contribute lots of photographs taken during my travels, mainly in Wisconsin. I enjoy working on racing topics and I have much more work to do on that topic. When I'm a Wikipedia consumer and I see a major topic that is completely neglected, I'll do some research and cite the article (like I did with Gladhand connector recently).

ILCM: I primarily work on pop music articles, along with Christian music articles, and I sometimes venture into editing the Just Dance series.

TCB: Yes, mainly music and media stuff, when it needs to get done, I try my best to get it accomplished.

WG: Software testing, QA, and software development. I also contribute to several association football (soccer where I live, football in pretty much the rest of the planet) articles, particularly with MLS team articles and my favourite European team: FC Bayern Munich. As a Canadian, I also have several national topics on my watch list and I also have a few articles on my denomination and theology on my watch list as well.

The Cross Bearer, you contributed to the Women in music and Black Women’s History edit-a-thons as part of Women in Red. What was it like participating in those events?

TCB: It gives me a greater sense of fulfillment and appreciation with regards to others noticing my laboriously created articles.

Walter Görlitz, in the approximately ten years that you've edited on Wikipedia, what are some key changes have you seen, both within the WikiProject or the larger encyclopedia, and how do you feel about them?

WG: I think it’s harder for people to enter the “community” of editors now. When I started, you could try to improve articles and almost all content additions were accepted. Now, much of it is deleted if it’s not referenced, and if not deleted, it’s marked as needing references. It makes me sad to see people who just want to share things they’re excited about be kicked down. I recognize the rules (we call them policies, guidelines and manuals of style) but some find it easier to enforce the rules rather than extend grace. For instance, many association football player articles have a section for number of games played (caps) and goals scored. New editors will go in and update articles for obscure players and those changes are reverted by more senior editors simply because an associated field, the club statistics last updated field, has not been updated. It would take very little additional effort to put the date of the change into that field, but it often does not happen.

When I started, new editors were mostly people who wanted to share information. Now, I see a lot of people pushing their own agendas, whether that information is a personal website, band (either as a member, a manager, promoter or a fan), music or things like that. I understand why. A link to a site can boost your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. A link on a popular site can boost it even further. That just annoys me from a sharing economy mindset.

When I started, the rules were present but vague. Now they have gone two ways. On one side, they have become very formal and as I said, that formality can make a substantial barrier to editors who just want to share information. On the other side, some groups, commonly called “cabals” on Wikipedia, have formed. I reverted an editor once a few months ago only to find that an admin who protected that editor’s edits blocked me for “edit warring”. I explained my case and was eventually exonerated, but it was a tense time. While I was blocked, I found out that this admin had done this to multiple other editors over the previous four months. That’s an extreme case. On the association football side, everyone has run into the mindset that is controlled by a few long-term editors about how the articles should appear and information should be presented. They have permitted articles to exist for certain teams because a rule was created years ago that determines whether a club is or is not notable. It makes perfect sense in areas where clubs that in lower ranks are fully professional, but not in North America. So articles exists for clubs that should probably be deleted because of that rule. Similarly, articles exist for some players that probably should not and don’t exist for players that probably should have them all because they determine whether the article fits into a flawed criteria, not if the subject is or is not notable. I have probably been guilty of that on the music front where some new editors want some particular information displayed at the template at the top of the article (the infobox) but several editors don’t think it’s needed, and we create a type of wall of impenetrability to change.

What would you say are your favorite contributions as an editor?

Sidewalk Prophets

RB: I really enjoyed researching the Brothertown Indians and it was my first DYK. I'm glad that some of the band articles that I started have become big names in the Christian music scene, like the Sidewalk Prophets and Addison Road.

ILCM: Adding missing information to articles, like release dates, changing out templates, track listings, and researching for information to add to articles.

TCB: I would say first and foremost the Jimmy Greene article, for the fact his daughter was killed in a hideous way at such a young age, where this was my impetus to get the article to DyK.

WG: When my local professional soccer team was playing in the USL, in 2010, I took it on myself to write a small program that would convert the daily results into something that could be used on Wikipedia. The top leagues usually get a lot of attention, but that year, a lower league had better and faster updates because of that. I made changes to one article in 2005 that has remained in that article unchanged. It has made that article a good example and I have seen people reference it in other discussions on the subject. It’s also a large table of numbers and so it’s been a target for people trying to test if they can edit Wikipedia over the years thinking that a small change will go unnoticed. It doesn’t. One other early edit was to the 1981 Daniel Amos article Horrendous Disc. It’s one of my favourite albums by the band. It too has stood the test of time, and the band’s manager has even edited that article and made improvements to those changes. I also helped define the criteria of what constitutes a “notable” recording.

Does your WikiProject collaborate with any other WikiProjects? What are some of the intersections of Christian music with other subject areas?

RB: Christian music articles rarely impact other WikiProjects, except for the band's home region.

ILCM: Not to my knowledge. Christian music doesn't really affect any other music articles, unless it's a cross–over situation like with Carrie Underwood.

TCB: I try to collaborate with everyone on this encyclopedia because we work better together in achieving the aims, focuses, and mission statement of this project as a whole.

WG: I have formally left all other WikiProjects and have only listed my name on the Christian Music Project and Music Project. I know about other projects and know where to go for help when I’m working on those articles, but I feel that don’t have the needed knowledge to contribute well on other projects.

Has your project formed any special workgroups or task forces?

RB: I initially joined WikiProject Contemporary Christian music and members later decided to change it to become a Workforce under the Christian music Wikiproject.

ILCM: I haven't joined any at the moment, but I would like to someday.

TCB: Not presently, while I believe we should be forming more task oriented groups to work on getting stuff expanded, fixed, or created in the first place.

WG: The Christian Music project has informally broken into areas of specialties and there is the “contemporary Christian music” workforce. On this project, one editor is excellent at finding sources and creating new articles that meet Wikipedia standards. I have turned to him to help gather sources when I’m not sure about a topic myself. The general music project has divided into genre-specific groups, Christian Music and CCM being two, but other genres as well. There are also special groups who focus on recordings and how to present them. I have been very active on the albums and less active on the single group. I have also been active in defining how artist articles should be displayed.

[Interviewer's note: In addition to the CCM, albums, and songs task forces, there also are the Southern Gospel and Urban Contemporary Gospel task forces, and a sister project, WikiProject Christian Metal]

What are WikiProject Christian music's most pressing needs?

RB: I see the WikiProject as being in maintenance mode. It should be starting articles for new artists and keeping up on established artists' careers.

ILCM: Expansion, whether it's under an artist's article or a musical article. For an artist, there isn't much information available on them such as birthdates, birth places, or background. For musical articles, things like critical reception and background are especially lacking.

TCB: We have a lack of actively involved editors in addressing the subjects in our genre, whether it is expanding an article to explain why an artist is notable, such as Darrell Evans, or in creating good to great content from the get-go. Every piece someone could add in a beneficial way, is tremendously needed across the project and broader encyclopedia as a whole.

WG: Interesting question. I’ve never thought of the project as having any pressing needs. About two years ago I came to realizing that the Internet isn’t going anywhere soon and Wikipedia isn’t going to cease to exist if my current high-priority issues are not addressed. In my mind, there are many important musicians from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who are not represented, at least not represented well, and I suppose that the project needs to have a more balanced approach. One musician, whose article is on my watch list, has resorted to updating himself, and he’s done a great job of it. Other artists tend to be promotional and that’s a shame. Other artists don’t even have articles.

What would you say are some of the most pressing issues for Wikipedia as a whole?

RB: Finding and retaining women contributors is a well-written answer to that question. Getting any newcomer to stay should be a pressing need. I imagine it would be very hard to be a newcomer. Consider the difficulty to learn the markup, all of the rules that I see veterans using to revert their editing, learning inline citations an article, and how many get their first articles nominated for deletion. The best thing that veterans should do is to offer to mentor new contributors. Help by improving their articles to show them the ropes. More contributors will stay.

ILCM: More experienced editors helping and welcoming newcomers, rather than biting them, and showing them pages to build their editing skills instead of assuming that they are disrupting/vandalizing on purpose. This especially on Pop music articles.

TCB: We have a lack of notable articles across all subject areas on Wikipedia, yet we need editors to craft articles in a manner where it showcases each individual subjects notability. Notability is not inherited it must be earned with coverage or merit, such as winning a GMA Dove Award, or being nominated multiple times.

WG: The same issue that affects most churches: being welcoming to newcomers. Both tend to be nice to people who are nice to them. I can see a rules-based community, like Wikipedia, being unwelcoming to people who break the rules.

How can a new contributor help the WikiProject today?

RB: I suggest approaching members and learn how to edit Wikipedia first. Having a mentor will make a much more pleasant experience.

ILCM: By trying and doing their best at editing at Wikipedia.

TCB: They should be aware Wikipedia will not by any means accept articles based on your favorite band, musician, or artist. Every article on Wikipedia must adhere to our policies and guidelines per GNG for its notability and existence on this encyclopedia, and for biographies it must not go against BLP by any means. We should engage them to create notable content in the areas of interest to them, with researching and finding topics for them to work on in an encyclopedic manner.

WG: I would encourage them come to Wikipedia with information and references, whether those are books, articles by reputable authors in reputable publications, or websites that are reputable. It doesn’t just have to be in music, but information can be shared. Be prepared to have your preconceptions challenged though. If you think something shouldn’t be present, you might want to check before removing it.

Any other final comments?

RB: Wikipedia is much more well respected now than when I started in 2005. I think that the major turning point happened when citations from reliable sources became a requirement. Consumers see the value in this encyclopedia. I see much less vandalism than five years ago.

TCB: I want editors as a whole to start getting stuff accomplished, rather than simply pondering what might be or will be done, if someone else does the task or work. I am only one believer amongst a couple billion, we should have all the content created that passes notability in a timely and effective manner.

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2016-04-01

Donald v Daredevil

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By Serendipodous

Summary: Despite a flurry of caucuses this week (most of which were won by Bernie Sanders, who capped the week by becoming the least likely Disney Princess in history), a lack of debates means that interest in politics among our viewers has ebbed. And with next week being a rare fallow period in the primary season, that means that *gasp* we might not have to talk about politics! For a while. Which, given the reactions we've been getting, would be a breather—I can tell you. Of course, we still have to talk about Donald Trump, though whether his presence on this list is actually due to politics is debatable. In other news, numbers are down for Easter this year, which is odd, given the lack of interest in politics. Fittingly, death continues to be a companion of Eastertide, with Garry Shandling and Johan Cruyff both dying this week. The second season of the Netflix/Marvel collaboration Daredevil finally got a decent airing on this list, having been hobbled in views by an awkward release date (the entire season was released at once on March 18, two days before this list's timeframe).

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 20 to 26, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice	3,152,933	Warner Bros might have cause to breathe again for the first time in three years, as their tent-pole gamble and hopes for an entire franchise have, it seems, paid off. Maybe. With $420 million earned worldwide in its first week, the official founding stone for DC's cinematic universe has gone down a storm, with the studio's highest ever domestic opening weekend. But, having cost an estimated $400 million to make and market, this movie will have to make $800 million worldwide just to break even, and after earning an atrocious "B-" Cinemascore from male fans, and a dismal 29% RT score, it's uncertain whether this storm will end up more of a squall.
2	Donald Trump	1,480,800	OK. What did he do this week? Not much, actually. Except insult Ted Cruz's wife Heidi for being unattractive. To be fair, he did this in response to a Cruz-aligned superPAC posting a nude photoshoot that Trump's model wife Melania did for GQ years ago, along with implicit slut-shaming and insinuations she was unfit to be First Lady (they must have never heard of Carla Bruni). Cruz was quick to distance himself from that image, and to defend his wife, calling Trump a "snivelling coward", but it seems Wikipedia viewers aren't listening. Ted and Heidi rank at 61 and 82 on the raw list, respectively, while Melania is at 32.
3	Garry Shandling	1,227,744	The popular comedian, whose groundbreaking sitcom/talk show hybrid The Larry Sanders Show was an early hit for HBO and widely considered one of the best TV comedies of all time, died this week at the age of 66.
4	Good Friday	797,456	The darkest moment of Easter week, this commemorates (despite its name, "celebrates" isn't really the right word) the Passion (torture and crucifixion) of Jesus Christ, as opposed to Easter Sunday which celebrates his resurrection.
5	Johan Cruyff	754,660	This hugely respected Dutch footballer, who spent most of his career at Ajax and Barcelona, both as player and manager, died this week at the age of 68. Considered by many to be one of the best footballers of all time, he presided over the rise of his country from a minnow to a footballing superpower in the 1970s.
6	Bluetooth	702,091	As learned on Reddit this week, the ubiquitous wireless technology was named after Harold Bluetooth, who first unified Denmark in the tenth century. Its logo is the bind rune that forms his initials. Despite the technology having originated with the Swedish company Ericsson, the name was coined by an American employee at Intel.
7	Punisher	669,723	After years in B- and C-movie purgatory, Marvel Comics's most merciless antihero finally got a decent mainstream adaptation, thanks to a primary plot thread on this season of Daredevil and a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal by The Walking Dead's Jon Bernthal.
8	Deaths in 2016	658,762	The annual list of deaths has always been a fairly consistent visitor to this list, averaging about 500,000 views a week. Since the death of David Bowie, this article's average weekly views have jumped.
9	Daredevil (season 2)	601,562	Numbers are up this week for the Marvel/Netflix series, which suggests that, despite critics' claims of a sophomore slump, interest may be more prolonged than I originally thought.
10	Elektra (comics)	593,434	The impractically underdressed ninja assassin from the Daredevil comics got her introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe last week, played by French/Cambodian actress and karate expert Élodie Yung.

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2016-04-01

A slow, slow week

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By Armbrust

Bradley Wiggins and Michael Rogers are the oldest and youngest winners of the men's time trial event of the UCI Road World Championships, respectively.

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 20 to 26 March.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Featured lists

Steve Downes is the voice actor of Master Chief, the main protagonist of the *Halo* franchise.

Two featured lists were promoted this week.

The men's time trial event at the UCI Road World Championships (nominated by NapHit) is the men's world championship for the road bicycle racing discipline of time trial. Introduced in 1994 by the Union Cycliste Internationale, the world's governing body of cycling, the event consists of a time trial covering a distance of approximately 45 kilometres over flat or rolling terrain. Riders start separated by two-minute intervals; the one that completes the course in the shortest time is the winner, and is entitled to wear the rainbow jersey in time trial events for the forthcoming season. Fabian Cancellara has won the most competitions, with four victories between 2006 and 2010. German cyclists are the most successful, with six victories; Swiss cyclists are second with five, and Australians are third with three.
The Ranji Trophy is the premier first-class cricket championship played in India. Conducted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India, it was founded in 1934 as "The Cricket Championship of India". As of February 2016, a triple century (nominated by Bharatiya29) has been scored on 35 occasions by 30 different batsmen in the competition. The highest number of triple centuries were scored by Ravindra Jadeja, who has reached the milestone three times while playing for Saurashtra.

Featured portals

One featured portal was promoted this week.

Halo (nominated by SSTflyer) is a military science fiction first-person shooter video game franchise created by Bungie and now managed and developed by 343 Industries. The series centers on an interstellar war between humanity and a theocratic alliance of aliens known as the Covenant. The Covenant, led by their religious leaders called the Prophets, worship an ancient civilization known as the Forerunners, who perished in combat with the parasitic Flood. The central focus of the franchise builds off the experiences of Master Chief John-117, one of a group of supersoldiers codenamed Spartans, and his artificial intelligence companion, Cortana.

Featured pictures

One featured picture was promoted this week.

Christ Church Cathedral
(created and nominated by Godot13)

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2016-04-01

Browse Wikipedia in safety? Use Telnet!

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By Tim Starling

Telnet, circa 1988.

HTTPS was a good start. But to be really secure, it's not enough.

The FBI's attacks against the Tor network have been in the news this week. In events reminiscent of the famous Operation Onymous, the FBI seized control of a web server and then used it to compromise the browsers of visitors to the site.

Could the same thing happen to Wikipedia? Absolutely. We follow industry standard best practice in keeping our servers secure, but this is in an industry where "best practice" means running code which is not known to be vulnerable. The more ignorant you are about the code you are running, the more secure you are. The mind boggles.

Just about every layer of our software stack has had security vulnerabilities of one kind or another disclosed and fixed, and yet we keep using it, because there is no alternative. And Pwn2Own proves every year that there is no reason to trust our web browsers.

Of course, the tools of the trade are not restricted to law enforcement. Anyone with patience and talent can find and exploit vulnerabilities. So what do you do if you want to learn about dancing mania but you don't want to expose your computer to complete compromise? Reduce the attack surface:

Wikimedia is pleased to announce the launch of a Telnet gateway to Wikipedia.

Sorry, there are no images, but you don't want them anyway, libpng vulnerabilities will own your phone.

If you care about privacy, you should access the gateway via the Tor hidden service at lgcjxm7fttkqi2zl.onion port 23. If you care about security, maybe you shouldn't. Who knows what vulnerabilities are hidden in the Tor client? Maybe it's best to run the Tor proxy on a separate server in an air-gapped, soundproof room, connected only by an optically-isolated RS-232 link to your secure laptop.

When it comes to choosing the Telnet client, there are two main approaches.

One is to use old, small, well-tested code, generally recognised to be safe, in the desperate hope that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. In this vein you might consider the BSD telnet client, running on a Linux virtual terminal console.

The BSD telnet client was written in about 1983, and is available in all major Linux distributions. Its manpage lists only a single bug: "The source code is not comprehensible." Well, surely in 33 years at least one person must have comprehended it by now and reviewed it for security, right? Right?

While you admire the pretty colours in your Linux console, you might reflect on the fact that they are brought to you by C code which interprets terminal escape sequences while running in Ring 0.

The other approach is defense in depth. Perhaps JTelnet, with an extremely restrictive Java security policy which denies all local access, running as an unprivileged user in a chroot in a VM.

We'll leave the details up to you. Stay safe, folks.

For more information about connecting and further technical details, please see the wiki page.

P.S.: please don't ask for a web gateway to the Telnet server. That really misses the point.

Tim Starling is lead platform architect on the parsing team at the Wikimedia Foundation

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2016-04-01

"Employing Wikipedia for good not evil" in education; using eyetracking to find out how readers read articles

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By Piotr Konieczny and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

"Employing Wikipedia for good not evil: innovative approaches to collaborative writing assessment"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

University of Sydney

This paper^[1] is a good example of how to write articles for the "teaching with Wikipedia" field. The authors report their positive experiences with several under- and postgraduate classes at the University of Sydney, developing articles such as pregnancy vegetarianism, Cleo (magazine) or Slave Labour (mural). They describe in relative detail a number of assignments and assessment criteria, and discuss benefits that their Wikipedia assignments have for the community (improving valuable and underrepresented content) and for the students themselves (improving their writing, research and collaborative skills). The paper could benefit from a more comprehensive literature review, however: while it describes a useful set of educational activities, and rather well at that, these are not groundbreaking—practically all activities discussed in this paper have been discussed in peer reviewed literature by others. Unfortunately, the authors fail to cite many of related works (I count only about five citations to the other peer-reviewed works from the much larger field of teaching with Wikipedia). Furthermore, the authors seem unaware of the Wikipedia:Education Program. It does not appear that any of their courses so far have been registered on Wikipedia; sadly they have no on-wiki homepage allowing identification of all edited articles or participating students; it is also unclear if the instructors themselves have a Wikipedia account. This suggests a failing both on the part of the researchers (they spent years reading about, researching and engaging with the teaching with Wikipedia approach without realizing there is a major support infrastructure in place to assist them), as well as on the part of the Wikipedia community and the Education Program itself, which is clearly still not being visible enough, nor active enough to identify and reach out to such educators who have been engaged in several years of ongoing teaching on Wikipedia. Hopefully in the future we can integrate those and other educators into our framework better.

Using eyetracking to find out how Wikipedia articles are being read

Reviewed by Tilman Bayer

Screenshot of eyetracking software (not from the papers discussed here)

Researchers from the University of Regensburg in Germany have used eyetracking methods to find out which article elements readers focus on while searching for information on Wikipedia, depending on the nature of the search task (factual information lookup, learning, or casual reading—a classification taken from a 2006 article^{[supp 1]} about exploratory search in general).

In two 2012 articles^[2]^[3] the researchers summarized the methodology and results of one of their lab experiments with 28 participants, which besides eyetracking also incorporated data from survey questionnaires, browser logs and electromyography for two facial muscles that indicate emotional reactions (the corrugator and the zygomaticus major). Among the results of this first study (see also a related paper in English with illustrations explaining the various article elements^[4]):

During lookup tasks, tables and graphical representations were preferred (but illustrative/decorative images were almost never looked at. As the authors point out, their test question, about the number of passengers on the Titanic, focused on textual information). On the other hand, "in 'learn' tasks users concentrate more on the introduction and lists. In the 'casual leisure' area, many different content elements are used." [this and other quotes have been translated from German]
Users tend to skim the article during lookup tasks, but read more text parts in the other tasks.
According to a post-task survey, user satisfaction in both the lookup and learn tasks was independent of the number of images.

A subsequent German-language PhD thesis ^[5] (see also 2012 conference poster) contains much more detail, e.g. reporting that in "lookup" tasks, readers spend >45% of their time on scanning the table of content and lists in the article, in "learn" tasks these only amount to <10% of the time.

A second PhD thesis, covered in a brief paper^[6] last year, examined for example which elements readers look at first within an article (from an experiment involving 163 German Wikipedia articles and 90 participants who were asked to prepare themselves for an course on the history of Bavaria in the 20th century, i.e. a "learning" overview task): The table of contents was the most frequent entry point (36%) followed by the lead section (31%) and the text body itself. The author observes further that "the article heading and images serve less often as entry point. The text heading [presumably the first section heading after the lead] and image captions very rarely occurs as points of first contact". Another publication^[7] by the same author focused on "users' interaction with pictorial and textual contents ...[ The spread] of information within the articles and the relation between text and images are analyzed. ... By now 30 articles have been analyzed according to this scheme. [Within these, there] are 639 contact points leading to images. Results show that 39% of all contact points lead from image to image, in mutual directions (previous or next). All text contact points [e.g. citations] sum up to a total of 37%. In 5% of all cases, an introduction triggers a saccade to an image. The remaining types of contact points occur rather rarely."

A later overview article^[8] summarizes other aspects in less detail, e.g:

More experienced readers used the table of contents less often.
Overall, search strategies did not differ a lot between the "learning" and casual reading ("non-work-based") tasks. But there were statistically significant differences to the information seeking behavior in fact lookup tasks. The largest differences concerned the consumption of text, images and TOC (cf. above). Readers also spent a larger ratio of time navigating compared to analyzing content.

(For an overview over other new data sources shedding light on how readers navigate within articles, see also this reviewer's recent tech talk at the Wikimedia Foundation, and a research overview page on Meta about the question "Which parts of an article do readers read?)

Other recent publications

An analysis used Wikipedia to rank Jimi Hendrix as the most influential rock guitarist

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.

"Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Market Place of Information"^[9] From the abstract: "Wikipedia’s popularity and reputation give politicians incentives to use it for enhancing their online appearance effectively and tailored towards their constituency. [...] we assemble data covering editing activity for articles on all 1,100 members of the German parliament (MPs) for the three last legislatures. We find editing to be a persistent phenomenon that is practiced by a substantial amount of MPs and is growing throughout election years."
"Identifying missing dictionary entries with frequency-conserving context models"^[10] From the abstract: "Upon training our model with the Wiktionary—an extensive, online, collaborative, and open-source dictionary that contains over 100,000 phrasal-definitions—we develop highly effective filters for the identification of meaningful, missing phrase-entries. With our predictions we then engage the editorial community of the Wiktionary and propose short lists of potential missing entries for definition, developing a breakthrough, lexical extraction technique, and expanding our knowledge of the defined English lexicon of phrases."
"Population automation: An interview with Wikipedia bot pioneer Ram-Man"^[11] From the abstract: ".... an in-depth interview with Wikipedia user Ram-Man, [...] creator or the rambot, the first mass-editing bot. Topics discussed include the social and technical climate of early Wikipedia, the creation of bot policies and bureaucracy, and the legacy of rambot and Ram-Man’s work."
"Mining Wikipedia to Rank Rock Guitarists"^[12]^{[predatory publisher]} From the abstract: "The influence of a guitarist was estimated by the number of guitarists citing him/her as an influence and the influence of the latter. [...] The results are most interesting and provide a quantitative foundation to the idea that most of the contemporary rock guitarists are influenced by early blues guitarists. Although no direct comparison exist, the list was still validated against a number of other best-of lists available online and found to be mostly compatible."
Predicting tennis players' Wikipedia popularity from tournament performance: From the abstract of a paper titled "Untangling Performance from Success":^[13] "We show that a predictive model, relying only on a tennis player's performance in tournaments, can accurately predict an athlete's popularity [as measured by Wikipedia pageviews], both during a player's active years and after retirement."
"Request for Adminship (RFA) within Wikipedia: How Do User Contributions Instill Community Trust?"^[14] From the abstract: "... we examine the impact of different forms of contribution made by adminship candidates on the community's overall decision as to whether to promote the candidate to administrator. To do so, we collected data on 754 RFA cases and used logistic regression to test four hypotheses. Our results supported the role of total contribution, and clarification of contribution in RFA success while the impacts of social contribution was partially supported and the role of content contribution was not supported. Also, both control variables (tenure and number of attempts) showed significant relationships with RFA success."
"Wikidata: A platform for data integration and dissemination for the life sciences and beyond"^[15] From the abstract: "Our group is [...] populating Wikidata with the seeds of a foundational semantic network linking genes, drugs and diseases. Using this content, we are enhancing Wikipedia articles to both increase their quality and recruit human editors to expand and improve the underlying data. We encourage the community to join us as we collaboratively create what can become the most used and most central semantic data resource for the life sciences and beyond."
"A matter of words: NLP for quality evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles"^[16] From the abstract: "We prove the effectiveness of our approach by classifying the medical articles of the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, which have been previously manually labeled by the Wiki Project team. The results of our experiments confirm that, by considering domain-oriented features, it is possible to obtain sensible improvements with respect to existing solutions, mainly for those articles that other approaches have less correctly classified."

References

^ Lauro, Frances Di; Johinke, Rebecca (2016-02-15). "Employing Wikipedia for good not evil: innovative approaches to collaborative writing assessment". Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 42 (3): 478–491. doi:10.1080/02602938.2015.1127322. ISSN 0260-2938.
^ Knäusl, Hanna; Rösch, Barbara; Schubart, Lea (2012). "Einfluss von Kontextfaktoren auf das Suchverhalten in der Wikipedia". Information - Wissenschaft & Praxis. 63 (5): 319–323. doi:10.1515/iwp-2012-0061. ISSN 1619-4292. ("Detecting context factors in Wikipedia search tasks", in German with English and French abstracts)
^ Knäusl, Hanna; Ludwig, Bernd (2012). "Assessing the Relationship Between Context, User Preferences, and Content in Search Behaviour". Proceedings of the 5th Ph.D. Workshop on Information and Knowledge. PIKM '12. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 67–74. doi:10.1145/2389686.2389700. ISBN 9781450317191. author's copy
^ Knäusl, Hanna; Ludwig, Bernd (2013-03-06). What Readers Want to Experience: An Approach to Quantify Conversational Maxims with Preferences for Reading Behaviour. 6th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence. Angers, Loire Valley, France. pp. 478–481.
^ Knäusl, Hanna (2014-12-18). "Situationsabhängige Rezeption von Information bei Verwendung der Wikipedia" (Thesis of the University of Regensburg). (in German, with English abstract)
^ Rösch, Barbara (2015). "Wie interagieren Nutzer mit Text- und Bildinformationen in einem Wikipedia-Artikel?". Information - Wissenschaft & Praxis. 66 (1): 17–21. doi:10.1515/iwp-2015-0008. ISSN 1619-4292.
^ Rösch, Barbara (2014). "Investigation of Information Behavior in Wikipedia Articles". Proceedings of the 5th Information Interaction in Context Symposium. IIiX '14. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 351–353. doi:10.1145/2637002.2637062. ISBN 978-1-4503-2976-7.
^ Knäusl, Hanna (2015). "Information Behavior – Informationssuche in der Wikipedia". Information - Wissenschaft & Praxis. 66 (1): 10–16. doi:10.1515/iwp-2015-0016. ISSN 1619-4292. (in German, with English abstract)
^ Göbel, Sascha; Munzert, Simon (2016-01-22). Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Market Place of Information. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2720141.
^ Williams, Jake Ryland; Clark, Eric M.; Bagrow, James P.; Danforth, Christopher M.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan (2015-03-06). "Identifying missing dictionary entries with frequency-conserving context models". arXiv:1503.02120.
^ Livingstone, Randall M. (2016-01-09). "Population automation: An interview with Wikipedia bot pioneer Ram-Man". First Monday. 21 (1). doi:10.5210/fm.v21i1.6027. ISSN 1396-0466. Retrieved 2016-02-03.
^ Siddiqui, Muazzam A. (2015-11-08). "Mining Wikipedia to Rank Rock Guitarists". International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Applications. 7 (12): 50–56. doi:10.5815/ijisa.2015.12.05. ISSN 2074-904X.
^ Yucesoy, Burcu; Barabási, Albert-László (2015-12-02). "Untangling Performance from Success". arXiv:1512.00894 [physics.soc-ph].
^ Kreider, Christopher; Kordzadeh, Nima (2015-01-01). "Request for Adminship (RFA) within Wikipedia: How Do User Contributions Instill Community Trust?". SAIS 2015 Proceedings.
^ Mitraka, Elvira; Waagmeester, Andra; Burgstaller-Muehlbacher, Sebastian; Schriml, Lynn M.; Su, Andrew I.; Good, Benjamin M. (2015-11-16). "Wikidata: A platform for data integration and dissemination for the life sciences and beyond". bioRxiv: 031971. doi:10.1101/031971.
^ Cozza, Vittoria; Petrocchi, Marinella; Spognardi, Angelo (2016-03-07). "A matter of words: NLP for quality evaluation of Wikipedia medical articles". arXiv:1603.01987 [cs.IR].

Supplementary references:

^ Marchionini, Gary (April 2006). "Exploratory Search: From Finding to Understanding". Commun. ACM. 49 (4): 41–46. doi:10.1145/1121949.1121979. ISSN 0001-0782. Online copy

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2016-04-01

Podcast # 121: How April Fools' went down

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By Andrew Lih, Emily Temple-Wood, and Gamaliel

Wikipedia Weekly Episode 121

In the first roundtable discussion on the podcast for 2016, we discuss what English Wikipedia did for April Fools' Day; interesting takeaways from the monthly metrics/activities meeting in the Katherine Maher era (25:20); Emily Temple-Wood's newly found fame in turning trolls into edits (36:58); and Wikipedia Zero and the problem with Angolan file sharers (43:38). Participants: Fuzheado, Keilana, and Gamaliel. Readers who want to navigate through the audio file can do so here.

Wikipedia Weekly is a spoken English-language audio podcast that discusses the Wikimedia movement, and has been produced intermittently since 2006. These new episodes mark a return to what we hope will be a semi-regular publication schedule and will be regularly featured in The Signpost.

We welcome a diverse range of participation and voices from all over the community. Ideas and feedback can be left on the talk page on the main Wikipedia Weekly page, and an active Facebook group has been popular in keeping the conversation going between episodes. We welcome community help in indexing the time code and topics discussed, to make for easier navigation of the content.

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed on wikipediaweekly.org.

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2016-04-01

Growing hashtags: Expanding outreach on Wikipedia

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By Alex Stinson and Stephen LaPorte

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

International Women's Day Editathon at Helsinki University, March 8, 2016

In March 2015, the Hatnote team (volunteer developers Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi) announced that the “Humble Hashtag is now on Wikipedia”, launching the first hashtag search tool for Wikipedia edits.

Every Wikipedia edit is accompanied by an edit summary, a short description of the changes made in each revision. If you include a hashtag in the edit summary, you will see your edit appear on the search page alongside other similar edits.

One year later, hashtags are providing vital insight into Wikipedia editing events in over a dozen languages. This post explores some of the success stories made possible by dedicated volunteers using hashtags on Wikipedia.

Mobilizing the world’s librarians

One of Wikipedia’s biggest movements has been the Wikipedia Library’s #1lib1ref. In January 2015, the Wikipedia Library (@WikiLibrary) asked librarians and Wikipedia volunteers around the world to imagine “if every librarian added one more reference to Wikipedia.”

This campaign continues today, its global momentum still building in part by #1lib1ref usage on mainstream social media, but also Wikipedia itself.

Hashtags not only spur interest, but are prove effective in archiving contribution history and gauging editor reach. Previously editors would report their edits to organizers, who really had to work to maintain complete records. Now, new editors need little to no explanation and, The Wikipedia Library organizers can watch the contributions roll in.

That said, even the most experienced editors need a reminder. Getting remote participants around the world to write useful edits summaries continues to be a challenge — and we expect the 1250 edits with the hashtag to underestimate participation in the campaign by as much as 50%. For our notes on best practices and and more about the #1lib1ref campaign, check out our lessons learned.

So easy a robot can do it

Wikipedia editing never stops, and volunteer automation in the form of bots help keep the edits going around the clock. These bots fill tedious gaps, usually with small edits that add up to make a big difference, allowing more editors to work on harder problems.

One of these tireless bots is Cyberpower678’s Cyberbot II. This bot fixes dead links on English Wikipedia by pointing to backups provided by the Internet Archive. But in its thousands of edits per day, Cyberbot II also has other jobs, like fighting spam. By simply adding #iabot to its archive link edits, the bot keeps a record of the deadlink task within its other work, and everyone can see it has replaced links on almost 90,000 pages—over 200,000 links saved!

Similarly, on Wikidata, Wikipedia’s structured data sister project, there have been a number of tools transforming the tedious into something easy and fun, like Magnus Manske's Wikidata Game. The Wikidata Game and other similar tools now use hashtags to show how different people contribute to Wikidata.

Fostering diversity

Still other hashtags have been used to maximize the impact of our communities working on improving balance on Wikipedia. Take, for example, the usage of the hashtag during a recent editathon at the Helsinki University Library Kaisa House in Finland focused on prominent women.

[[File:|800px|left|]]

International Women's Day Editathon at Helsinki University, March 8, 2016

Organizers asked the event’s over one hundred participants, many of whom were new editors, to use the hashtag #satanaista, meaning “100 Women” in Finnish. One of the event’s organizers, Teemu Perhiö of Wikimedia Suomi (Finland), said, “hashtags were easy to teach to the audience as it is something they are used to in other social media.” For the organizers, hashtags provided an easy way to explain a very particular part of Wikipedia’s design and culture: “the edit summary is sometimes confusing; people don’t know what to write, so now at least they had simple guideline to it, just add the hashtag!”

For Finnish Wikipedia, the visibility of the hashtags makes them a catchy convention. Bigger Wikipedias see dozens of edits per minute, often burying hashtagged summaries. Perhiö writes “edits with hashtags were visible on our Recent Changes feed, making the hashtag more meaningful in Finnish Wikipedia due to the smaller editor base.” For them, the right hashtag signified a well-meaning edit: “Experienced Wikipedians noticed the hashtag and could easily realise when edits were related to the event. Knowing this, Wikipedians could tune their approach and assume good faith more easily.”

Other editors have used hashtags to help follow editing related to the March Art+Feminism event, the Wikipedia Gender Gap, and editing related to the Eemhuis in Amersfoort, Netherlands.

Hashtags for every Wikimedian!

Ultimately, we hope to see the hashtag become useful for a whole range of Wikimedia communities and projects, and you can help. In the short term, experiment with the hashtags in your own language community! If you use the hashtag in a new or novel way, let us know!

If you plan to use hashtags on a currently unsupported Wikimedia wiki or discover a bug, report an issue to Hatnote on Github. Also, if you care as much about community organization as we do, join the conversation about making hashtag support an integral part of MediaWiki!

Alex Stinson is the Wikipedia Library projects manager and Stephen LaPorte is legal counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. LaPorte's work on this project has been strictly in his volunteer capacity.

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