User:Evad37/Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2021-01-31

News and notes
1,000,000,000 edits, board elections, virtual Wikimania 2021

Special report
Wiki reporting on the United States insurrection

In focus
From Anarchy to Wikiality, Glaring Bias to Good Cop: Press Coverage of Wikipedia's First Two Decades

Opinion
Wikipedia's war against scientific disinformation

In the media
The world's press says "Happy Birthday!" with a few twists

Technology report
The people who built Wikipedia, technically

Videos and podcasts
Celebrating 20 years

News from the WMF
Wikipedia celebrates 20 years of free, trusted information for the world

Recent research
Students still have a better opinion of Wikipedia than teachers

Humour
Dr. Seuss's Guide to Wikipedia

Featured content
New Year, same Featured Content report!

Traffic report
The most viewed articles of 2020

Obituary
Flyer22 Frozen

 

2021-01-31

1,000,000,000 edits, board elections, virtual Wikimania 2021

By Smallbones, Majavah, Bri, and Tilman Bayer

Edit number 1,000,000,000

Ser Amantio di Nicolao is already well known for being the "most productive editor" on the English language Wikipedia in terms of the number of edits he has made. This month, he added "the billionth edit" made by all editors on enWiki to his laurels. The count was complicated by a change in software and other factors – so let's say it was the billionth edit since the counter was reset in 2002.

The article he edited was Death Breathing and it was later converted to a redirect. He told The Signpost "Getting the billionth edit wasn't actually my goal, though it's certainly a nice lagniappe – all I had been trying to do was to push us closer to the goal itself, so that we could hopefully clear it before the twentieth anniversary of Wikipedia on January 15. It was quite a shock to discover that I'd hit the magic number. The article itself holds no particular interest for me – my musical interests lie more in the direction of classical. It was just one of a large handful of articles to which I was adding authority control templates. Nothing special."

He explained the personal significance of the achievement with a story. "Not long before my mother left the Soviet Union, her employer, Leningrad State University, got a copier for use in the office. It was a revolutionary tool; previously, office staff had relied on mimeographing and typing to perform many of the tasks the copier would take over. The powers-that-be knew that the new machine could be dangerous in the wrong hands, and restricted access to it. Only the departmental secretary could let people in to use it. And they had to be witnessed while they were making their copies. My mother never used this miracle machine, but when she heard about it her first thought was: 'This is it. This marks the beginning of the end of Soviet power.'"

"Just like the paper copies in Leningrad, each of the billion edits on Wikipedia, no matter how insignificant, is another step in ensuring that knowledge, and learning, and freedom, can be made available to all. That's the force of this moment in Wikipedia's history. The cumulative effect of those billion edits shows me just how far we have managed to come, collectively, in changing the world. 'As ordinary as it all appears,' to borrow a line from Jhumpa Lahiri, 'there are times when it is beyond my imagination.' "

Foundation removes community elections from bylaws, calls for feedback on future process for "community-and-affiliate-selected" trustees

The Board of Trustees has approved a bylaw change to increase the number of trustees from a maximum of 10 up to a maximum of 16 with 8 seats to be "community-and-affiliate-selected". The minimum number of seats is 9. As a step to ensure that the balance will not favor board-appointed seats, the Board will not make an appointment if that appointment will result in a minority of "community-and-affiliate-selected" seats.

In the announcement, the board's chair remarks that "We have not used the term 'community-sourced' that we initially proposed and instead now call these 'community-and-affiliate-selected' seats." According to a three-way diff prepared by a community member, the change otherwise largely implements the revision that the board had published for feedback in October (see our detailed earlier report). In particular, it still removes the requirement that a certain number of trustees have to be "selected from candidates approved through community voting," replacing it with the wording "sourced from candidates vetted through a Community and/or Affiliate nomination process" (also combining the board seats selected by editor community with those selected by affiliates, i.e. chapters and other recognized organizations within the Wikimedia movement). With this change, the board aims for "a process that enables diverse and equitable representation from communities across the Wikimedia movement." It is also likely to help the board avoid situations like the community re-electing a community-selected trustee despite the rest of the board having dismissed him not long before.

The removal of "voting" had been controversial, with founder trustee Jimmy Wales objecting that "I will personally only support a final [bylaws] revision which explicitly includes community voting". However, the December 9 resolution approving the change was unanimous. On the other hand, the announcement notes that "the status of Jimmy Wales as Community Founder Trustee remains unchanged" – after the October consultation, the board had taken up a proposal to remove his position (see earlier coverage: "WMF Board considering the removal of Jimmy Wales' trustee position amid controversy over future of community elections").

How are the community seats to be selected? We don't know yet! You can comment on an appropriate method at Call for feedback: Community Board seats from February 1 to March 14.

Wikimania 2021 going virtual

Last year's Wikimania scheduled for Bangkok was originally delayed to 2021 because of the pandemic. This week the in-person 2021 Wikimania was cancelled in favor of a virtual event. Janeen Uzzell announced on the Wikipedia-l mailing list that "it seems unlikely that we will all be able to travel freely and convene together by August 2021". Planning for the virtual Wikimania will begin soon and comments are welcomed at Talk:Wikimania 2021 on Meta.

Brief notes

RFAs since 2007

• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Hog Farm. In 2020, 17 new administrators were approved by the community out of 25 nominations.
• The 2020 Annual Report for the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group was published.
• Edit-a-thon: An online Wikipedia edit-a-thon organised by the Berlin chapter of Tech Workers Coalition will be held February 19-21, 2021 to improve coverage of trade unions, works councils and labour disputes in the tech industry. They hope to improve articles such as Amazon worker organization, Google worker organization and Platform economy. See the event page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Organized Labour/Online edit-a-thon Tech February 2021.

Reader comments

2021-01-31

Wiki reporting on the United States insurrection

By GorillaWarfare

U.S. Capitol at 2:22 p.m., 6 January 2021 according to the photo's metadata

Two weeks before Donald Trump's presidency ended, one of its defining moments appeared in near real time on the pages of Wikipedia. Our article on the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was created as rioters were overwhelming Capitol security, shots were reported on Wikipedia 30 minutes after they were fired, and the inevitable conclusion, the affirmation of Joe Biden's election as president of the United States, was recorded on our pages an hour after it was recorded in Congress.

At 1:10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on January 6, Donald Trump ended his speech in which he repeated the false claims that he had won the presidential election, and instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol. "After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you," he promised, although he never would join them. Among the protesters were people who took to heart Trump's statement that "If you don't fight ... you're not going to have a country anymore". At 1:26 p.m., Capitol police ordered the evacuation of two buildings in the Capitol complex as the gathering crowd continued to swell, and rioters began to overwhelm those guarding the plaza.

Meanwhile, Another Believer looked on. He'd worked on several similar articles, both pro- and anti-Trump marches, including March 4 Trump, Mother of All Rallies, LGBT protests against Donald Trump, Women's March on Portland and Not My Presidents Day. This day he watched as Trump gave his speech on the Ellipse, instructing his supporters to converge on the Capitol. It was when Another Believer heard that evacuations had been ordered in the Capitol complex that he became confident that this was not just another unbelievable but ultimately non-notable event in a presidency full of unprecedented chaos. At 1:34 p.m. he hit publish on the first draft of what would later be titled 2021 storming of the United States Capitol. It began as a one-sentence stub: "On January 6, 2021, thousands of Donald Trump supporters gathered in Washington, D.C. to reject results of the November 2020 presidential election."

By 2:30 p.m., when I became the second editor of the article, it was three sentences long, with three references, and three "see also" entries. The last two sentences were "At least 10 people have been arrested. Select buildings in the Capitol Hill complex were evacuated."

When I joined Another Believer editing the page, neither of us knew that about fifteen minutes earlier, rioters had broken windows in the Capitol building, climbed through, and unlocked doors to allow a surge of people to breach the Capitol. The first editor to report this did so at 2:33 p.m., and as rioters began to flood into the Capitol, edits began to flood in to the article as Wikipedians attempted to document the breaking news event in close to real time. Before too long, a new edit to the page was being saved every ten seconds. At 2:49 p.m., a Wikidata item was created to record structured data about the event, and by 3 p.m. editors on the Arabic and Basque Wikipedias had created pages of their own.

Shortly before 3 p.m., reports began to trickle in that shots had been fired inside the Capitol building. The first reports came from unreliable sources: Twitter posts, many of which also showed photographs of Capitol police gathered with guns drawn at the doors to the U.S. House of Representatives. By 3 p.m., ABC News confirmed, and it was added to the article less than fifteen minutes later. The first page move happened around the same time, when an editor observed that the page title, "January 2021 Donald Trump rally", did not disambiguate the event from other Donald Trump rallies that month. The page remained at its new title, "January 2021 United States Capitol protests", until a requested move discussion with more than 200 participants over 12 hours closed in the early hours of January 7 with consensus to move the page to "2021 storming of the United States Capitol".

The page continued to change at breakneck speed throughout the afternoon. By 4 p.m. a total of 257 edits had been made, 206 in the previous hour. Discussions unfurled on the talk page as hundreds of editors worked to craft the page. Should "parties to the civil conflict" be represented in the infobox, or was that too militaristic? Should various leaders' comments tweets about the event be included in a "reactions" section on the page, and if so should flag icons be used to denote their nationality? Should the people at the Capitol be called a mob, rioters, protesters, insurrectionists, or something else, and should that name differ based on whether they entered the building or stayed outside it?

The first image to be added to the article

At around 5:40 p.m., law enforcement announced they had cleared the Senate building. By this time, the page was 1,800 words long. People had begun looking for freely licensed images and videos with which to illustrate the page, and the first image appeared in the article at 6:36 p.m. By the end of the day, over 1,000 edits had been made to create a page that was more than 4,000 words long.

As of January 31, 1,084 editors have collaborated to create a page that has been viewed over 2.7 million times. The article is more than 12,000 words long and cites 475 unique references. The talk page is up to twelve pages of archived discussion, and a new move discussion continues as editors deliberate over whether the page ought to be retitled "Insurrection at the United States Capitol". Articles about auxiliary topics too long to fit in the main page have been created to describe the timeline, domestic and international reactions, and aftermath of the event. The article exists on 55 language versions of Wikipedia, and there are entries about the topic at French and Russian Wikinews and English and Italian Wikiquote. Hundreds of images and videos have been uploaded to Category:2021 storming of the United States Capitol and its subcategories on Wikimedia Commons.

Breaking news editing on Wikipedia often reminds me of the myth about bumblebees, which holds that bumblebees are able to fly despite being scientifically unable to do so. That thousands of editors can work together, communicating only through edit summaries and talk page messages, to accurately and comprehensively document breaking news as it unfolds seems to be something that could never work in theory. But in practice, it is nothing short of remarkable that we are able to sift through inaccurate and sometimes contradictory news reports to separate the facts from the inevitable inaccuracies and hyperbole of breaking news, make our best guesses at what will have lasting notability, and, eventually, revisit the articles once time has passed to ensure they are complete and balanced.

Reader comments

2021-01-31

From Anarchy to Wikiality, Glaring Bias to Good Cop: Press Coverage of Wikipedia's First Two Decades

By Omer Benjakob and Stephen Harrison

Media coverage of Wikipedia has radically shifted over the past two decades: once cast as an intellectual frivolity, it is now lauded as the "last bastion of shared reality" online. To increase diversity and digital literacy, journalists and the Wikipedia community should work together to advance a new "wiki journalism."

Omer Benjakob is a journalist and researcher focused on Wikipedia and disinformation online. He is the tech and cyber reporter and editor for Haaretz and his work has appeared in Wired UK as well as academic publications.

Stephen Harrison is an attorney and writer whose writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and The Atlantic. He writes the Source Notes column for Slate magazine about Wikipedia and the information ecosystem.

This article has been updated from a version published on November 16, 2020 by Wikipedia @ 20 and is licensed CC BY 4.0.

Introduction

Wikipedia and its complex array of policies and intricate editorial processes are frequently misunderstood by the media. However, these very same processes – which seem convoluted if not impenetrable to outsiders not versed in the nuanced minutiae of Wikipedic culture – are many times the key to its encyclopedic success.

For example, Wikipedia's main article for Wikipedia, one of the most important (as well as most edited) articles on the project, explains that the ability to lock pages and prevent anonymous public editing on the encyclopedia that anyone can edit was the key to Wikipedia's success in weeding out disinformation on the coronavirus. Citing a respected media source, Wikipedia's Wikipedia article explains: "A 2021 article in the Columbia Journalism Review identified Wikipedia's page protection policies as '[p]erhaps the most important' means at Wikipedia's disposal to 'regulate its market of ideas'". The article in the Columbia Journalism Review was written by us, in wake of research we conducted for the book Wikipedia @ 20 published by the MIT Press and edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner this year. The mutually affirming relationship between Wikipedia and the media, as exemplified by our CJR story and the role it plays on the Wikipedia article, is only the latest in a long line spanning 20 years. Increasingly, journalists covering Wikipedia like us (Omer Benjakob for Haaretz and Stephen Harrison for Slate, among others) have found our articles about Wikipedia being quoted as sources on Wikipedia's articles. However, this circular relationship between sources and the sourcers, the cited and the citers, is a hallmark of Wikipedia and its community's somewhat volatile relationship with popular media over the years.

The following is an attempt to map out the different stages of those ties over the years as well as to glean from them real conclusions to help improve them. In the end we lay out what we think are small yet key steps that can be taken by journalists, Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation to help improve the public's understanding of the project. While our research for MIT Press was intended for the academic community and the WMF, and while the CJR article was focused on journalists and how they can improve their coverage of Wikipedia, this text for The Signpost is aimed at the Wikipedian community.

Diverse and divergent as human society itself, one can never truly generalize about those involved in editing Wikipedia. However, to improve the public's ability not just to understand Wikipedia's process but also participate in it and provide critical oversight of the world's leading source of knowledge also requires openness to change, forgiveness for miscommunications and most importantly: good-faith. Good-faith not just towards your fellow Wikipedians, but also those not yet involved in it, or perhaps making their first foray into Wikipedia's processes, either as journalists – or as would-be first-time editors (who are sometimes responding to what they view as an encyclopedic injustice revealed by a journalist).

We as reporters trying to explain Wikipedia outwardly have many times been met with apprehension if not suspicion by members of the community, reluctant to air internal grievances publicly, and perhaps even risk facing accusations of off-wiki canvassing. Many times, we as journalists have been told to "fix" Wikipedia instead of write about it. This position is of course understandable. However, it misses both the wider role Wikipedia and journalism play in society. Wikipedia is a volunteer-community-run project, but it does not belong exclusively to the community.

Though everyone can participate, without proper media oversight there is no realistic way to expect people to find their place within the sprawling Wikipedic world of projects, task forces, associations and even faux-cabals. The following is an attempt to stress the mutually affirming ties Wikipedia and its community have had with the media, with the explicit attempt of helping to forge a new path for them, one in which journalists accurately portray the community, but also one in which the community works with journalists to help them navigate the halls of online encyclopedic power.

Four phases

"Jimmy Wales has been shot dead, according to Wikipedia, the online, up-to-the-minute encyclopedia." That was the opening line of a blatantly false 2005 news report by the online magazine The Register. Rather than being an early example of what we may today call "fake news", the report by the tech site was a consciously snarky yet prescient criticism of Wikipedia and its reliability as a source for media. Wales was still alive, of course, despite what it had briefly stated on his Wikipedia entry, but by attributing his death to English Wikipedia, The Register sought to call out a perceived flaw in Wikipedia: On Wikipedia, truth was fluid and facts were exposed to anonymous vandals who could take advantage of its anyone-can-edit model to spread disinformation.

Over the past twenty years, English Wikipedia has frequently been the subject of media coverage, from in-depth exposés to colorful features and critical Op-eds. Is Wikipedia "impolite" as The New York Times claimed, or rather a "ray of light" as The Guardian suggested? Both of us are journalists who have regularly covered Wikipedia in recent years, and before that we were frequent consumers of knowledge on the site (like many of our journalist colleagues). Press coverage of Wikipedia during the past 20 years has undergone a dramatic shift, and we believe it's important to highlight how the media's understanding of Wikipedia has shifted along with the public's understanding. Initially cast as the symbol of intellectual frivolity in the digital age, Wikipedia is now being lauded as the "last bastion of shared reality" in Trump's America. Coverage, we claim, has evolved from bewilderment at the project, to concern and hostility at its model, to acceptance of its merits and disappointment at its shortcomings, and finally to calls to hold it socially accountable and reform it like any other institution.

We argue that press coverage of Wikipedia can be roughly divided into four periods. We have named each period after a major theme: "Authorial Anarchy" (2001–2004/5); "Wikiality" (2005–2008); "Bias" (2011–2017); and "Good Cop" (2018–present). We note upfront that these categories are not rigid and that themes and trends from one period can and often do carry over into others. But the overall progression reveals how the dynamic relationship between Wikipedia and the press has changed since its inception, and might provide further insight into how the press and Wikipedia will continue to interact with each other in the internet's knowledge ecosystem.

In short, we argue for what we term "wiki journalism" and the need for media to play a larger role in improving the general public's "Wikipedia literacy". With the help of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia community, the press, we claim, can play a more substantial role in explaining Wikipedia to the public and serving as a civilian watchdog for the online encyclopedia. Encouraging critical readership of Wikipedia and helping to increase diversity among its editorship will ensure greater public oversight over the digital age's preeminent source of knowledge.

Authorial anarchy (2001–2004/5)

When Wikipedia was launched in 2001, mainstream media as well as more technology minded outlets treated it as something between a fluke and quirky outlier. With quotes from co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, early coverage tended to focus on what seemed like Wikipedia's most novel aspects: how it is written by anyone, edited collaboratively, is free to access and, in the case of tech media, extends the culture of open software development to the realm of encyclopedias.

"Anyone who visits the site is encouraged to participate," The New York Times wrote in its first piece on Wikipedia, titled "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You." Reports like these laid out the basic tenets of English Wikipedia, focusing on how collaborative technology and the volunteer community regulated what was termed "authorial anarchy." Many of these reports included a colorful lede ("What does Nicole Kidman have in common with Kurt Godel?" Both have Wikipedia articles) showcasing the quirky diversity of content on the new site, where "[y]ou don't even have to give your real name" to contribute.

Despite Wales' lofty claims that Wikipedia was creating a world in which everyone could have "free access to the sum of all human knowledge", throughout the early 2000s, mainstream media remained skeptical towards Wikipedia. Reports from 2002–2003 mostly documented with some surprise its rapid growth in scale and scope, as well as its expansion into other languages. MIT Technology Review ran a report called "Free the Encyclopedias!", which described Wikipedia as "intellectual anarchy extruded into encyclopedia form" and "a free-wheeling Internet-based encyclopedia whose founders hope will revolutionize the stodgy world of encyclopedias" – then still dominated by the Enlightenment-era Britannica and its more digital savvy competitor Encarta.

Repeated comparison to Encarta and Britannica is perhaps the most prominent characteristic of early media coverage, one that will disappear in later stages as Wikipedia cements its status as a legitimate encyclopedia. MIT Technology Review, for example, unironically claimed that Wikipedia "will probably never dethrone Britannica, whose 232-year reputation is based upon hiring world-renowned experts and exhaustively reviewing their articles with a staff of more than a hundred editors". The demise of the status of experts would later become a hallmark of coverage of Wikipedia (discussed in the next section), but its seeds can be found from the onset: For example, in its first exposé on Wikipedia in 2004, The Washington Post reported that Britannica's vaunted staff was now down to a mere 20 editors. Only a year prior, Wikipedia editors noted that the prestigious paper "brushed off" Wikipedia almost entirely and instead focused on CD-ROM encyclopedias – all the rage since Encarta launched a decade earlier, mounting what seemed at the time to be the bigger threat towards Britannica. Within a year, however, the newspaper's take on Wikipedia changed dramatically, and it was now concerned by the long term effect of Wikipedia's success, suggesting "the Internet's free dissemination of knowledge will eventually decrease the economic value of information".

At the end of 2005, this tension between the English encyclopedia of the Enlightenment and that of the digital age would reach its zenith in a now infamous Nature news study that compared Wikipedia and Britannica. Published in December of 2005, Nature's "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head" found Wikipedia to be as accurate as its Enlightenment-era competitor, bringing experts to compare randomly selected articles on scientific topics. News that Wikipedia successfully passed scientific scrutiny – that its ever-changing content was deemed to be as reliable as the static entries of a vaunted print-era encyclopedia like Britannica – made headlines around the world. The Nature study was the final stage in a process that peaked in 2005 and cemented Wikipedia's shift from a web novelty whose value was to be treated skeptically at best to a cultural force to be reckoned with.

In March of 2005, Wikipedia had crossed the half a million article mark and some intellectuals began to discuss the "the wikification of knowledge".

Tellingly, 2005 was also the year that the Wikipedia community first began recording its coverage in the media in an organized fashion. Initially focused on instances of "Wiki love" from the press, in 2005 the community created categories and project pages like "America's Top Newspapers Use Wikipedia" for its early press clippings. The Signpost, the online newspaper for the English language Wikipedia, was also founded in 2005 to report on events related to Wikipedia. Over time the community grew increasingly conscious of its public role and by 2006 an organized index of all media references to Wikipedia was set up – first with a list for every year and then, as coverage swelled, one for every month as well. Categories were also created for times when Wikipedia was cited as a source of information by mainstream media – a rare reversal of roles that highlighted the mutually affirming relationship between Wikipedia and the media that would develop over later periods.

Indeed, 2005 was to be a key year for Wikipedia: it saw its biggest vindication – the Nature report – alongside its biggest vilification – the so-called Seigenthaler affair. By 2005, Wikipedia was no longer quirky. Now it was to be viewed within a new framework which contrasted its popularity with its accuracy and debated the risks it posed. The New York Times, for example, claimed that the Seigenthaler "case triggered extensive debate on the Internet over the value and reliability of Wikipedia, and more broadly, over the nature of online information". In the next phase, Wikipedia's effect on the popular understanding of truth that would be the overriding theme.

Wikiality (2005–2008)

Stephen Colbert launched his satirical news program The Colbert Report with a segment dedicated to what would be dubbed 2005's word of the year: truthiness. "We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth – the truth we want to exist", Colbert explained. He even urged viewers to take the truth into their own hands and "save" the declining populations of elephants in Africa by changing their numbers on Wikipedia, causing its server to crash. The wider point resonated. "It's on Wikipedia, so it must be true", The Washington Post wrote that year. Wikipedia was no longer taken to be just another website, it was now a powerhouse undermining intellectual institutions and capable of changing our very perception of reality.

Colbert followed up his infamous segment with another potent neologism: wikiality. "Wikiality", he charged, was the reality created by Wikipedia's model, in which "truth" was based on the will of the majority and not on facts. This was a theme that had a deep political resonance in post-9/11 America, buoyed by the presidency of George W. Bush and the rise to prominence of Fox News – and Wikipedia was increasingly cast as providing its underlying intellectual conditions. "Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didn't, that's my right," Colbert charged. "Thanks to Wikipedia, it's also a fact. [We're] bringing democracy to knowledge."

During 2006–2009, the dominance of Wikipedia's encyclopedic model was solidified. In 2008, The New York Times published a "eulogy" for print encyclopedia and flagged the need to understand the "epistemology of Wikipedia" and the "wikitruth" it bred. Wikipedia's underlying philosophy – its model's effects on the very nature of facticity – was now deserving of more serious and critical examination. MIT Technology Review ran a piece on "Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth", asking "why the online encyclopedia's epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy".

Concerns that Wikipedia's epistemic model was replacing expertise loomed large: In 2006, The New York Times debated the merits of "the nitpicking of the masses vs. the authority of the experts", and The Independent asked: "Do we need a more reliable online encyclopedia than Wikipedia?" In a report that profiled Wikipedians, The New Yorker wondered: "Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?"; and Larry Sanger, who had left the project by then, lamented "the fate of expertise after Wikipedia". Though largely negative, these in-depth reports also permitted a more detailed treatment of Wikipedia's theory of knowledge. Articles like Marshal Poe's "The Hive", published in The Atlantic's September 2006 edition, laid out for intellectual readers Wikipedia's history and philosophy like never before.

Epistemological and social fears of Wikipedia were also fueled by Wikipedia's biggest public media storm to date – the so-called Essjay scandal of 2007. It even spurred calls to reform Wikipedia. The fact that Ryan Jordan held an official status within Wikipedia's community seemed to echo an increasingly accepted political truism: facts were being manipulated by those with power.

Knowledge was increasingly being politicized and the entirety of Capitol Hill was banned from editing Wikipedia anonymously during 2006 after politicians' articles were whitewashed in what The Washington Post called "wikipolitics". During this period Wikipedia also first faced allegations of having a liberal bias – for example by "evangelical Christians" who opened a conservative wiki of their own. Reports like these helped grant social currency to the claim that knowledge was political like never before.

The politicization of knowledge, alongside a proliferation of alternative wikis – exacerbated in part by Wales' for-profit website Wikia, launched in 2006 – all served to highlight the wikiality of America's political and media landscape. It was at this time that the first cases of "citogenesis" – circular and false reporting originating from Wikipedia – appeared. These showed how dependent classic media was on Wikipedia – and therefore how politically vulnerable and unreliable it was by proxy. These included reports that cited the unfounded claim regarding Hillary Clinton being the valedictorian of her class at Wellesley College, an error born from false information introduced to her Wikipedia article. The edit wars on Bush's Wikipedia page highlighted the online encyclopedia's role in what The New York Times termed the "separate realities" within America.

By 2007, Wikipedia was among the top ten most popular websites in the world. And though it was a non-profit, it maintained partnerships with corporate juggernauts like Google, whose donations and usage of Wikipedia helped it walk among giants, giving it a privileged position on the search engine results and sparking concerns of a "googlepedia" by internet thinkers.

Wikipedia was now a primary source of knowledge for the information age, and its internal workings mattered to the general public. Coverage shifted in accordance. Reports began to focus on the internal intellectual battles raging within the community of editors: For example, The Guardian wrote about the ideological battle between "deletionists" and "inclusionists". For the first time, coverage of Wikipedia was no longer monolithic and the community was permitted diverging opinions by the press. Wikipedia was less a unified publisher and more a vital discursive arena. Policy changes were debated in the media, and concerns over Wikipedia's "declining user base" were also covered – mostly by Noam Cohen, who covered the encyclopedia for the New York Times. Wikipedia was now a beat. Its worldview was now fully embedded within our social and political reality. The question was what was it telling us, who was writing it, and who was being excluded.

Bias (2011–2017)

In February 2011, The New York Times ran a series of articles on the question "Where Are the Women of Wikipedia?" in its opinion pages. These 2011 articles have very different headlines than the paper's coverage of Wikipedia in the prior decade. Reporting between roughly the years 2006 to 2009 focused on Wikipedia's reliability, with headlines like "Growing Wikipedia Refines its ‘Anyone Can Edit' Possibility" (2006) and "Without a Source, Wikipedia Can't Handle the Truth" (2008).

By 2011, however, the press coverage had zeroed in on the site's gender imbalance. Headlines were much more openly critical of the community itself than in the past, with The New York Times' series calling out "trolls and other nuisances" and Wikipedia's "antisocial factor," as well as "nerd avoidance". Press coverage had shifted from the epistemological merits of Wikipedia to legitimate concerns about bias in its contributor base.

The 2011 series about gender on Wikipedia followed a 2010 survey conducted by United Nations University and UNU-MERIT that indicated only 12.64 percent of Wikipedia contributors were female among the respondents. Although the results of that study were later challenged, much like with Nature's study, the fact that its results were contested by Britannca made little difference. The fact that the UN study received an entire series of articles indicates how the results struck a cultural nerve. What did it say about Wikipedia–and internet knowledge generally – that a disproportionate number of the contributors were men?

One could argue that this shift – from grappling with underpinnings of Wikipedia's model of knowledge production to a critique of the actual forces and output of the wiki way of doing things – symbolized an implicit acceptance of Wikipedia's status in the digital age as the preeminent source of knowledge. Media coverage during this period no longer treated Wikipedia as an outlier, a fluke, or as an epistemological disaster to be entirely rejected. Rather, the press focused on negotiating with Wikipedia as an existing phenomena, addressing concerns shared by some in the community – especially women, predating the GamerGate debate of 2014.

Press coverage of Wikipedia throughout the period of 2011 to roughly 2017 largely focused on the online encyclopedia's structural bias. This coverage also differed markedly from previous years in its detailed treatment of Wikipedia's internal editorial and community dynamics. The press coverage highlighted not only the gender gap in percentage of female contributors, but in the content of biographical articles, and the efforts by some activists to change the status quo. Publications ranging from The Austin Chronicle to The New Yorker covered feminist edit-a-thons, annual events to increase and improve Wikipedia's content for female, queer, and women's subject, linking contemporary identity politics with the online project's goal of organizing access to the sum of human knowledge. In addition to gender, the press covered other types of bias such geographical blind spots and the site's exclusion of oral history and other knowledge that did not meet the Western notions of verifiable sources.

During this period, prestigious publications also began profiling individual Wikipedia contributors, giving faces and names to the forces behind our knowledge. "Wikipedians" were increasingly cast as activists and recognized outside the community. The Washington Post, for example, covered Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz's death in 2014, noting that Wadewitz was a "Wikipedian" who had "empower[ed] everyday Internet users to be critical of how information is produced on the Internet and move beyond being critical to making it better". The transition from covering Wikipedia's accuracy to covering Wikipedians themselves perhaps reflects an increased concern with awareness about the human motivations of the people contributing knowledge online. Many times this took on a humorous tone, like the case of the "ultimate WikiGnome" Bryan Henderson whose main contribution to Wikipedia was deleting the term "comprised of" from over 40,000 articles. Journalists (including the authors of this paper) have continued this trend of profiling Wikipedians themselves.

A 2014 YouGov study found that around two thirds of British people trust the authors of Wikipedia pages to tell the truth, a significantly higher percentage than those who trusted journalists. At the same time, journalists were increasingly open to recognizing how crucial Wikipedia had become to their profession: With the most dramatic decline in newsroom staffs since the Great Recession, Wikipedia was now used by journalists for conducting initial research –another example of the mutually affirming relationship between the media and Wikipedia.

As more journalists used and wrote about Wikipedia, the tone of their writing changed. In one of his reports for The New York Times, Noam Cohen quoted a French reporter as saying, "Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007". When Cohen first began covering Wikipedia, most people saw Wikipedia as a hobby for nerds–but that characterization had by now become passé. The more pressing concern, according to Cohen, was "[s]eeing Wikipedia as The Man".

Overall, press coverage of Wikipedia during this period oscillates between fear about the site's long-term existential prospects and concern that the site is continuing the masculinist and Eurocentric biases of historical encyclopedias. The latter is significant, as it shows how Wikipedia's pretenses of upending the classic print-model of encyclopedias have been accepted by the wider public, which, in turn, is now concerned or even disappointed that despite its promise of liberating the world's knowledge from the shackles of centralization and expertise, it has in fact recreated most of the biases of yesteryear.

Good Cop (2018–present)

In April 2018, Cohen wrote an article for The Washington Post titled "Conspiracy Videos? Fake News? Enter Wikipedia, the 'Good Cop' of the Internet." For more than a decade, Cohen had written about Wikipedia in the popular press, but his "Good Cop" piece was perhaps his most complimentary and it signaled a wider change in perception regarding Wikipedia. He declared that "fundamentally … the project gets the big questions right." This would become the main theme of coverage and by the time Wikipedia marked its 20th anniversary, most main stream media sources were gushing with what the community in 2005 called "wiki love" for the project.

Cohen's "Good Cop" marks the latest shift in coverage of Wikipedia, one that embarks from the issue of truthiness and reexamines its merits in the wake of the "post-truth" politics and "fake news" – 2016 and 2017's respective words of the year.

The Wall Street Journal credited Wikipedia's top arbitration body, ArbCom, with "keep[ing] the peace at [the] internet encyclopedia." Other favorable headlines from 2018 and 2019 included: "There's a Lot Wikipedia Can Teach Us About Fighting Disinformation" and "In a Hysterical World, Wikipedia is a Ray of Light – and That's the Truth." Wikipedia was described by The Atlantic as "the last bastion of shared reality" online, and for its 18th birthday, it was lauded by The Washington Post as "the Internet's good grown up."

But this was only the beginning. What caused press coverage of Wikipedia to pivot from criticizing the encyclopedia as the Man to casting Wikipedia as the web's good cop? Two main external factors seem to have played a key role: U.S. President Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic. Since Trump's election in 2016, the mainstream press expressed concerns about whether traditional notions of truth and reality-based argument. This resulted in large part from what seemed to be an official assault by the administration in the White House – both against the media itself and facts, and its offering alternative outlets for communication and "alternative facts" in their stead. The "truthiness" culture of intellectual promiscuity represented by the Presidency of George W. Bush had deteriorated into the so-called "post-truth" culture of the Trump White House. Wikipedia's procedural answers for the question of what is a fact, initially hailed as flawed due to their inherent beholdance to existing sources, could now be taken in a different light.

Wikipedia had also gotten better, but its model had remained the same. What had changed was the internet and our understanding of it. Wikipedia's emphasis on neutral point of view, and the community's goal to maintain an objective description of reality, represents an increasingly striking contrast to politicians around the world whose rhetoric is not reality-based. Moreover, the Wikipedia community's commitment to sourcing claims (exemplified by Wikipedia's community ban on the Daily Mail in 2017 and of Breitbart in 2018) highlighted how Wikipedia's model was seemingly more successful than the traditional media in fighting its own flaws and the rise of "fake news."

2018 also saw Wikipedia lock horns with some of those considered supportive of Trump and the "post-truth" discourse, including Breitbart and even Russian media. The so-called "Philip Cross affair" saw a British editor face accusation that he was in fact a front for the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense or even the American C.I.A., claims that were parroted out by Sputnik and RT. Breitbart all but declaring war on the online encyclopedia (running no less than 10 negative reports about it in as many months, including headlines like "Wikipedia Editors Paid to Protect Political, Tech, and Media Figures" and "Wikipedia Editors Post Fake News on Summary of Mueller Probe"). 2018 also saw the clearest example of Russian intervention in Wikipedia, with Russian agent Maria Butina being outed by the community for trying to scrub her own Wikipedia page.

The shift toward more positive press treatment of Wikipedia also overlaps with a general trend toward negative coverage of for-profit technology sites. In recent years, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube have been chastised in the press for privacy violations, election hacking, and platforming hateful content. But Wikipedia has largely dodged these criticisms. Complimentary journalists have noted the site's rare position as a nonprofit in the most visited websites in the world – the only site in the global top ten that is not monetized with advertising or by collecting and selling personal information of users. Journalists have also praised Wikipedia's operating model. As Brian Feldman pointed out in a New York Magazine piece titled, "Why Wikipedia Works", the site's norms of review and monitoring by a community of editors, and deleting false information and inflammatory material, seems vastly superior to the way social media platforms like Twitter fail to moderate similarly problematic content.

With the 2020 election, this process reached its zenith. While Twitter and Facebook scrambled to prevent the New York Post report about Hunter Biden from spreading through its platform, sparking yet again a debate on the limits of free speech online, the dynamic on Wikipedia was very different: Instead of censoring the link or trying to prevent its content from being disseminated, Wikipedia's editors contextualized its publication as part of a wider "conspiracy theory" relating to Biden being pushed out by Trump's proxies. By election day, Reuters, Wired, Vox and others were all praising Wikipedia for being more prepared for election disinformation than social media.

It's important to note that even during this period of relatively favorable press coverage of Wikipedia, newspapers still published highly critical articles. But the focus has been on reforming Wikipedia's governance policies rather than rejecting its underlying model of crowdsourced knowledge. For example, Wikipedia received significant media attention in 2018 when Donna Strickland won a Nobel Prize in physics and, at the time of her award, did not have a Wikipedia page; an earlier entry had been deleted by an editor who found that Strickland lacked sufficient notability, despite the fact her two male co-laureates had pages for the same academic research that earned the three the prestigious award. But note how press coverage of Strickland did not dispute Wikipedia's underlying premise of community-led knowledge production. Rather press coverage was continuing the structural critique from the previous phase.

Furthermore, by this era the Wikimedia Foundation had increasingly begun speaking publicly about matters of concern to the Wikipedia community. When it came to the Strickland incident, the Wikimedia Foundation was not overly apologetic in its public statements, with Executive Director Katherine Maher writing an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled "Wikipedia Mirrors the World's Gender Biases, it Doesn't Cause Them". Maher challenged journalists to write more stories about notable women so that volunteer Wikipedians have sufficient material to source in their attempt to fix the bias. Maher's comments, in other words, advocate further awareness of the symbiotic relationship between the media and Wikipedia.

The Strickland incident is in some ways an outlier during a time of relatively favorable press coverage of Wikipedia. How long will this honeymoon period last? One indication that the pendulum will swing back in a more-critical direction is the coverage of large technology companies using Wikipedia. The press widely covered YouTube's 2018 announcement that it was relying on Wikipedia to counteract videos promoting conspiracy theories when there had been no prior notice to the Wikimedia Foundation regarding YouTube's plans. Journalists also wrote – at times critically – about Facebook's plan to give background information from Wikipedia about publications to combat "fake news", Google's use of Wikipedia content for its knowledge panels, and how smart assistants like Siri and Alexa pull information from the site.

Prominent tech critics have questioned whether it is truly appropriate to leverage Wikipedia as the "good cop" since the site is maintained by unpaid volunteers, and tech companies are using it for commercial purposes. But from a news perspective, it might not matter so much whether it's fair or prudent for technology companies to leverage Wikipedia in this way–the appearance of partnership is enough to spur a news story. The more it seems as if Wikipedia has become aligned with Big Tech, the more likely the encyclopedia will receive similarly adverse coverage.

Nonetheless, coronavirus proved a pivotal moment, giving Wikipedia and its model what seems to be its biggest vindication since Nature 2005. As a key node in the online information ecosphere, and with concerns regarding Covid-19 disinformation causing the WHO to label the pandemic an "infodemic" in February 2020, vandalism on coronavirus articles was not something WP and perhaps the world could afford. Luckily, the WikiProject Medicine was prepared. "Our editing community often concentrates on breaking news events such that content rapidly develops. The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus has been no exception," Doc James told Wired magazine, in what would be the first of many stories praising Wikipedia's response to the virus due to its especially rigid sourcing policy.

The project and Doc James would turn into the face of Wikipedia's response to the pandemic – so much so that the community would even open a special article on "Wikipedia's response to the Covid-19" pandemic – a rare sign of WP's community efforts meeting their own notability guidelines. Wikipedia, as the article about its response to the pandemic both said and showed, was notably reliable due to its emphasis on neutral point of view and verification of sources. Wikipedia's Covid-19 task force had relied on the top tier of legacy media – building a list of recommended sources from popular and scientific media – and they vindicated it for their commitment to trusted institutions of authority. By the start of 2021, as the pandemic marked its one year anniversary and Wikipedia its 20th, publications across the world were praising it.

Conclusion

Over the span of nearly two decades, Wikipedia went from being heralded as the original fake news, a symbol of all that was wrong with the internet, to being the "grown up" of the web and the best medicine against the scourge of disinformation. This process was predicated on Wikipedia's epistemic model gaining social acceptance as well as the erosion of status of mainstream media and traditional knowledge sources. Comparisons to older encyclopedias have all but disappeared. More common are appeals like Maher's request following the Strickland affair that journalists aid Wikipedia in the attempt to reform by publishing more articles about women. This dynamic highlights how Wikipedia is now a fixture within our media landscape, increasingly both the source of coverage and the story itself.

Understanding the mutually affirming and dynamic between media and Wikipedia opens up a rare opportunity to engage directly with some of the issues underscoring information as well as disinformation – from critical reading of different sources, to basic epistemological debates, issues that were once considered too academic for mainstream media are now finding their place in the public discourse through coverage of Wikipedia. For example, reports about Strickland's lack of a Wikipedia article helped make accessible the feminist theory regarding knowledge being "gendered". The idea that history is his-story was highlighted in debates about Wikipedia's gender bias, with the dire lack of articles about women scientists being easily explained by the lack of historical sources regarding women. Meanwhile, reports about Wikipedia being blocked in countries such as China and Turkey have allowed for a discussion of the politics of knowledge online as well as a debate regarding the differences between Wikipedias in different languages and local biases. Detailed and critical reports like these are part of a new sub-genre of journalism that has emerged in the past years, what we term "wiki journalism": Coverage of Wikipedia as a social and political arena in its own right.

Nonetheless, much more can be done – by journalists, the Wikimedia Foundation and even the Wikipedia community of volunteers. Though Wikipedia's technology purportedly offers fully transparency, public understanding of Wikipedia's processes, bureaucracy, and internal jargon is still a massive obstacle for would-be editors and journalists alike. Despite its open format, the majority of Wikipedia is edited by a fraction of its overall editors, indicating the rise of an encyclopedic elite not too dissimilar in characteristics than that of media and academia. To increase diversity in Wikipedia and serve the public interest requires journalists to go beyond "gotcha" headlines. Much of the popular coverage of Wikipedia is still lacking and is either reductive or superficial, treating Wikipedia as a unified voice and amplifying minor errors and vandalism. Many times, reports like these needlessly politicize Wikipedia. For example, after a vandal wrote that the Republican Party of California believed in "Nazism" and the error was aggregated by Alexa and Google, reports attributed blame to Wikipedia.

These issues are discussed at length in our text in the Columbia Journalism Review, which urges journalists to help increase Wikipedia literacy, dedicating more coverage to the project's inner workings and policies. But the media is not alone and the WMF as well as Wikipedians can also help. In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has taken the helpful step of hiring communications specialists and other employees to help members of the press connect with sources both at the Foundation and the larger Wikimedia movement. Yet although the Wikimedia Foundation has made press contacts much more accessible, there is still work to be done to enhance communication between Wikipedia and the media. Creating a special status for wiki journalists, for example, recognizing their users and granting them read-only status for deleted articles and censored edits – a right currently reserved for official administrators – could help reporters better understand the full context of edit wars and other content disputes.

The community must too be more open to working with media and take a much less aggressive approach to external coverage of their debates. Many times, editors are reluctant to speak to reporters and are antagonistic towards unversed users who have come to mend an error or bias they have read about in the media. In some cases, editors who speak with the press are stigmatized. Much like the interviews with editors of WikiProject Medicine's Covid-19 task force showed, working with the media can actually help highlight the important work taking place on the encyclopedia. Wikipedia editors must accept that they and their community play a much wider social role than they may perceive – a social role that places the output of their volunteer activity center stage online and also makes them part of the public debate. To help bridge the gap between public discourse and the Wikipedic one, editors need to go beyond the "just fix it yourself" mentality and help increase public oversight of Wikipedia.

As Wikipedia is fully transparent, the demand for further public oversight may seem misplaced or even anachronistic. However in much the same way we need the media to help oversee public committee hearings in town halls or national legislatures plenums, so too does the public need the media's help in participating in Wikipedia's transparency. Much like we need a strong active media to help encourage and facilitate civilian oversight of political processes, so too do we need robust media coverage to help encourage civic involvement in encyclopedic processes.

Wikipedians may not perceive themselves to be gatekeepers in the same way lawmakers or congressional aides are, but for those viewing Wikipedia from the outside, many times they do actually appear to play just such a role. Lack of public engagement in Wikipedia cannot be blamed solely on the public or its purported apathy. Wikipedians must not just allow the media to highlight problems within their community, but proactively flag issues, helping reporters sift through countless debates and find the truly important stories, instead of limiting themselves to internal forums and demanding journalists and the public fix Wikipedia themselves.

Together, journalists, the Wikimedia Foundation and the community, can help increase critical digital literacy through deeply reported coverage of Wikipedia. High-quality wiki journalism would not treat Wikipedia as a monolithic agent that speaks in one voice, but rather would seek to understand the roots of its biases and shortcomings. This will serve to highlight the politics of knowledge production instead of politicizing knowledge itself.

References

Reader comments

2021-01-31

Wikipedia's war against scientific disinformation

By Mary Mark Ockerbloom

Mary Mark Ockerbloom was a Wikipedian-in-residence at the Science History Institute from 2013 to 2020.

The playbook for undermining scientific expertise was created in the 1920s. Perhaps surprisingly, its creators were scientists. Wikipedia is one battleground in the hundred years' war against scientific disinformation. The tactics of scientific disinformation that were developed then are still used today. We need to be aware of these tactics so that we can counter them; we also need more scientifically-savvy allies to help us get it right.

The practice of scientific disinformation

Tetraethyllead (TEL) at the point of sale

Charles Kettering, on a Time cover, 1933

On December 3, 1921, Thomas Midgley Jr. and Charles Kettering, scientists at General Motors, discovered that adding tetraethyllead (TEL) to gasoline improved a car's performance. As patent holders of the new technology who held senior positions in the companies producing and marketing TEL, Kettering and Midgely had everything to gain by promoting TEL's use rather than developing other non-patentable alternatives.

TEL contains lead: an odorless, colorless, tasteless, poisonous element. Once present in a person, lead does not degrade, it accumulates. Kettering and Midgley were warned of the dangers of lead and TEL by other scientists. Erik Krause of the Institute of Technology, Potsdam, Germany had studied TEL extensively, and described it as "a creeping and malicious poison". Internal confidential reports document that the companies involved knew TEL was "extremely hazardous", while their safety precautions were "grossly inadequate".

"Loony gas", New York Journal, October 31, 1924

By 1923, cases of violent madness and death were being reported among workers at TEL plants. At least 17 persons died, and hundreds more suffered neurological damage. Postmortems confirmed the cause as tetraethyllead. Coworkers referred to the fumes they breathed as "loony gas" and to a building they worked in as the "House of Butterflies", because workers had hallucinations of insects.

Tetraethyllead

The newspapers, the public, and the government began to take notice. Midgley himself was treated for lead poisoning. Despite this, he protested that TEL was perfectly safe, even washing his hands in it in front of reporters on October 30, 1924, the same day the New York City Board of Health banned the sale of TEL-enhanced gasoline.

As concerns about TEL grew, Kettering took protective measures for the company, but not its workers. He hired Robert A. Kehoe, a 1920 medical school graduate, as an in-house "medical expert" whose job was to prove that leaded gasoline did not harm humans. An early study is illustrative of the methodological problems in his work. In that study he reported that workers handling TEL had levels of exposure no higher than a control group, which was composed of workers at the same plant. He suggested their levels of lead were "normal", equating normal and harmless.

Alice Hamilton was among those who criticized Kehoe's research. A pioneer in industrial toxicology and occupational health, Hamilton was America's leading authority on lead poisoning, with decades of experience in public health research and policy-making. On May 20, 1925, Hamilton and other public health advocates from Harvard, Yale and Columbia faced off against Kettering, at a conference called by the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service to consider the use of lead in gasoline. Would lead in gasoline be released into the air when the fuel was burned, putting the general public at risk? Hamilton warned that lead posed environmental as well as occupational dangers. "You may control conditions within a factory, but how are you going to control the whole country?" Kettering argued that TEL was the only way to improve gasoline, and asserted that no one had proved that leaded gasoline was harmful.

The conference ended with the formation of a committee to further investigate the possible effects of leaded gasoline. The committee could have taken responsibility for further independent research, but public health advocates lacked funding, and the government wasn't willing to provide it. In a classic case of setting the fox to watch the henhouse, the commission chose to rely on industry to monitor itself, ignoring the inherent conflict of interest. Not surprisingly, Robert Kehoe reported that the industry-funded research showed "no evidence of immediate danger to the public health."

Hamilton reportedly told Kettering to his face that he was "nothing but a murderer". Kettering formed the Kettering Foundation for public policy-related research. Kettering and Midgley developed Freon, which eventually became another environmentally disastrous product. Kehoe became the gasoline industry's chief spokesperson, largely controlling the next fifty years of scientific and public narrative around leaded gasoline.

Risk, responsibility and the undermining of science

Public health advocates and corporate representatives took different approaches to risk and responsibility in the debate over leaded gasoline. Public health followed a precautionary principle, arguing that unless scientists could demonstrate that something was safe, it should not be used. The Kehoe paradigm laid the burden of proof on the challenger. Rather than demonstrating that their product was safe, they demanded that critics prove it was harmful. But Kehoe's rule is logically flawed – absence of evidence of risk does not imply evidence of the absence of risk. Regardless, the Kehoe paradigm became extremely influential in the United States.

This not only set scientist against scientist, it made the undermining of science tactically useful. Experimental research is a method of testing ideas and assessing the likelihood that they are correct based on observable data. By its very nature, the results of a scientific study do not provide a 100% yes-or-no answer. Disinformation exploits this lack of absolute certainty by implying that uncertainty means doubt. If evidence is presented to challenge a position, it is suggested that the proof is not sufficiently compelling, that doubt still remains, that more research must be done, and that no responsibility need be taken in the meantime. By repeatedly raising the issue of doubt, companies and scientists use "cascading uncertainty" to manipulate public opinion and protect their own interests.

In the 1960s geochemist Clair Patterson developed sophisticated monitoring equipment and methods to measure the history of the earth's chemical composition. Initially uninterested in lead, his research provided compelling evidence of its extraordinary increase in the planet's recent history. Patterson broke the industry's leaded gasoline narrative. The industry spent almost 25 years trying to discredit him and his work through professional, personal, and public attacks. Nonetheless Patterson did what Kettering and Kehoe had challenged public health officials to do in 1925 – demonstrate the impact of TEL from gasoline.

By then, lead contamination from gasoline (and from paint) was found worldwide, not just in North America. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers lead to be one of the top ten chemicals posing a major public health risk, with immense personal, social and economic costs. One of the "key facts" they state is "There is no level of exposure to lead that is known to be without harmful effects."

Kettering's playbook has been replicated repeatedly. Companies and their researchers have argued that smoking, CFCs, opioids, vaping, fossil fuels and climate change (to name only a few) aren't really dangers; that concerns about public safety and environmental damage have not been sufficiently proven and so do not require action; and that raising a shadow of doubt is enough to challenge widespread scientific consensus. I strongly recommend reading Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway, 2010) and Doubt Is Their Product (2008) and The Triumph of Doubt (2020) by David Michaels.

At its most extreme, we face an attitude that assumes scientific issues are simply matters of opinion and belief, independent of underlying scientific evidence and informed consensus. The dangers of this are apparent: We are in the midst of a pandemic that some refuse to believe exists. Anti-mask and anti-vaccination propaganda are recent areas of scientific disinformation, putting us all at risk.

Defeating scientific disinformation on Wikipedia

Companies and individuals who try to whitewash their home pages or promote pseudoscience cures are fairly obvious examples of conflict of interest and promotional editing. I suspect most Wikipedians both recognize and know how to deal with such situations. But there are patterns of disinformation, manipulation, and the undermining of science that are harder to spot and address. We need to watch for patterns of bias that go far beyond articles for a specific company or product.

Tactics in the disinformation playbook include:

• Ignore warnings and deny reports of possible safety issues,
• Accuse critics and the media of sensationalism,
• Fund "experts" to conduct research that can only support your position,
• Control the narrative and reframe issues to avoid consideration of risk,
• Use any level of doubt to claim there is not enough evidence of risk,
• Ignore scientific consensus,
• Personally attack those who challenge you,
• Avoid acknowledgement of responsibility and delay taking actions that could address issues.

Do funders and researchers have a vested interest in a particular outcome? Too often, companies are funding the research that claims their products are safe or effective. Scientific articles will generally indicate who supported the research. Check out the funders, and watch out for industry organizations, think tanks and researchers with a history of anti-regulatory bias. Look for independent evidence-based sources from credible groups like Consumer Reports.

In striving for balance, we need to recognize the importance of counter-narratives around public health. Actively look for scientific work that raises issues of public health and follows a precautionary principle. These are important concerns, and addressing these concerns is part of presenting a balanced picture. Be wary of the burden of proof. Are different expectations being applied to the research of proponents and critics of an idea? Keep in mind that industry pours huge amounts of money into its research while public health receives far less.

In a war of supposedly scientific claims and counterclaims, are proponents of a particular position using the technique of raising doubt? Is research critical of a position repeatedly minimized or dismissed on the grounds that it fails to meet some increasingly strict or absolute standard of proof? Are personal attacks and appeals to public opinion being used to displace scientific evidence? These tactics can be particularly insidious in Wikipedia articles, because we are encouraged to present all sides of an issue. As editors we need to remember that writing in a fair and balanced way doesn't mean that all ideas have to be given equal weight. Present them in proportion to their importance.

Beware of cherry picking: it is encouraged and amplified by social media, and Wikipedia articles can be particularly susceptible to the selective presentation of information. Look for the weight of scientific consensus on an issue. If the vast majority of scientists worldwide accept that climate change is real (as they do), you can be definite about it.

Wikipedia needs more scientific expertise

The tactics of disinformation complicate the difficulties of writing about science. Let's be clear – writing about science is hard! Writing about science for Wikipedia's readers – much of the world's population – is an even more challenging task. First you must wrap your own head around an area of expertise that may be highly specialized, and then you must communicate your understanding to readers who may lack a scientific background or do not share your frame of reference. As the Wikipedian-in-residence at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia for seven years, I rarely read a science-related article on Wikipedia that did not need significant improvement. Working on biographies of scientists and other pages with historical content, I asked myself "Where is the science?"

When it comes to science, Wikipedia needs all the help it can get. There are scientists who have manipulated and undermined scientific information, as I describe above, but there are many more scientists whose credentials, expertise and research are rock-solid. We need to find ways to engage with those scientists and leverage their knowledge. Doing that was the most challenging part of my job as a Wikipedian-in-residence.

We need more editors with scientific expertise. We need editors with an awareness of how scientific information can be manipulated. We need science communicators who can evaluate scientific materials and write about science in a way that is comprehensible to nonscientists. We need as many people as possible keeping a careful eye on scientific information on Wikipedia to prevent the kinds of manipulation we know occurs. I often worry that a collection of volunteer editors hasn't a hope of keeping up. We need allies.

In the ongoing war against disinformation, Wikipedia needs scientific expertise – and science needs Wikipedians to get things right.

References

Reader comments

2021-01-31

The world's press says "Happy Birthday!" with a few twists

By Smallbones and Bri

Media throughout the world have written congratulatory articles about Wikipedia on the encyclopedia's 20th birthday. The Wikimedia Foundation has done a good job letting the press know that we're big, popular, appear in about 300 languages, and are frequently edited, mostly by volunteers. See, for example this list. But what else is new? A couple of dozen newspapers just focus on these numbers and add some seemingly random or local-interest facts. The more interesting stories take different angles, often telling as much about the author and their relationship with the encyclopedia, as about Wikipedia itself. Fair enough! No journalist can be expected to summarize Wikipedia in a single article.

United States Capitol protests/storming/riots/insurrection

• The Washington Post focuses on Wikipedia's ability to sort out misinformation and disinformation. The Post uses the article 2021 storming of the United States Capitol as an example of how editors cooperate and contend to create articles on news events as they happen, quoting Molly White, Katherine Maher, and Anne Clin on several examples throughout the article. Other topics covered include the pandemic, the gender gap, hoaxes and vandalism and the reliability of Wikipedia.
• Time magazine also uses the "Storming the Capitol" article as a starting point, and then goes on to describe the generally self-healing nature of knowledge management in the Wikipedia community. More directly, they write "why does Wikipedia seem to have a general immunity to bullshit?" Anybody who disagrees might wish to take Time to ANI.
• The Guardian: "Wikipedia at 20: last gasp of an internet vision, or a beacon to a better future?" chronicles the building of the 2021 storming of the United States capitol article from a one-editor effort by Another Believer to an in-depth community collaboration, as an indication of Wikipedia's growth since its early days to what it is today, potentially a "shining beacon lighting the way to a better future".
• Fast Company examines the insurrection story, again mentioning Another Believer, in "As a mob attacked the Capitol, Wikipedia struggled to find the right words".
• Connecticut Public Radio interviews administrator and former ArbCom member Molly White in "Wikipedia at 20: The Promises and Pitfalls of the 'Free Encyclopedia'". White, who was the second editor at the Capitol storming article (see further details in the Special report), describes its development and wider issues of Wikipedia's relationship with its editors and readers including how to handle situations where there is no clear "accepted truth" and the "weaponization" of neutrality.

With a twist

• The Economist solves the problem of how to fit everything into one article by publishing three separate pieces.
  • Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher. In its youth Wikipedia was the butt of many jokes, and even now "The Economist's fact-checkers frown on relying on it". But they consider us "the standard reference work for anyone with an internet connection, and quote WMF staffer Toby Negrin saying we are the "guardian of truth".
  • A rich-world Wikipeak - Wikipedia's future lies in poorer countries: "From 2010 to 2018 the number of active editors working in languages spoken in the richer half of countries in the world fell by 5%, but the corresponding figure for those spoken in the poorer half more than doubled."
  • In a 27 minute podcast The Economist asks Jimmy Wales "Is social media still a force for good?" One answer "perhaps the most surprising thing is how little Wikipedia has changed." For more on podcasts, as well as videos, on our birthday, see The Signpost article here.
• The BBC reduces the history of Wikipedia, with some help from long-time admin David Gerard, to five articles: George W. Bush, COVID-19 pandemic, Gladys West, List of WWE personnel, and Inherently funny word. The Signpost might replace Inherently funny word with Exploding whale or Standard poodle, but that's just quibbling.
• Wikipedia is a monument of human cooperation and collaboration, according to Vice Motherboard's piece on the billionth edit – which also carries a pleasingly wonky analysis about the merit of the use of the term "billionth" from their source, Wikipedia editor The Cunctator.
• Wikpedia at 20: Did you know Will Ferrell was once not killed in a paragliding incident? in the Irish Times gives the most well-rounded and best-written overview of all these articles. "Its prose is flat, design rudimentary, but Wikipedia remains a triumph of human ingenuity."
• Deutsche Welle gets very serious. Topics include wikiwashing by politicians, hoaxes involving celebrities, and nationalistic spins on the same article topics in different language editions of Wikipedia, using as an example Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, which is also called Анексія, anéksija or "Annexation" in Ukrainian, but Присоединение, prisojedinénije which can also mean accession (see wikt:присоединение) in the corresponding Russian Wikipedia article. It goes on to give the reader ways to verify an article is credible including checking its spelling and grammar, whether it has a neutral tone, and whether its references check out.
• That's why Wikipedia is still the boys' arena (paywall, in Swedish) by Professor Nina Wormbs in Dagens Nyheter. She points out Wikipedia's success as a long-term non-commercial internet actor while embodying the original on-line values. Focus has been properly placed by Wikipedians on both the quantity of articles and accuracy. In reviewing the gender-gap, she concludes that a gender balance of biographical articles might indeed not be possible. An important point is that broader knowledge about Wikipedia and its limits would greatly enhance the usefulness of the encyclopedia. Wormbs invokes Yochai Benkler in saying that Wikipedia is a sign of successful collaboration outside of the market system. Benkler also suggests that we should learn from projects like Wikipedia when it comes to other non-market collaborations, e.g. the climate crises. Another Swedish article, "A social medium that brings out the best in us" (paywall) was published in Svenska Dagbladet.
• The most bizarre birthday article is from NDTV, "So Glad You Exist": Elon Musk's Birthday Wish For Wikipedia, focusing on a short tweet from the world's richest man. The Signpost returns Musk's compliment; we're glad that he exists as well, but we're not so sure about NDTV.
• WIRED thinks Wikipedia Is Basically a Massive RPG where "We will see the rise of a new paladin class—those who are not code sorcerers, and who are not writer warriors, but someone in-between—using powerful, pre-prepared spells to fight vandals and abusers, as well as to improve content overall" according to author's source Dariusz Jemielniak.
• Speaking of wonky, Mashable brings us "20-plus facts about the free encyclopedia that you never knew you never knew" to celebrate Wikipedia's 20th anniversary (though in truth this Signpost editor did know about half of them, and the real-life name of Giraffedata besides).

Where we go from here?

• Wikipedia is twenty. It’s time to start covering it better Stephen Harrison and Omer Benjakob, in the Columbia Journalism Review address their fellow journalists using many of the same examples as they use to address academics in their chapter in Wikipedia @ 20 and to address Wikipedia editors in this issue's In focus. They conclude that "journalism should help readers better understand Wikipedia’s policies and inner workings." Since "Wikipedia’s diverse and often divergent community is the secret to its success," journalists should report on the community with more nuance than writing as if all editors have a single point of view or engage in a constant free-for-all.
• Wikipedia's Biggest Challenge Awaits in 2021 in Wired by the dean of Wiki-journalists Noam Cohen, starts with a retelling of Wikipedia's many achievements but then moves to the Universal code of conduct and why it is sorely needed. The changes proposed by the WMF and many others to diversify the editing community raise existential questions for the online encyclopedia. He uses the examples of the articles Mythology of Benjamin Banneker and Der Giftpilz, a Nazi children's book. The mythology article is not really about Banneker, an accomplished African-American, but a strong critique of stories made up about him. Why don't we have similar articles about the mythology of George Washington or Albert Einstein? The Nazi children's book article included a link to the book's contents and might promote the book in other ways. Both articles will make editing Wikipedia a harrowing experience for some editors. "This is the gnawing challenge for Wikipedia. After a period of wild, unrestrained growth, it needs some civilizing laws. The equivalent of a fair housing act and safety inspections to ensure it won’t exclude certain groups from its pages and allow hateful material to grow and fester."

In brief

Hunters and busybodies-Infographic (Melissa Pappas (UPenn))

• Curious and curiouser: A University of Pennsylvania press release titled Hunters and busybodies summarizes a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour by a team led by Danielle Bassett. The type of curiosity volunteers exhibited was measured using their Wikipedia browsing behavior as either "hunters" or "busybodies".
• One Page At A Time, Jess Wade Is Changing Wikipedia: Jess Wade on NPR on a 13 minute Short Wave (podcast).
• Monument against Genocide wins ticket to compete in Wikimedia contest: Genocide monument in Rwanda.
• Meet Raju Jangid: From Carpenter to Wikipedia Editor Who Got Gifted Laptop and Free Internet in Yahoo! India. According to the India Times, he has edited 57,000 pages on a mobile device. See also Zee News in Hindi
• Arrest follows creation of Wikipedia article: BIGLOBE News reports that a Japanese man, Junya Okuno – who caused the emergency landing of a flight between Hokkaido and Honshu in December for refusing to wear a mask and injuring a flight attendant in September, and then appeared on Japanese television and social media as early as December 2020 to discuss his skepticism of masks to contain coronavirus – was arrested on January 19, the day after a Wikipedia article about him was created. The Japanese Wikipedia page had 280,272 views in four days since its creation. Fox News covered the story in English but without the Wikipedia connection.
• Lincoln compared to a Wikipedia list: An advisor to The Lincoln Project compares his actions to the compilation of a Wikipedia list. But Lincoln's efforts are labeled a "blacklist" by the editorial page writers at The Wall Street Journal.
• Long – or is that nagai? – pages: Yahoo! Japan discusses the content of the three longest articles on Japanese Wikipedia. First place, concerning Trails series in the video game The Legend of Heroes, is 440,000-character article Legends of Heroes Characters in the Trails Series on Japanese Wikipedia. By way of comparison this would be number eleven on the English Wikipedia long pages list.
• Twitter Birdwatch compared to Wikipedia peer moderation model by Associated Press, El Diario, NBC, and more...
• "The Women of Wikipedia Are Writing Themselves into History": "A team of fiercely dedicated women Wikipedians is working around the clock and around the globe to write themselves into the pages of history, one edit at a time," writes Jenny Singer in Glamour.

Notes

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

Reader comments

2021-01-31

The people who built Wikipedia, technically

By Legoktm

Servers in the Wikimedia Foundation's "eqiad" datacenter in Ashburn, Virginia.

Legoktm is a site reliability engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation. He wrote this in his volunteer capacity.

Wikipedia has seen incredible success thanks to the efforts of thousands of dedicated contributors and the technical side is no exception. From backend and infrastructure developers to translators to bot and script writers, Wikipedia grew from a hobby project sitting on a single server to a robust platform operating out of datacenters on multiple continents.

Erik Möller, former Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation and an early developer, noted in an email, "What always amazed me working in this environment is how many brilliant people found a niche in which they individually made incredibly impactful contributions, and that seems as true today as it ever was."

Starting with trust

At the very beginning, getting server access was "pretty loosey-goosey", Brion Vibber, an early developer and the first employee of the WMF, said in an email. "If you showed up and put in good work helping out, you might well hear 'yes' to getting some fairly direct access to things because that was the only way we were going to get anyone to do it!"

Assume good faith applied here as well. Möller said, "As I recall, in the very early years, these decisions were made based largely on trust by folks like [Jimmy Wales] or the people he had already delegated access to (e.g., [Vibber]), with a high assumption of good faith that the people who showed up to help had no darker motives."

The source code was maintained and developed in a CVS repository on Sourceforge.net. Gabriel Wicke, a developer and later Principal Software Engineer at the WMF, said in an email, "Getting revision control access (CVS at the time) basically was about winning trust with whoever set up accounts, which I strongly suspect was [Vibber]."

Tim Starling, an early developer and current Principal Software Architect at the WMF, said in an email he got CVS access from Lee Daniel Crocker as soon as he said he was interested. "There was no pre-commit review, but the code on the server (just one or two servers back then) was not automatically updated, so commits were theoretically reviewed before they went live," he said.

Getting root (also known as superuser access) was a bit harder.

"I remember there being a ridiculously long and painful period between getting shell access and getting root, like six months," Starling said. "I had read/write access to the database, I could edit the code, I could view the server access logs, but for some reason root was a big deal."

Domas Mituzas, a former system administrator and WMF board member, said in an email, "It took me a bus trip to Berlin and sleeping on a German Wikipedian's couch and meeting everyone (we all were meeting each other for the first time!) that eased everyone into the idea of giving me root."

Scaling up

By 2003, significant changes needed to be made on the software side to accommodate the quickly increasing traffic. At the time, Wikipedia was running on only two servers and was rendering every page view from scratch, Wicke said.

"A then-fancy 64-bit Opteron DB server upgrade helped briefly, until it started crashing," he said. "The site was often down, and it was clear that any further growth would quickly consume whatever hardware had just been added."

A diagram from Gabriel Wicke's Squid caching proposal demonstrating how the servers could be laid out.

After posting a proposal to add caching using Squid, and receiving feedback from Wales, Vibber and Jens Frank, Wicke "...went ahead and prototyped a basic Squid integration with active cache purging, initially on [his] own servers," which would be serving the main site by February 5, 2004.

"There were issues of course, like missing purges for images or transclusions," he said. "Those were fairly quickly resolved or worked around, and there was a lot of tolerance given the preceding phase of poor site availability."

A few weeks later on February 25, Wikipedia was featured in German news program Tagesthemen (watch on YouTube). Watching the live traffic stats, Wicke said they got "...all excited on IRC when the site briefly went from ~25 [requests per second] to around 1,500 without falling over."

More servers

Wikipedia originally ran on servers managed by Bomis, a dot-com startup. Starling said, "Before February 2004, Jason Richey, a Bomis employee, managed the hardware and would occasionally log in and restart things or otherwise try to fix downtime."

Sometimes this involved literally going the extra mile, as he lived in Los Angeles, while the servers were in San Diego. "I remember [Richey] having to drive 4 hours to San Diego to fix downtime caused by a really simple problem, like a broken hard disk," Starling said.

Some tasks required his intervention that today seem unthinkable. "My favorite memory from the very early Bomis days is that if you wanted to upload an image, you emailed a guy named Jason who would helpfully place it on the server for you," Möller said.

The servers in Tampa, Florida on the first day they were installed in 2004.

In 2004, Wikipedia moved to a datacenter in Tampa, Florida, to be closer to Wales's new home. "I believe Wales helped to rack the first batch of servers in Tampa," Starling said.

A year later, the Board named Mituzas the Hardware Officer, putting him in charge of, as he describes it, placing servers in a shopping cart and then asking Wales to pay for them.

"Instead of ordering servers one by one I tried a more exponential approach (buy 20, then 40, then 80, ...) – and each time we'd land those batches the site would get much snappier and within a few weeks we'd have more users to fill all the capacity," Mituzas said. "We bought cheap servers that needed hands in datacenters to do anything with them, but we had the capacity to survive the growth."

When others in the WMF's leadership wanted to use some funding to pay other bills, he said he pointed out that if the site wasn't up, there wouldn't be any other bills to pay.

"The challenging part of the role was being the first one to grab [Wales] when he got online – so paying attention to IRC notifications was key, otherwise we would not get our servers," Mituzas said.

Growing pains

Between rapid growth in traffic and not having enough technical resources while constantly implementing new features, Wikipedia was down rather frequently.

Mituzas recalled one outage from when nearly all of the developers met up for the first time in Berlin. "Kate, who wasn't at the meeting deployed Lucene-based search that nobody knew about and thus we were trying to understand why is Java running on our servers and why is it taking everything down."

Other times, developers created contingency plans in response to real world events; in one case it was because of Hurricane Charley.

"I didn't really know much about hurricanes or what to expect, but the local media was talking up the threat," Starling said (he lived in Australia at the time). "There was a risk that power and/or network access would be temporarily lost. We were making off-site backups of our data as if there was a chance of Tampa being flattened like a modern-day Galveston, which was maybe a bit of an overreaction, although I guess it's nice that we were making off-site backups of private data for the first time ever."

In 2005, The Signpost reported how tripped circuit breakers took the site down. It took developers a full day to restore editing after the primary database became corrupt.

"[That] outage caused Wales to quip that downtime is our most profitable product," Starling said.

Changes were often queued up for months at a time before being deployed to wikis in a single release. But eventually the breaking point was hit, Roan Kattouw, a current Principal Software Engineer at the WMF, explained in an email.

"In early 2011, we scheduled a 6-hour window to attempt to deploy the 1.17 upgrade and fix any resulting issues, and decided that if we couldn't fix things within those 6 hours, we would roll back to 1.16," Kattouw said. "This time window was from the morning to the early afternoon for me in the Netherlands, from the late afternoon into the evening for [Starling] in Australia, and from the late evening into the night for our US-based colleagues. The first two times we tried it, a lot went wrong, the site went down at times and we had major issues that we couldn't fix quickly enough, so we rolled back."

It took about three tries for them to get it working "successfully," he said.

"For some definition of success, that is: the site was up and was stable, without any critical issues. After the window ended, I spent the rest of the day fixing various outstanding issues while the others slept, and I passed the baton to Tim when he woke up," Kattouw said. "One of the issues I remember us encountering was all redirects being broken on French-language wikis. Today, that kind of issue would be considered a major problem and a train blocker, but that day it was so far down the priority list that we left it broken for about 12 hours."

Soon after developers began working on "heterogeneous deployment", allowing for progressive deployments.

"This way we can deploy a new version to only a few small wikis first, and work out the kinks before deploying it to larger wikis," Kattouw said. "We were able to accelerate this over time, and nowadays the deployment train runs every week, with major wikis getting new changes only two days after the first test wikis get them."

Expanding functionality

Wikipedia's Main Page as it appeared on 20 December 2001, powered by UseModWiki.

Wikipedia originally ran on the UseModWiki engine, which was written in Perl. Magnus Manske, a biochemistry student at the time, wrote a new wiki engine in PHP to allow for adding more Wikipedia-specific functionality. The "PHP script", as it was known, added features like namespaces, user preferences, and watchlists. It would be officially named "MediaWiki" when it was rewritten by Lee Daniel Crocker.

Other features taken for granted today like an autogenerated table of contents and section editing were controversial when initially introduced.

"As I recall the table of contents feature was a bit more contentious (no pun intended), mostly because of the automagic behavior (hence flags like __NOTOC__ were created to control it)," Möller said. "With section editing, the first visual design was a bit cluttered (and of course there were still kinks to iron out, e.g., in the interaction with protected pages), but I think most people could fairly quickly see the appeal."

In other cases, editors forced developers to add features to the software. Carl Fürstenberg, a Wikipedia administrator, created {{qif}}, which allowed for conditional logic in templates.

"At one point I realized that the parameter expansion logic could be 'misused' to create a way to inject boolean logic into the at time limited template syntax, which could be helpful for creating more generic templates which didn't have to call chains of helper templates to create the same as it was before," he said in an email. "Thus I created Qif, Switch, and different boolean templates."

The developers weren't pleased. Starling wrote to the wikitech-l mailing list that he "...caved in and [had] written a few reasonably efficient parser functions...[that] should replace most uses of {{qif}}, and improve the efficiency of similar templates."

Fürstenberg said he never expected {{qif}} to ever be used so widely. "I think I first realized it had become widely used when it had to be protected as any edit to it halted Wikipedia for a while," he said.

In his 2006 mailing list post, Starling blamed the 2003 introduction of templates and the MediaWiki namespace and said he didn't understand "what a Pandora's box" he opened. But that functionality was key to enabling one of MediaWiki's greatest strengths: localization, allowing users to use the software in their preferred language.

Niklas Laxström, the founder of translatewiki.net and a WMF Staff Software Engineer, said in an email he originally submitted translations via Bugzilla, and then worked up his courage to ask Vibber to deploy them for him, sometimes breaking the Finnish Wikipedia because he forgot a semicolon.

"It was no wonder then, that many opted to do translations in the Wikipedias itself using Special:AllMessages. There was no risk of syntax errors and changes were live immediately, as opposed to potentially taking many months as deployments were few and far between," Laxström said. "By the way, this is a unique feature; I have not seen other websites which allows translation and customization of the whole interface by the users of the site using the site itself."

Scratching his own itch, Laxström started modifying Special:AllMessages to make translation easier, but didn't feel those changes were acceptable to go back into MediaWiki, so he hosted them on his own wiki. Today, nearly all localization of Wikipedia's interface is done via translatewiki.net, rather than on individual wikis.

He credits Raimond Spekking with having managed MediaWiki's localization process for over a decade now.

"[Spekking] checks the changes to mark the translations outdated where necessary, he renames messages and performs other maintenance activities. He exports translation updates multiple times per week." Laxström said. "He does this so well that it can feel like magic."

Divesting power

Early versions of Wikipedia's software gave immense power to developers. Only developers could block users, promote new administrators, rename users, and so on.

Seeing this as a problem, in 2004 Starling wrote an email to the Wikipedia-l mailing list titled "Developers should mind their own business", proposing that certain user rights be split into a separate group.

Wikipedia should not be a technocracy, ruled by those with knowledge of computer systems. Wikipedia should be a democracy. Those in power should be accountable to the community at large, and ideally selected from and by the community at large.

Today, Starling describes that shift in power as having been a big deal at the time. "I was very conscious of the fact that I was designing a social system," he said. "As you can guess from that email, I was uncomfortable with the fact that the power to do so had somehow fallen to me, but I wanted to get it right."

He credits Sunir Shah, the founder of MeatballWiki, for discussing "...that change with me at length, as well as other changes at the interface of social policy and technical design."

It's unclear how much lasting impact this change had, given the WMF's rise to the top of the Wikimedia power structure, in large part because it controls the majority of developers and servers. In 2014, Möller instituted "superprotect", which allowed the WMF to protect a page from even administrators editing it.

"[Möller's] idea was that it would be used in cases of conflict between the Foundation and the community, as a softer alternative to de-sysopping," Starling said. "When that conflict came, [Möller] asked me to make the necessary group rights changes. I said that I was uncomfortable putting my name to that on the wiki, so he found someone else to press the button."

Starling has a simple conclusion as to why the WMF has risen to the top of the power structure: Wikipedia lacks leadership.

"I would like to see an elected editorial board with the mandate and courage to make major policy changes," he said. "Without such a body, WMF necessarily fills in the power vacuum, although it is too timid to do so effectively, especially on any question relating to the content."

"The most controversial move in Wikipedia history"

Derek Ramsey originally wanted to create an article about a town he knew, but couldn't come up with anything more than a couple of sentences.

"So I came up with a solution: find a public domain mass data set that allowed a (somewhat) stub useful article to be created," he said in an email. "I've always had an interest in mass data processing, so this was something I knew I could do. I imported a number of census data tables into a MySQL database tables running on my own Linux computer. I correlated the data with other geographic data sources."

After cleaning up and performing other validation steps, Ramsey said he generated more than 3,000 text files for articles about United States counties and began adding them to Wikipedia by hand.

"This was extremely tedious and slow, but effective," he said. "However, there were 33,832 cities, and that would have taken an order of magnitude longer to complete."

He first wrote a Java program to read each article and make HTTP requests to post it to Wikipedia, later coding "... in features like error checking, error correction, throttling, pauses for human verifications, and other features."

Increasing the number of articles in Wikipedia by 40%, Andrew Lih later called it "the most controversial move in Wikipedia history" in his 2009 book The Wikipedia Revolution.

"I was bold and ignored all rules. You could still do that back then," he said. "After all, if I could edit articles manually, what difference did it make if I did the same thing automatically? It saved me time, but the end result was identical."

Out of all the controversy around mass article creation came two key things that Wikipedia still uses today.

First, Ramsey created {{cite web}}, which most references on Wikipedia today use (and featured in xkcd).

"I wanted a generic way for Wikipedians to cite their sources easily, since prior to this the only citations made were manual and inconsistent," he said. "This was necessary because it was before the devs created native reference support in the Wikimedia software."

Second, Ramsey worked with other Wikipedians to develop an early bot policy. The initial version contained the contradictory statement, "In general bots are generally frowned [upon]."

"I thought the concern was overblown, but the consensus was demanding that something be done to address the perceived issues," Ramsey said. "It was my desire to get ahead of the issue before draconian measures shut it all down, so I created bot policy as a sort of compromise. I figured it was better to do that than to have all bots banned wholesale."

Soon after users started running bots and scripts under administrator accounts, dubbed "adminbots", to significant controversy.

"There was a lot of hysteria surrounding adminbots on the English Wikipedia but a few people quietly ran them, as far back as like 2005," Max McBride, a bot operator who previously ran adminbots, said in an email. "Some of these scripts were admittedly kind of terrifying and there weren't as many tools to mass undo unintentional damage."

McBride described people's attitudes on adminbots as "beyond reason" and suggested they were based on some sort of jealousy. "Like a random script gets admin rights and an admin gets two admin accounts, but not lots of regular users," he said. "I think that bred and fed some opposition."

Strong security

Unlike many other prominent websites, Wikipedia hasn't suffered from an embarrassing, public security incident losing its users' private data. Some of this is due to a lack of collecting private data in the first place, but since the beginning there has been a strong culture of focusing on security.

"In the early days, the worst case scenario was irreversible destruction of large amounts of user work, since we didn't have the resources to make frequent backups," Starling said. "I spent a lot of time doing security reviews, and informed by that work, I wrote policies and improved our APIs and conventions."

He also credited Vibber with making key policy decisions for other MediaWiki installations (disabling uploads by default and having a non-web writable source tree), that ensured MediaWiki didn't become a "...constant source of botnet nodes like some other PHP web applications."

But for readers and editors to visit the site securely required using a special secure.wikimedia.org gateway until native HTTPS support was rolled out in 2011 as an opt-in option.

An NSA slide explicitly listing Wikipedia as being visited over insecure HTTP protocol.

Then in 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was targeting Wikipedia users visiting the site over the default, unencrypted HTTP protocol.

Ryan Lane, a former WMF Operations Engineer, said in an email the Snowden leaks prioritized switching to HTTPS by default. "We knew some governments were spying on their users (the great firewall of China was well known for this, and they were sharing this tech with other governments), but the Snowden leaks showed that the government was explicitly targeting Wikipedia users," he said.

Kattouw worked on the MediaWiki-side of the HTTPS change, allowing for protocol-relative URLs to be used. "I think the [Site Reliability Engineering] people who worked on the HTTPS migration deserve more credit," he said. "That was a much more difficult migration than many people thought."

The politics involved in making the switch weren't the regular WMF vs. community ones, it was actual global politics.

"For example, Russian Wikipedia asked us to implement HTTPS only (for all users, not just signed-in users) as soon as possible, as they wanted to head off Russian legislation that would have enabled per-page censorship, and it would have forced the government to choose between blocking all of Wikipedia, which was politically difficult, or dropping their aim at per-page censorship," Lane said. "This is why Russian Wikipedia got support before any other wiki (and more extensive support, at that). Chinese Wikipedia, on the other hand, asked us to delay rollout, as the Chinese government was already doing per-page censorship, and had previously blocked all of Wikipedia a number of times."

There's one large exception to this focus on security: the ability for users to create custom scripts and styles and share them with other users, on the wiki. In web development, this is typically known as a cross-site scripting vulnerability, but for Wikipedia it was a feature.

Fürstenberg created one of the most popular user scripts, Twinkle. He said it started as a helper for himself to "...conduct anti-vandalism and maintenance easier, from the point of reverting quickly, to the tedious task of filing reports to different sections. It pretty much boiled over from there."

Looking back, Vibber thinks the idea of user scripts is great, but implemented incorrectly. He said there are two primary problems:

1. Running someone else's malicious code can lead to your account being taken over
2. Script code access internal data and methods that aren't going to stay stable, potentially breaking over time.

"Both can be solved by using a sandboxed environment (probably a suitable iframe)," Vibber said. "I think there's a lot of cool stuff that can be built on top of this method, with full-on APIs for accessing an editor state as a plugin, or whatever."

Missed opportunities

Mockup of what Athena might have looked like from Brandon Harris's Wikimania presentation.

At Wikimania 2012 and then in a Signpost op-ed, then-WMF Senior Designer Brandon Harris presented the "Athena Project", outlining a vision for what Wikipedia should look like in 2015.

Suffice to say, that vision was never fully implemented, and Harris said in an email he could write a book as to what went wrong. "I'd say the primary reason was the fact that Foundation had a stellar lack of focus and a muddled leadership direction which allowed for lower-level political infighting to thrive," he said.

The reaction to Harris's proposal was generally mixed to negative, but that's what Harris was hoping for. "A thing a lot of people – even professional designers – don't understand about the design process is that only 10% of it is actually 'designing,'" he said. "Most of it is marketing: You have to understand the market you're designing for to know what to design and you have to convince folk that your design solves the problem. You may have to sell the idea that the problem even exists!"

Part of the purpose of his proposal was an exercise in re-examining the entire interface, something he said neither the WMF nor community do enough of. "Look at what happens, every day! Nothing has changed since 2015," Harris said. "The Foundation still doesn't know how to sell its ideas and it keeps trying to fix the same problems with the same tepid changes to the toolchain. The community still doesn't know how to govern itself and still keeps using the same broken processes to inadequately deal with the same issues."

McBride wrote an op-ed response to Harris, titled Wikimedians are rightfully wary, expressing concerns about previous software deployments that didn't live up to their promise, like FlaggedRevs, which was supposed to solve the BLP problem.

"It wasn't a proposed solution as much as it was the only 'solution,'" he said. "And a lot of people had pinned their hopes on it being successful, but I was more interested in it failing fast so we could move on and try other solutions."

After various trials, and years of RfCs, Flagged Revisions (now rebranded on the English Wikipedia as "Pending Changes") is barely used on BLP pages, unmaintained and no longer enabled on new wikis. (It's worth noting that some communities like the German Wikipedia view it as a success.)

"The BLP problem is definitely not fixed," McBride said. "And there's an enormous gap between current tech and what could be implemented to alleviate the problem."

In his op-ed, McBride questioned whether upcoming projects like VisualEditor would end up with a similar fate as FlaggedRevs. As it turned out, the rollout of VisualEditor and Media Viewer a few months later were both extremely controversial among Wikipedians (not to mention the separate but related issue of superprotect), something that Möller acknowledges in hindsight.

"In both cases, a more gradual rollout (probably adding at least 1–2 years to the release timeline for VE, and 6–12 months for MV) could have prevented a lot of pain and frustration," Möller said. "I take on my share of responsibility for that."

Both Möller and McBride independently brought up the same saying: "change moves at the speed of trust" (Möller credited Lydia Pintscher for teaching it to him).

"For that principle to work in practice, an organization has to be prepared to let go of overly rigid timelines and commitments, because its commitments must always first and foremost be to the people whose trust it seeks to earn and keep," Möller said. "That doesn't mean it's impossible to make radical, transformative changes, but it can certainly feel that way."

McBride put it more bluntly. "Wikimedians don't like shitty software, they quickly embrace good software (think @pings or mass messages or...)," he said. "A lot of software is bad and is imposed on the communities without consultation or input. Of course people will dislike that and reject it."

Harris doesn't disagree. "...I think the primary reason is that editors are rightly concerned about impacts to their workflows, and the Foundation has been historically terrible about thinking about this and accounting for it," he said. "This is why I designed the New Pages Feed to work independently of the existing workflows and scripts that people had developed themselves."

Recognition

Brion Vibber celebrating his day in 2013.

Early on, Wales recognized key development milestones by giving developers their own holidays: Magnus Manske Day (January 25), Tim Starling Day (October 31) and Brion Vibber Day (June 1).

"It isn't really clear who gets the credit now – whenever you step away, very few people remember what you did," Mituzas said. "Being recognized and rewarded by the community was definitely part of the motivation to keep on working."

Mituzas himself is remembered on the blame wheel, where he's responsible for 25% of Wikipedia's problems. "Sometimes it feels that the blame wheel is the only part that is left of any fame I had," he said.

Harris is likely the best known Wikimedia developer, having appeared on fundraising banners in 2011.

"We had three 'storytellers' who interviewed a lot of us about why we were working there and they liked what I had to say. They took photos," he said. "Later one of them ended up being used as a test and performed fairly well. This became popular and weird because the internet is weird."

Unsurprisingly, there's a direct parallel to how credit operates on Wikipedia itself.

"It's always fascinated me how much wiki editing has mirrored open source software contributions," McBride said. "In both, a lot of people making small suggestions and improvements are the ones who push the project forward."

Some of those names can be found on Special:Version or in the credits. Others might be in mailing list archives, forgotten bugs and long lost IRC logs, but their contributions nonetheless built Wikipedia into what it is today.

Reader comments

2021-01-31

Celebrating 20 years

By Smallbones

Most Wikipedians do not use video or audio very often or very well in articles, relying almost exclusively on text and photos. Perhaps the COVID pandemic has improved editors' skills in this area with all the Zoom calls we've had to make. The pandemic has also increased our need for multimedia as in-person conferences, such as Wikimania 2020, have been cancelled. This week Wikimania 2021 was turned into a virtual event (see this message from Janeen Uzzell on the Wikipedia-l mailing list).

The video and audio resources created to celebrate Wikipedia's 20th birthday demonstrate the flexibility of these media. The videos include a slick two-minute celebratory video, an hour-long video press conference from the WMF, and even longer deep dives produced by the community.

Videos

Happy 20th birthday, Wikipedia! from the Wikimedia Foundation.

• Happy 20th birthday, Wikipedia! celebrates 20 years of the Wikipedia movement. Also available on YouTube, Vimeo, and the Wikimedia Foundation. (time 2:17)
• Wikipedia 20 Press Call The press talks to Jimmy Wales, Katherine Maher, Dr. Netha Hussain, and Wikipedia editor Risker. Moderated by Anusha Alikhan. Includes transcript. (time 1:15:00)

Wikimedia New York City celebrates 20 years of Wikipedia.

• Wikimedia New York City celebrates 20 years of Wikipedia. New York Wikipedians relate their personal experiences with Wikipedia and how the NYC chapter developed. Produced by the master of Wikipedia video, Victor Grigas. (time 39:50)
• Wikipedia Weekly features contributors to the thick book of essays Wikipedia @ 20, Stories of an Incomplete Revolution, published by MIT Press. The guests include the co-editors Jackie Koerner and Joseph Reagle; academics Phoebe Ayres, Brian Keegan, and Benjamin Mako Hill; journalist Stephen Harrison; and others. (time 1:34:00)

Audio

• Economist asks Jimmy Wales "Is social media still a force for good?" Wales covers several variants of this question, but part of his answer is that Wikipedia serves our readers, not our advertisers. Everybody knows what an encyclopedia is and the community has stayed faithful to the project's original goals. (time 27:15)
• One Page At A Time, Jess Wade Is Changing Wikipedia: Jess Wade on NPR about how she has changed Wikipedia by writing articles on scientists from under-represented groups such as Sarah Gilbert, Kizzmekia Corbett, and Gladys West. (time 13:29)
• The World According to Wikipedia, the new Irish podcast has now completed 5 episodes. In this GLAM/Birthday episode they interview a digital docent based in Washington, D.C. who works with the Smithsonian Institution. (time 26:56)
• "Wikipedia At 20: The Promises And Pitfalls Of The 'Free Encyclopedia' ": Connecticut Public Radio interviews Wikipedians Molly White, Sherry Antoine, and Ariella Rotramel to hear an insiders' view of the Wikipedia editing process, including how Wikipedians have developed tools to fight misinformation, and how they are working to address "persistent gender, racial, and geographic disparities". (time 49:00)

Reader comments

2021-01-31

Wikipedia celebrates 20 years of free, trusted information for the world

By Wikimedia Foundation

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

20.wiki.x.io launches to commemorate Wikipedia's birthday, look back at the past 20 years, and meet the humans behind the platform.

This article was originally published by the Wikimedia Foundation on January 14, 2021 to mark Wikipedia's 20th birthday, at Wikimedia Foundation News. It is licensed CC-BY SA 3.0.

Wikipedia, the world's largest free online encyclopedia, turned 20 years old on 15 January. This birthday commemorates two decades of global efforts to support free knowledge, open collaboration, and trust on the internet. In a time when disinformation and polarization challenge our trust in information and institutions, Wikipedia is more relevant than ever. Wikipedia celebrates its past and looks ahead to how it will meet the challenges of tomorrow to grow into a more resilient, equitable knowledge resource.

"Wikipedia has evolved from a seemingly impossible idea into a sprawling testament to humanity—a place where we can collaborate, share, and learn about anything and everything," said Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. "It is a global effort of volunteers who elevate knowledge and cooperation over conflict and self-interest. We are committed to preserving the integrity and value of information at a time when the world needs it most."

Today, Wikipedia's more than 55 million articles can be accessed in over 300 languages, for free, and without advertisements, all created by volunteers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia saw record-breaking increases in daily traffic with a growing community of medical professionals contributing knowledge about COVID-19 to the platform. Studies have shown that Wikipedia is one of the most-viewed sources for health information, and its role in providing trusted access to information about COVID-19 in the pandemic led to a milestone collaboration with the World Health Organization in October 2020.

"In a world where information is increasingly commoditized, Wikipedia's model has always been based on the belief that knowledge belongs to all humans," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "Wikipedia forces us to step outside of our echo chambers and contend with what a shared understanding of the world could really look like. After all, a Wikipedia article is the same no matter who or where you are in the world, and if something isn't right in the article, you can change it."

An Art+Feminism edit-a-thon at the Royal Armoury in Stockholm, 2017

Wikipedia aspires to reflect the sum of all human knowledge. As it celebrates 20 years and looks to the future, the people who contribute to Wikipedia also acknowledge that there are deep knowledge gaps that must be addressed. Initiatives such as WikiProject Women in Red, WikiGap, and AfroCROWD, among many others, aim to ensure that Wikipedia more fully represents the diversity of the world. The Wikimedia movement's 2030 strategic direction also reflects this commitment. In addition, the Foundation recently developed a $4.5 million Equity Fund that will offer grants to advance more equitable, inclusive representation in Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia's volunteer communities are actively evolving to face the challenges of our time, including by:

• Investing in the overall health and diversity of volunteer communities to be more inclusive and globally representative
• Developing tools and programs to expand the quantity and diversity of Wikipedia content
• Modernizing Wikipedia's technology to meet the needs of the future
• Advocating for policies that preserve user privacy, free expression, and the free exchange of knowledge online
• Enhancing volunteers' ability to combat disinformation with better resources and insights

The Wikimedia Foundation held a virtual event, hosted by Katherine Maher, Wikimedia Foundation CEO, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, to showcase the contributions of Wikipedia's global volunteer communities. The event kicked-off a year-long celebration themed "20 Years Human," a nod to the humans who make Wikipedia possible—including regular contributors, donors, and readers. Viewers can tune in via the livestream link.

To learn more about Wikipedia's growth over the last two decades visit 20.wiki.x.io.

To attend Wikipedia virtual celebrations hosted by volunteers around the world, please visit the events page.

Share your favorite Wikipedia story on social media using #Wikipedia20, and tag @Wikipedia in your posts.

To make a donation and continue to sustain Wikipedia's future, visit donate.wikimedia.org.

Wikipedia facts and figures

• Wikipedia has more than 55 million articles across over 300 languages.
• Wikipedia is edited by more than 280,000 volunteer editors every month around the world.
• Wikipedia is edited 350 times per minute and read more than 8000 times a second.
• Wikipedia is accessed by 1.5 billion unique devices every month and read more than 15 billion times every month.
• Roughly 89% of articles on Wikipedia are in languages other than English.
• Most vandalism (edits that do not meet Wikipedia's reliability and neutrality standards) is addressed within five minutes on Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia is supported by nearly 7 million donors, with the average donation being about $15 USD.

About Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the world's free knowledge resource. It is a collaborative creation that has been added to and edited by millions of people from around the globe since it was created in 2001: everyone can edit it, at any time. Wikipedia is offered in more than 300 languages containing a total of more than 55 million articles. It is the largest, collaborative collection of free knowledge in human history, and today its content is contributed and edited by a community of more than 280,000 volunteer editors each month.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

Reader comments

2021-01-31

Students still have a better opinion of Wikipedia than teachers do

By Matthew Sumpter and Tilman Bayer

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

Wikipedia as OER: the “Learning with Wikipedia” project

Reviewed by Matthew Sumpter

An article from the Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society reports on the qualitative results of the "Learning with Wikipedia" project, which involved 1200 students and 30 faculty members from the University of Padua. The project was designed in response to the UNESCO policy agenda to promote Open Education (OE). The goal was to determine the effectiveness of learning subject-specific content with communal forms of assessment and to stimulate digital competencies involved in information literacy, while also creating open content and encouraging the spirit of OE.

The project was divided into planning and teaching phases. The planning phase required that instructors were trained on Wikipedia philosophies and rules, and activities were designed for each course, while also setting up test environments for students to familiarize themselves with. Several potential student activities were designed, including: translation of an English Wikipedia article to Italian, elaboration on course content, validation of Wikipedia content when compared to other sources, as well as new article creation regarding course content. Students attended a workshop that introduced them to the goals and expectations of the project before beginning, and then were continuously assisted throughout with a focus on developing skills related to OE. Specifically, these included skills in "finding, selecting and evaluating information, digital citizenship actions, applying guidelines for online etiquette, creating and developing digital content, becoming familiar with copyright issues and the use of Creative Commons licenses, [and] protecting personal data". In this way, the project served the joint tasks of teaching course content and digital OE skills.

The article analyzes the outcomes of this project using a questionnaire provided to participants to answer two research questions: 1) How do teachers and students perceive Wikipedia? and 2) What digital competences do teachers and students believe have been improved by creating a Wikipedia article in the project? The authors found that teachers and students have contrasting opinions regarding Wikipedia - teachers exhibited a poor opinion while students on average had a good opinion. The authors point to this finding as an important indication that teachers must be involved in the planning and implementation of educational Wikipedia projects, in order to prevent negative bias towards the medium. In regards to the digital competences, students expressed they had learned Wikipedia's rules, how to browse, search, create, and manipulate digital content. They also indicated that "evaluating data, information and digital content", an essential goal, was not sufficiently covered. This was again in contrast to the teachers' answers, of which 100% indicated that this task was well stimulated. The authors suspect this is because many bibliographic sources used for writing the articles were provided to the students by the instructors. This becomes one of the authors' main conclusions when considering future work - namely that students should be provided more freedom in finding primary sources. Additionally, they cite the need for carefully managed learning strategies to ensure the work is educational while following Wikipedia's rules, so that student articles do not risk deletion.

Briefly

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

Wikipedia is "largely successful" at removing harmful content

From the abstract:

"... we aim to assess the degree to which English-language Wikipedia is successful in addressing harmful speech with a particular focus on the removal of deleterious content. We have conducted qualitative interviews with Wikipedians and carried out a text analysis using machine learning classifiers trained to identify several variations of problematic speech. Overall, we conclude that Wikipedia is largely successful at identifying and quickly removing a vast majority of harmful content despite the large scale of the project. The evidence suggests that efforts to remove malicious content are faster and more effective on Wikipedia articles compared to removal efforts on article talk and user talk pages."

See also earlier coverage of the researchers' presentation at Wikimania 2019, and the research project's page on Meta-wiki

Wiki Loves Africa Logo

Recruiting previous participants of the "Wiki Loves Africa" photo contest

From the abstract of a preprint titled "Broadening African Self-Representation on Wikipedia: A Field Experiment":

"Wiki Loves Africa (WLA) is a Wikipedia community project that hosts an annual photo competition focused on increasing African contributions to imagery that represents African people, places, and culture. In a field experiment with [5,905 previous] participants, we randomly assigned past contributors to receive a recruitment message and observed their contributions to the 2020 competition. On average, receiving a message caused a 1.2 percentage point increase in competition entrants (p=0.002). Among those who contributed to the contest in 2019, there was an increase of 2.7 percentage points compared to the control group (p=0.029)."

"WiTPy: A Toolkit to Parse and Analyse Wikipedia Talk Pages"

From the abstract:

"In this article, we propose an opensource toolkit to extract, parse, and analyze the Wikipedia talk pages. [...] User-friendly and high-level analysis methods are created on the top of NoSQL database, which can be used to understand the collaboration dynamics on article talk pages."

"Modelling User Behavior Dynamics with Embeddings"

From the abstract:

"... we present a user behavior model built using behavior embeddings to compare behaviors and their change over time. To this end, we first define the formal model and train the model using both action (e.g., copy/paste) embeddings and user interaction feature (e.g., length of the copied text) embeddings. Having obtained vector representations of user behaviors, we then define three measurements to model behavior dynamics over time, namely: behavior position, displacement, and velocity. To evaluate the proposed methodology, we use three real world datasets [ ... including] (iii) thousands of editors completing unstructured editing tasks on Wikidata. Through these datasets, we show that the proposed methodology can: (i) surface behavioral differences among users; (ii) recognize relative behavioral changes; and (iii) discover directional deviations of user behaviors."

"Deriving Geolocations in Wikipedia"

From the abstract:

"We study the problem of deriving geolocations for Wikipedia pages. To this end, we introduce a general four-step process to location derivation, and consider different instantiations of this process, leveraging both textual and categorical data. [...] our system can be used to augment the geographic information of Wikipedia, and to enable more effective geographic information retrieval."

"Testing the validity of Wikipedia categories for subject matter labelling of open-domain corpus data"

From the abstract:

"In this article, a hierarchical taxonomy of three-level depth is extracted from the Wikipedia category system. The resulting taxonomy is explored as a lightweight alternative to expert-created knowledge organisation systems (e.g. library classification systems) for the manual labelling of open-domain text corpora. Combining quantitative and qualitative data from a crowd-based text labelling study, the validity of the taxonomy is tested and the results quantified in terms of interrater agreement. While the usefulness of the Wikipedia category system for automatic document indexing is documented in the pertinent literature, our results suggest that at least the taxonomy we derived from it is not a valid instrument for manual subject matter labelling of open-domain text corpora."

"Wikipedia, The Free Online Medical Encyclopedia Anyone Can Plagiarize: Time to Address Wiki-Plagiarism"

From the abstract and paper:

"... plagiarism of Wikipedia in peer-reviewed publications has received little attention. Here, I present five cases of PubMed-indexed articles containing Wiki-plagiarism, i.e. copying of Wikipedia content into medical publications without proper citation of the source. [...] ... I subsequently contacted the authors of the three other Wiki-plagiarizing papers, as well as the publishers and Editors of the journals involved, to ask for an explanation, correction or retraction. None of them replied, despite the fact that these journals are members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Of note, the article on exome sequencing was edited by the same author as the 2010 published paper. ... "

"Hierarchical Trivia Fact Extraction from Wikipedia Articles"

From the abstract:

"In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised algorithm that automatically mines trivia facts for a given entity. Unlike previous studies, the proposed algorithm targets at a single Wikipedia article and leverages its hierarchical structure via top-down processing. [...] Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is over 100 times faster than the existing method which considers Wikipedia categories. Human evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can mine better trivia facts regardless of the target entity domain and outperforms the existing methods."

"Multilingual Contextual Affective Analysis of LGBT People Portrayals in Wikipedia"

From the abstract:

"Prior work has examined descriptions of people in English using contextual affective analysis, a natural language processing (NLP) technique that seeks to analyze how people are portrayed along dimensions of power, agency, and sentiment. Our work presents an extension of this methodology to multilingual settings [...] We then demonstrate the usefulness of our method by analyzing Wikipedia biography pages of members of the LGBT community across three languages: English, Russian, and Spanish. Our results show systematic differences in how the LGBT community is portrayed across languages, surfacing cultural differences in narratives and signs of social biases. Practically, this model can be used to surface Wikipedia articles for further manual analysis---articles that might contain content gaps or an imbalanced representation of particular social groups."

(The underlying article dataset has also been used by another researcher to create this interactive visualization.)

References

Reader comments

2021-01-31

Dr. Seuss's Guide to Wikipedia

By Levivich, Atsme, EEng, and GeneralNotability

One hundred years ago, Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known as "Dr. Seuss") arguably began his writing career by authoring a book review of a railroad timetable and contributing to the Dartmouth College humor magazine Jack-O-Lantern. Since then millions of children – young and old – have delighted in the wit and wisdom of his iconic books with their hallucinatory illustrations. In celebration of this centennial, The Signpost has blatantly hijacked some of Seuss's most familiar works (and a few less familiar ones) in service of the perhaps questionable goal of indoctrinating a new generation of editors in the wacky ways of Wikipedia.

"Editors are just obsolete children, and the hell with them." – Dr. Seuss

"It's a pretty good zoo",
said young Gerald McGrew,
"And the fellow who runs it
seems proud of it, too."

– Dr. Seuss, If I Ran the Zoo

Dr. Seuss's ABCs of Editing

• One Link, Two Link, Red Link, Blue Link
• I Can Revert 30 Vandals Today! 
• I Can Edit with My Eyes Shut! 
• Come Over to My Talk Page
• Hooray for First Edit Day! 
• The Recent Changes Feed and Other Lost Stories

“ You're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
so get on your way! ” — Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

I Am Not Going to Edit Today!

All around the world
they're editing.
And so they don't need me.
Let others edit Switzerland
or Memphis, Tennessee.
Let them edit in Alaska
and in China.
I don't care.
Let others edit Italy.
Let others edit Spain.
Let them edit Massachusetts,
Connecticut and Maine.
Someone else can edit London
and Paris and Berlin.
Let them edit all they want to.
But not me.
I'm sleeping in.

TBANed Editor Will You Please Go Now!

Just go. Go. GO! I don't care how.
You can go edit foot. You can go edit cow.

The Bitter Battleground Book

My wonderful weapon, the Rollbacker-Snatchem,
will roll back those edits as quick as we catch 'em.

Oh, the Places Redirects Go!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can redirect articles
any places you choose.

If I Ran Arbcom

Ei! What a committee! Fit for its purpose!
Our clerks they love clerking. They say, "Work us! Please work us!
We'll clerk and we'll clerk until we're lightheaded
(But you'll only see half 'cause discussion's unthreaded!)" 

“ I'm a North-Going Zax
and I always go north.
Get out of my way, now,
and let me go forth! ” — Dr. Seuss, The Zax

The Zax's Conduct Guidance

• You're Only BOLD Once
• Oh Say You Can't Say
• Great Day for UPE! 
• Did I Ever Tell You How Unlucky You Are? 
• How the Grinch Defaced Articles with Infoboxes

I Had Trouble Reporting to WP:ANEW

I learned there are vandals of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead and some come from behind.
But they gave me the bit – I'm all ready you see.
Now those vandals are going

to be blocked by me! 

(Sequel: I Had Trouble Reporting to AIV, Too)

“

   And to Think That I Saw It in a Featured Article
Those stars weren't so big. They were really so small.
You might think such a thing wouldn't matter at all.

” — Dr. Seuss, The Sneetches and Other Stories

The Lorax's Content Policies

• The Footnote Book
• Green Eggs and Spam
• Horton Hatches a Hoax
• My Article about ME

Horton Hates a Hasty Hyphen

I'll just have to fix it. Because, after all
An error's an error, no matter how small.

ArbCom Hatches the Egg

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant ...
ArbCom is faithful, one hundred per cent! 

“ Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not. ” — Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

Oh, the Links You Can Link!

Link internal, external, piped or unpiped.
Oh, the links you can link up however you like!
Don't link left-wing or right-wing, promo or spam.
Practice safe linking whenever you can! 

Tech Tips from Sam-I-Am

• Scorsese Ahead of Swayze
• Horton and the Phabberbug
  and More Lost Stories
• What PetScan Have I Ran? 
• Lua the Big-Hearted Module
• The Admin's Mop
• Bartholomew and the Ombud

The Place I Be and Other Stuff

Wrote the Far Western part
Of south-east North Dakota,
And a very fine article
About the iota,
But I'll write a stub
That is even much finer
On the north-eastern west part
Of South Carolina.

Yasmin the Admin and Other Stories

Editors know, up top you see great sights,
but down here at the bottom, we too should have rights.

“ Are you sure everyone on enwiki is working?
Quick! Check the contribs! Is anyone shirking?  ”

“ I'm sorry to say so but sadly it's true
that edit conflicts can happen to you. ”

Wardrobe Advice from
The Cat in the Hat

• There's a Socker in My Locker
• Blocks of Socks
• The 5000 Sockpuppets of Dr. T
• Dr. Seuss's Sleeper Book
• The 500 Hats of
  Bartholomew Cubbins
• The Hat in the Cat

“

The Waiting Place
A place you could sprain
both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out?
Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose?
How much can you win?

” — Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Hop on POP3 *

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
That wasn't me, it was my brother.
My brother edits little bits
Fixing words like its and it's.
———
*Non-geeks should refer to our article on POP3.

A Little Dab'll Do Ya!

Too Many Dabs Wikipedia:Disambiguation Wikipedia (disambiguation) Wikipedia:Wikipedia (disambiguation) Wikipedia:Disambiguation (disambiguation) Disambiguation (disambiguation) See also: Too Many Daves

Too Many Debs

---

Aides-mémoire

Thanks Doc, we couldn't have done it without you!

Bonus video

US Senator Rafael Edward Cruz reads Green Eggs and Ham I do not like that single-payer, I do not want it for my Bayer. I will not use Obamacare, I will not use it anywhere. I will not use it for a sprain, I will not use it in the brain. I will not use it for my gout, I will not use it on my snout. I will not use it for my head, I will not use it when I've bled. I will not use it here or there, I will not use it anywhere!

Bonus audio
Ön Beyond Zebra!

---

     "I'm telling you this
           'cause you're one of my friends.
     My alphabet starts
           where your alphabet ends! ...
     So, on beyond Z!
           It's high time you were shown
     That you really don't know
           All there is to be known."

— Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra!

Reader comments

2021-01-31

New Year, same Featured Content report!

By Adam Cuerden

Oh, hello! This spinyhead blenny, by q-phia is one of the "newest" (19 December) featured pictures, and is utterly adorable.

---

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 12 December through 31 December. Quotes are generally from the articles, but may be abridged or simplified for length. Oh, and specifically for this issue, I had to borrow from the actor bios to summarise the filmographies, because actor bios can summarise because there's more text after the lead, whereas lists promptly turn into giant tables of data once the lead's done.

---

New year, same pandemic as well... I hope I can change out this illustration soon.

Well! A new year is upon us, so let's finish up the dregs of last year's featured content processes - we have to work a bit behind publication so that I can get this done in advance and not have to plan my life around finishing up the article on a specific date - and hope that that old cove, COVID-19, stops being just the worst guest and goes away soon. (As I keep saying: Stay safe, and look after yourselves, aye?)

I'm afraid I must confess to an error in the last report: the Royal Artillery Memorial was briefly miscredited: It should have said it was nominated by both Hchc2009 and HJ Mitchell. This is the problem with making these reports entirely by hand. Always plenty of room for error. I also failed to make the all-but-necessary joke for the article "Blank Space" until the second day of publication, which was also a mistake. I must do better. We'll deal with my other big mistake at the appropriate time, which is later in this report.

Speaking of which - and maybe this says more about what I listen to in the background when editing here than being a universal truth - but, ever notice all the podcasts and videos and such that tell you that if you like it, you can get more of the same by subscribing? ...Always thought you can do that much better by hitting replay. Or by having each bit of content posted to the podcast or Youtube channel or Featured Content Report be a repeat of the last one. No... um... reason for bringing that up.

Anyway! 2021 is upon us, and it's time to start a new year of Wikipedia. They do say that stating your intent can be helpful in getting things done, so my goal is to finally reach 100 featured pictures in a single year. We'll see how well I do with that. Feel free to state your Wikigoals (Which sounds like a new Wikimedia project. Would make New Year's resolutions far easier to achieve if you could edit them later...) in the comments below.

-Adam

Featured articles

15 featured articles were promoted this period.

Portrait of a Musician, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci

Portrait of a Musician, nominated by Aza24

The Portrait of a Musician is an unfinished painting widely attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, dated to c. 1483–1487. Produced while Leonardo was in Milan, the work is painted in oils, and perhaps tempera, on a small panel of walnut wood. It is his only known male portrait painting, and the identity of its sitter has been closely debated among scholars. Perhaps influenced by Antonello da Messina's introduction of the Early Netherlandish style of portrait painting to Italy, the work marks a dramatic shift from the profile portraiture that predominated in 15th-century Milan. It shares many similarities with other paintings Leonardo executed there, such as the Virgin of the Rocks and the Lady with an Ermine, but the Portrait of a Musician is his only panel painting remaining in the city, where it has been in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana since at least 1672. There are no extant contemporary records of the commission. Based on stylistic resemblances to other works by Leonardo, most current scholarship attributes at least the sitter's face to him. Uncertainty over the rest of the painting is due to the stiff and rigid qualities of the body, which are uncharacteristic of Leonardo's work. While this may be explained by the painting's unfinished state, some scholars believe that Leonardo was assisted by one of his students.

55th (West Lancashire) Infantry Division, nominated by EnigmaMcmxc

The 55th (West Lancashire) Infantry Division was an infantry division of the British Army's Territorial Army (TA) that was formed in 1920 and existed through the Second World War, although it did not see combat. The division had originally been raised in 1908 as the West Lancashire Division, part of the British Army's Territorial Force (TF). It fought in the First World War, as the 55th (West Lancashire) Division, and demobilised following the fighting. In 1920, the 55th (West Lancashire) Division started to reform. It was stationed in the county of Lancashire throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and was under-funded and under-staffed. In the late 1930s, the division was reduced from three to two infantry brigades and gave up some artillery and other support units to become a motorised formation, the 55th (West Lancashire) Motor Division. This was part of a British Army doctrine change that was intended to increase battlefield mobility.

Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the division created new units around cadres of its own personnel, a process called "duplicating". The division then used these new formations to create its "duplicate", the 59th (Staffordshire) Motor Division. The 55th remained in the United Kingdom, in a defensive role, after the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940, following the Battle of France, the motor division concept was abandoned. The division regained its third infantry brigade, and became the 55th (West Lancashire) Infantry Division. It remained within the United Kingdom, training for future operations as well as training replacements for combat units, and assigned to anti-invasion duties. By 1944, the division had been drained of many of its assets. The remnant of the division was used in Operation Fortitude, a deception effort that supported the Allied invasion of France. At the end of the war, the division was demobilised and not reformed.

Battle of Powick Bridge, nominated by Harrias

The Battle of Powick Bridge was a skirmish fought on 23 September 1642 just south of Worcester, England, during the First English Civil War. It was the first engagement between elements of the principal field armies of the Royalists and Parliamentarians. Sir John Byron was escorting a Royalist convoy of valuables from Oxford to King Charles's army in Shrewsbury and, worried about the proximity of the Parliamentarians, took refuge in Worcester on 16 September to await reinforcements. The Royalists despatched a force commanded by Prince Rupert. Meanwhile, the Parliamentarians sent a detachment, under Colonel John Brown, to try to capture the convoy. Each force consisted of around 1,000 mounted troops, a mix of cavalry and dragoons.

The Parliamentarians approached the city from the south on the afternoon of 23 September. Their route took them up narrow lanes and straight into Rupert's force, which was resting in a field. The noise of the approaching Parliamentarian cavalry alerted the Royalists, who quickly formed up. The Royalist dragoons gave their cavalry time to prepare, firing at point-blank range as the Parliamentarians emerged into the field. Rupert's cavalry then charged and broke most of the Parliamentarian cavalry, though one troop stood its ground and returned fire. Ultimately, all of the Parliamentarians were routed.

Brown protected his cavalry's escape by making a rearguard stand with his dragoons at Powick Bridge. Rupert gave chase as far as Powick village, but the Parliamentarian cavalry fled 15 miles (24 km) further, their flight causing panic among part of the main Parliamentarian field army. The Royalists abandoned Worcester, leaving safely with their valuable convoy. The Parliamentarian army arrived in the city the next day and remained for four weeks before shadowing the Royalist move towards London, which led to the Battle of Edgehill.

Hottentotta tamulus, the Indian red scorpion

Scorpion, nominated by LittleJerry and Chiswick Chap

Scorpions are predatory arachnids of the order Scorpiones. They have eight legs, and are easily recognized by a pair of grasping pincers and a narrow, segmented tail, often carried in a characteristic forward curve over the back and ending with a stinger. They mainly live in deserts but have adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions, and can be found on all continents except Antarctica. There are over 2,500 described species, with 22 extant (living) families recognized to date.

Scorpions primarily prey on insects and other invertebrates, but some species take vertebrates. They use their pincers to restrain and kill prey. Scorpions themselves are preyed on by larger animals. The venomous sting can be used both for killing prey and for defense, however, the vast majority of species do not represent a serious threat to humans, and healthy adults usually do not need medical treatment after being stung.

Sonic the Hedgehog, nominated by TheJoebro64

Sonic the Hedgehog is a Japanese video game series and media franchise created and owned by Sega. The franchise follows Sonic, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who battles the evil Doctor Eggman, a mad scientist. The main Sonic the Hedgehog games are platformers mostly developed by Sonic Team; other games, developed by various studios, include spin-offs in the racing, fighting, party and sports genres. The franchise also incorporates printed media, animations, a 2020 feature film, and merchandise.

The first Sonic game, released in 1991 for the Sega Genesis, was developed after Sega requested a mascot character to compete with Nintendo's mascot Mario. Its success helped Sega become one of the leading video game companies during the fourth generation of video game consoles in the early 1990s. Sega Technical Institute developed the next three Sonic games, plus the spin-off Sonic Spinball (1993). After a hiatus during the unsuccessful Saturn era, the first major 3D Sonic game, Sonic Adventure, was released in 1998 for the Dreamcast. Sega exited the console market and shifted to third-party development in 2001, continuing the series on Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation systems.

Laguna del Maule (volcano), nominated by Jo-Jo Eumerus

Laguna del Maule is a volcanic field in the Andes mountain range of Chile, close to, and partly overlapping, the Argentina–Chile border, named after the Laguna del Maule lake within the field. The bulk of the volcanic field is in the Talca Province of Chile's Maule Region. It is a segment of the Southern Volcanic Zone, part of the Andean Volcanic Belt. The volcanic field covers an area of 500 square kilometres (190 sq mi) and features at least 130 volcanic vents. Volcanic activity has generated cones, lava domes, lava coulees and lava flows, which surround the Laguna del Maule lake. Between 2004 and 2007, ground inflation began in the volcanic field, indicating the intrusion of a sill beneath it. The rate of inflation is faster than those measured on other inflating volcanoes such as Uturunku in Bolivia and Yellowstone Caldera in the United States and has been accompanied by anomalies in soil gas emission and seismic activity. This pattern has created concern about the potential for impending large-scale eruptive activity.

Warner Bros. Movie World, nominated by CR4ZE

Warner Bros. Movie World is a theme park on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. Owned and operated by Village Roadshow's Theme Parks division, the park opened on 3 June 1991. It is part of a 154-hectare (380.5-acre) entertainment precinct, with the adjacent Village Roadshow Studios and nearby Wet'n'Wild Gold Coast, among other properties operated by Village. Movie World is Australia's only film-related theme park and the oldest of the Warner Bros. parks worldwide (the others are at Madrid and Abu Dhabi). As of 2016, it receives a yearly average of 1.4 million visitors.

Attractions range from thrill rides such as Batwing Spaceshot and Superman Escape to family attractions such as Wild West Falls Adventure Ride and Justice League: Alien Invasion 3D, entertainment at the Roxy Theatre and the Hollywood Stunt Driver live show. Among the six operating roller coasters, DC Rivals HyperCoaster is Australia's tallest, fastest and longest, and Green Lantern Coaster has the world's third-steepest drop angle. Film characters regularly roam the grounds to interact and take photos with guests. Each afternoon, characters participate in a parade along Main Street. The seasonal Fright Nights and White Christmas events are hosted annually.

An early-stage (Category I) Buruli ulcer. They're painless, just unpleasant.

Buruli ulcer, nominated by Ajpolino

Buruli ulcer is an infectious disease characterized by the development of painless open wounds. The disease is limited to certain areas of the world, most cases occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia. The first sign of infection is a small painless nodule or area of swelling, typically on the arms or legs. The nodule grows larger over days to weeks, eventually forming an open ulcer. Deep ulcers can cause scarring of muscles and tendons, resulting in permanent disability.

Buruli ulcer is caused by skin infection with bacteria called Mycobacterium ulcerans. The mechanism by which M. ulcerans is transmitted from the environment to humans is not known, but may involve the bite of an aquatic insect or the infection of open wounds. Once in the skin M. ulcerans grows and releases the toxin mycolactone, which blocks the normal function of cells, resulting in tissue death and immune suppression at the site of the ulcer.

The World Health Organization recommends treating Buruli ulcer with a combination of the antibiotics rifampicin and clarithromycin. With antibiotic administration and proper wound care, small ulcers typically heal within six months. Deep ulcers and those on sensitive body sites may require surgery to remove dead tissue or repair scarred muscles or joints. Even with proper treatment, Buruli ulcer can take months to heal. Regular cleaning and dressing of wounds aids healing and prevents secondary infections.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, nominated by Toccata quarta

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (born Leon Dudley Sorabji; 14 August 1892 – 15 October 1988) was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose musical output spanned eight decades and ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and for his large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and had a lifelong tendency to seclusion.

As a composer, Sorabji was largely self-taught. Although he was attracted to modernist aesthetics at first, he later dismissed much of the established and contemporary repertoire. He drew on diverse influences like Ferruccio Busoni, Claude Debussy and Karol Szymanowski and developed a style characterised by frequent polyrhythms, interplay of tonal and atonal elements and lavish ornamentation. Although he primarily composed for the piano, he also wrote orchestral, chamber and organ pieces. Sorabji has been likened to many of the composer-pianists he admired, including Franz Liszt and Charles-Valentin Alkan. Features of his works, not least their harmonic language and complex rhythms, anticipated trends in compositions from the mid-20th century onwards. His music remained largely unpublished until the early 2000s, but interest in it has grown since then.

2006 Football League Championship play-off Final, nominated by The Rambling Man

The 2006 Football League Championship play-off Final was an association football match which was played on 21 May 2006 at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, between Leeds United and Watford. The match was to determine the third and final team to gain promotion from the Football League Championship, the second tier of English football, to the FA Premiership. Reading and Sheffield United, the top two teams of the 2005–06 Football League Championship season, gained automatic promotion to the Premiership, while the clubs placed from third to sixth place in the table took part in play-off semi-finals. Third-placed Watford defeated fourth-placed Preston North End in the first semi-final, while fifth-placed Leeds beat sixth-placed Crystal Palace. The winners of these semi-finals competed for the final place for the 2006–07 season in the Premiership. Watford won the match 3–0, with opening goalscorer Jay DeMerit named man of the match. Leeds goalkeeper Neil Sullivan scored an own goal to make the score 2–0 to Watford after 60 minutes, and the final goal was a penalty kick scored by Darius Henderson.

Cover of the first issue of Imaginative Tales from September 1954. The caption... charmingly?... reads, "The devastating H-bomb redhead fused to explode – men. (Brother, that's you!)" - to which I can only shake my head, vaguely amused at the ridiculousness of the past.

Imaginative Tales, nominated by Mike Christie

Imaginative Tales was an American fantasy and science fiction magazine launched in September 1954 by William Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing Company. It was created as a sister magazine to Imagination, which Hamling had acquired from Raymond A. Palmer's Clark Publishing. Imaginative Tales began as a vehicle for novel-length humorous fantasy, early issues featuring stories by Charles F. Myers and Robert Bloch. After a year, Hamling switched the focus to science fiction and it became similar in content to Imagination, publishing routine space operas. In 1958, with public interest in space high, Hamling changed the title to Space Travel, but there was little effect on sales. Magazine circulation was suffering because of the rise of the paperback, and the liquidation in 1957 of American News Company, a major magazine distributor, made it even harder for small magazines to survive. Hamling eventually folded both Imaginative Tales and Imagination in 1958, preferring to invest the money in Rogue, a men's magazine he had started in imitation of Playboy in 1955.

John Young (astronaut), nominated by Balon Greyjoy

John Watts Young (September 24, 1930 – January 5, 2018) was an American astronaut, naval officer and aviator, test pilot, and aeronautical engineer, and the ninth person to walk on the Moon. In 1962, Young was selected as a member of NASA Astronaut Group 2. He flew on the first crewed Gemini mission in 1965, and then commanded the 1966 Gemini 10 mission. In 1969, he flew as the command module pilot on Apollo 10. After that, he commanded Apollo 16, and spent three days on the lunar surface exploring the Descartes Highlands with Charles Duke. Young also commanded STS-1 in 1981, the Space Shuttle program's first launch, and STS-9 in 1983, both of which were on Columbia. Young served as Chief of the Astronaut Office from 1974 to 1987, and retired from NASA in 2004. He died in 2018 at the age of 87.

Portsmouth War Memorial, nominated by HJ Mitchell

The City of Portsmouth War Memorial, also referred to as the Guildhall Square War Memorial, is a First World War memorial in Guildhall Square in the centre of Portsmouth, Hampshire, on the south coast of England. Portsmouth was and remains a port and home to a major naval dockyard. The dockyard and the armed forces provided much of the employment in the area in the early 20th century. As such, the town suffered significant losses in the First World War. Planning for a war memorial began shortly after the end of the conflict and a committee was established for the purpose. It selected a site adjacent to a railway embankment close to the Town Hall (renamed the Guildhall in 1926 when Portsmouth was granted city status) and chose the architects James Gibson and Walter Gordon, with sculptural elements by Charles Sargeant Jagger, from an open competition.

The memorial consists of a semi-circular sunken recess (exedra) with a screen wall. Bronze panels fixed to the wall list the names of the dead. Archways in the wall lead out of Guildhall Square towards Victoria Park and the railway station, and balustrades lead away back into Guildhall Square, terminating in sculptures by Jagger of a life-size soldier and sailor with machine guns. In the centre is a cenotaph surmounted with an urn and decorated on the sides with relief carvings of wartime scenes. Prince Arthur unveiled the memorial on 19 October 1921, before its completion.

2018 EFL League Two play-off Final, nominated by Amakuru

The 2018 EFL League Two play-off Final was an association football match played on 28 May 2018 at Wembley Stadium, London, between Coventry City and Exeter City. The match determined the fourth and final team to gain promotion from EFL League Two, English football's fourth tier, to EFL League One. Coventry won 3–1 to earn promotion to the 2018–19 EFL League One. It was their first promotion for 51 years since being guided by Jimmy Hill into the 1967–68 Football League First Division. Marc McNulty, the Coventry striker was named the man of the match.

"New Romantics" (song), nominated by HĐ

"New Romantics" is a song recorded by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift for the deluxe edition of her fifth studio album, 1989 (2014). It was written by Swift alongside its producers, Max Martin and Shellback. The song's title is a reference to the New Romantic cultural movement of the 1970s and 1980s; the new wave musical style of that era influenced the song's synth-pop production. The lyrics find Swift reigniting her hopes and energy after having endured emotional hardships. "New Romantics" was made available for digital download as a promotional single on March 3, 2015, by Big Machine Records. It was released to US radio as the seventh and final single from 1989 on February 23, 2016, by Republic Records in partnership with Big Machine.

Featured pictures

27 featured pictures were promoted this period.

• 
  Mohawkite, by Alchemist-hp
• 
  Apollo 4 launch, by NASA
• 
  Hawksbill sea turtle, by Anna Varona
• 
  Physalis peruviana, by Ivar Leidus
• 
  Simone Veil, by Rob Croes for Anefo, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Utah monolith, by Patrickamackie2
• 
  Jacques Isnardon, by Atelier Nadar, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Cliffs and coastline in the Jasmund National Park, by Moahim
• 
  Size comparison of NASA spacecraft, by Davis Paul Meltzer for NASA
• 
  Kaʻiulani. Unknown photographer, restored by Mark Miller
• 
  Entrance hall of the Eureka Inn, by Frank Schulenburg
• 
  The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam, by Carl Blechen, 1834
• 
  Acanthemblemaria spinosa, the spinyhead blenny, by q-phia
• 
  Himalayan salt, by Ivar Leidus
• Collapse of the Arecibo Telescope, by the National Science Foundation
• 
  Wesley Bell, by Jamelle Bouie, edited Bammesk
• 
  Poster for Victor Herbert's The Fortune Teller, by The U.S. Lithograph Co., restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Fumarole formation of tazieffite acicular crystals, by Ppm61
• 
  Bicycle crankset, by Petar Milošević
• 
  Poster for the 1933 film State Fair, by Twentieth Century–Fox Film Corp [sic], restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Svan peasant in traditional dress. Unknown photographer, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Mistletoebird, by JJ Harrison
• 
  Nassau grouper, by q-phia
• 
  Valerie Thomas next to a stack of the Landsat Computer Compatible Tapes she worked out the image formats for. Photograph by NASA, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Poster for Arthur Sullivan's The Contrabandista by Robert Jacob Hamerton, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  Set design for Act 2 of La bohème by Adolfo Hohenstein, restored by Adam Cuerden
• 
  San Francisco cable car, by Thomas Wolf

Featured lists

18 featured lists were promoted this period. An additional one, which was promoted 3 January, was included to complete a set.

The beautiful demoiselle (Calopteryx virgo) is one of the most common species of Odonata in Slovenia

List of Odonata species of Slovenia, nominated by Yerpo

The Odonata species of Slovenia include 72 species of dragonflies and damselflies (Slovene: kačji pastirji) for which reliable records exist from the present territory of Slovenia, including one that has not been seen since the 1960s and is presumed extirpated (locally extinct), but may have simply been overlooked. The list is based on two reference works: Atlas of the Dragonflies (Odonata) of Slovenia, a joint publication from 1997 of the Slovene Odonatological Society and the Slovene Centre for Cartography of Fauna and Flora, and the newer Atlas of the European dragonflies and damselflies (2015), supported by other, more recent publications in which new species found after 1997 were documented.

List of What Would You Do? episodes, nominated by Some Dude From North Carolina

What Would You Do? (commonly abbreviated as WWYD, and formerly known as Primetime: What Would You Do? through the program's fifth season) is an American situational hidden camera television series that has been broadcast on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) since February 26, 2008. Created by Chris Whipple, the show follows the reactions of passing strangers as they encounter conflict or illegal activity in a public setting, unaware that its all staged and being recorded with hidden cameras. Throughout all of its sixteen seasons, the show has been hosted by news correspondent John Quiñones

The Mir Castle Complex is one of the World Heritage Sites in Belarus

List of World Heritage Sites in Belarus, nominated by Tone

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites are places of importance to cultural or natural heritage as described in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, established in 1972. Belarus accepted the convention on 12 October 1988, making its natural and historical sites eligible for inclusion on the list. As of 2020, there are four World Heritage Sites in Belarus. The first site in Belarus added to the list was the Białowieża Forest in 1992, representing an extension to the site previously listed in Poland in 1979. This is the only natural site in Belarus, the other three are cultural. In addition to Białowieża Forest, the Struve Geodetic Arc is also a transnational site, and is shared with nine other countries. As of 2020, Belarus has five sites listed on the tentative list, all were added in 2004.

List of Burnley F.C. managers, nominated by WA8MTWAYC

Burnley Football Club is an English professional association football club based in the town of Burnley, Lancashire. Founded on 18 May 1882, the club was one of the first to become professional (in 1883), putting pressure on the Football Association to permit payments to players. As a result, the team were able to enter the FA Cup for the first time in 1885–86, and were one of the twelve founding members of the Football League in 1888–89. Burnley have played in the top four tiers of English football from 1888 to the present day. The team have been champions of England twice, in 1920–21 and 1959–60, have won the FA Cup once, in 1913–14, and have won the FA Charity Shield twice, in 1960 and 1973. Burnley were the second, and are one of only five teams to have won all four professional divisions of English football, along with Wolverhampton Wanderers, Preston North End, Sheffield United and Portsmouth.

Dayahang Rai at the International Theater Festival in 2019

Dayahang Rai filmography, nominated by CAPTAIN MEDUSA

Dayahang Rai is a Nepalese actor, director and play writer known for his work in Nepali cinemas. He is one of the most popular and acclaimed actors in Nepal. He has starred in 40 plus films and is one of the leading contemporary actors in Nepal. Dayahang rose to prominence from the television series Yuva, Dalan and Hamro Team. His first leading role in a film was in Anagarik (2006) and had only one successful film Dasdhunga (2010) to his name but the 2012 Industry Hit film Loot (2012) marked turning point in his career and since then has starred in successful films Chhadke (2013), Badhshala (2013), Karkash (2013), Jholey (2014), Kabaddi (2013) and its sequels Kabaddi Kabaddi (2015) and Kabbadi Kabbadi Kabbadi (2019), Talakjung vs Tulke (2014), Woda Number 6 (2015), How Funny (2016), Bir Bikram (2016), Loot 2 (2017), Kaanchi (2018) and Jatrai Jatra (2019). He has starred in the film White Sun (2016) which was his first film that was entry of Nepal for Academy Awards.

Dayahang Rai is also the recipient of numerous awards including three National Awards for Best Supporting Actor in 2009 for Dasdhunga, Best Actor in 2015 for Sambodhan, and Best Actor in 2016 for Kabaddi Kabaddi. (Text from Dayahang Rai for reason of length and wanting to accurately hit career highlights))

List of Billboard number-one country songs of 1949, nominated by ChrisTheDude

In 1949 Billboard magazine published three charts covering the best-performing country music songs in the United States. At the start of the year, the magazine published two charts covering the genre: Most-Played Juke Box Folk Records, which had appeared in Billboard since 1944, and Best Selling Folk Retail Records, which had debuted in 1948. With effect from the issue of the magazine dated June 25, Billboard began using the term "country and western" for the first time in the titles of the charts, renaming the juke box chart to Most-Played Juke Box (Country & Western) Records and the best sellers chart to Best-Selling Retail Folk (Country & Western) Records. In December the magazine added a third country chart when it began publishing the Country & Western Records Most Played By Folk Disk Jockeys listing. All three charts are considered part of the lineage of the current Hot Country Songs chart, which was first published in 1958.

Dimple Kapadia at the Pichvai Exhibition, 2018

Dimple Kapadia filmography, nominated by Shahid

Dimple Kapadia (born 8 June 1957) is an Indian actress who predominantly appears in Hindi films. She was discovered at age 14 by Raj Kapoor, who cast her in the title role of his teen romance Bobby (1973), which achieved commercial success and gained her wide public recognition. In the same year, she married the Indian actor Rajesh Khanna and retired from acting. Kapadia returned to films in 1984, two years after her separation from Khanna. Her comeback film Saagar, which was released a year later, revived her career. Both Bobby and Saagar won her Filmfare Awards for Best Actress. Through her work over the decade, she established herself as one of Hindi cinema's leading female actors.

Kapadia's initial roles often relied on her perceived beauty and sex appeal but she was keen to challenge herself and expand her range. She took on more serious parts of troubled women in films ranging from mainstream to neorealist parallel cinema, and received acclaim for her performances in films including Kaash (1987), Drishti (1990), Lekin... (1991), and Rudaali (1993). For her role as a professional mourner in Rudaali, she won the National Film Award for Best Actress and the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress. Kapadia followed with supporting roles in Gardish (1993) and Krantiveer (1994), the latter of which garnered her a fourth Filmfare Award.

Starting in the 1990s, Kapadia became more selective about her roles, and her work over the following decades was infrequent, with substantial gaps, but included several notable films, such as Dil Chahta Hai (2001) Leela (2002), Luck by Chance (2009), Finding Fanny (2014), and, most recently, the Christopher Nolan film Tenet (film) (2020). (Text largely from Dimple Kapadia, for reason of length and wanting to accurately hit career highlights)

List of operas by Carl Maria von Weber, nominated by Aza24

The German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) is best known for his operas, of which he wrote 10 between 1798 and 1826. His first four exist in various states: Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins (comp. 1798) is completely lost; two fragments survive for Das Waldmädchen (1800); the libretto to Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn (1803) is lost; and only three numbers from Rübezahl (comp. 1804–05) survive. Weber's mature operas – Silvana (1810), Abu Hassan (1811), Der Freischütz (1821), Die drei Pintos (comp. 1820–21), Euryanthe (1823), Oberon (1826) – all survive intact; they were all performed within his lifetime, except Die drei Pintos which was posthumously completed by Gustav Mahler. His contributions to the genre were crucial in the development of German Romantische Oper (German Romantic Opera) and its national identity, exhibiting much influence on Richard Wagner. Der Freischütz, his most famous and significant work, remains among the most revered German operas.

Lithograph of Greif (left), Meteor (center), and Jagd (right) by Willy Stöwer

List of avisos of Germany, nominated by Parsecboy

The German navies, beginning with the Prussian Navy in the 1840s, acquired a series of avisos for use in a variety of roles, including as scouts, flagships for gunboat flotillas, and dispatch vessels. The first such vessel, SMS Preussischer Adler, was a packet steamer requisitioned for service during the First Schleswig War in 1848, though she returned to civilian duty after the war. In 1850, the Prussians ordered a pair of small vessels—the Nix class—from Britain; like Preussicher Adler, these were both paddle steamers. The first screw-driven aviso followed in 1856: the French-built Grille. Another paddle steamer, Loreley, was laid down in 1858, the first vessel of the type built in a German shipyard. Many of these vessels served as yachts for the royal and later imperial family. During the Second Schleswig War, Loreley and Preussischer Adler saw action at the Battles of Jasmind and Heligoland, respectively.

At the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the Prussians purchased Falke and requisitioned Pommerania. Grille engaged French forces in the Baltic during the war, but the rest of the fleet's avisos saw little activity in the conflict. Zieten, the first torpedo-armed aviso to be built for what was now the German Imperial Navy, was also the last major warship to be built abroad for the Imperial German fleet. The 1880s saw a significant aviso construction program that included two Blitz-class avisos, Greif, two Wacht-class avisos, and two Meteor-class avisos. The latter two classes were disappointments in service owing to their small size, insufficient speed, and in the case of the Meteors, excessive vibration from their engines. SMS Hela, the last vessel of the type to be built for the Imperial fleet, was completed in 1895. The Germans thereafter built light cruisers that fulfilled the roles occupied by the avisos; the first of these, the Gazelle class, combined the best features of Hela with those of contemporary unprotected cruisers. Hela was herself sunk in September 1914 during World War I; the other vessels still in service saw little active use during the war and were all broken up afterward.

One final vessel, Grille, was built in the mid-1930s for use as a yacht for Adolf Hitler. During World War II, she was used as a minelayer, a training ship, and a stationary headquarters ship in Norway before being seized by Britain. She was sold after the war to a private owner and was ultimately scrapped in 1951.

List of Xevious media, nominated by Namcokid47

Xevious is a shoot 'em up video game franchise published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, formerly Namco. The eponymous first entry was released for arcades in January 1983 in Japan and a month later in North America by Atari. It was created by Masanobu Endo, who is also known as the creator of The Tower of Druaga The game received multiple sequels, spin-offs, and re-imaginings, the latest being Xevious Resurrection from 2009. Xevious games have been ported to many platforms and compiled into several Namco compilations. The franchise contains twelve games—seven mainline entries and five spin-offs—soundtrack albums, pachinko machines, and an animated feature film produced by Groove Corporation.

Gameplay in the series consists of controlling a spaceship named the Solvalou throughout a series of levels, shooting at enemies and avoiding their projectiles. Critics have retrospectively labeled it as being among the most important games of its kind. It is credited as the first vertical-scrolling shooter, and among the first video games to implement bosses and a cohesive world and storyline. Xevious inspired games such as Gradius, TwinBee, Zanac, and RayForce.

Jennifer Doudna, Pomona College class of 1985, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on CRISPR-based gene engineering, one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology.

List of Pomona College people, nominated by Sdkb

Pomona College is an elite private liberal arts college in Claremont, California, and the founding member of the Claremont Colleges. Many notable individuals have been affiliated with the college as graduates, non-graduating attendees, faculty, staff, or administrators. Since its founding in 1887, Pomona has graduated 127 classes of students. As of the fall 2020 semester, the college enrolls approximately 1,460 students and has roughly 25,000 living alumni.

List of plant genus names (A–C), nominated by Johnboddie, and List of plant genus names (L–P) and List of plant genus names (Q–Z), nominated by Dank

See "List of plant genus names (D–K)" in last issue. Now, I don't want to diminish the achievement these featured lists represent: lists are only divided up when amount of content is simply too large to put on one webpage - even within the limits these lists set, which, for example, unlike my old biology professor, don't put the fungi under plants, and don't appear to include synonyms or obsolete names - is a ridiculously massive project, with around 600 meticulously-referenced and documented items in each of these pages, with a total of 2450 plant genera over the four lists. However, while each of them is rightfully a featured list in their own right, they are, at the same time, parts of the same, larger list, with pretty much exactly the same introduction. And it's the introduction we quote here, not the masses of work after that. Unless we write a description like this one, I suppose.

List of Vampire: The Masquerade books, nominated by Alexandra IDV

Vampire: The Masquerade is a tabletop role-playing game in the World of Darkness series, in which players take the roles of vampires. It was originally released by White Wolf Publishing in 1991, and new editions were released in 1992 (second edition), 1998 (Revised Edition), 2011 (20th Anniversary Edition), and 2018 (fifth edition), each of which updated the game rules.

Supplementary game books include: the By Night series, each of which cover a real-world city, and describe how it is handled within the setting; the Clanbook series, covering the vampire clans; guides to the game; sourcebooks for sects and factions; and various other books. The supplements often introduce gradual change to the game's setting, advancing the overarching narrative. Adventure modules have been released, but only rarely, as White Wolf Publishing has preferred to let storytellers construct their own adventures, an uncommon choice in tabletop role-playing games that they could afford due to the World of Darkness series' success and longevity.

91st Academy Awards, nominated by Birdienest81

The 91st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 2018 and took place on February 24, 2019, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonly referred to as Oscars) in 24 categories. The ceremony was televised in the United States by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and was produced by Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss, with Weiss also serving as director. This was the first telecast to have no host since the 61st ceremony held in 1989.

Green Book won three awards including Best Picture. Other winners included Bohemian Rhapsody with four awards, Black Panther and Roma with three awards, and Bao, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, First Man, Free Solo, If Beale Street Could Talk, Period. End of Sentence., Skin, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, A Star Is Born, and Vice with one. The telecast garnered 29.56 million viewers in the United States.

The meerkat, seen looking up at the two spots I already discussed List of herpestids, is one of the herpestids that I haven't used to illustrate the same writeup yet.

List of herpestids, nominated by PresN

This list appeared in both of the previous two featured content reports. With different herpestids illustrating it. See, last issue covered things from 12 November to 11 December, but the lists are assembled from Wikipedia:Goings-on which archives in convenient one-week archives, which start on a Sunday, and 12 November is a Thursday, meaning I should have ignored anything from that week that promoted before Thursday. But having failed to do that for "List of herpestids" once already ...Well, it seems a shame to break a tradition at this point.

List of Billboard number-one country songs of 1950, nominated by ChrisTheDude

In 1950, Billboard magazine published three charts covering the best-performing country music songs in the United States: Most-Played Juke Box (Country & Western) Records, Best-Selling Retail Folk (Country & Western) Records, and Country & Western Records Most Played By Folk Disk Jockeys. The juke box chart was compiled based on a "weekly survey among a selected group of jukebox operators whose locations require country and western records", the best sellers chart based on a "survey among a selected group of retail stores, the majority of whose customers purchase country and western records", and the jockeys chart based on a "weekly survey among a select list of over 400 disk jockeys specializing in country and western tunes". All three charts are considered part of the lineage of the current Hot Country Songs chart, which was first published in 1958.

In the first issue of Billboard of 1950, Christmas songs were at number one on two charts, with "Blue Christmas" by Ernest Tubb in the top spot on the juke box chart and Gene Autry's recording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" atop the jockeys chart. The number one on the best sellers chart was "Slipping Around" by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, which had held the top spot since the previous October. The longest-running number one of 1950 on all three charts was "I'm Movin' On" by Canadian singer Hank Snow, which spent 14 weeks in the top spot on the juke box chart, 18 on the best sellers listing, and 17 on the jockeys chart. The song would spend three further weeks at number one on the best sellers chart in 1951, tying the record set in 1948 by Eddy Arnold's "I'll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)" for the highest number of weeks spent at number one on any one of Billboard's country singles charts. Red Foley spent the highest total number of weeks at number one on both the juke box and best sellers charts in 1950, topping each for 19 weeks. He also had the highest number of individual chart-toppers on each of the two listings, with four and three respectively. On the jockeys chart, Hank Williams was the only artist with more than one number one hit, and he also spent the most weeks at number one, totalling 19 weeks in the top spot with his three chart-toppers.

List of Bluey (2018 TV series) episodes, nominated by SatDis

Bluey is an Australian animated television series for preschool children that premiered on ABC Kids on 1 October 2018. The series was created by Joe Brumm with Queensland production group Ludo Studio. The show follows Bluey, an anthropomorphic six-year-old Blue Heeler puppy who is characterised by her abundance of energy, imagination and curiosity of the world. The young dog lives with her father, Bandit; mother, Chilli; and younger sister, Bingo, who regularly joins Bluey on adventures as the pair embark on imaginative play together. Other characters featured are each depicted as a different dog breed, some inspired by dogs from Brumm's childhood. Overarching themes include the influence of a supportive family, Australian culture, and the importance of play throughout childhood.

List of diplomatic missions of Taiwan, nominated by MSG17

Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, has 112 diplomatic missions across the world as of December 2020. Due to the One-China policy, other countries are only allowed to maintain relations with either Taiwan or the mainland-based People's Republic of China. As most countries have changed their recognition to the latter over time, only 17 of Taiwan's diplomatic missions have official status, consisting of fifteen embassies and two consulate-generals. This makes Taiwan one of the few countries in the world that has resident embassies in all of the states with which it has formal diplomatic relations.

Despite these barriers, 57 United Nations members maintain relations with Taiwan on an unofficial basis. In addition, Taiwan has informal relations with Somaliland, a state that is not internationally recognized by any other country, including China. To serve these locations and other places throughout the world, 92 semi-official representative offices are utilized for matters that would otherwise be handled by embassies or consulates. Their heads are still appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, making them de facto missions. Owing to pressure from China, most of these offices cannot operate under either the country's official or common name, using the name of the capital Taipei instead to avoid addressing Taiwan's political status. The only exception is the representative office in Somaliland, which has "Taiwan" in its name.

Not a featured picture or anything. I just figure we need a bit of a celebration for finally getting through 2020, and this picture of my city in the beforetimes will hopefully remind us all of the big celebrations we will soon be able to have again.

In the meantime, let's let the old year burn. Happy Hogmanay, everyone, and let's hope this reads as well when this is published as it did when I wrote it on the 2nd of January.

Reader comments

2021-01-31

The most viewed articles of 2020

By Igordebraga, A lad insane, Benmite, Mcrsftdog, Kingsif, Rebestalic and Serendipodous

This traffic report is adapted from the 2020 Top 50 Report, prepared with commentary by:

•   A lad insane
•   Benmite
•   Igordebraga
•   Mcrsftdog

•   Kingsif
•   Rebestalic
•   Serendipodous

Holy cheese.

2020 in a nutshell? There's a reason "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" hit the charts again near the start of the year: so much happened that for the first time in the (short) history of this list, more than 50 articles got over 10 million unique views! But the top 50 most-viewed Wikipedia articles give an insight into what was going on in the world, as if there won't be countless history books devoted to each season. Unsurprisingly, the list is largely dominated by the pandemic, you know, that thing, and the election. The U.S. one. Two events that really hold the fate of the world in the balance, with over 200 million combined views for the major players: the pandemic, the outgoing president, deaths in 2020, and the incoming Pres and VP take the top 5 spots. Among the many other COVID-19 related articles on the list are those specific to the United States and India, where large numbers of Wikipedia readers are. And in a year when celebrity deaths have all but been knocked off the list thanks to pandemic and election, it's a few faces from these countries – and Scotland – that appear. Legendary Bond Sean Connery finds a place, as does the three-named Bollywood star Sushant Singh Rajput and some American icons better known by shortened names: Kobe, Chadwick, and RBG. The first two Yanks were young Black icons, and didn't die of coronavirus, nor from racial violence, something that exploded in the second quarter and led to other entries about police killing innocents. Not-so-innocent on the list are convicted criminals like Jeffrey Epstein, posthumously embroiled in one of several conspiracy theories, and Joe Exotic, star of a Netflix docuseries. It's the popularity of outgoing President Trump dragging up those other conspiracies, though, while streaming film and TV is also responsible for other entries like the Royal Family and Alexander Hamilton (an unlikely pairing!) getting a lot of views. Entertainment appears on the list in other ways. Remember going to the movies? Large events with lots of people? Well, this list will surely remind you as there's Parasite, the Oscar Best Picture winner from February, and Grammy-winner Billie Eilish taking spots. In sport, we also have LeBron becoming winning-est, though behind closed doors, and CR7 still scoring his goals. And finally, in a tiny glimmer of hope for this list becoming mainstream, YouTube gets a place for cancelling its Rewind. Maybe they thought summarizing this year would be too challenging, but no, not us.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About	Peak
1	COVID-19 pandemic		83,764,908		Easily the defining event of the chaotic year that is 2020, Anno Domini. With the index case recorded on New Years' Eve 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has infected possibly up to ten percent of the world population when factoring undiagnosed cases, killed more than a million, forced restrictions on movement across the entire globe, and caused the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The pandemic has forced countless events to make compromises on audience size and format, if not to be cancelled altogether; everything from the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards to many, many funerals, weddings and the like. Near the start of the year, I remember planning a commentary just for this article, for this year's Top 50; I included a placeholder phrase, that reads "The pandemic finally turned to humanity's favour by...". Many months later, the pandemic has not turned to humanity's favour at all, with a daily new diagnosed case count of six hundred thousand cases per day (that's more than the population of some minor cities) that's very likely to keep on rising unrestrained.	Mar. 12 (one day after WHO declares it a pandemic)
2	Donald Trump		57,061,632		Well, he got what he wanted. After years of declining Wikipedia views, from a high of 75 million in 2016 to a low of 15 million last year, the man whose sole goal in life is to be mollycoddled and adored by everyone he encounters shot back to the top, only beaten by a virus whose manifest dangers he has steadfastly downplayed. Assuming the laws of the United States are upheld, he is now nearing the end of his Presidency and so one might consider it a fair time to assess his performance over the last four years. Nonetheless, to paraphrase True Grit, let us restrict our events to 2020 so we may have a manageable figure. Prior to the 2020 election, there were ten spikes in the President’s view count. The first when he ordered the assassination of Iran's security and intelligence chief; the second when he was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress; the third was when he visited India; the fourth when he claimed, against all evidence, that the death rate from coronavirus in the United States was “a fraction of one percent”; the fifth was when he used stun grenades and tear gas against peaceful protestors for a photo op; the sixth was the publication of his niece Mary Trump’s tell-all book; the seventh was when he signed an order banning TikTok in the United States; the eighth was during the 2020 Republican National Convention; the ninth marked his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court and his first presidential debate against Joe Biden; the tenth his second debate. But of course, it was the election that drove views to his page more than anything else, and in particular his refusal to concede, which has ensured his time in the limelight is as long as possible.	Nov. 10 (starts lawsuits alleging election fraud)
3	Deaths in 2020		43,569,558		The baby boomer generation, the generation that coupled with increasing medical capabilities to kick-start the population boom, is finally reaching an age near the average life expectancy, and the rise in celebrity culture (ensuring there were more people to hear about and thus notice the deaths of) combined with that to ramp up the recent perceived and actual death rate worldwide. For whatever reason, this ramping up seemed to come flying out of the gate in 2016 with David Bowie and hasn't cooled off since. This year in particular though, even compared to the few years previous, was aided by the pandemic you've surely heard about by now to take quite a heavy toll on the numbers of the living – Ruth Bader Ginsburg (#38 on this list), Alex Trebek, Ellis Marsalis Jr., and Kobe Bryant (#7 on the list) were just a few of the famous that chose this year to shuffle off the mortal coil.	Apr. 2
4	Kamala Harris		39,467,219		Like everyone, the Vice President-Elect and President-Elect – to everyone except the outgoing, at least – have been through hardships this year. Sure, they got to travel more than most, but they had to do that to be in close proximity to people who've touched the White House recently. Biden and Harris first entered the news as likely-to-bes in the Democratic primaries, which Biden won; of all the runners-up, he picked Harris as his running-mate in August. The pair have been in and out of the news as they ventured along the campaign trail, with their families also picked up for consideration as their opposition variously questioned Harris's country of birth based on nothing but the color of her skin – Harris is proudly the child of immigrants – and called into question Biden's position on national security because of son Hunter's emails that Trump lawyers apparently unearthed but ironically wouldn't let anyone see. Not that these fabricated scandals seem to change the final vote that, shortly after the pair released their tax returns, took several days to make official but saw them elected with the highest vote count of any presidential ticket, ever. Their victory speeches, and Harris's outfit for hers, the first given by a VP-Elect, have also been in the news, applauded worldwide for actually appearing presidential.	Nov. 8 (won presidential election)
5	Joe Biden		35,416,621
6	Coronavirus		33,689,841		Undoubtedly nothing was more important in 2020 than avoiding one of these microscopic things that causes respiratory diseases, more specifically the one called SARS-CoV-2. A successor to the virus that caused the SARS outbreak nearly 20 years ago, it mutated from bats and possibly pangolins (no, it wasn't man-made in Kazakhstan out of gypsy tears!) and after first showing up in a wet market in Wuhan wound up spreading worldwide. After derailing our year, it's certain we can't wait to hear to word "corona" and only think of Mexican beer and Italian music.	Jan. 27 (first COVID case in Canada)
7	Kobe Bryant		33,298,596		The first terrible event of 2020 A.D. that had a profound effect on me. On the day that legendary American basketball player Kobe Bryant's death was announced and circulating in the media, I remember waking up and reading the news as I usually do and seeing the headlines, which were all about him. I was a bit shocked. What a great player. Nowadays, remembering all those memories where people in my locality hung out and took three-pointer shots and said 'Kobe' just for good luck, I can't help but feel a bit weird.	Jan. 26 (died)
8	COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory		29,637,765		One advantage of a totalitarian state is that when a strict lockdown order is put into place for public safety, there's not too many peeps from the public about violations of freedom. There are, however, other ways of achieving this benefit – say, for example, widespread knowledge of basic epidemiology and/or well-funded public health campaigns. However achieved, the ability of a country to reach this standard seemed to have a rather large impact on how well their citizens fared this year against the COVID-19 pandemic. China for instance, who logically would be the worst hit given the large population and that it was the location of the epicenter, managed to stave off the worst of the care rationing, even if that meant flooding patients into hastily built hospitals. Italy, on the other hand, didn't fare even that well.	Apr. 3 (continues to escalate)
9	Elizabeth II		26,481,926		I have always wondered what it is like to be Elizabeth II. To be born into the highest privilege, but to be handed a job for life you didn't ask for, can't change and have only limited control over who succeeds you. The entire monarchy have been thrown to the wind by the era of the self-made individual, as the decision early this year by her grandson Prince Harry, in part due to the media scrutiny on his wife, Meghan Markle, to step down from royalty and actually become a contributing member of society is the starkest reminder of this yet. Her reaction to this "crisis" led to a view spike in the month of January, as did a fleeting suggestion in April that she might have COVID. She did not, and continued stoically with her duties, providing more view spikes with her speeches concerning the COVID crisis, on her birthday(s) (she has two, poor thing) and on VE Day, as well as marking 25,000 days on this singularly bizarre job. But let's not kid ourselves. The real reason she's on this list is the same reason the rest of her family is: The Crown, Netflix's fawning, forelock-tugging hagiography of her interminable time in office. It's somewhat telling, I think, that we prefer a fictional version of her to the real thing.	Nov. 20 (shortly after The Crown (season 4))
10	2020 United States presidential election		25,765,871		Biden won, so note that down. This. This was a wild ride. So what you need to know really started back in 2016 when Trump won and took some swing states with him. But maybe we'll skip to 2018 when Arizona elected a Democratic senator for the first time in forever, shortly after John McCain died. What does this have to do with anything, you ask? These two events lay the groundwork for a growing body of Latino and Native voters actually not being disenfranchised and voting, and for Trump dissing McCain enough to turn Arizona Republicans off of him. Arizona, a traditionally Republican state, wasn't even listed as a major swing state going into the 2020 vote count, but as a Democrat-lean state. It took them forever to count but they finally decided that they did vote for Biden. This is the same kind of voter narrative – anti-Trump Republicans and demographic enfranchising – that played out across a lot of more Republican areas that won the election for Biden. It just can't be pinned down to two moments in other states like it can with the Sinema/McCain duology. Cut to the middle of 2020. Obviously, Trump (or someone in his campaign) saw a lot of this progress and tried their best to stop it from happening (late in the day), be it begging white women to vote for him or blocking mail-in ballots and encouraging racial violence on election day. He still refuses to admit he lost, and keeps demanding recounts. By my count, we've watched him lose nearly 50 times. Despite that embarrassment, he wants his legal challenges against nearly every state that voted for Biden to be taken seriously. That's hard to do when the man announcing the lawsuits is making his big speech by some flyers out the back of a garage of a landscaping company next to a porn shop in an industrial unit in suburban Philly. That all happened, I promise you. Oh, and a soft reminder that like 47% of voters still picked Trump even after the poor pandemic handling and nearly causing WW3 on January 2nd, so that might be something to look at.	Nov. 4 (day after voting)
11	Spanish flu		23,018,236		While there were other pandemics since this one from almost exactly 100 years ago, they all could be (and were) ignored by the most vocal and privileged sector of the world. Ebola was "that African disease", AIDS was just "the gay sickness", and cholera was "a third-world issue". Not quite so easy to pooh-pooh when world leaders – then Woodrow Wilson and King Alfonso XIII, now Boris Johnson and Donald Trump – publicly fall ill, masks promoted in public safety to everyone, and it can't immediately be stabbed away with a vaccine. There are other similarities between the pandemic of current and this one of past – each embedded into the public's mind alongside a nationality, both shuttered schools – but with 100 extra years of science, hopefully we can all avoid the numerous waves of 1920 that vaguely resembled an especially roused basketball stadium.	Mar. 22 (COVID escalates)
12	Elon Musk		22,517,107		We finally got to see this magnate’s full metamorphosis from goofy, internet-beloved, mumble rapping, occasionally reefer-smoking, pronoun-hating, relatable-if-you're-a-gamer-in-the-one-percent wealth hoarder anime cat girl to full-on supervillain or superhero, depending on where you stand. Musk's biggest appearance in the headlines might have been because of his and his garden fairy wife giving birth to the world's first human computer virus (and/or living meme), X Æ A-12, but based on his appearance on this list, that clearly wasn’t all he was doing. At the top of the year, we were treated to Musk dancing in Shanghai for our viewing pleasure, but mostly for our viewing pain, in a style that could only reasonably be described as "creepy but sometimes funny uncle at a barbecue". The quality of his dancing was akin to that of the rest of the year, though maybe not for Elon: he became the second-richest man on the planet, SpaceX became the first privately-owned company to send astronauts into orbit and to the International Space Station and launched the first manned spacecraft on American soil in nearly a decade with the test flight Crew Dragon Demo-2, Tesla became the most valuable car company ever, Neuralink unveiled a nifty, totally-not-dystopian brain chip, likened by Musk to a "Fitbit in your skull", meant to enhance the abilities of humans to rival that of the rapidly-growing capabilities of artificial intelligence (just look at Microsoft's Tay!), and Musk himself gave birth. Well, he didn't give birth, but you get what I mean. His run was not without some very public blunders, though. He endorsed his friend Kanye West's publicity stunt—I mean presidency and was confronted by scientists and ministers, but perhaps his most egregious mistake was being so cavalier about COVID-19. Musk spent a good portion of the year mimicking Trump's response to the pandemic by simply pretending that it was barely happening at all, defying orders to close his Tesla factory which he called "fascist" and, when the pandemic was right around the corner, tweeting out that the panic surrounding it was "dumb". His refusal to acknowledge the virus for what it really was became his public downfall, earning him the nickname "Space Karen". Maybe Azealia Banks had a point.	May 6 (announces birth of son)
13	2016 United States presidential election		21,860,377		Or as John Oliver would say it, Lice on rats on a horse corpse on fire 2016!!!!!!!!!! With a result that shocked the world in putting #2 in the White House, it's no wonder people revisited the article again in preparation for and during the endless vote counting of this year's edition (#10).	Nov. 4 (day after 2020 election)
14	Coronavirus disease 2019		21,672,589		The main reason why by March, every sneeze or cough inspired panic, and in the following months whoever was in the street was subject to face masks and hand sanitizer. COVID-19, like other coronavirus-caused (#6) illnesses, manifests through the respiratory tract – fever, cough, fatigue, and breathing difficulties, which can evolve into lung damage (nothing related to intestines, making the toilet paper shortages more questionable...). It is not particularly lethal (more than half the infected managed to recover), but still very contagious (over 70 million cases, with the WHO estimating the numbers were actually 10 times higher!). And proving it shouldn't be underestimated, the countries where the disease spread the most were those whose presidents dismissed COVID as "a little flu".	Mar. 12 (one day after WHO declares it a pandemic)
15	Michael Jordan		21,278,718		Like many basketballers who grew up in the 80s and 90s, #7 idolized Michael Jordan, and could be considered a successor in a way – Jordan eulogized Kobe saying he felt like a younger brother to him, and even joked that mourning him on TV gave birth to another Crying Jordan. But "His Airness" earns most of his views to his own unrivaled legend: in the sad stretch where the NBA was stopped due to the pandemic instead of having its playoffs, ESPN and Netflix released The Last Dance, a docuseries that used the sixth and final title of Jordan in 1998 to showcase the big names of those Chicago Bulls, above all the #23 who in those old images proved why he still is the greatest basketball player ever.	Apr. 20 (The Last Dance premieres)
16	COVID-19 pandemic in the United States		19,707,145		It's important to stress that COVID-19 isn't an unstoppable force. China has basically contained their outbreak, while Vietnam and New Zealand stopped theirs from getting bad in the first place. Strong governmental action is necessary, whether it involves mass testing, financial relief, or an absolute lockdown. Federal, state, and local governments have either avoided these measures or botched them, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. Bizarrely, as the pandemic got worse, the restrictions got lighter; schools closed nationwide before we hit 10,000 cases, but opened back up when 1,000 were dying per day. The good news is, we're probably going to have a vaccine sometime next year – but, knowing the U.S.'s track record on this, I wouldn't hold my breath.	Mar. 27 (the lockdowns start to take off)
17	COVID-19 pandemic in India		18,895,254		By global standards, India has escaped the COVID crisis fairly lightly. It doesn't seem that way; India ranks second in the world in the number of confirmed cases and third in the number of deaths. But compared to its vast population (1.35 billion at last count) the numbers are fairly low. There is always the danger of under-reporting, of course, especially given India's relatively poor infrastructure, but even if they were ten times higher, India's death count per head of population would be only slightly higher than Spain's. Or even my country, the UK. Thanks to a widely praised program of testing and contact tracing, India now sees about 40,000 new cases per day (twice that of the UK, which has one 20th its population, and a fifth that of the US). So yeah, good on you, India.	Mar. 26 (the lockdowns start to take off)
18	Sushant Singh Rajput		18,840,371		After the young Bollywood star Sushant Singh Rajput (SSR) killed himself in June, I followed along with all the updates and conspiracies to write up the Top 25 report each week. One of the theories I somehow missed back then was the one that Wikipedia itself planned his death. This all ended up involved in the Bollywood scandal about nepotism, too, resulting in SSR's article having one of the highest single-week pageview totals ever.	June 14 (died)
19	QAnon		18,766,515		There are two central beliefs to QAnon: the world is controlled by a cabal of pedophiles (their list is longer than the flight logs,) and Donald Trump is actively fighting them. In the past few years, the theory has migrated from old online shut-ins to young people, by way of Instagram and Facebook; these young people are much more open about their belief, organizing "#SaveTheChildren" marches in over 400 American cities in late summer. Twitter and Facebook started mass-bannings of QAnon accounts in September and October, respectively, which'll either stop the spread or Streisand effect them to greater prominence.	Oct. 16 (Trump doesn't discredit it in debate)
20	Chadwick Boseman		17,967,222		To the shock of many, on one (American) evening at the end of August, Boseman's family used his Twitter account to announce that he had passed away. With a year full of deaths, this was one of the six most impactful, if this list is anything to go by. And, like some of those others, a complete blindside. Perhaps more shocking was the explanation in the tweet: Boseman had stage 4 colon cancer that he fought for 4 years without telling anyone. And he did that while playing the beloved action hero T'Challa/Black Panther, in a physically demanding role. He is also known for a variety of biopics, playing important Black figures in history. Young people dying is tragic any time, but Boseman's death came while the world was still mourning another young Black actor and a couple of Freedom Riders, and right in the middle of a year very emotionally demanding as a whole: it was hard not to equate him with the Black icons he portrayed on screen, and many fans felt another blow at the thought of their loss. The fact that fans were just happy his family got to announce the news rather than TMZ is an infuriating reflection of how celebrity deaths have been going in 2020, too. He's been back in the news in the fall following acclaim for his latest roles, and the news that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will work around his death and give a larger part to his character's sister.	Aug. 29 (died)
21	Parasite (2019 film)		17,927,701		We finally get to a movie, and a groundbreaker at that: the 92nd Academy Awards had the biggest winner, with four awards including Best Picture, not even being in English. Instead, the nowadays very popular South Korea provided a film by Bong Joon-ho (who also took home Best Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature statuettes) about a poor family who through manipulations tries to leech over a rich one. Well made, acted, and full of surprises, as its script manages to get viewers laughing and horrified, often in succession, Parasite even managed to become the most successful Korean movie ever, including $53 million in North America, showing many viewers decided to follow Bong's words to "overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles".	Feb. 10 (day after Academy Awards)
22	United States		17,793,247		Contributing to Main Page, I keep in mind that about half of Wikipedia readers are North American and we have to work for that, ahem, knowledge level and base. It's perhaps surprising that one of our most-viewed articles is about the United States, then – surely all these readers know about their own country? Lower down, you'll see India has made the list, too, where the third-most readers come from. Is this some kind of nationalist vanity inherent to humans, no matter the continent? Or maybe some computer stations default Wikipedia to the country's article? Is it the masses of students who use Wikipedia either against or with their teachers' advice doing a class presentation on their nation's history? Or perhaps a horde of vandals aiming to change the president's name to something juvenile every day? Likely a combination of all to get numbers quite this high. As far as our statistics show, the biggest spike in viewership came right after the U.S. presidential election, which at least marks out one of those reasons: changing the name of the president!	Nov. 4 (day after election)
23	Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon		16,605,649		As a lifelong fan of cyberpunk, I've often pondered the boundary between reality and fantasy, and how humans blur them without thinking. The life of Margaret, younger sister to the Queen, was made into a soap opera even in her lifetime. So-called "royal watchers" and the eternally vindictive British press dragged out every detail of her unhappy married life as if it belonged to them, casting her as the fallen angel. As she would never assume the throne, she would never have an impact on the real world, so she was relegated to a false one. And now, in death, she has become even more fictional. Aside from spillover from her sister's spikes, the only attention she has received this year are from a documentary about her life and, of course, The Crown.	Nov. 21 (after The Crown)
24	YouTube		15,799,979		Time was when other websites had a permanent home in Wikipedia's top articles: Facebook, Google, Yahoo. Even Lycos (hello botnets). Then came the rise of tablets, and the ability to instantly connect to any website you wanted without having to search for it. Suddenly those websites disappeared. Ah yes. The old "tried to click on website but clicked on Wiki article instead" gaffe. Just another symptom of Wikipedia's strange relationship with Google's algorithm. If any one website were to remain on the list, you'd think it would be Facebook; virtual home of half the world's population, kingmaker in elections, arguably complicit in genocide. But it's YouTube. And honestly, that makes sense. Many people use Facebook; few people work there. Most people's livelihoods are not directly affected by the decrees of Facebook's masters. YouTube is more than a community or a news service. It is an industry employing millions. Millions whose very survival can depend on the capricious winds of YouTube's famously inept algorithms. In essence, YouTube is a country; a venal, ramshackle third world country run by bumbling dictators. Views spiked first in January, when YouTubers came to grips with the fallout from YouTube's COPPA settlement, and learned that from now on, any YouTuber publishing what their algorithm might consider children's material gets their channel de-listed. Views then surged during the first coronavirus lockdown, where it made news for de-listing anti-vaxxer conspiracy channels. It shouldn't have; in a sane world that would be standard practice unworthy of note, but we don't live in a sane world. Another jump in views came on November 12, when it announced that their annual tradition, YouTube Rewind, a compilation of the year's videos, had been cancelled because "2020 has been different". As if people only used YouTube to escape from reality. For a while, it seemed YouTube might actually escape the year scandal-free. But then, in November, it announced that from now on it will be collecting advertising revenue from its videos, regardless of whether the creators signed up for advertising. And no, un-partnered creators would not get a cut. This technically makes every un-partnered YouTuber on the site a slave laborer. Also, YouTube has proven remarkably bad at policing its paid content, and no one seems to have pondered if advertisers would appreciate their ads indiscirminately plastered all over the site. Adpocalypse 3.0 in 10, 9, 8...	Nov. 12 (announces Rewind's cancellation)
25	United States Electoral College		15,165,810		The United States Electoral College, initially a compromise between a full democracy and a straight Congressional election but long a point of contention among voters, was thrust into the spotlight once again this year as a dramatic flourish on the already tense Presidential election between Donald Trump (#2) and Joe Biden (#5). Five times in American history, in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016, the Electoral College switched the winner of the election from the popular vote winner. With two occurrences of this in such recent memory, naturally everyone was on the edge of their seats come early November rooting for their preferred candidate (whoever it be) to eke out a victory in not only sheer numbers but the right distribution to tick those 270 boxes. Of course, it didn't all go smoothly this year, because what's a mildly dysfunctional government without a few snafus to spice things up? This year's features included a few states being unusually slow to certify results, arguments about just how closely signatures needed to match for a vote to "qualify" as legit, a crippled postal service complicating plans to avoid COVID-19 exposures by expanding vote-by-mail systems, accusations of fraud flying in attempts to discredit and cast doubt onto legitimate voting means, and discrepancies in party affiliations between different methods of voting triggering even more accusations of fraud to fly, as well as a late "blue wave" caused by mail-in votes escalating the nail-biting on both sides, with the possibilities of faithless electors swinging the vote, or states sending "alternative electors" specifically chosen to be faithless adding a dramatic cherry on top of the whole pile.	Nov. 4 (day after election)
26	Barack Obama		15,108,942		The forty-fourth President of the United States, and the first African-American to fill in that role. Recent media star Joe Biden (#5) was his Vice President.	Nov. 8 (after Biden was elected)
27	Alexander Hamilton		15,030,057		Let's just say two things: If you use US dollars, he's the guy who's on the $10 bill and he was also a very important player in the formation of the US financial system. Was featured in a stage musical in 2015, of which a filmed adaptation was released this year on Disney+. For those who'd like to have a summary: Spoilers! Essentially, Hamilton: 1. Starts the revolution with Aaron Burr and others. 2. Falls in love with Elizabeth Schuyler (Eliza) and soon marries her. 3. Wins the revolution. 4. Starts being a lawyer and becomes a founding father. 5. Has a fat beef with Thomas Jefferson. 6. Falls in love with Maria Reynolds. 7. Has a fat beef with his old friend Burr. 8. Is framed for a crime he didn't commit and is forced to disclose his extramarital affairs with Maria Reynolds to save himself. 9. Ends up with what the musical portrays as quite an unhappy wife. 10. Finds himself with a dead son; he was killed in a gun duel. 11. Dies himself in a gun duel.	July 4 (Hamilton premieres on Disney+)
28	Diana, Princess of Wales		14,886,552		You know why she's on here. We all know why she's on here. Prior to the Big Reason (which is somewhat remarkable given that she only debuted in November), the wayward scion's view count largely followed in the wake of her much put-upon mother-in-law. With two exceptions: her birthday and her deathday. It seems Diana is rapidly following the martyr's path from metaphorical icon (and actual person) to literal icon.	Nov. 16 (after The Crown)
29	Jeffrey Epstein		14,181,060		Hey, speaking of those flight logs from before... This year, we added one more to the relatively brief list of last names that are also automatically pejoratives (see: Hitler.) Even after offing himself a year ago (unless...), the notoriously scorned financier couldn’t stay out of people's mouths or their search bars this year. Now that he's moved on to other pastures and is no longer here to wreak havoc on young women across the globe, the public found it easier than ever to find out about the depths of his crimes, and, perhaps more importantly, how much he was enabled. A big blow to a reputation which was already covered in the tears of those he's hurt was the release of Filthy Rich, a Netflix docuseries featuring accounts from a number of his victims that put both Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who was arrested this year on charges that she knowingly lured victims to Epstein, and his victim Virginia Roberts Guiffre in the spotlight.	May 31 (shortly after Filthy Rich)
30	Tenet (film)		13,948,713		The goddamned pandemic made this an awful year for movie fans, to the point views were low for the film industry's usual entries on the annual report – 2020 in film, List of Bollywood films, and superhero movies (the Marvel Cinematic Universe got postponed until next year, Wonder Woman 1984 premiered too late, and both Birds of Prey and The New Mutants didn't garner enough attention). The one 2020 release that managed to break into the list was Tenet, Christopher Nolan's latest movie which managed to one-up Inception in being an overtly weird and complex movie. Tenet followed people who manage to reverse the flow of time in a story that certainly helped the article's views so people could make sense of it without a rewatch, while its visuals were worthy of actually being seen on a big screen, no matter if most theaters were still closed due to COVID – which is why the costly production will certainly lose some money in spite of the respectable $356 million worldwide.	Aug. 29 (U.S. release)
31	List of presidents of the United States		13,930,182		There've been forty-four unique Presidents of the United States—that number differs from Donald Trump's standing as the 45th because Grover Cleveland won an election, lost the next, and won the one after that. Thus #5 will be both the 46th and 45th, depending on the point of view.	Nov. 4 (day after election)
32	Billie Eilish		13,729,615		At just 18 years old (now 19 years old), Ms. William Eyelash became the youngest person to do a lot of things this year: get nominated for/win all four major Grammy categories (+1), write and record a James Bond theme song, perform at the Democratic National Convention, become one of the world's highest-paid celebrities, be the most-streamed female artist on Spotify in a year, have a signature root color, quote Descartes in a top-10 hit, and cause the internet to implode by wearing a tank top. In the pile of shit that was 2020, Eilish seems to have risen above it, though not without running into a few obstacles along the way. She righteously claimed that rappers be fibbin' in their music, which made her the target of criticism from those who felt she was overstepping her bounds, and, later in the year, earned undoubtedly less valid criticism from some man-babies on the bird app who she made vewwy, vewwy angwy by walking outside in form-fitting clothing (though, thankfully, this incident garnered her more support than anything.) Billie did a whole bunch of other stuff this year, too, including getting a tattoo, unfollowing everyone on Instagram, speaking out against police brutality and All Lives Matter, and joining TikTok (her first video is now the third-most liked video on the platform.) Yet for all of the buzz surrounding Eilish, who has mostly earned recognition for her music, she didn’t release much of it this year, only putting out the two aforementioned singles plus another one about how she’s gonna meet her future self à la Looper. We should be blessed with some new music from Billie and her brother (who is still dating Billie's doppelgänger) in the coming year, though, since not only has she released the trailer for her upcoming Apple TV+ documentary, but she has also promised the arrival of a new era of Billie complete with – wait for it – BRAND NEW HAIR! Eeeee!	Jan. 27 (wins 5 Grammys)
33	Killing of George Floyd		13,505,134		Imagine having someone kneeling on your neck for nine and a half minutes. Well, forty-six year old African-American man George Floyd didn't need to imagine it; he died from it. Floyd was asphyxiated to death by just that method by Derek Chauvin, who was a police officer two years his senior. His death sparked protests against police brutality and racism worldwide.	June 1 (autopsy)
34	Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh		13,484,074		In Wiki, as in life, he follows his wife. The Queen of England's most persistently frustrating appendage rode the rises and falls of interest in his wife's life, as he has for nearly 75 years. The only exception was his 99th birthday, which saw a spike for his wife as well.	Nov. 17 (after The Crown)
35	The Mandalorian		13,253,771		This is the way. This the way now. This is the way. The Rise of Skywalker didn't do Star Wars any favors, but thankfully fans still had Season 2 of the Disney+ show about a bounty hunter and his 50-year old baby, which along with the expected intergalactic thrills had some surprises in hand. Namely old characters, no matter how unexpected. Disney won't ignore the runaway success of The Mandalorian and is already preparing spin-offs, some related to those characters.	Dec. 19 (one day after season 2 finale)
36	Joe Exotic		13,212,787		Cause I saw a tiger Now I understand I saw a tiger, and the tiger saw a man If there was one man who exemplified just how unpredictable this year was, it would probably have to be the gay polygamous zoo operator/potential attempted murderer/former presidential candidate right here. Joe Exotic was the talk of all the cool cats and kittens due to the release of a little Netflix docuseries called Tiger King, which chronicled the bitter rivalry between him and fellow zoo owner and possible murderer herself (okay, probable murderer) Carole Baskin. His treatment of animals might not have been so savory, but his wild antics, zany personality, unbelievable fashion, and [some other synonym for crazy] persona, earned him an easy spot in our hearts, on our screens, and on the list.	Mar. 29 (one week after Tiger King premiered)
37	Charles, Prince of Wales		13,149,544		Leaving aside The Crown, the current season of which I seriously doubt he's watching, His Royal in-Waitingness's biggest boost came in March, when he came down with COVID and potentially endangered the continuation of his line. He's fine, though still waiting. If his mum lives as long as hers did, he has eight years to go.	Nov. 16 (after The Crown)
38	The Queen's Gambit (miniseries)		12,907,536		Besides The Crown, Netflix was taken by storm by another period piece with a regal name about an Elizabeth. In this case, mini-series The Queen's Gambit, which managed to become the streaming service's most viewed scripted limited series by dealing with the high-octane sport of... chess? Well, the game certainly becomes an addiction for prodigy Beth Harmon, as much as green tranquilizer pills (and at times, some alcohol), with the expert direction of co-creator Scott Frank making all those pieces moving look like epic battles, and Anya Taylor-Joy's performance conveying well how the character is no ordinary girl, and not only because she becomes capable of playing among the grandmasters in the very misogynistic 1960s.	Nov. 1 (shortly after release)
39	COVID-19 pandemic in Italy		12,553,943		Italy. Italia. Італія. 意大利. Whatever combination of syllables represent it to you, Italy is the "boot" of the Mediterranean, the home of Italian cuisine, and the first major country to be badly and famously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (#1 on the list, shocker) outside of its native China. While havoc was wreaked there that then seemed unimaginable to the rest of the world – an older population median forcing healthcare workers to make life-and-death triage decisions, serious lacks of both personnel and adequate protective equipment, and emergency expansions of isolation wards – the country turned out to be, for some others, just an indication of what lay ahead.	Mar. 22 (lockdown strengthens)
40	List of Marvel Cinematic Universe films		12,183,740		After kicking off with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, Marvel Studios only took a break in 2009, with every year since 2010 having at least one theatrical release adapting the comics of the "House of Ideas". Until 2020, which certainly aimed lower given the previous year had the the culmination of 21 movies that became the highest-grossing film ever, but soon had Marvel's plans derailed once theaters worldwide started to close because of a goddamned pandemic (#1), just one month prior to the release of Black Widow. Both Natasha Romanoff and the cosmic heroes of Eternals will only hit the silver screen in 2021, which will be very busy for fans as a third Spider-Man movie and a kung fu superhero are also scheduled. All we need is for the heroes of real life, the scientists developing the COVID-19 vaccine, to make going to the movies safe again.	Aug. 29 (Chadwick Boseman's death)
41	Antifa (United States)		11,936,594		Antifa is a decentralized group that mostly counter-protests right wing rallies. According to conservative politicians and media, it's also a dangerous terrorist organization that needs to be prosecuted. This zeal against antifa might be an attempt to criminalize any leftist opposition to the government, but it might be genuine incompetence – take, for example, the case of Chandler Wirostek: he jokingly tweeted that he was a local antifa leader, and the FBI asked him to become an informant.	May 31 (Trump denounces the concept)
42	Shooting of Breonna Taylor		11,918,806		"The most disrespected person in America is the black woman." Based on its placement on this list, it seems safe to assume that most people know the basic facts of the case, but just to reiterate: Taylor, an ER technician, was with her boyfriend at his apartment, when police banged on the door and broke the hinges off without warning, despite not being at the right apartment. Soon after her boyfriend fired a shot in self-defense, officers responded by blindly firing 32 rounds into the apartment, with six hitting and killing Taylor. Yet this case does not end with justice, as if there ever could be any for such a thoughtless crime: only one of the officers involved was so much as fired, and none were charged for causing Taylor's death. In the final weeks of the year, a statue of Breonna Taylor was vandalized with a hammer. Her name was mined for clicks and memed and mocked and everything but respected. She deserved so much better from a society whose refusal to let her live peacefully and save lives is exemplary of just how dependent this country's police system is on ending black lives at whatever cost. Rest in peace, Breonna Taylor.	Sep. 24 (officers not charged)
43	Ruth Bader Ginsburg		11,884,007		RBG sat on the Supreme Court of the United States for 27 years, until her death on September 19 at the age of 87. In just over a month, her seat was filled by Amy Coney Barrett, replacing a reliable liberal vote with a (probably) reliable conservative one. Ginsberg had previously refused to resign in 2013, when Democrats held the Senate and the White House, saying that "There will be a president after this one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president."	Sep. 19 (died)
44	India		11,300,302		One of the ancestral homes of #4-ranked Kamala Harris, the Republic of India is a country situated in southern Asia. Characterised by large land area and population as well as a hugely vibrant culture encompassing dozens of languages (not every Indian speaks Hindi) and thousands of dialects below that as well as a successful film industry, Bollywood, plus a lot more.	Mar. 28
45	LeBron James		11,247,404		Completing three dominating basketballers in this list, the current star on the Los Angeles Lakers of #7 (he cried profusely when eulogizing him) and the 'rightful heir' of #15's jersey number. After an off year where he was injured and stopped a streak of 8 straight finals, "King James", now helped by Anthony Davis, made the Lakers the top team in the regular season, and once he went to Disney World to contest the playoffs four months later, trampled the competition to get his fourth title, on the way also becoming the first player to be chosen Finals MVP for three different franchises.	Oct. 12 (day after finals Game 6)
46	George VI		11,234,652		Elizabeth II had with the pandemic a crisis that arguably was equivalent to the one her father George VI saw as Britain entered World War II (you might have seen the movie about it, source of this hilariously NSFW scene). Though his entry here owes, of course, to The Crown, and is a demonstration of how strong the views pull caused by that show is, given that "Bertie" only appeared in the show's first two seasons, but people still seek his article during their "Wiki Walks" through the Royal Family!	Nov. 24 (after The Crown)
47	Money Heist		11,014,501		Money Heist, originally titled La casa de papel, is the real proof of Netflix's streaming power. Originally released in Spain, which has a lot of mystery-thriller elements even in its comedies, the show was averagely received. When Netflix decided to pick up more shows in the most widely-spoken language in the world, and people from countries without an abundance of actual drama on their TV got to see it, the show became a sensation. Or, a phenomenon, according to the title of the documentary about its cultural impact. It helps that in the few years between its Spanish run and its international platforming, the sentiments expressed by the heist team in the show had begun to resonate a lot more with a lot more people. Its use of icons – the Dalí mask and red jumpsuit, Bella ciao, the Professor's glasses – also made it instantly recognizable, easily imitable, and easy to lend itself to other facets of subculture. Cosplay and fan edits abound the internet. The fourth season by North American standards, or season 2, part 2, for the rest of the world, was eagerly anticipated after the, ahem, major cliffhanger at the end of part 3. Released in April, along with that documentary, it was one of the slew of shows that boomed at the start of pandemic quarantines: already hugely popular, and now with more people stuck at home binge-watching straight away, it rocketed to the top of Netflix's most-watched list and stayed there. Turns out people stuck inside also like watching TV about a group of friends all stuck inside, too.	Apr. 3 (season 4 released)
48	Melania Trump		11,004,680		There have been plenty of tell-all books about the current President of the United States, but only one about his wife: Melania and Me. The book was written by friend and former advisor Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who is being sued by the Justice Department for breach of a non-disclosure agreement. Other big news stories involving Melania this year include her and Donald visiting India in February, and a speech at the RNC in August.	Aug. 26 (RNC speech)
49	Amy Coney Barrett		10,943,787		A Supreme Court pick hasn't been this controversial since...well, the last one, but Scalia's mentee and Trump's rapid replacement for RBG (at #42) still managed to scrape her way into a seat as Associate Justice thanks to a Senate with a Republican majority. Concerns about her nomination were numerous, from her previously staunch disapproval of abortion rights to her evasive approach to discussing Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriage across the United States, leading people to worry she would consider overturning it. One of the most off-putting factors of Barrett's confirmation is her lack of experience: according to Mother Jones, she is the least experienced nominee, let alone Justice, the Court has seen in 30 years. Her confirmation led to a huge uproar regarding packing the courts, or adding more seats, and we have yet to see if that will happen.	Sep. 26 (named for the Supreme Court)
50	Ken Miles		10,933,493		It's been a while that the subjects of movies and shows based on real life get more views than the productions themselves. And one such case is Ken Miles, a British racecar driver played by Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari, about how Miles and car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) led Ford's racing division to win the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. Miles, who in that race finished second on a technicality, died some time afterwards testing another vehicle, but his legacy was revived last year with that movie's critical and commercial success, that in 2020 translated into many awards, including three Academy Awards (only behind the big winner at #20, and helping shut out fellow Best Picture nominee The Irishman).	Feb. 16 (Ford v Ferrari hits VOD)

Exclusions

• For those who saw the Pageviews' most seen articles and wonder about the differences:
  • That list does not include redirect views, which is an issue considering articles get renamed – COVID-19 pandemic was previously titled 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak and 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic – and so we rely on the tab that consults individual page views combined with alternate names.
  • Articles with mobile views over 90% (Tasuku Honjo) or under 10% (F5 Networks) are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue.
  • If the mobile views are not that high, but there is no reasonable explanation for so many views (Wikipedia, Microsoft Office, Kepler's Supernova), such anomalous entries are likely DDoS attacks or automated views and also get excluded.

Reader comments

2021-01-31

Flyer22 Frozen

By Wikipedia editors

Flyer22 Frozen, previously known as Flyer22 and Flyer22 Reborn, died in her late 30s on January 16, 2021, from complications of a long-term physical illness. An editor since May 2007, she was well-known for policy-focused editing in controversial topic areas, especially sexology, to ensure that appropriate sources were used and the neutral point of view policy followed, and for identifying a large number of sockpuppets over the years. Flyer22 racked up a prodigious 366,000 edits across 180,000 pages. The first page she created and worked on was JR Chandler and Babe Carey. Some of her best work was at Todd Manning , which became a featured article in 2015, as well as at Titanic (1997 film) , Jennifer's Body , Avatar (2009 film) , 2011 Tucson shooting , Clitoris , Vagina , G-spot , and Asexuality . She made significant contributions to many other topics, including Angelina Jolie , Brad Pitt , Scarlett Johansson , Human brain , Sexual intercourse, Lexa (The 100), and One Tree Hill (TV series).

Flyer22 was among Wikipedia's most generous editors when it came to helping other contributors develop their skills and knowledge. She would write detailed and highly cogent article talk posts explaining the diverse range of opinions found in mainstream sources – something that is especially valuable in fields like gender studies where prevailing views can change rapidly. Many fellow editors expressed gratitude for what Flyer taught them, some noting that Flyer helped them improve as an editor and collaborator not just on Wikipedia but on other wikis as well. Flyer took article accuracy and policy adherence very seriously, although she would occasionally show her playful side.

Besides her strong focus on mainspace editing, Flyer22 was also a frequent participant in WikiProject Medicine, WikiProject LGBT Studies, WikiProject Film, WikiProject Anatomy, and WikiProject Soap Operas; plus a variety of noticeboards, especially on biographies of living persons, page protection, vandalism, reliable sources, edit warring, and original research – with especial attention to child protection and the blocking of egregious trolls. She was given around 74 barnstars and other wiki-awards between 2007 and 2017.

Editors who kept in touch with Flyer22 over the years came to know her as a warm, kind woman. A vegetarian, she enjoyed the occasional Impossible Whopper. Her death was announced to her closest wiki-collaborators on January 21 by her brother, Halo Jerk1.

Some testimonials from her fellow editors:

• "Flyer22 believed in the good that Wikipedia could do in the world, and lived that out."
• "I never knew how deeply she had affected me. When I first started at Wikipedia, she showed me what an effect I could have, too."
• "She was tough as nails, but underneath that exterior armor she was very sensitive and had a heart of gold, and some of the highest integrity of anyone I've ever seen."
• "She didn't need to boast about plaques on the wall, because it was readily apparent she brought real expertise. I was always thankful we had someone like Flyer around."
• "She epitomized the comment Jimbo once made about how it amazed him that WP editors could put up with so much and for as long as we do."
• "I think she was the bravest editor I have known."
• "Flyer was a good human being, and that was the basis for her becoming a great editor. She can be succeeded but never replaced. Godspeed."

Her brother stated:

• "She was an anchor for me for many years. I loved her deeply and will miss her."

(Contributors to this obituary include Anatashala, Crossroads, Cullen328, Doug Weller, FeydHuxtable, Figureskatingfan, Girth Summit, Halo Jerk1, Montanabw, Ozzie10aaaa, Pyxis Solitary, SlimVirgin, SMcCandlish, and Zaereth.)

Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to .

The Signpost is written by editors like you – join in!

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions