Wikipedia

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-12-02

< Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost‎ | Single
The Signpost
Single-page Edition
WP:POST/1
2 December 2015

 

2015-12-02

Whither Wikidata?

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Andreas Kolbe
Just over half of all statements in Wikidata are unreferenced, according to the latest published figures. Source: https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php


Wikidata, a Wikimedia project spearheaded by Wikimedia Deutschland, recently celebrated its third anniversary. The project has a dual purpose: 1. Streamline data housekeeping within Wikipedia. 2. Serve as a data source for re-users on the web; in particular, Wikidata is the designated successor to Google's Freebase, designed to deliver data for the Google Knowledge Graph.

We need to talk about Wikidata.

Wikidata, covered in last week's Signpost issue in a celebratory op-ed that highlighted the project's potential (see Wikidata: the new Rosetta Stone), has some remarkable properties for a Wikimedia wiki:

  • A little more than half its statements are unreferenced.
  • Of those statements that do have a reference, significantly more than half are referenced only to a language version of Wikipedia (projects like the English, Latvian or Burmese Wikipedia).
  • Wikidata statements referenced to Wikipedia do not cite a specific article version, but only name the Wikipedia in question.
  • Wikidata has a no-attribution CC0 licence; this means that third parties can use the data on their sites without indicating their provenance, obscuring the fact that the data came from a crowdsourced project subject to the customary disclaimers.
  • Hoaxes long extinguished on Wikipedia live on, zombie-like, in Wikidata.

This op-ed examines the situation and its implications, and suggests corrective action.

But first ...

A little bit of history

Wikidata is one of the younger Wikimedia projects. Launched in 2012, the project's development has not been led by the Wikimedia Foundation itself, but by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German Wikimedia chapter.

The initial development work was funded by a donation of 1.3 million Euros, made up of three components:

The original team of developers was led by Denny Vrandečić (User:Denny), who came to Wikimedia Deutschland from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Vrandečić was, together with Markus Krötzsch (formerly KIT, University of Oxford, presently Dresden University of Technology), the founder of the Semantic MediaWiki project. Since 2013, Vrandečić has been a Google employee; in addition, since summer 2015 he has been one of the three community-elected Wikimedia Foundation board members.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Institute for Artificial Intelligence provided half the funding for the initial development of Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland's original press release, dated 30 March 2012, said,

Wikidata thus has a dual purpose: it is designed to make housekeeping across the various Wikipedia language versions easier, and to serve as a one-stop data shop for sundry third parties.

To maximise third-party re-use, Wikidata—unlike Wikipedia—is published under the CC0 1.0 Universal licence, a complete public domain dedication that waives all author's rights, to the extent allowed by law. This means that re-users of Wikidata content are not obliged to indicate the source of the data to their readers.

In this respect Wikidata differs sharply from Wikipedia, which is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence, requiring re-users of Wikipedia content to credit Wikipedia (attribution) and to distribute copies and adaptations of Wikipedia content only under the same licence (Share-alike).

Search engines take on a new role as knowledge providers

Google contributed a quarter of the initial funding for the development of Wikidata, which is now replacing Freebase as one of the sources for the Google Knowledge Graph

The March 30, 2012 announcement of the development of Wikidata was followed six weeks later, on May 16, 2012, by the arrival of a new Google feature destined to have far-reaching implications: the Google Knowledge Graph. Similar developments also happened at Microsoft's Bing. These two major search engines, no longer content to simply provide users with a list of links to information providers, declared that they wanted to become information providers in their own right.

The Google Knowledge Graph, Google said, would enable Internet users

The move makes sense from a business perspective: by trying to guess the information in which people are interested and making that information available on their own pages, search engines can entice users to stay on their sites for longer, increasing the likelihood that they will click on an ad—a click that will add to the search engine's revenue (in Google's case running at around $200 million a day).

Moreover, search engine results pages that do not include a Knowledge Graph infobox often feature ads in the same place where the Knowledge Graph is usually displayed: the right-hand side of the page. The Knowledge Graph thus trains users to direct their gaze to the precise part of a search engine results page that generates the operator's revenue. Alternatively, ads may also be (and have been) inserted directly into the Knowledge Graph itself.

Microsoft's Bing search engine has followed much the same path as Google with its "Snapshot" feature drawing on Wikimedia content
Microsoft's Bing followed a very similar development from 2012 onwards, with Bing's Satori-powered "Snapshot" feature closely mimicking the appearance and content of Google's Knowledge Graph. Bing has used some of the same sources as Google, in particular Wikipedia and Freebase, a crowdsourced database published under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence that was acquired by Google in 2010.

Neither Freebase nor Wikipedia really profited from this development. Wikipedia noted a significant downturn in pageviews that was widely attributed to the introduction of the Google Knowledge Graph, causing worries among Wikimedia fundraisers and those keen to increase editor numbers. After all, Internet users not clicking through to Wikipedia would miss both the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising banners and a chance to become involved in Wikipedia themselves.

As for Freebase, Google announced in December 2014, a little over four years after acquiring the project, that it would shut it down in favour of the more permissively licensed Wikidata and migrate its content to Wikidata—Freebase's different Creative Commons licence, which required attribution, notwithstanding.

"The PR Pros and SEOs are Coming"

Freebase was widely considered a weak link in the information supply chain ending at the Knowledge Graph. Observers noted that search engine optimization (SEO) specialists were able to manipulate the Knowledge Graph by manipulating Freebase.

In a Wikidata Office Chat conducted on March 31, 2015, future Wikimedia Foundation board member Denny Vrandečić—juggling his two hats as a Google employee and the key thought leader of Wikimedia's Wikidata project—spoke about Google's transition from Freebase to Wikidata, explaining that Wikidata's role would be slightly different from the role played by Freebase:

Denny Vrandečić, the co-founder of the Semantic MediaWiki project, has to juggle three hats: he is a Google employee as well as a community-elected Wikimedia Foundation board member and the primary Wikidata thought leader

Noam Shapiro, writing in Search Engine Journal, drew the following conclusions from his review of this chat, focusing on the statements highlighted in yellow above:

Shapiro's point concerning spam and bias mentioned "the need for recognized references". This is a topic that we will shortly return to, because Wikidata seems to have adopted a very lax approach to this requirement.

The relationship between Wikidata and Wikipedia: Sources? What sources?

Citations to Wikipedia (blue) outnumber all other sources (red) together (yellow = unreferenced)

The fact that Wikidata and Wikipedia have what seems on the face of it incompatible licences has been a significant topic of discussion within the Wikimedia community. It is worth noting that in 2012, Denny Vrandečić wrote on Meta,

More recently, the approach seems to have been that because facts cannot be copyrighted, mass imports from Wikipedia are justified. The legal situation concerning database rights in the US and EU is admittedly fairly complex. At any rate, whatever licensing qualms Denny may have had about this issue at the time seem to have evaporated. If the original plan was indeed "not [...] to extract content out of Wikipedia at all", then the plan changed.

Bot imports from Wikipedia have long been the order of the day. In fact, in recent months contributors on Wikidata have repeatedly raised alarms about mass imports of content from various Wikipedias, believing that these imports compromise quality (the following quote, written by a non-native speaker, has been lightly edited for spelling and grammar):

The circular reference loop connecting Wikidata and Wikipedia

The result of these automated imports is that Wikipedia is today by far the most commonly cited source in Wikidata.

According to current Wikimedia statistics:

  • Half of all statements in Wikidata are completely unreferenced.
  • Close to a third of all statements in Wikidata are only referenced to a Wikipedia.

References to a Wikipedia do not identify a specific article version; they simply name the language version of Wikipedia. This includes many minor language versions whose referencing standards are far less mature than those of the English Wikipedia. Moreover, some Wikipedia language versions, like the Croatian and Kazakh Wikipedias, are not just less mature, but are known to have very significant problems with political manipulation of content.

Recall Shapiro's expectation above that spam and bias would be held at bay by the "need for recognized references". Wikidata's current referencing record seems unlikely to live up to that expectation.

Of course, allowances probably have to be made for the fact that some statements in Wikidata may genuinely not be in need of a reference. For example, in a Wikidata entry like George Bernard Shaw, one might expect to receive some sympathy for the argument that the statement "Given name: George" is self-evident and does not need a reference. Wikidata, some may argue, will never need to have 100 per cent of its statements referenced.

However, it does not seem healthy for Wikipedia to be cited more often in Wikidata than all other types of sources together. This is all the more important as Wikidata may not just propagate errors to Wikipedia, but may also spread them to the Google Knowledge Graph, Bing's Snapshot, myriad other re-users of Wikidata content, and thence to "reliable sources" cited in Wikipedia, completing the "citogenesis" loop.

Data are not truth: sometimes they are phantoms

Citogenesis

As the popularity of Wikipedia has soared, citogenesis has been a real problem in the interaction between "reliable sources" and Wikipedia. A case covered in May 2014 in The New Yorker provides an illustration:

It seems inevitable that falsehoods of this kind will be imported into Wikidata, eventually infecting both other Wikipedias and third-party sources. That this not only can, but does happen is quickly demonstrated. Among the top fifteen longest-lived hoaxes currently listed at Wikipedia:List of hoaxes, six (nos. 1, 2, 6, 7, 11 and 13) still have active Wikidata entries at the time of writing. The following table reproduces the corresponding entries in Wikipedia:List of hoaxes, with a column identifying the relevant Wikidata item and supplementary notes added:

Hoax Length Start date End date Links Wikidata item
Jack Robichaux
Fictional 19th‑century serial rapist in New Orleans 		10 years,
1 month 		July 31, 2005 September 3, 2015 Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jack Robichaux https://archive.is/Z6Gne Note: The English Wikipedia link has been updated.
Guillermo Garcia
"Highly influential" but imaginary oil and forestry magnate in 18th-century South America 		9 years,
10 months 		November 17, 2005 September 19, 2015 Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Guillermo Garcia (businessman) https://archive.is/0pprA
Gregory Namoff
An "internationally known" but nonexistent investment banker, minor Watergate figure, and U.S. Senate candidate. 		9 years,
6½ months 		June 17, 2005 January 13, 2015 Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gregory Namoff Archive https://archive.is/urElB Note: 10 months after the hoax article was deleted on Wikipedia, a user added "natural causes" as the manner of death on Wikidata
Double Hour
Supposed German and American television show, covering historic events over a two-hour span. 		9 years,
6 months 		September 23, 2005 April 4, 2015 Double Hour (TV series) deletion log https://archive.is/rjFjw Note: This item has only ever been edited by bots.
Nicholas Burkhart
Fictitious 17th-century legislator in the House of Keys on the Isle of Man. 		9 years,
2 months 		July 19, 2006 September 26, 2015 Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nicholas Burkhart https://archive.is/A0lt7
Emilia Dering
Long-lived article about a non-existent 19th century German poet started with the rather basic text "Emilia Dering is a famous poet who was Berlin,Germany on April 16, 1885" by a single-purpose account 		8 years,
10 months 		December 6, 2006 October 6, 2015 Emilia Dering deletion log; deleted via A7. On the day of the article's creation, a person claiming to be the granddaughter of Emilia Dering published a blog post with a poem supposedly written by her. https://archive.is/eNJbc

Using the last entry from the above list as an example, a Google search quickly demonstrates that there are dozens of other sites listing Emilia Dering as a German writer born in 1885. The linkage between Wikidata and the Knowledge Graph as well as Bing's Snapshot can only make this effect more powerful: if falsehoods in Wikidata enter the infoboxes displayed by the world's major search engines, as well as the pages of countless re-users, the result could rightly be described as citogenesis on steroids.

The only way for Wikidata to avoid this is to establish stringent quality controls, much like those called for by Kmhkmh above. Such controls would appear absent at Wikidata today, given that the site managed to tell the world, for five months in 2014, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was also known as "Adolf Hitler". If even the grossest vandalism can survive for almost half a year on Wikidata, what chance is there that more subtle falsehoods and manipulations will be detected before they spread to other sites?

Yet this is the project that Wikimedians like Max Klein, who has been at Wikidata from the beginning, imagine could become the "one authority control system to rule them all". The following questions and answers are from a 2014 interview with Klein:

Given present quality levels, this seems like a nightmare scenario: the Internet's equivalent of the Tower of Babel.

What is a reliable source?

A crowdsourced project like Wikidata becoming "the one authority control system to rule them all" is a very different vision from the philosophy guiding Wikipedia. Wikipedians, keenly aware of their project's vulnerabilities and limitations, have never viewed Wikipedia as a "reliable source" in its own right. For example, community-written policies expressly forbid citing one Wikipedia article as a source in another (WP:CIRCULAR):

Wikidata abandons this principle—doubly so. First, it imports data referenced only to Wikipedia, treating Wikipedia as a reliable source in a way Wikipedia itself would never allow. Secondly, it aspires to become itself the ultimate reliable source—reliable enough to inform all other authorities.

For example, Wikidata is now used as a source by the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), while VIAF in turn is used as a source by Wikidata. In the opinion of one Wikimedia veteran and librarian I spoke to at the recent Wikiconference USA 2015, the inherent circularity in this arrangement is destined to lead to muddles which, unlike the Brazilian aardvark hoax, will become impossible to disentangle later on.

The implications of a non-attribution licence

The lack of references within Wikidata makes verification of content difficult. This flaw is only compounded by the fact that its CC0 licence encourages third parties to use Wikidata content without attribution.

Max Klein provided an insightful thought on this in the interview he gave last year, following Wikimania 2014:

Klein seems torn between his lucid rational assessment and his appeal to himself to "really believe in the Open Source, Open Data credo". Faith may have its rightful place in love and the depths of the human soul, but our forebears learned centuries ago that when you are dealing with the world of facts, belief is not the way to knowledge: knowledge comes through doubt and verification.

What this lack of attribution means in practice is that the reader will have no indication that the data presented to them comes from a project with strong and explicit disclaimers. Here are some key passages from Wikidata's own disclaimer:

Internet users are likely to take whatever Google and Bing tell them on faith. As a form of enlightenment, it looks curiously like a return to the dark ages.

When a single answer is wrong

Jerusalem—one of the most contested places on earth

This obscuring of data provenance has other undesirable consequences. An article published in Slate this week (Nov. 30, see this week's In the Media) introduces a paper by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute and Heather Ford of the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. The paper examines the problems that can result when Wikidata and/or the Knowledge Graph provide the Internet public with a single, unattributed answer.

Ford and Graham say they found numerous instances of Google Knowledge Graph content taking sides in the presentation of politically disputed facts. Jerusalem for example is described in the Knowledge Graph as the "capital of Israel". Most Israelis would agree, but even Israel's allies (not to mention the Palestinians, who claim Jerusalem as their own capital) take a different view – a controversy well explained in the lead of the English Wikipedia article on Jerusalem, which tells its readers, "The international community does not recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and the city hosts no foreign embassies." Graham provides further examples in Slate:

Ford and Graham reviewed Wikidata talk page discussions to understand the consensus forming process there, and found users warring and accusing each other of POV pushing—context that almost none of the Knowledge Graph readers will ever be aware of.

In Ford's and Graham's opinion, the envisaged movement of facts from Wikipedia to Wikidata and thence to the Google Knowledge Graph has "four core effects":

This is a remarkable reversal, given that Wikimedia projects have traditionally been hailed as bringing about the democratisation of knowledge.

Conclusions

Errors can always be fixed

From my observation, many Wikimedians feel problems such as those described here are not all that serious. They feel safe in the knowledge that they can fix anything instantly if it's wrong, which provides a subjective sense of control. It's a wiki! And they take comfort in the certainty that someone surely will come along one day, eventually, to fix any other error that might be present today.

This is a fallacy. Wikimedians are privileged by their understanding of the wiki way; the vast majority of end users would not know how to change or even find an entry in Wikidata. As soon as one stops thinking selfishly, and starts thinking about others, the fact that any error in Wikidata or Wikipedia can potentially be fixed becomes secondary to the question, "How much content in our projects is false at any given point in time, and how many people are misled by spurious or manipulated content every day?" Falsehoods have consequences.

Faced with quality issues like those in Wikidata, some Wikimedians will argue that cleverer bots will, eventually, help to correct the errors introduced by dumber bots. They view dirty data as a welcome programming challenge, rather than a case of letting the end user down. But it seems to me there needs to be more emphasis on controlling incoming quality, on problem prevention rather than problem correction. Statements in Wikidata should be referenced to reliable sources published outside the Wikimedia universe, just like they are in Wikipedia, in line with the WP:Verifiability policy.

Wikidata development was funded by money from Google and Microsoft, who have their own business interests in the project. These ties mean that Wikidata content may reach an audience of billions. It may make Wikidata an even greater honey pot to SEO specialists and PR people than Wikipedia itself. Wikis' vulnerabilities in this area are well documented. Depending on the extent to which search engines will come to rely on Wikidata, and given the observed loss of nuance in Knowledge Graph displays, an edit war won in an obscure corner of Wikidata might literally re-define truth for the English-speaking Internet.

If information is power, this is the sort of power many will desire. They will surely flock to Wikidata, swelling the ranks of its volunteers. It's a propagandist's ideal scenario for action. Anonymous accounts. Guaranteed identity protection. Plausible deniability. No legal liability. Automated import and dissemination without human oversight. Authoritative presentation without the reader being any the wiser as to who placed the information and which sources it is based on. Massive impact on public opinion.

... to rule them all

As a volunteer project, Wikidata should be done well. Improvements are necessary. But, looking beyond the Wikimedia horizon, we should pause to consider whether it is really desirable for the world to have one authority—be it Google or Wikidata—"to rule them all". Such aspirations, even when flying the beautiful banner of "free content", may have unforeseen downsides when they are realised, much like the ring of romance that was made "to rule them all" in the end proved remarkably destructive. The right to enjoy a pluralist media landscape, populated by players who are accountable to the public, was hard won in centuries past. Some countries still do not enjoy that luxury today. We should not give it away carelessly, in the name of progress, for the greater glory of technocrats.

One last point has to be raised: Denny Vrandečić combines in one person the roles of Google employee, community-elected Wikimedia Foundation board member and Wikidata thought leader. Given the Knowledge Graph's importance to Google's bottom line, there is an obvious potential for conflicts of interest in decisions affecting the Wikidata project's licensing and growth rate. While Google and Wikimedia are both key parts of the world's information infrastructure today, the motivations and priorities of a multi-billion-dollar company that depends on ad revenue for its profits and a volunteer community working for free, for the love of knowledge, will always be very different.


Further reading


Andreas Kolbe has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2006. He is a member of the Signpost's editorial board. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.



Reader comments

2015-12-02

Online harassment consultation; High voter turnout at ArbCom elections

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Andreas Kolbe
Illustration by Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942).

Working together on the problem of online harassment

As reported on the Wikimedia blog in a post titled "Working together on the problem of online harassment in Wikimedia communities", the Wikimedia Foundation is currently conducting the first community-wide harassment consultation, asking community members to contribute their ideas:

At the time of this writing, the page contains 22 proposals from community members.

The consultation follows last month's harassment survey conducted in 16 languages.

An online harassment resource guide focusing on scholarly literature and reports by organizations is available on Meta, offering a broad overview and starting point to scholars, advocates, and practitioners working to understand and respond to online harassment.

High voter turnout at ArbCom elections

2015 voter edit count distribution vs. 2014 and 2013

This year's Arbitration Committee elections are seeing substantially higher voter turnout than in previous years, a reflection of the use of mass messaging to notify volunteers eligible to vote. SecurePoll's voters' list shows 2,778 votes cast at the time of this writing (including some repeat votes from users who changed their votes). Last year's ArbCom elections, by comparison, attracted just 593 valid votes.

The population of voters taking part also appears to shape up very differently from past years. According to an analysis by Opabinia regalis, herself a candidate in the election, the percentage of voters with relatively few contributions (150–5,000 edits) is markedly higher this year. However, early fears that the mass messaging would attract large numbers of voters who had not edited the English Wikipedia in years and were consequently out of touch with the project seem to have been disconfirmed. According to a post by Opabinia regalis on 1 December 2015, based on data available at the time, only 162 voters would have been filtered out by a "must have edited Wikipedia in the last three months before the election" eligibility criterion.

The elections are scheduled to close at 23:59 (UTC) on Sunday, December 6, 2015.

Brief notes

Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2016 are now being accepted.
  • Wikimania scholarships: Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2016 are being accepted 5 Dec 2015–9 Jan 2016. Please consider applying. To learn more about Wikimania 2016 scholarships, please visit: here. To apply for a scholarship, fill out the application form: here.
  • Community Wishlist Survey: Voting on the proposals in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey is ongoing and will continue until December 14.



Reader comments

2015-12-02

Is Wikidata as transparent as it seems?; Wikimedia Fund-raising drive launches

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Mdann52

Wikidata: optimised for machines, not humans

Jerusalem's Old City, at the centre of this week's article

This week, Slate commented on how, with Google sourcing more and more content automatically from databases such as Wikidata, with little human intervention, misinformation can spread quickly (Nov. 30). The article points towards a search for Jerusalem, which comes up with the result "Capital of Israel" in the Google Knowledge Graph, even though the city's status is in fact intensely contested. The author, Mark Graham from the Oxford Internet Institute, argues that as much information and sources are stripped away, it can easily lead to less transparency on where information comes from, and a lack of context when interpreting it.

Does the Wikimedia Foundation really need more money?

The amount the WMF are asking for is the price of a cup of coffee.

Following the launch of the Wikimedia Foundation's annual English-speaking fund-raising drive this week, The Washington Post published a piece (December 2), commenting that the language of the banner may well lead readers to think ...

. They also point out that Wikipedia's drive is controversial within the community:

In brief

One of the files involved with the lawsuit.
  • "Monkey see, monkey sue...?": Arstechnica covers latest developments in the PETA lawsuit against David Slater[citation needed] over the monkey selfies (December 5). PETA asserts that Naruto, the monkey named in their complaint, actually holds the rights, a claim disputed by the defendants, who argue that even if a monkey could hold the copyright, Naruto wasn't the monkey who operated the camera's shutter, and the suit should be dismissed on these grounds alone.
  • Vandalism following Syria vote: the Express reports (December 4) that, following a House of Commons vote to authorise air-strikes on Syria, several Labour defectors had their Wikipedia articles vandalised, including Hilary Benn.
  • VIP access after Wikipedia vandalism: Several articles, including ones in the Guardian, BBC and Independent, were written about a fan gaining backstage access at a performance by Peking Duk, after adding himself as family on the artist's Wikipedia article (December 3).
  • Jimmy Wales to lobby China: Channel News Asia reports (December 2) that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales plans to fly out to China in the next few weeks to discuss getting Wikipedia unblocked in China.
  • Artificial Intelligence tool launched: MIT Technology Review (November 30), the BBC (December 2) and others reported on the launch of ORES (Objective Revision Evaluation Service) this week. The tool aims to automatically flag up low-quality edits to articles. (Read more in The Wikimedia Blog.)



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



Reader comments

2015-12-02

Jonesing for episodes

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Serendipodous

Once again, disaster fatigue has set in, and viewers are taking comfort in the bosom of mass media. The vast majority of articles on this list are either pop culture-related, returnees from previous weeks or years, or both. The main focus of that interest was the latest Marvel Netflix series, Jessica Jones, which took the top two slots.

For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of November 22 to 28, 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Jessica Jones C-class 1,918,186
The Netflix series based on this Marvel Comics superhero, starring Krysten Ritter (pictured), debuted on November 20, 2015, and, like its predecessor, Daredevil, has shot to the top of this list. Pandemic binge-watching of the latter among MCU fans led to a rapid decline in interest, as everyone scoffed down the entire season in two days. It will be interesting if this series, which is far more thematically complex and problematic than Daredevil and thus more likely to trigger debate, will share the same fate. As before, ratings don't really apply to Netflix shows but the critics have given this show almost as much love as Dardevil, with a 92% RT rating.
2 Jessica Jones (TV series) C-class 1,599,328
See above.
3 Adele C-class 1,389,379
Up from 903,238 views last week, as the popular singer's new album 25 (#20) was released on November 20 and set about rewriting sales records all over the world.
4 Thanksgiving C-class 1,384,676
This beloved North American holiday has, in the past, been very ill-used by Wikipedia viewers. Every year, when it came around, immediately money-spinning spammers started flooding Wikipedia with fake views for this article, thus forcing us to remove what should have been a perfectly acceptable annual addition to this list. This is the first time since the project began that I can safely say that the article has been included entirely on its own merits without any, ahem, stuffing.
5 Lucy (Australopithecus) Start-class 1,148,394
In 1974 the discovery of this half-complete fossil assembly in Ethiopia's Hadar Formation overturned centuries of anthropocentric thinking by showing that our evolutionary big break from the animal kingdom came not when we started getting smarter, but when we started walking upright. On November 24, the 41st anniversary of her discovery, her "birthday" was celebrated by a Google Doodle.
6 Black Friday (shopping) Start-class 1,129,549
The day after Thanksgiving is also the day that retailers have earned enough to cover their debts from the previous year, and are thus "in the black" (at least, that's what they say; in truth it probably originated as a reaction to the traffic). Because of this, they often mark down their prices, leading this to become a major day on the shopping calendar and the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season. Over in the UK, where I live, more pious commentators have been staring at this phenomenon with something like horror, decrying its gradual "consecration" as a holy day for the new religion of consumerism. They may be right.
7 Lady Colin Campbell Start-Class 828,117 Campbell is a British socialite who is now appearing on the new season of Britain's I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!, which debuted on November 15. This reality series is one whose American version floundered, but has enjoyed great success elsewhere including in Britain, and in Germany where it is nicknamed "Das Dschungelcamp". Her continuing popularity may also be due to her interesting backstory, as she was born intersex and raised as a boy, though her androgynous name is due to her brief and ill-fated marriage to Lord Colin Campbell, son of the 11th Duke of Argyll.
8 Survivor Series (2015) Start-Class 774,114
As expected, this professional wrestling event, held on November 22, got a fifty percent boost in numbers this week. Roman Reigns (pictured) won the main event.
9 The Man in the High Castle (TV series) Start-Class 763,741
Amazon Video's big competitor to Netflix's stable, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's dystopian alternate history set in an America ruled by the victorious Axis Powers, put up eight of its ten episodes on November 20.
10 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant C-class 742,427
If they are to be believed, the repellent non-state has finally managed to extend its war beyond its shredded borders and into the heart of the West. This is an unprecedented escalation from them, but then, if there's one thing they've proven themselves good at in the last few years, it's unprecedented escalation. Some see it as desperation; ISIL have suffered numerous substantial losses from bombing and Kurdish incursions. Others have pondered if it marks the first shot in a new generational conflict.



Reader comments

2015-12-02

This Week's Featured Content

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Armbrust
Last Judgement is a tempera painting created by Stefan Lochner circa 1435
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 22 to 28 November.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.


Featured articles

Brian Vickers was the winning driver of the 2006 UAW-Ford 500
The Norse-American medal was sculpted by James Earle Fraser

Eight featured articles were promoted this week.

  • Stefan Lochner (nominated by Ceoil) (c. 1410–1451) was a German painter working in the late "soft style" of the International Gothic. His paintings combine that era's tendency towards long flowing lines and brilliant colours with the realism, virtuoso surface textures and innovative iconography of the early Northern Renaissance. Based in Cologne, Lochner was one of the most important German painters before Albrecht Dürer.
  • Suillus bovinus (nominated by Sasata and Casliber) is a pored mushroom of the genus Suillus in the family Suillaceae. A common fungus native to Europe and Asia, it has been introduced to North America and Australia. The fungus grows in coniferous forests in its native range, and pine plantations in countries where it has become naturalised. It forms symbiotic ectomycorrhizal associations with living trees by enveloping the tree's underground roots with sheaths of fungal tissue, and is sometimes parasitised by the related mushroom Gomphidius roseus.
  • "From The Doctor to my son Thomas" (nominated by Cirt) is a viral video recorded by actor Peter Capaldi and sent to the autistic nine-year-old Thomas Goodall to console him over grief from the death of his grandmother. Capaldi filmed the video in character as the 12th incarnation of the Doctor in the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who. Capaldi's message had a positive effect on Thomas; his father said the boy smiled for the first time since learning of his grandmother's death and gained the courage to go to her funeral.
  • The Norse-American medal (nominated by Wehwalt) was struck at the Philadelphia Mint in 1925, pursuant to an act of Congress. It was issued for the 100th anniversary of the voyage of the ship Restauration, bringing early Norwegian immigrants to the United States. The medals recognize those immigrants' Viking heritage, depicting a warrior on the obverse and a vessel on the reverse. They also recall the early Viking explorations of North America.
  • Smilodon (nominated by FunkMonk and LittleJerry) is an extinct genus of machairodont felid, commonly known as the saber-toothed tiger. It lived in the Americas during the Pleistocene epoch. The genus was named in 1842, based on fossils from Brazil. The Smilodon hunted large herbivores such as bison and camels and it remained successful even when encountering new prey species. It died out at the same time that most American megafauna disappeared.
  • History of York City F.C. (1908–80) (nominated by Mattythewhite) York City F.C. is a professional association football club based in York, England. The history of the club from 1908 to 1980 covers the period from the club's original foundation, through their reformation and progress in the Football League, to the end of the 1979–80 season.
  • The 2006 UAW-Ford 500 (nominated by Bentvfan54321) was a stock car racing competition which took place on October 8, 2006. Held at Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama, the 188-lap race was the thirtieth in the 2006 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series and the fourth in the ten-race, season-ending Chase for the Nextel Cup.
  • Hurricane Fay (nominated by Juliancolton) was the first hurricane to make landfall on Bermuda since Hurricane Emily in 1987. The sixth named storm and fifth hurricane of the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season, Fay began as a subtropical cyclone on October 10, transitioning into a tropical storm on October 11, briefly achieving Category 1 hurricane status on October 12, and eventually degenerating into an open trough on October 13.

Featured lists

Dwight D Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States, was a member of the class the stars fell on

Four featured lists were promoted this week.

  • The class the stars fell on (nominated by Hawkeye7) is an expression used to describe the United States Military Academy Class of 1915. In the United States Army, the insignia reserved for generals is one or more stars. Of the 164 graduates that year, 59 attained the rank of general, the most of any class in the history of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, hence the expression.
  • List of Padma Bhushan award recipients (1954–1959) (nominated by Vivvt) The Padma Bhushan is the third-highest civilian award of the Republic of India. Instituted on 2 January 1954, the award is given for "distinguished service of a high order", without distinction of race, occupation, position, or sex. The recipients receive a Sanad (certificate) signed by the President of India and a circular-shaped medallion with no monetary grant associated with the award. In its first six years 94 awards were conferred.
  • List of Connecticut Huskies in the NFL Draft (nominated by Grondemar and Robert4565) The University of Connecticut Huskies football team has had 39 players selected in the National Football League Draft. Two of those selections were in the first round of the draft, both with the 27th overall pick: Donald Brown in 2009 and Byron Jones in 2015. A Connecticut football alumnus has been selected in every NFL Draft since 2007 and ten of the last eleven NFL Drafts.
  • The AAA Mega Championship (nominated by Wrestlinglover) is a professional wrestling world heavyweight championship in the Mexican Asistencia Asesoría y Administración promotion. The championship is generally contested in professional wrestling matches in which participants execute scripted finishes rather than in direct competition. Since it's inception in 2007, eight wrestlers had hold the title for a total of twelve reigns. The title is currently vacated.

Featured pictures

Seven featured pictures were promoted this week.



Reader comments

2015-12-02

Tech news in brief

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Wikimedia tech ambassadors
The following content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.


The symbol for advanced news items has been changed. This is because the symbols were too similar. If a news item is for more technical readers it now looks like this: . You can give feedback on this change.

Problems

  • On September 29 users' skin preferences were removed by mistake on small and medium-sized wikis. This changed preferences back to Vector. Restoring all data would cause even more problems. Affected users who want to have their preference changed back globally can ask for it as a comment on Phabricator task T119206 until December 21 2015. [1]
  • Some scheduled tasks were not working properly from September to recently. This meant some pages in the special pages namespace were not updated. It has now been fixed. [2]

Changes this week

  • Wikinews, Wikispecies, MediaWiki.org and Meta will be able to use information from Wikidata. [3][4]
  • There are no MediaWiki deployments this week (calendar).

Meetings

Future changes

  • Category watchlists are now available on test wikis and MediaWiki.org. The plan is to enable it on most wikis in January. [5]
  • Cross-wiki notifications are being developed. When this is done you will not have to go to the wiki where something happened to be notified. [6]


Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.




Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.
The Signpost is written by editors like you — join in!
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2015-12-02&oldid=1183873186"