Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2024-09-04
WikiCup enters final round, MCDC wraps up activities, 17-year-old hoax article unmasked
The WikiCup gears up for its final round
The 2024 WikiCup, hosted by users Cwmhiraeth, Epicgenius and Frostly, is entering its final phase, after Round 4 ended on 29 August. A total number of 135 users, including the late Vami IV, joined the contest at the start of this year; however, just eight of them have made it to the ultimate showdown. Here are the finalists, ranked from first to last as per their scores in the latest round:
- Generalissima (1150 points);
- Arconning (791 points);
- AirshipJungleman29 (718 points);
- BennyOnTheLoose (714 points);
- Hey man im josh (601 points);
- BeanieFan11 (579 points);
- AryKun (499 points);
- Sammi Brie (472 points).
Since its creation back in 2007, the WikiCup has strived to "encourage content creation and improvement and make editing on Wikipedia more fun", and this year's edition is no exception: according to the official data, competitors have so far contributed to 44 featured articles, 72 featured lists, 385 good articles, 94 In the News credits, and over 300 Did You Know credits; thanks to their efforts, 38 articles were also added to featured topics and good topics.
On behalf of The Signpost, we would like to thank the judges and every participant in the 2024 WikiCup, and wish good luck to the eight finalists.
– O
Journals cited by Wikipedia compilation now tracks free DOIs
) next to DOIs and other identifiers in citations!
Tens of thousands of freely available sources flagged
4 December 2023
Top scholarly citers, lack of open access references, predicting editor departures
27 March 2022
The Wikipedia SourceWatch
31 March 2019
New guideline for technical collaboration
4 November 2016
Wikimedia Foundation adopts open-access research policy
25 March 2015
As of 18 August, the Journals cited by Wikipedia (JCW) compilation (see previous Signpost coverage) now tracks the number of distinct DOIs present on Wikipedia, and how many are flagged with |doi-access=free. Several of these are automatically tracked and tagged as free to read by templates and bots (see previous Signpost coverage). As of the 1 August dump, the compilation kept track of 3.70M citations, of which 2.41M had DOIs. Of the citations that had DOIs, 661,103 were identified as free to read, or about 27.44%.
The 17–18 August 2024 update of the CS1/CS2 modules further identified the Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (doi prefix 10.4230) and the Living Reviews journal series (doi prefix 10.12942) as free-to-read registrants, as well as 11 individual journals that can be identified by the starting pattern of DOIs (like 10.1046/j.1365-8711..., 10.1093/mnras.., and 10.1111/j.1365-2966... for the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society). Citation bot will automatically flag those with |doi-access=free when it runs on the article (see our guide on how to use Citation bot yourself).
If you notice a DOI link that takes you to a free-to-read article that wasn't flagged by the bot, you can flag the citation manually with |doi-access=free. You can also try to use WP:OABOT (see our guide on how to use OAbot yourself). If you are aware of fully free-to-read journals/publishers that aren't already kept track of by the CS1/CS2 templates (see CS1/2 FAQ), leave a note at Help talk:CS1 and User talk:Citation bot.
Following the 20 August dump, the compilation kept track of 3.72M citations, of which 2.42M had DOIs. Of the citations that had DOIs, 663,976 were identified as free to read, or about 27.46% (up from 27.44%). It took a few days for the server cache to clear and tracking categories to be populated. I estimate that the 'true' count should have been about 666K, mostly due to MNRAS and MNRAS Letters being identified as free to read.[a]
Related to the JCW update, all CS1/2 templates (like {{cite journal}} and {{citation}}), and the standalone templates {{doi}} and {{doi-inline}}, now support the flagging of free-to-read DOIs with |doi-access=free. The standalone versions, however, are not currently supported by any bot, nor do they have tracking categories.
Thanks to Trappist the monk for their efforts on templates and the identification of free-to-read publishers/journals (I was also involved), as well as the maintainers of Citation bot, JL-Bot, and OAbot (particularly AManWithNoPlan, JLaTondre and Nemo bis) for facilitating the mass-tagging of free-to-read articles.
- ^ Update: Following the 1 September dump, most of the caching issues were resolved, and we have a count of 3.73M citations, of which 2.42M had DOIs (an increase of 15,261 since 1 August). Of the citations that had DOIs, 668,036 were identified as free to read, or about 27.56%. An increase of 6,933 free DOIs (both new and newly-identified), representing 0.11% of all DOI citations, since 1 August.
– H
AI policy positions of the Wikimedia Foundation
In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation provides an overview of several statements it has submitted since last year in response to
[...] governments and international organizations [...] seeking stakeholder feedback about how [AI] policies should be formulated in order to best serve the public interest. [...] The Foundation’s comments have fallen into two categories. Some are directly relevant to the work being done by volunteer Wikipedia editors around the world, such as on copyright and openness of foundational AI models. Others applied our values and the valuable lessons we have learned from our AI/ML work to benefit public interest projects focused on free knowledge and the online information ecosystem—i.e., decentralized community-led decision-making, privacy, stakeholder inclusion, and internet commons.
— "AI for the people: How machines can help humans improve Wikipedia" (Wikimedia Foundation)
For example, in a response to the US Copyright Office's Request for Comments on AI and Copyright, the Foundation states that it "generally supports uses of Wikipedia content for purposes including AI model development", but (as summarized in the blog post) argues that
At a minimum, AI developers who include Wikipedia in the training data used to create large language models (LLMs) should publicly acknowledge that use and give credit to Wikipedia and the volunteer editors who made this rich source of raw materials for LLMs.
At the same time, the Foundation's statement indicates that this attribution might not always be legally required, depending on whether courts decide that the unauthorized use of copyrighted content in training of such AI models is covered by fair use (in which case the attribution requirements of Wikipedia's CC BY-SA 4.0 license would be moot). The Foundation refrains from taking a categorical position on this legal question: "Based on our analysis, we do not believe that training AI models should either be categorically fair use or categorically not fair use. Rather, the particulars of the training process and the way courts view the purposes of a use should inform whether a particular training process is fair or not." The analysis does however offer some detailed if speculative observations on how courts might evaluate the four fair use factors in this context. For example, it is argued that because "the vastness of the datasets used in training mean that any single copy [of a copyrighted work] is barely a drop in the ocean of the whole", judges may want to focus on "the extent to which a work is weighted in the development of a model": "Hypothetically, if a copyright protected work was manually weighted to have an outsized impact in model development, then one could argue that although the uses of other full works may be fair, the amplification of one particular work in the training set is not." (Various LLMs are known to have weighted Wikipedia more highly than other parts of their training dataset, for example GPT-3.)
On the other hand, the Wikimedia Foundation's statement also urged the Copyright Office to take not only the perspective of copyright owners into account, but also that of the users of copyrighted works and of AI-based tools – noting that "The Foundation is somewhat uniquely positioned as both the host of a primary source of training material for generative AI and a user of many AI and ML tools that aid human editors with the creation of free knowledge." In particular, it cautions to keep public interest in mind in possible future changes to copyright laws and AI regulations, e.g.
On the use of data, specifically, we encourage regulators and legislators to align their approaches with existing models, such as the European Union’s inclusion of an exemption for text and data mining in the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, that enable public interest research and other beneficial uses of protected works.
[...] we encourage the Office to consider the potential impacts that changes to copyright law could have on competition among AI developers. If copyright law changes are enacted such that the acquisition and use of training materials becomes more expensive or difficult, there is a risk that dominant firms with greater resources will become further entrenched while smaller companies, including nonprofit organizations, struggle to keep up with mounting development costs.
– H
The Farewell of the MCDC
Chosen by communities, selected by affiliates, and appointed by the WMF, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC), a committee of 15 Wikimedians, first took on the job of drafting a Charter for the Wikimedia movement in November 2021.
There were multiple feedback rounds, a lot of conversations, more discussions and a final ratification vote where the community and affiliate support was overwhelming (albeit with a low turnout in both cases due to the voter eligibility criteria), but the WMF's Board of Trustees decided the draft was not good enough (not safe to try). As reported in the previous issue of The Signpost, the Foundation published three pilot projects to take the work forward.
In August 2024, the committee (which still included 11 people), shared their process and ratification reflections pre-Wikimania. Before dissolving on 30 August, they also published their recommendations for next steps, including a response to the three pilots proposed by the WMF.
– Ciell, former MCDC member
Brief notes
- China blocks Wikimedia Foundation's WIPO accreditation for the fourth time: In what has become an annual tradition, an application by the Foundation to be accredited as a permanent observer at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) failed because of opposition by the Chinese government, despite support from several other countries. As explained by the Foundation's Global Advocacy team, the WIPO is "the specialized United Nations (UN) agency that determines global policies on copyright, patents, and trademarks. Observer status would enable the Foundation to participate in and contribute to WIPO committees where intellectual property norms are set." The Foundation first applied in 2020, when Beijing's delegate objected to "a large amount of content and disinformation in violation of [the] ‘One China’ principle" (see Signpost coverage: "Beijing blocks WMF from World Intellectual Property Organization, citing Wikimedia Taiwan"). China has since also blocked several Wikimedia chapters from gaining permanent observer status.
- Wikimedia ESEAP Conference: Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia has uploaded a video with highlights of the May 2024 Wikimedia ESEAP Conference to YouTube.
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Cancel culture. Please be bold in helping improve this article! Next week's Article for Improvement (beginning 9 September 2024) is Caroline Islands.
- New record low count for active administrators: A new low point of 427 active administrators was reached on 26 August, marking a new decline after the slight increase in July. Meanwhile, the first RfA since June was initiated just a few days before we went to press with this issue.
- The curtain rises on a new edition of WLM: The fifteenth edition of Wiki Loves Monuments kicked off on 1 September. For this year's photo contest, which will focus on built heritage, 53 countries have enrolled. The respective national campaigns will be hosted until 31 October, and then each nation will send their Top 10 to the international jury for the Grand Finale in December.
- Article on non-existent species removed: "Pratylenchus dulscus," a ten-word article without references, was deleted on 22 August, after existing in the encyclopedia for over 17 years. Though not strictly speaking a hoax – it appears to have been created in good faith, based on a species name in a Wikipedia list article that had been altered by an IP – it is currently listed among the longest-lived hoaxes on Wikipedia.
- The Campaigns teams would like to learn about how you collaborate online: Editors can take this Google Form survey or share examples of successful collaborations on Meta Wiki.
AI is not playing games anymore. Is Wikipedia ready?
Portland pol's publicly-paid profile: Part II
- See previous coverage: "Portland politician spends $6,400 in taxpayer dollars to 'spruce up his profile on Wikipedia'" about the article Rene Gonzalez (politician)
The 2020 Oregon Ballot Measure 107 allows campaign finance disclosure regulations in the state of Oregon, which may have been violated by the Gonzalez campaign, in addition to Gonzalez authorizing irregular expenditures of taxpayer funds not allocated to campaigning. Alt-weekly Portland Mercury said "It's unclear which fund the money for the Wikipedia edits came from, and why the money didn't instead come from Gonzalez's mayoral campaign funds."
Two Portland-based television stations had stories on an investigation into the expenditures. KOIN, the CBS affiliate, said that Gonzalez claims "the money went to train staff on how to follow Wikipedia standards", not to conduct impermissible campaigning; KGW, the NBC affiliate, also carried a full story about the case, titled "Commissioner Rene Gonzalez now the subject of Portland campaign finance investigation". – B
Is Wikipedia ready to play the game of Jum-AInji?
In a recent article for The New Yorker, titled Was Linguistic A.I. Created by Accident? (paywalled), Stephen Marche focuses on the role of chance and good luck in the research that led to the landmark 2017 AI paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture. The paper was originally supposed to focus on using the transformer to make English-to-German translations.
Instead, as part of the AI model's training process, the Google team asked the transformer to read Wikipedia entries for two days, covering almost half of the platform's pages. The model was then asked to create five new Wikipedia-style articles from scratch, all about made-up subjects called "The Transformer": a fictitious Japanese hardcore punk band formed in 1968, a fictitious video game, a fictitious 2013 Australian sitcom, a fictitious studio album by an alternative metal group called Acoustic, and even a fictitious science-fiction novel. At first reading, the articles produced by Transformer on the made-up topics all looked like real Wikipedia articles: they were almost too good, "filled with inconsistencies, but [...] also strikingly detailed", suggesting that AI had made a jump of twenty or more years of progress:
Why was a neural network designed for translating text capable of writing imaginative prose from scratch? "I was shocked, blown away," (researcher Aidan) Gomez recalled. "I thought we would get to something like this in twenty years, twenty-five years, and then it just showed up." The entries were a kind of magic, and it was unclear how that magic was performed.
— Was Linguistic A.I. Created by Accident?, Stephen Marche
The historical bond between Wikipedia and machine-learning based natural language processing goes back even further. The first attempts to provide the encyclopedia with text generated using artificial neural networks trace back to at least 2009.
But artificial intelligence and large language models are not just derived from Wikipedia; they are important topics for discussion and policy about the platform's future.
The rapid rise of ChatGPT has raised the most interest and sparked dozens of research efforts towards the implementation of LLMs in the creation and improvement of Wikipedia articles, among other tasks, with the STORM system prototype being the latest example. The Wikimedia Foundation has taken note of AI's progress, for example, by expanding its Machine Learning team and even testing an experimental ChatGPT plugin between July 2023 and February 2024. The Signpost itself has included DALL-E-generated images in various articles. On the other hand, in somewhat Jumanji style, the more we get invested in the AI game, the more traps we discover: without proper checks and balances, machine-generated content can pose a threat to the integrity of Wikipedia, should the number of unsourced and fictitious articles keep increasing and causing more problems with COI-related material and disinformation.
The Spanish newspaper El País recently interviewed Wikimedian and Wikimedia España member Miguel Ángel García, along with the WMF's Director of Machine Learning, Chris Albon (in Spanish, free registration might be required). García, who joined Wikipedia in 2006, noted how many newly-registered users introduce themselves by "[pasting] a giant text, apparently well-structured and well-developed", which turns out to be poorly-written and redundant after a closer look. Luckily, the platform is usually able to handle this material through mechanisms such as speedy or proposed deletion, as well as the continuous efforts of its volunteers, which have also been acknowledged by Albon. (Everyone interested can give a helping hand by joining initiatives such as the WikiProject AI Cleanup.)
However, both expressed concerns over the long-term impact of automatic content on the encyclopedia: while García is mainly worried about the incorporation of "pseudo-media" hosting bot-generated articles as sources on Wikipedia - a phenomenon that could actually be mitigated through reports at the noticeboard - Albon took a brief detour from his usually optimistic view on AI tools, explaining that "if there's a detachment between the places where knowledge is created, like Wikipedia, and the places where it is accessed, like ChatGPT, we're at risk of losing a generation of volunteers". He also said that LLMs providing the platform with poorly-sourced or unreferenced content could "introduce an unprecedented amount of disinformation" on the Internet, since "users will not be able to easily distinguish accurate information from [AI] hallucinations"; quite an ironic situation to find ourselves in, considering that chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini are being fed with thousands of Wikipedia articles as part of their training schedules.
Titled "ENC-AI-CLOPEDIA. AI is mining the sum of human knowledge from Wikipedia. What does that mean for its future?", a separate interview by Sherwood News (the media arm of trading platform Robinhood Markets) also featured Albon, together with his colleague Lane Becker, Senior Director of Earned Revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation and president of its for-profit subsidiary Wikimedia LLC, which runs Wikimedia Enterprise.
The interviewer first confronted them with "Data from Similarweb [which] shows that traffic to Wikipedia has been in decline" since about 2020. In response, Albon pointed to the Foundation's own (presumably more precise) pageview and unique devices data, with Becker asserting that "We have not seen a significant drop in traffic on Wikimedia websites that can directly be attributed to the current surge in AI tools." (This conclusion is somewhat in contrast with two recent academic papers, see our coverage: "ChatGPT did not kill Wikipedia, but might have reduced its growth", "'Impact of Generative AI': A 'significant decrease in Wikipedia page views' after the release of ChatGPT")
However (similar to Albon in the El País interview), Becker voiced "concern [...] about the potential impact that these AI tools could have on the human motivation to continue creating and sharing knowledge. When people visit Wikipedia directly, they are more likely to become volunteer contributors themselves. If there is a disconnect between where knowledge is generated (e.g. Wikipedia) and where it is consumed (e.g. ChatGPT or Google AI Overview), we run the risk of losing a generation of volunteers." (Not mentioned, but presumably on Becker's mind as well, was the fact that these visitors are also, via Wikipedia's well-known donation banners, the Foundation's most important source of revenue by far.)
Asked "How do you feel about practically every LLM being trained on Wikipedia content?", Becker stressed that "we welcome people and organizations to extend the reach of Wikipedia's knowledge. Wikipedia is freely licensed and its APIs are available for free to everyone, so that people all over the world can use, share, add to, and remix Wikipedia content." However, "We urge AI companies to use Wikimedia's free APIs responsibly and include recognition and reciprocity for the human contributions that they are built on, through clear and consistent attribution. They should also provide pathways for continued growth and maintenance of the human-created knowledge that is used to train them" - such as "Clearly attributing knowledge back to Wikipedia", but also, for "high-volume commercial reusers of Wikipedia content to use our opt-in paid for product, Wikimedia Enterprise." Becker shared that its total revenue (i.e. not accounting for the staffing and other costs of Wikimedia Enterprise itself) "for FY 2022-23 was $3.2 million - representing 1.8% of the Wikimedia Foundation's total revenue for the period." However, he declined to disclose how much of that came from Google (one of the few publicly known customers, another one being yep.com).
See also in this issue's News and notes: "AI policy positions of the Wikimedia Foundation"
In brief
- Wikimedian of the Year gets recognition within her local community: Local Canadian newspaper Thorold Today recently dedicated a full article to Wikipedian Hannah Clover, who has recently become the latest recipient of the Wikimedian of the Year award at Wikimania 2024 in Katowice; the newspaper likely cited Hannah's acceptance speech at the convention, where she broke down her most fond memories about the platform, as well as her successful RfA from last year. Among the other key contributions she was recognized for in the award, there's also a notable Signpost essay from January 2023, where she gave feedback on mobile editing of Wikipedia: you can find it here.
- Wikipedia discussion about the war in Gaza keeps spilling over into the real world: A recent decision to rename the article Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza as Gaza genocide, which followed a lengthy talk page discussion, is being covered by an ever-growing number of media outlets worldwide. The latest ones to join the list are Israeli newspaper Haaretz (behind pay-wall), which has also highlighted a notable rise in the amount of daily pageviews since the title was changed, and German portal Israelnetz--published by evangelical association Christliche Medieninitiative pro--which has stated that the page's title was "altered to Israel's detriment", while noting how a deletion discussion over the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia was also taking place (it has since been deleted).
- See previous Signpost coverage about the controversy surrounding this article, as well as the discussion about the reliability of the Anti-Defamation League on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, here and here.
- Edit wars over the noisiest Olympic culture war: Italian online newspaper Fanpage.it recently covered the edit wars on the English Wikipedia page of Imane Khelif; during her participation at the 2024 Summer Olympics, where she eventually won the gold medal in her weight, the born female Algerian boxer became the subject of extensive controversy, as sports functionaries, conservative politicians, (former) social media CEOs and writers all falsely claimed[neutrality is disputed] that she had XY chromosomes or elevated levels of testosterone that could give her some kind of advantage over her opponents. As of this issue's publication, Khelif's article remains extended protected, having been blue-locked since August 1.
- The Editors reviews and events: Wikipedia beat reporter Stephen Harrison, who is best known for his articles on Slate, has recently been busy promoting his debut novel, The Editors, focused on a fictionalized version of the platform (named Infopendium) that is suddenly caught up in global cyberwarfare during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following his interviews in July, Harrison sat down with WFAA and Numlock News, as well as New America and Arizona State University, as part of Future Tense event. WashU newspaper Student Life also published a review of the novel. KAMR (NBC in Amarillo) has an under-three-minute video if you are in a rush.
- We'll be with you down every road: In a recent episode of NPR's radio program 1A, fittingly titled "Why All Roads Of Inquiry Lead To Wikipedia", host Jenn White talks about how "much of our factual questions get answered by the site", and interviews Stephen Harrison. They emphasize the collaborative nature of Wikipedia and how this can lead to heated debates, for example on Donald Trump's conviction, which The Signpost extensively covered back in June.
- Boolean roulette: Musicians and YouTubers Andrew Huang and Tom McGovern recently challenged themselves to write a full song from scratch by using a random Wikipedia article as an inspiration. Helped by Matt Inouye's tool WikiRoulette, the two artists eventually resolved to turn a... Boolean circuit into a metaphor for a meaningful relationship. You can hear the final result of their efforts--with some help from Gabi Rose--at this link.
- Lawsuit against Taiwanese chapter rejected: Taiwan's Liberty Times [1] (Google Translate) and United Daily News [2] (Google Translate) both report that businessman Tsai Eng-meng has lost a lawsuit he filed in Taipei's district court against Wikimedia Taiwan, after edits he made to the Chinese Wikipedia's coverage of his ties to the Chinese Communist Party and purchase of media organizations, including the China Times, had been reverted. The chapter pointed out that it is not the owner, nor the operator of the website.
Simulated Wikipedia seen as less credible than ChatGPT and Alexa in experiment
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Identical text perceived as *less* credible when presented as a Wikipedia article than as simulated ChatGPT or Alexa output
A paper[1] published in Nature's Scientific Reports presents "the results of two preregistered experiments in which [1222 human] participants rated the credibility of accurate versus partially inaccurate information ostensibly provided by a dynamic text-based LLM-powered agent, a voice-based agent, or a static text-based online encyclopedia". These mock-ups (examples, full set) "looked or sounded as similar as possible to the respective real applications" ChatGPT, Amazon Alexa and English Wikipedia, respectively. In the first experiment, this included branding ("Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia" etc.), which was removed as part of the second experiment so that the mock-ups "looked and sounded like a generic voice-based agent, a dynamic text-based agent, or a static text-based encyclopedia" instead.
The brief texts presented were identical across the three mediums. In the Wikipedia case, they were made to resemble the lead section or other parts of a full article. They were generated as answers to
"[...] six questions that related to general knowledge and covered diverse topics8: What do I do when I encounter a wolf? What are the risks of hookah smoking? How many people died when the Titanic sank? What is appendicitis? How many bones are in the human body? Tell me something about the country Slovenia!"
Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the three presentation modes, and shown six texts where
"For half the topics [...] the information was entirely accurate, while for the other half, the information contained several factual inaccuracies and/or internal inconsistencies (i.e., a piece of information within a snippet contradicted another piece of information provided within the same snippet); both error types are known to happen regularly during typical usage of LLMs."
For each text, subjects were asked to rate "the extent to which they perceived the information to be accurate, trustworthy, and believable."
The results might come as an unpleasant surprise to Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation, which has consistently sought to present Wikipedia as a more reliable option over LLM-based tools like ChatGPT (see e.g. "In the media" in this Signpost issue:
"As expected, credibility assessments were overall higher for accurate than for partially inaccurate information. In line with our predictions, we also found that presentation mode influenced credibility assessments in both experiments, with significantly higher credibility for the voice-based agent than the static text-based online encyclopedia. Additionally, in Experiment 1, credibility assessments were significantly higher for the voice-based agent than for the dynamic text-based agent, whereas this difference was not significant in Experiment 2. [...] Importantly, branding did not significantly moderate the effect of presentation mode on perceived information credibility. [... Overall, we] showed that information provided by voice- or dynamic text-based agents is perceived as more credible than information provided by a static-text based online encyclopedia."
The researchers note that these results might be influenced by the fact that it is easier to discern factual errors on a static text page like a Wikipedia than when listening to the spoken audio of Alexa or watching the streaming chat-like presentation of ChatGPT:
"The most plausible interpretation for the observed pattern of results appears to be that both a modality effect (i.e., reading vs. listening) and an effect of conversational nature (i.e., conversational vs. non-conversational) work in parallel and in partially opposing ways: discernment between accurate and inaccurate information benefitted from reading (vs. listening) and from being presented in a non-conversational (vs. conversational) way. Because dynamic text-based agents combine both, higher discernment through reading and reduced discernment through the conversational nature, they score between voice-based agents (lower discernment through listening and conversational nature) and static text (higher discernment through reading and non-conversational nature)."
They point out that this interpretation is consistent with another recent experiment that found "no differences in perceived credibility of information between Wikipedia, ChatGPT, and an unbranded, raw text interface when the conversational nature of ChatGPT is made less salient"
(see our review: "In blind test, readers prefer ChatGPT output over Wikipedia articles in terms of clarity, and see both as equally credible").
The authors offer us some consolation in form of an additional result (not part of the main, preregistered experiment):
"However, exploratory analyses yielded an interesting discrepancy between perceived information credibility when being exposed to actual information and global trustworthiness ratings regarding the three information search applications. Here, online encyclopedias were rated as most trustworthy, while no significant differences were observed between voice-based and dynamic text-based agents."
Besides information credibility as the experiment's main outcome, participants were also asked to provide ratings about several other aspects. For example, "Social presence" was gauged using questions such as "How much did you feel you were interacting with an intelligent being while reading the information/listening to the information?"
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was "lower perceived social presence for static text-based online encyclopedia entries compared to both voice-based agents and dynamic text-based agents."
On the other hand,
"Contrary to our predictions, people felt higher enjoyment [measured using questions like "I found reading the information / listening to the information entertaining"] when information was presented as static or dynamic text compared to the voice-based agent, while the two text-based conditions did not significantly differ. In Experiment 2, we expected to replicate this pattern of results but found that people also felt higher enjoyment with the dynamic text-based agent than the static text."
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.
Contrary to expectations, higher social integration of a new wiki community does not predict its long-term success
From the abstract:[2]
"We hypothesize that the conditions in which new peer production communities [such as wikis like Wikipedia] operate make communication problems common and make coordination and integration more difficult, and that variation in the structure of project communication networks will predict project success. [...] We assess whether communities displaying network markers of coordination and social integration are more productive and long-lasting. Contrary to our expectations, we find a very weak relationship between communication structure and collaborative performance. We propose that technology [such as wikis] may serve as a partial substitute for communication in coordinating work and integrating newcomers in peer production."
From the paper:
"we test whether early-stage peer production communities benefit from the same sorts of communication network structures as offline groups, using a dataset of 999 wiki communities gathered from Fandom (Wikia) in 2010. We create a network based on communication between members of each wiki and examine how well the structure of these networks predicts (1) how productive community members are in adding content to the wiki and (2) how long the community survives."
"Our findings about the relative unimportance of communication structure, combined with theories of stigmergic communication and coordination, suggest a possible tradeoff between social structure and project structure. When the structure of a project is explicit and tasks are straightforward, as in many early-stage peer production projects, there are few social interdependencies. Many simple coordination tasks can be performed through the wiki itself and thus do not require complex social structures. This theory suggests an explanation for findings in the peer production literature that projects tend to become more structured and hierarchical over time (Halfaker et al., 2013; Shaw & Hill, 2014; TeBlunthuis et al., 2018). In contrast with work groups, the work of a typical peer production project may be simpler in early stages. As projects grow and become more complex, it becomes more difficult to signal needs through the artifact and structured coordination is needed."
"Wikipedia's Race and Ethnicity Gap and the Unverifiability of Whiteness"
From the abstract:[3]
"Although Wikipedia has a widely studied gender gap, almost no research has attempted to discover if it has a comparable race and ethnicity gap among its editors or its articles. No such comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia's editors exists because legal, cultural, and social structures complicate surveying them about race and ethnicity. Nor is it possible to precisely measure how many of Wikipedia's biographies are about people from indigenous and nondominant ethnic groups, because most articles lack ethnicity information. While it seems that many of these uncategorized biographies are about white people, these biographies are not categorized by ethnicity because policies require reliable sources to do so. These sources do not exist for white people because whiteness is a social construct that has historically been treated as a transparent default. [...]. In the absence of a precise analysis of the gaps in its editors or its articles, I present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these structures that prevent such an analysis. I examine policy discussions about categorization by race and ethnicity, demonstrating persistent anti-Black racism. Turning to Wikidata, I reveal how the ontology of whiteness shifts as it enters the database, functioning differently than existing theories of whiteness account for. While the data does point toward a significant race and ethnicity gap, the data cannot definitively reveal meaning beyond its inability to reveal quantitative meaning. Yet the unverifiability of whiteness is itself an undeniable verification of Wikipedia's whiteness."
"WhatTheWikiFact: Fact-Checking Claims Against Wikipedia"
From the abstract:[4]
"[We present] WhatTheWikiFact, a system for automatic claim verification using Wikipedia. The system can predict the veracity of an input claim, and it further shows the evidence it has retrieved as part of the verification process. It shows confidence scores and a list of relevant Wikipedia articles, together with detailed information about each article, including the phrase used to retrieve it, the most relevant sentences extracted from it and their stance with respect to the input claim, as well as the associated probabilities. The system supports several languages: Bulgarian, English, and Russian."
"Wikipedia context did not lead to measurable performance gains" for LLMs in biomedical tasks
From the abstract:[5]
"We participated in the 12th BioASQ challenge, which is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) setting, and explored the performance of current GPT models Claude 3 Opus, GPT-3.5-turbo and Mixtral 8x7b with in-context learning (zero-shot, few-shot) and QLoRa fine-tuning. We also explored how additional relevant knowledge from Wikipedia added to the context-window of the LLM might improve their performance. [...] QLoRa fine-tuning and Wikipedia context did not lead to measurable performance gains."
"LLMs consistently hallucinate more on entities without Wikipedia pages"
From the abstract:[6]
"we introduce WildHallucinations, a benchmark that evaluates factuality. It does so by prompting LLMs to generate information about entities mined from user-chatbot conversations in the wild. These generations are then automatically fact-checked against a systematically curated knowledge source collected from web search. Notably, half of these real-world entities do not have associated Wikipedia pages. We evaluate 118,785 generations from 15 LLMs on 7,919 entities. We find that LLMs consistently hallucinate more on entities without Wikipedia pages and exhibit varying hallucination rates across different domains. Finally, given the same base models, adding a retrieval component only slightly reduces hallucinations but does not eliminate hallucinations."
From the "Analysis" section:
"Do models hallucinate more on non-Wikipedia knowledge? We also compare the factuality of LLMs on entities that have Wikipedia pages with those that do not.[...] We observe a significant decrease in WILDFACTSCORE-STRICT when recalling knowledge from sources other than Wikipedia for all eight models, with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o exhibiting the largest drop. Interestingly, even though [the retrieval-augmented generation-based] Command R and Command R+ models perform web searches, they also exhibit lower factual accuracy when generating information from non-Wiki sources."
"Impact of Generative AI": A "significant decrease in Wikipedia page views" after the release of ChatGPT
From this abstract-only paper presented at last month's Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS):[7]
"Although GenAI tools have made information search more efficient, recent research shows they are undermining and degrading engagement with online question and answer (Q&A)-based knowledge communities like Stack Overflow and Reddit [...]. We extend this stream of research by examining the impact of GenAI on the market value and quality of peer-produced content using [...] Wikipedia, which is different from Q&A-based communities mentioned above. We [...] extend empirical analyses focusing on ChatGPT’s release on November 30, 2022. We collect monthly Wikipedia page views and content (text) data for six months before and after the release date as the treatment group. We then collect data for same months a year before as the control group. The difference-in-difference (DID) analyses demonstrate significant decrease in Wikipedia page views (market value) after the release of ChatGPT. However, we found an increase in the quality of Wikipedia articles as evidenced by a significant increase in verbosity and readability of the articles after ChatGPT release. Our analyses have controlled for betweenness and closeness centrality of the articles, and article, year-month, and article category fixed-effects. We will extend this research by finding the mechanisms underlying the impact of GenAI on online knowledge repositories. Further, we plan to conduct detailed analyses to examine the impact of GenAI on knowledge contributors."
See also our review of a different paper addressing the same question: "ChatGPT did not kill Wikipedia, but might have reduced its growth"
See also in this issue's "News and notes" :"AI policy positions of the Wikimedia Foundation"
References
- ^ Anderl, Christine; Klein, Stefanie H.; Sarigül, Büsra; Schneider, Frank M.; Han, Junyi; Fiedler, Paul L.; Utz, Sonja (2024-07-25). "Conversational presentation mode increases credibility judgements during information search with ChatGPT". Scientific Reports. 14 (1): 17127. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-67829-6. ISSN 2045-2322. Preregistration, experiment materials
- ^ Foote, Jeremy; Shaw, Aaron; Hill, Benjamin Mako (2023-05-01). "Communication networks do not predict success in attempts at peer production". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 28 (3): –002. doi:10.1093/jcmc/zmad002. ISSN 1083-6101.
- ^ Mandiberg, Michael (2023-03-01). "Wikipedia's Race and Ethnicity Gap and the Unverifiability of Whiteness". Social Text. 41 (1): 21–46. doi:10.1215/01642472-10174954. ISSN 0164-2472.
, freely available archived version
- ^ Chernyavskiy, Anton; Ilvovsky, Dmitry; Nakov, Preslav (2021-10-30). "WhatTheWikiFact: Fact-Checking Claims Against Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management. CIKM '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 4690–4695. doi:10.1145/3459637.3481987. ISBN 9781450384469. / Preprint version: Chernyavskiy, Anton; Ilvovsky, Dmitry; Nakov, Preslav (2021-10-10), WhatTheWikiFact: Fact-Checking Claims Against Wikipedia, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2105.00826
- ^ Ateia, Samy; Kruschwitz, Udo (2024-07-18), Can Open-Source LLMs Compete with Commercial Models? Exploring the Few-Shot Performance of Current GPT Models in Biomedical Tasks, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2407.13511
- ^ Zhao, Wenting; Goyal, Tanya; Chiu, Yu Ying; Jiang, Liwei; Newman, Benjamin; Ravichander, Abhilasha; Chandu, Khyathi; Bras, Ronan Le; Cardie, Claire; Deng, Yuntian; Choi, Yejin (2024-07-24), WildHallucinations: Evaluating Long-form Factuality in LLMs with Real-World Entity Queries, arXiv, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2407.17468
- ^ Singh, Vivek; Velichety, Srikar; Li, Sen (2024-08-16). "Impact of Generative AI on the Value of Peer Produced Content - Evidence from Wikipedia". AMCIS 2024 TREOs. (abstract only)
Meet the 12 candidates running in the WMF Board of Trustees election
12 candidates are running for 4 seats at the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in the 3–17 September 2024 elections. Who are they, why are they running and what are they bringing to the Board to advance the whole Wikimedia Movement?
Bobby Shabangu
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
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Christel Steigenberger
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
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Deon Steyn
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
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Erik Hanberg
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
The most important thing to call out is that I am the author of “The Little Book of Boards” and three other books for nonprofit leaders, which have collectively sold more than 60,000 copies over the past 15 years. With a long history of nonprofit board experience and nonprofit staff leadership roles, I believe I have a lot to contribute to the Wikimedia board, its culture, and its systems. Additionally, I served as a local elected official on a nonpartisan government board for more than 12 years, and I bring that board experience as well. Currently, I serve as the Director of Audience Development for my local NPR affiliate radio station, where I focus on promoting nonprofit and nonpartisan news. I also view my nonfiction books similarly, where I spread knowledge and sharing my experience with other nonprofit leaders. Finally, my science fiction is particularly attuned to technology, information, and how it shapes society. My series “The Lattice Trilogy” looks at a world with perfect information and its implications. Whether personally or professionally, I am interested in these questions at all levels, and Wikimedia is at the forefront of addressing them for the future. I bring an understanding of nonprofit boards, a desire to build systems and culture that outlast the people who created them, and a deep love of Wikipedia and the mission and projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Farah Jack Mustaklem
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
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Lane Rasberry
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
At Wikimedia Summit 2024 the Wikimedia movement affiliates decided that the new Movement Charter and Global Council will transfer power from the Wikimedia Foundation to the user community. This power transfer may not happen without strong advocacy, but I will negotiate for the resources the community needs to be successful. This includes sustaining current community programs and increasing funds to the Spanish-speaking world, India, and African countries. Because currently only members of wiki organizations get access to some governance rights, we also must create governance participation options for the 99% of editors and readers who have no such membership. I have 12 years of experience as a "Wikimedian in Residence", which is a professional Wikimedian role. I am at the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia, and my institution is ready to back me in my Board work with legal, accounting, ethical, and other expert academic support.
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Lorenzo Losa
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
I wasn't a newbie: my first edit on Wikipedia was in 2004, and I already had governance experience. I had engaged in the international community for a decade. Yet, I didn't fully grasp our global nature. In my first board meeting, I remember a slide telling a story about the Taliban's capture of Kabul - a recent event at the time. This is not something I was used to! It's an important global event, in every newspaper - but I wasn't used to thinking that what I do impacts, or is impacted by, these events. The same goes with our communities, which have the full breadth and diversity of a global movement; and all the challenges of different cultures, languages, timezones working together. Being on the board widened my perspective on our communities - and the opportunity to serve them better. I look forward to continuing to learn from our communities around the world, and to supporting them in any way possible.
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Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
I am running for the Board of Trustees because:
I bring in the perspective of the first digital generation, major Wikimedia governance experience, and the conviction to cooperate with all who wish to further the Wikimedia mission.
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Mohammed Awal Alhassan
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
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Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
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Tesleemah Abdulkareem
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
Also, I am an enthusiastic individual who put in the best in whatever she does. I will be bringing my energetic vibe to the board which is very contagious, of course!.
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Victoria Doronina
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Why are you running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees? What would you contribute? What would you like to learn more about?
As a person from the Global South, with experience living in a totalitarian regime and a seasoned scientist, I hope to offer an important perspective to the Board. Over the last three years, as part of the Board, I have communicated with the Movement, collaborated with the CEO, and provided strategic guidance to the WMF. I want to build on this experience further to improve the relationship between the WMF and the Movement.
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A month after Wikimania 2024
- Maciej Nadzikiewicz (User:Nadzik) was the Wikimania 2024 lead.
- In 2024, Wikimania returned to Central and Eastern Europe for the first time since 2010. Back then, it was also in Poland – in Gdańsk (see previous Signpost coverage). The outside world has changed a lot since then, but luckily so did our movement. Read more about what happened at Wikimania this year!
What happened during Wikimania 2024?
This August, over 1,100 people met in person (with an additional 1500+ joining online) to celebrate the Wikimedia movement and its contributors, in Katowice, Poland. People came from 143 countries on all continents (except the continent with no countries), and were engaged in discussions about the future of our movement and the direction in which Wikipedia and her sister projects are heading.
The conference lasted from 6 to 10 August, with the main programme held on 7–10 August. It was available in six languages through online translations: Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. In total, over 300 sessions (on 12 tracks in 8 parallel rooms) were available to the community. In addition, the WikiWomen Summit and Wikimania 2024 Hackathon, and many other side events took place during the event.
day 1 · day 2 · day 3 · day 4
You can also check out the pictures by the community and organisers
Day 1 – Opening of the conference
On the first day of the conference, the WikiWomen Summit took place. This event, created by the community, was attended by a group of female Wikimedians to address gender imbalance within Wikimedia projects. Discussions focused on the challenges faced by women in the movement, the persistence of stereotypes about them on Wikipedia, and the exploration of new technological solutions and other strategies to close the gender gap.
During the official opening of the conference, we met the Wikimedians of the year, awarded by Jimbo. This included a new category for the award: "Functionary of the Year". This year, the following contributors were recognized:
- Wikimedian of the Year: Clovermoss, for her project "Editor reflections"
- Wikimedia Laureate: DerHexer, longest-serving Steward in the Wikimedia Movement
- Media Contributor of the Year: Kurmanbek, for his volunteer work on graphic design for Wikimedia conferences
- Newcomers of the Year: Wayuu community, represented by Leonfd1992
- Functionary of the Year: Vira Motorko, administrator on the Ukrainian Wikipedia and active UK-EN translator
- Honorable Mention: Gu Eun-ae, executive director and co-founder of Wikimedia Korea
- Tech Contributor of the Year: Siddharth VP, a contributor to MediaWiki core infrastructure in the Echo and Gadget extensions
You can read more stories about this year's winners on Diff.
Day 2 – Welcoming the newcomers
Wikimania 2024 was unique in the type of contributors it brought together. Over half of all participants were under the age of 35, representing the generational shift in the structure of the Wikimedia Movement. For almost 50% of all participants, Katowice was the first Wikimania they ever attended. Previous Wikimaniae in Europe (but not the CEE region) were Stockholm, Sweden, in 2019 and Esino Lario, Italy, in 2016). Special youth-oriented meetups took place, which allowed community members from various countries to exchange their ideas, learn about new projects, or just get to know each other.
The Wikimania 2024 Hackathon was one of the hottest (and not due to the AC malfunction!) events this year. On Phabricator you can check out the tasks that developers were engaged with during Wikimania. The Wikimedia Foundation presented their strategy for the future of MediaWiki and discussed the Foundation's current work on the MediaWiki software's core infrastructure. One of the other topics discussed was the Trust & Safety (T&S) Product's tools that presented the research results of the T&S team that will lead to improving blocks on the Wikimedia projects, with the aim to limit the collateral effects of the blocks, and the current developments in temporary accounts.
Day 3 – Focusing on the technological debt
Wikimania serves as a means to introduce its participants to the country's culture and the region in which it takes place. This year, the cultural elements of Poland and the Central and Eastern Europe region were present in the conference's design. Polish wycinanki were a base for the Wikimania 2024 graphic design. The attendees of the conference had a chance to visit the museums of Katowice, take guided walks through the historical Nikiszowiec neighborhood, and participate in the traditional Bolesławiec pottery workshops. During the day, the traditional Łowiczan group performed dances and songs from their region.
With over 200 people attending the Wikimania 2024 Hackathon, the focus on technology and product work was visible throughout the Wikimania program. Sometimes, the interest was so overwhelming that there was no more space in the rooms, and even the in-person attendees had to listen to the session online! The day was dominated by discussions on the Wikimedia Movement's infrastructure and its integration with the broader internet. Among the topics of the sessions were cooperation of Wikipedia with the GenAI developments and the panel on how the Wikimedia Foundation is proceeding with its own Artificial Intelligence activities. In the second part of the day, attendees participated in the poster session, where over 30 different projects were introduced.
All posters are available on Wikimedia Commons.
Day 4 – Goodbye to Wikimania 2024
During the last day of Wikimania, we wrapped up the program by thinking about the future of our Movement. Among the topics discussed was the Future of Wikimania, which guided our thinking about the upcoming Wikimania conferences. We had a chance to talk about the position of Wikipedian in Residence in the Wikimedia Movement and how the role has evolved since it was first introduced, as well as how we can address our Future Audiences. There were also presentations of the candidates in the upcoming Wikimedia Foundation 2024 elections.
During the closing ceremony, the first-ever international performance of the WikiOrchestra took place. It performed two short pieces of Polish music: Nocturne in E-flat major op. 9 no. 2 by Frédéric Chopin and Karliku, a Silesian traditional folk song by Zdzisław Pyzik. The 5th edition of the Coolest Tool Award was presented, with the following winners by category:
- Quality: Web2Cit by Diegodlh,
- Editor: Cat-a-Lot by Magnus Manske, Ilmari Karonen, DieBuche, Rillke, and Perhelion,
- Experience: InteGraality by Jean-Frédéric,
- Tiny: Wikidata Walkabout by Yaron Koren and Sahajsk,
- Newcomer: View It! by SuperHamster, JamieF, and Dominic
- Honorable Mention: CampWiz by Nokib Sarkar, Mst. Rukaiya, Islam Tonni, Tiven2240, Mrb, Rafi, Wasiul Bahar, and Joy
- Eggbeater: ISA Tool by Anthere et al.
Thank you to the Wikimania 2024 team
Each Wikimania is a Herculean effort by the volunteers who organize it. Over the past 20 months, since we learned that Poland would be hosting Wikimania 2024, we have gathered an amazing group of people to work on the event: from the Wikimedia Foundation, from Wikimedia Polska, and most importantly, from the community.
In total, over 80 volunteers from 20 countries participated in Wikimania 2024 preparations, to whom I am personally amazingly grateful. We took over 200 meetings together and exchanged more text in e-mails and Slack/Discord messages than there is in the The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Special thanks go to the members of the Core Organizing Team (COT) and the Extended Organizing Team:
- Käbi & Kiur Laan from Estonia (COT) – who headed a team responsible for reviewing over 3600 scholarship applications and was the organizer of WikiWomenSummit,
- Wojciech Pędzich from Poland (COT) – who oversaw the creation of the Wikimania 2024 programme puzzle out of over 300 individual fragments and 550+ applications,
- Tar Lócesilion from Poland (COT) – who created and oversaw the execution of the Wikimania 2024 communications strategy and made the Wikimania 2024 Hackathon happen,
- Kiril Simeonovski from North Macedonia – who co-created the Wikimania 2024 programme,
- Janbery from Czech Republic – who coordinated Wikimania 2024 social media presence
- Msz2001 from Poland – who was the wiki-wizard behind the Wikimania 2024 wiki
- Natalia Ćwik from Poland – Executive Director of Wikimedia Polska and a liaison with their amazing team who helped the Wikimania 2024 come true!
There are many amazing people on the Wikimania 2024 team who deserve credit for their help in creating this event with us – you can see all of them Wikimania-wiki page. I feel proud of leading such an amazing and diverse team, the past 20 months have sure been an adventure!
What it's like to be Wikimedian of the Year
I attended my first Wikimania this year in Katowice, Poland. I thought about applying for a scholarship when the process was open, but ultimately decided against it. I figured that attending WikiConference North America was enough for one year; obviously, I changed my mind once I was chosen as the Wikimedian of the Year. I had never been outside of North America before this event, so this experience was a lot of firsts for me. If I had told younger me that my first trip to Europe would be in Poland, she would have been very confused.
In late May, I received an email telling me that I was one of the five people shortlisted for the award. I tried not to think about it too much: I didn't think I'd actually be the winner and that one of the other four editors would be chosen. I didn't consider my accomplishments to be even remotely comparable to those of Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight or Emily Temple-Wood, so why would it be me? I was told to expect a response within three weeks, but it ended up taking longer than that (apparently, there were unexpected challenges internally, and I was told it wasn't my fault). I found out that it was actually me on July 4, which gave me about a month to come to terms with my upcoming fame. I was excited for the most part, but I was also terrified; sometimes it felt like a countdown of doom, where my life would never be normal again.
August 6 – Tuesday
This was a pre-conference culture crawl day, so there were no sessions to attend. Katowice is six hours ahead of Niagara Falls, where I live, so I was also trying to recover from jet lag. I didn't really see much of the city other than getting a super secret tour of the venue and hanging out with some staff members in the attached café. We had some interesting conversations, though: I found out that the Wikimedia Foundation owns their data centres for privacy reasons, that this practice is incredibly expensive, and that it's unusual for tech companies to do this. A new data centre was recently built in Brazil, and this took a lot of work: you can read about it here. I was also told that the codebase for MediaWiki is incredibly old: as a result, this presents unique challenges and a lot of things are "hacks on top of hacks". I was encouraged to attend a session where this topic was featured, which can be watched here. Unfortunately, I did not manage to do so.
August 7 – Wednesday
I had breakfast in the hotel lobby and talked to New Zealand user Giantflightlessbirds, who told me about some interesting work he does as a Wikipedian at Large (an alternative name for a Wikipedian in Residence) in his home-country. I also talked to a few other Wikimedians... but did not get their usernames. Finally, I showed one young woman my knitting and we took a selfie together.
Sessions
- I attended the orientation from 9:00 to 9:45 am. It was mostly some background on how the 2024 Wikimania conference was moved from Kraków to Katowice (including some friendly banter about how they were going to gaslight us with the slides and merchandise), some anecdotes about Polish cuisine and culture (did you know that pierogies can have a blueberry filling?), to follow the friendly space policies (essentially, don't be a jerk), and to exercise caution regarding alcoholic beverages.
- I attended the Volunteer Supporter's Network session from 10:00 to 10:25 am. I noted that these resources were only offered to affiliates, so at the end of the session, I asked someone from the audience about my desire to know more about the type of activities affiliates participate in, since I think this process can be somewhat confusing from the outside looking in. However, I have not heard back yet.
- I attended the blocking and temporary accounts sessions by Trust and Safety, and I found them incredibly informative. The latter session ran into unexpected challenges when the pre-recorded video lost audio, but I think Dreamy Jazz did a good job stepping in and making the best of it.
Opening ceremony
Preparation for the opening ceremony started at 1 pm. I was one of two recipients who misunderstood that I was supposed to have lunch before meeting Jimmy Wales; luckily, Vermont saved the day by finding us meals and beverages. Apart from that, my introduction to Wales and the rest of the recipients went smoothly. We sat next to each other in one big circle and shared who we are and which category we were chosen for. Then, we rehearsed the ceremony itself.
After the rehearsal finished, I spent time with a bunch of friends behind a staircase (we had a table and it's way less gloomy than it sounds). Some plans were made for after the opening ceremony, because "it's not like any of us will have anything to do". It was incredibly difficult to keep a straight face and not give the secret away at that point. When we all sat down at a table in the room for the opening ceremony, at 5 pm, my heart was pounding, but I tried my best to remain calm and just act like everything was normal, and I think I did a good job acting the part. On the inside, I felt like I was experiencing something akin to an adrenaline rush: it's difficult to explain precisely what I was feeling, but it was incredibly intense. I was sitting next to Seddon, and he was determined to update all the award recipients as they were announced. However, he had no idea that I was going to be one of them, and his laptop died, so he switched to his tablet to edit through the app when my time came. It was oddly fitting, given that I'm known for mobile editing... The secret was out once Natalia started describing me; Seddon suddenly looked up from his tablet and literally blurted out, "It's you!" We shared a knowing look: sure enough, it was me. My name was announced, the lights that gave everyone a headache went crazy, and I forced myself to walk onto the stage.
I admit I have very limited experience with public speaking: I had never been on a stage before, and I had a thousand people watching me for the first time in my life. I could literally feel my legs shake, and I spent a lot of my mental effort just trying to stay still and not fall. I was told by a few people afterwards that I did look a little nervous, but the situation didn't look as dire as it felt. If you wish to watch it, you can do so here. In retrospect, I'd empty my pockets beforehand (my wallet and passport are bulky)... I would also have spoken more slowly, deliberately, and with less filler words. After the ceremony ended, I mingled with the other conference participants, because I'm a social butterfly. A bunch of people congratulated me and asked for a selfie, and one person even asked me to sign their copy of All the Knowledge in the World.
August 8 – Thursday
Sessions
- I attended the Opening the Academia keynote session from 9:00 to 9:55 am. It was a panel with four participants, and I listened to what the speakers had to say about their experiences; I particularly agreed with the argument that academic publishing should be more open access than it currently is. Later on, I heard something that stood out to me: "If you're a scholar and you do not ask your students to write Wikipedia articles as a form of submitting your essay for a grade, you're a loser. You're a massive loser." This comment concerned me for multiple reasons: one question posed in editor reflections is about WikiEd, with numerous people having used this space to share that they have cleaned up after student editors and that they found this experience frustrating. I don't think this conclusion is surprising to anyone who has read an WP:ANI thread where a WikiEd class has gone wrong. So hearing someone say, "If you do this, Wikipedia editors will oftentimes check to see if it's plagiarized or not, they will make comments, they will edit it for you", and, "If from a class of thirty people... five articles remain, it's zero versus five", it came across as a somewhat reckless mentality to have. I expressed these concerns when questions and comments were opened up to members of the audience:
"You mentioned you were very pro-student editing and how you think everyone should do it, right? Obviously, I'm cool with young people editing, because I'm 21 and if I was against that, I wouldn't be editing at all. But I think maybe there are more factors to consider than just seeing if some articles stay. From the newcomer's perspective, you don't want to be setting people up to fail. Then, from the community outreach perspective, [...] yes, people will clean up after the people who are doing things that they aren't supposed to be, but it kind of diminishes the volunteer morale a bit? [If] they're constantly flooded with content that they need to clean up, then it can be a bit of a vicious cycle where they're less welcoming to student editors. So, I was just wondering if you've ever considered that, and if you had any thoughts on how you might want to mitigate factors like that?"
- In response, they said:
"I think it's a very good argument that you're making, but there's two things that I wanted to add to that. First of all, editors are already flooded with bad quality edits. [I interrupted them to clarify that my concerns were related to the scale in which these issues can arise. Then they said:] I would still argue that the average quality of professor-supervised class editing will be higher than the average quality of a newcomer edit. Mainly because students have access to all those journal libraries and are, by design, probably the top 1% of knowledge-privileged people. By design, their edits will most likely not be horrible, although probably not great, either. Second, I think the problem you're raising is super important, that we do not discourage people by hanging them out to dry, go out and edit Wikipedia and of course, prepare them. I think you're very right that, first of all, we need to let people know what the rules are, maybe get them familiar with the format, but isn't that true of academic writing in general? You do not ask people to start writing journals."
- In retrospect, I wouldn't have interrupted them as they were speaking, as I did a few times in that exchange: I think I was treating it like a conversation, but in this context, it comes across as somewhat rude. If I meet him again someday, I'd likely apologize for that. Afterwards, I had a brief conversation with other audience members in the hallway, where I discussed how I think Wikipedia works best when someone's heart is in it, and not because they're doing it for a grade. I mentioned another editor I had met at a Toronto meetup, who has a Wikipedia club at their university: I brought this up as an example of how one can mitigate the potential disadvantages of large scale student editing without getting rid of the advantages, such as new editors and access to university resources.
- I attended this session about human rights from 10:00 to 10:55 am: it was not uploaded on YouTube, but the slides are available here. It was a bit odd to hear about general internet safety after outing myself to more than a thousand people the night before, but I think it was interesting, nonetheless. Here are some key takeaways: women are more likely to be harassed online, people have gone to jail for editing Wikipedia, and it's important to respond quickly to safety concerns. I asked a question about how they determine the "realness" of a threat, and it turned out that it depends a lot on the context of the specific situation. Do they live in a country with a good human rights record? Does the project itself, or the person, see the threat as concerning? Sometimes the foundation does not get involved because they don't want to do any harm (e.g. if they make a public statement, they might put the victim's family in danger). There was some audience participation about the general nature of how some editors are more open about their identities than others, and how it's very much a personal choice that we should not judge others for.
- I attended the Information Integrity during Elections session from 11 am to 11:55 am. One key takeaway was that disinformation on Wikipedia looks different from how it would on a social media site (for example, _targeted ads cannot be bought), but Wikipedia's increased visibility raises the motivation for bad actors. If a government fails to censor its opponents, they usually try to discredit the information source and threaten people: at the start of election cycles, sometimes people will contact political parties directly to remind them of the rules. When there's political violence, chapters and admins collaborate in private channels. Trust and Safety performs investigations and has a disinformation team. I learned that the Anti-disinformation Repository is a resource that exists. I also learned that occasionally the foundation does policy advocacy when it has implications for Wikimedia projects. An example was a Texas law, which would later become the subject of a Supreme Court case, that would make it possible to construe reverting content from an unreliable source as political speech. Other examples given were surveillance reform advocacy and Section 230 protections.
- I attended the Frontlines of Truth and Learn from each other with linked data sessions to fulfill my duties as a volunteer. Anyone who receives a scholarship to attend Wikimania is required to do this; I had to send a few emails to get this rearranged a few times, though. The first time I was chosen to do video editing (which I have no idea how to do), while the second time I was chosen to take notes for a session that was being presented in Spanish (a language I do not understand). I tried my best to take notes during these two sessions for the Etherpad, but I had no idea how that was supposed to work, and it stressed me out a little. The latter session was aimed towards a very technically minded audience, so I asked the speaker a bunch of questions during a break, just to make sure I was not misrepresenting what was being said.
- I attended the Fireside Chat with the Wikimedia Foundation Executives from 5 to 5:55 pm. There was a demo of Edit Check, which was incredibly exciting to see! The gist is that this feature will encourage editors to cite a source before adding content, or explain why they do not want to do so. It'd be a game changer. Apart from that, there was some discussion about how the foundation is concerned about the future of search engine traffic and keeping younger editors engaged. The time for questions was extended to allow me to ask one:
"[How did] you [come] to the conclusion that there are less younger editors that are interested in contributing? I think I actually had a conversation with Selena about this briefly at WikiConference North America, [where] I talked a bit about how I know lots of people my age that edit. [Obviously,] anecdotal experience isn't everything, but I assume you have pretty good reasons for coming to that conclusion?"
- In response, Selena Deckelmann said:
"I think there's editing and there's readers, so I can talk about the editing piece of it. With editors, it's complex. There are things that have shifted over time, and I actually have this really promising report the Community Metrics team put together, that says we're starting to see a rise in younger editors overall. That doesn't [necessarily] translate to functionaries, but I don't have as good data on [them] overall. They're a crucial population of people that make the whole system work, so for me there's data that shows that younger editors are kind of turning in a different direction, and if you dig in and look at each region, you start to see different stories. So it's quite a complex picture. Overall, I would say I get a lot of feedback from the administrators, in particular, that they're just seeing their numbers drop, that we're not getting enough new people into that system, so those are the factors and data that I have about admins and I'm really interested in more."
Conversations
- I had breakfast, and then arrived at the conference venue absurdly early (like 7 am). I had trouble sleeping after the intensity of the previous night, and I woke up around 4 am. I had a conversation with Ocaasi, as I talked a bit about my personal life and my ambitions, and we discussed how he wants more experienced Wikimedians to be a part of Residence programs. We also discussed how he does a lot of work guiding newbies, noting that when they don't make mistakes, they're often accused of being sockpuppets. He stated that I'm good at "constructive dissent": I'd never heard that phrase before, but I think it describes me well.
- During the election disinformation session, I had a whispered conversation with Shikeishu, who is an active editor on Wikidata. They showed me some interesting things, like Wikidata query, their community portal and project chat.
- At lunch, I had a conversation with Tohaomg: I told him about my goal to understand affiliates and what they do a bit more. He was willing to talk about what Wikimedia Ukraine does, being a board member of the organization since February 2021. He said that a lot of what they do when interacting with the public is correcting common misconceptions (an example being that projects don't operate like a business and there are no clearly defined hierarchies). We talked a lot about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine impacted daily life and in turn, Wikimedia Ukraine itself: a lot of Wikipedians either died, were conscripted, or moved to Poland, so the organization asked for help from other projects to help keep up with the maintenance of the Ukrainian Wikipedia, while assigning temporary admin rights to volunteers who were interested. However, most people had other priorities than editing Wikipedia, and even if they wanted to, power outages were common. There were also other practical issues, like how most European keyboards do not support typing in Ukrainian, and highly skilled workers having to take lower-paying jobs because their qualifications were not transferable to other countries. Other concerns were Russian disinformation and being contacted by Ukrainian government officials (he said that sometimes people will ask how to add an image, or that they don't like that certain content exists, in which case they are told that they would be reverted if they tried to remove it, and that Wikimedia Ukraine cannot control what's on the Ukranian Wikipedia). I was somewhat shocked, because it must be really intimidating to receive a phone call from government officials out of the blue like that. What's more, Ukraine does not have freedom of panorama, and that impacts what images are allowed to be uploaded to Commons: Tohaomg said that the organization had tried to get members of the national parliament to recognize why changing these rules would be useful, but it took so long that other people got elected, and so they would have to start over if they tried again. Then the war happened, so obviously politicians have different priorities. Still, Wikimedia Ukraine supports local contests to improve articles and add photos, while also partnering with other affiliates to do something called CEE Spring, which involves a lot of cross-project collaboration. For example, Polish Wikipedians will write content about Ukraine, and vice versa. Wikimedia Ukraine also does outreach work with libraries and museums. Finally, they have monthly awards where the most active editor and newbie win... a can of condensed milk. If you're as confused as I am, it's a play on words in Ukrainian, where the phrasing for "condensed milk" and "milk you don't pay for" is similar. They also support an annual event called Wikimarathon.
- I talked for an hour with cscott about template parsing and a possible new feature regarding talk pages. I repeatedly emphasized the importance of how the community would much rather have years of backlogs worth of technical issues dealt with, compared to radically reinventing features. We also talked a bit about how sometimes people in the community and the WMF don't understand each other that well and some possible sources of that tension (what I refer to as the "Venn diagram situation"). He told me that when the fundraising banners were less manipulative and also less effective last year, they had to lay off 20% of their staff. Apparently, the endowment was created as a buffer, so when people donate less often, the foundation will still be okay.
August 9 – Friday
Sessions
- I attended the Exploiting Wikimedia foundation platforms session, because it sounded fascinating. Unfortunately, I did not find it to actually be that way, and ended up leaving early. It mostly seemed to be about... one editor being upset that Commons did not block a specific person? They suggested a foundation committee needed to be established for this, which confused me. It's possible I didn't understand the importance of what they were trying to get at.
- I attended the Citation Watchlist session after I left the previous one. I learned that the foundation has not given technology grants for awhile, so the project was being supported by Hacks/Hackers. More information about the script can be found on this page.
- I attended the Universities and Wikimedia session from 10:30 to 10:55 am. Some key takeaways were: most Wiki Education efforts have been in North America, _targeting faculty and databases; libraries are a vast resource of pay-walled or otherwise hard to access sources, and if 1% of American university students made a contribution, it'd be 150,000 contributions. Then the talk switched to something I had talked about with other people yesterday: Wikipedia clubs! The speaker made the argument that students can write about what they're interested in, which provides a lot of good long-term engagement. One of the downsides, though, is that it can take a lot of work to establish one of these clubs.
- I attended the 10 Years and 20 Million Links Fixed session from 11:00 to 11:25 am. This session was about InternetArchiveBot, and I thought it was really interesting. The foundation does not fund this; that comes from a partnership with the Internet Archive itself.
- I attended the Student Engagement with Openness session from 11:30 to 11:55 am. I thought it was a very interesting success story for what Wikimedian in Residence programs can accomplish. The slides are linked at the session page for others who are curious.
- I attended the Remixing Open Culture session from 3:30 to 4:10 pm. The poster I created can be found here.
Conversations
- Before the sessions started, I had a conversation with other editors. Someone told me about how they attended a wedding of two Wikipedians and the lead section of marriage was read at the ceremony. He also said that there have been people that got married at Wikimania. I also got some advice about how the foundation might offer me a job at some point, because they like "poaching" prominent community members; however, I was warned that this experience can be incredibly frustrating. Another editor, Ragesoss, showed me something called Impact Visualizer, which I thought was a really cool tool. I then talked to central notice admin TheresNoTime about how they improved Wikimedia UK budgets (this affiliate does a lot of GLAM work with museums and libraries). Vermont told me about how they broke temporary accounts during the hackathon: they found a way to give a temporary account sysop rights and the ability to block an admin. It's only possible because they're a steward, but the issue is going to be fixed, regardless. This is also when I found out I now have a Commons category and a Wikidata item.
- While I did not attend this session, I was told that my mobile editing essay was mentioned at the Board of Trustees meeting.
- I had lunch with HJ Mitchell, ToBeFree and Hawkeye7. Then, I got an email from a Foundation employee to tell me that BBC's Tech Life wanted to interview me, so I cut lunch a bit short and headed up to the press room. My interview starts at 20:20. I talked for longer than what was actually included in the interview. For example, I was asked what my favourite article was: it was a question that caught me somewhat off-guard, but I said that it was ketchup chip, due to its novelty. If you tell any Canadian that this article didn't exist until I wrote it this year, they'd be shocked. Anyways, I realized that the article could be in better shape than it was, so I expanded it after I finished the interview. I bought an e-book about the history of Canadian snack food and read portions of it while hanging out with other editors in the hackathon room. I did this for the rest of the day and hung out with editors Chlod, Dreamy Jazz, Novem Linguae, Leaderboard, Harej and Cyberpower678 (I did take a quick break to attend the remixing open culture session linked above).
August 10 – Saturday
Sessions
- I attended the Older vs younger generations session from 10:00 to 10:25 am. There were fancy charts, pie charts, and conclusions, but I believe that the sample size was far too small to do any of that, since all of this was based off a survey where there had been just 28 participants. I talked with DerHexer after the session concluded, and he let me know about an equivalent German Wikipedia survey with more than 1,000 participants. Unfortunately, I don't understand German, but I think that's a more representative sample size than 28.
- I attended the Understanding and assisting with undisclosed paid editing enforcement session from 11:00 to 11:55 am. The speaker was employed by the Foundation's legal department and it was a pre-recorded presentation. Details were limited, because there's only so much that can be shared, but I found what was presented interesting. Key takeaways were that they've taken down 150 domains, have created lines of communication with platforms where UPE scams are provided, and have performed more than 50 informal settlements. He repeatedly thanked the members of the community who offer leads into these investigations, as the team has to focus on the worst offenders due to limited resources.
- I attended The Future of the Wikipedian in Residence Position from 1:30 to 1:55 pm. I admit to being intrigued about the concept of the position itself (it's near the top of the list for my dream job aspirations).
- I attended the closing ceremony, and then the closing party, where I mostly just had conversations with other editors. Someone shared a screenshot of a mobile fundraising project with me, which prompted me to start a thread over at the village pump.
Conversations
- I wanted to watch the Wikipedia and television session, as well, but I got lost trying to find the room, so I gave up and returned to the hackathon to hang out with people again. It was mostly the same group as yesterday, although Samwalton9 also joined us. Whenever I was not attending a session, I was there.
- I had lunch with Pacita (WikiNYC): she's a relatively new editor, and we had a very interesting conversation together, mainly talking about perennial sources, RfA, and sources of tension between the Foundation and community.
- I received a coffee mug and keyboard mouse as a gift from the city of Katowice. The organizers of the conference itself handed these gifts to me and the other Wikimedian of the Year winners.
August 11 – Sunday
I woke up early to check out of the hotel, because my shuttle back to the Katowice Airport would leave at 9 am. It was about a half-hour drive, and I had a fun time talking with several other editors on the bus.
When we arrived at the airport, I said an official goodbye to some editors, and we arranged a group photo where we all showed our passports. However, plenty of us didn't have flights for hours, so we organized an impromptu edit-a-thon in the airport café. I unpacked my backpack to show Kingoflettuce the books I had brought to the conference, and he did start reading one of these books: Jehovah's Witnesses: A New Introduction by George Chryssides. He got about halfway through it, and then we talked a bit about the lack of active editors in the topic area, and how I've been trying to reduce the reliance on primary sources; he told me what he knew about the group's history in Singapore. On a side note, Chlod said that he was going to try to nominate an article for good article status for the first time, so we all encouraged him to go for it!
Finally, I learned a little bit about how Malaysian names worked from Taufik Rosman, and he also told me about the work he does across projects. It was really cool to have an extended conversation with the previous Wikimedian of the Year!
Gallery
-
The buildings to the left and right of the conference venue. I coined the term "Lego building" to refer to the latter when giving people directions and it caught on. Someone else coined "UFO" to refer to building on the left. -
The ICC building where Wikimania was held. -
Inside the conference venue. -
Ice cream I bought at the plaza across from my hotel on the first day. -
A selfie with Jimmy Wales. -
Being interviewed by another Wikimedian in front of the hack-a-thon room. -
A selfie with Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. -
A talented artist creating a representation of Wikimania. -
My spot on the board :) -
The food I ate at the closing party. -
Edit-a-thon at the airport. -
I'm the maple leaf in the top right.
After the gold rush
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, Vestrian24Bio, ltbdl, Marinette2356, Alexysun. Ollieisanerd, and CAWylie.
We were staying in Paris (July 28 to August 3)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Imane Khelif |  |
6,746,991 |  |
Would be nice if the Olympics (#3) propelled an athlete to the top of this list simply for excelling in sport. Instead, the gender controversies that are all the rage nowadays manifested once Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer competing in the women's 66 kg division, won her opening bout in less than a minute, with just one punch. |
| 2 | Simone Biles | |
4,580,661 |  |
Three years after a much hyped appearance in the Tokyo Olympics that didn't pan out because she felt ill during the initial competitions, the most decorated gymnast in history is dominating the gymnastics competitions in Paris like she did in Rio, having won three golds in team, individual all-around and vault, and has become the most successful U.S. gymnast in the Olympics (and third overall) with ten medals, seven of which are golden. Her closest competitor is another Black gymnast from the Americas, Brazilian Rebeca Andrade, who won a gold in Biles' absence in Tokyo, but so far only managed to gain two silvers and a bronze. |
| 3 | 2024 Summer Olympics | |
3,486,142 |  |
France receives the biggest multi-event sport in the world, mostly in host city Paris, but with some sports being held in 15 other Metropolitan France cities, and going as far as Tahiti for the surfing competitions. 32 sports are being contested, including the debut of breakdancing, and for the third time a controversy made Russian athletes compete with a different collective name. After the Russian doping scandal led to them being the Olympic Athletes from Russia and the Russian Olympic Committee, this time the Russian invasion of Ukraine propelled a ban of just about every Russian and Belarusian athlete, and the select few who could enter are competing as Individual Neutral Athletes. |
| 4 | Deadpool & Wolverine | |
3,467,395 |  |
Again the Marvel Cinematic Universe provides a movie full of nostalgia, fanservice and multiversal shenanigans. Only this time it's far from family-friendly entertainment, as the transition of the X-Men from the Fox film series to the Marvel Studios stable is led by the ultraviolent and potty-mouthed anti-hero Deadpool, who tries to prevent the destruction of his universe by teaming up with the most famous of the Mutants, Wolverine, who in spite of being another Canadian fond of bloodshed, is not as welcoming to the buffoonery of the "Merc with a Mouth". The combined power of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in their signature roles, along with the usual action and comedy (only more graphic this time around - there is a man getting his skin ripped off and over 100 F-bombs!) and added tributes to many past Marvel movies, led to Deadpool & Wolverine becoming a smash hit, with positive reviews and massive box office intakes - the $200 million budget alone was covered by the North American opening weekend, and analysts think a billion dollars worldwide is very possible, in spite of high content ratings. |
| 5 | Kamala Harris | |
2,522,226 |  |
The American vice-president is now officially the Democrats' candidate for the 2024 United States presidential election, quite progressive to rely on a Black woman (no matter if the competition questions her ethnicity). Expect the next edition to have high views for her and the guy Harris chose as her running mate. |
| 6 | Katie Ledecky | |
1,951,185 |  |
Two American women returning to Olympic glory. Ledecky is the most decorated female swimmer ever, and in her fourth Olympic appearance reached 14 medals with the four she got at #3, including gold in both the 800m and 1500m freestyle races. Lee was the gymnastics team standout in Tokyo once #2 bailed out, winning the all-around competition, whereas this time she shared the team gold with Biles and was behind her and Andrade in the all-around podium. |
| 7 | Sunisa Lee | |
1,604,952 | 
| |
| 8 | Michael Phelps |  |
1,590,737 |  |
Two athletes not competing at #3 but present in Paris for other reasons. Phelps is the male equivalent of #6, who became the most decorated Olympian ever by dominating the pools in four different games (this after not winning anything in his debut!), with 28 medals and only 5 of them not being gold; this year, though, his appearance rather included a video with Snoop Dogg, who is showing up in a lot of competitions. Owens will never be an Olympian, given American football is far from entering the programme, but was cheering on wife #2, which always leads to amusing pictures, since he's one head taller than her. |
| 9 | Jonathan Owens |  |
1,382,247 | 
| |
| 10 | India at the 2024 Summer Olympics | |
1,295,100 |  |
No surprise in seeing this here, or that the country did not perform well in spite of its huge population. Still, the first week of #3 had three bronze medals from shooting, two with air pistols and one with rifles. Near medaling was achieved with fourth places in both shooting and archery. As a sidenote, the Indian flag bearers at the opening ceremony were two people good with rackets: shuttler P. V. Sindhu (who didn't get her third Olympic medal due to falling in the first round of the playoffs) and Sharath Kamal of table tennis. |
Let's show them we are better (August 4 to 10)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tim Walz | |
6,659,696 |  |
Harris (#8), the vice-president and Democratic candidate for the upcoming United States election, has picked the progressive Governor of Minnesota to be her running mate. |
| 2 | 2024 Summer Olympics | |
3,234,409 |  |
The Games of the 33rd Olympiad hosted in Paris is reaching its conclusion this Sunday, with only one question remaining, whether US or China will finish atop the medal table. As much as the competitions were entertaining, the Games saw their fair share of problems, like the Olympic Village having no air conditioning and insufficient food, the Seine not being clean enough yet still serving as swimming venue for two sports, and the surfing competition held in Tahiti having an unfortunate lack of waves during its decisive semifinals and finals. |
| 3 | Deadpool & Wolverine | |
2,452,770 |  |
X(-Men) gon' give it to ya! The team-up of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as two anti-heroic Mutants fond of slashing people in their debut at the Marvel Cinematic Universe is wrecking the box office, and should soon join another comic book-based movie, Joker, in making a billion dollars in spite of an R-rating. |
| 4 | Simone Biles | |
1,740,385 |  |
The most decorated gymnast ever had a dominating performance at #2, winning golds with the U.S. team, the individual all-around, and the vault. Only the last day of competition had Biles being surpassed, as she first missed the podium altogether with a fifth place in the balance beam, and then getting the silver at the floor, beaten by her Brazilian friendly rival Rebeca Andrade, who Biles made sure to bow to in the medal presentation (the other woman paying respects, Jordan Chiles, is currently threatened to lose her bronze). |
| 5 | Imane Khelif | |
1,726,957 | |
#2 could simply be the pinnacle of this Algerian boxer's career, having won the gold medal. Yet Khelif earned a lot of attention for less flattering reasons, given that after quickly winning her first fight, she was subject to accusations of the most outrageous sort, leading to her opening a criminal complaint against the transvestigation full of cyberbullying that in her words, "harms human dignity". |
| 6 | Armand Duplantis | |
1,622,327 |  |
Still in #2, this Swedish pole vaulter successfully defended the gold medal he had first earned in Tokyo 2020, breaking his own world record in the process. The record-setting jump of 6.25 m earned extra attention for its heartwarming follow-up, as Duplantis rushed to the stands to kiss his girlfriend. |
| 7 | Sheikh Hasina | |
1,483,799 |  |
The daughter of the "founder of Bangladesh", Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina served as the prime minister of Bangladesh from January 2009 to August 2024. Her reign was marked by government corruption, democratic backsliding, enforced disapperances, and extrajudicial killings. Domestically, she was criticised as being too close to India. Protests and riots broke out in June. Initially, they were meant to reform the quota system, which prescribes quotas to government jobs, but evolved into anti-government protests. At least a thousand protesters died, with many more injured. The movement eventually demanded Hasina's resignation on 4 August. She resigned on 5 August, and has fled to India. In the meantime, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has taken over the seat as a caretaker leader. |
| 8 | Kamala Harris | |
1,470,024 |  |
I can't wait for this election to end. |
| 9 | Noah Lyles | |
1,363,713 |  |
Last year, this American sprinter earned attention as his response to winning three golds in the 2023 World Athletics Championships was complaining about a habit of the American major leagues: "You know the thing that hurts me the most? I have to watch the NBA Finals and they have 'world champion' on their head. World champion of WHAT? The United States?" #2 made Lyles become both world and Olympic champion by winning by a chin the most prestigious race, the 100 metres. He contracted COVID-19 in the days before the 200m race, but decided to compete in the final regardless: eventually, despite winning the bronze, he was so exhausted that he left the track in a wheelchair. And the basketballers decided to remember Lyles' swipe by celebrating their gold medal by posting on social media "Are we world champs now?" (to which the response was "No, you're Olympic champions, the basketball world champions are those who win the World Cup, and you didn't.") |
| 10 | Vinesh Phogat | |
1,359,234 |  |
This Indian freestyle wrestler competed under the 50kg women's category at #2 and had qualified for the Final, even defeating the reigning Olympic and world champion Yui Susaki in the first round. But during the weigh-in on the morning of the finals, she was disqualified for being above the stipulated weight by 100 g (3.5 oz) and was relegated to last place in the classification. Although she had appealed against the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, she was ultimately declared as "Lost by forfeit", breaking the hearts of many Indians in the process. |
Just like a prayer, you know I'll take you there (August 11 to 17)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Deadpool & Wolverine | |
1,865,839 |  |
A few weeks after its release, the sole Marvel Cinematic Universe movie of the year managed to top the Report. It's no surprise, as it was a sure fire way to get a hit by teaming up the two X-Men that earned solo movies, the overtly irreverent Deadpool and the embittered and grumpy Wolverine, and fans also liked to see along with the expected action and comedy the unexpected return of characters from non-MCU Marvel adaptations (including from a movie that never came out). Deadpool & Wolverine made over a billion dollars and surpassed Joker as the highest-grossing R-rated movie, although the clown from the Distinguished Competition will have a chance to earn its belt back in October, when Joker: Folie à Deux will probably make some people go gaga. |
| 2 | Alien: Romulus | |
1,299,377 |  |
Like the Predator two years ago, the Alien got another chance at the movies. Set between the first and second installment of the series, Alien: Romulus has a group of scavengers raiding an abandoned space station, only to discover the place was used to study a particularly vicious alien creature who is subsequently out to get them. Reviewers and fans alike were impressed at how director Fede Alvarez made Alien: Romulus both frightening and stylistically faithful to the earlier Alien movies, and already made back its budget in a single weekend with $108 million worldwide. |
| 3 | 2024 Summer Olympics | |
1,252,858 |  |
The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad hosted by Paris concluded last Sunday, with US finishing atop the table for the fourth consecutive time and overall 19th time - it was a tight affair, though, given the US had the same number of golds as China (not helped by Russia's absence). The event called it a day with the Olympic flag being handed over to Tom Cruise, who then carried it to Los Angeles, the host city of the next Olympics. |
| 4 | It Ends with Us |  |
1,032,327 |  |
This 2016 romance novel, about dealing with domestic violence and emotional abuse, nearly spawned a coloring book in 2023, until author Colleen Hoover wisely changed her mind. Instead, it was adapted into a film (#8) that released last week. |
| 5 | Deaths in 2024 |  |
981,509 |  |
They say an end can be a start Feels like I've been buried, yet I'm still alive... |
| 6 | Stree 2 | |
893,252 |  |
This Bollywood sequel to the 2018 film was released last Friday coinciding with the Indian Independence day and opened to positive reviews from critics. The film has already emerged as the sixth highest-grossing Indian film of 2024 and third highest-grossing Hindi film of 2024. |
| 7 | Rachael Gunn | |
842,250 |  |
"Raygun" had a rough week. She entered the Olympics as a breakdancer with her Australian team (albeit not in the proper attire), scored zeroes in the first round against three competitors, and quickly became the _target of online bullies, to the point that a petition on Change.org was made regarding her "unethical conduct" and whether or not she should have even been on an Olympic team. AOC executive Matt Carroll saw the veiled bullying of an entry and called for its subsequent removal. Gunn herself has lashed out at the internet trolls. |
| 8 | It Ends with Us (film) | |
824,641 |  |
The Justin Baldoni-directed adaptation of #4 opened second at the box office, right behind #1. The competition between husband and wife Ryan Reynolds and #10's latest cinema releases over the top spot certainly does resemble last year's unforgettable battle between a doll and an atomic bomb. |
| 9 | Kamala Harris | |
762,832 |  |
Americans don't really know what Harris stands for, apparently, so they go to Wikipedia. |
| 10 | Blake Lively | |
701,559 |  |
The wife of #1 star Ryan Reynolds plays the lead character in #8. Though the film did come in second at the box office, right behind Marvel's latest release, Lively's presence on this list is most likely enhanced due to the feud with her co-star and director Justin Baldoni and the unusual press tour of It Ends with Us, which had the two lead stars promoting the film separately (unlike the currently inseparable Reynolds and Hugh Jackman), as well as Lively framing her movie like a celebratory girls' night, despite its heavy subject on domestic violence and physical abuse, and promoting her new haircare line. |
I close my eyes, Heaven help me (August 18 to 24)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kamala Harris | |
2,232,813 |  |
The 2024 Democratic National Convention was held from August 19 to 22 in Chicago: a loud, boisterous convention with lots and lots of speeches. It's also where delegates selected the presidential nominee. Harris, the current Vice-President who was literally the only candidate standing, was selected. |
| 2 | Mike Lynch (businessman) | |
2,079,337 |  |
The British tech tycoon died by drowning on August 19, aged 59, after his superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm. He had just been fully acquitted of fraud during an American criminal trial in June, a case where he had just a 0.5% chance of acquittal. Lynch's co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, had just been killed after being hit by a car whilst running on August 17. |
| 3 | Stree 2 | |
1,468,938 |  |
This Bollywood comedy horror film released last week, has made ₹505 crore at the box office (against a budget of ₹50 crore) and already is the second highest-grossing Indian film of 2024, behind only Kalki 2898 AD. |
| 4 | Alien: Romulus | |
1,294,533 |  |
The latest installment in the 45-year old franchise about slimy and particularly invasive extraterrestrials, announced at the 2019 CinemaCon and taking place between the first two films of the franchise, opened last week to positive reviews from critics and has grossed $129 million worldwide so far. |
| 5 | Alain Delon | |
1,269,691 |  |
An icon of French cinema, who worked for at least six decades (which included forays into Hollywood like Lost Command and Red Sun, plus playing Julius Caesar in Asterix at the Olympic Games), actor Alain Delon died at the age of 88 of B-cell lymphoma. |
| 6 | Tim Walz | |
1,187,274 |  |
#20 on last week’s report. #1 on the week before last week. You probably already know who he is: The Democrats' VP pick. A slight boost in page views this week can be attributed to the DNC occurring this week, where Harris and Walz were official locked in as the Democratic Party's nominees for the presidential election in November. |
| 7 | Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | |
1,175,853 |  |
The son of Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy Jr. is an environmental lawyer turned anti-vaxxer who ran for US president, but gave up on August 23, subsequently endorsing Donald Trump, due to dismal polling and campaign funds running out. He blamed his failed campaign on Democrats, and he could potentially have a position in Trump's administration if he wins. |
| 8 | Deadpool & Wolverine | |
1,111,265 |  |
The savior of the MCU, released a month ago has made $1.16 billion worldwide, and became the second-highest-grossing film of 2024 behind another Disney movie. It has now surpassed the Civil War to become the 8th highest grossing film in the franchise and is expected to surpass the original Avengers film soon. |
| 9 | Donald J. Harris | |
1,038,889 |  |
Yes, he is #1's father, and his English Wikipedia page most likely rose to #9 because Elon Musk claimed that the Stanford University emeritus professor is a "Marxist economist" (did you mean: Marxian economist) in his live conversation with Donald Trump on X on August 12, telling people to look it up if they didn't believe him. |
| 10 | Deaths in 2024 | |
998,439 |  |
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns It calls me on and on across the universe |
Exclusions
- These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.
Most edited articles
For the July 19 – August 19 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| List of Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign endorsements | 2678 | A laundry list of people supporting the Vice-President in the upcoming election. These include even Republicans and conservatives, showing how controversial her opposition is. |
| Deaths in 2024 | 2153 | Our version of the obituary, and the period had among its deceased actress Gena Rowlands, executive Susan Wojcicki, voice actress Rachael Lillis and musician Greg Kihn. |
| 2024 Venezuelan presidential election | 1974 | Hugo Chávez used questionable tactics to remain in power in Venezuela, and his successor Nicolas Maduro is more of the same, as there was strong evidence that opposing candidate Edmundo González Urrutia had more votes in the latest presidential election but the incumbent government insisted they still won through fraudulent claims. The Venezuelans protested, leading to an attempted crackdown by the government, and many countries are questioning the election results. |
| 2024 Wayanad landslides | 1842 | India is infamous for heavy rain, and a consequence of this was that the Wayanad district of Kerala saw hillsides collapsing in the early hours of July 30, sending torrents of mud, water, and boulders. It is the deadliest tragedy in Kerala history, with reports of over 420 fatalities, 397 injuries, and more than 118 people still missing. |
| United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics | 1785 | Most countries treat the United States in the Olympics like the antagonists in sports movies. Even if the hosts have representatives in all sports, the U.S. still are the country with the most athletes (592, as opposed to 573 for France), who seem to win just about every competition – and while Paris was an exception, there are occasions where all three medals go to Americans. And to make matters worse, when Team USA don't have the most gold medals, their media starts counting by total medals so they remain as the top team. With that out of the way, the U.S. was again atop the medal table with 40 gold medals and 126 total. And they are the next hosts, so don't be surprised if the numbers are even bigger in 2028 (even if not as massive as the last time Los Angeles had the Games). |
| Non-cooperation movement (2024) | 1627 | As mentioned above, a protest against the government of Bangladesh that eventually led to its Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigning. |
| Deadpool & Wolverine | 1517 | After a bumpy 2023 for Disney, the company is making all the money in 2024 with two billion dollar movies, Inside Out 2 and the sole Marvel Cinematic Universe release of the year, featuring two Mutant heroes and a cluster of cameos and role reprisals. Given how full the Marvel Studios schedule is, no word on when a proper X-Men movie will be made. |
| 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony | 1465 | A rainy affair that included the Parade of Nations being boats sailing down the Seine, things like a masked torchbearer and Gojira playing a heavy metal version of "Ça Ira" in front of decapitated Marie Antoinettes (here's hoping Australia copies that by doing a Mad Max tribute, complete with flaming guitar, in Brisbane 2032!), and a (supposed) recreation of The Last Supper that made conservatives angry. |
| 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement | 1436 | Bangladesh has a quota system for government jobs. A movement initially focused on restructuring it eventually expanded against what many perceive as an authoritarian government, and the hundreds of protestors and civilians, most of whom were students, were often met with armed resistance by the police and other government forces, leading to 354 dead and thousands injured, including children. Once the movement refused negotiations with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina due to the violence, it evolved into the aforementioned non-cooperation movement, who proceeded to basically take over capital Dhaka, leading Hasina to resign and flee to India. |
| India at the 2024 Summer Olympics | 1409 | Another instance of India not being a sports potency like its neighbor that also has over a billion people, with six medals (China usually gets that in a single day... or sport), none golden – at most Neeraj Chopra tried to defend his Tokyo title and got the silver, with the remaining five bronzes being three in shooting, and one each in field hockey and wrestling. And that's not counting all the close calls (4th places at archery, badminton, shooting and weightlifting) and Vinesh Phogat being disqualified just when she was guaranteed at least silver. In any case, Los Angeles 2028 has a possible podium, as Twenty20 cricket will be one of the competitions. |
| Bigg Boss OTT (Hindi Digital series) season 3 | 1399 | One of the Indian versions of Big Brother has a streaming spin-off, with the "OTT" standing for "over-the-top". |
| Great Britain at the 2024 Summer Olympics | 1397 | The UK remain reaping the sports investments made for London 2012, as they matched the 65 medals won as hosts, albeit the 14 golds were the lowest amount since the 9 of Athens 2004. |
| 2024 United Kingdom riots | 1330 | Shortly after the 2024 France railway arson attacks, things got even worse across the English Channel, with looting and hate crimes along with the fires. It started with a mass stabbing in Southport on July 29, and misinformation was spread that the attacker was a Muslim migrant or asylum seeker (the one arrested suspect is a British citizen of Rwandan descent), leading to an attack to a mosque the following day, followed by many oft-violent far-right, anti-immigration protests until August 5, leading to over a thousand arrests. |
| Chronological summary of the 2024 Summer Olympics | 1286 | How high can I jump How high can I throw How high can I run How long can I hold my breath and stay underwater and wave my legs around in perfect unison with my partner who really doesn't understand me Or my Olympic dream... |
| China at the 2024 Summer Olympics | 1229 | With Russia banned (aside from a small contingent of athletes) due to that awful thing that doesn't end, it was a tighter race between the U.S. and the last team to beat them at the medal table. China had 40 of their 91 medals be golden (including all in table tennis!), and given the Americans had the same amount, the Asians only got down to second place due to tiebreaker by number of silvers. No word if they repeated the 'laughable sore loser excuse to claim the top spot' – just like the U.S. shifts to total medals, after Tokyo 2020 China tried to say they were #1 by counting the medals of Taiwan and Hong Kong. |
Local man halfway through rude reply no longer able to recall why he hates other editor
VILLAGE PUMP — Lamenting his lack of diligence, longtime Wikipedia editor Hubert Glockenspiel, 42, told reporters that halfway through writing a response to a comment, he has completely forgotten why he hated the guy whose signature he recognized.
"Originally I had been planning to oppose whatever stupid proposal he was making, or support his siteban, or whatever," said Glockenspiel. "You know, on account of the fact that he's repeatedly demonstrated himself to be an arrogant incompetent moron, or an incorrigible POV warrior, or a disingenuous cheat who routinely misrepresents both sources and policy. But then I couldn't remember which of these things he was, or what he had done, or why. You know, now that I think of it, maybe he was one of those damn deletionists. Or worse, one of those damn anti-deletionists."
Glockenspiel's attempts to jog his memory proved fruitless, as neither the guy's userpage nor the guy's top hundred or so contributions turned up anything obvious. Even external tools were no help; an Xtools list of his most-edited pages, a Startist list of all the discussion threads he had opened, and an afdstats analysis of his deletion votes all depicted a completely normal editor with no visible agenda or obsession.
"I cannot for the life of me remember why I hate this guy," Glockenspiel said. "I can't open a proposal for a siteban, because someone might ask me to give actual evidence, but I'm sure as heck going to support it if someone else does." He added that he had consulted WP:CONFUSED to make sure he hadn't mixed him up with anyone else having a similar name.
Despite a failure to recall anything about the circumstances that gave rise to his seething disdain, Glockenspiel reiterated a commitment to keep hating.
"Well, I don't decide to hate somebody's guts for no reason. It had to have been something."
At press time, Glockenspiel was trying to find the hard drive with his old IRC logs from during the Esperanza MfD, in the hopes that he might discover a long-forgotten flamewar.