Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2024-12-12
Arbitrator election concludes
Arbitration Committee elections
Following scrutineering, this year's ArbCom elections results were announced, representing ballots from 1,736 voters:(source)
| Candidate | Support | Abstain | Oppose | Net | Percentage | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liz (talk · contribs) | 1103 | 377 | 256 | 847 | 81.16% | two year term |
| KrakatoaKatie (talk · contribs) | 907 | 611 | 218 | 689 | 80.62% | two year term |
| Worm That Turned (talk · contribs) | 902 | 603 | 231 | 671 | 79.61% | two year term |
| CaptainEek (talk · contribs) | 897 | 548 | 291 | 606 | 75.51% | two year term |
| ScottishFinnishRadish (talk · contribs) | 901 | 534 | 301 | 600 | 74.96% | two year term |
| Elli (talk · contribs) | 729 | 721 | 286 | 443 | 71.82% | two year term |
| Theleekycauldron (talk · contribs) | 819 | 591 | 326 | 493 | 71.53% | two year term |
| Daniel (talk · contribs) | 681 | 764 | 291 | 390 | 70.06% | two year term |
| Primefac (talk · contribs) | 802 | 581 | 353 | 449 | 69.44% | one year term |
| Guerillero (talk · contribs) | 676 | 713 | 347 | 329 | 66.08% | |
| Just Step Sideways (talk · contribs) | 601 | 621 | 514 | 87 | 53.90% | |
| Simonm223 (talk · contribs) | 343 | 712 | 681 | -338 | 33.50% |
Changes afoot for Arbitration Committee administration
The Arbitration Committee has posted motions discussing paid clerks, and other changes.
Brief notes
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Gulf (beginning 9 December 2024) followed by Jetty (beginning 16 December 2024). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
Palestine-Israel articles 5
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 5 is running in parallel with Arbcom's private consideration of a case based on a boatload of private evidence (see prior Signpost coverage).
The case's evidence phase is ongoing at our writing deadline. The deadline for the community to comment with new evidence is 14 December 2024; the workshop phase closes a week later, followed by a target 11 January 2025 decision date. This report is covering just some of the community comments presented into evidence.
- An interesting analysis of 12 tortuous threads at talk:Zionism between June and October was presented into evidence as a "microcosm" of the problems of PIA writ large. It found:
- Multi-month debates
- A recurring cast of characters
- Major problems with sockpuppetry
- Another analysis took a comprehensive look at PIA articles recently involved in requested moves, and found a pattern of factions with support
predicated by their POV on the I-P conflict
.
- A third analysis of frequent multiple-times-a-day incidents over the article Genocide of indigenous peoples found editwarring and repeated RfCs to wear down opposition and to establish
LOCALCONSENSUS of the most invested editors
.
Just reading through the history of the case and related cases can be wearying. Strange and off-putting
is a mild reaction – another community member said that it exhaust[s] the community's will to engage
. An effective and properly targeted Arbitration committee decision on these cases is anticipated by many.
- An announcement concerning the private case "Off-wiki misconduct in Palestine–Israel topic area" was made at the Arbitration Noticeboard. It came after the Signpost deadline, but we are squeaking this into the issue.
In the private case, the Committee banned one editor and made some other less consequential changes in editor privileges.
Sex, power, and money revisited
How paid editors squeeze you dry
31 January 2024
"Wikipedia and the assault on history"
4 December 2023
The "largest con in corporate history"?
20 February 2023
Truth or consequences? A tough month for truth
31 August 2022
The oligarchs' socks
27 March 2022
The stories behind articles in The Signpost seldom end on the article's publication date. In this reporter's long running series about paid editors and other conflict of interest editors, court cases may drag or a new case may start. Government officials may step down and then be appointed to new positions. Expect the unexpected. This is particularly noticeable in the stories on the roughly twenty billionaires I've reported on; maybe less so for the politicians and government officials. This year, and especially this last month have had many unexpected events about the subjects of my reporting. Just this week a major article on an old Signpost subject was published.
Sex offenders
Convicted sex offenders are a special group. Paid editing on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein was extensive and shocking, but there have been few developments in his case since the Signpost article was published seven months after his death.
Those edits apparently attributable to Ghislaine Maxwell, in contrast, were few, confused, and soon deleted, except for the photo she apparently sent us. Her court case was fairly quick, and her conviction was widely expected.
Peter Nygård's case, on the other hand, has had drawn-out legal proceedings and strong evidence of prior paid editing on Wikipedia.
The Finnish-born Canadian fashion designer had a net worth of about $900 million CAD in 2017. By 2020 the FBI had raided his New York office, his businesses were being sold to cover his debts, and he was being sued by at least 57 women who claimed that he raped or sexually abused them, many when they were minors. In December 2020 he was arrested in Canada on criminal charges, for extradition to the US. Later he was also charged in Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg for similar alleged crimes.
In December 2023, after 36 months being held without bail, the 82-year-old Peter Nygård was convicted in Toronto on four charges of sex crimes, in the first of his four possible criminal trials. He was finally sentenced this September to eleven years in prison, but after deducting time already served, only seven more years might need to be served — on this conviction.
Epstein, Maxwell, and Nygård are the only sex offenders I've covered. While some other people who appear to have violated Wikipedia's rules have been convicted of crimes, please remember that any of those offenses are quite different from the ones described above. And please also remember that no investigation of paid editing conducted entirely on-Wiki can definitively prove an editor's employer. The editor may just be trying to embarrass the subject of his edits.
Back to prison
Greg Lindberg was convicted in May of bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and is now awaiting sentencing. He bought several insurance companies, and was accused of draining $2 billion of their financial reserves into his own pockets, or of lending the money to other companies he owned. He was indicted in 2019, found guilty of trying to bribe North Carolina's insurance commissioner and reported to Federal prison on October 20, 2020, a month before the Signpost article about him.
The Signpost article showed that three apparent undeclared paid editors, plus one very aggressive declared paid editor, had edited the article about Greg Lindberg.
His sentence for bribery was 7 years and 3 months, and if nothing else had happened in the case, he could have been out of prison by 2028. Instead, he appealed his conviction and got a retrial. This May he was convicted again on the same charges, but has not been sentenced yet. In November, he pled guilty to other charges of conspiracy to defraud and money laundering, and left the court in FBI custody. The guilty plea could lead to an additional sentence of up to 15 years. Reportedly he spent $50 million on legal fees over seven years. While the ultimate damages caused by his fraud have yet to be fully assessed, one observer reports that he may be responsible for the largest insurance fraud in history.
Just this week Bloomberg reported on a non-business aspect of Lindberg's life in How a Billionaire's 'Baby Project' Ensnared Dozens of Women. Lindberg has a dozen children, including three with his former wife. They separated about 2019. The other nine children were born over about 5 years: mostly through the use of a large network of egg donors, in vitro fertilization, and surrogate mothers. He is the only caregiving parent for eight of the nine children. The 6,000 word Bloomberg article details major surprises every few paragraphs. While there are complaints from several of the egg donors and surrogates, most or all of the "Baby Project" may have been done legally, even though there are serious questions raised about the lack of regulation in the IVF industry. Other surprises are that Lindberg considers billionaires to be "a persecuted class", and that there apparently were large bachelor-style parties on his yacht Double Down documented on YouTube.
New powers
Matthew Whitaker
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Whitaker was acting US Attorney General for three months during the later part of President Trump's first administration. The Signpost reported that he apparently created the articles Matthew Whitaker, about himself, and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa in 2006 (while he held that position), as well as adding his name to Iowa Hawkeyes football as a "notable player". He also worked with the fraudulent company World Patent Marketing, and incorrectly claimed to have received an Academic All-America award.
He was unofficially nominated as the US Ambassador to NATO by Trump on November 20, 2024, despite a lack of foreign policy experience.
Vivek Ramaswamy
.jpg)
Back in July 2022, before Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the 2024 GOP US presidential nomination, User:Jhofferman, following Wikipedia's rules, declared that Vivek Ramaswamy paid him to edit the article about Ramaswamy. Mediaite later said that Jhofferman whitewashed the article about Ramaswamy, removing information about his participation in The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans and a COVID-19 response team.
The Signpost added that, against Wikipedia's rules, over a dozen sockpuppets had apparently edited the articles about Ramaswamy or his companies (Roivant Sciences and Axovant Sciences) without declaring their paid status.
Ramaswamy, along with Elon Musk, were nominated November 12, 2024 by President-elect Trump to lead a planned presidential advisory commission called the Department of Government Efficiency.
It's the same old song
In January, the Signpost exposed the ugliest scam I've seen on Wikipedia. Several apparently-connected firms with names like "EliteWikiWriters" and "WikiModerators" would solicit small businesses, entrepreneurs, artists and authors, nonprofits, churches, and others promising to write Wikipedia articles for them. After collecting a few thousand dollars, they wouldn't bother to write the articles, or just abandoned whatever they had written. If the customers complained, the firm(s) would blame Wikipedia, and try to upsell the customers for a few thousand dollars more.
The "EliteWikiWriters" website was working at least through June 17, and now appears to be offline. The WikiModerators website, if it can be reached, looks like they are not doing business as usual. In November a possibly new firm, "Elite Wiki Writing", posted a press release that looks like the same old scam. Checking the new firm's website, the text looks very similar to EliteWikiWriters, even if most of the graphics and the formatting are different. In an online chat, one of their salespeople claimed that they have been in business for "seven years" and employ "30" Wikipedia administrators or editors. (The chat transcript is available to admins on request, as is an archive of the press release which contains a URL blacklisted on Wikipedia.)
Gautam Adani
On January 24, 2023, Adani was one of the richest people in the world — with a net worth of about $119 billion — when the bottom dropped out. Short-seller Hindenburg Research issued a report saying that his companies were conducting "one of, if not the most egregious example of corporate fraud in history". His net worth dropped by $67 billion (as of 2023/02/15) by the time the Signpost was getting ready to publish the story of one of, if not the most obvious example, of paid editing on Wikipedia. An unregistered editor had made an extensive edit to the Adani Group article, leaving his name, and job title, in their edit comment:
| “ | (Revisited & updated all the content, Changes by Satyam Trivedi (Corporate Communication, Adani)) | ” |
as well as an IP address that was identified as coming from Adani Enterprises Limited. On top of this self-identified complete rewriting of the Adani Group article, more than 40 accounts later blocked as sockpuppets, unidentified paid editors (UPE) or CheckUser-blocked editors, created or rewrote nine articles related to Adani, combining their edits on the articles.
Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, does it? On November 20, 2024 Gautam Adani and seven others were indicted for securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy in the US and Adani and his nephew were also charged in a civil case by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The alleged fraud involved lying to US investors while offering to sell bonds of the company Adani Green Energy. The alleged lie was denying that the firm paid, or had promised to pay, bribes (about $265 million worth) to Indian government officials. Gautam Adani is in India and is not expected to be arrested.
A week after the indictment was announced, AFP reported that the Adani Group had lost $55 billion in market value.
Did Adani continue to manipulate Wikipedia content after the Signpost article? At the Adani Group article one aggressively pro-Adani editor, User:Sambyal was blocked for "persistent removal of content; [I] suspect this may be professional reputation management". The same editor also edited articles on several other large Indian companies. User:Maduant made nine edits including two large pro-Adani deletions and was blocked for undisclosed paid editing. A few other editors were later blocked as sockpuppets but they made few edits and it is difficult to say if they were pro-Adani.
At Adani Green Energy, Maduant twice deleted sections about the Hindenburg report. At Adani Enterprises, their seven edits were more factual, but still pro-Adani. So yes, there appears to have been an effort to continue manipulating Wikipedia content, but it is not so obvious as it was before the Signpost article.
As always, please leave any comments in the section below. If you have any tips about newsworthy people using paid editors on Wikipedia, please email me here. And have yourself a merry little Christmas.
On the backrooms
The Signpost reached out to me recently and asked if they could republish this essay that I initially published in June, which I had recorded about a month after I resigned as an administrator. There's an irony in running it now, as I recently returned to adminship. As you will hear or read below, I considered but quickly dismissed the idea that I might change as a person in some way that altered my tolerance for the problems I'd identified with our backroom culture. I was wrong about that, for reasons that are both very pleasant and not very interesting to anyone but me, and so I now find myself an admin again, if with some trepidation. I stand by the rest of what I said, though.
The original format of this essay is audio, and I think it comes across best in that medium, but a full transcript is presented as well, lightly annotated.
I've been wanting for a while to write up my thoughts on the circumstances that led me to resign as a Wikipedia admin at greater length than I did at the time, and I keep finding that I just can't find a way to structure what I want to write. So I figure if I talk into a microphone for long enough, I will eventually make the points I want to make.
I guess I'll start with a personal clarification that I'm very grateful to people who have said that they hope to see me back as an admin someday or something like that, but that's (sigh). I don't want to say there's no chance of that happening, 'cause maybe there could be some radical changes to how Wikipedia works or maybe radical changes to how I work, although I think I've had all the big ones, dare I tempt fate there, but I don't foresee a plausible future where I would ever want to return to Wikipedia adminship.
And a lot of that, to be clear, has to do with who I am as a person, with radical changes that I have experienced in my personality—all for the better—that were just making me feel like... In short, I don't like being in charge of other people. And that's a big part of this, and I certainly don't want this to seem like it's all you, not me. No, it's you, Wikipedia, and it's me.
But let's talk about the cultural criticism I have. One thing I realized a while ago on Wikipedia, before I even became an admin, was how much of everything revolves around social capital. We have these almost ritualized ways that we acquire, and trade, and spend social capital, some of which is proxied by things like edit count and number of GAs or FAs and user rights, but is all overall a fairly nebulous concept. But it disturbed me more and more as time went on in my admin career, how much people acted like the outcomes of our internal processes were always based on just what was objectively the right decision, as opposed to very often being based on social capital and nothing else. And one turning point experience for me was the user Ɱ, who was using bare URLs to account-walled pages in citations and got taken to AN/I over it. Now, astute observers might note that there's not actually a policy against either of those things, but they[a] were kind of a jerk when they were taken to AN/I—maybe because they were taken to AN/I over something that there isn't a policy against, maybe because they put a lot of effort into writing a lot of Wikipedia articles on things that people would normally think, "Oh, there's no way that you could get a whole article on this", and they would get, you know, multiple articles on that topic and get some of them to featured article. They'd put all this work in. Someone had a gripe about a relatively minute part of it.
And they didn't communicate well. But what happened was a bunch of people who spend a lot of their time critiquing how other people do their work, while often not doing a lot of work themselves, all came down on Ɱ and, you know, they got fed up and retired. And, to me that was so obviously a case of someone getting screwed over not for actually making the encyclopedia worse but for not really playing our social games, for not respecting the self-appointed gods of AN/I. That was an important step in my disillusionment from a lot of these processes. Then from there I got thinking, the longer I was an admin, about the dynamics behind blocks.
One thing I think a lot of people don't realize is that if you're making serious blocks—not vandalism blocks, not routine sockblocks, but you know, the type people write home about, the type that can wind up under noticeboard review, under ArbCom review, that get threads on Wikipediocracy—your main consideration isn't "Does policy justify this block?" It's "Does this block stick? Will this block stick?" And whether a block sticks will have much more to do with social capital than with anything. And I spent a lot of time staffing AN/I as an administrator. And I found so often you could just compare two threads on the same page of "Oh this user got indeffed for this comment and, you know, an experienced user commented, 'This is an absolutely unacceptable thing. I can't believe anyone would ever say this.'" And two threads down, here this thread was SNOW-closed against sanctions against someone who said something worse. There's a lot of that, and it's bullshit, and it's unfair, and especially given that like, let's be honest, like at least half of our editorbase is autistic and the other half is close enough to it, that's really unfair to them, right? They're trying to get a sense of what is acceptable to say and what isn't, and here's this thread where someone didn't get blocked and here's this thread where someone did, and it's all social capital!
So when I would make a block, you know, I, sure there's the question of "Is this a policy-compliant block?", but that's usually pretty easy to answer. The rest would be, "Do I have the social capital?" It's not, "Could some admin make this block?" It's "Could I make this block?" And then it's, "Okay, how much visible adminning have I been doing lately? If this is a content thing, how much content have I been doing lately?" If I've, like, gotten a couple GAs recently, that could look better for making this block of a content editor.
There's just a bunch of politics to follow and it felt like Agar.io, the Web game where you're just trying to be a bigger circle so you can eat the littler circles. And, you know, you'd see blocks get overturned because the admin was too small of a circle. Not because the person they were eating didn't do something wrong, but because the admin was a littler circle than the person they blocked. And this is unfair in both directions. Like, I stand by just about every block I ever made. I had two blocks overturned. Looking back I think, eh, they were marginal. I still don't know if they needed to be overturned but I probably shouldn't have made them. But that's it, out of like 2,000. I don't have any doubt that the blocks I made were good for the encyclopedia.[b] But the fact that only two were ever overturned, I don't think is because they were good blocks. It's because I played the game well. I was visible. I did useful work. I was a known name.
Over time I got a bit of reputation for taking other admins to ArbCom—although, I will stress, never for overturning anything I did or anything like that, only for things I came upon. But still, I'm sure that was good for having social capital, good for making people not want to mess with my blocks. And so, yeah, the fact that all of my blocks but those two stand, or stood while they were active, is a reflection of my political acumen, not a reflection of my acumen at enforcing Wikipedia policy. And I would see this with other admins. I would see admins make obviously bad blocks that no one would want to challenge because "Oh, you know who that is? I'm not going to take that guy to AN/I. Even though he just blocked that person for a username violation for a username that I can point to a hundred people who have the same kind of username." So it's unfair against the people who get blocked. And then, you know, the maybe better-known side of this coin is the unblockables' side, right? It's unfair for the people who have to deal with the ones who don't get blocked, where the community can't get a consensus to tell people that various, you know, insults are unacceptable because "Oh, we like the work they do." So that was another big part of my disillusionment, was the charade of our user conduct enforcement.
And then, the thing that, you know, finally made me say, "Okay, I've been thinking about this and I should just step away from this thing that's been a big part of my life" was my friend Vami_IV, who killed himself on February 13. Vami and I talked a lot over the years. We were joined, forever bonded, by these twin horrific RfAs that were linked a year apart. Because the controversy at my RfA was a comment I'd made at his RfA. Vami asked me, I want to say around November, "Do you ever go back and just read through your whole RfA?" And I said, "No, I don't." I'll be honest, I've never read the whole thing. (Chuckles) That's probably like one of the only things I've ever lied about, just outright lied about on Wikipedia. There's a couple times I said, "Oh I read every oppose." No, I stopped reading on like Day 6. Just, completely tuned it out. If you had a really thoughtful support or oppose in the last couple days of my RfA, sorry, I probably still haven't read it. But, that's[c] what I said to Vami. And he said "Oh, you know I do it every few months. I go back and I read the whole thing." I'll be honest, I think what I said at that point was, "Yeah, if I want to self-harm I do it the old-fashioned way." (Pause) And I'm not trying to make any assumptions about what role that played in the deterioration of his mental health. I don't know. I genuinely have no idea. But I do know it was a major source of sadness in his life. And thinking about the impact that Wikipedia nastiness could have on someone way outside the Wikipedia sphere but really hurting them a lot as a person, and being... I know it was one of the worst things that ever happened to him. He would have said that.[d]
My RfA was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I don't know if I would say worst. But it was, like, a notable life trauma. And I mean, I'm sure there are people who would say that I deserved that, or, you know, that he did. But, we're humans. We're humans here. And... I think we let ourselves be governed too much by bullies. And maybe that's necessary. Maybe Wikipedia deals with so much bullshit—POV-pushing from every possible corner of the globe—that we need the assholes who will, you know, kick people when they're down, who will do what needs to be done to keep the encyclopedia safe. But I don't really believe that. I think we could be nicer. And we just aren't, because... maybe because sometimes being mean is fun. Like I'm not claiming I have a perfect record of always being nice to everyone. (Chuckles) That's what I said when I resigned! Was I felt like I wasn't being nice enough anymore. I was being too mean. And I think we could be nicer. I don't know a way to make that the case. I think maybe slowly the community's on a trajectory toward more niceness. That's like, the general thrust of things in my years of on-and-off interacting with Wikipedia as an editor. But I don't know if we're anywhere close to on-track to being a site without this kind of toxicity. And this isn't—I think the difficult thing to get with is, it's mostly not about individual people.
Like, sure, there's some people you could point to—like for instance, in the context of Vami's RfA, there's one editor, one admin who obviously, like, shouldn't be a part of this community, which you can see just from reading how that RfA went. But most of the time it's a structural issue. Our whole model is built on conflict. The BRD cycle that all of our collaborative editing revolves around is built on this idea of "Oh, you should revert people". But also, "Don't revert people the wrong way or we'll block you for edit-warring." And the line between refining each other's edits and edit-warring is not super clear and, oh yeah, has a lot to do with social capital. Other editing models are possible, right? You could imagine some sort of Git-style model, where it's more like putting in a pull request to an existing page? That would require us to at least in some cases abandon or strongly minimize the idea of no ownership of articles. But let's be honest, that ship sailed a long time ago. If you read "No ownership of articles", it's mostly about the situations in which people own articles. All it really means at this point is you can't say, "Hey, this article is mine. You need my permission!" So I think actual structural changes to how the wiki editing model works are worth some sort of dialogue about, blue-skies thinking.
And what I just said is just one of many ways you could potentially do either technical changes or normative changes to make that most basic unit of interaction more friendly. Instead I think what we have is this very, like, early-2000s Internet-libertarian way of doing it, just like, "Eh, conflict is inevitable." It's a very masculine way of looking at it. Call that stereotyping if you want, but the less masculine my personality has become,[e] the less I've been comfortable with the levels of conflict we have on Wikipedia.
So I'm excited about the newer generation of editors, the post-COVID wave. They seem a lot more conscientious than your average old-timer, including me, probably. Again I'm not pretending I've always been nice. Maybe in years, years, they'll really be running this site and will take serious an idea not just of civility, but of collegiality. Because you know, I've been civil to Westboro Baptist Church members face-to-face. Civility is a fucking low bar, and maybe the reason that we never meet that bar is because it's so low. Collegiality isn't that high of a bar. It's not friendliness. It's not love.
I try to infuse my editing with friendliness and love, and I mostly fail, but I do try. But we don't need to make that the communal standard. But collegiality would be nice. So maybe in years, years, as these Zoomers take over Wikipedia, that will change. And hey, maybe then I'd want to come back as an admin, but I don't know if they'd want to have me by then! Because I'm kind of a dick sometimes. And kind of got into a lot of drama, and that's... (Pause)
I did all of that in a really calculated way to be clear. Like, I knew I would always be a controversial admin, and so I embraced that, and tried to effect serious changes that I wanted to see through that controversiality I have. And, again, I'm mostly proud of that track record. Some things I'd go back and do differently, but I was able to send a really clear message to ArbCom that the community cares about holding admins accountable, and I wouldn't have been able to do that without kind of being a loudmouth a lot. So, I'm proud of that, but it's also just not who I naturally am as a person.
I don't actually like doing it. I liked the results, but I recently saw a video of Ronnie O'Sullivan, the greatest snooker player of all time, immediately after cementing his status as such with this victory over the other best player currently in the game. On a hot mic, he hugs his children and says something like, "I can't keep fucking doing this. It's going to kill me."[f] And there was a lot of, you know, discussion, of people saying, "Why would someone who's so good at something have that reaction to being good at it?" But I get it. I mean, I won't claim to have had—(Laughs)—anywhere near the prowess as a Wikipedia admin as Ronnie O'Sullivan has at snooker, but it's just, I was a good admin. I was a good SPI clerk. And no, I... Playing that part, of being the troublemaker who got important things done by causing drama in the right places, was exhausting and demoralizing and hurt my soul. And I'm glad I'm not doing that anymore. I feel a little guilty about it, because I still look around and see cases of "Oh, geez, if someone were to drop in the right bit of, you know, fire into this thread, it would really push things in the right direction". But—that ain't me. I don't... That's... That's not me anymore.
But anyway, what was I saying? Yeah, that, given all that background though, I would not be shocked if I'm not welcome on the hypothetical future super-collegial admin team. And very well! I started editing to write content. I thought, "I'll do a little antivandalism work first." I got sucked into that. Took a few years off. More antivandalism. When I finally, after like years, got to sit down and really set to what I'd meant to do when I was years old, which was just write articles, I loved it. And I still love it. And I'm gonna keep doing it as long as y'all will have me, I hope.
Wow. This is 26 minutes and 56 seconds right now. I'll probably cut it down if I can figure out how to do that. But um, whatever I cut it down to, I'm sure it will be long. So, if you've listened this far, thank you for listening.
And I hope this explains something. Happy editing.
Notes
- ^ I used he/him pronouns in the audio version, but upon review I see that Ɱ has no pronouns set in their preferences, so I have corrected this to they/them here.
- ^ Since recording this, I've acknowledged fault for another admin action, in a piece also published in the Signpost. However, for privacy reasons, I cannot say specifically what the action in question was.
- ^ For clarity, "that" here refers to my earlier line of "No, I don't."
- ^ Recording this in a single take, I was afraid I might overstate something and over-hedged here with "would have". He did, in fact, say that, to me and to others.
- ^ Missing context: In the years since I began my gender transition (hormones June 2019, full social transition October 2019).
- ^ Actual quote: "I can't do this anymore! I can't! I can't do it. It'll kill me."
Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?
Wikipedia aims at representing the sum of all knowledge. It is not so easy to define "the sum of all knowledge". We could expect the sum of all knowledge means knowledge from every region in the world (geographical distribution), from every era in History, from every culture, every ethnic group, every gender group, etc.
Trying to measure diversity of knowledge on Wikipedia, we can look at diversity of contributors, number of Wikipedia articles, diversity of sources and references[1] or diversity in mentioned entities inside a given article.[2]
In this article, I look at the geographical distribution of people mentioned in an article (people mentioned with a blue link).
I apply my methodology to a selection of articles about general topics such as music, culture or knowledge in a selection of Wikipedia versions and I discuss the results.
Methodology
Given a Wikipedia article, I select all internal links (blue links) and I call them "mentioned entities". This can be done through the endpoint "links" in the MediaWiki generator API. The magic is that this API can be integrated in a SPARQL query in the Wikidata Query Service. So I combine the call to the API with a Wikidata query. I select all mentioned entities with P31 equal to Q5 (humans) with a known birthplace (P19) and I collect the country of the birthplace with property P17.
SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?country ?countryLabel ?birthplace
?birthplaceLabel
WHERE {
SERVICE wikibase:mwapi {
bd:serviceParam wikibase:endpoint "en.wikipedia.org";
wikibase:api "Generator";
mwapi:generator "links";
mwapi:titles "Music";.
?item wikibase:apiOutputItem mwapi:item.
}
FILTER BOUND (?item)
?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5 ; wdt:P19
?birthplace.
?birthplace wdt:P17 ?country .
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,mul". }
}
I then collect a mapping between actual countries and continents. The mapping comes from Wikidata but is consistent with United nations M49 classification.[3]
SELECT DISTINCT ?continent ?continentLabel ?country ?code WHERE {
VALUES ?continent {
wd:Q55643
wd:Q48
wd:Q15
wd:Q18
wd:Q49
wd:Q46
}
?continent (wdt:P527*) ?country.
?country
wdt:P2082 ?code.
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,mul". }
}
I perform a left join of the two data frames using the Arquero JavaScript library.[4]
Finally, I regroup Europe and North America as "Western World" and the four other continents as "Rest of the world". This is an opinionated and radical approach but it makes the numbers easier to read. Places of birth which cannot be associated with a current country are labeled "Unclassified".
I've developed a user interface using Observable notebook.[5] Users can choose two parameters: the Wikipedia project (i.e. "pt.wikipedia.org") and the title of the article. Parameters can be added in the URL directly. For instance, you can look at article "Kennis" (i.e. knowledge) in Afrikaans: https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=af.wikipedia.org&article=Kennis.
All computations are performed in the appendix of the notebook. The code is open source licensed under the ISC.
Results
This approach makes sense for articles about general topics such as music, work, art, beauty, love, humanity, knowledge, education, school, religion, etc. Also it makes sense if the number of people mentioned in the article is high enough to compute percentages.
In this section, we focus on three notions, music, knowledge and culture in five languages English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.
Music
Music comes from all over the world. I would expect an encyclopedic article to mention people from all the continents. Let's take a look at the numbers.
| Linguistic version | Article | Rest of the world | Unclassified | Western world |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Music | 6 (8.2%) | 2 (2.7%) | 65 (89.0%)[6] |
| Spanish | es:Música | 0 (0%) | 3 (5.0%) | 57 (95.0%)[7] |
| French | fr:Musique | 4 (6.5%) | 0 (0%) | 58 (93.5%)[8] |
| Portuguese | pt:Música | 1 (5.0%) | 0 (0%) | 19 (95.0%)[9] |
| Arab | ar:موسيقى | 23 (79.3%) | 0 (0%) | 6 (20.7%)[10] |
On the French, English, Portuguese and Spanish Wikipedias, the proportion of people born in Europe and North America is higher than 89%. This leaves little room for people born in Asia, Africa, South America or Oceania. Although Spanish is widely spoken in South America, the article in Spanish does not mention any musician born on this continent or in Africa, Asia or Oceania.
Knowledge
Knowledge is another general topic. One would expect the article to mention people from all over the world. Wikipedia in English and Wikipedia in Portuguese have articles with more than 90% of mentioned entities born in Europe or North America. Wikipedia in French has too few entities and Wikipedia in Spanish has more diversity.
| Linguistic version | Article | Rest of the world | Unclassified | Western world |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Knowledge | 5 (6.4%) | 2 (2.6%) | 71 (91.0%)[11] |
| Spanish | es:Conocimiento | 1 (3.1%) | 5 (15.6%) | 26 (81.3%)[12] |
| French | fr:Connaissance | 0 (-) | 0 (-) | 10 (-) [13] |
| Portuguese | pt:Conhecimento | 1 (3.4%) | 1 (3.4%) | 27 (93.1%)[14] |
| Arab | ar:معرفة | 6 (20.7%) | 4 (13.8%) | 19 (65.5%)[15] |
Culture
Looking at culture shows that the article in French lacks diversity, with 96.5% of mentioned people from Europe and North America. Articles in English and Spanish are a little bit more diverse, with 84.0% and 88.9% of people from Europe and North America. The article in Portuguese is a good example of diverse article with respect to our criteria, with 55% people from Europe and North America.
| Linguistic version | Article | Rest of the world | Unclassified | Western world |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Culture | 21 (12.9%) | 5 (3.1%) | 137 (84.0%)[16] |
| Spanish | es:Cultura | 4 (8.9%) | 1 (2.2%) | 40 (88.9%)[17] |
| French | fr:Culture | 2 (3.5%) | 0 (0%) | 55 (96.5%)[18] |
| Portuguese | pt:Culture | 10 (20.4%) | 12 (24.5%) | 27 (55.1%)[19] |
| Arab | ar:ثقافة | 0 (-) | 0 (-) | 4 (-)[20] |
Discussion
Globally, the results show that on the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, people born outside Europe and North America are not mentioned very often.
Of course, there are multiple layers of explanations. The total number of written sources about those topics may be higher in Europe and North America than in the rest of the world. The total number of contributors may also be higher in those regions than in the rest of the world. There is also maybe an imbalance in the number of biographies between people born in Europe and North America and people born in other continents.
Of course, nobody knows what would be the fair percentage of people born outside Europe and North America for a given Wikipedia article. But WWRW helps raise awareness of some imbalances. If people from Oceania, South America, Asia or Africa are not mentioned in an article about the topic, it's worth asking why and looking for new sources which could help to add some diversity in the article.
More work is needed to measure diversity in Wikipedia articles. Anyone can play with the WWRW tool or any other tool in "article analytics"[21] and do his or her own report, and anyone can develop new ways to measure diversity.
References
- ^ For instance, Piotr Konieczny and Włodzimierz Lewoniewski look at the number and of articles related to the United States of America and the number of American sources in references. See their presentation at Wikimania 2024: https://prezi.com/view/C7snnAZFWqZz7vPD0kLu/
- ^ In a previous Signpost article, I look at the gender distribution of people (human entities) mentioned in Wikipedia articles: Measuring gender diversity in Wikipedia articles, The Signpost, may 2022
- ^ https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/overview/#
- ^ Arquero is JavaScript library developed by Jeffrey Heer: https://idl.uw.edu/arquero/api/
- ^ Observable is a platform created by Melody Meckfessel and Mike Bostock which proposes to write notebooks in JavaScript. It is widely used by the data visualization community
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=en.wikipedia.org&article=Music
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=es.wikipedia.org&article=M%C3%BAsica
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=fr.wikipedia.org&article=Musique
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=pt.wikipedia.org&article=M%C3%BAsica
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=ar.wikipedia.org&article=%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D9%82%D9%89
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=en.wikipedia.org&article=Knowledge
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=es.wikipedia.org&article=Conocimiento
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=fr.wikipedia.org&article=Connaissance
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=pt.wikipedia.org&article=Conhecimento
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=ar.wikipedia.org&article=%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%A9
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=en.wikipedia.org&article=Culture
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=es.wikipedia.org&article=Cultura
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=fr.wikipedia.org&article=Culture
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=pt.wikipedia.org&article=Cultura
- ^ https://observablehq.com/@pac02/wwrw?wikipedia=ar.wikipedia.org&article=%D8%AB%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%A9
- ^ https://observablehq.com/collection/@pac02/article-analytics
"Like the BBC, often useful but not impartial"
"As biased as the BBC"
The Telegraph analyzes David Rozado's paper Is Wikipedia Politically Biased? which can be viewed as answering the question with a qualified "yes". The study was covered in The Signpost on July 4 by Tilman Bayer, who answered the same question with a qualified "perhaps". The Telegraph cites Bayer's article, and much of the rest of the article quotes British conservatives on why they think that Wikipedia has a liberal bias. Toby Young says:
"My own Wikipedia entry looks like it’s been written by [Left-wing commentator] Owen Jones," says Toby Young, the director of the Free Speech Union. "I used to check it from time to time and painstakingly remove all the inaccuracies that had been introduced since the last time I’d looked, but I’ve now given up."
Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg says he is "not surprised" by Rozado's results, "I have always thought of Wikipedia as if it were the BBC: often useful but not impartial."
Nigel Farage of Reform UK is quoted saying "There’s an inherent liberal bias in all of these sites. Whether it’s old-fashioned stuff like Wikipedia or newer sites like ChatGPT, it all has a huge bias – and that’s why it’s an absolute joy that Elon Musk’s bought X to give it a bit of balance."
Not to be outdone in comparing Wikipedia to the BBC, GB News's article 'Wikipedia is just as biased as the BBC' Research finds platform associates 'more negative' words with right-wing public figures, summarized most of the reactions from the Telegraph article, including Bayer's, and then plays fast and loose with the facts.
Wikipedia's own co-founder, Larry Sanger ... has accused the site of being taken over by left-leaning volunteers.
Last year, he told The Telegraph: "Wikipedia has, just like academia, tended to drive away people on the right," he says, "because conservatives tend to self-select out of communities that are deeply hostile to them."
Wikipedia's other co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who is chief executive of its parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation, has insisted the website is not "woke" and its [sic] "not true" to suggest it has become a standard bearer for left-wing causes.
As good as it's ever been?
Jimmy Wales, interviewed in New York magazine's "Jimmy Wales on Why Wikipedia Is Still So Good" answers a broad range of questions including how the platform is working now, explosive topics, the two sides of AI, and why people shouldn't edit their own pages.
- On current challenges in the information environment: "the decline of trust in journalism and politics is quite severe, which then, in some cases, translates into people feeling more angry and lost because they don't know what to trust and what to believe. That's all challenging, but the Wikipedia community, we just plug away, trying to be neutral, trying to be clear."
- On accusations of a liberal bias: "the main thing I think about there is what I call 'community health.' What that really means is, Is the community happy? Is it doing quality work, productive work? Is it feeling supported in that work? That's obviously crucial because if you don’t have the right people, what things can descend into — and we see this all over the internet — is just a battleground."
- On why biographies of minor celebrities haven't been updated since 2012 or 2013: "that is almost certainly the case because that was when we had the peak number of editors. It stabilized, so it didn't collapse after that, but it stabilized and is pretty steady. Again, it would require a job that runs all the time, that's scanning through Wikipedia one page at a time. And now that you can augment it with search — ChatGPT by default will often go and do a search on the web. I'm going to play with this. That’s actually a great idea, just to say, 'Here's a page that hasn't been updated and is citing sources from 2012, but there’s actually new important information in the past five years.' "
- On COI editors getting caught editing their own articles: "if you're in the public eye, that could become a problem. But I also understand it. One reason we've never outright banned it, rather than just recommend against it, is that sometimes people see something terrible that's wrong in their entry. They click 'edit' and they take it out. They sometimes yell at people: 'Why did you say this about me?' And you're like, Well, that's not really how to be a good Wikipedian, but it's not your job to be a good Wikipedian. You're just somebody who had a bad false claim in your Wikipedia entry and you're upset. We sort of have to go, 'Yeah, actually, that's fine.' There's probably a better way, but we don't want Wikipedia to be wrong."
Institutional capture from organized editing groups and other problems noted with genocide articles, again
- See prior Signpost coverage September 4, August 14, and July 4
"Wikipedia editors include Palestine in genocide of indigenous peoples article": A report by The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles includes the editing of at least one editor who is a party to the new Israel-Palestine case opened by Arbcom, which we reported on in issue 16.
In a Toronto National Post op-ed by Neil Seeman and Jeff Ballabon titled Wikipedia has it out for Israel, and we've got the data to prove it", the authors say their data-driven analysis found
biases [that] contradict the spirit of a "wiki" — an ethos of bottom-up collaboration and respect expressed toward all its volunteer editors. These biases include: elite theory bias, that is, a preference for academic sources over grassroots knowledge; high-contributor frequency bias (disproportionate influence of frequent editors); citation gaming (strategic use of citations to push particular viewpoints); temporal bias (over-representation of recent events or perspectives); institutional capture systematic bias (from organized editing groups); language complexity bias (use of complex language to obscure bias); and source selectivity bias (selective choice of sources to support particular views).
The New York based Algemeiner Journal has an article titled "Wikipedia's Quiet Revolution: How a Coordinated Group of Editors Reshaped the Israeli-Palestinian Narrative".
It covers the allegations of editing being coordinated by Tech for Palestine, labeling it "ideological subversion at scale", and describes how "After Rindsberg's [Pirate Wires] report was published, Ïvana was 'summoned' — in her words — by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee and is reportedly facing a potential lifetime ban from the platform." That very Arbitration Committee action is covered here in The Signpost both in the earlier mentioned issue 16, and in this month's Arbitration report.
– B
Politics and business in the pages of Wikipedia
EU Reporter gives an encyclopedic review of "article manipulation" on Wikipedia, which we might call paid and conflict of interest editing by activists, corporations, political parties and governments. Their examples include the article Comparisons between Donald Trump and Fascism, Asian News International, the Warsaw death camp story, the takeover of Croatian Wikipedia, with mentions to articles about Israel and the war in Gaza. You might even think that you are reading an article in The Signpost. Nevertheless we'll raise a red flag. EU Reporter's business model includes a free online newspaper popular among the EU political class, as well as bespoke information gathering for other clients. We could not identify the authors of this article, the International Foundation for Better Governance, despite two requests for information, which were not answered. – S
In brief
- So terrible, yet so good: Alt-weekly Pittsburgh City Paper finds the article Terrible Towel terrific. See Yinzer for a possible explanation.
- Questions about truth, authority, and shared responsibility: How Creative Commons licenses can transform Rwandan storytelling
- Art models life training art, imitating life: Infinite Craft, a sandbox game, allows the creation of an in-game "Wikipedia" (Game Rant [1]). In an odd bit of life imitating art recursion, the game is based on Meta's LLaMA large language model, and LLaMA was in turn trained on Wikipedia.
- The Wikimedia Foundation's crucial spot on the frontlines of the disinformation war: PEN America interviews Maggie Dennis, vice president of community resilience and sustainability at the Wikimedia Foundation.
- WikiEd–Mellon collab: Look It Up: Humanities Students are Filling Wikipedia’s Content Gaps, Mellon Foundation
- An Indian voice: Comedian meghnerd lets it all hang out.
- The US politics-driven vandalism is just beginning: A vandalism edit that lived for all of one minute was reported on by Live Mint: [2]. Bill Ackman, who had trouble with the meaning of "plagiarism", took the one minute example of potty-talk as enough evidence to post on X:
Wikipedia is a disaster. It purports to be an objective source of the world’s knowledge, and in reality it is a propaganda machine funded by unwitting citizen donors.
Let’s bring back the Encyclopedia Britannica.
- Bill Ackman on X
- Actually, Bill, Encyclopedia Britannica has never gone away. You can access it at Britannica.com; it costs less than $75 per year. – S
- Fourteen leading reading rollercoasters: Comic Sands summarizes a Reddit thread about Wikipedia articles that take you on a rollercoaster. What's a reading rollercoaster, you ask? All of the biographies have lots of ups and downs and will occasionally turn your stomach. The top 14 were Colonel Sanders, Jerrie Cobb, Jack Parsons, Shi Pei Pu, Michael Angelo Aquino, Juan Pujol García, Julie d'Aubigny, Arthur Rimbaud, Northern Calloway, Jake Weber, and Tarrare, 1904 Olympic marathon, Jim Thorpe (the world's greatest athlete, not the borough), and Roy Sullivan.
- DataStax and WMDE announced a new project Wikimedia Deutschland Launches AI Knowledge Project in Collaboration with DataStax Built with NVIDIA AI DataStax
WMDE plans to make Wikidata’s data easily accessible for the Open Source AI/ML Community via an advanced vector search by expanding the functionality with fully multilingual models, such as Jina AI through DataStax’s API portal, to semantically search up to 100 of the languages represented on Wikidata. To vector embed a large, massively multilingual, multicultural, and dynamic dataset is a hard challenge, especially for low-resource, low-capacity open source developers. With DataStax’s collaboration, there is a chance that the world can soon access large subsets of Wikidata’s data for their AI/ML applications through an easier-to-access method. Although only available in English for now, DataStax’s solution provided a valuable initial experiment ~10x faster than our previous, on-premise GPU solution. This near-real-time speed will permit us to experiment at scale and speed by testing the integration of large subsets in a vector database aligned with the frequent updates of Wikidata
- Dr. Jonathan Fraine, Chief Technology Officer, Wikimedia Deutschland.
- An earlier presentation gives further details.
- Top-read Wiki articles: You'll never believe what's #1: A number of media wrote pieces on the year's end list of most read (English) Wikipedia articles, including ITV, CNN, and Boing Boing. Mediaite's clickbait-friendly title was "Here Are the Top 25 Wikipedia Searches for 2024 — And #1 is BLEAK". Spoiler, Deaths in 2024 topped the list.
Something Wicked for almost everybody
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, Vestrian24Bio, Ollieisanerd and BarntToust (November 10 to 16); by Igordebraga, CAWylie, Alexysun and Vestrian24Bio (November 17 to 23); and by Igordebraga, DementiaGaming, Soulbust, Vestrian24Bio and CAWylie (November 24 to 30).
It's the eye of the tiger, it's the thrill of the fight (November 10 to 16)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pete Hegseth |  |
3,946,704 |  |
Selected by Donald Trump (#8) to be the United States Secretary of Defense during his second presidential term. |
| 2 | Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson |  |
3,849,647 | _(cropped).jpg)  |
YouTuber-turned-professional boxer #3 defeated the former undisputed heavyweight world champion #4 via unanimous decision in #2. It was streamed globally on Netflix. Boxing fans said it wasn't very good given Tyson showed he was nearly 60 and had no shot against a man less than half his age, but liked the preceding match where Katie Taylor defended her championship belt fighting Amanda Serrano.
#3's brother Logan Paul is expected to fight #4 next. |
| 3 | Jake Paul |  |
3,518,950 | ||
| 4 | Mike Tyson | |
3,518,013 | ||
| 5 | Matt Gaetz | |
2,713,660 | .jpg) |
Initially selected by Donald Trump (#8) to be the United States Attorney General during his second presidential term. He withdrew himself from consideration following overwhelmingly negative reactions from Senate Republicans associated with recent ethics investigations regarding his alleged misconduct. |
| 6 | 2024 United States presidential election | |
2,240,981 |  |
Latest U.S. election, between 45th president Donald Trump (#8) and current vice president Kamala Harris, with the former winning. |
| 7 | Tulsi Gabbard | |
1,966,999 | _(cropped).jpg) |
A former Democrat that even tried to be the party's presidential candidate in the 2020 election and has since defected to the Republicans. She has been selected by Donald Trump (#8) to serve as the Director of National Intelligence during his second presidential term. |
| 8 | Donald Trump | |
1,478,718 |  |
President-elect of the United States, won #6 and will assume office on January 20, 2025. He selected his presumptive cabinet last week which includes #1, #5, #7, as well as other officeholders such as #9, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy and Tom Homan. |
| 9 | Elon Musk |  |
1,454,372 | _(cropped)_(b).jpg) |
Selected by Donald Trump (#8) to lead the Department of Government Efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy during his second presidential term. This planned presidential advisory commission (not a federal executive department) would help to "dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies" and will work with the Office of Management and Budget to address the "massive waste and fraud" in government spending according to #8. |
| 10 | 2020 United States presidential election | |
1,411,165 |  |
Previous U.S. election, between Donald Trump (#8) and Joe Biden, with the latter winning. |
It's time to try defying gravity (November 17 to 23)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pam Bondi | |
2,256,474 | .jpg) |
In 2020, this former Florida attorney general served on Donald Trump's defense during his first impeachment trial. This led to a job on his organization America First Policy Institute, and now Trump has appointed Bondi as the next United States attorney general after his initial nominee (#7) withdrew. |
| 2 | Gladiator II | |
1,561,228 |  |
16 years after he saw in the Colosseum the fatal duel of Maximus and emperor Commodus, Lucius Verus experiences his own version of Maximus' journey, as the Romans kill his wife, enslave him and turn him into a gladiator. No one was requesting this sequel (specially as one attempt at a script was absolutely insane), and like Gladiator it plays fast and loose with Roman history, yet director Ridley Scott managed to deliver another entertaining sword-and-sandal epic, leading to positive reviews and earnings of over $100 million internationally before its North American release, which will determine if the studio can recoup the hefty budget of at least $250 million. |
| 3 | Murder of Laken Riley | |
1,423,886 |  |
In February, a nursing student was murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant while jogging at the University of Georgia, causing much commotion (the President mentioned the crime during his 2024 State of the Union address) and leading the House of Representatives to pass an immigration bill named the Laken Riley Act, requiring federal detention of undocumented immigrants who commit burglary, given the perpetrator did not stay imprisoned after some arrests for theft last year. Something that won't repeat for the killer, as last week he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole after a trial for 10 charges, including felony murder and aggravated assault with intent to rape. |
| 4 | Wicked (2024 film) | |
1,421,038 | _2.jpg) |
In what was called a second coming of Barbenheimer, #2 is opening opposite a girly big release, namely an adaptation of a Broadway juggernaut (#10) centering around Elphaba and Galinda, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch, back when they were newcomers and roommates at the witchcraft school of the Land of Oz. Widely praised for its cast, spearheaded by Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, visuals and music, Wicked is also expected to already cover its $150 million budget with its global opening weekend. And given it only tells half of the musical's story; expectations are high for Wicked Part Two releasing next November. |
| 5 | Mike Tyson | |
1,239,426 |  |
It's been a week since this former undisputed heavyweight world champion fought Jake Paul live on Netflix and lost by unanimous decision. |
| 6 | Linda McMahon | |
1,178,863 |  |
This former CEO of WWE, a professional wrestling promotion, partially walked away from it (and, later, her famous husband) to enter politics in 2009. She ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. senate seat, but, in 2017, then-President Trump made her the administrator of the Small Business Administration. On November 19, 2024, Trump nominated her for, what else, secretary of education. Of course. |
| 7 | Matt Gaetz | |
1,147,692 | .jpg) |
Initially picked by Donald Trump to be the United States Attorney General during his second presidential term, Gaetz later withdrew, due to the negative reactions from the Senate Republicans associated with recent ethics investigations regarding his alleged misconduct. |
| 8 | 2024 United States presidential election | |
1,156,188 | |
Latest U.S. election, between 45th president Donald Trump and current vice president Kamala Harris, with the former winning. |
| 9 | Jon Jones | |
1,079,287 |  |
On November 16 at UFC 309, in a match that was supposed to happen last year, the heavyweight champion knocked out Stipe Miocic with a spinning knee kick in the third round in what was called the "performance of the night." |
| 10 | Wicked (musical) | |
1,082,560 |  |
Way before Disney made some questionable retellings of "villain as an anti-heroine" in Maleficent and Cruella, in 1995 Gregory Maguire wrote Wicked, a revisionist biography of the Wicked Witch of the West, now named "Elphaba". 8 years later this musical adaptation hit Broadway, and was a massive hit, being alongside The Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King one of three plays to earn over $1 billion on Broadway, and generating multiple international versions (in fact, the picture to the left is the Brazilian one). A film version of the musical is in theaters (#4), and has a cameo of the original portrayers of Elphaba (Idina Menzel) and Glinda (Kristin Chenoweth). |
We're off to see the Wizard (November 24 to 30)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wicked (2024 film) | |
2,285,212 | .jpg) |
21 years after Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman made a musical doing a revisionist take on the Land of Oz (itself based on novel) comes a film adaptation – or rather, half of it, with its part II set to release next Thanksgiving – directed by Jon M. Chu, and co-written by Holzman. Wicked tells about Elphaba, who later became the Wicked Witch of the West (played by #4) and Galinda, best known as Glinda the Good Witch (#6), before they received a visitor from Kansas. The first part, released last week in the U.S., opened to positive reviews and made $162.9 million worldwide in its opening weekend, thus recovering its $150 million budget. |
| 2 | Wicked (musical) | |
1,974,913 | ||
| 3 | Gladiator II | |
1,441,383 |  |
In the United States, the above movie opened opposite a very different competitor, an unexpected sequel to Gladiator where the now grown child from the first movie follows the same journey of being attacked by the Romans, enslaved and joining blood sports, and the contrast was compared to Barbenheimer, with Gladiator II protagonist Paul Mescal encouraging a double feature to what he described as "Glicked". Even if its opening weekend was half of its competitor, $55 million is still a respectable number, and added to international totals Gladiator II has passed $300 million after 3 weekends playing worldwide. |
| 4 | Cynthia Erivo | |
1,278,829 | _2.jpg) |
This British actress and singer first appeared in some of her country's television series in 2011. Two years later, she starred in an Off West End production of The Color Purple musical and made her Broadway debut in its revival in 2015 (and won a Tony Award). Many stage and screen appearances later, she stars in #1 as Elphaba, alongside #6. |
| 5 | Moana 2 | |
1,029,002 |  |
The ego of a former wrestler was part of the reason this film was made; his ego will continue to manifest itself in Hollywood with a planned live-action Moana reboot. Not that Moana was a bad movie, and neither is this one (the original is better, but Moana 2 is a far cry from the shoddy direct-to-video sequels Disney used to make for their animated classics), that was promoted from Disney+ miniseries to a theatrical feature expected to make a splash at the box office. |
| 6 | Ariana Grande | |
991,041 | .jpg) |
In 1998, a young Boca Raton girl was hit by a puck in a Florida Panthers game. 17 years later, she was the main attraction at the same arena, following an acting stint on Nickelodeon and two studio albums. And now this year is glorious for both parties, with the Panthers having won the Stanley Cup and Ariana Grande-Butera (which is how she's credited on #1; she normally drops the latter part of her surname, leaving only the ironic one meaning "big" when Grande's fairly short) having an acclaimed performance as Glinda the Good Witch that is even considered a possible Academy Award nominee. |
| 7 | Deaths in 2024 |  |
990,059 |  |
Let's quote the above: I only wanna die alive Never by the hands of a broken heart... |
| 8 | 2024 United States presidential election | |
837,220 | |
Latest U.S. election, between 45th president Donald Trump and current vice president Kamala Harris, with the former winning. |
| 9 | International Society for Krishna Consciousness | |
819,731 |  |
This could be excluded on the mobile view percentage below, but there seems to be a reason for it to enter: a monk of this group commonly known internationally as "Hare Krishnas" (who in India itself are referred to as ISKCON) was arrested in Bangladesh, and a protest of his supporters evolved into a conflict with security forces, during which a lawyer was murdered. ISKCON denied direct involvement with the death, but there were even requests to ban the organization from Bangladesh. |
| 10 | Killing of JonBenét Ramsey | |
773,420 |  |
Why is this article on the list? One word: documentary. It's a pretty-well known fact that most of the entries on Top 25 make it here because of a documentary on the streaming service known as Netflix. JonBenét Ramsey, a beauty pageant child, was found dead in the basement of the house she lived in on Christmas Day in 1996. It's a pretty long and drawn-out murder case that I'm not going to explain into detail when there is a new documentary waiting for you on Netflix to watch yourself. Funny enough, my parents are watching this documentary right now in the living room! My mom is explaining the whole documentary to my dad because he won't listen to the show. |
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.
Worm That Turned's reconfirmation RfA debriefing
I was kindly invited to write a debrief of my recent RfA, and thought I'd use this opportunity to give some thoughts on reconfirmation and the requests for adminship process.
I gave up my administrator tools at the beginning of the year, fully expecting I wouldn't have time for Wikipedia again for a few years. Happily my circumstances have changed, and I have free time again. When I handed in my tools, I stated that I would use the RfA process if I wanted the tools back and, inspired by a few reconfirmations of the past (1, 2, 3), decided to carry on and do so.
The process was real. I did not hold the toolset when I requested it, and while I hoped the community supported me as an administrator, I did not know for certain. Happily, there was an outpouring of support over the following few days, and the process was successful. I specifically asked for feedback as part of my nomination statement, and was pleased to get some meaningful feedback from a few individuals.
Whilst I did receive some personal feedback, and a wonderful outpouring of confidence from the community – there was a definite question over whether the RfA was a waste of time, mentioned in approximately 20% of all votes. Interestingly, commentary was evenly split between positive and negative on the topic, on one side, comments about it being admirable and showing accountability; and on the other about how precious a resource our community time is (this side included approximately 80% of the opposition and neutral comments).
Importance of feedback
Our project has been going for decades, and is still fairly unusual in the way that we handle our volunteers to crowdsource knowledge. We do allow, and indeed encourage, individuals to pop in and make a tweak and disappear into the aether. Last time I checked, the vast majority of the edits were indeed added that way. Equally, on the other end of the spectrum, we have editors who have been around for years, having made tens or hundreds of thousands of edits, if not millions.
How do we give feedback to those editors who do stick around – to let them know that they're doing a good job, or what areas they can work on to improve? Whose responsibility is it to give that feedback? At present, I see the following
- Thanks — quick and easy to add encouragement, but gives little meaningful feedback.
- Talk page notes & awards — this is how our feedback has been given throughout our history, but is ad hoc and may not truly reflect how the community feels about you.
- Peer reviews of work — specific requested feedback of work on an article or in an area; can be used as a tool for the volunteer looking for that feedback.
- Requests for adminship / bureaucratship / arbcom elections – A time intensive way to pull together feedback from the community, with a note added to watchlist and hundreds of people turning up to give an opinion.
- Noticeboard threads — generally raised when behaviour has become an issue – but this puts the subject on the back foot and can be dismissed as bad actors holding a grudge.
- Historically we had WP:RfC/U an area that was used to force feedback upon a person, and led to a very negative experience for individuals.
The benefits of feedback are tremendous though. Positive feedback will allow editors to feel personally valued, acknowledging their strengths. This, in turn, should increase editor retention. Constructive feedback can allow editors to modify their behaviour to improve the editing environment for everyone, again, increasing editor retention. We all know that prevention is far less costly than cure. Feedback is not a waste of time.
Feedback should be given before it's too late
Why is this question of feedback relevant now? Our community is currently wrestling with the concept of WP:Administrator recall. The problem with recall is that, by the time we get to the process, it's too late. I find it hard to conceive of a scenario that an administrator's petition meets its requirement for RRfA, and that administrator goes on to be reconfirmed.
That begs the question — should an administrator know that they are acting in a manner that does not meet community expectations? Yes, they may have had noticeboard threads — but as I mention, these may be rationalised away. There's an idea that admins should police their own — but how quickly does that become somebody else's problem or "likely just a one off"?
I will concede that RfA was not the optimal process to get feedback, as too costly. That only goes to show that we do need a process - a process that people should want to participate in. Perhaps not a full reconfirmation RfA, but something. It should happen regularly, perhaps on a regular timescale (every 5 or 10 years), perhaps on editing milestones (10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, 200k... ) - but it should not be something to be scared of, nor shied away from. By burying one's head in the sand - one doesn't know what will bite you on the bottom.
I'd like to conclude by thanking every participant in my RfA — for those who gave feedback, for those who showed up to acknowledge my existence. It may not have been the optimal use of the community's time, but I appreciated it.