Blog P.I.

This week’s edition presents something of a dilemma. As the title of this latest installment indicates, several articles related to the “The Dark Knight” and Batman universe show up in this week’s list of the most-edited articles on the English Wikipedia.

The problem is, you see, I haven’t actually seen the movie yet. (I know, I know.) I do hope to get myself to a movie theater sometime this week, but for the time being I am avoiding spoilers like Ebola. That means I won’t be able to read too closely about anything related specifically to the film’s plot or characters, but I think we’ll manage.

A note: This marks the final bi-weeekly version of All the Rage before we start going monthly in September — but the new, more frequently-recurring Wikipedia section is still in the offing, I promise. And last but not least, thanks again to Craig Wood and Wikirage for making this feature possible, and to the Wikipedia Weekly podcast for the inital inspiration.

1. Article: Radovan Karadžić
   Why: The indicited former leader of the Bosnian Serbs (at right with Photoshopped trucker hat), long sought for alleged war crimes against non-Serbs under his rule, was finally captured this past week.
   Detail: Most of the activity here over was focused on keeping the article up to date with current events and general cleanup, but it also seems that much energy was expended keeping Karadžić’s supporters from tilting the page in his favor. The talk page includes at least four debates among editors, one of them very long, about which facts to represent, how to do so, and as happens on the most controversial of pages — what precisely constitutes a fact. And the article history contains a few intriguing edit summaries, such as ths one: “No trivia sections, especially ones which have blobs of text defending war criminals.”
2. Article: Two-Face
   Why: Née Harvey Dent, from the Batman universe. Not Billy Dee Williams, Tommy Lee Jones or Aaron Eckhart, but the comic book character himself.
   Detail: According to the talk page, it does look like the updates owe something to The Dark Knight. In fact, even before the movie came out, one editor suggested, “Two Face is likely to be receiving lots of attention when The Dark Knight (film) is released. Is anyone interested in working this up to GA [Good Article] level before may?” It doesn’t look like they made it; it’s only rated B-class, which is still better than average.
3. Article: List of characters from Total Drama Island
   Why: It’s a list of characters from an animated parody of a reality game show.
   Detail: This one came up two weeks ago, and here it is again. The show has 34 characters at present, which I am sure makes for plenty of updates. It still seems an odd entry to keep showing up this high in the list repeatedly; despite being an Adult Swim show I still have not heard of it offline, and even at Television Without Pity the associated forum is all but dead. I’ve often considered the pop culture entries on this list as a barometer of what’s bubbling up below the radar, and I still think that is generally the case — but with this one I’m not so sure.
4. Article: Joker (comics)
   Why: Where does he get those wonderful Wikipedians?
   
   Detail: As with the Two-Face article, fans of the Batman comics and films have made an effort to bring this article up to Good Article status, and on more than one occasion. I’m still seeing what I presume to be minor spoilers on the talk page, such as “Following the release of The Dark Knight, does anyone else think ‘ballistics’ or ‘bomb expert’ should be added to Joker’s repertoire of abilities?” But then I did see this in the six-minute preview released to theaters last year, so I’ll survive.
5. Article: Deaths in 2008
   Why: People died, Wikipedia testified! (Sorry.)
   Detail: Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor who became well-known for his inspirational “Last Lecture”; “Golden Girls” actress Estelle Getty; America’s “Spam King” in a murder-suicide; and the drug trafficker who once hired Woody Harrelson’s father to (successfully) murder the presiding judge of his first trial.
6. Article: Joe Jonas
   Why: An American pop-rock singer who is in a band with his two teenage brothers. Whether this makes them a Hanson for the 21st century I know not.
   Detail: But I do recognize the Jonas name from various online pop culture periodicals (I mean, gossip blogs) so I guess I’m not totally clueless. They’re contemporaries of Miley Cyrus and the Nickelodeon crowd, which indicates to me that this article is here instead of other articles from the genre which occasionally appear, such as iCarly. The article is currently locked due to vandalism, which may have something to do with the Jonas brothers being on the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone.
7. Article: Christian Bale
   Why: Although he’s currently starring in the number one movie in America, Bale made headlines for a different reason this past week, being briefly jailed over a family dispute in which his mother and sister made claims of assault.
   Detail: You can pretty much chalk this one up to “wrong” headlines, and how exactly to represent the incident has been a matter of considerable talk page debate. At one point the incident had its own section in the article, but now it has been folded into the Personal life section. I find it interesting that, after 1900+ words of discussion about the incident on the talk page, the currently approved verision of this is just 49 words. And it’s probably the right one.
8. Article: Joker’s appearances in other media
   Why: Hey, wait a minute — this just redirects back to “Joker (comics)”.
   
   Detail: Not being an admin, it is impossible for me to determine when the page was first created, but I can say that it was merged sometime this past week, and most of that content can now be found in this section.
9. Article: Breakout (album)
   Why: Did I really think I would get out of this edition without mentioning Miley Cyrus again? I shouldn’t have, because apparently her new album came out just over a week ago.
   Detail: As someone whose favorite albums sometimes have very, very little written about them, perhaps this should annoy me. It might, if I didn’t understand how Wikipedia’s biases work — and when it comes to music, Wikipedia is heavily biased toward recordings by famous people garnering lots of coverage, not to mention albums released in the Wikipedia era (if you will). If I want The Decemberists’ debut album Castaways and Cutouts to be anything more than a stub, it’s up to me. Or anyone else who gets there first.
10. Article: Hurricane Dolly (2008)
    Why: There it was. It rocked you like a hurricane.
    Detail: Or didn’t. Dolly is just the second hurricane (and fourth cyclone, hence the D-name) of the (young) 2008 season, and caused modest devastation and relatively few casualties. Nonetheless, hurricanes draw Wikipedia’s serious-minded breaking news contingent, producing a well-written, highly-sourced article (74 citations at latest count) with a talk page more civil than most you will find. Good show.

Holdovers this week: Deaths in 2008

Falling off the list: All else, including WALL-E

Recurring themes: Miley Cyrus, popular American movies

Honorable mention: Had there been an installment of this feature last week, I have little doubt that The Dark Knight (film) would have topped the list. After all, the film appears to be breaking all box office records — so why shouldn’t it be breaking at least a few Wikipedia records? Well, I don’t think anyone is keeping track of these things (at least not yet) so until I can get someone to program that particular tool, research of that sort remains prohibitively time-consuming. But then it may have not been quite that big — after all, WALL-E made topped Wikirage two weekends in a row whereas this film did not.

Images courtesy midgard, Sick Sad M!kE and Coast Guard News on Flickr.