Category Archive for ‘Wikipedia’ at Blog P.I.

Archive for the 'Wikipedia' Category

Welcome Back, Henrik: More on Sarah Palin and Wikipedia

Published by William Beutler on September 9, 2008 in Barack Obama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Site Traffic, Technology, Trend Tool, White House '08, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 1 Comment

One of the best homebrew Wikipedia tools around is the Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool maintained by a young Swede who goes by the name Henrik on Wikipedia. At least it was, until Henrik announced he was going on vacation in July and the statistics fell into quick disrepair. Many began clamoring for his return (including yours truly), and some concluded that he wasn’t coming back.

Luckily, this past week, he did. Whereas many Wikipedia editors announce that they will be on leave and then continue to edit, this guy took his vacation seriously. And from what I hear, the Europeans do take some long vacations.

So if you’ve never seen this tool, I thought I’d take this day of much discussion about Sarah Palin and Wikipedia to compare two snapshots of Henrik’s tool for the main Sarah Palin article. First, the chart for May. Each bar represents one day, and the number with each counts raw page views. So how many views is that?

35,563 total. Not bad — in fact, that’s more than twice number of page loads at Tim Pawlenty’s article that month. I am not, however, suggesting we start using this like a futures market; the tool is highly sensitive to news articles that will send droves to Google with a particular keyword in mind, and then many of them to Wikipedia. So how many visited Palin’s article in August?

Notice how you can’t see those bars almost at all until the spike at the end of the month? Some of those slivers toward the end are 14,000+ views. The biggest day was somewhere around 2.5 million, for a total of 4,220,407 views for the month. Barack Obama’s page received a relatively meager 1,377,462 page views for the entire month (if only the site had existed when Obama announced in Feb. 2007) and John McCain’s page received an even smaller 988,944. And both presidential nominees received a significant boost that day and for a few thereafter. How about Joe Biden? Better than the top of each ticket, but still about half of his rival undercard. This proves nothing except that Sarah Palin’s entry into the race drew a tremendous amount of attention, but we already knew that.

Now that the tool is back, I will plan to make use of these charts every once in awhile. Close readers will wonder if this is the Wikipedia feature I hinted at a few months ago, and others may wonder if I’ve given up on writing All the Rage for this month. The answer to both is no, so hang tight. As to whether this blog is now simply about Wikipedia… the answer is I don’t think so.

Who is Encouraging Obama Supporters to Vandalize Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Article?

Published by William Beutler on September 8, 2008 in Barack Obama, Edit Wars, Sarah Palin, Social Networking, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 33 Comments

Note: Stephen Ewen responds; see the end of this post.

If you’re like me, you’re a member of Barack Obama’s social network my.barackobama.com mostly for informational purposes. That is, to see what they’re saying. Today on a semi-public (anyone is free to join) listserv associated with a group called “Obama Rapid Response”, I found this curious suggestion from one member:

As frequent readers know, I take vandalism of Wikipedia seriously, especially when it’s political in nature. So who would recommend such a thing? I Googled his name, and this was the first result:

Which leads to this:

And then to this:

Ewen’s identity appears to be no real secret (nor is his e-mail address, for that matter), but what he doesn’t volunteer is that he is also an editor and advocate of the Citizendium, a would-be rival to Wikipedia founded by the co-founder of Wikipedia who isn’t Jimmy Wales (it’s Larry Sanger). And he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder. In fact, it appears Ewen’s account exists only to defend Citizendium’s honor on Wikipedia and on Wikimedia Commons, maintaining a template to note articles there that are based on Citizendium articles, among other activities. I could only find one, and the article is, perhaps appropriately, Vinegar.

But Ewen appears to be not so much a loyal Citizendium user as a loyal Wikipedia critic, because it seems he also took a considerable amount of time last month to write a page for Google’s recently launched semi-competitor, Knol, about Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church. The article is very long and appears to be quite informative, except for its one-sided account of the Jeremiah Wright controversy:

News and political commentary outlets repeatedly broadcast brief excerpts from several sermons by Trinity’s thirty-six-year former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, which especially conservative political commentators interpreted as anti-American and supportive of several conspiracy theories. The repeated airings brought the Obama campaign into crisis until, days later, Obama responded by delivering a speech, A More Perfect Union, that was widely lauded across the political spectrum. Obama later completely severed his ties with Wright and Trinity, although some of his political opponents have continued to try to use the matter as a political wedge.

For what it’s worth, the same incident on Wikipedia is described in neutral language and appears one paragraph earlier.

And what of his suggestion that Obama supporters “tussle” (as Jennifer Lopez memorably did with (or rather to) Isaiah Washington in Stephen Soderbergh’s Out of Sight) on the Political positions of Sarah Palin article? Well, the article in question has been edited nearly 100 times today, and not clearly by any new Palin antagonists. The only reversions this afternoon are to the edits of one user, Booksnmore4you, active just since late August. This account appears primarily concerned with adding tendentious arguments against the Republican vice presidential nominee to this article and the main Sarah Palin entry. There is only one exception to this pattern: Booksnmore4you’s Wikipedia career began by editing three random articles before editing Trinity United Church three times, in one case to include text similar to that found on Stephen Ewen’s Knol page.

So there you have it: Stephen Ewen is a sometime critic of both Wikipedia and Sarah Palin, as of recently an active opponent of the governor on Wikipedia and, as of today at least, an activist using tools provided by the Obama campaign to suggest that fellow supporters make life difficult for the dozens of editors doing real work to improve the article. One can’t hold the Obama campaign responsible for Mr. Ewen’s actions, but one hopes they agree that his advice should not be followed.

Update: And because I take Wikipedia seriously, I’ve added a note about this on the Talk page associated with Political positions of Sarah Palin.

Update, Tuesday: Stephen Ewen responds in the comments:

The above is outrageous and slanderous. Since the overwhelming preponderance of authors at the article appeared to be Palin supporters, I sent out a few email requests for people to go and collaborate at the article, if they were so inclined to deal with the back and forth debate at Wikipedia, so as to hopefully produce a more neutral outcome. This is routinely done at Wikipedia, and in fact, there would be few quality science articles there without users doing such. Wikipedia’s fundamental philosophy is that balancing viewpoints produce better and more neutral articles. That’s the point. I am requesting you kindly take down this blog post in this light.

Naturally, I won’t be removing the post. Without getting into the details of his edits, all it takes is a glance at Ewen’s recent contributions to determine that his edit summaries are highly uncivil, which is always a red flag. He is right insofar that balancing viewpoints are supposed to produce a better Wikipedia. But if he really believes that inviting partisans unfamiliar with the customs, to say nothing of guidelines, at Wikipedia is the way to accomplish this, then he really is better off focusing his attentions elsewhere.

Defining Plagiarism Down?

Published by William Beutler on August 11, 2008 in John McCain, Rhetoric, White House '08, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 16 Comments

Taegan Goddard is getting a lot of attention from the leftosphere right now for posting allegations that John McCain’s campaign lifted text from the Wikipedia article about Georgia (the nation-state, not the U.S. state). But as a writer and former professional journalist, I know from plagiarism, and I think McCain’s detractors are jumping on this one a little too quickly.

I think the only reason there is any controversy is because the first quoted passages, about Georgia and Christianity, are obviously very similar. They are also very short. And in all three examples, the text is purely expository: none of it expresses any thoughts, feelings, emotions or other content that would be an obvious case of intentional plagiarism. Additionally, it’s worth noting that historical facts cannot be plagiarized, only their expression. If there is any here, it’s probably inadvertent.

Meanwhile, consider that plagiarized text is almost always longer than original text. This is because the original writer is likely to state things in as few words as possible while the plagiarizer is trying to hide the origin, which means more words. But here, the McCain speech text is shorter in the second and third examples. The second example is the most alike, as ThinkProgress highlights, but the phrases in common are themselves quite pedestrian, and the other word choices are rather different.

The biggest blow to the plagiarism charge, however, is that the third McCain section actually contains information not in the Wikipedia version. The McCain version notes that Mikheil Saakashvili is a “U.S.-educated lawyer”, but this is not in the Wikipedia passage. Sure, this information is available from Saakashvili’s article, but if that’s the charge, I think the McCain campaign can rest easy. Pretty soon they’ll be accused of doing actual research.

I think that about covers it. Of course, if the campaign did plagiarize it, at least Wikipedia is released under a free public license. And as one Wikipedia editor puts it on the Georgia talk page:

Well, at least we’re being useful to lay readers, rather than specialists; and the extracts appear to be factual…

Update: Keith Olbermann just mentioned the “plagiarism” accusations on Countdown a moment ago, so this just might be the next “100 years” claim (which, curiously, I never seem to hear about anymore).

John Edwards Among the Wikipedians

Published by William Beutler on July 29, 2008 in Asymmetrical Media, Beltway media, Breaking News, Edit Wars, Fox News, Google, John Edwards, Scandal and Wikipedia. 8 Comments

John Edwards’ Wikipedia article is locked until July 30.

Considering that my last two posts were more or less about non-coverage of the John Edwards kerfuffle and highly active Wikipedia articles, I can’t believe I’ve so far missed out on the controversy over what to do with said scandal on said politician’s entry on said reference website.

More than 26,000 words (!)* have been expended on the discussion page associated with the John Edwards encyclopedia entry since the National Enquirer posted a story claiming he was seen leaving a hotel room rented for Rielle Hunter (last week), the woman with whom they have alleged he fathered a child out of wedlock (last year). So far, there is no mention of this story in the article — let alone the existence of Ms. Hunter — and because it has been temporarily locked (see above), it doesn’t appear that anyone will. Not just yet, anyway.

I’ve now read about half the debate, which is the whole extent of it before new people start showing up and re-arguing old points. Based on my own knowledge of how Wikipedia works and what I’ve seen in the press, I’ve come to the conclusion that, even though it sure looks like Edwards’ goose is cooked, Wikipedia’s editors are currently doing the responsible thing by keeping it out of the article.

This post is longer than most, so I am tucking the length of it below the fold. If this subject interests you, follow me.

*When I started writing this post yesterday, it was 15,000. Another 11,000 words (!) went up overnight.

Update: This post was featured in a story by Sarah Stirland at Wired.com today, and points out, there are now a couple sentences about the controversy in the article. I left this comment on the story:

When the page came unlocked, it seems that Wikipedia editors previously uninvolved in the debate came onto the talk page, held a formal vote, and now it’s just a few sentences in the 2008 Presidential campaign section. Or it was until I changed it to “2008 presidential campaign” — a Manual of Style thing.

Continue reading ‘John Edwards Among the Wikipedians’

All the Rage #17: Holy Wiki Edits, Batman!

Published by William Beutler on July 28, 2008 in Entertainment, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 4 Comments

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Falling off the list:

WALL-E

Recurring themes:

Honorable mention:

The Dark Knight (film)

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

All the Rage #16: More Changes Stay the Same

Published by William Beutler on July 13, 2008 in Entertainment, Foreign Policy, Fox News, Sports, Television, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 0 Comments

Our periodic look at the top ten most-edited articles on the English language Wikipedia, made possible Craig Wood’s Wikirage monitoring tool, is back this week. It’s been two weeks since our last installment, the previous week’s edition being canceled on account of travel.

However, it also marks the beginning of a new direction for this recurring feature, or at least a new frequency for its recurrence. When July ends in two more weeks, All the Rage will start appearing on a monthly basis. I think we’ve pretty well established a week-by-week pattern, and here is a brief outline of the kinds of articles that usually make the list:

Weekly installments of popular television shows in the U.S. and UK are frequently represented.
The highest-grossing film in North America each week almost always makes the list.
Pay-per-view professional wrestling events are not unheard of.
Other entertainment genres popping up from time to time: Nickelodeon sitcoms aimed at tweenagers, televised elimination-style competitions produced by Simon Cowell, sports playoffs and championship series.
Deaths in 2008 is the list-based article most likely to appear in the top ten articles, and prominent passing figures sometimes earn a spot of their own.
Those who write the breaking/current news articles — on terrorist attacks, natural disasters and many things government-related — are among the most sophisticated and motivated Wikipedians of all.
If an article attains the status of Featured Article, thereby giving it 24 hours on the front page of Wikipedia, the resulting vandalism and reversions thereof can push it into the most-edited articles of the week.

Now that we’re going monthly (and between these three installments, bi-monthly) I wonder what different patterns will emerge. What’s likely is that some or all of the above article types will remain, but they won’t all and their relative chart positions may prove to be different as well. Or maybe the trends will look no different on a month-by-month than week-by-week basis. Stay tuned and we’ll find out.

Also, this is not to say that Wikipedia commentary on Blog P.I. itself will be reduced, and this may also be a good place to announce that I will introduce, in the next few days, a new recurring feature also focused on evaluating Wikipedia articles. The angle will be different and the frequency will be a little more when-I-feel-like-it-and-have-the-time, and I’ll have much more to say about that very soon.

And in the meantime, how about that list for the past week:

Article: Rafael Nadal
Why: Spanish tennis player Nadal, long the #2 in the world, won Wimbledon 2008 over Roger Federer, long the #1 in the world.
Detail: This article is very long and well-developed, and was so going into the final two days of the tournament. And while new information has been added to the 2008 section, making it a few paragraphs longer, it is now recognized as being of lower quality. Specifically, the “Playing style” section has been slapped with a warning that says it “may contain original research or unverified claims.” This despite the fact that it’s a paragraph or two shorter and already cited several sources. Among the claims disputed enough to be removed entirely is his being known for “ultra-precise drink bottle positioning on changeovers.”

Article: Roger Federer
Why: Despite losing to Nadal last week, Swiss tennis player Federer is still the #1 ranking player in the world, for a record consecutive 232nd week.
Detail: As with the Nadal article, it is very much the same article as it was just a week ago, and the differences are not always apparent on first glance. On second glance, however, we see that the old section “Personal life” — listed above the “Tennis career” section — has been broken up into two constituent parts and reordered. The article now begins with a section called “Early life” containing a basic biographical sketch. Information about his dating life and charitable works has been relocated to the end of the article and is still titled “Personal life.” Meanwhile, context has been given to the “Tennis career” section, which is itself broken into “Junior tennis” and “Career on the ATP.”

Article: WALL-E
Why: Pixar + robots × space = intense fan interest.
Detail: Seriously, this is the third week in a row WALL-E is on the list, after consecutive weeks in the number one position. I could be wrong, but that might make it the single most-edited article in the three-plus months I’ve been writing this feature. Based on the discussion page, it looks like much of the recent editing has focused on dealing with the extraneous info added by some editors — an Apple references section existed at one time — and debates over how much a critique of consumerism it represents. In its current form, the “Commentary” section largely focuses on disagreements among conservatives about whether the film is “leftist” or reinforcing of “traditional conservatism,” and whether the culprit is big business or too close a tie of business to big government.

Article: List of characters from Total Drama Island
Why: Let’s see if I’ve got this right: it’s a Canadian television show modeled on Survivor and Drawn Together, now being shown on Adult Swim.
Detail: Why not the main article itself? Why the list? Well, the show seems to have a lot of characters, and the show has apparently struck enough of a nerve that fans are compelled to fill out as much information as possible about them. And the place for that has been designated this page, not the main article.

Article: I Love Money: Challenge Show
Why: This one is about a reality game show, rather than the above article, which is a parody of a reality game show.
Detail: I must say, this is a terrible article — written by fans and for fans but not giving outsiders any idea what the show is like or why it is interesting or how it works different from other shows. Most edits, so far as I can tell, have gone into meticulous updates of the chart showing contestant and episode progress, with detailed but impenetrable episode summaries. Too much detail. Not enough background. Just goes to show that even highly active articles are not necessarily good articles.

Article: Journey’s End (Doctor Who)
Why: Marking its second week on the list, this is the final episode of the “fourth series” of Doctor Who — after 26 “seasons” that is.
Detail: To be fair to the fans of I Love Money, I am sure it is much easier to write an “encyclopedic” article about Doctor Who. The show has been around since the 1970s, continuity and the TARDIS-associated universe has a detailed history to explain and even summarize when it gets too long. While there is very little discussion on the I Love Money series talk page, the talk page for this individual episode of Doctor Who is already very long, and fairly sophisticated. And it surely can’t hurt that there is a WikiProject Doctor Who.

Article: To Kill a Mockingbird
Why: It was the Featured Article (FA) on July 11.
Detail: Featured Articles are frequently vandalized (sometimes amusingly but more often not), articles with racial components are especially vulnerable, literary disputes can get very contentious, and damage done by these edits will bring people to the talk page complaining about how this terrible article was made, FA by editors who may or may not have a bone to pick with other editors or WikiProjects. That more or less describes what’s happened here.

Article: Atom
Why: The Featured Article on July 9.
Detail: More FA vandalism. After watching this list for some time, I would probably be willing to vote for temporary semi-protection of Featured Articles. Wikipedia prides itself on openness and in its site policies prefers not to create barriers for new editor participation (in its behind the scenes clique-ishness, it can be a bit different). However, policing vandalism on these articles seems like a real drain for editors on “Recent changes (RC) patrol”, aka vandal watch. A semi-protect would only apply to unregistered users and very new accounts, and would only last the period on which the FA was front-paged. I am sure this has been proposed before and shot down in a vote or debate, but if I ever become aware of a discussion to implement this, I would certainly weigh in on its behalf.

Article: Deaths in 2008
Why: The hardiest perennial makes another showing.
Detail: Passing this week: former White House press secretary and Fox News anchor Tony Snow, medical pioneer Michael DeBakey, the founder of Benihana, a producer of Woody Allen films, and an Indonesian serial killer.

Article: 34th G8 summit
Why: As mentioned above, the government and news-focused Wikipedians do a damn good job of creating detailed articles about recent events in record time. Editors of, say, I Love Money expended many edits on not that much result. Editors of this article added a great deal of information in fewer edits.
Detail: It seems strange to me that President Bush’s joking conclusion, “goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” didn’t make the article. I could understand, though, that it may be a little too U.S.-centric given the global scope of the article, although with equal treatment of similar news coverage of leaders’ statements in other countries, it would not be out of place. But then it seems even more curious that the statement was not raised at all on the discussion page. These people mean business.

Holdovers this week:

Falling off the list:

Recurring themes:

Honorable mention:

Tony Snow

Images courtesy Graham Hodgson, agentjon and davidsilver on Flickr.

All the Rage #15: Seven Words You Can Say on Wikipedia

Published by William Beutler on June 29, 2008 in #pdf2008, Entertainment, Obituary, Rhetoric, Sports, Technology, Television, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 0 Comments

If it’s Sunday (or, admittedly, sometimes Monday) it’s Blog P.I.’s weekly post about the ten most-edited articles on Wikipedia:

Article: WALL-E
Why: Disney-Pixar’s latest movie hit theaters this weekend, and it’s unsurprisingly shaping up to be a hit, posting Pixar’s third-best opening ever.
Detail: Wikipedia aims to be as impartial as possible, but what can you do when the subject is universally acclaimed? You fine-tune the language and cut back on verbatims, as one editor advises: “Well, as you say, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, so it will be difficult to get the reception section sounding anything less than a puff piece. However, and speaking as the editor who added the current version of the reception section, I entirely agree that the reviews should be paraphrased better, with fewer direct quotes.”

Article: The Stolen Earth
Why: The penultimate episode of the latest run of Doctor Who episodes on BBC One.
Detail: Which means there’s a very good chance we’ll see the final episode appear in one of these slots next weekend. Of the numerous British articles included in this list over the past few weeks, Doctor Who has ranked the highest most consistently.

Article: 2008 NBA Draft
Why: If you’ve ever wondered where all these new basketball players come from, perhaps you should learn about the NBA draft.
Detail: The NBA still hasn’t caught back up with football in national prominence, but basketball fans still eagerly anticipate and closely follow draft night each year. With two televised rounds of thirty picks each and numerous trades, that’s a whole lot of updates on one night — and as Wikirage shows, most edits did occur all on one night.

Article: Night of Champions (2008)
Why: It’s not the WWF, that’s the World Wildlife Federation. It’s WWE now — World Wrestling Entertainment.
Detail: If the NBA draft is a bit less-attended than the adventures of the Tenth Doctor and his TARDIS (yes, I’ve been skimming the Doctor Who pages) at least it is a little better-attended than this WWE event. This page was reverted and protected and reverted, but not necessarily due to vandalism. More the problem seems to be enthusiastic but inexperienced editors adding information in the wrong place and even trying to use the page as a forum. This happens often on some popular subjects, and it makes me wonder about members of the WikiProject Professional wrestling. No doubt the project counts among its members some dedicated and knowledgeable editors, but it seems that they find themselves having to undo a lot of the “help” they get. I doubt the same happens at WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Article: Guitar Hero World Tour
Why: Previously titled Guitar Hero IV, makers of the next installment of the popular video game series have continued to make new information available over the past few weeks, but was protected from unhelpful help (see above) until early June. Now the gates are wide open.
Detail: Allowing people to add spurious rumors such as the planned inclusion of a Soulja Boy track with no guitar instrumentation (since removed). Interesting also that video games seem to show up in this list months ahead of release — the title won’t be out until late October — while movies typically don’t appear until the week of release.

Article: Deaths in 2008
Why: Death and taxes may be inevitable, but only one ranks well in the list of most-edited Wikipedia articles.
Detail: Passing this week: one of the most influential comedians in my life and the second half of the 20th century, George Carlin. And then some other people, including a 37-year-old American comic book artist of cancer, a 20-year-old Russian-Kazakh model who threw herself from her 9th story Manhattan appartment yesterday afternoon, and the 9-year-old University of Georgia mascot, Uga.

Article: District of Columbia v. Heller
Why: In the session’s most closely-watched decision, the Court affirmed 5-4 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a firearm.
Detail: Through the week I’ve been somewhat skeptical of the claim bandied about that the case was the first to rule on the Second Amendment, and here is an amusing smackdown of Slate’s lead legal correspondent, who apparently was among the banditos: “We are well aware of U.S. v. Miller, and know much more about it than the sensationalist writer Lithwick. The article does not say that D.C. v. Heller is the first case to pertain to the Second Amendment or that has incidental remarks that could be interpreted as pertaining to the question of individual-rights vs. collective-rights; it is not the first such case, nor is it the second. It is, however, the first case to definitively or directly or comprehensively address the question.”

Article: Battlefield: Bad Company
Why: Not the English rock supergroup, but a new video game from Electronic Arts which “puts the player in a fictional war against Russia, where gamers will lead a squad of AWOL soldiers fighting both Russians and Mercenaries.”
Detail: I can’t really tell where all the edits went, except that editors have removed some unnecesary sections, but I was a bit surprised to find out that this page has existed since August 2006, presumably when it was first announced.

Article: 2008 WWE Draft
Why: Did you know the ~~WWF~~ WWE had a draft? Or maybe that should be “draft”? If it wasn’t for Wikipedia and this feature, I wouldn’t.
Detail: Do you think Vince McMahon is mocking David Stern?

Article: Camp Rock
Why: The Disney Channel sitcom all but ignored in last week’s edition because I was trying to pay attention at Personal Democracy Forum is back again, down to the tenth slot from the third.
Detail: For I think the first time, Disney holds the first and last articles on this list.

Holdovers this week:

Falling off the list:

Recurring themes:

Honorable mention:

Carlin

fired for editing Tim Russert’s article

an edit war of sorts

you most certainly can say them on Wikipedia

P.S. For what it’s worth, I feel compelled to note that I have made a few disclosed edits to a handful of Disney movie articles for distributor Buena Vista. However, I have not contributed to the Disney movies listed here — haven’t been asked and haven’t needed to do so.

Images courtesy andy castro, noamgalai and eyewash design on Flickr.

All the Rage #14: Live from New York, it’s Monday Morning

Published by William Beutler on June 23, 2008 in Entertainment, Sports, Television, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 0 Comments

I spent most of Sunday traveling to New York City for Personal Democracy Forum, so I am filing this week’s edition from the auditorium. This means I’ll have to keep it short, including this intro:

Article: Mozilla Firefox
Why: Although Firefox 3.0 has been available for a few weeks in beta, the official release took place just this past week.
Detail: One editor asks: “Should we include a section on Easter eggs into this article? For example, typing ” about:robots ” into the URL bar in Firefox3 results in a page titled ‘ Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” Apparently not — that’s already covered in The Book of Mozilla.

Article: The Incredible Hulk (film)
Why: The #1 film in America last week. But why still so high?
Detail: One possibility, nothing better than a little healthy competition to raise the article to “GA” or “Good Article” status: “How can we improve this article to make it GA quality? Iron Man (film) was GA within two weeks I think? Something like that I think. We should get moving on this article. Thoughts?”

Article: Camp Rock
Why: This Disney Channel
Detail: Last week it was ICarly, this week it’s Camp Rock? I was about to assign credit to WikiProject Disney, but it turns out that particular project hasn’t claimed the film. WikiProject Films has. That said, it does seem that something Disney-related does make it on this list most weeks.

Article: UEFA Euro 2008
Why: Last week’s #1, still in the top of the list.
Detail: The European soccer tournament concludes on June 29, so it may well appear on this list again next weekend.

Article: Feed the Animals
Why: It’s a mash-up album released just this week.
Detail: The album contains substantial information about which samples were used on each track, so much so that I suspect it wouldn’t withstand serious scrutiny from the community. In fact, already the page is tagged for failing to cite sources.

Article: Tim Russert
Why: The host of Meet the Press died of a sudden heart attack two Fridays ago.
Detail: I expressed some irritation last week that Russert’s article had failed to crack the top ten — apparently I just spoke too soon.

Article: 2008 NBA Finals
Why: The Boston Celtics won their first championship in some twenty years last week, devastating the hated Los Angeles Laters and forever banishing all comparisons of Kobe Bryan with Michael Jordan to the dustbin of history (so says this Blazers fan).
Detail: In a previous edition, I had also wondered at why the article about the NBA playoffs failed to make the list, even as European soccer tournaments appeared. Well, finally it has.

Article: Dasavathaaram
Why: A Tamil-language film released in the past couple weeks.
Detail: This article too was mentioned in last week’s edition, as an example of an article which ranked higher than Russert’s.

Article: Midnight (Doctor Who)
Why: The latest episode of Doctor Who on BBC.
Detail: This is the third Doctor Who episode to appear on this list during the latest season (or as they say, series) began.

Article: The Happening (2008 film)
Why: The latest Shyamalan film to be met with mostly negative reviews.
Detail: Which has, apparently, elicited the interest of more than a few Wikipedians. Who make suggestions like this one: “I have noticed that a lot of edits for this article were inclusions of unnecessary details, some of them detailing the methodology of suicides used in the film. I haven’t got time at the moment but perhaps, it might be useful if I (or someone else who beats me to it) make a new section that describes just that: how people killed themselves.”

Holdovers this week:

Falling off the list:

Recurring themes:

Honorable mention:

George Carlin

All the Rage #12: The Neither Tim Russert Nor 3G iPhone Edition

Published by William Beutler on June 15, 2008 in Apple, Entertainment, International, MSNBC, Obituary, Sports, Tech Blogosphere, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Although All the Rage exists as a feature for the purposes of examining the top 10 most-edited articles on the English-language Wikipedia for the week ending Saturday, sometimes it’s almost more interesting what doesn’t make the list. Today we’ll do both:

Article: UEFA Euro 2008
Why: The 2008 UEFA European Football Championship is under way right now in Austria and Switzerland, and at least some English-speaking country must still be alive.
Detail: Possibly the UK? British subjects (the articles, not the citizens) dominated the top slot for the past month now, and we can assume plenty of them are involved here.

Article: The Incredible Hulk (film)
Why: It’s the number one movie in America this week.
Detail: Just as British articles have been landing in the top 5 edited articles for several weeks now, so have the top-grossing U.S. films on their opening weekends.

Article: Kung Fu Panda
Why: The number one movie in America last week.
Detail: See above.

Article: Lukas Podolski
Why: This Polish-born German soccer player made both goals in a 2-0 victory over Poland on June 8. Then he scored the Germans’ only goal in a 2-1 defeat by Croatia.
Detail: I’m not sure if he’s just really good or Germany is really just not that good. And if you assumed that the German-language Podolski article would be longer than the English one, as I did until just a moment ago, you’d be wrong.

Article: Treaty of Lisbon
Why: This EU treaty, apparently in the works since at least 2001, was rejected this week by Irish voters, thus throwing its future into question.
Detail: I’d never heard of this treaty once, I’ll admit. But if I wanted to find out more about it, this is probably the best place to find it. I am sincerely impressed by the quality of the article. When I first saw it, I assumed it was a historical subject that had made Featured Article. Well, it’s not — but it should probably be up for Featured Article status. The editors who assembled this page are among Wikipedia’s most sophisticated.

Article: ICarly
Why: It’s another one of those Nickelodeon “sitcoms” aimed at “tweenagers”, and it’s back on this list after appearing once, in this feature’s second week.
Detail: Given the target age range for this show noted above, I’m surprised this show is so frequently edited. It can’t be my sisters and their friends; though they’re a precocious wireless generation more advanced than the wired childhood of my generation, I doubt they’re editing Wikipedia just yet. The youngest editors I’ve seen are still a few years older, maybe late middle school. Does this show have an adult following? A few questions I can’t answer: Why hasn’t Hannah Montana been on this list? And do you think SpongeBob SquarePants would have made this list during its heydey?

Article: Deaths in 2008
Why: The most consistently-ranking Wikipedia article on WikiRage is back after a couple off-weeks.
Detail: If that’s how you want to put it. Passing this week: Washington’s most respected journalist, Tim Russert, the politician uncle of Rep. Jeff Flake, a 28-year-old Armenian chess grandmaster, by heart attack (perhaps even more tragic than the 58-year-old Russert) and the suicide of a Polish-German footballer (stay happy, Lukas Podolski).

Article: Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
Why: It’s the new Coldplay album, released in Europe last week and available in the United States on Tuesday.
Detail: They are English, but somehow I doubt that’s it. For one thing, they’re in all those iTunes commercials right now. I’m one of those Radiohead fans who views all Coldplay fans as easily entertained if not actual philistines, but I’ll admit the section played before the Apple logo comes onscreen is catchy.

Article: Jurassic Park (film)
Why: Front-paged on the English Wikipedia as a Featured Article on June 9.
Detail: Meanwhile, the article about the novel Jurassic Park “needs additional citations for verifications.” That’s a damn shame.

Article: George I of Great Britain
Why: The Featured Article on June 11.
Detail: For the first time this week, the first and last articles on this list concern something British.

Holdovers this week: Nothing, actually, for just the second time.

Falling off the list: Last week’s list.

Recurring themes: British articles of all kinds, American blockbuster films, Featured Articles, I try to be polite when I don’t care about the subject.

Honorable mention: Tim Russert made it just to #24 according to WikiRage as of Sunday afternoon. That’s fewer than the apparently unintentionally hilarious new M. Night Shyamalan flick, the two-weeks out Adam Sandler vehicle, and a Tamil-language film released in “many theaters.” Hmm.

Brian Cubbison

Wikipedia beat the AP

John Robinson

rolling the page back

Wikinews

One more thing: Notice something missing? How about the 3G iPhone? In fact, this article is at #20 overall at the time of this writing. I’m not sure if it’s counting edits still, because the article has been “merged” with iPhone. The announcement last week was covered heavily by the business and tech press in addition to the Apple and gadget blogs, but on this website full of geeks, that’s as good as it can do? Does this bode ill for Apple and the new iPhone, or does it say something about the type of people who are and are not on Wikipedia? I’ll leave you with that thought.

Image courtesy queenkv on Flickr.

All the Rage #11: Britain’s Got Wikipedians

Published by William Beutler on June 8, 2008 in Entertainment, Obituary, Sports, Television, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 1 Comment

For the third time in four weeks, an article about a British television show takes the top spot in our exploration of the top 10 most-edited articles on the English-language Wikipedia for the week of June 1 to June 7. Hat tip as usual to WikiRage creator Craig Wood for making this feature possible. Let’s get started:

Article: Britain’s Got Talent
Why: Simon Cowell’s latest show actually named its winner in time for last week’s edition, but apparently there was more to stay about it. Sustained editing and discussion of how best to organize the article continued until June 4, but now the edits are trailing off as the article stabilizes.
Detail: I think for the first time, we have the same #1 two weeks in a row, although if not for week nine’s asterisk edition, I think Indy IV would have preceded it.

Article: Harold Innis
Why: Featured Article on June 1. Heavily vandalized
Detail: I had never heard of the guy, but the article certainly demonstrates that he was interesting. But what’s more interesting to me is what appears to be no mere vandalism, but a hacking of the MediaWiki software. But be careful clicking on that link, especially if you have a large monitor. The heavily pixelated background is NSFW in the extreme, though it takes a moment to realize the fact.

Article: Yves Saint Laurent (designer)
Why: The French fashion designer whom I would not have won an “alive or dead?” guessing game until his death on June 1 was announced.
Detail: It’s actually a surprisingly short article for a business celebrity or a most-edited page. My guess is that Saint Laurent didn’t do much publicity. The article’s two photos are from when he was fairly young. I can’t ever recall seeing him answer Vanity Fair’s Proust questionnaire like Karl Largerfeld has done. Heck, Lagerfeld picked the music and DJs for a radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV. Yves Saint Laurent, not so much.

Article: Bo Diddley
Why: The American rock singer, songwriter and rectangular guitarist died at age 79 on June 9.
Detail: I wondered what the last version of the page before his passing was announced looked like, so I looked it up. It’s substantially the same and approximately even the same length, but now is more tightly written. One image has been removed, likely because it wasn’t clearly released under a public license. It may be tempting to think of the latter change as making Wikipedia worse, but Wikipedia is quite conservative when it comes to approving images for use, probably to avoid being sued. This actually makes the “information wants to be free” types on Wikipedia strong defenders of copyright, which is kind of ironic.

Article: Ran (film)
Why: Featured Article (FA) on June 1.
Detail: The article is fairly long, but apparently its suitability for the front page fell under dispute almost as soon as it went up. The page seems fine to me, and I’m not sure this wasn’t just a case of a user from WikiProject Music sniffing that his work was better.

Article: Confederate government of Kentucky
Why: Featured article on June 3.
Detail: You can always count on certain articles which have reached FA status resulting in some debate on the associated talk page, even though these are pages which have supposedly reached enough stability that they’ve been so approved for the front page. Headline on the latest talk page debate: “’provisional government’ or ’shadow government’ a better term?”

Article: 2008 Danish embassy bombing
Why: The Danish embassy in Islamabad was the site of a suicide car bombing on June 2, killing five. Al-Qaeda reportedly claimed responsibility on June 5, citing the Jyllands-Posten cartoons as motivation.
Detail: With no natural disasters to meticulously document this week, Wikipedia’s newshounds instead focused on building up this article. With the breakdown of country-by-country responses and substantial number of news citations (48) it certainly looks more than a little like it.

Article: One Night Stand (2008)
Why: It’s a WWE pay-per-view event that aired on June 1.
Detail: WWE has been dominating the bottom half of these lists for awhile. Long enough now that maybe we should think about it. Apparently one of the entertainment/media subcultures that has really taken to Wikipedia is professional wrestling and its fans. They may be more active than fans of any other professional sport; playoffs and championships pages sometimes show up here when they come around, but the 2008 NBA Finals are nowhere to be found, though it’s not a bad page. I used to have a WWE-related page watchlisted and for awhile, noted the changes each day. Kudos to WP:PROWRESTLING, or WikiProject Professional wrestling (you don’t capitalize “wrestling”). They’ve created 5 Featured Articles, which is pretty good, considering the subject matter.

Article: Giovani dos Santos
Why: At first I thought he might be Baby Diego from “Children of Men” but apparently he’s a 19-year-old “attacking midfielder or forward, who plays for Barcelona and the Mexican national team.”
Detail: Why him, why now? Looks like the surge of interest owes to Santos transferring to Tottenham Hotspur in London, a deal worth between four and eight million pounds.

Article: Night of Champions (2008)
Why: It’s a pay-per-view WWE event coming up on June 29.
Detail: “The official theme song is “Devour” by Shinedown.[3]”

Holdovers this week:

Falling off the list:

Recurring themes:

Honorable mention:

Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008

Images courtesy garretkeough, timburts and greggoconnell on Flickr.

Blog P.I.

Archive for the 'Wikipedia' Category

Welcome Back, Henrik: More on Sarah Palin and Wikipedia

Defining Plagiarism Down?

John Edwards Among the Wikipedians

All the Rage #17: Holy Wiki Edits, Batman!

All the Rage #16: More Changes Stay the Same

All the Rage #15: Seven Words You Can Say on Wikipedia

All the Rage #14: Live from New York, it’s Monday Morning

All the Rage #12: The Neither Tim Russert Nor 3G iPhone Edition

All the Rage #11: Britain’s Got Wikipedians

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