Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2024-12-24
Responsibilities and liabilities as a "Very Large Online Platform"
Independent audit for "responsibilization" of Wikipedia as a VLOP completed
Wikipedia has passed its first audit required due to its designation as a Very Large Online Platform under the EU's new Digital Services Act (see prior Signpost coverage). The audit was conducted by an outside entity, named Holistic AI, for the Wikimedia Foundation, as reported by Holistic's press release. The Foundation has published the audit, its own "Audit Implementation Report" and related documents on its website.
The audit report found some non-material non-compliance in the area of providing the Terms of Use in every official national language of the EU member states, to affect Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Romania, and further requested that Wikimedia-controlled translations be made for all languages other than English, rather than community translations, in order to avoid unintentional changes in meaning and to provide email emergency and other regulation-relevant contacts directly, rather than through separately linked web pages. The auditors also noted:
Another recommendation is to establish a separate ToU for the EU, free from references to non-EU legislation or mechanisms, to better align with the access requirements under Article 14.
— Holistic AI 2024 DSA audit, Article 14 response, page 25
This recommendation that the Wikimedia Foundation ought to provide nation-specific Terms of Use appears to have been rebuffed with this response from the Foundation, referring to a singular ToU: "The Wikimedia Foundation will review the ToU to make it less US-centric and to ensure contact information is easily accessible."
In its European Policy Monitoring Report for November 2024, Wikimedia Europe notes that besides this audit, Wikipedia's annual obligations under the DSA also include
A Systemic Risk Assessment and Mitigation (SRAM) Register. This is basically a living document where the WMF identifies risks and keeps track of mitigation measures.
Wikipedia, according to the documents, meets the obligations under the DSA, albeit improvement recommendations are made. The systemic risk register lists “disinformation” and “harassment” as immediate priorities with corresponding mitigation measures.
Meet the new European Commissioners who could play a key role in the relation between Wikipedia and copyright policy
In other EU news, Wikimedia Europe reported that, on November 27, a new European Commission was officially approved by the European Parliament, and started its five-year term on December 1. As kindly highlighted by Wikimedia Europe itself and euronews, the Commission – once again led by Germany's Ursula von der Leyen – includes some faces who will likely become more and more familiar to tech experts and Wikipedia members in the next few years.
First up, it's Finland's Henna Virkkunen (EPP), who will serve as Executive Vice President and European Commissioner for Digital and Frontier Technologies. After serving two terms as an MEP and being elected for a third term last June, Virkkunen will be tasked with managing the Commission's digitalisation strategy, including matters such as the Copyright Directive and the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – which she had led the EU Parliament's work on – as well as the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). Then, there's Bulgaria's Ekaterina Zaharieva (also from the EPP), who will be the European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, whose primary targets will include improving conditions for start-up and scale-up companies and setting up a new research council on AI.
In their analysis of Zaharieva and Virkkunen's November hearings, Communia highlighted a few key insights on copyright policy:
"From a copyright perspective, there was nothing surprising or unexpected in the hearings. While we understand the heavy emphasis on generative AI, we would like to see more work being done to promote the public interest.
The commitment to the idea of a 'fifth freedom' for knowledge and the support for a European Research Area Act are commendable. We fully support this proposal, but would encourage the incoming Commission to be even bolder and, in addition, propose a more comprehensive intervention – a Digital Knowledge Act – that benefits all kinds of knowledge institutions, including universities and research institutions, but also libraries, archives and cultural heritage institutions. If we want to unlock the full potential of European knowledge institutions, we need to address the barriers that currently prevent them from fulfilling their public service mission, including in the field of copyright."
The Wikimedia Europe "deep-dive" article also shed a light on two more relevant Commissioners for the organization: Ireland's Michael McGrath (RE) and Malta's Glenn Micallef (PES). McGrath will serve as the European Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, and the Rule of Law: although his portfolio is quite wide, The Irish Times reported that he will have responsibility on developing the Digital Fairness Act – which aims to tackle dark patterns and influencer marketing – and improve co-operation between national data protection regulators. During his hearing, McGrath stated that he would "deepen the work to counter foreign information manipulation and interference and disinformation", among other tasks needed to "put citizens at the heart of our democracy".
On the other hand, as the new Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture, and Sport, Micallef will contribute to address the issues of child protection, cyberbullying and "addictive design" that might trick users and consumers into increasing their engagement on digital platforms. The youngest member of the Commission by far, Micallef pointed out during his hearing that "social media's ability to amplify voices and movements has made them a powerful tool for youth engagement, but navigating them requires critical thinking."
In their own conclusions, Wikimedia Europe noted how the work and the positioning of the new Commission on each of the aforementioned topics might be significantly impacted by the thin supporting majority and the rise of new right-wing political groups in the Parliament, writing quote:
– O"For Wikimedia, the new political landscape comes with some unforeseeable risks, but could also open up new avenues.
For the time being, it seems that the EPP [group], and its chair, Manfred Weber, can play the pivotal role. Developments at the national and international level, and a different political stance of the S&D group, could overturn this situation. It would not be bold to say that the EU has challenging years ahead."
Wiki Loves Earth announces winners of the 2024 international contest
On December 5, Wiki Loves Earth publicly announced the top 20 of the best pictures submitted by users around the world for the 2024 edition of the annual photographic contest, which historically aims to highlight the conservation areas of each participating country and collect new images under free licenses.
According to the official data, a record 56 countries and territories took part in this year's competition, with more than 80,100 submissions from over 3,800 different uploaders. Germany registered by far the highest number of submissions, with 16,921 total uploads; Ukraine ended in second place with 6,438 uploads, while Senegal came in third (just) with 3,774 uploads.
After each country had chosen their local winners, the jury of WLE, formed by professional photographers, experts, and Wikimedians, gathered to select the 20 international winners of the contest, divided as usual in two categories: "Landscapes" (including individual trees that are considered natural monuments) and "Macro/close-up" (involving pictures of animals, plants and fungi). Two more special sections dedicated, respectively, to human rights-themed images and video nominations were also hosted.
You can discover the international winners of WLE 2024 here and here. Enjoy! – O
News from WMF
Since the latest Signpost issue covering them in October this year, there have been three Wikimedia Foundation bulletins: early November, late November, and early December.
The 2023-24 Fundraising report was published. Fundraising grew by 0.51% since 2022-23 (in comparison to a 2.7% growth from 2021-22 to 2022-23) to reach $170.5 million. The number of unique donations increased by 2.5 million to total 17.4 million. The WMF published a post about the 2024 Fundraising Campaign in English.
The WMF Board of Trustees met in August 2024, voting to dissolve its Talent & Culture Committee (BoT minutes can be read at the Foundation wiki). Tulu Wikisource and Moore Wikipedia went live.
An open call went out for Wikimania 2027 and 2028. Any communities interested in hosting should make an 'Expression of Interest' by 27 January 2025.
Charts Extension, planned to replace the abandoned Graphs extension, was enabled on Commons and three pilot Wikipedias. The Graphs extension had been disabled sitewide in April 2023 over security concerns. – S
ANI vs. WMF updates
As part of the Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation saga, the Foundation published an update on 3 December 2024. WMF staffer Quiddity (WMF) clarified that the Foundation had delivered a summons to the three editors involved in the case without disclosing information about them to ANI. There have been two more hearings since then, and a Delhi High Court Justice is now planning to read the sources used to reference the defamation lawsuit – see more in-depth coverage at "In the media". – S
Brief notes
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Hog Farm, who returned to adminship via a reconfirmation RfA (with roughly 93% support) after voluntarily stepping away in September 2023. Some discussion occurred regarding the appropriateness of reconfirmation RfAs in the wake of other high-profile reconfirmations (for more, see Graham87's writeup on his own in this issue's Opinion). As The Signpost was approaching publication, the RfA of user Sennecaster was also being evaluated.
- U4C hears first case: With the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) accepting cases since November 2024, the first case was recently concluded, resulting in the lifting of a user's block on German Wiktionary. There is also currently one open case.
- Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones in November and December 2024:
- Wikipedia articles
- 1,000 articles: Swazi Wikipedia, Mooré Wikipedia
- 10,000 articles: Moroccan Amazigh Wikipedia
- 20,000 articles: Pashto Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia
- Wikipedia articles
- Wikipedia Day: First celebrated by common acclamation in 2002, this year's celebrations will be held between January 11 (in Seattle) and January 25 (NYC) according to the list compiled by Wikimedia NYC, with other meetups in San Francisco, Minnesota, and Toronto. Be bold: don't bother asking anybody for permission to organize an event, just do it. Kwara State University is running a month-long series of editing events between December 17 through February 21.
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Architect (beginning 23 December 2024) followed by Entomology (beginning 30 December 2024). Please be bold in helping improve this article!
Situations
- The Signpost is committed to publishing a diversity of perspectives, and this article reflects the opinions of its author, whom we invited to republish this userspace essay, originally written in October. Beeblebrox is a long-time Wikipedia editor, administrator (since 2009) and former Arbitration Committee member, who was elected and served for three terms (2013, 2019, and 2021).
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On-wiki-vs-off-wiki
Wikipedia has policies for a reason. We are trying to do something here, this is explicitly not just a place to hang out chatting and gossiping. A certain amount of decorum and respect is generally appropriate and this is a policy that has strong support from the community, even though enforcement is uneven at best. Policies like WP:CIVIL are intended to remind users that although nobody here is paid, this is basically a workplace. Maybe it's more like a Montessori school in that all work is self-directed and there is no deadline for completing it, but we still don't expect users to randomly attack one another or to post animated emojis in article space because they think it's funny.
Off-wiki criticism forums do not have these rules, that is their entire point. I'm mainly speaking of Wikipediocracy (WPO) here, as it is the only one of those forums I participate in. Some of the other forums truly are hate or attack sites, as opposed to being mostly focused on genuine criticism. So, a person might say something on WPO that they would never say here, because it would be outside policy to do so. This is not a crime, although in some extreme cases it could and should lead to on-wiki sanctions.
Insults and name-calling
Some folks on these external sites like to come up with nicknames based on a user's on-wiki name. Obviously, this is not allowed here. There is also arguably little to no value in it, especially if endlessly repeated every time the user in question comes up. Sometimes they say things like "<username> is a total idiot who should have their head examined" which, even if true, is unlikely to be seen by the user in question as useful feedback. Part of this trend may be due to the fact that, by and large, the person so targeted is not present in the discussion, but as has become very, very apparent; sometimes they might be lurking, reading the discussion without participating in it. In my opinion, it just isn't helpful, but it equally is not an excuse for the user so targeted to start doing things on Wikipedia that violate Wikipedia policies.
I would say that some of these folks need to grow up, but, in many cases, so do the targets of their comments. If you want to engage someone who is criticizing you, step up and do it in the place where they are doing so. If you don't want to do that, your remaining option is to let it go, not to start attacking them on-wiki.
Outing
Nobody can deny that there is material posted on WPO that, were it posted on Wikipedia, would violate the outing policy. Wikipedia's outing policy is substantially stricter than pretty much the entire rest of the internet. It is forbidden to speculate on the identity of other users in any way, including other online identities on other websites that may clearly be the same person, unless that person has disclosed that connection on Wikipedia itself. Whether one agrees with it or not, this is policy and should be adhered to.
WPO does not have any such rule. Most websites don't. It isn't generally considered a horribly invasive act to notice that User:Steve D edits content about the band Billy and the Boingers, and that some guy on Twitter or whatever named Steve Dallas is, in fact, the band's manager. Saying as much on a completely different website manifestly cannot be considered a violation of any Wikipedia policy. Although it might be preferable that, instead of posting it on a forum, the information was sent to paid-en-wp@wikipedia.org, we cannot obligate users of other websites to do so.
Note that this is not the same thing as doxing, which involves posting non-public personal information about someone without their permission.
What happened with me and the Arbitration Committee
The rest of this is about my specific situation; if you don't care about that, you can stop right here.
This is a bit more personal. In November 2023, the Arbitration Committee, of which I was a duly elected member at that time, informed me that they were considering removing me from office due to disclosures I had made on WPO. Plenty has been written about that elsewhere; look it up if you want to know more. The short version is that I did what they said I did: I disclosed certain material from ArbCom's mailing list publicly on WPO. In a surprisingly-quick decision for the committee, I was not removed per se; the committee went with the odd decision to suspend me for six months, despite the fact that my term was ending in a month anyway, and I wasn't running for reelection. I could accept that, even if I didn't quite understand the reasoning behind a suspension when I was done anyway. What I did (and still do) have trouble accepting is that they also revoked my Oversight and Volunteer Response Team access when there was no hint of any sort of wrongdoing there.
Every arbitrator is granted these by default — along with CheckUser access — but I'd already had the Oversight permission for twelve years on my own merit, and there had never been any serious issues with my use of it, or with keeping material I saw in the course of using it confidential.
But it's the same thing, isn't it?
I don't think so.
Functionaries are appointed by the Committee, and they all know it is their responsibility to keep their mouths shut about what they see when using these powerful tools (which can certainly include personal data). It was, and is, important that such material be held in the strictest confidence.
Arbitrators are elected by the community to represent them at the highest level of dispute resolution. The community knew who I was, and what to expect, and I ran on a promise of trying to be more transparent when possible. I did what I did when I thought there was good reason to do it, even if it technically violated the level of privacy one normally expects from an email discussion. I wasn't there to toe the line and do what the other arbs wanted, I was there to do what I was elected to do — not once, but three times. There absolutely was not any personal information of any kind in any of the material I disclosed. It's an important distinction, and I would never release the kind of extremely sensitive material one routinely sees when using these tools.
What is important here is not that anyone agrees with my view — they only need to ask if they believe that I genuinely feel the way I say I feel about it.
I've apparently failed repeatedly at making that point to the Committee, possibly because I don't think I've ever put it quite like that. Maybe next year I'll try again. It is important work, and I did it for a very long time.
Graham87 on being the first-ever administrator recall subject
I have been a Wikipedia editor since February 2005 and was an admin on this site from August 2007 until November 2024. I lost my admin status after failing a re-request for adminship (RRFA) following the first ever admin recall, largely due to my aggressive blocking and heavy-handed treatment of new users. The RRFA is the subject of this article, in which I offer explanations for what led to it and what it was like to undergo it. This is not a general overview of everything I've done on Wikipedia; for that, see my 2017 Signpost interview and my personal Wikipedia timeline.
Background
I became a Wikipedia administrator in August 2007 following a unanimous request for adminship discussion. I have had four main preoccupations on Wikipedia: wikiarchaeology (investigating the old history of the site), mostly history merges and imports (the latter being the reason I obtained the importer user right in 2013), my daily skim-reading of selected Wikipedia noticeboards (such as the technical village pump, the main admins' noticeboards, and later the bureaucrats' noticeboard), Wikipedia's accessibility for blind screen reader users like myself, and, most importantly for the purposes of this article because it's where I found many of the users I'd blocked, my (until recently ever-expanding) watchlist. It contained not only articles that I'd worked on, but also many articles subject to vandalism/deleterious editing that had not been undone for more than a couple of days.
When I became an admin, I tried my hand at dealing with regular backlogs (like speedy/proposed deletion, which I found unfulfilling), and I did not regularly check pages where users requested protection, asked for vandalism blocks, or reported bad usernames because I prefer to be self-directed, so my watchlist became my Wikipedia fortress, so to speak.
I would often check all the recent edits (or those that were the top edit) of any new user/IP to appear there. As I encountered more contributors making various types of problematic edits over the years, I became more paranoid about new users and their possible motives, leading me to become more and more aggressive about blocking. I became especially afraid of new users who I thought were gaming auto/extended confirmed permissions by making small edits (such as overlinking and often unsuccessful attempts to copyedit articles) to increase their edit count and school IPs (as many articles were on my watchlist due to vandalism from schools). I fairly frequently blocked users/IP's who I thought were problematic with little or no warning because I felt that allowing them to continue editing would waste the community's time and I valued the integrity of the encyclopedia above just about everything else.
My friends, especially the occasional Wikipedian Codeofdusk, half-seriously called me a "Wikipedia meanie" for my approach to dealing with new users. Most articles on my watchlist were there because no other active users were watching them, so most of the time I obtained relatively little feedback about my admin actions except from the new users themselves (which I generally discounted) and the occasional admin/established user who either praised me for doing a good job or let me know that I was getting out of line with community expectations; in the latter case, I'd try to heed their advice.
That all changed with two admins' incidents noticeboard discussions started in September 2024: "Overzealous blocking by Graham87", about one of my blocks, and "Inappropriate blocks and WP:BITE by Graham87", about my general approach to blocking and new users; I took on board the advice in both of those threads. There are more details on my personal Wikipedia timeline subpage about how I lost my adminship, which details several sliding doors moments in which if I'd made better decisions, I could've kept my adminship; the subpage also includes a link to a relevant thread on Wikipediocracy.
Meanwhile, the foundations were being laid for the admin recall process, in which 25 users had to sign a petition to force someone to undergo an RRFA within 30 days, and I happened to be the first person to be subjected to it. It was going about as well as a first try at a completely unfamiliar process can go on Wikipedia (i.e. not particularly well), but in the first nine days it had only received 12 out of the needed 25 signatures ... until 5 November when this edit adding a good-faith, but irrelevant reference to the Sleepover article appeared on my watchlist. I checked the other edits by the user who made it, was so incensed by the quantity and nature of their edits (as they pressed so many of my buttons at once) that I was hyperfocused on them and didn't even think about the recall petition, and eventually gave them a remarkably poorly executed and communicated indefinite block ... which meant that all hell broke loose.
My petition reached 27 signatures in over half a day, and I needed to face a new request for adminship if I had any chance of keeping my admin status.
My RFA and relevant preparations
After the above-mentioned block and its fallout, I had a huge amount of soul-searching to do. I wanted to keep my adminship largely for wiki-archaeological work, which sometimes requires it. I realised that to have even a sliver of a chance of keeping it, I should rid my watchlist of articles I wasn't interested in that were potential newbie magnets, and pledge to avoid blocking. I originally saw my watchlist purge as a dereliction of duty (though the idea had been at the back of my mind for many years beforehand), but I later saw it as liberation. I spent seven hours sorting through my watchlist, removing 1,173 pages, which calmed it down considerably. As many voters in my RRFA did, I knew that my no-blocking pledge was technically unenforceable, and that my attempt to hide the block links in my common.css was akin to putting an alcoholic's drink of choice in a slightly more difficult-to-reach part of the fridge. But without the political will to separate the block button from the admin tools, that's all I could do.
I also had to find potential nominators, by asking people I'd worked with in the past to endorse me for adminship. It took some time, but finally, my re-RFA was ready, and I was relatively optimistic. What happened next is best summed up at the timeline of how I lost my adminship, the relevant parts of which I have copied here:
- 17 November: my re-request for adminship went live. Unlike a normal RFA whose threshold is 70%, this one was to have a passing threshold of 60% with any result between 50 and 60% up for bureaucrat discretion. By the time I'd signed off that night, it was at 42/5/2, so I was feeling pretty optimistic.
- 18 November, by the time I'd answered my latest batch of questions, my RRFA was at 67/33/5. Not as good as the night before, but still not the end of the world.
- 19 November: By the time I'd surfaced, we were at 105/109/7 with rumblings about withdrawing. We were below the 50% cutoff that meant failure. I'd earlier decided to withdraw at 45% (but didn't want to make the exact figure public at the time). I held on to hope that maybe things would turn around.
- 20 November (local time): The day I withdrew my RFA. At the start we were at 115/131/9 by the time I got up, not much different from 111/124/8 the night before, so I kept on holding on. After getting back from the gym later that day, the RRFA looked something like this, with a discussion of another harsh block I'd made and a very long oppose that gave me pause. I then spent a few hours thinking about what to do before I finally withdrew the RFA, gave myself some user rights that I'd need later (but avoided giving myself rollback because some people in my RFA objected to my use of that right), and let the bureaucrats know. An RFC was started later that day to allow non-admin importers (I'm the only one) to be able to history-merge pages and it was implemented nearly a week later.
In short, by blocking users to avoid wasting the community's time, I ended up creating a colossal time sink discussing my adminship status; I'm very sorry about that.
Legacy
The last few months have certainly been a wild ride but the support of my friends and family along with music have helped immensely. The fact that I spent my first two-and-a-half years as a Wikipedian without admin tools (which was a long time by the standards of 2007, the year I gained adminship) makes it a bit easier to adjust; I've just revived my old habit of adding speedy deletion tags like {{db-G6}} for uncontroversial maintenance (like pages left-over from history merges) rather than deleting the pages myself.
I've been missing the tools in the strangest ways. For instance, when I notice an unfamiliar user, I've often been in the habit of comparing their account-creation date to the date of their first edit and checking their deleted edits if the two don't match; I can't do that now. I also didn't realise until I lost the rollback tool that I sometimes used it for orientation; my screen reader puts links like the rollback link on their own line and that was helpful when navigating lists of edits — and a line like "rollback: 3 edits" let me know that there were three edits by a particular user to navigate past before I find other edits to potentially check. That's a bizarre way to use rollback and I doubt I'd use it much for its intended purpose these days after the watchlist purge. If someone wants to grant me the rollback right, I'd be OK with that, but I also don't want it to cause any controversy. I've missed the tools in more tangential ways too, like having to ask for a page undeletion to facilitate a history merge. As for blocks, as of the publication date of this Signpost piece, three out of the four blocks I've requested since losing adminship have been carried out.
I can't lay all the blame on this, but I sometimes wonder if the newcomer homepage has a hand in some of the edits I've noticed in recent years. One thing it encourages people to do is copyedit, which is a great first editing task for a competent native speaker of English, but not a good one for people whose English is more shaky than they realise (compare the Dunning–Kruger effect).
The situation I was in reminds me a little of the 2005 Stevertigo arbitration case, one of the Committee's first desysopping cases, that I've never forgotten because of the debacle of the reconfirmation RFA the committee forced him to undergo; they've never done that sort of thing since. I do hope a re-RFA is always an option for admins with certified recall petitions though; I've implied this elsewhere.
Despite the setback of losing my adminship, I hope to continue editing Wikipedia for many years to come. I'm ranked #5 among human editors on the list of Wikipedians by longest consecutive daily editing streaks, and I intend to keep that up.
Delhi High Court considers Caravan and Ken for evaluating the ANI vs. WMF case
Delhi High Court Justice will read the sources
Bar and Bench, an Indian source for news on the judicial system, reported that Justice Subramonium Prasad, who is hearing the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal of a possible injunction in the Asian News International case, has said that he will read the sources used to reference the alleged defamation, with a particular focus on articles published by The Caravan and The Ken. A similar article appeared in Medianama. If the sources cited support the text included in the Wikipedia article about ANI, then Justice Prasad may not impose an injunction upon the WMF.
As per the Bar and Bench report, the Justice said that "the courts in case of 19 1(a) ... have said that injunction must be exception and not the rule. Keeping that in mind, I have to then look into the question of irreparable loss, prima facie case and balance of connivance."
"I will also read the articles ... to see whether the (edits) are borne out of the articles or not. Obviously, if they are not borne out of the articles, they cannot do it [publish the claims]. Therefore, I can, to that extent, even ask them to take down those offending statements," the Court said.
The Court added that if it finds that such inference, as made in the edits, can be drawn from the articles, then it may not pass a takedown order.
However, it also wondered whether it can go into such detail at the interim stage.
"This is an understanding of the editor of what the source means. If the understanding is so defamatory that it is relying on something which actually does not mean it at all, then the person can be restrained... again the question is even if it can be understood in that way, then would the court go deeper into that aspect to come to a conclusion as to whether in no circumstances can it be construed it as that at all."
Pertinently, The Caravan and The Ken are not party to ANI's defamation suit before the High Court.
The defamation suit was filed alleging that Wikipedia was allowing defamatory edits to its page on the online encyclopedia.
The Court also said it would later examine whether Wikipedia is only an intermediary or a publisher to whom different rules will apply.
–Bar and Bench
Justice Prasad may not even have too much reading to do. As of July 1, 2024, just before ANI filed their lawsuit, there were only two references to The Caravan in the whole article about the news agency:
- "The Image Makers – How ANI reports the government's version of truth" (behind paywall, cited 28 times);
- "ANI, Srivastava Group named in massive EU disinformation campaign to promote Modi government's interests" (not paywalled, cited only once);
And just one reference to The Ken:
- "How ANI quietly built a monopoly" (paywalled, cited 12 times).
The page contains eight more news stories cited from Alt News, BBC, The Diplomat, The Guardian, Le Monde, Newslaundry, Outlook magazine, and Politico.
See previous Signpost coverage about the ongoing case here and here. – S
Prison or worse: the stories of volunteers imprisoned for editing Wikipedia
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In a recent article for Boing Boing, named "From keyboard to prison cell: The dangerous side of Wikipedia editing", Ellsworth Toohey reminds us of four Wikipedia editors who have been imprisoned and one editor who has been executed for editing Wikipedia.
- Bassel Khartabil was a Syrian open source software developer, who had worked with Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Mozilla and other open source projects; he was arbitrarily arrested in March 2012 and tortured, before being charged with "spying for an enemy State" and sent to the Adra Prison in Damascus. Despite the global efforts to secure his release, Khartabil was executed shortly after being transferred from the Adra Prison in 2015.
- Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani are two Saudi medical doctors and Wikipedia volunteers who were arrested in 2020 for "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals". Khalid (formerly an admin on the Arabic Wikipedia) received a five-year prison sentence, which was later increased to 32 years, while al-Sofiani received an eight-year sentence.
- Pavel Pernikaŭ is a Belarusian human rights activist and Wikipedia editor was sentenced to two years in prison in April 2022 for "discrediting the Republic of Belarus" through editing activity that had taken place before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was reportedly released in August 2023.
- Mark Bernstein is a Belarusian blogger and contributor to the Russian Wikipedia who spent several weeks in jail awaiting trial apparently based on an alleged violation of a Russian law rather than a Belarusian one. He was arrested on March 11, 2022, then released from custody on June 24, when he received a sentence of three years of restricted freedom for "organizing and preparing activities that disrupt social order".
See List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia and previous coverage in the Signpost. – S
Morrissey: Wikipedia not "intelligent enough to set the record straight"
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The Smiths' former frontman Morrissey laments what he considers to be inaccuracies on the Wikipedia page about him. As reported by NME, Morrissey listed the purported inaccuracies about his alleged past affiliations to two different punk rock bands: The Nosebleeds – briefly active between 1976 and 1978 – and Slaughter & the Dogs – formed in 1975 and still going. Morrissey's "Madness" missive, posted on his own website on December 1, stated:
“Wikipedia confidently list me as an ex-member of Slaughter And The Dogs, and an ex-member of The Nosebleeds. I did not ever join The Nosebleeds and I have no connection whatsoever with Slaughter And The Dogs. Is there anyone at Wikipedia intelligent enough to set the record straight? Probably not.”
But somebody has been quick enough to edit out details about both bands from Morrissey’s article, with a few users engaging in reciprocal reverts. The page, which has been white-locked for a while now, no longer contains any reference to Slaughter and The Dogs; on the other hand, phrases about Morrissey’s ties to The Nosebleeds both in the introduction and the "Early life" section are now referenced by the NME article. The Wikipedia page about the Nosebleeds had also been modified to reflect Morrissey’s claims, before user Martey reverted the edits. The article for Slaughter & the Dogs has actually stayed untouched since October 21, and never included any major reference to Morrissey.
Morrissey is not shy about controversies, and he might have a point, so Stereogum put together a lengthy investigation on his past relationships with both bands. According to their report, in John Robb’s 2006 oral history Punk Rock, Slaughter & the Dogs' guitarist Mick Rossi stated that Morrissey auditioned for the band right after their first singer, Wayne Barrett-McGrath, had departed. Morrissey recorded four demos in the process, but none of these recordings have ever surfaced, and the artist never joined the group on a stable basis.
However, the game gets trickier when discussing The Nosebleeds. The Italian edition of Rolling Stone noted that the only significant reference to that band left on Morrissey's Wikipedia page, which mentions that Morrissey had agreed to join them as the lead vocalist in November 1977, is supported by a citation of David Bret's 2004 biography Morrissey: Scandal and Passion. The Stereogum report managed to find an even older source supporting this version: Johnny Rogan's 1992 biography Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, where a mutual friend of the future Smiths leader and his fellow member Johnny Marr confirmed that Morrissey had briefly joined The Nosebleeds, while Rogan himself stated that the artist had even co-written several of the group's songs with guitarist Billy Duffy.
Duffy's website provides more evidence of Morrissey's involvement with the punk rock band, as he joined him for at least two live gigs in 1978, the latter of which was even reviewed by NME, and later recreated in the 2017 biographical film England Is Mine. To his credit, Morrissey did acknowledge this performance in his 2013 memoir Autobiography, but insisted that it was a one-off and that he was "lumbered" with the line-up for that evening being billed as The Nosebleeds.
So, while Stereogum tried their best to fact-check Morrissey's claims, it’s safe to say that the trip down his past music ventures is just as confusing as some of the various recent controversies. Still, as suggested by the magazine, if anyone manages to put the man himself "in touch with Mr. Wikipedia", maybe we can finally "set the record straight". Let us just make all those involved aware of the rules on paid editing and COI, and let a reliable source sort it all out before editing the articles again. – O
In brief
- Wikipedia-ing Kimchi snakes: Josiah Gogarty reported for the UK edition of GQ on how "Wikipedia boyfriends" have resorted to binge-searching on the site as a healthier alternative to doomscrolling, even noting that a study published in the American Political Science Review in March 2023 had named the encyclopedia "the last good place on the internet".
- More Wiki sociology: Shakespeare and dreck: As re-posted by Boing Boing, Annie Rauwerda, of Depths of Wikipedia fame, recently sat down with quarterly online journal Asterisk Mag to explain why our seven-year-long yogurt spelling war was "longer than three Shakespeare plays", why WikiProjects such as Military history and Tropical cyclones are so respected, and why biographies of social media influencers are dreck.
- Wikipedia's coverage of COVID-19 deemed hard-to-read: A long paper published in the Universal Access in the Information Society last November analyzed the readability of information about COVID-19 on Wikipedia. As per the paper: "A total of 36 Wikipedia pages on COVID-19 were analyzed with 7 validated indices. The results revealed that the text in Wikipedia pages on COVID-19 is difficult to read and is suitable primarily for advanced readers. All pages are above the recommended readability level, and none of the pages are suitable for the general public."
- JPost reports on recent ArbCom verdict on Palestine-Israel articles: In "Wikipedia suspends pro-Palestine editors coordinating efforts behind the scenes", the Jerusalem Post commented on the recent Arbitration Committee decision on a new case involving Palestine-Israel articles (see prior Signpost coverage), and media coverage of PIA. JPost states that "an arbitration committee set up by Wikipedia for 'Palestine-Israel Cases' has banned two editors indefinitely and imposed restrictions on three others." The Signpost notes that user Ïvana was banned in a private-evidence case, but we're unable to find a second banned editor in the public case, named Palestine-Israel articles 5.
- Xmas cram session "like reading War and Peace": As per the Daily Mirror, Irish actor Nicola Coughlan said she didn't know anything about Doctor Who when she was cast for a part on the series' newest Christmas special, "Joy to the World", and that cramming on the related Wikipedia article was "like reading War and Peace".
- Long Live Regina Claudia: Italian newspaper la Repubblica recently interviewed and made a reference to the it.wiki article for supercentenarian Claudia Baccarini, which is currently the joint-eighth oldest living person in the world (together with Izabel Rosa Pereira), according to the Gerontology Research Group. Baccarini, who turned 114 on 13 October, is also the oldest living person in Italy, having first gained the special crown following the death of Domenica Ercolani in November 2023.
- Wikipedia blocked in Edinburgh schools: According to Glasgow-based newspaper The Herald, schools in Edinburgh have had Wikipedia blocked from access on school devices, but it wasn't clear if it was intentional. As per the report, the main goal of the block was actually to prevent access to any search engine other than Google over pre-existing concerns with online safety and filtering systems.
Where to draw the line in reporting?
- Six years ago on Christmas Eve, we published Where to draw the line in reporting? in our From the editors column. One of the comments from readers – namely, the late Nosebagbear – suggested that we continue asking the same question, annually if possible, so we are taking up that request with a delay. The original article follows, complete with its original introduction.
As anyone paying attention to The Signpost in 2018 would have noticed, the publication was struggling. So was the team. One of the struggles that has recently cropped up again is in how to deal with reporting that involves specific members of the Wikipedia community and the wider Wikimedia movement. For example, what type of Wikimedian-specific content, if any, should we cover? Are critical pieces of specific Foundation members acceptable? What about controversies surrounding members of the community, such as chapter board members or notable Wikimedians? Is the line drawn at trawling AN/I for juicy threads, or is that acceptable, too? At what point does investigative journalism become sensationalism, or community news become gossip?
Prior issues have contained content which criticized specific people, and which reported on conflicts and controversies between particular users; reader responses have been mixed, with some condemning it, others criticizing it, and still others commending the commentary. While the support is encouraging, the criticisms, some of which are borderline personal attacks and harassment in a venue that is considered by some to be a safe haven from our Wikipedia policies, and complaints tell us where we may be falling short of the hopes and expectations of our readers.
At The Signpost, as in Wikipedia generally, the readers come first. We write for you, so your input is paramount in deciding the content of what we write; and if you write, we publish. Like the rest of Wikipedia, we also value consensus in determining what to publish—and not just the local consensus that may be achieved in the newsroom. That is why we are bringing this to you, the readers:
on individuals within the Wikimedia movement?
Please, tell us what you think in the reader comments below! We want to understand where the line is—and what you want to be reading—when it comes to reporting on controversies, conflicts, scandals, and other news involving specific members of the community. The better we do, the better we can provide the content you will want to read - or in the worst case scenario, if you wish to continue reading The Signpost at all, and whether or not the editorial team is fighting an uphill battle to keep it in print.
Finally, the editors and contributors to The Signpost would like to wish our readership and the Wikipedia community a very happy holiday season. Enjoy a well deserved break, and we'll see you after the new year.
"Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial", but those motivated by "social image" may put quantity over quality
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial", especially community "superstars" – but editors motivated by "social image" may put quantity over quality
A paper in The Economic Journal, titled "Public Good Superstars: a Lab-in-the-Field Study of Wikipedia",[1] presents results from a nine-year (2011–2020) study of the motivations and contributions of English Wikipedia editors. From the abstract:
Over 9 consecutive years, we study the relationship between social preferences – reciprocity, altruism, and social image – and field cooperation. Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial on average, and superstars even more so. But while reciprocal and social image preferences strongly relate to contribution quantity among casual editors, only social image concerns continue to predict differences in contribution levels between superstars. In addition, we find that social image driven editors – both casual and superstars – contribute lower quality content on average. Evidence points to a perverse social incentive effect, as quantity is more readily observable than quality on Wikipedia."
The study operationalizes these concepts using data from several sources. The sample consists of 730 English Wikipedia editors who volunteered to participate in a 2011 online survey and experiment designed to gauge their reciprocity and altruism: Participants were classified as "free-rider", "weak reciprocator", "reciprocator" and "altruist" according to their decisions in a public goods game. A topline result here indicates, perhaps unsurprisingly, that among Wikipedians there are fewer free-riders and more altruists than usual:
[...] the overwhelming majority of our subjects behave either as full or weak reciprocators (38 and 47%, respectively). The proportion of free-riders (about 7% in our data) does appear lower than the proportion of 20-30% usually obtained with more standard subject pools, however. Similarly, more subjects behave as pure altruists in our data (about 9%).
Furthermore, the paper uses the concept of "superstar contributors", defined generally as "highly regarded community members with impressive contribution records"
, and operationalized in case of Wikipedia as editors who have received a barnstar. Among these, the editors who chose to display at least one such award on their user page are classified as "social signalers." (More precisely, the authors try to control for the fact that editors who contribute more may be more likely to display a barnstar simply because they are more likely to have received one – e.g. by taking into account the size of the editor's user page and the total number of barnstars received.)
The authors had already used this data in some publications which we covered here back in 2013 ("What drives people to contribute to Wikipedia? Experiment suggests reciprocity and social image motivations"). In the new paper, they also look these 730 editors' contributions over the period from 2011 to 2020, specifically
- Quantity of contributions (using both edit counts and number of bytes added)
- Quality of contributions, measured using content persistence (i.e. whether or not other editors later removed the contributed content)
- "Interpersonal cooperation", measured by
how likely editors are to delete (i.e., “revert”) the contributions of others without providing an explanation [...] Wikipedia contributors typically consider non justified reverts as highly uncooperative and harmful to the project.
Among other results, the authors
uncovered a surprising negative correlation between our measures of contribution quantity and quality at the editor level. Namely, the social signalers in our data, if they contribute significantly more content to Wikipedia, also contribute lower quality material on average. In practice, this means that, as vetted by their peers, social signalers contribute content that persists about 38% less revisions on average.
Two of several "interesting patterns" highlighted by the authors concern editors' age and education level (two of the demographic variables from the 2011 survey):
older editors appear more cooperative by two of our measures: (i) they tend to contribute significantly more content [...], and (ii) they are less likely to leave their reverts unexplained [...]
[..] editors’ level of education is strongly associated with the quality of their edits [...]. Out of an 8-points scale, each additional degree level yields an average increase of 6% in content persistence. This represents a sizeable number: all else equal, an editor moving from the lowest education level in our data (i.e., who did not complete high school), to the highest (i.e., earned a PhD), would thus see the persistence of their contributions increase by 48% on average.
"Princ-wiki-a Mathematica: Wikipedia Editing and Mathematics"
From the article:[2]
"In this overview, we will discuss how to go about creating or editing an article on a mathematical subject. [...] We will also discuss biographies of mathematicians, articles on mathematical books, and the social dynamics of the Wikipedia editor community."
The authors (all experienced Wikipedia editors) aptly cover various misunderstandings and pitfalls that academic mathematicians might encounter when contributing to Wikipedia. (For example, the "Writing About Your Own Work" section advises that "Rather than advertising their own super-specialization, experts can make themselves useful by explaining the prerequisites to understanding it. What articles would a student read in order to understand the background and broader context of your research?"
). Somewhat ironically, the paper's first paragraph illustrates one such tension between the conventions of academia and Wikipedia:
This essay incorporates with permission material from our pseudonymous colleague XOR'easter,[supp 1] who also contributed many suggestions during the writing process. By the extent of XOR’easter’s contributions, they would normally be credited as an author. However it was not possible in time to find a way to strictly preserve anonymity and assign legal copyright. All four contributors disagree with this exclusion. I regret its necessity — Ed.
The paper's title includes a rather cringe-y pun referring to the Principia Mathematica.
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
"A Test of Time: Predicting the Sustainable Success of Online Collaboration in Wikipedia"
From the abstract:[3]
we introduce the SustainPedia dataset, which compiles data from over 40K Wikipedia articles, including each article's sustainable success label and more than 300 explanatory features such as edit history, user experience, and team composition. Using this dataset, we develop machine learning models to predict the sustainable success of Wikipedia articles. Our best-performing model achieves a high AU-ROC score of 0.88 on average. Our analysis reveals important insights. For example, we find that the longer an article takes to be recognized as high-quality, the more likely it is to maintain that status over time (i.e., be sustainable). Additionally, user experience emerged as the most critical predictor of sustainability."
"Impact on species' online attention when named after celebrities"
From the abstract:[4]
"Using a large-scale examination of publicly available data, we assessed whether species across 6 taxonomic groups received more page views on Wikipedia when the species was named after a celebrity than when it was not. We conducted our analysis for 4 increasingly strict thresholds of how many average daily Wikipedia page views a celebrity had (1, 10, 100, or 1000 views). Overall, we found a high probability (0.96–0.98) that species named after celebrities had more page views than their closest relatives that were not named after celebrities, irrespective of the celebrity threshold."
Why do Wikipedia editors hesitate to "declare crisis" on climate change?
From the abstract:[5]
"This qualitative discourse analysis of editors' debates around climate change on Wikipedia argues that their hesitancy to 'declare crisis' is not a conscious editorial choice as much as an outcome of a friction between the folk philosophy of science Wikipedia is built upon, editors' own sense of urgency, and their anticipations about audience uptake of their writing. This friction shapes a group style that fosters temporal ambiguity. Hence, the findings suggest that in the [English] Wikipedia entry on climate change, platform affordances and contestation of expertise foreclose a declaration of climate crisis."
References
- ^ Hergueux, Jérôme; Algan, Yann; Benkler, Yochai; Fuster-Morell, Mayo (2024-10-21). "Public Good Superstars: a Lab-in-the-Field Study of Wikipedia". The Economic Journal: –093. doi:10.1093/ej/ueae093. ISSN 0013-0133.
/ Working paper version (freely accessible)
- ^ Eppstein, David; Lewis, Joel Brewster; Woodroofe, Russ (2025-01-01). "Princ-wiki-a Mathematica: Wikipedia Editing and Mathematics" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 72 (1): 1. doi:10.1090/noti3096. ISSN 0002-9920.
- ^ Israeli, Abraham; Jurgens, David; Romero, Daniel (2024-10-24). "A Test of Time: Predicting the Sustainable Success of Online Collaboration in Wikipedia". arXiv:2410.19150 [cs.CY].
- ^ Blake, Katie; Anderson, Sean C.; Gleave, Adam; Veríssimo, Diogo (2024). "Impact on species' online attention when named after celebrities". Conservation Biology. 38 (2): –14184. Bibcode:2024ConBi..38E4184B. doi:10.1111/cobi.14184. ISSN 1523-1739. Retrieved 2024-07-16.
- ^ Steiert, Olivia (2024-09-09). "Declaring crisis? Temporal constructions of climate change on Wikipedia". Public Understanding of Science. doi:10.1177/09636625241268890.
- Supplementary references and notes:
Backlash over Santa Claus' Wikipedia article intensifies
Wikipedia is under fire as mounting calls demand a rewrite of its article on Santa Claus. They are urging the online encyclopedia to classify the article under its biography of living persons (BLP) policy, arguing because Claus is a real, living individual, his article should fall under the protections designed to safeguard living individuals from malicious portrayals. A source close to Claus alleges he is angry that the article is not a BLP, and has said descriptors used in the first sentence, such as legendary
and who is said to bring gifts
, cast doubt on his existence.
A CheckUser investigation determined that a series of good faith edits aimed at correcting these disparaging misrepresentations were traced to the same IP user associated with a workshop in the North Pole. The good faith edits were quickly reverted and the good faith editors were blocked and labeled as sockpuppets, prompting accusations from many people of administrative overreach and unfair treatment. One brave elf, who has chosen to remain anonymous, said "the article undermines him and is an attack page."
It should also be noted that allegations have surfaced regarding potential conflicts of interest in a recent request for comment related to the article. We've reviewed the discussion and found no evidence to support these claims. Critics have argued that these accusations serve only to deflect from the legitimate concerns raised about the article's tone and adherence to Wikipedia's policies.
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 | An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. Within 24 hours, this page will be added to the following list: When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below. |
Should the article on Santa Claus fall under BLP? SClausWiki (talkHo ho ho) 10:15, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yes. sources suggest that he is a real person and the article should fall under BLP. Rudolph_NoseSoBright (talk) 10:16, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yes per Rudolph_NoseSoBright. Dasherisfast1 (talk) 10:18, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yes. DancerParty6 (talk) 10:19, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yes. He's real. Prancerprances (talk) 10:21, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Strong yes, per DancerParty6. Vixeneditswiki (talk) 10:25, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yes. I thought Wikipedia's purpose was to provide factual information. Comet12345 (talk) 10:27, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Strongest yes possible. On northpolewiki, it's a BLP. CupidArrow135 (talk) 10:28, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Weak yes, per NOTCENSORED. DonnerForReal (talk) 10:29, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yes. There are plenty of sources. Blitzen_fast (talk) 10:32, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
We reached out to Claus' team and Wikipedia for comment, but did not receive a response.
A feast of holidays and carols
- This article first appeared a year ago in The Signpost. A couple of the staff here liked it enough to ask me to resubmit it this year. I'm happy to do it, I just really love Christmas carols. Of course I had to make a few changes, and I'll make more next year if I get the chance again. Please post some of your own favorite carols in the section for comments, along with any holiday wishes or Christmas cards you like. I'll try to include some of these next year. Happy holidays! – S
I love Christmas carols, especially the old ones. Charles Dickens's story A Christmas Carol is not that old — first published in 1843 — but is written in the form of a "Christmas carol in prose", according to the title page. Its chapters are even called staves. In the first stave, a passing caroler sings a small snippet of an old carol to Scrooge. Do you know the Christmas carol sung in A Christmas Carol?
"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" goes back to the 1650s, but songs have been associated with mid-winter holidays for over 2,000 years. For example, the Roman holiday Saturnalia was associated with song, as well as wine and political incorrectness — though it should not be confused with Bacchanalia. There's even a modern Saturnalia song, sung in Latin, titled "Io, Saturnalia" (In English: "Yo, Saturnalia") which might be better to skip.
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Carols are not necessarily religious, but they are almost always happy music you can dance to. "O Tannenbaum" means "Oh, fir tree" in German but is usually translated into English as "Oh, Christmas Tree". Other than the word "Christmas", the song has little to do with religion. It just praises the fir tree's "faithfulness" — its ability to stay green all Winter. In German, in French, and in English.
Religious carols
My favorite religious carols include:
"Good King Wenceslas" — celebrates the day after Christmas, the Feast of Stephen, and emphasizes the importance of charity (and gift-giving in general).
"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" — a song that has lyrics from a poem of the same name, and is a very intellectual expression of the author's personal interpretation of the meaning of Christmas. It may mark his joy at the announcement of peace ending the Mexican–American War.
"O Holy Night" — sends a similar message.
Ramsey Lewis gives a jazz version of "We Three Kings".
To fully appreciate "O come all ye faithful", you need to hear it in a large, packed church with a powerful organ belting it out on Christmas Eve. The original Latin version, Adeste Fideles, can be even more powerful. Strangely, though I only know a few words of Latin, I always think of it as Venite Adoremus from the words in the chorus that translate to "Oh come let us adore (him)".
The explanation is the quirky, sprightly carol "The Snow Lay On the Ground", which also uses the words venite adoremus. The lyrics are attributed to a 19th-century Italian folk song, but three quarters of the time you just sing venite adoremus.
Another folk song, an African-American spiritual, "Go Tell It on the Mountain", is an expression of pure joy. It was first mentioned in 1901, and published in 1909.
There aren't many African-American folk songs that have become classic Christmas carols, but there is the ultimate "Christmas Song" sung and played by some of the best musicians on this page, including by the composer. [1]
And another great December song.
Diverse points of view
Modern Christmas carols and songs express many of the same themes as the earlier carols, adapted to the current state of the world. But I'm not going to link to "All I Want for Christmas is You" — you know where to find it, and you know that you have heard it enough already this year.
There are also many people who live in different circumstances in other countries, who celebrate different winter holidays, and worship in different faiths. Nobody should be left out at this time of year. We are sorry that there is not enough time to cover everybody's circumstances.
"Silver Bells" brings great memories of "Christmastime in the city". But I also have mixed feelings on its message. Is it meant to honor the Salvation Army? Or is it just an advertisement for the modern commercialized holiday that seems to start in October? Or maybe it is just a great song, in a bad movie, starring an even worse comedian?
There is no doubt that Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas" is a great song. But sometimes I wonder if it has anything to do with Christmas.
José Feliciano's song [2] "Feliz Navidad" causes no such mixed feelings. A little bit of repetition never hurt a Christmas song.
Russia and Ukraine both have long traditions of celebrating Christmas and New Year's Day. And they share some of them.
В лесу родилась ёлочка ("In the woods is born a fir tree") is a Russian children's New Year's song. It mirrors Oh, Christmas Tree but includes a cute little bunny, an angry wolf, and most kiddy videos include Father Frost (a Slavic Santa Claus).
The music to this little Christmas dance was written by a gay Russian composer whose grandfather was born in Ukraine.
Do not be fooled by a bit of chaos at the start to this video of Ukrainian carolers.
These shared traditions only make the current war more tragic.
There are other tragedies happening right now that involve different religions that share, in part, a common heritage.
You might think it would be difficult finding a Jewish Christmas carol, but a song often called "The best selling Christmas song of all time" was written by Irving Berlin, a Jew.
Hanukkah songs include "The Dreidel Song", "8 Days (Of Hanukkah)" by Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings [3], and "Hanukkah Rocks" [4] by The LeeVees (the last two links are to NPR's Tiny Desk Concert).
You might think there are no Muslim Christmas songs, and perhaps you are right. But Muslims are allowed to borrow the Christmas carols they like and even compose their own, just like anybody else. This is the view put forward in these two thought-provoking videos.
We all share part of our common human heritage. We all share in our common human tragedy.
Was a long and dark December
- This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, CanonNi, Shuipzv3, Vestrian24Bio, DementiaGaming, and CAWylie.
Push it, make the beats go harder (December 1 to 7)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pushpa 2: The Rule |  |
2,707,690 | The much-awaited sequel to the 2021 Tollywood film, Pushpa: The Rise was finally released last week after three years of waiting. It stars Allu Arjun (pictured) in the titular role, paired with Rashmika Mandanna. The film recovered its ₹500 crore (US$59 million) budget within just three days, becoming the first Indian film to gross such a sum in such a period of time. | |
| 2 | Kash Patel | |
2,038,926 |  |
Formerly a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice, he was selected by the president-elect Donald Trump to be the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during Trump's second presidency. |
| 3 | Wicked (2024 film) | |
1,215,749 | .jpg) |
A well-received, star-studded theater adaptation (#7), offering a revisionist take on the Land of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West is just a victim of prejudice and propaganda that decided to embrace the bad image painted upon her. Along with making lots of money - mostly in North America, where it passed the $300 million mark - Wicked is expected to become an awards contender. |
| 4 | Syrian civil war | |
1,090,108 |  |
A war that started when I was eight months old still continues to this day. Syria's civil war can be described as a hell on earth, with 620,000 deaths (half of whom are civilians) and millions of displaced folks. The reason it's this high is the recent rebel offensive (#9) that wiped out Ba'athist Syria, and Bashar Al-Assad with it, in less than 11 days. |
| 5 | Martial law |  |
1,036,797 |  |
Replacing civilian government with military rule and suspending civilian legal processes with military powers. Only reason it's here now is because, in what has been described as a "self-coup", "political suicide", and "stupid", South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared it with no advance warning on December 3. Within two hours, 190 legislators forced themselves into the National Assembly Proceeding Hall (including Lee Jae-myung, who livestreamed himself) and unanimously voted to repeal it. |
| 6 | Deaths in 2024 |  |
1,010,937 |  |
Quoting one of the biggest hits of this year by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga: If the world was ending, I'd wanna be next to you If the party was over and our time on earth was through I'd wanna hold you just for a while And die with a smile... |
| 7 | Wicked (musical) |  |
994,074 |  |
The book adaptation that made a killing on Broadway before getting the film treatment (#3). The original Elphaba (Idina Menzel) and Glinda (Kristin Chenoweth) have cameos in the movie, and many countries that staged their own versions of Wicked brought the women who played the witches to dub their film counterparts (such as the two to the left, Mexicans Danna Paola and Ceci de la Cueva, in the Latin American Spanish version). |
| 8 | UnitedHealth Group | |
939,448 |  |
This American health insurance provider, currently 8th on Fortune's Global 500, places higher than that of its CEO (#10), following his killing in NYC this week. Their alleged greed elicited contempt on social media, even so far as to view Thompson's death as justified, vindicating the thousands of deaths each year, due to the company denying health care coverage. |
| 9 | 2024 Syrian opposition offensives | |
937,915[1] | .jpg) |
The Syrian opposition hadn't done a military offensive campaign since 2020, but with the help of allied Turkish-backed groups, decided to finally go all-in against the forces of Bashar Al-Assad. After taking back cities such as Aleppo, Homs and Palmyra, the rebels ended the week covered by this report invading the capital city of Damascus. By the early hours of Sunday, Assad fled to Russia, ending a totalitarian hereditary dictatorship that had ruled Syria ever since Assad's father had taken over in a 1970 coup. |
| 10 | Brian Thompson (businessman) |  |
925,938 | .svg){kind=small} |
The CEO of #8 left his Manhattan hotel at 6:45 in the morning of December 4 and was walking across the street to attend an investors' meeting. He didn't make it to the door: he was shot several times from behind and died thirty minutes later. He had previously received death threats, and his assailant from out of town had been staying in a NYC hostel for ten days. |
- ^ Most views under the name Northwestern Syria offensive (2024), which was the page's name until Saturday
I've witnessed your suffering, as the battles raged higher (December 8 to 14)
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bashar al-Assad |  |
4,026,589 |  |
Syria's controversial ruler for over twenty years, Assad and his government were recently overthrown in #4. He has fled to Russia, a country ruled by another twenty-year ruler, and given political asylum. What he plans to do is unknown. One thing is for sure: he isn't returning to Syria (#3) anytime soon. |
| 2 | Pushpa 2: The Rule | |
4,023,277 |  |
A sequel that comes three years after the first film, while a third film is already on the way. Released a week ago, Pushpa 2 has already collected ₹1,106 crore (US$130 million) to emerge as the second highest-grossing Indian film of the year, fourth highest-grossing film in India and the eighth highest-grossing Indian film (#5). |
| 3 | Syria | |
2,563,423 | |
A civil war that has been going on for thirteen years was only the most recent part of Syria's decades-long sociopolitical chaos, and the conflict has regained international attention following the opposition taking over capital Damascus and ousting #1. The war is far from over, and with neighboring countries launching invasions, heavy fighting continues, and the country's future is an uncertain one. |
| 4 | Syrian civil war | |
1,822,405 | ||
| 5 | List of highest-grossing Indian films | |
1,270,262 | .svg) |
Indian cinema definitely has a important part in the International film industry. With #2 reaching new feats, it's no wonder this list made it onto the list. Out of the top 8 grossing films, four came from Tollywood, and three from Bollywood. Although Kollywood has actors with international fandom, unlike others, it couldn't make it past 15th place. |
| 6 | Gukesh Dommaraju | |
1,200,900 | .jpg) |
The world of chess welcomes its newest World Champion. Having played chess since the age of seven and won several championships throughout his career, Gukesh is only 18 years old, a remarkable age for a grandmaster. He defeated Ding Liren, who's nearly double his age, in a close World Chess Championship battle, narrowly winning by a single point. Checkmate. (Well, not really. Ding resigned before Gukesh could do that.) |
| 7 | Asma al-Assad | |
1,079,427 |  |
#1's wife, she has also fled to Russia along with her three kids. Despite being born in the UK and retaining its citizenship, the UK government has said that she isn't welcome and is considering sanctions. |
| 8 | Killing of Brian Thompson | |
1,057,985 |  |
Brian Thompson, a low-profile businessman and CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot dead in Downtown Manhattan, allegedly by Luigi Mangione. His exact motive is unclear: some say it was revenge for his family members' denied claims, while others say it was political. The killing itself was controversial, with some claiming it was justified and others offering condolences to Thompson's family. Whatever the case, the incident was one of the most famous killings of 2024, and Thompson has been added to #10. |
| 9 | Brian Thompson (businessman) | |
1,026,961 | ||
| 10 | Deaths in 2024 | |
1,000,904 |  |
Now the Sun's gone to hell And the Moon's riding high Let me bid you farewell Every man has to die... |
Exclusions
- These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.
Most edited articles
For the October 11 – November 11 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Killing of Brian Thompson | 2263 | As mentioned above, the CEO of health company UnitedHealthcare was shot dead in Manhattan. Motives are unclear, but the alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione, has shown admiration for the Unabomber Manifesto. |
| Deaths in 2024 | 2029 | Along with Thompson, high-profile departures of the period included presenter Chuck Woolery, drummer Bob Bryar and director Jim Abrahams. |
| 2024 South Korean martial law | 1872 | South Korean president and PPP member Yoon Suk Yeol is not popular: he has had consistently low approval ratings, partly due to him stopping multiple corruption investigations into his wife, Kim Keon-hee. He has also struggled to do much since the National Assembly is controlled by opposition party DP. It seems that declaring martial law was a last-ditch attempt to keep power by Yoon and, considering he had told almost no one beforehand, his decision alone. This is the first declaration of martial law since the coup d'état of May Seventeenth, and to older Koreans, recalled the military dictatorship that South Korea had been under. Koreans immediately went into the streets to call for Yoon's impeachment and arrest. Legislators did try to impeach him, but their attempt failed since Yoon's party refused to cooperate. Still, Yoon is now banned from leaving South Korea. |
| Wicked (2024 film) | 1419 | In 1995, Gregory Maguire wrote a revisionist take on the Wicked Witch of the West, reimagining the Oz villain as Elphaba, a person targeted by prejudice and propaganda. Stephen Schwartz read it on his vacation and made a Broadway musical out of it, whose runaway success led to a film adaptation. Wicked was very well-received, having earned over $500 million worldwide and making appearances on many critics' "best of 2024" lists, raising its profile for awards season and expectations for Part 2 next November. |
| Bigg Boss (Telugu TV series) season 8 | 1141 | India has film industries for all its languages, so why not versions of Big Brother for them as well? |
| Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series) season 8 | 1132 | |
| Bigg Boss (Hindi TV series) season 18 | 949 | |
| 2024 UK Championship | 922 | York hosted this snooker tournament, won by current world #1 and 2019 world champion Judd Trump. |
| 2024 Jharkhand Legislative Assembly election | 870 | A few months after choosing their representatives for the central government, eight of the Indian states voted on their state assemblies. One of them was Jharkand, and the majority of the seats went to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party that rules the country. |
| Donald Trump | 857 | He's returning to the White House. The next four years will certainly be eventful. |
| Brian Thompson (businessman) | 850 | A murdered CEO of a health company, and his tenure saw rocketing profits for increasing denial of medical care, including denying insurance payment for non-critical visits to hospital emergency rooms, and downright using artificial intelligence to automate claim denials. This led to many people not offering condolences for Thompson's death, but rather celebrating it. |
| 2024 United States presidential election | 826 | People are still trying to process all that happened, specially as the news show Biden's lame duck actions (which included a controversial pardon for his son Hunter Biden) and Trump appointing his upcoming cabinet. |
| 2024 Irish general election | 823 | The Emerald Isle chose the members of the 34th Dáil, and the Fianna Fáil remained the party with the most seats. |
| Gladiator II | 813 | One of the least requested sequels of all time (the protagonist of the first film is apparently not happy with it existing). Yet the return of director Ridley Scott to Gladiator, no matter if nowhere as compelling as the Oscar-winning original, is very watchable, with impeccable production values, thrilling action scenes, and an amazing cast, highlighted by Denzel Washington as the devious Macrinus. Hence Gladiator II earned positive reviews and made over $400 million worldwide, providing some return to the massive budget of at least $250 million. |
| South Vietnam | 809 | A few IPs are doing a lot of edits to the page on the country that the Americans supported in the Vietnam War, and that ended up incorporated by North Vietnam in 1975 to create the current nation. |