Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2014-09-17
Turkish Twitter outrage, medical translation, audience metrics
Wikipedia article sparks Turkish Twitter outrage
The Hürriyet Daily News reports on a series of posts on Twitter from Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism Ömer Çelik. Beginning on September 14, Çelik tweeted complaints about the inclusion of current President of Turkey and former Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the Wikipedia article on authoritarianism. The offending passage reads:
Authoritarianism and democracy are not fundamentally opposed to one another, it is thus definitely possible for democracies to possess strong authoritarian elements, for both feature a form of submission to authority. For instance, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of Turkey, was elected three times, but shows strong authoritarian tendencies.
In a series of tweets continuing as of the 16th, Çelik complained that Turkey was included as an example of an authoritarian regime along with countries such as North Korea and Egypt. He claimed that editors had an "eclipse of reason" and that Wikipedia's "reliability has reached below zero".
The passage has ten citations, to sources including the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Hürriyet Daily News. The many citations may be the result of the previous attempts to remove mention of Erdoğan from the article. Attempts accelerated following Çelik's tweets and the article was semiprotected indefinitely.
One of the actions taken by the Erdoğan regime that has been seen as authoritarian was a ban on Twitter, the very platform Çelik used to make his complaint. Earlier this year, evidence of alleged corruption by high-ranking Turkish government officials circulated in social media. Twitter was banned in March after Erdoğan insisted the evidence was fake and vowed in a speech to "eradicate" the website. The ban was widely condemned in Turkey and worldwide and was overturned two weeks later by the Constitutional Court of Turkey.
Health news
Health24 reports (Sept. 10) that Rubric, a translation company, is helping translate Wikipedia articles on ebola into native African languages. This is part of Wiki Project Medicine’s Translation Task Force in their ongoing effort to translate medical articles into numerous world languages.
BBC News, Forbes, and Mashable are among the media outlets reporting on the jump in page views to Wikipedia articles about Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in the wake of the viral ice bucket challenge. Page views for the ALS article on the English Wikipedia are up 18 fold, from about 1.6 million in the previous year to nearly 3 million in August 2014 alone. Significant increases are reported from the Chinese (×59), Spanish (×14), German (×13), Russian (×13), and French (×5) Wikipedias as well.
The public domain
The Hindu reported (Sept. 5) that two Tamil language encyclopedias would be placed under a Creative Commons licence and be available for use in articles on the Tamil Wikipedia. The two works, Kalaikalangiyam and Kuzhandaigal Kalaikalangiyam, were produced by the Tamizh Valarchi Kazhagam (Tamil Development Council) from 1947 to 1954 and 1968 to 1976, respectively, and represent the work of thousands of scholars. Each encyclopedia is ten volumes and many thousands of pages. Though the encyclopedias have been scanned as image files, Professor C.R. Selvakumar (User:C.R.Selvakumar) of the University of Waterloo is looking for volunteers to type the articles in so the full text is searchable and can be made available on WikiSource.
BBC News reported (Aug. 29) on a project to post 12 million public domain images on the image hosting site Flickr. The project was initiated by Kalev Leetaru, a Georgetown University academic who has studied Wikipedia (see previous Signpost coverage). The images originate from 600 million pages from library books scanned by the Internet Archive to use optical character recognition to convert the pages into searchable text files. The scanned images were automatically ignored by the software and Leetaru added code to extract these images and convert them into jpeg files. Leetaru has so far posted 2.6 million images to Flickr, dating from 1500 to 1922, the earliest year when copyright restrictions cannot apply. Leetaru hopes many of these images will be added to Wikipedia articles.
Audience metrics
Variety is now publishing weekly "Digital Audience Ratings" that are intended to measure "fan engagement" online and in social media, including Wikipedia. The most current lists for film (Sept. 11) and television (Sept. 16) currently place Big Hero 6 and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon at the top of the ratings. The ratings are provided by ListenFirst Media. Lost Remote interviewed (Sept. 10) Jason Klein of ListenFirst, who said:
We leverage Wikipedia as a proxy for organic search, since Wikipedia is often in the top search results and a destination that millions of people go to directly for information daily. We have been monitoring Wikipedia page views daily for tv shows (as well as films and consumer brands) for over two years, and have found fascinating trends around search patterns related to everything from the day an episode premieres to when a show gets renewed or cancelled to announcements around upfronts. We've turned dozens of our network clients on to it, and they've become vigilant about monitoring Wikipedia data around their shows (and competitors’ shows) and making sure their pages are completely up-to-date with current info.
Conferences and edit-a-thons
The National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia DC announced they would hold an Open Government Wikihack at the National Archives on September 27 and 28.
Re/code announced (Sept. 11) that it will conduct an interview with new Wikimedia Foundation President Lila Tretikov at their Code/Mobile conference in October in Half Moon Bay, California.
Books LIVE reports (Sept. 3) on the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon focused on South African literature that will be held in conjunction with the Open Book Festival from September 17 to 21 in Cape Town.
DNAinfo Chicago announced (Sept. 2) a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on September 4 to create an article for transgender activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy prior to her talk at the Hull House Museum that evening. The talk, called "The Ebb and Flow of Resistance", was part of that week's Jane Addams birthday celebration. Photos of the Edit-a-thon were posted on the Hull House Facebook page.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (Aug. 19) announced a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on August 23 that was held simultaneously in Mexico City, Mexico and Bogotá, Colombia. The EFF, Wikimedia México, and a number of Latin American hacker organizations collaborated on improving articles related to digital rights on the Spanish Wikipedia.
Baltimore Brew announced (Aug. 20) an Edit-a-thon held by the Baltimore Wikipedians at the Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse on August 23 to improve articles on the history of Baltimore, Maryland.
The Canberra Times and Seven News reported on the first "Wikibomb" in Australia on August 14. 144 people participated in an event online and at the Australian Academy of Science to create and improve Wikipedia articles on female Australian scientists in conjunction with National Science Week. A full list of articles can be found at Category:Wikibomb2014.
In brief
- The Quinnspiracy: On Cracked, video game developer Zoe Quinn discusses the harassment she received being "The Internet's Most Hated Person" (Sept. 16) in the wake of "GamerGate", including malicious Wikipedia edits wishing her dead.
- Checking in with Britannica: The Chicago Tribune talks with (Sept. 10) Jorge Cauz, President of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., (see previous Signpost coverage) about their latest efforts to compete with Wikipedia. Cauz said
I think the honeymoon for 'everything goes' is over...I think people are understanding that even though digital technologies are great ways of creating and disseminating content, knowledge and scholarship are not democracies. There are people that know better, and the challenge is how to make that knowledge more efficient and make that knowledge reach many, many more people.
- What's my password?: CNN is among the news outlets speculating (Sept. 4) that Wikipedia was a source of biographical information used to derive the answers to security questions or passwords in the August 2014 celebrity photo leaks.
- No laughing matter: On the August 28 episode of her podcast The Bardoux Show, adult film actress Rebecca Bardoux complained that her Wikipedia article no longer contained information regarding her work in stand-up comedy. The removal was part of a still-continuing editing dispute, which spilled over onto multiple noticeboards, regarding whether or not the sources documenting her comedy work and other aspects of her career met the criteria of the reliable sources guideline. She also discussed similar problems encountered by another adult film actress, Brittany Andrews, who complained on Bardoux's Facebook page about Wikipedia’s focus on activities in pornography, writing "they absolutely do not care at all if you've done anything mainstream if you take it up the ass with two penises it will also get on there in a second - if you win the Nobel Prize they have zero interest”. Bardoux expressed the desire for stronger legal controls on the Internet, at one point fantasizing about being married to an attorney. She urged her audience to “go and write a letter to Wikipedia to tell them that they suck."
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A trip up north to Scotland
As Scotland is deciding its future this week, we thought it might be a good idea to get to know the editors of WikiProject Scotland and talk to them about the project. A moderately-sized WikiProject with around 90 active participants, it covers a huge area ranging around every Scottish town from Coldstream to Brae. It has a number of child projects, including ones for Edinburgh, Clans of Scotland, Medieval Scotland, Scottish Castles, Scottish Islands and Transport in Scotland. According to its assessment department, there are currently 51 pieces of Featured content and 139 Good articles under the project's umbrella. In short, a very successful set-up covering a wonderful country with some of the best scenery in Great Britain. So, it makes great sense to feature them in a WikiProject Report and get the inside story from some Scottish Wikipedians. We interviewed Ben MacDui, Drchriswilliams, Mutt Lunker and Nick.
What was your motivation for joining WikiProject Scotland? Do you, or have you ever lived in Scotland?
- Ben MacDui: Simply that I live in Scotland and enjoy reading and writing about the subject.
- Mutt Lunker: I mainly use Wikipedia to browse areas of interest and if I spot any aspect of an article that I feel I can address, I usually edit it. As I’m Scottish I often found myself editing Scotland-related articles so signed up for the project.
- Drchriswilliams: I live in Scotland. Wikipedia is a valuable online resource but there are gaps and inaccuracies that are often more obvious when you live in the place that the article refers to.
- Nick: I live in Scotland and found myself involved in the WikiProject by accident really, I started writing about things I know about, so wrote about the areas that I have lived in, where I grew up and areas I'm familiar with.
Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles? What is the most difficult hurdle to overcome when building an article about Scotland to Featured status?
- Ben MacDui: See my User page for details of GA & FAs etc. It can be frustrating writing about the more obscure topics – reviewers sometimes want high quality references that don’t exist and enthusiasts’ websites are sometimes all there is to go on. Within reason, there is a place for local knowledge.
- Nick: I did a lot of work on Arbroath and got it up to a good standard, it was taken on to Good Article status later by other editors. I did take the article on The Glenlivet distillery to GA status and found it enjoyable, and had intended to get Whisky up to featured article status, but I'd say the biggest problem writing about Scotland is availability of sources. Scotland, having such an lengthy history, lacks good online resources and requires frequent trips to the library to get print sources.
Does Scotland receive the kind of attention that other countries in the United Kingdom get? Are there any significant gaps in the coverage of Scotland that don't plague the coverage of England or Wales?
- Ben MacDui: I think so and I’m not aware of any, although inevitably there are fewer editors at work than in the much more populous England. I'd like to think we punch above our weight.
- Drchriswilliams: Some parts of Scotland are remote and don't have the concentration of editors that large urban areas have. Wikipedia:WikiProject Scottish Islands is another project that has helped to try and overcome this barrier.
- Nick: I agree with the above comments, fewer people, fewer newspapers, fewer writers, it all adds conspires to make writing about some areas of Scotland very difficult, I'd expect it's difficult for authors to write material we can then use as reference material. It would be nice to see the National Archives at Kew publish more Scottish material, giving us more to write about.
Do you have any knowledge of the Scots language, and if so, have you ever edited the Scots Wikipedia?
- Ben MacDui: Yes to the first but although I have visited a couple of times, no to the second.
- Mutt Lunker: Yes. I have edited there but not for some time. I feel that speaking and writing in Scots has an important place as a means of expression in other media, written or spoken, but when it comes to a collaborative work of reference, as all speakers of Scots are also speakers of English and the Wikipedia for the latter is used and improved by numbers of people several orders of magnitude larger, resulting in a much larger resource, spending time largely duplicating effort in the Scots Wikipedia may be largely best left to when English Wikipedia is so mature it is largely finished (which may be effectively never). My understanding from when I last had a substantial visit is that the most active editors on the site are non-speakers and although I applaud their interest, it can’t aid the integrity of the content.
- Drchriswilliams: It is a big enough task trying to update the main Wikipedia pages!
- Nick: Yes, familiar enough with a number of local dialects, done a few edits to Scots Wikipedia but feel it's better served by well translated articles from English Wikipedia, rather than dedicated, written from scratch articles. There's a difference at times in perspective between, say, English and Chinese Wikipedia articles that is less noticeable between English and Scots articles, as they're more likely to be written by the same group of editors.
What can Wikipedians visiting or living in Scotland contribute to the project's photography? Are there any locations or objects that could be easily handled by anyone with a camera?
- Mutt Lunker: There may well be gaps that require to be filled but I’m not across where they may be, though I’ve added the odd photo when I feel it’s required.
- Drchriswilliams: Sure photos can help and there are currently projects in some of Scotland's museums, for example, to help share good quality images of important things.
- Nick: Yes, looking through the first two weeks of Wiki Loves Monuments uploads for Scotland, as usual, Edinburgh Castle, Calton Hill and a few other Scottish sites feature regularly, but only a few new sites not previously photographed have been added. We're in danger of being swamped by too many photographs of popular locations, buildings and sites.
Has WikiProject Scotland noticed an increase in activity in the project's articles due to the recent 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow? Have you contributed to any of the articles about the Games?
- Drchriswilliams: The 2014 Commonwealth Games was a really great celebration of sport and culture, but I'm not aware of any major impact that it had on Wikipedia.
- Nick: Not that I can recall, certainly nothing major, maybe a few corrections or small updates.
As the Scottish referendum about independence is taking place this week, will WikiProject Scotland be working hard to cover its results and the possible new country, or is this left to the editors of WikiProject UK Politics?
- Ben MacDui: I’m interested in the result of course but I tend to avoid high-traffic current news articles. Depending on the result, there could be a huge amount of work to do but as I see Wikipedia as a repository of knowledge rather than a free news service, there's plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done.
- Drchriswilliams: I expect lots of people will have reasons to contribute, hopefully Wikipedia projects can help keep things encyclopaedic.
- Nick: I'd expect editors from everywhere will be contributing to our coverage of the referendum, but from what I'm led to believe, the result (Yes or No) will be announced when the outcome is mathematically guaranteed, the full results and detailed breakdown of the results will be available later on Friday 19th, so I'd expect our coverage on the referendum to expand more slowly throughout the day, rather than in a big burst. I'm stuck inside the bubble when it comes to the referendum, but know it's being reported very differently in various countries, so for a lot of our coverage, it's probably going to need a lot of help from people not connected with either the Scotland or UK Politics wikiprojects if we want to get an international view of events.
How can a new contributor help today?
- Ben MacDui: Create content about topics you are enthusiastic about.
- Mutt Lunker: Write about what you are interested in and know about or have the resources to find out about and back it up with sources. Point out improvements that are required on article talk pages but stick to that rather than general discussion of the topic.
- Drchriswilliams: Out of date content is sometimes more obvious to new contributors. If you have specialist or local knowledge then have a look for relevant pages on Wikipedia.
- Nick: I'd urge people to use their local knowledge to get involved, and to realise that because of the geographic spread of the population in Scotland, if they don't get involved, there might not be anybody else who will. We're in danger of losing easy, personal access to some information, in future it we could be more reliant on old newspapers and without a good idea about where to start, writing about things is going to be much harder.
Anything else you'd like to add to the interview?
- Ben MacDui: Unless the polls are wrong the referendum result will be very close. A lot of people are therefore going to be disappointed, whatever the result. In my experience the campaign has been a good-natured credit to the democratic process so far. I hope that we will make the edits that are needed in this same spirit rather than descending into bickering and point scoring. We should be the HCF to Twitter's LCD.
- Nick: I agree wholeheartedly with Ben MacDui, above.
Next week, we'll see what it takes to review a Good article and see how you can help attack the backlog. Up to then, you can always look in the archive for all past Wikiproject reports.
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Wikipedia's traffic statistics understated by nearly one-third
A Wikipedia researcher has discovered that the encyclopedia's widely used article traffic statistics are missing out on approximately one-third of total views.
Computer scientist Andrew West has found that mobile readers are not counted by stats.grok.se (an unofficial website linked from the "history" tab on every Wikipedia page) or any other service/report that tabulates and visualizes the Wikimedia Foundation's official raw data. Thanks to a historical artifact, desktop and mobile counts have been segregated since the figures were first released in 2007. "The world has changed a lot since the original code was written," the WMF's director of analytics Toby Negrin told the Signpost. "We are working hard to catch up."
Impact
Of 9.5 billion total views to English Wikipedia in August 2014, about 3 billion—31.6%—are not reported in the raw per-article statistics. Other projects are assumed to have similar omissions based on their own mobile viewership ratios.
West told the Signpost he ran into the problem when collating view statistics for the English Wikipedia's Medicine WikiProject. The figures are being used in an upcoming academic paper comparing Wikipedia to WebMD, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, and other high-traffic medical websites. West caught the error early enough to add a disclaimer, but he's "curious and fearful as to how many other WikiProjects and researchers might have fallen into the same trap."
Unfortunately, that number is not zero. For a new example, Variety's new "Digital Audience Ratings" use Wikipedia's traffic statistics as a key cog. Jason Klein of ListenFirst, the company writing the posts, said in an interview with Lost Remote that "We have been monitoring Wikipedia page views daily for tv shows (as well as films and consumer brands) for over two years, and have found fascinating trends ..." (Editor's note: for additional information, please see this week's "In the media").
Similarly affected are the English Wikipedia's top 25 viewed articles (ten of which are used in the Signpost's weekly "Traffic report"). All of these initiatives are missing out on what West calls the mobile "bump" that popular culture and breaking-news events kindle.
The largest ramification may be reserved for users in the global south, where a higher percentage of individuals use mobile phones to surf the web. High-priced traditional computers can be out of reach for large segments of the population, who have turned instead to smartphones; this was a chief inspiration for the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Zero project. Pgallert laid out the scope of the computer issue on the Wikimedia blog last year:
| “ | The computer lab of Epukiro Post 3 Junior Secondary School in the Omaheke Region of Namibia is idle most of the time. School management is afraid that equipment might be stolen or the infrastructure be damaged, and the Ministry of Education ... did not offer any training on how to operate the computers, or what to use them for. As a result, there are typing classes a few times a week, and nothing else. During school breaks the lab is not used at all. / The computers occupy one entire classroom; their power consumption is a liability for the school. ... Yet Epukiro Post 3 JSS houses the only computer lab in the entire rural settlement cluster of Epukiro, an area accommodating several thousand people and covering thousands of square kilometers. | ” |
Future
Negrin told us that they are aware of the problem and are currently working to replace the current apparatus with a "modern, scalable system," which will come out in a preliminary form next quarter. The team is also working on a redefining what a "page view" is, taking modern concepts like mobile apps and web, API requests, and automated bots into account. Negrin added that "fortunately, we'll be in a position very soon to provide more accurate data to the Foundation and the Community."
The work involved in this is not negligible. As research analyst Oliver Keyes wrote to us, "The overall page view trends are of increasing importance to how we understand how people consume our site. At the moment we ... have a lot of ideas and a lot of the nuts and bolts worked out and tested, but it's fairly inchoate and needs to be organised better before we do anything with it. Once we have done that, we'll move on to implementing it and running it in parallel to the existing infrastructure to detect irregularities."
In the meantime, the unofficial status of grok.se (it is still listed as a "beta service") and the varying reliability of the WMF's data dumps leave researchers like West in the lurch. For example, grok.se periodically misses full days of stats (such as 28 August), which invariably leads to frustration with the website's coder, Henrik—but the issue lies with the WMF-released data. In the example, the traffic statistics for five hours (UTC 16:00–21:00) are missing.
It appears that statisticians, researchers, and curious Wikimedia contributors will have to wait only a little longer for a more stable and reliable solution.
- Editor's note: emails to Henrik, the owner of stats.grok.se, and Domas Mituzas, the former WMF database administrator who originally coded the raw data output, were not returned by publishing time.
- Update: a new Pageview API was released by the Wikimedia Foundation in December 2015, and stats.grok.se has been replaced by a WMF Labs tool since January–February 2016.
In brief
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- Indian chapter in crisis: A major community consultation about the future of Wikimedia work in India will be held in Bangalore on 4 and 5 October. This follows a community planning process for the event, which comes after general recognition that key parts of the movement's presence and programmatic activities in India need to be revamped. The unstable situation in India includes the state of the chapter, which held an emergency meeting on 31 August. Three members of the chapter board have resigned in recent weeks: the president, Moksh Juneja, who was the subject of Signpost coverage concerning his failure to disclose to voters before last year's board elections that two sitting members were in his employment; Pranav Curumsey; and Srikanth Ramakrishnan ("I am not pleased with the way things are working out right now"). This follows a further loss to the board due to the non-renewal of membership by Nikita Belavate at the end of June. Ramakrishnan wrote last week that "since the chapter is now in a limbo", an administrator should be appointed "to conduct the Annual General Meeting and elections as soon as possible and run the organisation in the interim."
- Template reform: A Let's fix templates thread was opened on the Wikimedia mailing list after heated discussions concerning the Media Viewer roll-out and the difficulties of developing software products that face a sprawl of inconsistently built templates on WMF sites. The thread has been followed by the WMF's launching of a metadata cleanup drive on Meta. The goal is to "fix file description pages and tweak templates to ensure that multimedia files consistently contain machine-readable metadata" across WMF projects.
- Community feedback on product development: Editors' attention is drawn to the page for community feedback and discussion on improving the ways in which software components are built and delivered to communities. The page has been established by the Foundation's relatively new Community Engagement (Product) team, headed by Rachel diCerbo. Editors of all WMF projects are encouraged to engage on the talkpage.
- Affiliations Committee: Three new user groups have been approved by the WMF's AffCom: Cascadia, LGBT, and Ghana.
- IEG: The second round of individual engagement grants is open for submissions.
- Stub contest: The stub contest is open until 30 September; prizes will be awarded to the winners.
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Tolstoy leads a varied pack
There is no unifying theme we can slap on top article popularity this week. A Google Doodle for Leo Tolstoy's birthday propelled that 19th century author to the top spot, followed by the thirteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Current events, including the suspension of American footballer Ray Rice after release of video footage of a domestic violence incident, and the release of the video game Destiny, followed close behind. And in the slightly quirky category, another alleged revelation of the identity of Jack the Ripper, a mystery which has remained unsolved since 1888, took up spots 6 and 9.
The greater WP:TOP25 is also a scatter shot of items including actress Brittany Murphy (#17) and the UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying rounds (#22). The only new hard news entry in the extended list is the Scottish independence referendum, 2014 at #21, and which is sure to rise in the next report.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.
For the week of 7 to 13 September 2014, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Leo Tolstoy 
755,226 
A Google Doodle on 9 September commemorating the 186th birthday of this Russian writer of War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) was enough to put this article in the top spot for the week. 2 September 11 attacks 
745,804 
Last year this article was #1 for the week on the Top 25 Report, so it is not surprising it is bested only by a Google Doodle this year. Views are about 240,000 lower this year, but that could be due in part to competition from the current world conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (#5). Last year, this solemn anniversary only had to compete with twerking. 3 Ray Rice
655,572 
On September 8, footage was released by TMZ of this American football player sucker punching his fiancée unconscious on an elevator, leading to the issuance of an indefinite suspension the same day. The world has known about this event of domestic violence for months, and the National Football League's decision in July to only suspend Rice for two games for assault caused much public outcry. It seems letting the world see the video of the encounter, which was sent to the NFL months ago but not released, made it too hard for them to keep downplaying this event. 4 Destiny (video game)
573,518 
This video game was released on September 9, and by the next day publisher Activision claimed that it was the most successful new gaming franchise launch of all time, with more than $500 million USD in sales to retail stores and consumers worldwide. 5 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
553,631 
Down from #3 last week. The world continues to struggle with how to assess and treat this brutal group. Less importantly the world also struggles with what to call it. Politicians rotate among "ISIL" (the abbreviation of this article title), ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), and simply the "Islamic State." In Syria, ISIS's detractors use the term "Daʿesh", which sounds like "Dash", based on the Arabic letters for the Arabic ISIL name. 6 Aaron Kosminski 
481,805 Kosminski has long been one of the persons suspected of being the infamous 1888 London killer Jack the Ripper. A claim by author Russell Edwards this week to have proven Kosminski's guilt using DNA evidence caused much internet attention. It is an interesting and remarkable claim, and thus somewhat likely to fade away if disproved, leaving people with the vague impression that it was true, like most sensationalistic claims of this type. Head on over to Jack the Ripper suspects if you want to see the gallery of all possible suspects. 7 Deaths in 2014 
446,753 
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. Deaths this week included: Fanny Godin (pictured at left), the oldest living Belgian, at age 112 (September 7); American fast-food restauranteur S. Truett Cathy (September 8); Scottish guitarist and former member of the band Primal Scream, Robert Young (September 9); 1960s Japanese track athlete Yoshinori Sakai (September 10); German actor Joachim Fuchsberger (September 11); former Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Ebeid (September 12); and Serbian footballer Milan Galić (September 13). 8 Richard Kiel
444,110 
The most viewed death of the week. Kiel, who died on September 10, was an American actor best known for his role of the steel-toothed Jaws in the 1970s James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. 9 Jack the Ripper 
441,407 
See #6. 10 Joan Rivers
435,784 
Down from #1 last week. The brassy, pioneering comedian died on September 4.
Reader comments
Which is not like the others?
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Franklin Pierce, from the new featured article -
Ivan Goremykin, from the new featured list -
John Adams Dix, from the new featured picture set
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Featured articles
Four featured articles were promoted this week.
- SMS Scharnhorst (nominated by Parsecboy) One of the final three armored cruisers built for the Imperial German Navy, Scharnhorst was assigned to Germany's East Asia Squadron for its entire career. When the First World War broke out, Scharnhorst and several other ships went on a rampage across the Pacific Ocean and around Cape Horn, sinking several British warships. Stung by the losses, the British sent two modern battlecruisers and several cruisers to the South Atlantic to hunt the Germans down; none of the German ships were able to escape.
- Ontario Highway 61 (nominated by Floydian) This provincial highway runs from the Canada–US border to near Thunder Bay, on the northern shore of Lake Superior. The nominator noted that the most unusual aspect of the road is the international crossing it terminates at. By 1916, roads existed on and terminated at either side of the river, but a bridge would require authorization from both national governments. The local Rotary Clubs were unwilling to wait, so they built one anyway. To their surprise, no one protested. The bridge opened in 1917 with provincial and national politicians in attendance.
- Franklin Pierce (nominated by Designate and Wehwalt) The fourteenth US president is "almost always denigrated", says one of the nominators, even though "in his time, he was one of the bright young stars of the Democratic Party." Born in New Hampshire, Pierce was a Northern politician at a time when the US was becoming increasingly divided over the Southern institution of slavery. His compromises between the two sides, including the new Kansas–Nebraska Act and faithfully abiding by the Fugitive Slave Act, earned him the ire of both. Worse, historians believe that his actions played a role in kindling the Civil War; unsurprisingly, Pierce frequently shows up on lists of the worst president ever.
- Epacris impressa (nominated by Melburnian and Cas Liber) Better known as the common heath, Epacris impressa is native to southeast Australia. The pink form of it is used as the floral emblem of Victoria, an Australian state.
Featured lists
Two featured lists were promoted this week.
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- List of heads of government of Russia (nominated by Tomcat7) Dating back to the 1700s, 57 people have been at the head of Russia's government. Dmitry Medvedev, prime minister under Vladimir Putin, is the current titleholder.
- 59th Academy Awards (nominated by Birdienest81) Held in 1987, the 59th Academy Awards honored 1986's greatest television and cinematic achievements. Paul Newman, Marlee Matlin, Dianne Wiest, and Michael Caine took home the top individual awards, while Platoon was voted as the best picture.
Featured pictures
51 featured pictures were promoted this week.
- Alexander Hamilton, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Samuel Dexter, Albert Gallatin, George W. Campbell, Alexander J. Dallas, William H. Crawford, Richard Rush, Samuel D. Ingham, Louis McLane, William J. Duane, Roger B. Taney, Levi Woodbury, Thomas Ewing, Walter Forward, John C. Spencer, George M. Bibb, Robert J. Walker, William M. Meredith, Thomas Corwin, James Guthrie, Howell Cobb, Philip Francis Thomas, John Adams Dix, Salmon P. Chase, William P. Fessenden, Hugh McCulloch, George S. Boutwell, William Adams Richardson, Benjamin Bristow, Lot M. Morrill, John Sherman, William Windom, Charles J. Folger, Walter Q. Gresham, Daniel Manning, Charles S. Fairchild, Charles Foster, John G. Carlisle, and Lyman J. Gage (created by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, prepared and nominated by Godot13) A collection of engravings of all United States Secretaries of the Treasury up to 1902. As the Secretary of the Treasury oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said secretaries formed part of a series by the Bureau, which is a particularly useful resource to Wikipedia.
- Lilium bulbiferum (created by Uoaei1, nominated by Crisco 1492) Lilium bulbiferum, better known, perhaps, as the tiger lily, is a popular perennial garden plant, growing every year from bulbs in the soil, with bright orange flowers. Its Latin name refers to bulbs that form on the stem, and drop to the ground, propagating the plant. It is native to the mountains of central and southern Europe.
- Roundhay Garden Scene (created by Louis Le Prince, nominated by Alborzagros) Very early films - and this is the earliest film surviving - didn't necessarily need to be particularly deep to be interesting. The sight of a moving picture being displayed would be sufficient in itself. Not all of the filmstock survives, but this is likely to be representative of the whole: People walking around a garden, one walking backwards.
- Ceiling and lantern of Ely Cathedral (created and nominated by David Iliff ) Diliff continues his tour of English cathedrals with the beautiful Ely Cathedral, in Cambridgeshire, England. The image, I think, speaks for itself, and concludes this report.
- White-headed stilt (created and nominated by JJ Harrison) With breeding populations in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Indonesia, the white-headed stilt is a relatively common shorebird with a wide range. It has black and white plumage with long, bright pink legs.
- Indian yellow-nosed albatross (created and nominated by JJ Harrison) The Indian yellow-nosed albatross appears a little misnamed. I mean, isn't one of the first lessons in ornithology that birds have beaks and bills, not noses? Nonetheless, this lovely photograph gives an easy view of the gilded schnoz.
- Lesser whistling duck (created and nominated by JJ Harrison) This whistling duck's tune may not yet be for our ears, but skilled bird photographer JJ Harrison has made its face available for a song.
- The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (directed by John Emerson, distributed by Triangle Film Corporation, and nominated by GamerPro64) A parody of Sherlock Holmes, particularly emphasizing Holmes' cocaine addiction, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916) stars Douglas Fairbanks, and was written by Tod Browning and Anita Loos.
- Venezuelan peso (created by the Government of Venezuela, nominated by Godot13) A one-peso note from the First Republic of Venezuela, issued a mere two months after the country declared its independence from Spain. This note, as with all recent banknote images, was scanned by Godot at the National Numismatic Collection, which holds this specimen.
- ColecoVision (created by Evan Amos, nominated by Crisco 1492) The ColecoVision, released in 1982, was a fairly popular console, and its arcade ports considered of better quality than those of Atari. However, the console's creator, Coleco, was driven out of the industry after the 1983 crash.
- Roses. Marie Krøyer seated in the deckchair in the garden by Mrs Bendsen's house (created by Peder Severin Krøyer, nominated by Belle) Krøyer's Roses, completed in 1893, depicts his wife Marie and his dog relaxing under a rose bush. Which of the three he considered most beautiful is lost to the annals of time.
- Allegory of Vanity (created by Antonio de Pereda, nominated by Hafspajen) Although the word vanity may make us think of Carly Simon, de Pereda had a rather different concept in mind: futility, the "meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits". In this painting, an angel holds dominion over earthly concerns... though the collection of skulls is admittedly a bit large.
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A magnificent view of the lantern and nave of Ely Cathedral -
Roses. Marie Krøyer seated in the deckchair in the garden by Mrs Bendsen's house, P.S. Krøyer (1893)
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