Famous Wikipedian: Roger Ebert

Uploaded by Rebert himself

Although I can't find the exact column, the late film critic Roger Ebert discussed personally editing Wikipedia a number of times. It didn't take Wikipedians long to discover the username of Ebert: not an anonymous ten-digit IP address, but an account with an actual name, User:Rebert. From his user contributions page, we can tell Ebert made 22 edits over a period of five years, mostly related to himself, the film industry, or films he liked. Some of his edits included self-promotion, but very possibly he didn't know that was taboo. It's not like he was struggling to get noticed in the world of film critics
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Ebert died this past April. He joined that solemn club of Deceased Wikipedians, and there's a banner at the top of his talk page saying it's preserved as a memorial. Someone even put a touching "See you at the movies" at the end of the banner.

Voyager 1 and a Featured Picture

According to scientists, the space probe Voyager 1 -- launched in 1977 to study the solar system and possibly introduce Earth to aliens -- has finally left the solar system. They mean it. They're for real this time. This isn't like all the other times this year when the probe was said to have left the system.

Maybe. Possibly. Trust us.

In honor of this event, here is yet another nice picture. Nine years ago this month it was selected as a Picture of the Day, and soon it became a Featured Picture. The image is of the Sombrero Galaxy (aka M104), a picturesque galaxy some 28 light years away that would take about 491,820 years for the Voyager 1 probe to drift to. Give or take a year, of course.

  

Happy Interstellar Day!

Yet another nearly-featured picture

Taken by Luca Lorenzi, another amazing picture that was a finalist for Picture of the Year 2008.

Your Nearly-Featured Picture of the Day

By User:MichaelMaggs, I present Colouring pencils.jpg:

 

This was almost a Featured Picture in 2011. It was also a finalist in Wikipedia's Picture of the Year 2007. I think it's pretty fantastic.

Page views as indicator of war

As discussed in last week's post, Wikipedia is good at indicating whether or not a film will be a success (more on that later). Can it predict military campaigns?

Check out Syria's page view statistics. In the past week, the number of people looking at the page has skyrocketed from 5,000 views a day to nearly 90,000. In the coming days it will probably jump a lot higher if the US launches a missile strike against that country. Now, a lot of these views are probably due to media attention or from the Syria article being displayed on the Main Page, but don't you think it's possible that among those 90,000 views are a bunch of military people looking for targets?

Or are they consulting Intellipedia?

Wikipedia pokes fun at itself

If you get a chance, you should check out Wikipedia:Silly things. If you think the behind the scenes work at Wikipedia is boring or irrelevant, think again. This page highlights minutiae like "bad jokes and other deleted nonsense," which displays the heights of (non-offensive) vandalism; "April Fools," which is the best humor posted April 1, and a "List of really, really, really stupid article ideas that you really, really, really should not create."

My favorite is probably Wikipedia: Deleted articles with freaky titles. Since I love lists, I always scroll right to the "list" section under the letter L and look at what gems this article features. Among them:

List of convicted drunk drivers who have become president of the United States 

List of Dads Who Make Other Dads Eat Bugs

The article itself was completely blank, but the talk page just read "my dad".

List of movie posters with lamps in them

          The list contained one item – Mission: Impossible – with a footnote saying "NB: does not contain lamps."

 And my favorite:

List of people who are alive or are dead

Can Wikipedia predict box office success?

Pic by Fernando de Sousa

Wikipedia may be able to predict whether a movie will be successful or not. Researchers from Oxford University, the Central European University at Budapest, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics have published an article in the journal PLOS ONE saying that user activity before a film's release date will indicate its success. The more edits and more page views an article on a movie gets, the more likely it is to be a box office hit.

You can read the PLOS ONE article here. It has a lot of math, and footnotes, but that's to be expected in a scientific journal. All they really needed to put in there were a few cool images that helped to illustrate the article.

Article: Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data