Archive for the ‘Wikipedia’ Category

These are the most read entries on Wikipedia in 2023: atomic bombs and much more. – Softonic EN

If you want to know what most people are searching for on the internet, maybe the total views on Wikipedia could give you an idea of what has been a trending topic this 2023, a year marked by wars, inflation, and numerous scandals.

If we go by the 25 most viewed Wikipedia articles in 2023, people have been very concerned this year about two key issues: the atomic bomb and artificial intelligence. The first issue makes sense and its not because of Russia or Israels fault.

At the top of the list, as expected, is ChatGPT, with a whopping 49.4 million page views. OpenAIs chatbot has appeared on multiple lists this year, including the favorite apps list for Android users.

And its not just on the English Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation stated that ChatGPT racked up over 78 million page views across all languages.

There are some surprising and some not-so-surprising things about this years top Wikipedia articles. While top movies of the year usually receive many clicks, people worldwide wanted to know more about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Projects research on the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer held the seventh position among Wikipedia entries with the most clicks, while the Oppenheimer movie itself landed in the fifth spot. The Barbie movie secured the 13th position, with nearly 19.8 million visits.

Movies claimed seven out of the top 25 spots. Among them was the sequel to Avatar: The Shape of Water by James Cameron, the grand science fiction production featuring blue cats and humans, at position 20.

Of course, the celebrities also grabbed several top spots. Swifties worldwide propelled Taylor Swift to the 12th position, with 19.4 million visits. Argentine footballer Lionel Messi nearly hit 16.6 million visits.

If youre curious, here are the 25 most-read Wikipedia articles in 2023.

Journalist specialized in technology, entertainment and video games. Writing about what I'm passionate about (gadgets, games and movies) allows me to stay sane and wake up with a smile on my face when the alarm clock goes off. PS: this is not true 100% of the time.

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These are the most read entries on Wikipedia in 2023: atomic bombs and much more. - Softonic EN

Wikipedias Most-Viewed Articles of 2023 Revealed – Greek Reporter

Wikipedias 2023 most-viewed articles feature ChatGPT, cricket showdowns, Bollywood hits, and global sports icons like Ronaldo and Messi. Credit: Wikimedia commons . Eukaryogurt cc by 4.0

Wikipedia just spilled the beans on its hottest reads of 2023, and its a mixed bag of interests that has kept people hooked. The English edition of the web encyclopedia clocked in over eighty-four billion visits. This years top twenty-five most-viewed articles cover a range of subjects, from tech and sports to movies, current events, and famous faces.

OpenAIs virtual chatbot, ChatGPT, stole the spotlight by clinching the number one position with over forty-nine million views. This year, it marked its first anniversary and experienced a significant surge in popularity.

Securing the second spot was the yearly roundup of notable deaths, a page that consistently attracted a lot of attention.

Pages dedicated to individual entries of prominent figures who passed away, such as Matthew Perry and Lisa Marie Presley, also drew substantial interest this year.

Famous faces like pop sensation Taylor Swift claimed the twelfth spot with a whopping nineteen million views. Notably named Times Person of the Year, shes been quite the talk of the town.

Tech tycoon and billionaire Elon Musk secured the nineteenth position, boasting over fourteen million views. Meanwhile, controversial influencer Andrew Tate grabbed the twenty-fifth spot with more than twelve million views.

The much-awaited 2023 Cricket World Cup in India, during which the hosts faced defeat against Australia in the final, clinched the third spot.

In a historic turn, cricket content has made its debut on the list since the Wikimedia Foundation began tracking page views in 2015. Three other cricket-related entries joined the ranks, with the Indian Premier League claiming the fourth place with over twenty million views. Cricket enthusiasts certainly made their mark on the most-read pages.

The themes in the top twenty-five also showcased a strong interest in cinematic pursuits, including searches for summer blockbusters like Oppenheimer, Barbie, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

The page dedicated to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer himself garnered considerable attention, amassing over twenty-five million views. Clearly, the allure of the silver screen played a prominent role in the most-read pages.

Indias Bollywood action flicks, Jawan and Pathaan, secured spots among the most-viewed pages.

The list also featured sports icons, including football sensations Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, adding to the diverse array of interests that captivated readers.

The eclectic mix of topics that dominated Wikipedias most-viewed articles for 2023 reflects the diverse interests of readers worldwide. From ChatGPTs virtual prowess to sports and cinema, the list encapsulates a snapshot of what caught our collective curiosity.

The presence of cricket, Bollywood, and global football icons further underscores the universal appeal of these subjects.

As we bid farewell to another year, these insights into our shared online explorations serve as a fascinating testament to the varied and ever-evolving landscape of information consumption in our interconnected world.

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Wikipedias Most-Viewed Articles of 2023 Revealed - Greek Reporter

Watching the Napoleon Movie? Don’t Forget to Read His Wikipedia Page. – Slate

Napoleon Bonaparte did a lot, but he didnt quite do it all. He did not, for example, fire a bunch of cannons at the Egyptian pyramids. Does it matter that Ridley Scotts Napoleon includes a scene of French armies attacking million-ton, completely inanimate structures of stone? Or that the Battle of Austerlitz scene focuses on a frozen pond incident that, in reality, occurred long after the battle was won?

Ridley Scott admitted he doesnt know if Napoleons armies shot cannons at pyramids and that the scene was merely a fastand loose, I might addway of saying he took Egypt. His response to the critics was a swift Get a life. In another interview, he stated that fucking historians dont truly know about Napoleonic Europe because they werent there.

Scotts fact-agnostic attitude toward Napoleon, one of the most documented humans to ever walk the planet, hasnt gone unnoticed. History-minded reviewers have pointed out the inaccuracies littered throughout the 2-hour-and-38-minute flick. If youre looking to get a crystal-clear portrait of the French emperor, you may want to supplement your movie night with some additional readinglike one of the bazillion books about Napoleon, or more conveniently, the famed rulers sprawling Wikipedia page.

Napoleons main article is nearly 20,000 words, cleanly divided into sections such as Appearance and The Invasion of Russia (the latter will inform you that Napoleon almost certainly did not say I must begin my march to Moscow, like his character did in the film, since he didnt think hed have to go so far into Russia). Wikipedia has additional entries dedicated to his tomb, legacy, penchant for art looting, and more. Le petit caporal even has a stand-alone article on his genitals (only Jesus and Hitler can say the same).

When it comes to films that dance on the line between fantasy and reality, the post-movie Wikipedia dive is a sacred online ritual. You sit next to your partner or pal and simultaneously scroll through historical synopses, occasionally piercing the silence with new-to-you info like Napoleon was frenemies with Beethoven! or People think he had a body-odor fetish but he probably didnt! as you sort creative liberties from historical canon.

I know for a fact that Im not the only one fond of pairing entertainment with light research. When Sony Pictures released the Napoleon trailer on July 10, Wikipedia traffic for the long-dead leader skyrocketed to third place on the daily list of most-viewed articles, beating out popular entries like Sex and ChatGPT. And that was just the trailer!

Even from the grave, Napoleon is dominating new (online) worlds. As the release date approached, traffic to Napoleon topics climbed steadily, surpassing contemporary figures like Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Beyoncall before it was even released. Even the article about bicorne hats, Bonapartes headwear of choice, is at its highest traffic in recorded history.

Unlike the encyclopedias of yore, Wikipedia shows which entries people are looking upand which ones nobody is reading (a tireless study by an admin named Colin Morris revealed that many of the least-trafficked articles are on obscure moth species). Without fail, the box office, particularly for based on true events flicks, drives hordes of Wikipedia traffic. J. Robert Oppenheimers article got 100 times more pageviews in July than Vagina, a shocking achievement considering Vaginas consistently strong performance on the Wikipedia charts (it averages more views than God).

During the week of July 23, 16 of the Top 25 articles in English Wikipedia were directly related to Barbenheimer. Last month, following Netflixs Beckham, David Beckham made the Top 5; during the heights of the Tinder Swindler, Simon Levievs article breached the Top 3; Blonde carried Marilyn Monroe to the Top 5; Pamela Anderson hogged the top charts after the Pam & Tommy miniseries. Whether or not film adaptations of history win over the Academy, they consistently clean up on Wikipedia. In the monthlong buildup to the Napoleon movies release, Napoleons penis alone got more traffic than articles like Electromagnetism and the list of Pacific islands.

No one knows film-driven Wikipedia traffic more keenly than Igor, a volunteer whose user page starts with Hello, Im Brazilian, have a lot of free time and a will to learn things. I adore his ardent write-ups of the encyclopedia charts, which are really thinly veiled cultural criticism. Each week since 2017, he has dutifully explained why each of the Top 25 articles are trending, answering the question no one was asking: How is the documentary du jour affecting the encyclopedia?

He recaps pageview trends with no less fervor than an NBA sportscaster during Game 7: In 2022, when Inventing Anna was dominating Netflix, he called fraudster Anna Sorokin the only thing preventing a top-ten monopoly of the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis. During Anna Sorokins second week in the charts, Igor criticized the salacious, tabloid-esque true story limited series that are all the rage these days and stated youd never catch me watching it (he caved just four write-ups later). Netflix has too much of a pull on people, he proclaimed in the second of five straight weeks that Jeffrey Dahmer occupied the No. 1 spot (Dahmer achieved Wikipedias second-highest all-time weekly viewership).

In a 2018 Nielsen poll, 45 percent of adults responded that they used a second screen very often or always when watching TV, and in a blog post, Wikipedia called itself a second-screen experience. In the five years since then, the line between encyclopedia and entertainment has only gotten blurrier. But its not invisible. Wikipedia shouldnt sacrifice its meticulousness for movie magic, nor should movie scripts adopt the dry, info dump-y quality of an encyclopediacommentators have made the latter point abundantly clear.

Film critics deride the dense dramas and documentaries with overly stiff adherence to the historical recordstorytelling thats more didactic than artful, more concerned with detail than drama. The New Yorker called Baz Luhrmanns Elvis movie a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article and IndieWire dubbed the Whitney Houston biopic a Wikipedia page set to song, panning the abject laziness of the films construction. The New York Times diminished Solo: A Star Wars Story to a filmed Wikipedia page. Netflixs Pel movie contains nothing you couldnt get from Wikipedia, and the doc on Joyce Carol Oates is just a glorified Wikipedia article. The critics are clear that an encyclopedia is no replacement for a movie: Films may prompt a Wikipedia binge but they should not be the Wikipedia binge.

Reviewers raise this comparison as a critique of moviemakers, but I cant help but interpret the sentiment as a sneaky salute to Wikipedia. What an achievement for a humble encyclopedia, written by literal randos, to bear any sort of resemblance to big-budget entertainment. Slowly but surely, the once scrappy Wikipedia project has graduated into the go-to metaphor for no-frills factfulness.

Richard Brody clearly spelled out his praise in the New Yorker review of Oppenheimer: Wikipedias simple fact-heavy article offered more complexity and more enticing detail than Nolans script, he wrote. Wikipedians everywhere blushed with pride.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Watching the Napoleon Movie? Don't Forget to Read His Wikipedia Page. - Slate

Crowdsourced fact-checking fights misinformation in Taiwan … – Cornell Chronicle

As journalists and professional fact-checkers struggle to keep up with the deluge of misinformation online, fact-checking sites that rely on loosely coordinated contributions from volunteers, such as Wikipedia, can help fill the gaps, Cornell research finds.

In a new study, Andy Zhao, a doctoral candidate in information science based at Cornell Tech, compared professional fact-checking articles to posts on Cofacts, a community-sourced fact-checking platform in Taiwan. He found that the crowdsourced site often responded to queries more rapidly than professionals and handled a different range of issues across platforms.

Fact-checking is a core component of being able to use our information ecosystem in a way that supports trustworthy information, said senior author Mor Naaman, professor of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Places of knowledge production, like Wikipedia and Cofacts, have proved so far to be the most robust to misinformation campaigns.

The study, Insights from a Comparative Study on the Variety, Velocity, Veracity, and Viability of Crowdsourced and Professional Fact-Checking Services, published Sept. 21 in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.

The researchers focused on Cofacts because it is a crowdsourced fact-checking model that had not been well-studied. The Taiwanese government, civil organizations and the tech community established Cofacts in 2017 to address the challenges of both malicious and innocent misinformation partially in response to efforts from the Chinese government to use disinformation to create a more pro-China public opinion in Taiwan. Much like Wikipedia, anyone on Cofacts can be an editor and post answers, submit questions and up or downvote responses. Cofacts also has a bot that fact-checks claims in a popular messaging app.

Starting with more than 60,000 crowdsourced fact-checks and 2,641 professional fact-checks, Zhao used natural language processing to match up responses posted on Cofacts with articles addressing the same questions on two professional fact-checking sites. He looked at how quickly the sites posted responses to queries, the accuracy and persuasiveness of the responses and the range of topics covered.

He found the Cofacts users often responded faster than journalists, but mostly because they could stand on the shoulders of giants and repurpose existing articles from professionals. In this way, Cofacts acts as a distributor for information. They carry those stories across language, across the nation, or across time, to this exact moment to answer people's questions, Zhao said.

Importantly, Zhao found that the Cofacts posts were just as accurate as the professional sources. And according to seven native Taiwanese graduate students who acted as raters, articles by journalists were more persuasive, but Cofacts posts often were clearer.

Further analysis showed the crowdsourced site covered a slightly different range of topics compared with those addressed by professionals. Posts on Cofacts were more likely to address recent and local issues such as regional politics and small-time scams while journalists were more likely to write about topics requiring expertise, including health claims and international affairs.

We can leverage the power of the crowds to counter misinformation, Zhao concluded. Misinformation comes from everywhere, and we need this battle to happen in all corners.

The need for fact-checking is likely to continue to grow. While its not yet clear how generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as ChatGPT or Midjourney, will impact the information landscape, Naaman and Zhao said it is possible that AI programs that generate text and fake images may make it even easier to create and spread misinformation online.

However, despite the success of Cofacts in Taiwan, Zhao and Naaman caution that the same approach may not transfer to other countries. Cofacts has built on the user habits, the cultures, the background, and political and social structures of Taiwan, which is how they succeed, Zhao said.

But understanding Cofacts success may assist in the design of other fact-checking systems, especially in regions that dont speak English, which have access to few, if any fact-checking resources.

Understanding how well that kind of model works in different settings could hopefully provide some inspiration and guidelines to people who want to execute similar endeavors in other places, Naaman said.

The study received partial support from the National Science Foundation.

Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

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Crowdsourced fact-checking fights misinformation in Taiwan ... - Cornell Chronicle

The Sunday Read: ‘Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth’ – The New York Times

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In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers. But he had no doubts about its potential. I think A.I.s day of writing a high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later, he wrote in Death of Wikipedia, an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time, displace his beloved website and its human editors, just as Wikipedia had supplanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in 2012 announced it was discontinuing its print publication.

Recently, when I asked this editor if he still worried about his encyclopedias fate, he told me that the newer versions made him more convinced that ChatGPT was a threat. It wouldnt surprise me if things are fine for the next three years, he said of Wikipedia, and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff.

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The Sunday Read: 'Wikipedia's Moment of Truth' - The New York Times